Report #1 from Prospect.2 New Orleans: The Music Box

Prospect New Orleans is an international art biennial founded and directed by Dan Cameron, former Sr. Curator of the New Museum and Director of the New Orleans CAC. Cameron conceived the event as a way to help bring visitors back to the city after Katrina.

Prospect.1 in 2008 was more or less spectacular (see posts here); Prospect.2 was delayed a year for lack of funding and is smaller but still worth the trip.

The Music Box, A Shantytown Sound Laboratory: 
Phase one of Dithyrambalina is a local, "satellite" project and is not to be missed. Unfortunately, I couldn't get in for the season's last concert, but the artists were kind enough to let me visit the next day; more pics and vidis here.

The project began when the New Orleans Airlift acquired a barely-standing, late 18th century Creole cottage, which promptly fell to the ground. The group asked artist Swoon to take a look. For some time she'd been dreaming of a musical house; so the artists decided to use the remains of the cottage to create a collection of experimental shanties that could serve as prototypes for instrumentalities in a larger house they hope to build.

Audio recordings of shantytown concerts are available here.

The Music Box was curated by Delaney Martin with assistance from Swoon and Theo Eliezer and was created by those and other artists including Taylor Lee Shepherd, Jayme Kalal, Quintron, Taylor Kuffner/Zemi17, Ross Harmon, Ben Mortimer, Nick Yulman, Angeliska Polacheck & Colin McIntyre, Ranjit Bhatnagar, Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels, Elizabeth Shannon, Ratty Scurvics, Rainger Pinney & Jonah Emerson-Bell, Micah Learned, Aaron Kellner, Andrew Schrock, Jade Brandt, and Myrtle Von Damitz III.

Last in this post below is a really nice vidi by grossymmetric about The Music Box. Nola.com also has a good video interview with Swoon about the project. More info on the project here.

Prospect.2 New Orleans runs through January 29, 2012.

Two more posts on the biennial to come.

Mel Chin's "Fundred Dollar Bill" Project

You may remember the first pic, right, from my 2008 post on Prospect.1 New Orleans.

What I should also have mentioned is that this "safe house," created by artist Mel Chin, was the launching pad for a massive art project, Operation Paydirt, in which we're all invited to collaborate.

Chin visited New Orleans after Katrina and learned that not only had the city been decimated by the disaster, but thousands of its kids were struggling with severe learning disabilities and behavioral problems because dangerous levels of lead had been allowed to accumulate in the local soil. He discovered that lead contamination is pervasive in many U.S. cities, and he determined to do something about it.

Chin developed a template that can be used to make "FUNdred Dollar Bills," and using this template, kids and others across the nation have created thousands of unique artworks and sent them to Chin's collaborative. Their goal is to amass three million FUNdred bucks by the end of the 2010-2011 school year and deliver them by armored truck to Congress, to help bring attention to the problem.

They want you to become part of the collaborative by making and contributing your own Fundred buck(s). You can download the template and find lots more info here, including where to send your bucks.

We included the template in the Non-Profit Margin exhibition at CentralTrak, as one of several examples of socially-engaged, participatory art projects in the vein contemplated by Temporary Services' ART WORK newspaper, and we solicited people to make and contribute their own FUNdred Dollar Bills. You can see a few more examples here (the two shown in this post are by Gabe Dawe and moi).

Please consider making this a project for your family, students, or drinking buddies. Here's a video about Operation Paydirt:

Kalup Linzy's "Keys to Our Heart"

He's got 'em.

This video (24:06 min.; 2008) was commissioned by Prospect.1 New Orleans and was also shown at the Fusebox Festival. The production is in a lush, vintage-y black and white and seems more polished than Linzy's earlier work; perhaps he's gotten comfortable that by now we know better than to take his work at face value.

Keys is an example of what I might call "quasi-narrative." There's a clear plot line, but various aspects of the piece subvert any "willing suspension of disbelief" or other inclination to relate to the piece as a conventional story.

