Nick Cave. Soundsuit, 2015; mixed media. Courtesy of Shreveport Regional Arts Council. Photo: Casey Jones.

Shreveport is a border town at the crossroads of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. The city is known for its musical history—the term “Elvis has left the building” was coined there. But Shreveport also suffers from crippling issues of injustice. Shreveport prosecutors use peremptory challenges to bar people of color from juries, and juries in Caddo Parish “now sentence more people to death per capita than juries in any other county in America.” Beyond disparities in the justice system, Shreveport has the fourth-highest rate of persons living with HIV in Louisiana. In 2013, 22.8% of the residents lived below the poverty line. Poverty, health, and the justice system are all intertwined here, and this year visual artist Nick Cave is in residence at these crossroads, participating in a residency with the Shreveport Regional Arts Council. How does a visual artist address these problems? From October 2015 to March 2016, Cave is working on a multi-dimensional project that attempts to speak to the disparate realities of the citizenry.

Tori Bush: What led you to create this project in Shreveport? How does the history and context of each place inform your projects?

Nick Cave: The Shreveport Regional Arts Council contacted me when I was working in Detroit on a project titled Hear Here. They were interested in working with visual artists who practice within a social spectrum as well. And I was very interested in the project, to work with social organizations, which for me was a different outreach than I was familiar with. And I was even more interested in the fact that SRAC was using art as a kind of healing device. I was very interested in that, and really that is why I came on board with the project. It allowed me to go even further into the fieldwork. This project is the way I’m interested in working right now. I come to a city with an idea, and the city builds the project. And the thing that’s so fascinating here is that this is really Shreveport’s project. I’m acting as the director.

I said from the start, this project is not going to be a wow-wow, bang-bang performance, where everyone is going to have a good time. We are working with social-services organizations that aid citizens who are trying to reenter society. We are dealing with serious issues. How can I come to this project with compassion? How can I create a work that is reflective of the voices of the community? How can I leave with an imprint so that it is moving, and not just fluff? It’s allowing me to rethink the role of my work and the purpose of this project, and take myself out of the center of it.

Nick Cave working with students in Shreveport, LA. Courtesy of Shreveport Regional Arts Council. Photo: Casey Jones.

TB: Tell me a bit more about how this is making you rethink your work—is this community work an evolution of your own process as an artist?

NC: Well, it has made me realize everyone that is involved—we are finding roles so that citizens of the community all have a major part in the project. Shreveport Regional Arts Council has been having these amazing bead-a-thons, and thirty beaded blankets are being made at Shreveport Arts Center by everyone in the neighborhood who comes. [Local poet] Poetic X is working with individuals and families about the role of the service organizations, and what they are trying to overcome, and for the opening performance he’ll use these stories to tell an amazing narrative as a spoken-word piece. During the performance, individuals will come and place these blankets on Poetic X as he is reading. For me it is all very sensitive work. I don’t want anyone to feel that I am coming in and exploiting them. And so I have to think about that really clearly.

TB: Can you tell me a bit more about the community groups you are working with in Shreveport? What is the role of each community group in the project? Can you tell me one great story from your time there?

NC: We’ve been working with Mercy Center, Providence House, Lighthouse Ministries, and Hotel McAdoo. Every time I come to Shreveport I visit each house and speak with everyone there and thank them for being involved. You know, everyone wants to feel that they matter, and to say, “Oh my god, this is amazing” just puts a glow on their faces.

Mercy House is one of the organizations helping persons with HIV. There is one individual there, Larry, who is so spectacular, and he is so committed to the narrative in the blanket he is creating and talking about what that means to him, using the blanket as a sense of comfort, protection, a form of warmth. He talks about how happy he is to be part of this project. And I told him the other day that I will put him in a major performance piece titled Upright, which is an initiation piece, a piece about empowerment. Larry will transform by stripping down to his shorts and tank top and then he’ll be rebuilt into a new, sculptural object. Again, I’m looking at ways in which I can help facilitate individuals in positions where they may not have this opportunity before.

