Category Archives: Criticism

Bonnie Maygarden: Spatial Trickster

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A Review for Tulane Fine Arts Department

Published May, 2013

Bonnie Maygarden, a first year MFA student at Tulane, is a trickster- a breaker of rules. Her art intentionally leads the viewer astray through tromp l’oeil and illusion, sometimes obscuring flatness and other times confusing texture. Ironically however, through the evolution in her body of work, Maygarden’s goal to obfuscate the viewer’s perception has unwittingly led to an exploration of painting as a spatial entity.

Bonnie Maygarden

Bonnie Maygarden

Maygarden’s Gold Abstraction series depict in photorealistic detail gold slices of crumpled Mylar paper. The valleys and mountains within the paper prove rich subjects that allow the artist to describe both an observed object as well as the distorted reflection light produces. Maygarden produced this series while living in New York, the financial capital of the world. It is logical then, that her work represented the false financial materials that form the foundation within our economy. Her surprising statement is: “I use gold to convey empty value, which in my mind is a metaphor for art.”

Maygarden’s current work use paint, not to enhance form, but rather undermine or shape it. Using polygonal canvases, Maygarden has adventured deeply into the use of spray paint to create illusionistic texture. Similar to the painted mylar paper, the spray paint creates simulated valleys and folds based on color theory. Learning from the godfathers of the modernist movement such as Joseph Albers, Maygarden layers color to replicate light and shadow, thus suggesting a depth of field that is non-existent.

Bonnie Maygarden

Bonnie Maygarden

Maygarden’s experimental techniques push the spatiality of the paintings.  By depicting an abstract expanse, the painting becomes the space, rather than a traditional depiction of one. While this point of materiality is a great jumping off point, an artist can also run the risk of covering well-developed territory. One can’t help but point to Frank Stella, a master of spatial theory in painting. “But, after all, the aim of art is to create space – space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live.”[1]

What evolution in Maygarden’s work will push this dialogue forward? There is the impression that one of her work is producing the next. I look forward to seeing what happens when Maygarden explores implications raised by the body of work as a whole. Then, the trickster may become queen.

[1] Stella, Frank. “Caravaggio” Art Theory and Criticism: An Anthology of Formalist, Avant-Garde, Contextualist and Post-Modernist Thought. Everett, Sally, ed. Jefferson, North Carolina. 1991. 243-263.

Caleb Henderson; The Fall

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A Review for Tulane Fine Arts Department

Published May, 2013

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a heaven of Hell, a hell of Heaven.

– John Milton, Paradise Lost

Solitary and timeless figures fill the canvases of Caleb Henderson’s most recent work, inhabiting the vacant landscape like Spartan sleepwalkers. Landscapes fixed with static light stretch like vast, vacant lands that once burned. A first year MFA student at Tulane, Henderson’s insistent theme is that of estrangement; of humans from each other and of ourselves from the spaces we inhabit.  Henderson’s work is paradox, a forlorn search for objective truth coupled with religious intensity and tone. This contradiction underlies the struggle within his body of work between the very gray worlds of perceived reality versus objective reality.

Caleb Henderson

Caleb Henderson

The traditional painterly techniques of great Renaissance masters are under appreciated in art institutions these days. Multi-media works and heavy-handed design fill white-walled galleries. Henderson emerges as an anomaly in this world; his work, implausibly, influenced only by painting preceding the sixteenth century. Raphael and Rembrandt, with their studious, analytical and meticulous work have more in common with Henderson than Eric Fischl ever will.

Like Renaissance masters, Henderson is looking at the human body in an objective, scientific way in order to find a tangible truth. “[I’ve realized] that there are things going on in another person’s head that I have no access to at all. They have a whole universe inside their mind. There are times when I look at my wife, who I know as well as I know anyone, and she’ll be a stranger to me.” Henderson’s deft illustrations are technically stunning, impartially depicted like a scientist recording a cadaver. By breaking down figures into patterns and shapes, he can see the infinitesimal details. Fine muscles and bones reveal well-loved subjects. However, no study of immeasurable details can reveal the internal mechanisms of the mind.

