Dan Cameron at Prospect 1

At the opening event October 31st, Cameron told a crowd of art world regulars, “Something is wrong in this country when a city like New Orleans is not getting the help it needs. I wanted to do Prospect 1 to bring people to New Orleans so that they would fall in love with it. I realized that if I found the 81 best artists I could and brought them to New Orleans to be inspired by the city, they would make art that is inspiring to visitors and locals alike. Prospect 1 is an experiment, a gamble, and I’m lucky because the venues decided to gamble with me and allowed us to use their spaces for free.”

In order to foster this love affair with New Orleans, Cameron spread Prospect 1 across the city and made the exhibitions and events free and open to the public. Visitors are given a specially designed map to navigate around the sites which serves as a guide to the city itself and even lists a few satellite art events not connected to the biennial. Venues include traditional places like the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Contemporary Art Center, but also historic homes, storefronts, a funeral home, an abandoned church, a couple of Katrina-cleared empty lots near the Lower 9^th Ward levee break as well as vacant buildings battered by the storm and barely standing. On opening weekend museum directors and international art collectors toured the city in town cars or on shuttle busses provided by the organizers, visiting locations that would otherwise have been far off the cultural map.

Although most of the art is not about the architecture of New Orleans per se one’s perception of it is deeply affected by the context of the city. Even veterans of international biennials and art fairs were moved by the sight of the art amidst the backdrop of historic buildings or ravaged landscapes. Art that, in other places, might be viewed as overly sentimental or politically obvious becomes relevant commentary on what has happened and what might lie ahead.

“It was impressive to see how the exhibition galvanized and energized New Orleans, said Adam Weinberg, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. “So many of the artists deeply connected with the city, its history, and its recent tragedy. Their work offers great hope and prospects for the future.”

But what about saving historic places? Louisiana Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu believes that events like Prospect 1 have an important role to play in the city’s recovery efforts. “When Dan came to us and asked for our help we were overjoyed,” he said at the opening press conference. “This biennial can help us orient how we see ourselves post-Katrina. Those of you who work in historic preservation know that you can lose your home, your school, your office, but not your soul. Having this event all across our city is a powerful message about our lives and shows people that we will not give up, we will not yield our history or our place. Prospect 1 will set the tone for how this century will look in New Orleans.”

Saving places was not necessarily the motivation of the artists, but most of them took the spirit of the endeavor to heart. Argentinian artist Leandro Erlich, for example, chose an empty lot in the Lower 9^th Ward for his work entitled “Window and Ladder, Too Late For Help.” Calling up images of the flood he suspends an open window with a leaning ladder in a fragment of a brick wall. High above the scrub grass, with an empty stoop and a nearly collapsed wreck of a house on the lot next door as background, the sight of the window in mid-air is shocking. Visitors stare at it and consider escape and devastation. Both poignant and provocative, the work stands where literally nothing is left whole and little has been rebuilt even three years after the hurricane.

Janine Antoni,

In a warehouse artist’s space called the Lower 9^th Ward Village, New York artist Janine Antoni, mainly known for her rather surrealistic photography and sculpture, has created a multi-media work entitled T-E-A-R. The work juxtaposes a worn wrecking ball with film of a staring eye accompanied by an echoing boom with each blink. Not subtle, Antoni warns us that the world is watching but doing little to stop the destruction taking place outside. Or, as one critic said, “more of the city is lost with each blink of the eye.”

Willie Birch

Across town where the storm did less visible damage, New Orleans artist Willie Birch uses the occasion of the Biennial to right a previous wrong. As an African American, his visits to the city’s art museum were carefully orchestrated to ensure that he and other people of color did not come into unnecessary contact with the city’s elites. “When I visited this museum as a child I felt that it was not my place,” he told New Orleans Museum of Art officials. “Having my art in this atrium now is very important to me.” His work, large multi-paneled black and white drawings depicting life in New Orleans, provides a powerful introduction to the museum and makes viewers long for more.

 Fred Tomaselli

 At the Contemporary Art Center, the setting for a more traditional biennial viewing experience, artists use the white museum walls for their works but still manage to evoke the storm and its aftermath. New York artist Fred Tomaselli, most famous for his druggy, psychedelic works made from pharmaceuticals, was obsessed by Katrina for months and years following the storm. “I watched the news on television and listened to radio reports while I was working,” he said. “I made two of the pieces in the show long before I ever visited New Orleans. I was horrified by what I was witnessing. The last piece was made after our trip last year,” he continued. “It is really about unity and healing, and coming together after the tragedy.”

In the Charles J. Colton School, one of many historic schools closed after the storm, area artists have created studio, exhibition and performance spaces under the umbrella of the Creative Alliance of New Orleans. Although the Prospect 1 exhibitions at Colton include internationally recognized art stars, the most moving aspect of the experience is seeing what the students and teachers created before the storm changed their world. On the blackboard of one classroom is a last message dated August 26^th, 2005. The teacher writes “Have a safe weekend.” Homework includes writing an essay about anything learned that week in class. In a badly scarred hallway, an upright piano sits beneath a brightly colored mural depicting the city with the superdome as its most prominent feature.