Nick Cave working with members of the community in Shreveport, LA. Courtesy of Shreveport Regional Arts Council. Photo: Casey Jones.

TB: And you’ve already spent a significant period of time in Shreveport?

NC: I’ve already been here five times. I’ll be back in December for a few days, and then I’ll be here for January, February, and March, a week to two weeks each month.

I’m so interested in finding out who is here in terms of musicians, actors, dancers, etc. Can this project be a magnet and draw the community together? How can this project be a facilitator to keep creative people here thinking and continuing this kind of work with one another? Once this project is over, I’m gone. So how can I leave a lasting imprint?

TB: Can you outline all the moving parts of this project?

NC: I’ll be doing an exhibition with a series of short films that will open in February in Shreveport. That exhibition is titled Spotted. The major piece, this Upright piece, will open in March. There are nine initiates who are going through this process of stripping down, they come on stage in their street clothes, fold their clothes, and stack their shoes on top. Then they proceed to sit down on the stool, and then we build them up into a shaman of sorts. As we are done building them, we say, “You are complete,” and in that moment, they writhe and become liberated.

When you’ve been initiated, you can stand in the world differently. And I think it is up to all of us, we can have cheerleaders, we can have supporters, but it comes down to us as individuals, how do we now proceed? Do we have the tools to proceed? Like Larry, for example—he is amazing person and I want him to recognize this by creating a platform on which he can stand.

TB: You’ve said you built your first Soundsuit in response to the Rodney King beating as a way to create a barricade between yourself and the world. Do you feel that your suits are more impactful when there is a heightened awareness of the inadequacy of the justice system, for example, in Shreveport?

NC: I think once the Rodney King incident happened, I realized at that moment that I was an artist with a social conscience. That has allowed me to be a renegade and ask myself what can I do to find new ways to create work that is not offensive, and allows me to lead an audience into an experience—and yet, once you are there, you can decide whether you want to address what is behind the work.

But you know, honey, we got a lot of work to do around the world. I wish that there were forty Nick Caves and we were all dropping projects on all the same day and then moving to the next destination, because it’s a lot to do.

Nick Cave. Soundsuits, 2015; mixed media. Courtesy of Shreveport Regional Arts Council. Photo: Casey Jones.

TB: So what comes next?

NC: After Shreveport, we are working on a major project at MASS MoCA. I’m so excited about it. That exhibition is titled Until and I’ll tell you a little about it. I’m putting you into the belly of a Soundsuit. It’s a piece that is political, but it allows the audience to walk into this space that talks about what gets me fired up and motivated to do the work that I do and why I do it. It’s a kinetic piece with this moving environment that shifts. At some point you are twenty feet in the air experiencing something. All these different entry points allow you enter into the work, and it really comes down to what is going on socially in the world.

TB: You once said, about putting on a Soundsuit, “I was no longer Nick. I was a shaman of sorts.” To me, your Soundsuits read as having a cultural connection to Mardi Gras Indian Suits, and I know Dan Cameron has done an excellent job revealing that connection curatorially. Carnival is a moment when anything is permitted. Our ingrained social and political structures are thrown out the door and hierarchies are temporarily overthrown. The performance of Carnival occurs on the border between art and life. Do these ideas resonate with you? Do you hope your performers exist outside of social or political structures, if only for the moment they have the suit on?

NC: Yeah, that is exactly what I’m trying to do. I have got to come up with a tool that works as seducer to some degree. I have to be able to pull you in. How can I diversify my audiences? What role do I have to play to be part of that shift? I have to take that seriously. That is why I’m interested in coming into these cities and understanding what is going on in the neighborhoods. We are still struggling with people who don’t feel comfortable going into museums. As a visual artist I ask how artists can be part of enacting a change.

TB: And do you think that change is actually happening in the United States?

NC: I do these lectures and I go to art openings and I’m looking around and I’m like, no. I need more diversity here. That is in my top five goals I must achieve for each project. How can I change this climate? What do I need to do? We as visual artists need to continue to be renegades and say, “Yes I am here to do a project, but what is the social service?”