Caleb Henderson, 2013

Caleb Henderson, 2013

In Henderson’s newer works such as I’ve Almost Forgotten It All and Time Passes there is a new evolution; a movement towards psychological inquiries rather than spiritual. Muscled male subjects in motion plunge through the composition in dangerously unbalanced ways. Color has also seeped out of the picture frame in this new series; the bright blues, reds and greens of Michelangelo no longer appear. Could it be that Henderson’s struggle to understand liminal realities has led him to a state of abandon and release?

There is a timeless quality about Henderson’s work that allows his work to have a continuous dialogue. While some bodies of work can become dated with references to political movements, social history and pop culture, Henderson’s work will remain relevant. Two years or ten will determine the outcome of these works- these adventures into liminal reality that open the porous spaces of the mind, where perception expands and faith has no threshold.

Last Call: “Self-Taught, Outsider and Visionary Art from the Permanent Collection of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art”

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Published on Pelican Bomb

April 6, 2013

Over 10,000 visitors attended February’s Outsider Art Fair in New York—triple the number from the previous year. While many in New Orleans may have missed this extensive fair, there is still time to catch the panoptic “Self-Taught, Outsider and Visionary Art from the Permanent Collection” at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Dusting off pieces rarely shown and in some cases never before made public, the exhibition is impressive in the sheer number of artists included, 42 in total. Rarely does an exhibit pay such expansive homage to the many artists who have been dubbed “self-taught,” “outsider,” or “visionary.” However, it is because the works are so numerous and diverse that the question naturally arises, how or why does an artist come to be defined in these terms?

Indeed the roots of these terms are deeply fraught, each one calling from different time periods and practices. Historically visionary art has often referred to the subject matter of the works, which includes images of a spiritual or religious nature. Self-taught is a term both broad and vague: What artist is not self-taught in some way? Outsider art, however, can be seen as the patient zero of this discussion.

Hunter, Clementine "Herding Cows"

Clementine Hunter  ”Herding Cows”

The category of outsider art can be traced back to Art Brut, a genre that originated from Jean Dubuffet’s intrigue with European psychiatric writings on the artistic output of institutionalized persons. Art Brut, which literally means raw or rough art, came to refer to creative work made outside the established art scene by those such as psychiatric patients, prisoners, and children. In 1972, British historian Roger Cardinale published a book,Outsider Art, which heavily informs the current use of the term. Outsider Art, for Cardinale, was not indoctrinated with “a cultural ideal that is untouchable, inalterable, based as it is on the unshakable belief in such things as ‘our cultural heritage,’ ‘the legacy of the past’ and the fetish of the great masterpiece.’” Cardinale clarifies what outsider art is not more than what it is.

One of the many problems with this term “outsider art” is that it does not refer to any particular unified aesthetic or theory. In its most generous usage, the only unifying point is that each artist is working to create a highly personalized and individualistic visual account of the world. For some curators and art historians, the term “outsider” has become simple shorthand to encapsulate a large group of disparate artists, but we must acknowledge that the term tends to group together already marginalized artists.

Almost three-quarters of the artists in the Ogden’s exhibition are people of color. While critical, curatorial, and historical precedents have codified these artists into the genre, maybe this term has outlived its use, revealing the carefully constructed art world that separates those that belong from those that don’t.

Reverend Howard Finster and Thornton Dial are both exemplary creators of art, one a white Baptist Reverend from Georgia who at age three saw his first vision of God, the other a black farmer and factory worker from Alabama who spent a lifetime working with found objects to expand upon the yard art traditions he saw around him. There is little that connects these two artists aesthetically or conceptually. Finster was an intensely prolific painter of angels, leopards, UFOs, and clouds. Dial creates large, physical pieces made of things like driftwood, barbed wire, scrap metal, and dead birds that comment on contemporary issues of politics, race, and death. These two artists’ works are intensely specific to their own worldviews of aesthetics and practice, and united perhaps only by an aeonian creativity and eccentric soul.

