Olaf Breuning, Smoke Bombs 2008 

The Jazz is a term my classmate,  Rafael Ochoa, came up with to describe a quality in art that grabs your attention by mixing a state of disarray, with an apt articulation of the culture around you. He sent me this OED level definition via text message.

The Jazz: Unsettling elegance. The appearance of articulating a zeitgeist with ease, a distillation and composition of a cultural aesthetic to the point of distinction. The Jazz tends to be threatening on two levels. The First takes on an aesthetic of danger either allegorical or empirical. ie.pippy longstockings with a Venus flytrap or bodiless stockings kicking u in the shin and skipping off. The second level is a cultural, hierarchical threat to the observer.When the observer experiences the Jazz, they often fail to make a distinction between the two levels and undergo a decentered process. Ie. It scrambles spidey senses.

Olaf Breuning has Jazz. A cursory look at Breuning’s smoke bomb piece from 2008 shows a mixing of the unsettling image of pillars of smoke in an urban setting, with a color scheme reminiscent of a Macdonald’s playplace ball room.Very Jazzy