Weekly Roundup
Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher, "Better Dimension (detail)", 2010. Ink and tape on glass slide from an installation of silkscreened wood panels, four Hasselblad slide projectors, one 16 mm eiki projector, resin and steel projection screen, 106 × 252 × 268 in. Collection of the artist; courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York.
Biennials, cremated canvases, German faces, cashmere sportswear, sculptural tour de force, fashionable shoes, and an iPhone app comprise this week’s roundup:
- 2010: Whitney Biennial will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Thursday, February 25. Art21’s Ellen Gallagher (Season 3) is one of fifty-five artists selected by curators Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari for this year’s show. She was also included in the 1995 Biennial, and had a solo exhibition at the museum in 2005. This time Gallagher has partnered with Dutch artist Edgar Cleijne on a film installation that includes sculptural construction and silk-screened panels. Gallagher recently told The Providence Journal: “In some ways, it feels very similar to my first Biennial. I mean, it’s a huge honor for any artist to be invited to participate in a Whitney Biennial. In a way, it’s a little like being nominated for an Academy Award. You feel this wonderful sense of validation.” 2010 is on view through May 30.
- Shrew’d: The Smart & Sassy Survey of American Women Artists, a biennial invitational at the University of Nebraska’s Sheldon Museum of Art, focuses on the work of artists who question social norms of representation in art, pop culture and daily life. According to the website, the survey “takes a critical feminist perspective on society’s mixed messages about assertive women, which describes what some contemporary women artists have had to become.” Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5), whose work is included in the exhibition, will lecture at the museum on March 30. Shrew’d continues through May 9. (Watch a slideshow here.)
- Pure Beauty is the largest retrospective exhibition ever mounted in Spain that is dedicated to Season 5 artist John Baldessari. The Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona display features more than 130 works created between 1962 and 2009. Curated by Leslie Jones, Jessica Morgan and Bartomeu Marí, the exhibition brings together many of the artist’s most relevant works, such as God Nose (1965); Cremation Project (1970), which marked Baldessari’s burning of all the canvases he had produced between May 1953 and March 1966, accompanied by its corresponding urn, commemorative plaque and death notice published in the San Diego Union newspaper; Commissioned Paintings (1969); and Baldessari Sings LeWitt (1972), featuring the artist singing every one of Sol LeWitt’s thirty-five conceptual statements to the music of different popular tunes, such as “Singing in the Rain” and the American national anthem. Pure Beauty (titled for one of Baldessari’s early works) will travel to the Los Angeles County Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
- German Faces — an exhibition that draws from a long-term body of work by Season 2 artist Collier Schorr — is on view at Modern Art Gallery in London through March 20. Every summer for the past 18 years, Schorr has traveled to southern Germany, working in and around the small town of Schwäbisch Gmünd. She used the landscapes of artists Sander, Kiefer, Beuys, Baselitz and Chagall as a ground on which to play out imagined and inherited histories of Germany and her own Jewish heritage. Schorr’s images are further influenced by reportage, fictional films, and portrait photography. The installation of this project, completely arranged by the artist, includes photographs, drawings, collages and videos. Schorr was recently named “Artist of the Week” by The Guardian.
- Through April 23, works by Season 2 artist Maya Lin are on view at The Arts Club of Chicago. The exhibition includes wood constructed land formations and bodies of water, wire wall pieces, drawings, pastel rubbings, and a piece created specifically for the city. According to Chicago Art Magazine, “Maya Lin’s show is a sculptural tour de force, which will surely be counted among the year’s best.”
- Art21 artists Vija Celmins (Season 2) and Robert Ryman (Season 4) have inspired recent runway fashions. Payless ShoeSource tapped designer Lela Rose for a special fall shoe collection that debuted during New York Fashion Week. According to CNN Money, “The collection’s inspiration stems from the textural and ‘craggy’ landscapes of the moon and earth, and the graphite works by Vija Celmins featuring lunar floors and nighttime skies.” Huffington Post reports that designer Jason Wu’s fall collection was inspired by Ryman’s monochromatic canvases, resulting in minimalist “sportswear with a highly civilized twist and turn.”
- Works by Barbara Kruger (Season 1) and Lari Pittman (Season 4) are featured in the exhibition Disquieted at the Portland Art Museum. The show explores our social condition and how living artists have responded, challenging our preconceptions and exposing our vulnerability in turbulent times. The exhibition boasts its own iPhone application that includes video interviews with artists; commentary from curators and educators; and a map so visitors can easily locate featured works of art. Disquieted is on view through May 16.