Thornton Dial, "Struggling Tiger in Hard Times"

Thornton Dial, “Struggling Tiger in Hard Times”

So the question is: How will curators and art historians work to reposition artists that have been marginalized into (or outright excluded from) a canon that objectively builds links between creators along basic binary lines? As outsider art gains increasing market and critical attention through events like the Outsider Art Fair and national exhibitions, now is an important moment to examine a more respectful context in which we can discuss these works.

Short Review: Casey Ruble at the Foundation Gallery

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Published on Pelican Bomb

March 14, 2013

“The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.” — Italo Calvino, from Invisible Cities

offing

“Offing” is a nautical term referring to the part of the sea that can be seen from land closest to the horizon—a zone distant, but still imminent. Casey Ruble’s current exhibition suggests that the offing can be not only a physical distance, but also a temporal one. The passing of time, however indeterminate, leaves invisible marks on the places we live.

The New Jersey-based artist patches together small, beautiful landscapes of carefully cut pale-colored paper. Each work recalls a place of intense emotion, now left and forgotten—former orphanages, exhumed cemeteries, and locations of found murder victims in New Orleans. The tension of these sites is apparent in the surface of the collages. The immediate flatness of the even planes of color undermines the perspectival tricks used to depict depth. This push and pull of perception heightens the psychological anxiety of what might otherwise be banal scenes.

Ruble began the series for the forthcoming book, Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, a collection of maps and accompanying essays edited by Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedeker. As with Ptolemy’s Geographia, these maps deal with chorography, “the qualities rather than the quantities of the things that it sets down.” Ruble’s works depict the displacement of bodies both at the beginning and the end of life, framed so that there is an ominous suggestion of what else has or will happen.

The question remains: Are places forever marked by tragedy? While these sites may not advertise their history, there is perhaps an energy that still lingers. Ruble’s works have a palpable sense that this city is a palimpsest for the lost populations that came before and will come after us.

Post-Fordlândia: A Critical Look at a Failed Development

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Published Daily Serving
September 6, 2012

Megs Morley & Tom Flanagan, “Interior American Village Fordlândia”, Lamda print, 20×31, 2011

Post-Fordlândia, the new exhibit at Good Children Gallery, is a palimpsest for modern times: it calls from faded pasts to warn us of an ill-advised future. A series of high-def videos and large format photographs, taken by Irish artists Tom Flanagan and Megs Morley, depict the now defunct and abandoned town of Fordlândia, the mad brainchild of Henry Ford. This experiment in urban and cultural planning for the benefit of Capitalism was built in 1928 in the Amazon jungle of Brazil in order to supply rubber to the Ford production plants in the United States. Flanagan and Morley’s photographs document the disaster of this town as riots and unrest left Fordlândia now a barren, post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Megs Morley & Tom Flanagan, “Plantation Factory, Fordlândia” Lamda print, 20×29”, 2011

Post Fordlândia is a small exhibit, made up of five photographs and two videos. The rich, lushness of the high-def shots make the videos the tours de force of this show. Morley cites French philosopher Jacques Rancière ideas on documentary film as a form of fiction as an influence in the structure of the films.  In the video Fordlândia, twenty minutes of ephemeral spaces lulls the viewer into a hypnotized fascination. Imagined stories of the place and its inhabitants grow in the mind as the film progresses. Morley and Flanagan layer present day images and experiences over each other to reveal lost moments in time. Abandoned cities give the viewer the uncomfortable feeling of watching huge chunks of time happening at warp speed. As Peter Schedjahl pointed out recently, “Nothing spoils faster than the future.”[1] In this case, the past and the future seem to intermingle with uncomfortable ease.