The plot involves two entangled love triangles. Linzy, a black male, plays Lily, a lesbian with a jaded world-view. She and Dina (also black) are best friends who had sex once long ago. Now Dina has a boyfriend, John Jay (white or mixed), who treats her well. But Dina's been rebuffing him, sexually and otherwise; she and Lily exult in being "bitches." Lily advises the suffering John Jay that Dina will never love him unless he starts treating her badly, acting like an "asshole." John Jay distrusts Lily, but her words ring true. He confides in Sally Sue (white), who's friends with all of them. Sally Sue defends Dina to John Jay, and also goes to Dina to warn her that she could lose him. Dina starts to take Sally Sue's warning to heart, but while dithering, allows herself to be seduced into having sex with Lily again. Meanwhile, John Jay decides to give up on Dina and starts wooing Sally Sue. Dina resolves to approach John Jay to try to reconcile, but accidentally catches him having sex with Sally Sue. Lily then tricks the other three characters into meeting for a showdown in which Dina is confronted with the fact of John Jay's new relationship and Lily reveals that she and Dina have had sex twice and proclaims her love for Dina. Dina writes John an empathetic letter acknowledging her failure to appreciate him and seeking reconciliation. John Jay writes an empathetic letter back suggesting she'd probably be happier in a relationship with Lily.

As in much or most of his other work, in Keys Linzy himself plays one of the lead female roles and dubs in the voices of all the characters. The lines are spoken excessively slowly and enunciated excessively clearly, with an intonation that's at once overdramatic yet declamatory and slightly dead; and the voices themselves, other than Linzy/Lily's, sound completely unnatural. The weirdness of the dubbing lends an air of farce or surreality. (Trailer below; this is not the whole piece.)



Linzy's script is funny – my non-art-pro girlfriend LoL'd – and also odd. Most of the dialogue consists in the characters' explicating their own or others' inner motivations with more fluency than Woody Allen, in Oprah-esque pop psychological terms. And apart from a few clichés that are heavily repeated throughout the piece (discussed below), the characters' lines sometimes seem oddly literal or direct, sometimes almost robotic – e.g., here's John Jay, initiating his seduction of Sally Sue (in Linzy's unnaturally low, overly-enunciated voice): "Since you're single and have no boyfriend, I thought a late lunch with a male friend would serve you well."

The metaphor of "the key(s)" to [one or more persons'] "heart(s)" is used liberally throughout the script, and the characters are repeatedly referred to in terms of two, contrasting sets of stock types, one positive and one negative. Sally Sue announces the positive set: Lily is the "Queen," Dina is the "Princess," John Jay is a "good man," and Sally Sue is the "Sweetheart." Lily/Linzy proclaims the characters' negative identities: she and Dina are "Bitches," Sally Sue is the "Slut," and John Jay the "Queen of Assholes."

And the characters are often presented in an exaggerated, parodic style, as if intended to represent extremes of good and evil. But both sets of labels are shown to be over-simplifications. "Queen" Lily is played by an apparent drag queen – is Linzy sending up these stereotypes while at the same time reminding us of the extent to which they're often true – though perhaps not in the way we expected? In fact, the characters are neither good nor evil; the actions of all seem at bottom determined by self-interest, but the characters all also show compassion for their friends. Lily's manner of speaking generally seems the bitchiest, but the truths she delivers prove helpful to all.

The heavy-handed repetition of stereotypic labels and of the "keys" motif may in part be a reference to old soap opera scripts. Another soap opera-ish element in Keys is the use of stock dramatic or cinematic devices. These include the climactic scene in which all characters are brought together by Lily for the all-is-revealed! showdown. As usual in soaps, however, it turns out that all was not actually revealed; further insight comes through subsequent segments that deploy the stock device in which we see a character write a letter while we hear it read in voiceover – and one suspects any sequel would offer still further surprises. And then, of course, there's the soap-y organ music.

The lovingly detailed costumes and certain aspects of the sets invoke the 50's, while most of the music is Depression-era (the piece opens with Lily lip-syncing to a delightful 1930's recording by Lil Johnson of Get 'Em From the Peanut Man (Hot Nuts) (more on that below). And in one brief scene, as a fully-suited John Jay exits a door, Linzy speeds up the footage, giving it a Chaplin-esque look I associate with the 1920's.

The vintage accoutrements throw into relief aspects of the piece that may be common enough in recent decades but seem weird within the vintage-y frame:

• As mentioned, the characters spend much of their time pop psychologizing.