The Ethics of Dust: A Conversation with Jorge Otero-Pailos
In my previous columns in this monthly series, I’ve spoken with a number of practicing conservators to illustrate some of the ways in which we care for contemporary art. But I’ve never engaged directly into a discussion around the ethics of our work. What does it mean to preserve, clean, represent, or repair an artwork, building, monument, or cultural heritage site in the 21st century? What guides our decision-making process and how do we translate this process across different time periods and cultures? These aren’t easy questions.
As a way to consider ethical issues related to conservation, I’ve invited Jorge Otero-Pailos here for a conversation. In addition to being an architect and professor in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, Mr. Otero-Pailos is an artist who installed an artwork in the Doge’s Palace for this year’s Venice Bienale. His project for Venice, The Ethics of Dust, was commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Another installation of this project was exhibited at Manifesta 7 in Bolzano:
Richard McCoy: First of all, I really like your work and the complex issues it raises. But because last month I spoke with Glenn Wharton about interviewing living artists, I’d like to start by turning the tables a bit on you. Will you talk about your future plans for this work, and what kinds of parameters have been set into place for its long-term preservation? Or is this work itself ephemeral?
Jorge Otero-Pailos: As conservators know all too well, no work of art lasts forever. The Ethics of Dust is a project to preserve the world’s pollution, a material that I see as emblematic of modernity, but which we know only obliquely through its effects on other objects.
Paradoxically, even though conservation was formed in the effort to deal with the advent of pollution, we really don’t know very much about it politically, culturally, historically, and aesthetically. We also know very little about its own long-term behavior, or how to preserve it. But without it, a major part of our cultural history will be lost.
I’ve attempted to open up this conversation and to focus attention on pollution with this series of installations, in which I save pollution from major monuments. I’m using latex as a way to transfer the pollution from the buildings. Apart from standard directives, I have not set special parameters for its preservation. In what concerns the latex, we benefit from the work that has already been done on the conservation of Eva Hesse’s work. More importantly, regarding the pollution, I hope this work will open up the possibility to take “dust” more seriously and begin experimenting with how to conserve it.
The Art21 Guide to PERFORMA 09
If you’re lucky enough to be in New York City during Performa 09 this month, there are a number of events featuring Art21 artists that are not to be missed! Here’s a quick cheat sheet:
William Kentridge: I Am Not Me, the Horse is Not Mine
Monday, November 9 – Tuesday, November 10, 8:00pm
A comic and visually dazzling performance by Season 5 artist William Kentridge, in I Am Not Me, the Horse is Not Mine, Kentridge gives an unusual presentation related to his current opera-in-progress: a work inspired by Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s satirical opera The Nose, based on the Nikolai Gogol short story of the same name.
>> WATCH: William Kentridge preview from Art:21 Season 5
The PROMPT (a night club)
Wednesday, November 11 – Sunday, November 15, 8:00pm
A conceptual social club under the influence of Futurist Variety Theater, cues and propositions are offered each night in the form of conversation pieces, rules, performances and soundtracks, transforming this destination into a pressure cooker for ideas and intimacies. Participants include Art21 artist Mark Dion, among many, many others. Space is limited. RSVP: theprompt@kunstverein.us
>> WATCH: Mark Dion in Art:21 Season 4
Mike Kelley: Day is Done Judson Church Dance
Tuesday November 17 – Thursday, November 19 at 8pm and 10pm
In the first of two related Performa projects, Season 3 artist Mike Kelley will present three short dance/performance pieces in the Judson Memorial Church inspired by the darkly funny vignettes in his 2005 film and video installation Day Is Done. Premiering will be Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #33 (Ladder Piece), a work involving 13 people assembled on and around a large ladder playing music on horns.
>> WATCH: Mike Kelley directing Day is Done (Art:21 Season 3)
Oliver Herring: 3 Day Weekend
Friday, November 20, 6:30-8:30pm, Saturday, November 21, 3-5pm, and Sunday November 22, 3-6pm
3 Day Weekend is both a performance and material for a live video shoot. The Weekend will unfold as a series of interactions built over the course of three days with a group of people who were chosen through an open application process. The actions will be physical, dance related, mostly unrehearsed and therefore unpredictable. Art21 artist Oliver Herring will both “direct” the actions and film the footage.