Megs Morley & Tom Flanagan, “House, American Village, Fordlândia”, Lamda print, 20×29”, 2011

What is so interesting about this exhibit is that, when placed in the context of New Orleans, the images of an abandoned Americana are imbued with an ominous significance. Flanagan and Morley are collaborative artists working with Gallery 126, an artist-run coop based in Galway, Ireland. Malcolm McClay, a founding member of Good Children, is a native of Ireland and worked with Gallery 126 to bring these artists to New Orleans. He pointed out, “When I saw this exhibition in Galway I assumed Post-Fordlândia was Central or South America, yet when it opened at Good Children almost everyone asked me if it was New Orleans. It is a great reminder of how context profoundly affects the audience’s interpretation.”[2]

As New Orleans enters a new phase in its history, one of redevelopment rather than recovery, Post-Fordlândia reminds audiences that top-down cultural and urban planning are sincerely defunct practices. As large swaths of New Orleans are being knocked down to build hospitals and housing developments, one can clearly see the inherent instability of large-scale redevelopment. What happens to the culture lost during rebuilding? Will institutionally developed neighborhoods be adopted and provide cultural continuity or will Cabrini-Greenesque futures ensue? Owners of the 265 homes in Lower Mid-City razed through the Eminent Domain of the State to build a private hospital are unfortunate experiments in this test tube time.

By deciphering the lost history of Fordlândia, Morley and Flanagan present an alternative strategy, one of new criticism and skepticism regarding urban development. Long, poetic shots of Fordlândia’s empty factories and residences underscore not only the economic loss suffered by Ford (over twenty million dollars were lost by the Ford family when Fordlândia was sold in 1945) but also the loss of a physical space for those native to the region. These long shots are painful reminders of not just a recently empty city, but also a impending changes in the fabric of New Orleans as it becomes a bigger, brighter, slightly more sterile version of itself.

[1] Schjeldahl, Peter, The Art World, “Machine Dreams” The New Yorker, August 6, 2012. Pg. 74.

[2] Malcolm McClay. Personal Interview. September 25, 2012.

The Road To: An Interview with Franklin Sirmans

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Published Daily Serving

June 6, 2012

Issues of under-financing, administrative inadequacy and lack of community support are some of the problems that can be found currently in multiple organizations in New Orleans. Prospect New Orleans, a nascent biennial founded in 2008 has had its share of these issues. However, new leadership and the selection of an artistic director whose passion and interests jive with many of the cultural and social issues in the city suggest a new maturity and professionalism to be found in the upcoming edition.

Presently the Chief Curator of Contemporary Art at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Franklin Sirmans has taken on an additional role: Artistic Director for Prospect.3 in New Orleans. With recent news of the Biennial getting pushed back a year to 2014, this time presents a good opportunity to reflect with Sirmans on how he would like to see Prospect.3 define itself.

Franklin Sirmans. Photo by Julia Galdo.

Tori Bush: So, when did the opportunity to curate Prospect.3 arise and how does it relate to the work you’ve done at LACMA, the Menil Collection and Dia Center for the Arts?

Franklin Sirmans: The opportunity was presented after coming down to meet some members of the board via Dan Cameron, whose work I have admired. In some ways Prospect.3 might coincide with some of what I do at LACMA because that is where I am living and thinking and working closely with my colleagues Rita Gonzalez and Christine Y. Kim, who will advise me for Prospect.3, which, in many ways, I see as an extension of our everyday work.

Dia and the Menil are formative places for me, so the effect they will have might be there but far less noticeable than my work here at LACMA. Different things can, and have been done at those institutions keeping in mind the varied needs of three very different places covering this country, geographically and conceptually: New York, Houston, and Los Angeles. I try to be hyperaware of my surroundings. A show like NeoHooDoo played differently in New York, Houston and Miami though the overall framework was the same in each place. The resonance was different and that is the sort of texture I am interested in.

TB: New Orleans can be a politically savvy and wonderfully proud place. I was wondering how sensitive you are to that and how you will take the culture of New Orleans and Louisiana into account?