Nick Cave. Soundsuit, 2015; mixed media. Courtesy of Shreveport Regional Arts Council. Photo: Casey Jones.

Shreveport is a border town at the crossroads of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. The city is known for its musical history—the term “Elvis has left the building” was coined there. But Shreveport also suffers from crippling issues of injustice. Shreveport prosecutors use peremptory challenges to bar people of color from juries, and juries in Caddo Parish “now sentence more people to death per capita than juries in any other county in America.” Beyond disparities in the justice system, Shreveport has the fourth-highest rate of persons living with HIV in Louisiana. In 2013, 22.8% of the residents lived below the poverty line. Poverty, health, and the justice system are all intertwined here, and this year visual artist Nick Cave is in residence at these crossroads, participating in a residency with the Shreveport Regional Arts Council. How does a visual artist address these problems? From October 2015 to March 2016, Cave is working on a multi-dimensional project that attempts to speak to the disparate realities of the citizenry.

Tori Bush: What led you to create this project in Shreveport? How does the history and context of each place inform your projects?

Nick Cave: The Shreveport Regional Arts Council contacted me when I was working in Detroit on a project titled Hear Here. They were interested in working with visual artists who practice within a social spectrum as well. And I was very interested in the project, to work with social organizations, which for me was a different outreach than I was familiar with. And I was even more interested in the fact that SRAC was using art as a kind of healing device. I was very interested in that, and really that is why I came on board with the project. It allowed me to go even further into the fieldwork.

This project is the way I’m interested in working right now. I come to a city with an idea, and the city builds the project. And the thing that’s so fascinating here is that this is really Shreveport’s project. I’m acting as the director.

I said from the start, this project is not going to be a wow-wow, bang-bang performance, where everyone is going to have a good time. We are working with social-services organizations that aid citizens who are trying to reenter society. We are dealing with serious issues. How can I come to this project with compassion? How can I create a work that is reflective of the voices of the community? How can I leave with an imprint so that it is moving, and not just fluff? It’s allowing me to rethink the role of my work and the purpose of this project, and take myself out of the center of it.

Nick Cave working with students in Shreveport, LA. Courtesy of Shreveport Regional Arts Council. Photo: Casey Jones.

TB: Tell me a bit more about how this is making you rethink your work—is this community work an evolution of your own process as an artist?

NC: Well, it has made me realize everyone that is involved—we are finding roles so that citizens of the community all have a major part in the project. Shreveport Regional Arts Council has been having these amazing bead-a-thons, and thirty beaded blankets are being made at Shreveport Arts Center by everyone in the neighborhood who comes. [Local poet] Poetic X is working with individuals and families about the role of the service organizations, and what they are trying to overcome, and for the opening performance he’ll use these stories to tell an amazing narrative as a spoken-word piece. During the performance, individuals will come and place these blankets on Poetic X as he is reading. For me it is all very sensitive work. I don’t want anyone to feel that I am coming in and exploiting them. And so I have to think about that really clearly.

TB: Can you tell me a bit more about the community groups you are working with in Shreveport? What is the role of each community group in the project? Can you tell me one great story from your time there?

NC: We’ve been working with Mercy Center, Providence House, Lighthouse Ministries, and Hotel McAdoo. Every time I come to Shreveport I visit each house and speak with everyone there and thank them for being involved. You know, everyone wants to feel that they matter, and to say, “Oh my god, this is amazing” just puts a glow on their faces.

Mercy House is one of the organizations helping persons with HIV. There is one individual there, Larry, who is so spectacular, and he is so committed to the narrative in the blanket he is creating and talking about what that means to him, using the blanket as a sense of comfort, protection, a form of warmth. He talks about how happy he is to be part of this project. And I told him the other day that I will put him in a major performance piece titled Upright, which is an initiation piece, a piece about empowerment. Larry will transform by stripping down to his shorts and tank top and then he’ll be rebuilt into a new, sculptural object. Again, I’m looking at ways in which I can help facilitate individuals in positions where they may not have this opportunity before.

