Chandra McCormick, Jammin’ at the Shop in Treme, 1986, black-and-white photograph, 23 x 29". From “Gone,” L9 Center for the Arts, New Orleans, 2008.
via Artforum: [Link]
International biennials of contemporary art have long ventured into the cities that serve as their hosts, but perhaps none has reckoned with so loaded a locale as PROSPECT.1 NEW ORLEANS. More than three years after Hurricane Katrina wrought its devastation, much of the city remains in grave disrepair, making it a setting where critical designations such as “site-specific work” and “socially committed practice” can seem tenuous at best. Curator Dan Cameron and the eighty-one international artists he invited to participate in the first New Orleans biennial were well aware of this dilemma, and they often addressed the challenge by directly involving local communities across the city. The nearly three hundred works on view through January 18 by no means obviate the complexities of staging an exhibition in such a deeply troubled place, but they necessarily suggest heightened and far-ranging questions about how a biennial—or any work of art—might truly engage its context. Artist GLENN LIGON and Artforum senior editor ELIZABETH SCHAMBELAN headed to the bayou to survey the results. Ligon’s piece is available online; for Schambelan’s considerations, pick up the January issue of Artforum.
I ALMOST MISSED one of the most affecting presentations of Prospect.1 New Orleans. Wandering into a small room at the back of the L9 Center for the Arts, I discovered “Gone,” an exhibition of flood-damaged photographs assembled by the center’s founders, local artists Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick. Hung salon style in their ruined mats and mud-encrusted frames, these black-and-white documentary photos of weddings, block parties, and second-line parades in the Lower Ninth Ward are a devastating reminder of what Hurricane Katrina swept away and what a courageous and determined group of artists, community organizers, and local residents are working to restore. The problem is that “Gone” is not actually part of Prospect.1. L9 Center for the Arts is the host of a wallpaper installation by biennial artist Anne Deleporte, but Calhoun and McCormick seized the opportunity to highlight the work of the center and to present their own photos by hanging their show behind the official show. “Messy,” a friend said to me after she saw “Gone,” shaking her head sadly. It was unclear whether “messy” referred to the work in the shadow exhibition; to the fact that Calhoun and McCormick, touchstones for many artists working in the Lower Ninth Ward, aren’t officially in Prospect.1; or to the biennial itself, which is indeed messy, fantastic, disorganized, and tragic.
Curator Dan Cameron set himself an enormous task: to create a biennial on a minuscule budget in a half-ruined and infrastructure-challenged city. And like “Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art in Charleston,” a show curated by Mary Jane Jacob in 1991 that could have served as a template for this exhibition, Prospect.1 will surely be judged on its engagement with the city as well as on the art exhibited within it. Now, to be truthful, I’m a hater. Before I arrived in New Orleans I thought it needed a biennial like it needed a hole in the head and a stab in the neck. In retrospect, however, I have to congratulate Cameron on curating what turned out to be a stunning intervention in the life of a troubled city. Prospect.1 offers an opportunity to ask many hard questions about what a biennial can and cannot do—and it makes us ask the same of art.
The first question that must be asked is whether biennials as platforms for the presentation of art are played out. Yes, they are. The dozens of biennials that have sprung up all over the world have made little effort to reinvent the form, despite many claiming to have done so. Too often they are examples of the art world talking to itself through exhibitions staged primarily for a small and spectacle-hungry international art audience. These biennials give artists the chance to supersize their work in unproductive ways and provide them with venues to engage in facile notions of site-specificity, in which the local population acts as a backdrop for the main action. That said, why is this biennial different from all other biennials? What could Prospect.1 deliver that was distinct from those other biennials that keep me on airplanes for a good portion of the year?
The website for Prospect.1 claims that the exhibition “seeks to base an entirely new category of tourism for the city on the growing American interest in contemporary art, as well as the worldwide love for New Orleans,” and, to be sure, standing outside the L9 Center I was handed a questionnaire that sought to measure the level of tourist spending generated by the show. This may be “an entirely new category of tourism” for New Orleans, but it’s nothing new in Venice or Ljubljana or, for that matter, any city undertaking spectacular public art projects. Olafur Eliasson’s New York City Waterfalls, 2008, had an estimated economic impact of $69 million on New York, including the $15.5 million spent on construction and promotion—a sum more than four times the entire budget of Prospect.1.
What may actually be new in New Orleans, however, is the extent to which the strongest presentations there are essentially intangible and operate outside the logic of “spectacle equals spending.” For example, Dave McKenzie’s I’ll Be Back, 2008–2018 takes the form of a promise: The artist will return to New Orleans every year for a decade. Unclassifiable as performance or conceptual art project, McKenzie’s piece is a personal commitment to New Orleans that extends beyond the temporal boundaries of the biennial. Similarly, Invocation of the Queer Spirits, 2008, an undocumented séance performed by A. A. Bronson in collaboration with Peter Hobbs (which was underwritten by Creative Time and not technically part of Prospect.1), was also about commitment, in this case to the Lower Ninth Ward, which Bronson described as a place “dense with spirit life.” If on its website Prospect.1 acknowledges the necessity of satisfying the agendas of government agencies and corporate donors, such intangible projects signal a curatorial adventurousness that runs counter to the stated mission of the biennial and should be expanded upon in future exhibitions.
