New Orleans
Several locations
01/11/09 -
18/01/09
‘I fear my time here has
ruined me for life anywhere else.’
Lolis Erie Elie, Still Live, with Voices
…goes one of the concluding remarks in Lolis Erie Elie’s dramatic contribution to the New Orleans Prospect 1 catalogue. As a local journalist who writes for the city’s The Times-Picayune, Lolis’s time in New Orleans has, rather than ruined him for life elsewhere, fine-tuned his accent when speaking of the complex jumble of buildings and neighbourhoods, sounds and histories, beauties and catastrophies – all part of the Big Easy vernacular. His piece incorporates a number of voices, from the French colonial, to the American Indian and slave brought from West Africa, all vying for audibility in the narrative surrounding Nola (New Orleans, Louisiana), a city with as many names as it has variations of gumbo. The polyphony of this city invoked by Lolis’s linguistic collage has the capacity to both overwhelm with noise, and woo with its inevitable nostalgia.
It is impossible to separate the duets of New Orleans and Jazz, New Orleans and Mardi Gras, New Orleans and Katrina. When one is presented, the others quickly follow on as in the case of Dan Cameron’s Prospect 1, the first in a series of five self-sustaining biennials care of the U.S. Biennial Inc. founded by the same curator. Spawned by Cameron’s love of the New Orleans and Jazz duo, the curator calls himself a ‘longtime devotee of the city’. The ‘culture of attention’ bred in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was what drove him to initiate, as he unapologetically states, a humanitarian biennale, as an ‘on-going social sculpture’ in New Orleans. He sees it as an ‘artwork you can step in and out of…immersing yourself in the ongoing story.’
Even before 2005, New Orleans was a city of tourism. Its cultural uniqueness in terms of French and Creole influences give rise to some other statements by Cameron such as, ‘we are the culture before anything else’ as he feels himself now part of the ‘we’ invoked. Needless to say the culture has never been one of racial, gender or economic equality even pre-Katrina, and it is was Willie Birch, one of the few local artists to have received national acclaim and (for this reason or perhaps others) been included in Prospect 1, who stated the need for nuance when speaking of and for this collective made of so many dissonant factors – the ongoing process in his definition. ‘[It is a] means of survival – finding a culture that speaks to who you are.’
From the official Prospect sites of the old U.S. Mint, the The George & Leah McKenna Museum of African American Art, The Lower Ninth Village and the Ideal Auto Repair shop; to the independent smaller scale exhibitions at The Front, the Museum of Dance and Feathers and Mel Chin’s Safehouse; these ways of speaking about culture, be it art, community, music, indeed require a sophistication lacking in the simplistic tone of the biennial’s curatorial rhetoric.
Lolis’s text distinguishes between the very specific melodic lines playing out over the city, never seeking to make them sound similar or even appealing. Cameron’s overtly touristic agenda circumnavigates the beautiful ugliness of New Orleans’s complex culture(s) and this in turn inhibits internationally made works from introducing local audiences to new ways of speaking, while also preventing the exhibition’s context responsive pieces from transposing less audible voices into a vocabulary accessible to larger audiences.