>> WATCH: Participant Davis Thompson-Moss talking about working with Oliver Herring (Art:21 Exclusive)
A Fantastic World Superimposed on Reality: A Select History of Experimental Music
Friday, November 20 and Saturday, November 21, 6pm – midnight
Mike Kelley project #2: a mini noise music festival. In 1973, Kelley formed his own band, Destroy All Monsters. A Fantastic World continues Kelley’s continued interest in musical subcultures and focuses specifically on avant-garde music and sound art. Staged over two days, the festival will present both historic works from artists such as John Cage, Fred Frith, Fluxus, Bruce Nauman, and Max Neuhaus as well as performances by contemporary proponents of experimental music including Airway, Joan La Barbara, Tony Conrad, Jad Fair & Lumberob, Arto Lindsay, Genesis Breyer P.Orridge, z’ev, and John Zorn.
>> WATCH: Mike Kelley playing and recording music (Art:21 Season 3)
Notes from a Biennial Conference
Bergen Biennial Conference
In September, the Bergen Kunsthall hosted “To Biennial or Not to Biennial” in Bergen, Norway. The goal was to gather a group of people in the arts to discuss the effect and the potential of biennials on a global scale. Here are a few observations noted by Quinn Latimer (who blogged for Art21 not too long ago!) in a two-part article in Frieze Magazine (full articles here and here):
Noting that our current biennials are structurally indebted to these perennial exhibitions of the past, [MIT art historian Caroline A.] Jones argued that at the same time the biennial form has created key structural shifts – that, essentially, ‘biennial culture is the term we can use to describe this appetite for art as experience.’ One of her most interesting points was that the 21st century’s emphasis on experiential art works – now sometimes derided as ‘biennial art’ – is an echo of the 19th century, suggesting that the 20th century’s emphasis on form ultimately failed. If videos and installations are the genre of the new millennium, Jones claimed, then biennials are ‘their regulating salons.’ Since biennials have changed the art world, we must acknowledge that the ‘placement of the art object inside a world picture produces both the object’s and the picture’s significance.’ She then laid out her central philosophical question: ‘What are the conditions of possibility for the global work of art?’
Laura Steward, the Phillips Director of SITE Santa Fe, offered perhaps the funniest observation of the conference. Sighing, she asked: ‘Do you think it’s possible to exhaust your local audience?’ Pointing to biennials in ‘exotic’ locales like Santa Fe, Tirana or Bergen, she cited her own biennial, for which international artists often want to do site-specific works with the local community. ‘The Navajos are telling us: enough with your German artists already!’ To laughter, she offered an example for Bergen: ‘Will there be a work about the fish market in every biennial?’
Scenes from a Globalized Art World
Patrick Andrade for The New York Times
I’d like to start my guest blogging with Art21 by bringing up a series of questions surrounding globalization and artistic representation. My primary research interest is in the art market and the forces that shape it. With a background in cultural studies, I tend to approach the market through multiple lenses—analyzing it through its cultural, economic, and social contexts and impacts. In the next few weeks, I hope to present some interesting talking points surrounding this very issue, explore how arts communities are built, and feature artists working in exciting, new ways.
Not only can art expose the norms and hierarchies of the existing social order, but it can give us the conceptual means to invent another, making what had once seemed utterly impossible entirely realistic.
— Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Artforum, October 2009.
Last week, the San Francisco Art Institute hosted a panel discussion titled, “Global Art in the Downturn.” Panelists included Hou Hanru and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. My first question upon coming across the announcement was, what is the definition of “global art”? This is exactly the question that was first addressed by moderator, Dominic Willsdon of SFMOMA. The agreed-upon definition during the panel discussion was that “global art” included the genres and forms of art that are more popular across the globe, and that it is work presented in biennials, art fairs, and internationally-known institutions, and publications.
There are no set terms or definitions or categories for the levels at which artwork is produced, but what became clear to me in my two years of researching art world ecosystems for my master’s thesis is that artists make conscious decisions about how they want their work to be seen and by whom. At the same time, their agency is limited or co-opted by other art world players, such as curators and dealers who control access to major institutions and exhibitions.
