by Reggie Michael Rodrigue

Can an achievement be both a triumph and a trip back into the darkness?  This is a question I’ve been mulling in my head for the past week as I’ve been thinking back on my participation in the installation of “Prospect Lafayette” at the Acadiana Center for the Arts.  The exhibition is a satellite of the Prospect New Orleans 2 Biennial currently running until January 29, 2012.

According to Prospect New Orleans curator Dan Cameron, the exhibition is meant to be a historical overview of some of the work that was included in Prospect New Orleans 1 and Prospect New Orleans 1.5, as well as a showcase for a video by the Icelandic, multimedia artist Ragnar Kjartansson who is showing in the biennial for the first time.

The first iteration of Prospect New Orleans in 2008, as far as artistic achievement goes, was an unequivocal success by all accounts.  It included a blockbuster roster of more than 80 international and local artists.  It single-handedly put New Orleans on the global art map, along with providing the city some much-needed inspiration after the ravages of Hurricane Katrina.  Unfortunately, the business behind Prospect New Orleans 1 wasn’t so successful:  the biennial accrued over one million dollars in debt and a mess of political infighting among its board members which lead to a postponement of the second full installment until this year.  Prospect New Orleans 1.5, a city-wide move to showcase new and old local New Orleans artists and their work, was instituted to mitigate the situation and continue the momentum of the biennial.  Today, the Prospect New Orleans Biennial is back on track and “in the black” financially; however, it is making waves in a much more concentrated form.

This doesn’t mean that the biennial isn’t expanding in other ways, however.  “Prospect Lafayette” is a testament to this notion.  After a visit to the Acadiana Center for the Arts, Dan Cameron was impressed enough with the location to ask the ACA to participate in Prospect New Orleans 2 as a satellite.  Such a lateral move out of New Orleans is a first for the biennial and a monumental coup for the ACA.  Cameron has stated that the ACA is one of the most impressive and significant art centers in the state.  Personally, I couldn’t agree more – not only in regards to the facility itself, but also because of its curatorial efforts headed by Brian Guidry.

I’ve had the privilege of working as a preparator under Guidry for about a year- and-half by now.  Thanks to this, my experience of the curatorial side of the arts has been one of immense learning, care, intuitiveness and innovation that I don’t believe I could have received anywhere else.    During my time at the ACA, I’ve been part of a curatorial team that has put together some of the most impressive, articulate and awe-inspiring exhibitions I’ve ever seen.  These exhibitions have also been some of the most idiosyncratic ones I’ve had the pleasure to experience as well.  More often than not, an exhibition in the Main Hall of the ACA is about visual abundance, unconventional presentation and curatorial experimentation that seems to mirror the rich visual and cultural landscape of South Louisiana itself.  In the midst of all of this, somehow, the integrity of the work is maintained and even enhanced, which is paramount to any curatorial practice.

When it came to preparing for and installing “Prospect Lafayette,” we on the ACA curatorial team had to change our usual game plan.  We typically begin planning our exhibitions with a profusion of work.  We then whittle the exhibition down to it’s final form from there.  Due to the budgetary restrictions that have gone into effect for the Prospect New Orleans Biennial this year (along with other issues such as plain-old timing and the fact that despite the smaller scale of this year’s biennial, it’s still a logistical juggernaut for all involved), we received a smaller amount of work than anticipated.  This time around, we’d have to use everything we received in order to fill the exhibition space.   This isn’t to say that what we received wasn’t worth inclusion, though. It just meant that we had to make it work with what we had, which can be as much if not more of a challenge than dealing with a surplus.   The consensus was that we needed to treat the space as it would be treated in the major, cavernous galleries of  New York City in respect for Cameron’s roots there – to give back to Cameron the same way he has given to New Orleans and Lafayette.  We also faced a new challenge this time which we’ve never faced before: installing three separate videos in the exhibition.

