Prospect.3: Notes for Now

October 25, 2014 to January 25, 2015
Various sites in New Orleans

ExhibitBe
Saturdays, November 15 to January 25, 2015
3010 Sandra Drive, Algiers, New Orleans

“Prospect.3: Notes for Now,” the third New Orleans biennial, curated by Franklin Sirmans, presented 58 artists and collaborations at 18 locations within that city. The New Orleans Museum of Art showed Paul Gauguin’s Under the Pandanus (1891), on loan from the Dallas Museum of Art; paintings and drawings by Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral; and handsome modernist abstractions by Ed Clark, a veteran local artist. At the Ogden Museum of Southern art was a gallery of large paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat, who was involved with music from New Orleans — and he visited the city briefly. Also at the Ogden were photographs of the prisons in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, in nearby Angola; and colorful bas-reliefs by Herbert Singleton, who was incarnated in that prison. And three floors of the Contemporary Arts Center included displays of Manal Aldowayan’s photographs of female workers in her native country, Saudi Arabia and the grid-grounded paintings of McArthur Binion, which allude both to the history of that medium and to black political history. There were landscape photographs of Louisiana and Mississippi by Thomas Joshua Cooper; Charles Gaines’s LED panels presenting texts by African, Asian and European radicals and socialists; photographs of the Nigerian film industry by Pieter Hugo; and Yun-Fei Ji’s scroll, which uses a traditional format to present scenes of conflict in contemporary China.

This show displayed some good local artists and, also, a full sampling of the sorts of installations, photography and videos that are fashionable in the present art world. It thus provides New Orleans residents and visitors an opportunity to learn about contemporary visual art. And the weighty, expensive catalogue provides a full visual record of the art on display, though the free newspaper map and guide published by The New Orleans Advocate is actually a more useful guide. The problem here was, quite simply, that while New Orleans has long been a literary and musical center, it hasn’t really been the home of very many well-known distinctive visual artists. When Sirmans justifies his inclusion of Gauguin on the grounds that he was a friend of Edgar Degas, who did visit the city, or of Amaral because of her interest in cultural diversity in her country, Brazil, one’s aware of this problem. The issues concerning class, gender and race faced by New Orleans, pressing concerns elsewhere, are dealt with in this Louisiana city in distinctive ways, which don’t get adequate critical analysis.

Stimulated, but a little frustrated by this ambitious exhibition, I drove South across the Mississippi River to ExhibitBe, an outdoor graffiti display in an unoccupied apartment complex just off of General De Gaulle Boulevard in Algiers. These five-story buildings, public low-cost housing (which is soon to be demolished to make way for a sports center) were the site for an outdoor display by 51 graffiti artists, curated by Brandan “B-mike” Odoms. On the first of these high walls was a pale green portrait of a woman by the Australian artist Rone. At the edge between the buildings Ana Hernandez and Rontherin Ratliff wove plastic window blinds into the perforations of decorative concrete sunscreens to produce a pair of outstretched, three-story high hands in the form of plastic tapestry. On the next building is MEEK’s image of a Ferguson protestor tossing back a police tear gas canister. And Odum’s portrait shows a 15-year-old George Carter, who was murdered in New Orleans, staring from the fifth floor. On the two story building facing these apartments, B-mike painted black history icons — Gil Scott-Heron, Biggie Smalls, Harriet Tubman, Radio Raheem, Maya Angelou, Huey P. Newton, Fred Hampton, and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. And there was more graffiti inside some of the condemned apartments.

“This is temporary,” a sign warned: “take a picture. It will last longer.” On a sunny warm day, this open-air, free-admission show attracted crowds — including a DJ and dancers. As always, of course, the moral ambiguities of gentrification are not easy to resolve — the exhibition was possible only thanks to the allowance of a property developer, who is destroying public housing. Acknowledging that problem, I would argue that ExhibitBe, more so than Prospect.3, provides an authentic, accessible record of the visual culture of New Orleans. Recently Joachim Pissarro and I have made the distinction between art-world art and “wild art,” such as graffiti, that is found outside of museums, a distinction which is illustrated perfectly in the contrast between these two very different exhibitions.