There is no doubt that globalization, or the more nuanced French term mondialisation, has affected the art world as a whole—from the expansion of new markets, to the ability for artists to more easily travel, explore, and present a wider range of ideas, or to the proliferation of biennials and art fairs. How, then, does defining “global art” as the work endorsed by the international art community affect how non-endorsed works or artists are read within a globalized art scene?
No Nukes
Lisi Raskin, "Able Archer '83," 2008-09. LP recording, artist publication.
Four years ago, when using Google Earth satellites to zoom in on the roofs of our homes was all the rage, I was living in a Hudson River hamlet about an hour north of the city. In my one attempt to join the fun, my search resulted in aerial images depicting my regional topography as a massive black hole—the result of two military complexes and a nuclear power plant just down river. These facilities were not hidden in underground bunkers. Residents were not sworn to secrecy. Yet, national security did not permit me a peek behind the camouflage curtain. Certainly, virtual globes were not readily available in the mid-1970s, but if they had been, Lisi Raskin would have spent her childhood in a hefty Google Earth blank spot; she grew up a few miles from the Miami’s Turkey Point Nuclear Power Plant. Couple this with a memorable viewing of the post-apocalyptic made-for-TV movie, The Day After (1983), that imagined the cold war degenerating in full-scale nuclear holocaust and has fueled her artistic exploration of the military-industrial complex.
Over the past five years, Lisi has toured various facilities constructed throughout the Atomic Age. She spent six months as a resident artist at Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies rolling through places like the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona; Wendover Air Force Base in Utah; and the Nevada Test Sites in Las Vegas. Her engagement with the American frontier centers not on the lore of Manifest Destiny, but rather on a gloomy retelling of militaristic homesteading and recognition of unfortunate people who lived “downwind” of the radiation.
Lisi Raskin, "Wildlife Refuge," 2009 (exterior view), installation at the Athens Bienniale.
In this summer’s Athens Biennale, in the cavernous Esplanade Building built to host the 2004 Summer Olympics, Raskin cleverly depicts a disheartening scene. Her 18-foot-wide Wildlife Refuge (2009), parodies every environmentalist’s worst nightmare: green mountains hollowed out to conceal a bomb production facility. Call me naïve, but when I think of Colorado, it’s Tevas and granola, John Elway, and skiing that come to mind—a place as pure as the snow that dots the Rockies. But for nearly fifty years, the contamination leaking from the Rocky Flats plutonium plant inspired Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt to sing to a crowd of demonstrators until Congress agreed to transform the windy plateau back into a wildlife refuge and inspired Raskin to create this work. Clumsily constructed with wobbly painted plywood, the lines of the façade create a diagonal with several peek-holes leading down to the ultimate reveal. Greeted with an eerie dark purple light at the partially-sealed entrance, the viewer feels his anxieties rise at the sight of an empty headquarters and a Kodak slide projector shuffling through retro images of missile statistics, charts, and launch photos. There is a clue to the launch’s target: the Isle of Lesbos, a large Greek Island in the Aegean Sea, which caters primarily to lesbian tourists. Disturbingly, we are not allowed to trespass into the scene and are helpless to alert the islanders of the pending catastrophe.
Lisi Raskin, "Wildlife Refuge," 2009 (interior view), installation at the Athens Bienniale.
In the same year that included her international Biennale debut and stellar reviews for her solo exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin, Raskin has suffered two setbacks. First, in mid-February her New York gallery, Guild & Greyshkul (a personal favorite of mine), shut their doors (she is still represented by Country Club Projects in Cincinnati and Milliken Gallery in Stockholm, Sweden). Perhaps an even greater disappointment: after the tremendous high from an invitation to participate in the 11th International Istanbul Biennial came the realization that the U.S. State Department has ceased funding all international biennials (with the exception of Venice).
Letter from London: Doublecrossed
Hiroshi Sugimoto, "U.A. Walker," New York, 1978.
News of artists famous in one field crossing over into another is very often met with public derision. Bruce Willis, one of the most talented pub-rockers of the late 1980s (Return of Bruno), fell foul of the critics when he tried to branch out into acting (The Whole Nine Yards), as did indie songstrel Scarlett Johansson (Match Point) and rap supremo Joaquin Phoenix (Signs). De Kooning-esque abstractionist Paul McCartney’s forays into popular music have similarly met with the critical thumbs-down, and latterday expressionist Bob Dylan’s adenoidal folk-rock has received little more than shrugging indifference on the international music circuit.