• The dialogue is larded with "foul" language in quantities difficult to imagine in anything other than a modern production (bitch, pussy, bullshit, fuck, etc.) – esp. coming from characters wearing ties or white gloves. The grammar's also off, in "modern" ways.

• One scene shows doggy-style sex in the kitchen; and no qualms are suffered regarding extramarital sex.

• The casting seems "color blind"; and miscegenation is a total non-issue.

• An open lesbian, played by a transvestite, seduces a repressed lesbian. Lesbianism per se and the concept of committed, long-term lesbian relationships are accepted non-issues.

At the same time, some of these aspects (e.g., the psychobabble, perhaps the color-blind casting, and the foul language – how long has Southpark been on?) are themselves already verging on cliché.

Linzy's mash-up of vintages operates to distance us from the conventionalities in which we're immersed today. The soap-opera and vintage frames give us poke and a wink, prompting us both to laugh and to reflect not so much on what we've inherited from earlier decades as on what we've done with it lately.

At bottom, however, part of what makes this piece so appealing is that, even if Linzy's intentions are parodic, his work is full of love. The weird or parodic aspects do distance us from the characters and their story, but one strongly suspects that Linzy feels genuine affection not only for the vintage and soap opera elements he deploys but also for pop psychology, foul language, color-blindness, etc., as well as people in general. To the extent Keys is parody, it seems to be parodying our present as well as old soaps, but it also seems to be loving both.

What ARE the keys to our hearts? We hear truth in Sally Sue's sentiment that "if you want to have a sweetheart, you have to have a heart that is sweet." Or do you? One suspects John Jay's suggestion is correct that the two "bitches," Lily and Dina, hold the keys to one another's hearts; sweetness may be key for John Jay and Sally Sue but not for Lily and Dina. And compatible sexual orientation proves the sine qua non for all.

There's been some interesting confusion in writings about this piece regarding the title. Is it key to our hearts, keys to our hearts, or keys to our heart? The last is correct, suggesting that perhaps we all share one great heart, but the key for each of us is unique: another cliché we can both smile at and appreciate.

Keys may also be an example of a trend I've observed in which artists import or export material from the past into the present or vice versa, in the process transforming both. I recently came across Dieter Roelstraete's discussions of a "historiographic turn" in art (see e-flux here, citing Mark Godfrey’s essay “The Artist as Historian,” published in [e-flux?] in October 120 (2007), and here). I was excited to find Roelstraete's articles, found them brilliant, and think he nails many important points.

But Roelstraete laments "contemporary art’s inability 'to grasp or even look at the present, much less to excavate the future,'” and adds, "our inability to . . . imagine the future seems structurally linked with the enthusiasm shared by so many artists for digging up various obscure odds and ends dating from a more or less remote, unknowable past—and the more unknowable the past in question, the deeper the pathological dimension of this melancholy, retrospective gaze."

Much of the video and other new media-based work I've seen in recent years seems to be within or relate to this historiographic trend, e.g. (you may have to search the pages at the following links for the artist's name), Matthew Barney (Drawing Restraint 13), Michael Bell-Smith (Battleship Potemkin), Guy Ben Ner (Berkeley's Island), Matt Marello (Sitcoms), Andrea Fraser (her "museum" pieces, e.g., here), Simon Martin (Wednesday Afternoon and Carlton), Steve Reinke (Hobbit Love is the Greatest Love), Laura Paperina (Joseph Kosuth versus Matthew Barney, et al. {and keep clicking "next" for a while}), R. Luke DuBois (State of the Union Address, and keep clicking next for a while), Airan Kang (and keep clicking next for a while), Shana Moulton (her Whispering Pines series), and Erica Eyres (The Male Epidemic).

I believe at least some of these artists are in fact using the past to illuminate the present, in the hope of improving the future. Maybe not an excavation of the future; maybe just an invitation to all of us to help create it in a more conscious way.
____________

Lyrics to Get 'Em From the Peanut Man (Hot Nuts)
Recorded by Lil Johnson
Probably by Georgia White
Recording of March 4, 1936; from Complete Recorded Works In Chronological Order, Vol. 1 (1929-1936) (Document DOCD-5307).

