Art & Creativity Quote by Joseph Jarman

There’s a sly flex in Joseph Jarman’s line, but it isn’t just bragging rights. It’s a reminder that the avant-garde didn’t suddenly appear once galleries, critics, and university departments minted a term for it. Jarman is pointing at the gap between what artists were actually doing in the mid-60s and what the culture had language (and institutional permission) to recognize. The work came first; the label arrived later, like a passport stamped after you’ve already crossed the border.

As a musician embedded in the AACM orbit and the larger Black Arts ecosystem, Jarman’s “we” matters. He’s reclaiming authorship for a scene that routinely got filed under “jazz” as if that category were a cage: sound-only, club-only, entertainment-first. But their shows were already rituals, theater, costume, poetry, provocation - bodies in space making meaning, not just notes. Calling it “performance art” after the fact exposes how art-world naming can function as gatekeeping: once it has a label, it becomes legible to curators and grant panels, and the people who pioneered it are often treated like precursors instead of central figures.

The humor lands because it’s understated and slightly annoyed. “Just not calling it that” reads like: we didn’t need your vocabulary to validate the practice. It’s also a critique of how history gets written - less by what happened, more by what got archived, branded, and sold.