The message seems to be that there’s a kind of selfishness to cultural versatility and a public unwillingness to square fictionalized and “real” identities. (Perhaps the critics might have been kinder to Willis’s Under the Boardwalk if it had been released under the name of John McClane…well, there’s no point in wishing your life away). In any case, contemporary artists – operating as they do on the fringes of mainstream culture – are in the best position to facilitate an effective crossover into the mainstream, Schnabel’s professional volte-face being its axiom. Cultural crossover is, in other words, invariably outside-in, never effectively the other way around. Just ask Russell Crowe (wear a helmet, though).
Steve McQueen’s disheartening pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale was conducted very much as mainstream cinematic spectacle. You queued up in time-honored British fashion (imagine that at the French pavilion!) to be informed of your slot, waited around, got ushered in, and were told that you “weren’t allowed to leave for the duration of the film” (I paraphrase, but that’s pretty much what we were told). Naturally, this ruffled feathers in Venice, for a crowd accustomed to a 10-second whip-around in search of free tote bags, and ran counter to conventional experiences of art, directly proportional as it usually is to the duration of the audioguide, tour guide’s explanation, or syntactic adroitness of wall text. (Picture enforced viewing times for a Robert Ryman show, for instance, and you get the idea). For contemporary artists, cinema offers an opportunity to condition the duration of the viewer’s experience; after all, you’ve paid ten quid to get in anyway, and you might as well stay til the end to see who the dolly grip is. Little surprise, then, that Matthew Barney chose to screen some of his arduous-at-best Cremaster films at arthouse cinemas as well as galleries, or that Douglas Gordon’s lugubrious Zidane: A 21st-Century Portrait was released “as” a mainstream film. And the forthcoming theatrical release of Sam Taylor-Wood’s Nowhere Boy, a biopic of John Lennon’s childhood, will provide the video artist with a captive audience her ponderous and often pompous video works are rarely granted.
This foray into the mainstream, soon to be followed by an as-yet untitled project by the Chapman Brothers which I’m hoping will be turn out to be Hostel IV, might be read as testament to the increased visibility of contemporary artists in mainstream culture, but there is a clear demarcation, certainly in McQueen’s work, between his cinematic and artistic’output – a demarcation seemingly ignored in his Venice installation, which really should have been submitted for the film festival later in the year. The language of cinema forces the artist’s hand as well as the audience’s presumed attention – after all, you can (and should) wander out of the majority of displays of video art whenever you like, whereas leaving a cinema, clambering over snogging couples while scattering popcorn into their laps, is awkward at best and, strangely, frowned-upon (in Britain, anyway). For someone of middling talent like Taylor-Wood, the narrative and durational demands of cinema might shear off some of her worst indulgences (e.g.); comparing McQueen’s film, Hunger, with his art video, Giardini, is evidence enough of the ameliorative effects of cinematic convention. Still, it’s hard not to somewhat begrudge, as anyone with any stake in marginal cultural activity must (and, let’s face it, contemporary art, regardless of its glamour quotient, economic symbolism or intermittent tabloid friendliness, is a marginal cultural activity, like scat or bodybuilding), contemporary culture’s mainstream magnetic pole.
Summer Travelogue
Front door in Kerameikos
Upon arriving in Athens, several curious and helpful people gave me every warning to stay far away from the Kerameikos and Metaxourgeio neighborhoods, which was exactly where I was headed, for ReMap KM 2. Settled by new immigrants from Egypt, Iran, Afghanistan, and Lebanon, and dubbed Little Bangladesh, these neighborhoods are defined by poverty, drugs, petty crime, and prostitution.
Just as I was about to head into the first gallery, Nice & Fit from Berlin, a teenager came barreling around the corner, ran out into the intersection, and was gone without a trace. Six of Athens’s finest gave chase for a couple blocks before giving up the pursuit. Perhaps the bad reputation is sadly deserved. But there was a tremendously festive spirit that night. Hundreds of brave art appreciators were following maps, strolling between abandoned buildings where the 21 international galleries and 16 independent projects had set up squats. It felt like we visitors had set up a block party on derelict pedestrian streets after the residents had agreed to disappear for the night.
