Profile: Nina Schwanse (artist, New Orleans)
In 2009, artist Nina Schwanse relocated from New York City/Philadelphia to New Orleans to continue her video practice at the University of New Orleans. Her work refreshes the typically didactic terrain of mediated female objectification with verbal and visual wit. With each video, she channels a fascination with notoriety into an ongoing exploration of self-representation—an ontological dilemma faced in social contexts of all scales, but especially the macro that is increasingly common in our technological age of instant and accidental celebrity.
In her words, she aims to “restructure the narrative and formal language of news media, advertising, and pornography to create disjunctive portraits that intend to disappoint the expected course of entertainment,” and while doing so, she evokes personas that are genuinely entertaining. She plays most of these characters herself, limiting the degree to which they are allowed to present themselves on camera. When they address the viewer in first person, their speech is matched with speechless modeling, a separation whose tension produces caricatures that resonate beyond superficiality.
k-a-t-e(s) (11 mins., 2010)
Schwanse becomes the pantheon of celebrity Kates who congeal as a somewhat multi-faceted contemporary definition of the name. Her Kates offer deadpan excerpts of their biographies, personal PR, and, of course, humility.
The Process Behind the Portrait
Alec Soth, "Donald and Tamara," from the series, "NIAGARA," 2004.
The practice of photographic portraiture is rife with ethical implications – from the subject’s awareness of the project, to the artistic choices made throughout the session, to the work’s resulting place within the art market. The process behind the portraiture is particularly interesting to me, especially in how the relationship between the artist and subject can impact the ethical considerations of the project. The artist Alec Soth’s frank style of portraiture is realized through his ability to make his subjects feel comfortable in front of his camera. In an article last year in the New York Times, Julian Cox, Curator of Photography at the High Museum, was quoted, saying that Soth “communes with his subjects and his environment through the ritual of the photographic act. He’s a very natural type of communicator. That’s part of his magic formula for having his subjects turn themselves over to him.” Soth was kind enough to allow me to interview him about the relationships he builds with the subjects of his portraiture, and how it affects his resulting work.
Rachel Craft: I’d be curious to learn more about your process leading up to the photography session. When you find a subject, what are your first steps?
Alec Soth: My approach really varies from project to project. When working with a large format camera, I’ll often approach people while leaving the camera in my car. I’ll just talk to them, explain what I’m doing and ask if they’ll pose. In terms of the explanation, I try to be as honest as I can about what I’m doing. But sometimes this is made difficult by the fact that I really don’t know what I’m doing. Lately I’ve been working in a really free-form intuitive way and I’ve been having a hell of a time communicating this to the people I photograph.
Alec Soth, "Sunshine, Memphis, Tennessee," from the series, "Sleeping by the Mississippi," 2000.
RC: Does your relationship with your subject, and how easily he or she accepts the idea of your project, influence the resulting work?
AS: I wish there was a formula for great pictures, but there absolutely isn’t. Personally I don’t like to be too close to the people I photograph. If I could, sometimes I think I would take their picture without us ever talking. I like to imagine their personality based on their physical attributes. For this reason, it is really rare that I photograph family and friends.
RC: Your portraits always feel like a very honest portrayal of the person. To what extent do you allow your subject to choose how they represent themselves and to what extent do you project your own perspective on their portraits?
AS: It’s really hard to say. I mean, I don’t go out with a bag of a costumes and ask people to perform in my play, but I’m not comfortable saying that I’m entirely neutral. I choose the people, I choose the moment to snap the shutter and I choose the final picture. All of these little decisions add up to a lot of power in terms of how the person is represented.
New guest blogger: Adrian Duran
Many thanks to John d’Addario for his insightful and exciting posts on New Orleans contemporary art scene. Be sure to read his interview with Dan Cameron about Prospect.2, which launches in Fall 2010.
Up next is Adrian R. Duran, Assistant Professor of Art History at the Memphis College of Art in Memphis, TN. He received his Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Delaware in 2006 and specializes in Twentieth Century Italian art. He has published articles and reviews in Carte Italiane, CAA.reviews, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, SECAC Review, and Number: an independent arts journal. His current projects include a book on Il Fronte Nuovo delle Arti and articles on Grandmaster Flash and Leoncillo Leonardi.
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.
Banksy New Orleans: Then and Now
It’s been nearly a year since the U.K.-based street artist and provocateur known as Banksy completed over a dozen public art pieces in various locations around New Orleans, including the Faubourg Marigny, Mid-City, Tremé, and the Lower 9th Ward.
The appearance of the pieces coincided with the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and many of the images commented directly or obliquely on issues like government (non-)reponse to the crisis, racial and class divisions in the city of New Orleans, and the persistent efforts of local anti-graffiti vigilante Fred Radtke, aka the “Grey Ghost.”