The video for international superstar, Ragnar Kjartansson is receiving top billing in “Prospect Lafayette” as it is the debut of the artist’s work in the Prospect New Orleans Biennial.  A video bay complete with black walls was put together for his work “Death and the Children,” a black and white video in which Kjartansson attempts to confront a gaggle of young summer camp students while impersonating Death.  The artist’s impersonation is incredibly hokey, especially because it is evident that his scythe is made of paper.  One of the children actually calls him on it.  They follow and taunt him with irreverence and glee.  At one point they call Kjartansson an “elf with a stick.”  It’s not the deepest piece of art I’ve ever seen, but it makes for entertaining viewing and points to the naivete’ of the children and their inability to take death seriously, even in a graveyard.

Prospect 1.5 is represented by a handful of artists including Regina Scully, Jonathan Hicks and Tameka Norris.   Scully presents two wonderful gestural abstractions.  She is primarily interested in the hybridization of natural and man-made forms.  Her works here call to mind the fusion of water with the movement and fragmentation of the city, and they have somewhat of a map-like feel.   Scully manages to conjure all of this through a build up of tick-like brush strokes which seem to dance, slide, and skip across the canvas in a variety of hues atop an underlying pictorial structure.

Jonathan Hicks won top honors in my book with his triptych of performance based photographs.  Hicks appropriates artist Robert Longo‘s iconic “Men in Cities” images to his own end.  He realized that if he molded himself into the twisted poses of Longo’s “men,” the reading of the images would shift due to the color of his skin:  he is African American.  With this, Hicks was more than prescient.  Upon my first contact with these pieces, the first thing that came to my mind was that they were images of a victim being shot to death, an inherently stereotypical meme that runs through our society and, apparently, my head.  In pictures such as these, Hicks reveals the deeply engrained racism and prejudice hiding under the surface of his viewers.  Another tip-off that these images are concerned with race is Hick’s choice of tie color in each photograph: green, red or black.  Together, these are the colors of the Pan-African Flag, and Hick’s incorporates his tie colors into his titles so that the viewer doesn’t miss the point.  Stunning, mind-expanding, and filled with pathos, these works of art are the real “stars” of the exhibition.

Tameka Norris’ “Post-Katrina Sunset” is the other video on display in the main space.  In it, Norris wears a wrap around her head reminiscent of the headgear of the archetypal mammies of the Old South and African women.  She struggles to stay afloat in a body of water while carrying a plastic bin.  Her plight is accompanied by a violinist playing an anxiety-inducing solo on the nearby shore.  As the title suggests, all the while, the sun sets on the grim scene.  Norris seems to be commenting on the helplessness of the poverty-stricken African American population of New Orleans which suffered immensely in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.  It is mythologized that Emperor Nero played a lyre while ancient Rome burned.  I couldn’t help but draw a parallel between the figure of Nero and Norris’ violinist.  Norris’s analogy is a metaphor for the perceived insouciance that African Americans felt from the white majority of the nation, especially as it pertains to the government, in response to the horrors of Katrina.  “Post Katrina Sunset” is a devastating indictment of the intersection of racial prejudice and negligence in America.

The largest piece in the exhibition is from New Orleans own Willie Birch.  His monumental black and white triptych “We Come This Far by Faith” commands and towers over a side wall of the gallery.  It depicts an African American congregation, it’s original church in ruin due to the ravages of Hurricane Katrina and the new church the congregation built after the fact.  It’s an impressive and articulate marriage of history and artistry.  Yet, I was left yearning for Birch’s unframed, expansive paintings on paper of dancers and musicians in Congo Square which somehow feel more powerful, expressive and empowering than this work.  The other large sidewall in the main gallery is anchored by Los Angeles artist Gaijin Fujita’s “Saints,” a painting of a fantasy mascot/kabuki warrior Fujita created in response to being overwhelmed by the devotion of New Orleanians to their beloved football team.  Fujita brings together the traditional icongraphy of Japan and the visual language of Los Angeles street culture in his work, and “Saints,” despite being a nod to New Orleans is no different.  The painting is visually impressive, but it lacks a certain amount of feeling in it’s slickness.