Many of us ended our tours at Breeder Gallery’s elegant new space at the end of the nearly empty Iasonos Street. Co-owner George Vamvakidis explained to me that these seedy blocks were once part of Athens’s most affluent neighborhood, the grand homes creating a romantic passageway. As the city expanded, younger residents moved to further out suburbs, their parents died, and the crumbling facades were left to decay. I asked George if it had been a good idea to relocate his gallery to oblivion. He said he liked the action the street gets—all types of action—and that the foot traffic increased as the city grew darker each night. As it turns out, the vast majority of the seemingly abandoned-looking buildings were far from empty. Rather, they had been adapted into brothels, woven into the massive web of Greece’s legal sex trade.
Early the next morning, when I returned to the area to take a few photos in the light, I found myself walking behind the only other person who was out and about. He was dressed smartly, with a polo shirt tucked into his jeans and I assumed him to be a fellow tourist, perhaps a gallery-hopping collector, as we were both fumbling maps while walking. Suddenly he stopped, looked left, looked right, steadied himself, and then bolted through the front door of one of the brothels. I was left alone in the middle of the walkway completely surprised.
Perhaps it isn’t so shocking, the intertwining of ad-hoc galleries amongst prostitutes. Certainly, artists have long investigated the links between the two ancient professions. Marlene Dumas famously wrote, “lf a Prostitute is a person / who makes it a profession/ to gratify the lust of various persons / for economical reasons or gain, / where emotional involvement may / or may not be present— / Then it seems not so far removed / from my definition of an artist.” And six years ago, Andrea Fraser debuted her video, Untitled. She had sex with an unnamed collector who had paid her $20,000, then displayed the bird’s-eye-view footage in galleries around the world. (The $20,000 apparently did not cover the full girlfriend experience. They commenced with intercourse, engaged in a bit of talk, and then exited to opposite sides of the frame.)
With great pleasure, artistic provocateurs have explored every angle of the sex trade, but my recent European vacation made me wonder about the exploitative nature of the art viewer. See, in full confession, not long after I saw the john in Athens, I engaged in my own degrading activity — only mine took place at the entrance gate of an art museum in Venice.
Interview: Dan Cameron on Prospect.2 New Orleans
Before I say that Prospect.1 New Orleans was the most exciting art event to take place in the U.S. in the last decade, I should probably provide the disclaimer that I was responsible for its docent training (on a volunteer basis) as well for its archival photography (on a not-so-volunteer basis). But you don’t have to take my word for it: my Art21 blogging colleague Hrag Vartanian did a great job of chronicling the biennial on these very pages. It was truly a landmark event, and it’s a safe bet to say that there are still a lot of us here in New Orleans who are still catching our breath from the whole magnificently chaotic experience.
Prospect New Orleans curator Dan Cameron, however, doesn’t have the luxury of catching his breath like the rest of us. It’s the nature of biennials that plans for the next one begin the moment the previous one is finished, and Cameron is already immersed in preparations for the opening of Prospect.2 in the fall of 2010. I sat down with him this week at his home in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans to find out what’s in store.
John d’Addario: Let’s start by talking about some the lessons you learned from Prospect.1 that will change the way you’ll be doing things for Prospect.2.
Dan Cameron: Well, it’s not so much a case of what lessons were learned as it will be tweaking the model a little bit and improving on things that did work.
One of the top things I want to see happen is having the biennial more neighborhood-identified within the greater context of New Orleans. Over the course of Prospect.1, I noticed that some people found the whole thing very daunting given the scale of what we were doing, especially people from out of town who maybe were just encountering New Orleans for the first time, or who didn’t know that there’s a lot more to the city than the French Quarter. And a lot of those people might not have been familiar with what the different neighborhoods in New Orleans were all about.
This city is made up of incredibly diverse, vibrant neighborhoods and I want Prospect.2 to become more closely associated with places like Mid-City, Tremé, the Warehouse District … the list goes on. So we’re hoping that by branding the different neighborhoods as exhibition venues, it will make the whole experience more manageable for the people who come to see it.
Another thing is that Prospect.2 is going to be more focused on music than Prospect.1 was. On one level, the Prospect biennial is an art festival, and I always wanted to differentiate it from other festival-type events like Jazz Fest. But instead of using the festival concept as a restraining idiom, I want to focus on the concept of an art festival as grab bag: the biennial as centerpiece of a wider festival of the arts, which will include music as well.
So we’re planning to have some kind of music event somewhere in the city every night of the exhibition—we’ve already been discussing programming in terms of “65 Nights,” which is how long the biennial will run. It will be similar to the type of programming that goes on during an event like a World’s Fair, or a Documenta, except that our focus would be mostly on music. We’re thinking about a possible collaboration with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, and about inaugurating a visual and performing arts community space in the Lower Ninth Ward.