While the approach of Hurricane Gustav over Labor Day weekend and subsequent evacuation of the city prolonged the lifespan of several of these works for a few extra days, by the middle of September 2008, most of them had been painted over by parties not sympathetic to Banksy’s singular worldview. In one case, a Banksy image was physically sawed off the front of the shotgun house upon which it was painted. (Banksy’s pieces sometimes fetch considerable sums on the secondary market, although the artist has stated that any piece thus removed from its original context and sold without his consent is no longer “an original Banksy.”)
Share and Share Alike
Artists who garner the most attention in any given time period are those whose work, explicitly or implicitly, reflects the deeper political sensibilities of the era. Right now, contemporary artists to watch are those who have turned away from the traditional egocentric focus and embraced the communitarianism associated with Barack Obama’s campaign and now with his administration. Artists who project a me-me-me attitude and are consumed with obsessive careerism look shabby and regressive. While the art world rallied around commerce in the Bush years, it may zone in on community in the Obama epoch. Despite the demoralizing art market downturn, the art world has been infected with President Obama’s inclusive “Yes We Can” spirit, finally catching up with the small cadre of artists and art bloggers who were the first to adopt decentralized, community-minded art practices that fully embraced American pragmatism and ingenuity. If this shift is any indication, generosity may be the defining value of the new era. Here are a few of the artists who exemplify the shift from an inward to an outward focus.
In January, Chan, second from left, participated in an informal gallery talk with members of New Orleans art collective The Front. (Photo: Hrag Vartanian)
Paul Chan
With funding from Creative Time, Paul Chan went to New Orleans and staged Waiting for Godot in New Orleans. The project evolved into a larger social production involving free art seminars, educational programs, theater workshops, and conversations with the community. As a result of Chan’s seminars and workshops, several artists organized ongoing collective projects. In January, one of the collectives, The Front, was invited to participate in Things Fall Apart, an exhibition at Edward Winkleman Gallery, curated by artist/blogger Joy Garnett. “It is fashionable today (still?) to claim that there is nothing new beyond our horizon of art, that everything worth doing has been done, “ Chan said in his project statement for Godot. “But this seems to me an altogether specious claim, for it ignores the vast undiscovered country of things that ought to be undone. In these great times, the terror of action and inaction shapes the burden of history. Perhaps the task of art today is to remake this burden anew by suspending the seemingly inexorable order of things (which gives the burden its weight) for the potential of a clearing to take place, so that we can see and feel what is in fact worthless, and what is in truth worth renewing.”
“Habitat For Artists Goes Indoors” is on view through Feb. 28. Draper built a replica of one of the sheds so visitors could sit in it and appreciate the small spaces.
Simon Draper: Habitat for Artists
Using reclaimed materials, Simon Draper created a makeshift community of studio sheds in Beacon, NY, and invited artists to use them for the summer. He and co-organizer Amy Lipton, curator for ecoartspace, a New York- and California-based non-profit organization dedicated to raising environmental awareness through the arts, encouraged each artist to adapt their shack, initially outfitted with simple openings, doors, windows, or skylights to suit their own needs. This month, Draper, Lipton, and their band of collaborators brought the project inside to Van Brunt Gallery in Beacon, NY, where artists are using the gallery as studio space, offering workshops, organizing panel discussions, and sharing their art making practices with the general public.
Kalm Report on Blip.tv
Loren Munk: James Kalm Report
Loren Munk is the mastermind behind the James Kalm Report, a video chronicle of the contemporary New York art scene. Munk, a painter himself, bikes to art shows, tiny videocam in hand, interviewing both famous artists and friends at openings around the city. Each video, featuring Munk’s stage-whispered narration, is edited and posted on BlipTV free of charge. Munk’s commitment to the local art community also includes “Brooklyn Dispatches,” a monthly column in the artist-run art journal, The Brooklyn Rail. When Munk was honored by WagMag (Williamsburg and Greenpoint Monthly Art Guide) for his contributions to the local art community, he turned the event into a conceptual performance project called “The James Kalm Artist’s Economic Stimulus Grant,” giving everyone in the audience a dollar.
Touring Prospect.1 (Part 5), the Warehouse District
Roughly located between New Orleans’ Business and Garden Districts, the Warehouse Arts District was a major concentrations for Prospect.1 displays. Dominated by warehouses and old industrial spaces, there is little of the ornamental architecture that gives the rest of New Orleans its distinct flavor.
While there were a few works scattered in warehouse and neighborhood non-profit spaces, the vast majority of art was on display at the city’s Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) which is located near many of the city’s other museums, including the World War II Museum, the Children’s Museum, the Civil War Museum and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.