Nick Cave working with members of the community in Shreveport, LA. Courtesy of Shreveport Regional Arts Council. Photo: Casey Jones.

TB: And you’ve already spent a significant period of time in Shreveport?

NC: I’ve already been here five times. I’ll be back in December for a few days, and then I’ll be here for January, February, and March, a week to two weeks each month.

I’m so interested in finding out who is here in terms of musicians, actors, dancers, etc. Can this project be a magnet and draw the community together? How can this project be a facilitator to keep creative people here thinking and continuing this kind of work with one another? Once this project is over, I’m gone. So how can I leave a lasting imprint?

TB: Can you outline all the moving parts of this project?

NC: I’ll be doing an exhibition with a series of short films that will open in February in Shreveport. That exhibition is titled Spotted. The major piece, this Upright piece, will open in March. There are nine initiates who are going through this process of stripping down, they come on stage in their street clothes, fold their clothes, and stack their shoes on top. Then they proceed to sit down on the stool, and then we build them up into a shaman of sorts. As we are done building them, we say, “You are complete,” and in that moment, they writhe and become liberated.

When you’ve been initiated, you can stand in the world differently. And I think it is up to all of us, we can have cheerleaders, we can have supporters, but it comes down to us as individuals, how do we now proceed? Do we have the tools to proceed? Like Larry, for example—he is amazing person and I want him to recognize this by creating a platform on which he can stand.

TB: You’ve said you built your first Soundsuit in response to the Rodney King beating as a way to create a barricade between yourself and the world. Do you feel that your suits are more impactful when there is a heightened awareness of the inadequacy of the justice system, for example, in Shreveport?

NC: I think once the Rodney King incident happened, I realized at that moment that I was an artist with a social conscience. That has allowed me to be a renegade and ask myself what can I do to find new ways to create work that is not offensive, and allows me to lead an audience into an experience—and yet, once you are there, you can decide whether you want to address what is behind the work.

But you know, honey, we got a lot of work to do around the world. I wish that there were forty Nick Caves and we were all dropping projects on all the same day and then moving to the next destination, because it’s a lot to do.

Nick Cave. Soundsuits, 2015; mixed media. Courtesy of Shreveport Regional Arts Council. Photo: Casey Jones.

TB: So what comes next?

NC: After Shreveport, we are working on a major project at MASS MoCA. I’m so excited about it. That exhibition is titled Until and I’ll tell you a little about it. I’m putting you into the belly of a Soundsuit. It’s a piece that is political, but it allows the audience to walk into this space that talks about what gets me fired up and motivated to do the work that I do and why I do it. It’s a kinetic piece with this moving environment that shifts. At some point you are twenty feet in the air experiencing something. All these different entry points allow you enter into the work, and it really comes down to what is going on socially in the world.

TB: You once said, about putting on a Soundsuit, “I was no longer Nick. I was a shaman of sorts.” To me, your Soundsuits read as having a cultural connection to Mardi Gras Indian Suits, and I know Dan Cameron has done an excellent job revealing that connection curatorially. Carnival is a moment when anything is permitted. Our ingrained social and political structures are thrown out the door and hierarchies are temporarily overthrown. The performance of Carnival occurs on the border between art and life. Do these ideas resonate with you? Do you hope your performers exist outside of social or political structures, if only for the moment they have the suit on?

NC: Yeah, that is exactly what I’m trying to do. I have got to come up with a tool that works as seducer to some degree. I have to be able to pull you in. How can I diversify my audiences? What role do I have to play to be part of that shift? I have to take that seriously. That is why I’m interested in coming into these cities and understanding what is going on in the neighborhoods. We are still struggling with people who don’t feel comfortable going into museums. As a visual artist I ask how artists can be part of enacting a change.

TB: And do you think that change is actually happening in the United States?

NC: I do these lectures and I go to art openings and I’m looking around and I’m like, no. I need more diversity here. That is in my top five goals I must achieve for each project. How can I change this climate? What do I need to do? We as visual artists need to continue to be renegades and say, “Yes I am here to do a project, but what is the social service?”