FS: I’ve never done an international biennial before so I have no personal blueprint but I anticipate a show that has a good deal to say about where it is. This region and its immediate surroundings within the southern United States, more specifically (and affectionately, at least in Houston, called the 3rd Coast), the entire Gulf of Mexico region excites the hell out of me and has been a subtext of some of my work in the past.

At this point I’m wide open, not letting any theme guide me, just trying to listen and look to artists and the world around us at the moment. My desire is to spend some time getting the lay of the land, meeting people and figuring out venues early on, hopefully by the end of the year. After that, we shall see.

TB: Recently, there have been some discussions around the lack of site specific installations in Prospect.2 which had been so impressive in Prospect 1. How do you plan on integrating the profound amount of architectural and historical space of the city into your installations?

FS: I think site specificity is an integral part of any biennial type of exhibition where the city itself is a living host and really the backdrop and conceptual background of the exhibition and this can happen in varied ways. It was refreshing to see the last Venice Biennale make the city a conceptual part of its main exhibition, Illuminations. Three of the very first works encountered in this biennial of contemporary art were 16th century paintings by the Venetian artist Tintoretto.

Tintoretto. The Stealing of the Dead Body of St. Mark, 1562-66; The Last Supper 1592-94. Shown on view at the 2011 Venice Biennale.

In this case, the selection of New Orleans by Dan Cameron was very specific. It is a unique city, in so many ways. We all know that it is the birthplace of jazz; it is a pivotal place in America’s multicultural heritage; and Prospect began, in part because of Katrina and I will go absolutely no further in trying define a place I only know as an outsider. The foundation of Prospect is very closely tied to a reading of the city as integral to the art showcased in its biennial. I hope to explore those roots in selecting and presenting artworks and artists who are also interested in that history.

Back to the question. A tough question for me right now. The New Orleans contemporary art scene is raw and energetic, judging from the energy that comes from the galleries and the artists’ initiatives that are in St. Claude in particular. One could imagine doing a show that embraces a certain guerilla style representative of the city and looks solely to the inspiration that artists might find in the nooks and crannies of the city. But, on the other hand, there is the desire to show an American-based biennial that also embraces in part the language of the international biennial exhibition and thus there are certain traditional spaces that will also play an integral role in delivering some sort of a cohesive thematic around the exhibition. To be more specific to your question, I don’t know. It’s hard to say right now.

TB: With so many troubling issues in New Orleans – a test tube education system, crumbling ecosystems and the highest rate of murder per capita in the United States in 2011 – do you think Prospect.3 will seek to address these complex topics?

FS:An art exhibition can be many things. Rather than specifically address each of those things, which is possible, let me say that I am sure there will be a lot of topical issues, some of them quite complex, addressed in the work of Prospect.3’s artists. I’m not trying to be coy. Just at this early stage, I think we need to stay a little bit open.

TB: After the massive exhibition, Pacific Standard Time, the west coast seems to be reclaiming their place in the canon of American art history in the 60’s and 70’s. New Orleans is also a city that has an important link to the artists working here in the 60’s and 70’s. How will you choose to pay homage to earlier artists while still surprising audiences with new artists? Is that even a consideration as you begin working?

FS: That’s a tough comparison. I’m not sure another city could lay claim in quite the same way that LA could on the late 50s and early 60s as a point of departure. It’s a part of history that has been overlooked but it’s one that has existed, so it’s hard to say reclaim. I think it just got trumpeted properly now.

I have to look deeper and I also have a network of people who know that New Orleans history better than I do, so I look forward to exploring it. Nonetheless, there’s an artist named Ed Clark who was born in Storyville in 1926, and I’d like to see his work in New Orleans now. I worked for him as a studio assistant during college in the late 1980s and learned a lot from him. He wasn’t so active in New Orleans but I think his route is instructive and interesting. He studied at the Art Institute from 1947-1951 and before that was in the US military. After his studies, he ended up living in Paris during the 1950s. It’s a consideration because I also think that no matter how international a show like this is, there has to be a connection between the artists and the public of New Orleans. I’d like to see artists here who have a real resonance with New Orleans and Ed is definitely one of those.