Sellin' nuts, hot nuts, anybody here want to buy my nuts?
Sellin' nuts, hot nuts, I've got nuts for sale
Selling one for five, two for ten,
If you buy 'em once, you'll buy 'em again
Sellin' nuts, hot nuts, you buy 'em from the peanut man

Nuts, hot nuts, anybody here want to buy my nuts?
Sellin' nuts, hot nuts, I've got nuts for sale
They tell me your nuts is mighty fine,
But I bet your nuts isn't hot as mine
Sellin' nuts, hot nuts, you buy 'em from the peanut man

* * * * *

More here.

UPDATE: Just found a great interview of Linzy at, of course, Interview, by Chan Marshall. Linzy names Meryl Streep, Lynn Whitfield, Kim Wayans, and Ashton Kutcher as actors he'd like to work with, then says, "I’m trying to imagine them in the context of my work, which is a little difficult. But . . . [s]ometimes people are good-enough actors that they can transform themselves into something kind of kitschy." The new John Waters? Later he mentions, "I definitely want to do a [soap-ish] TV series at some point." YEAH!

Prospect.1; KK Projects; Tony Oursler

Remember Prospect.1 (2008), the largest biennial of international contemporary art ever organized in the U.S., previously blogged here?

I just learned my favorite project at KK Projects was by Tony Oursler. (I don't recall any signage or mention in the printed materials . . . . Sincere apologies for my failures and ignorance, both being infinite.)

See KK Projects for their visuals (click on biennial, then on tony oursler; some of the stills are by my own Ben!); and my vidi of the piece, here.

This all takes place on a block of very small, clapboard houses damaged by the flooding following Katrina. But there's a giant house on the corner, with a paucity of windows facing the block of small houses; and those windows there are, are shuttered, boarded up, or even barred.

Many houses in N.O. still have not been repaired and remain boarded up, so you almost might not particularly notice this house; except that faint sounds and ethereal music emanate from it. You follow the audio, discover that a few small, round holes have been drilled into the ground floor walls, and peer inside. You see video -- I wish I'd watched it through, but I didn't; but I think it had to do with New Orleans denizens, and music -- projected onto the interior rooms of this monolithic, foreboding house -- against a backdrop of shelves, a chair, and various implements.

Eyes, belly-buttons, voices, instruments, apertures.

Report on Prospect.1 New Orleans (the U.S.'s New International Art Biennial)

Prospect.1 is directed and curated by Dan Cameron, former Sr. Curator of the New Museum in New York, artistic director of the Istanbul Biennial in 2003, and current Visual Arts Director at the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center (CAC). He's been visiting New Orleans for years and conceived of the new biennial as a way to help bring visitors back to the city, which is still struggling to recover from Katrina.

Cameron points out that until now, the biggest biennial in the the U.S. has been the Whitney, which isn't international.

I concur that New Orleans is an ideal location for this event, because of its cosmopolitan heritage and culture, its location, and above all its indomitable and disproportionately elegant and beauty-and-fun-loving population.

The Prospect.1 exhibitions include some 80 artists, most well-known within the art world. A possibly unusually large percentage of the works were created specifically for Prospect.1; e.g., there's a wonderful installation by Cao Fei which incorporates a virtual, New Orleans-related space within Second Life, called NO LAB (to see the video online, go here, scroll to 081 - 04|11|08, and click on SEE VIDEO).

The official Prospect.1 exhibitions are located at over two dozen venues throughout New Orleans. This initially seemed inconvenient, but I think it was the right decision; as intended, it helped me get to know the city, which proved to be a pleasure. New Orleans is easy to navigate by car; there's also a shuttle running every 20 min.

Also showing are a number of independently-organized exhibitions; e.g., by KK Projects, which has transformed four small houses in St. Roch, one into a gallery and three more into home-sized artworks. For The NYT on KK Projects and its founder, Kirsha Kaechele, go here.

As far as I can tell, the city parties constantly. So, I recommend allowing at least four days, if you can. And go soon: the weather's great (no irony intended).

Below are links to more pics and vidis.