Sturtevant. Warhol Black Marilyn, 2004; synthetic polymer silkscreen and acrylic on canvas; 15 ¾ x 13 ¾ in. (40 x 35 cm). Ringier Collection. Courtesy Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London. © Sturtevant.

#access #discrimination #appropriation #institutions #representation #re-performance

Two important events transpired in the art world last week that have brought the complications of diversity and hierarchy into sharp focus. The first is the passing of artist Elaine Sturtevant, an artist who sublimated a critique of gendered inequity among artist peers into works that appropriated and re-created works deemed significant to the canon of contemporary art. The other is the withdrawal of the artist group Yams Collective from the Whitney Biennial following their unsuccessful resolution of objections to a racially problematic project by Joe Scanlan. These two stories illustrate the challenges that appropriation-based institutional critique continues to represent for art-world institutions that are resistant to change.

Rather than address gender inequity directly in her work, Sturtevant critiqued the negotiation between economics and art history that drives the valuation of art objects. Feminism was not her stated objective; in fact she disavowed gender’s relevance to her practice. Still, it is hardly a coincidence that the artists whose works she re-created were mostly white, heterosexual men, as these were the majority of works being shown and cited among her peers. She reenacted performances and re-created objects by Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Frank Stella, among others. By her acts of remaking, she thought through the processes and experiences of the artists who made these works before her, demystifying “genius” into a collection of styles and techniques; a catalog of contemporary practices that mirrored the distance and intellect of her own. Her work as an archivist and a re-producer prefigures important trends in contemporary art of the 1980s and 1990s by two decades.

Sturtevant was born in Ohio and came of age in New York, but the United States has been slow to embrace her. Exhibitions of her work were organized by the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Musée Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm over the past decade, yet the Sturtevant retrospective slated to open at MoMA in November 2014 will be the first museum show of her work in the U.S. since 1973. The wariness of American museums toward Sturtevant is surprising given their embrace of later appropriation artists such as the 1980s Pictures Generation, but less so considering the ongoing gender disparity among artists represented in museum collections. The market continues to prefer a canon defined by individual male superstars whom Sturtevant’s whole existence reflects as negation.

Micol Hebron. (en)Gendered (in)Equity: The Gallery Tally Project. Poster for Sara Meltzer Gallery (NYC) by Krista Feld, 2014.

Micol Hebron’s recent (en)Gendered (in)Equity: The Gallery Tally Poster Project at For Your Art in Los Angeles visualized the realities of gender imbalance in the art market on a grand scale. The galleries Hebron and her accomplices tallied in Los Angeles and New York represented nearly 70% male artists overall. As Sturtevant’s work so deftly makes clear, that economic circumstance also determines whose work is deemed significant to history. As yet, no similar assessment has been made of ethnic diversity among artists represented in galleries or museums. This would seem a logical next step and one that I intend to help initiate down the line.

A 2010 report commissioned by the American Alliance of Museums indicated that the racial composition of contemporary museum audiences has remained at a level of diversity reminiscent of the 1970s while the diversity of the general population has more than tripled during that time. Worse still, comparative data shows that the percentage of people of color who are visitors to museums and art galleries has decreased as those populations have increased. For example, in 1992 the data shows that 17.5% of Hispanics visited museums and galleries, but in 2008 it was only 14.5 percent. Meanwhile, the population of Hispanics in the U.S. multiplied from 9 percent to 30.2 percent. In approximate but digestible terms, while the population of Hispanics in the United States grew from 1:10 to 1:3, the population of Hispanics among art audiences dropped from 1:5 to 1:7. Similar, if less dramatic, trends are apparent among African Americans, the other minority group singled out in the NEA Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, cited in the AAM report. Given that art-gallery and museum attendance is shown to be dropping overall, the lack of traction with growing minority populations should be a significant cause for concern within the art world. Inexplicably, the Whitney Museum has instead opted to openly alienate minority audiences in this year’s Biennial.

Donelle Woolford. Avatar, 2007; digital file. Photograph by Donelle Woolford.