TB: What artists excite you right now? Why?

FS: Omer Fast: great storyteller and an artist, not unlike Steve McQueen and Pierre Huyghe, who can use the tools of film in a magical way to create poetic art. Also, the Propeller Group. They are based in Saigon and Los Angeles, in their own words, they are “manipulators of media language keen to reach a larger audience that takes the presentation of art beyond the world of gallery spaces and museums.” I find them very, very interesting in the way that they go about making work based in two cities on either side of the pacific and utilizing the strategies of international advertising and media.

Omer Fast, The Casting, 2007, Film Still, Fotograf Nicholas Trikonis.

TB: I realize it is very early on to say what specific themes might surround your Prospect.3 exhibits. However, can you tell us about some general themes you work with as you propose and develop new exhibits?

FS: I actually don’t think I can. Each exhibition is different. There are some cases where you might address one theme and that can become a template or a structure, something to jump off from. For instance, Trevor Schoonmaker and I created a template (Roebling Hall, 2006) for an exhibition that addresses the Beautiful Game, soccer, better known as football. It is something we will play with again in the future. But the next iteration will be quite different, different artists, different space.

TB: New Orleans is at a pivotal moment right now. The art scene is getting attention on a national scale, really for the first time ever. Do you believe the global attention is sustainable, and if so, what steps need to be taken to indeed sustain it?

FS: I do believe that Prospect is an important means of focusing that attention. New Orleans has great artists; a host of galleries showing great work in the city; artists showing in international fairs and world class museums; a big network of colleges and universities showing emerging artists and nourishing the potential artists of the future in addition to great self-taught art in abundance. If the people of New Orleans really choose to support all that, the legacy of arts in New Orleans should surely continue to grow.

Review: “The Glass Menagerie”

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Pelicanbomb. April 6, 2012

For years I would pass by museum exhibits of blown or cast glass in silent judgment. I regarded the medium as tacky; from millefiori paperweights to the art of Dale Chihuly, it all seemed frilly at best and ridiculously bourgeois at worst. While I have great respect for the processes of glassblowing, casting, and sandblasting, the final product never merited a second look in my opinion. I was wrong. Opening in tandem with the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival’s 25th year and the author’s 100th birthday, “The Glass Menagerie,” a group exhibition at Trouser House featuring work in glass by eight local artists, defied my judgment of the medium.

Carlos Zervigon’s House Menagerie, 2011, suggests the fragile relationship between resident and home in New Orleans. Alternately smooth and rough-hewn, each object in the collection of diaphanous glass houses seems more delicate than the next: one house stands precariously on wire stilts; another holds the ashes of the artist’s grandmother; a small globe of crystalline glass sits atop a bullet. The artist has called this series an investigation of “the universal aspect of the human condition that seeks (with varying levels of success) to protect ourselves from the ravages of nature.” Begun in 2004, Zervigon’s exploration of this topic became more poignant the following year in the wake of Katrina’s destruction. The piece also raises a complex debate between function and non-function in the medium. A petite house appears to float in a cup filled to the brim with water (also made of glass). By creating a work of common functional form and depriving it of functionality, Zervigon pays homage to the role glass plays in our everyday lives, while considering how materials are elevated by an art context.

Josh Cohen’s sound installation Sleep Soundly, 2011, uses ceiling fan motors, quartz crystal bowls, duct tape, Styrofoam, and rubber doll feet to create a complex instrument that recalls a Rube Goldberg machine. Four mechanisms spin slowly around, soft mallets gently ringing large quartz crystal bowls, drum cymbals, and a copper meditation bowl. The work fills the whole space with sound. On opening night, I could barely make it through the room due to the hypnotized, unmoving crowd. Cohen, also a musician, has a knack for experimenting with the effects of sound. He has said: “I measure the pitch of each bowl with a special strobe tuner accurate within one cent. Different brain wave states can be entrained by these controlled sound relationships, including lucid and sleep-like states during wakefulness.” The effect is mesmerizing.