I owe thanks to my daughter Liz, who is a New Orleans resident, for taking me to this marvelous show, which I would never have discovered on my own.

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Report from… New Orleans

Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial at the New Orleans Museum of Art

February 26 to May 15, 2011
One Collins Diboll Circle, City Park
New Orleans, (504) 658-4100

At his best, Thornton Dial is a great artist. Don’t Matter How Raggly the Flag, It Still Got to Tie Us Together (2003), a massive construction of enamel and spray paint on canvas on wood and mattress coils, chicken wire, clothing, can lids, found metal, plastic twine, wire, Splash Zone compound stands comparison with Jasper Johns’ flags. First Butterflies (2002), constructed of clothing, plastic, carpet, oil, enamel and spray paint on canvas on wood, can legitimately to be set alongside the classic color field paintings of Larry Poons. The exquisite Clouds Moving in the Sky, We Wake Up in Darkness and Look for Daylight (2006), built of denim pants fabric canvas scraps, staples, industrial plastic and enamel on canvas on wood can justly be hung alongside Robert Rauschenberg’s collages. And, as Thomas McEveilley has noted, Dial’s constructions with sacred themes, — Crosses to Bear (Armageddon) (2001-2004) is a good one — are worth comparing without any hesitation or apologies to Anselm Kiefer’s best works.

As the catalogue explains, Dial, born dirt poor in Alabama, September 10, 1928, has never been in an art school and has never studied art history; in fact, he is illiterate. That he worked for thirty years in a rail car manufacturing company explains his mastery of construction techniques, but it doesn’t elucidate how he came to make large paintings, which are so obviously related to the art of mainline late modernism. And while the catalogue provides a great deal of useful background information, it fails to treat him seriously as an artist who deserves to be judged alongside his peers whom I have named, by – instead — treating him as a black artist, providing too much information about his obviously heroic status as an outsider struggling with the sad history of Southern racism.  He is linked, for instance, to fellow Alabamian jazz musician Sun Ra and the compared with James Brown. It would be better, I think, to provide a balanced account of his artistic career, without focusing entirely upon the kind of sociological concerns that mostly dominate the catalogue essays. As it is, we don’t really learn how a man from such a harsh background became a major visual artist, with a utopian religious vision.

Dial is not always at his best. To my eye, the obviously anecdotal painting, Trophies (Doll Factory) (2000) with its Barbie dolls, stuffed animals and plastic toys, is too literal-minded to inspire conviction. And while Everybody’s Welcome in Peckerwood City (2005), which includes a doormat, wood doors and a bed frameamong its materials, with its seemingly beautiful façade and ugly back, is a potent comment on American racial divisions—“peckerwood” is derogatory black Southern slang for white people—it’s more of a manifesto than a fully convincing visual work of art. I can take or leave the drawings, which are delicate,often erotic, and certainly Picassoesque in their fascinating with female body parts. But this is nitpicking points. At his best he is a world-class artist.

Originating at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, this exhibition continues on to the Mint Museum, in Charlotte North Carolina and the High Museum. It is a singular misfortune, and a sad commentary on the limits of our present art world thinking that this exalted exhibition will not appear in New York, in Chicago or in California’s major museums.

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Born in Chicago in 1925, Joan Mitchell moved to New York in 1950 where she lived and worked among artists and poets of the New York School.  Already well recognized as an important abstract expressionist painter, she left New York in the late 1950’s and moved to a Parisian suburb of Vetheuil, where she worked prolifically until her death in 1992. Her expressive works exude the visual sentiments of nature-devoid of anecdote or theater and in her own words “to convey the feeling of the dying sunflower.” Mitchell composes with long curvilinear strokes or broad stains of color, contrasting warm and cool, often on unprimed, large-scale or multi-panel canvases.

Guest speakers included Ann Gibson, Ph.D. and Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware; Irving Sandler, Ph.D., art critic, historian and professor Emeritus of Art History at the State University of New York; Robert Storr, artist, art critic and Professor of Painting/Printmaking at Yale University; and Mâkhi Xenakis, artist and author.

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