The subject of the current controversy is Joe Scanlan’s contribution to the Biennial, curated in by Michelle Grabner. Scanlan is a white man and Princeton professor whose work engages consumerism and persona in the parodic, conceptual vein mined by Sturtevant. His project for the Whitney Biennial involves creating the fictional persona of an Ivy League-educated black female artist, “Donelle Woolford,” and presenting performances and art objects conceptualized by Scanlan as the creative products of this fictional artist who is played by a variety of actors. One of “Woolford’s” works consists of re-performing a censored Richard Pryor stand-up routine from 1977 entitled “Dick’s Last Stand.” Work that manipulates artistic persona is not unprecedented. Beuys and Warhol self-mythologized, and many contemporary artists work under assumed or collective names, or even through simulacra. Adrian Piper’s work Mythic Being (1973) and the work of Sara Greenberger Rafferty, an artist whose critique of social roles in stand-up comedy Grabner also curated into the Biennial, appear to have directly influenced Scanlan’s choices.The problem with his project is that it functions by exploiting rather than critiquing the severely limited representation of minority artists at the Whitney, and in the art world more broadly. Scanlan’s own name does not appear in exhibitions that include “Donelle Woolford,” who is represented as if a real person. On the Whitney’s artist roster, the inclusion of “Woolford” brings the number of African American participants in the Biennial to 9 out of 103 (8%), and the number of female participants to 38 (37%) (statistics reported by Jillian Steinhauer at Hyperallergic).

The form of Scanlan’s project mimics the structures by which minority voices are circumscribed and appropriated by white-dominated institutions under increasingly multicultural social conditions. Their perspectives are edited and reconstructed according to the established priorities of the dominant political class, such that their presence is ultimately represented as justification of policies that actively exclude others like them. The actors who portray “Donelle Woolford” adopt dissimilar personae, potentially critiquing the interchangeability of minority faces in an exclusionary environment. However, by maintaining that exclusionary environment, the Whitney negates any credibility it might gain from enabling the critique. Scanlan’s presence as manipulator mirrors larger oppressive structures, but rather than open those structures to change, this project reinforces their inflexibility. There is simply no reason apart from institutional racism that the multiplicity of black female perspectives that inform Scanlan’s project could not be gained through an actual multiplicity of black female artists participating in the Biennial. The fact that the Whitney prefers to present Joe Scanlan speaks volumes.

The artist Joe Scanlan.

Calculated to stand out from the several dozen white male artists at the Biennial (and in every other high-profile show and job applicant pool), Scanlan uses “Woolford” to usurp the visibility accrued to minority artists in the contemporary art spotlight by the fact of their relative absence. For artists of color, that visibility is a small and hard-fought concession, a minor boost that does little to offset entrenched limitations on their access to art-world power structures. For Scanlan, the attention garnered by this project—and granted only because of the basic conditions of inequity within the exhibition and the art world—situates him to accrue benefits to his profile and market value commensurate with his position of privilege. He has parlayed this work into a professorship at Princeton (in a department where all of the tenured faculty appear to be white). He attempts to deflect the reality of that privilege by casting his fictional black-woman persona as a person of privilege herself, as if this negates the structural power imbalance that his work exploits. (It does not.) Meanwhile, his inclusion sends a clear message to minority artists and art viewers that while the Whitney is welcoming on its face, the perspectives of people of color are subject to mediation by the white academic establishment.

HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? Good Stock on the Dimension Floor: An Opera, 2014; video, color, sound; 54 minutes. Collection of the Artists. © HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?