The rest of the main hall is rounded out by works from Fred Thomaselli, Navin Rawanchalkul, Paul Villinski, Danish art stars Superflex, Bruce Davenport, Jr., Dawn DeDeaux, and Robin Rhode.  Drag art phenom Kalup Linzy’s “Keys to Our Heart” video is on view in the ACA’s Vault due to it’s “adult” content.   The video is a black and white, soap operatic romp through the lives of four characters involved in a love quadrangle.  Race, sexual identity, and the human desire for love and companionship are explored in the video.  Linzy himself plays one of the female characters and provides the voice overs for all of the ensemble members.  The artist has stated that soap operas have been a major influence on his work because watching them brought his family and his community together when he was a child.  As such, the drama played out in “Keys to our Heart” is as over-the-top and stilted as any episode of “All My Children” or “As the World Turns.”  Unfortunately, the conceit falls a little flat, making a  passionate quest for love and understanding a bit of a comical farce.

So, we at the ACA got our piece of Prospect pie with some high-wattage artists to boot.  Yet, there’s something about this exhibition that gnaws at me.  Despite the occasional moments of excitement in some of the pieces such as the pomp and festivity of Bruce Davenport, Jr.’s fifteen-foot parade drawing or the grace and inventiveness of Paul Villinski’s “Boxed Birds” made from vintage LP’s, this exhibition is haunted.  It’s haunted by disaster: the natural, the cultural and the financial kind.  These specters of disaster taint everything.  The show on the whole is a bit sullen and austere in tone and presentation, especially when compared to the liveliness of previous exhibitions.  It seems to me that the life has been sucked out of the hall, and no matter how I look at it, this feeling doesn’t subside for very long.  It doesn’t help that there are a lot of things in this exhibition that I like, yet very few that I love.  I felt a little hope for a different perspective while I listened to Dan Cameron speak about the exhibition in the hall during his gallery talk on Friday, November 18.  He brought a personal touch to the exhibition and filled us in on more of the history and connections these works share with the biennial.

However, as I write and reflect on “Propsect Lafayette” today,  it’s as if the dark hand of recent history has laid the exhibition hall bare, and we are all exposed as well.  It’s as if the whole exhibition is an extrapolation of Robin Rhode’s spare post-Katrina photograph “St. Bernard Parish.”  This photograph is the true heart of “Prospect Lafayette.”   When we at the ACA received “St. Bernard Parish,” it was unframed and without any means of support for hanging.  We made a shelf for it, and protected it behind a sheet of plexiglass.  Now, this image silently presides over a trip back into darkness.  It’s a strange and foreboding journey for an exhibition that is meant to celebrate the history of the most momentous artistic achievement in Louisiana’s history.  I suppose it was foolish to think that Louisiana’s more unpleasant history and death itself could be cheated in an exhibition like this.  After all, the major impetus for Prospect New Orleans was the need for the city to recover from the devastation and despair of Hurricane Katrina.  With “Prospect Lafayette,” the horror of recent history and the cold hand of death hover over this trip back in time and are closer than they seem.  They whisper in one’s ear, veil one’s eyes, cut to the quick and make a home in one’s bones, even as the celebration of Prospect New Orleans 2 just begins to take flight.  I suppose the gnawing I’m feeling is my inability to fully reconcile between the two modes – to find a comfortable place to rest my mind amidst the triumph and the bleakness of the recent past.  Maybe that’s the great lesson and blessing of “Prospect Lafayette?”  To vacillate between joy and despair is to be open to all that life has to offer until one stops and begins to see the world for what it really is: a great emptiness pregnant with possibility.

Now, can I get a “Laissez les bons temps roulez?”  This is Louisiana after all, and no matter what, it’s always the appropriate response – whatever trip one is on.