Some of the works I liked best include:

• Takashi Horisaki's piece at the Hefler Center (starting here; and when I say starting, I mean you might want to click on "next" 'til you're sure it's over) was made by actually slathering a semi-destroyed house with latex, inside and out; I understand it took the artist two years of effort to create it.
• Candice Breitz's A Portrait of Bob Marley (here). What might not be obvious from my li'l vidi is that each individual is hearing the song through headphones and singing along, or not, without hearing the others.
• The "Batman on Poppers" (here) at the CAC was part of a pretty wonderful installation about a gay bar in N.O. destroyed by a fire in which many died. The story is provided as part of the installation and is worth the read.
• Pedro Reyes' Leverage (starting here), which I can't resist calling, "Teeter-Totter for Ten."
• Fiona Tan's Island (starting here) looked terrific in its space at the CAC, though I had trouble deciphering the audio.
• Allora y Calzadilla's brilliant piece, A Man Screaming Its Not a Dancing (starting here) -- I'm so sorry my four brief vidis don't begin to do it justice -- at the CAC. (I could have captured this piece better; but I think I unconsciously balked on the grounds that it was too stunning to steal.)
• The Cao Fei (starting here), I'm already a huge fan and she totally lived up to it, at the CAC.
• Sunset Refinery by David Sullivan (here), in the Universal Furniture space in the St. Roch area -- again, my vidi doesn't do it justice.
• The KK Projects house starting here. (I have to mention, the nite I saw these houses, little kids from the neighborhood were giving guided tours. They stood at the doors and hawked in high voices, "Come see the lovely art!"; and if you got anywhere near, they'd capture your hand and draw you into the house. Once inside, they carefully pointed out various features of the installations, recited the names of the artists involved, and offered interpretive tips.)
  
• Stephen G. Rhodes' installation at the U.S. Mint (starting here), though I didn't expect to. It captures certain aspects of life under B*shCo (e.g., the shock+awe), among other things, perfectly.
  
• The Kalup Linzy piece at the New Orleans Museum of Art is wonderful (clip here); also Pulse Tank (here) by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.

And there were plenty of other great pieces.

Before I lose any more of you, looking again at the visuals of this work, I'm pretty slapped up the head with how much of it seems concerned in part with the sweeping away, containment, erasure, or veiling of individuals -- and with efforts, at least partly successful, toward individual expression nonetheless.

Overall, the works included are perhaps not the most difficult -- many are downright charismatic. Conclude from that what you will; still, there's quality, breadth, and depth, and what I think will prove a fruitful sensitivity both to New Orleans' (decreasingly) peculiar plight and to the potential benefit to us all of having a truly great, international biennial based in the U.S.

Credit for this sensitivity is due both to Cameron and to the artists he selected (many of whom, of course, are furriners).

From a purely personal point of view, I was happy to find a decent amount of video, sorry not to find more new "new media."

Prospect.1 runs through January 17, 2009. The official P.1 homepage is here. Roberta Smith/NYT reviews the event (with more pics) here; artkrush has an article (with more pics) here.

Go here for my own pics and vidis (totally unadjusted, unedited, etc.; deepest apologies for all deficiencies and also for my failure to snap the artist/title cards for some works. Those I did snap generally appear AFTER the visual(s) of the work to which they relate. Also, I include some party pics and the like for those who were there, etc., though the emphasis is on the art. Finally, there were some great works I didn't snap, too many I missed seeing altogether, and others I snapped even though I'm not sure how much I like them; so no judgment should be inferred.)

If your interests are more selective . . .

For work at the Hefler Welcome Center, start here.
For work at the Contemporary Art Center, start here.
For the block party/gallery walk on Julia St., including 527 Gallery, start here.
For work at Louisiana ArtWorks, start here.
For Halloween nite, start here (including my costume).
For work etc. in and around St. Roch, start here.
For the dinner and work at KK Projects (including party pics of Kirsha, her mom, and other new friends), start here.
For the after-party and work at the Brickyard, start here.
For work etc. in and around the Lower Ninth Ward, start here.
For work at the U.S. Mint, start here.
For work in and around the New Orleans Museum of Art, start here.

On the way home, we caught a swamp tour from Cajun Man, also rec'd. Caveat: don't assume you can plug the address into your GPS and get there; call him for directions.

Below's a l'il Brickyard after-party for ya. Somewhat bigger-better version here; continued here; and I'm trying to get the band name, so if you like it, check back.