Many artists and art supporters of color have already heard this message implicitly at countless exhibitions and art fairs. Yams Collective’s alias HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? used for the Biennial speaks to how pervasive the generic view of blackness remains even in the new global art world, such that “Africa” is broadly and shallowly referenced as a historical and cultural framework, and only when compatible with a white-led agenda. Still, the inclusion of Scanlan’s project at the Whitney reads as blatantly exclusionary to many people of color. Already situated as a single entity charged with representing a vast diaspora in the absence of true parity, Yams Collective ultimately chose to withdraw their work from the exhibition after failing to receive what they felt was an adequately sensitive response from the museum staff or Grabner regarding their concerns. The collective explains that their withdrawal came at the tail end of the exhibition only after they abandoned a process of dialogue and reconciliation sought with the institution. It was met with a response from Joe Scanlan that underscores the tone-deaf nature of the whole undertaking, in which he justifies the “Donelle Woolford” project by extolling the educational value that producing the work has had for him personally: “I only want to say that the experiences I have had working on Donelle Woolford have been some of the most intellectually challenging and humanly rewarding experiences of my life.”

This self-centered perspective is at the heart of Scanlan’s decision to cast black women as agents for his personal edification and creative expression. It supercedes concern for those women’s lack of cultural space for self-determination, self-edification, or self-expression, or even whether the present undertaking further erodes that space. If Joe Scanlan wants to make art that looks at the world from someone else’s perspective, he would do better to work collectively and share the credit for his undertaking with peers who can help him to broaden it rather than engage superficially through contracted performers whose influence over the project’s trajectory is secondary to his own. This also requires that the Whitney value the contributions of a mixed-race group of artists as highly as they do those of a single white man. If the Biennial is to be redeemed from the obstinacy displayed by this debacle, it will only be by including a genuine diversity of artists and points of view in 2016. They could start by hiring some non-white curators next time around.

The 2014 Whitney Biennial is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York through May 25, 2014. Sturtevant’s retrospective will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from November 9, 2014–February 22, 2015.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.

Megs Morley & Tom Flanagan. Interior American Village Fordlândia, 2011; Lamda print; 20 x 31 in.

Post-Fordlândia, the new exhibit at Good Children Gallery in New Orleans, is a palimpsest for modern times: It calls from faded pasts to warn us of an ill-advised future. A series of high-definition videos and large-format photographs by Irish artists Tom Flanagan and Megs Morley depict the now-defunct and abandoned town of Fordlândia, the mad brainchild of Henry Ford. This experiment in urban and cultural planning was built in 1928 in the Amazon jungle of Brazil in order to supply rubber to the Ford production plants in the United States. Riots and unrest left Fordlândia a barren, post-apocalyptic wasteland, and Flanagan and Morley’s photographs document the disaster.

Megs Morley & Tom Flanagan. Plantation Factory, Fordlândia, 2011; Lamda print; 20 x 29 in.

Post-Fordlândia is a small exhibit, made up of five photographs and two videos. The rich lushness of the high-definition shots make the videos the tours de force of this show. Morley cites as an influence French philosopher Jacques Rancière and his ideas of documentary film as a form of fiction. In the video Fordlândia, the ephemeral space lulls the viewer into a hypnotized fascination; imagined stories of the place and its inhabitants grow in the mind as the film progresses. Morley and Flanagan layer present-day images and experiences over each other to reveal lost moments in time. As Peter Schedjahl pointed out recently, “Nothing spoils faster than the future.”[1] In this case, the past and the future seem to intermingle with uncomfortable ease.

Megs Morley & Tom Flanagan. House, American Village, Fordlândia, 2011; Lamda print; 20 x 29 in.

When placed in the context of New Orleans, the images of an abandoned Americana are imbued with an ominous significance. Flanagan and Morley are collaborative artists working with Gallery 126, an artist-run co-op based in Galway, Ireland. Malcolm McClay, a founding member of Good Children, is a native of Ireland and worked with Gallery 126 to bring these artists to New Orleans. He pointed out, “When I saw this exhibition in Galway I assumed Post-Fordlândia was Central or South America, yet when it opened at Good Children almost everyone asked me if it was New Orleans. It is a great reminder of how context profoundly affects the audience’s interpretation.”[2]

As New Orleans enters a new phase in its history, one of redevelopment rather than recovery, Post-Fordlândia reminds audiences that top-down cultural and urban planning are defunct practices. As large swaths of New Orleans are being knocked down to build hospitals and housing developments, one can clearly see the inherent instability of large-scale redevelopment. What happens to the culture that is lost during rebuilding? Will institutionally developed neighborhoods be adopted and provide cultural continuity or will Cabrini-Green-esque futures ensue? When 265 homes in Lower Mid-City are razed through the eminent domain of the state to build a private hospital, the owners are the unfortunate subjects of this experiment.