Of course we had a strong performing arts presence in Prospect.1 too … there was Kalup Linzy’s “Members Only” cabaret at Sweet Lorraine’s, and Navin Rawanchaikul and Tyler Russell’s jazz funeral for Narvin Kimball. But there are so many amazing performance spaces here in New Orleans that I’d like to utilize over the course of the exhibition, like the mortuary on North Rampart Street that the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation has taken over and Le Chat Noir, a cabaret on St. Charles Avenue. So there won’t be a problem finding enough material to have every night covered. It’s hard to predict how it’s exactly going to pan out at this point, but that’s what I want to see happen.
Jd’A: So what other changes can we expect to see in Prospect.2?
DC: There’s a somewhat higher number of New Orleans and Louisiana-based artists proportionately, though there’s also fewer artists overall: about 60 this time around, compared to over 80 last time.
We’re also going to charge this time, which hopefully won’t surprise too many people. Right now we’re discussing how best to do that, though it will probably involve a tiered system of day passes, weekend passes, and exhibition-long season passes. We’re fortunate that pretty much every institution that was involved in Prospect.1 wants to be on board for Prospect.2 as well, so that will give us the opportunity to do more clustering of venues throughout the city as we add new locations to make it easier for visitors to see everything.
A big challenge is how to expand the biennial’s presence in the French Quarter, which is of course the part of town that most visitors are familiar with – although we want to convey the idea that it’s a genuine neighborhood, not just a strip of bars on Bourbon Street. A lot of people told me how much they liked the “treasure hunt” aspect of Prospect.1, going all over the city to seek out some of the more out-of-the-way venues. That would work really well in a neighborhood like the French Quarter, and would give us the opportunity to draw attention to some great cultural landmarks a lot of people don’t get to see.
Seeing people in the New Orleans art community take advantage of the occasion to mount related exhibitions was one of the most exciting things about Prospect.1, and I want to see those satellite programs become even larger than the biennial itself. I want everyone – visitors and residents alike – to be able to see art all over the place, all the time.
I also expect to see at least twice as many visitors as we did for Prospect.1. We had 89,000 visitors last time, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to see that figure double next year.
The Studio at Colton: A Look Back and Ahead
If you had to point to one institution that best illustrated the progress of the arts community in post-Katrina New Orleans—not to mention the progress of the city in general—you wouldn’t have to look any further than the Colton Middle School on St. Claude Avenue.
Named for an evidently well-regarded member of the New Orleans Board of Education in the early years of the 20th century, the Charles J. Colton School opened in 1929 and operated for more than seventy-five years as a middle school serving a community which included the Bywater, Faubourg Marigny, Tremé, and Lower Ninth Ward neighborhoods. Although the school was one of a handful to reopen shortly after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, a dispersed population and resulting drop in attendance led to its closing after the 2007-08 school year.
Shortly after its closing as a middle school, the city’s Recovery School District leased the building to the Creative Alliance of New Orleans (CANO), a non-profit arts-focused economic development organization spearheaded by “cultural entrepreneurs” Jeanne Nathan and Robert Tannen. The couple organized the Studio at Colton partly as a response to concerns voiced by artist Paul Chan, who noted while visiting New Orleans for his landmark production of Waiting for Godot during Fall 2007 that there was not enough affordable studio space in the city.
In short order, and with a shoestring budget supplemented by donated janitorial services and volunteer work, CANO transformed the vacant 100,000 square foot building into exhibition, rehearsal, and studio space for more than 100 artists and arts organizations including painters, photographers, theater and dance companies, costume designers, sculptors, landscape architects and video production outfits. In return for use of the facilities, many resident artists and groups at Colton conducted free or low-cost classes and workshops for New Orleans student groups and adults. (More than 60 such classes and workshops were offered during the spring of this year.)
Rechristened the Studio at Colton, the building received a high profile boost when it was selected as one of the venues in last year’s Prospect.1 biennial exhibition. Art:21 Season 3 artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s Black Fireworks piece (above) was installed to magnificent effect in the Colton’s main auditorium, and Prospect.1 artists José Damasceno (below, left) and Tatsuo Miyajima (below, right) created room-scale installations in former classrooms elsewhere in the building.