A modern and spacious building, the CAC was expertly curated with dozens of works that felt like a biennial in and of themselves. The Warehouse District may have been a starting point for many biennial visitors but I chose to end my posts with a jaunt through this post-industrial neighborhood.
Jacqueline Humphries, installation view at Ideal Auto Repair; work on the bottom: Soft Machine (2008)
Born in New Orleans, Humphries chose a site that evoked the fact that her family once owned a auto repair shop. Using auto enamel and oil, she created five large gestural works that came alive in this naturally lit space full of grays, browns and dirty whites. The metallic pigments seemed to absorb the subtle light and I could’ve stayed for hours to watch how the light created subtle changes in the work. There was also a curious backroom to this exhibition which included picket-like forms painted in the same manner as the larger works. They were unidentified and posted in a dark room. I could only guess they were studies for the larger panels.
Robin Rhode, Kite (2008) at CAC
One of the funniest and most poetic works in the biennial, Rhode’s work included a video component (which is hard to identify in the photograph) that displayed the sky behind the imaginary kite. Hands on another canvas held the kite into place. The work creates a mood of nostalgia and loss. Place in a darkened corner of the museum, you sense you are experiencing a very private and intimate moment.
Touring Prospect.1 (Part 4), French District & Marigny
I was surprised that Prospect.1 shied away from New Orleans’ infamous French District as much as it did. The epicenter of New Orleans’ global brand, and one of the world’s favorite Mardi Gras destinations, only one artist exhibited in the neighborhood.
Fortunately, there was art galore next door in the somewhat lesser known but equally historic Marigny neighborhood, which is also home to a significant chunk of the city’s arts community.
Another venue located at the crossroads of the French Quarter and the Marigny, the Old U.S. Mint Building, was not only one of the most impressive art venues but also filled with some of the most fascinating works of the whole biennial. Today, I offer you a small tour through this well-preserved part of the city.
Rosângela Rennó’s video work (2008)
Rennó was the only artist to exhibit in the French Quarter. Juxtaposing videos of white Cajuns and black Creoles, she attempted to offer us some insight into the cultural appropriation that is part of the cultural fabric of New Orleans and, by extension, Louisiana. Unfortunately, after asking around and doing some research, I discovered that the binary scenario (black/white, creole/cajun) that Rennó offered us in her video wasn’t all fact and partly fiction. Like all issues of cultural appropriation and hybrid cultures, the realities were far more complex than they first appear.
Srdjan Loncar, Value (2008) at the Old Mint Building
In light of the economic crisis, Loncar’s work was almost prescient. Visitors could buy a case full of Loncar’s notes (not real money) for $500. According to the security guard, the work was quite popular and dozens had already sold. Appropriately installed in the Old U.S. mint building, I wondered if Loncar was spoofing the American financial system or the biennial viewers themselves.
Touring Prospect.1 (Part 3), the Lower Ninth Ward
If the impact of Katrina now seems minimal in the rest of New Orleans, in the Lower Ninth Ward it was obviously devastating. My guide, who has since become a friend, explained to me that the fields all around were once as densely packed as the city’s other neighborhoods. That knowledge deeply impacted the way I looked at the art in the area.
It wasn’t surprising, then, that many artists decided to use the “home” as a basis for their art. Katherina Grosse chose to paint a home at 5418 Dauphine Street; Wangetchi Mutu “sketched” one out of wood at 540 Caffin Avenue; and Leandro Erlich erected a ladder which leans on a window in mid-air, hovering as if it was ripped from a wall.
Below are some of what I saw among the ruins of the Lower Ninth Ward. It’s not surprising that many of the works seem obsessed with standing witness to the injustices that the surrounding community faced.
Janine Antoni (Season 2) T-E-A-R (2008)
The lead wrecking ball stands alone in front of a projected eye. The giant eye evokes the nightmare vision of George Orwell’s big brother (1984), where we are always being watched. But here the eye seems to have witnessed some form of destruction. The wrecking ball sits in a spotlight and echoes the shapes on the screen. I sensed the heavy burden that witnessing a tragedy can entail.
Ghada Amer, Happy Ever After (2005)
My guide told me that this piece was moved during the biennial and as a result the vines never grew up the trellises, which read, “Happy Ever After.”
Situated by the infamous levee that flooded the Lower Ninth Ward, when I sat on the round bench in the middle I could only imagine that if the vines had grown fully, the whole landscape would disappear, allowing me to imagine myself in a fantasy world of blue sky and greenery. Unfortunately like the promise of the Lower Ninth Ward, Amer’s piece was never fully realized in New Orleans, but it was a beautiful idea nonetheless.