By deciphering the lost history of Fordlândia, Morley and Flanagan present an alternative strategy, one of criticism and skepticism regarding urban development. Long, poetic shots of Fordlândia’s empty factories and residences underscore not only the economic loss suffered by Ford (over twenty million dollars were lost by the Ford family when Fordlândia was sold in 1945), but also the loss of a physical space for those native to the region. These long shots are painful reminders of not just a recently empty city, but also the impending changes in the fabric of New Orleans as it becomes a bigger, brighter, slightly more sterile version of itself.

French video artist Camille Henrot creates parallels between the mythical and the contemporary. In her first solo exhibition in the United States at the New Orleans Museum of Art, she investigates the legendary city of Ys in France and the vanishing coastal area of southern Louisiana that is occupied by the ancestral Houma Indians. Coastal erosion, in real and mythical tales, is at the heart of this exhibit.

Camille Henrot. Cities of Ys, 2013; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery Kamel Mennour

For over two years, the artist interviewed and researched the acculturation of the United Houma Nation. The exhibit is composed of sculpture, prints, and nine new videos mostly shot in Terrebonne Parish, the home of approximately 6,000 members of the Houma Nation.[1] The Houma have been in the process of seeking federal recognition as an American Indian tribe since 1979, when they first filed a letter of intent. That petition was rejected in 1994 and today the Houma are still waiting for recognition to be granted.

Henrot was born in Brittany, France, the home to the mythical city of Ys. According to legend, Ys was lost to the sea when the daughter of the king was tricked by the devil into opening the seawall, allowing the ocean to swallow the city whole. In southern Louisiana, over 2,000 square miles of marsh and swamp have become open water in the last seventy years.[2] This landscape took 6,000 years to build and with the help of oil companies and navigation canals, it has been quickly destroyed. In the next two decades, parts of the Houma Nation’s land will be completely submerged.

Camille Henrot. Study for Cities of Ys, 2013; still from video. Courtesy the of the artist and Gallery Kamel Mennour

Juxtaposing this reality, Henrot creates layered video of an oil pipe twisting on a computer display on top of a larger screen which shows Houma members being interviewed on their family history. Each video is displayed in sculptural settings, one embedded in a metal triangle with a wooden pane cut out in the shape of a pool. Another is framed with untreated wood, which is built both around and in front of the work, obscuring the full view of the screen. Henrot considers all the different videos to be part of one work and all videos have the same title. Seemingly random objects are posted near many of the videos. For example, in Plasmas plasma stealth (2013), a framed photo of a Wikipedia entry on lattes is placed below the screen, suggesting the malleability of information. How is culture recorded? If a culture is never recognized officially, who in the future will remember its loss?

Camille Henrot. Study for Cities of Ys, 2013; still from video. Courtesy the of the artist and Gallery Kamel Mennour

Henrot draws an analogy between the physical loss of land in Ys and southern Louisiana, but there is also a religious suggestion. In another video of Plasmas plasma stealth (2013), Kirby Verret, a member of the Houma, recites bible passages for a Sunday sermon. Sliced into images of Verret is video footage of young girls getting dressed in traditional Houma costume, braiding their hair slowly and wrapping it in fabric and fur. This video poignantly shows the religious tidal wave of mainstream U.S. culture that has subsumed much of the original traditions of the Houma.

Camille Henrot. Study for Cities of Ys, 2013; still from video. Courtesy the of the artist and Gallery Kamel Mennour

Camille Henrot’s body of work has focused on “intuitive unfolding of knowledge” through cultural and mythical explorations. One can only hope that her investigations of the Houma will lead to some sort of positive impact for the tribe. If not, this exhibition may become a historical documentation rather than a contemporary exploration.