Several existing arts programs used the occasion of Prospect 1. to unveil satellite exhibitions and experiments. One of the most exciting of these is KK Projects, brainchild of Kirsha Kaechele, and located on a derelict block of Villere Street in the St. Roch neighborhood.  Using her own home and six abandoned structures on the street, Kaechele invites artists to do site specific installations. “Artists often have an idea of what they will do before they come,” says project manager Katherine Bray, “but the work doesn’t really begin until they get here and start working in the space.” Exhibitions remain on view for three months before another artist takes over, and according to Bray, the condition of the space left by one artist often heavily influences the next one.

Mel Chin, Safe House

In the current KK series artist Mel Chin has created Operation Paydirt, an ambitious art/science project in what he calls the “flood-wrecked and lead-laden neighborhood of St. Roch.” Chin used an abandoned structure to create a “Safe House” where he is storing thousands of “Fundred Dollar Bills.” These bills are hand drawn interpretations of American $100 currency by children across the U.S. Once he has gathered $300 million worth of bills, Chin plans to drive the artworks to Washington, DC and demand $300 million of services to help mitigate lead pollution in New Orleans.

Down the block in a building listing dangerously toward the street, international art superstar Tony Oursler staged a video work that can only be seen by peering through holes in the collapsing walls. British artist Peter Nadin pierced his vine-covered structure with lances and the house next door is filled with rusting artifacts of the flood. Other works can be seen in Kaechele’s home, a former bakery that serves as KK’s offices and occasionally as a sort of community center for the neighborhood. During opening weekend Kaechele and company hosted some of the wildest and most entertaining of the parties, some free and others to benefit KK Projects. Although locals warned that finding a cab there in the middle of the night might be a sketchy proposition, it didn’t stop hundreds of art lovers from flocking there each night for the festivities.

Other events of the biennial spilled out into the streets. Since 2006 Thai artist Navin Rawanchaikul and Canadian curator Tyler Russell have google-searched the world for people named Navin in order to create an unlikely community. They found the misspelled name of jazz musician Narvin Kimball in New Orleans and went to work creating an imagined and real life for him in artworks that they then installed in the New Orleans Jazz Heritage Foundation and Center. In a mashup between New Orleans and the Far East, the duo, who call themselves Navin Party, created an artistic tribute that incorporates film footage of the musician, historic photographs, and painted works that resemble concert posters with an oriental flavor. Because Kimball died just shortly after Katrina  he was never given a proper jazz funeral, so, in one of the more emotionally loaded events of the weekend, the artist and his crew in collaboration with Preservation Hall, staged one for him. Funeral participants danced and held the artworks as they paraded through the streets accompanied by a horse drawn hearse and a jazz band. Following the ceremonies the film footage was made part of the installation.

“I am touched and impressed by Dan Cameron’s devotion to New Orleans and grateful to him for being able to express his passion in a way that does this much good for the city,” said resident Jack Davis, a Trustee of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “Prospect 1 gets people to go to uncomfortable and really illuminating places and I hope they will see our city’s possibilities. People from out of town are going to challenging and desolate sites to find the art and are deeply affected by the places. People who live here go to the places they know and are deeply affected by the art. It is a wonderfully inventive way to get people out of their comfort zones,” he continued.

According to Cameron this is just the first in a series of Prospect biennials in New Orleans. He has made a 10-year commitment to the project, promising that Prospect 2-5 will grow stronger and larger each year. And from the enthusiasm of the first weekend, it looks like the artworld will come back again to see it.

“Dan Cameron did an amazing job with little time and few resources,” says the Whitney’s Weinberg. “The next Biennial will be more challenging however, as it will have to move beyond the Katrina tragedy as a motivating force. I look forward to it.”

Farnsworth on Monday, September 15th as the water goes down

Yesterday Farnsworth began recovering from the floods there, but the photos of it under water are striking. i’m going to practice uploading photos by using those for your enjoyment or horror as it were.  the good news is that the damage isn’t as severe as it could have been, and the work we did in the last flood, which didn’t rise into the house, stood us in good stead. In that instance, we realized quickly that we would need to have a flat bottomed boat available to get to the house, and that we would need to raise the panels and furniture at least 3 feet off the floor to protect them from water in the house. On Saturday afternoon as the storm was approaching and rains were pouring down, our staff, especially Whitney French, went in and moved everything off of the floor and out of harms way. Unfortunately they were unable to move all of the paneling, so it is damaged and will need conservation. by the time they were getting to those it was nearing sundown and they were almost trapped in the house with the rising water. so, here are some photos.

Farnsworth House under water on Sunday, September 14th, 2008

My girlfriend linda hesh is doing a great project with benches that say “For” and “Against” you can choose to sit on either bench, have your picture taken and then tell a story about what you are for or against. I want to sit on both benches. i have a lot to rant about these days!