Camp, as Susan Sontag brilliantly wrote, is “a vision of the world in terms of style—but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off,’ of things-being-what-they-are-not.” Much of the aesthetic I love in New Orleans falls into the category of camp: our beaded trees, our cracked gardens, our exaggerated taste in…well, everything. So how is it that in a city as campy as New Orleans, the medium of glass quietly stood up and proclaimed its ability to be this thoughtful and suggestive? Perhaps it is that our city’s natural proclivity to exaggeration and frivolousness is the perfect aesthetic temperature to incubate an incredibly high-quality glass arts scene that thrives on simplicity. All I know is that I will no longer pass by glass exhibits of New Orleans artists. In fact, I offer my apologies for past judgment.

Round Up: The Best of Prospect.2 New Orleans: Lorraine O’Grady

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Pelicanbomb. November 9, 2011

“Avant garde art doesn’t have anything to do with black people.” This statement made by one of Lorraine O’Grady’s acquaintances was the impetus for the artist’s 1983 performance piece Art Is…, which emphatically proclaimed that avant-garde art is black people, black neighborhoods, black culture, and black issues. The photographic documents of this performance are now on view at the New Orleans African American Museum as part of Prospect.2. They show O’Grady and 14 other African-American artists and dancers riding through Harlem’s African American Day Parade on a float resembling an ornate, gilded frame with bold black letters bearing the open-ended phrase “Art Is….” Participants on the float carried smaller frames, which they held up to the audience members as they passed along Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard. O’Grady wrote years later in an email to art historian Moira Roth, “The people on the parade route got it. Everywhere there were shouts of: ‘That’s right. That’s what art is. We’re the art!’ And, ‘Frame ME, make ME art!’ It was amazing.”

A harbinger of identity politics in art, O’Grady’s use of the frame not only asked, “What is art?” but also, “Who chooses what is represented and how is it perceived by different viewers?” By putting black artists in charge of framing a predominantly black audience, the power of who makes art, who is art, and who perceives art is decided by the black community. In the history of western art, African Americans have been invariably depicted either as the other or not depicted at all. From the maid portrayed in Manet’s Olympia to the exclusion of black Abstract Expressionists from the famous photo of “The Irascibles” in 1950, the indelible lack of African Americans in the art historical canon is what gives credence to O’Grady’s performance. Years later, O’Grady would write, “[black bodies] function continues to be, by their chiaroscuro, to cast the difference of white men and white women into sharper relief.” By disallowing this fundamental contrast on that September day in Harlem, Art Is… redefined the relationship of African Americans both to and in art, allowing those present to celebrate themselves as works of art.

From Street Wall to Great Hall: A Perceptual Shift

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Pelicanbomb. August 24, 2011

Down on Poland Avenue there’s an empty building with a secret. Standing guard of that old corner store is a man made of parchment. Driving by, you would most likely miss him, but to the evening stroller his presence can spark a magical moment. Callie Curry, more commonly known as Swoon, wheatpasted this man along with a number of other pieces around New Orleans over the last three years. Each of these works creates a break in time into which the viewer can step out of his present-day reality and interact with his surroundings in an unexpected way.

How to create a moment rather than an object is one of the questions that Swoon has focused on in her art over the last decade. While still an art student at Pratt in Brooklyn, Swoon rejected the narrow assumption that an artist should make objects of consumption for gallery walls. She began to explore alternative possibilities to the institutional model, which led her to work outside, interacting with the forgotten spaces and crumbling bricks of New York City. Her newfound interaction with the city provided her with the realization that she could communicate with a far greater number of viewers simply by pasting an image on the street. For example, once, while checking on a work, Swoon was approached by a woman who lived nearby. The woman told her the story of another neighbor, who was mentally handicapped and had discovered the wheatpasted piece. He had begun calling it his secret and sharing it with everyone who walked by him on the block. Swoon noted in an interview: “By putting a tiny change in the environment I realized I could change the associations people have and create an opportunity for connections between people. Maybe there are slightly different worlds existing right where we are and we just have to have a perceptual shift to see it.”

