In the hours leading up to the premier of Kanye West's much-anticipated The Life Of Pablo, a new flip of an older cut has surfaced. It turns out that Nicolas Jaar of DARKSIDE remixed the 2013 Yeezus track "Blood On The Leaves" back in 2014 as part of a soundtrack for the short film Picturing Barbara Kruger, but the atmospheric rework is only just making its rounds of the internet now.
Our #BarbaraKruger doc for @LACMA (dir. @PippaBianco) is now online! feat @KanyeWest remix by @Nicolas___Jaar… #TLOP https://t.co/vrLsWmjd0N
— Ways & Means (@wysmns) February 11, 2016
Picturing Barbara Kruger was commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for its ART+FILM series in 2014, Pitchfork reports. It was directed by Pippa Bianco and produced by Erin Wright, Lana Kim and Jett Steiger of Ways & Means.
The five-minute-long visual tribute is narrated by the feminist conceptual artist herself as she details her creative process over a montage of her decades-spanning work set to an original score by Jaar.
As the dreamy electronic rendition of "Blood On The Leaves" plays in the background, Kruger discusses "the arbitrariness of fame and prominence." The artist explains "there are so many visual practitioners whose work we don't know and the reason is sometimes brutally arbitrary," The Fader reports.
The groundbreaking visual artist known for appropriating images and overlaying them with aggressive campaign-like directives such as "I shop therefore I am" apparently requested the Kanye remix personally, MixMag reports.
The film premiered the same year it was created at the museum's ART+FILM Gala honoring Kruger alongside Quentin Tarantino for their unique, indelible contributions to visual art. It then made its public debut at 2015's SXSW festival.
Check out Jaar's version of "Blood On The Leaves" as well as the brief video here.
2016 so far has seen Jaar busy with his serial imprint, Other People, which operates much like a magazine with new content released every week. This week's offering features new music from Budapest-based duo 12z.