Created in unanticipated places, Swoon’s pieces live in the gap between reality and imagination, colliding the two worlds. The imagination is sparked, the mind begins its travel, and yet the viewer is still left standing on the street next to a broken fence or empty parking lot. This brief moment of convergence and disorientation is how Swoon’s street pieces gain their power. When one enters a museum, however, the expectation of seeing art is already present, hindering the surprise confrontation. How then does Swoon’s Thalassa function when placed in the Great Hall of the New Orleans Museum of Art?

Cultural anthropologist Victor Turner wrote: “I see liminality as a phase in social life in which this confrontation between ‘activity which has no structure’ and its ‘structured results’ produces in men their highest pitch of self-consciousness.” Though rooted in theories of social ritual and rites of passage, this idea could also be applied to works of art. Swoon’s street pieces bridge the divide between sites previously unassociated with art and the structured art world. Her experience working outside the institution, striving to create a liminal space for art to live, allows Swoon to retain a vibrant and palpable energy in a work like Thalassa even when presented in the Great Hall. The sea goddess looks as if she is about to burst through the museum’s ceiling, leaving behind only shattered glass and delicate tendrils of tissue paper. Her long tentacles, dripping with Spanish moss-like appendages, reach out to the second floor balcony. Thalassa is dreamlike, a magical mess of paper and paint that makes the viewer feel like a child playing in a castle of pillows. It maintains inside that singular quality that makes Swoon’s street pieces so appealing: the possibility of other realities.

“Swoon: Thalassa” on view through September 25, 2011 at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Review: Hypothetical Development Organization

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Pelicanbomb. May 3, 2011

Hypothetical Development Organization, or H.D.O., has wildly imagined the future of twelve buildings throughout New Orleans. H.D.O.’s concepts enter into two distinct contextual realms: urban redevelopment and architectural fiction. At the same time, they open the next conversation held by street artists on those same derelict buildings. While many of the city’s prolific street artists turn to illustration (like Tard) or old-school graffiti (like Harsh), none actually envision anything for the future. Street art in New Orleans has for the most part simply existed in the moment, with artists looking to mark up the next great location. H.D.O. takes the discussion to the next level by conceptualizing the future of each site, rather than simply marking upon it. In fact, H.D.O. does not physically change anything about the site. Instead, they dream.

Hypothetical Development was founded by G.K. Darby, Ellen Susan, and Rob Walker in 2010. Each member of the organization began by exploring different neighborhoods and commercial districts for forgotten structures that provoked alternative narratives. They ask the question: What could this structure be without the constraints of money, materials, or even physics? Once an idea has been formed, an artist is chosen to render a two-dimensional model and a sign is placed on the site. This sign can function as a traditional street tag or pose as a startling announcement by a real estate developer. Either way, it calls attention to the fundamental disrepair of the building.  

Candy Chang, co-founder of Civic Center, an urban design studio, rendered the vision of Mobile Cornucopia. The building, located at 900 Franklin Avenue, is reimagined perched on a pickup truck, traveling throughout the city providing groceries. Chang’s vivacious image emphasizes the impossibility of the proposition: shoppers walk on massive steaks and cabbages while benches made of gigantic carrots surround real-life produce purveyor Mr. Okra’s famous red truck. The sign for the Mobile Cornucopia was placed over existing street tags last December, effectively reclaiming the site as its own.

Despite their implausibility, each of the extravagant visions challenges local street artists, as well as the regular passerby, to contemplate how they will be visually interacting with the New Orleans landscape five, ten, or twenty years from now. Will the city adopt imaginative thinking or will those in power continue to develop uninspiring structures that maintain the status quo? While H.D.O.’s visions embrace absurdist tendencies, they remind city inhabitants that a better future often starts with a dream.