local art criticism in jeopardy?

In the afterglow of Prospect.1, visual artists have been surprised to discover that local art criticism and coverage in print media appear to be diminishing, not increasing. As professionals we have relied on printed criticism to attract curators, gallerists, and patrons. Our viral email campaign to restore full length articles to Gambit Weekly was not successful, and art listings in the Times-Picayune have been reduced to “Highlights.” With newspapers closing around the country, it is time to be proactive in moving critical writing about art into new media. What can we do to encourage new voices, and how can we raise the profile of contemporary New Orleans artists in national and international arenas?

Please join us for an informal discussion/social event in the café of the Contemporary Arts Center on Wednesday, March 25 at 7:00. Caffeinated and alcoholic beverages will be available for purchase.
post by Cynthia Scott

Lecture with Caecilia Tripp & Film Screening Saturday

"POETICS OF RELATION", 2pm, Contemporary Arts Center
Filmmaker Caecilia Tripp, whose film The Making of Americans (2004) is currently on view as part of Score & Script: Music in Video, on view in the first floor gallery until April 5 , will present some of her recent films, made in locales ranging from Curaçao (Mi Curaçao, 2005) to Rio de Janeiro (Motoboy/Cacao The Mad Dog, 2008), Paris (Paris Anthem, 2008) and London (Making History, 2008). All of these films cast a poetic, yet critical, eye on creolization processes in these formlery colonized places, while paying attention to the new voices that they have produced - from an underground Carioca DJ to the acclaimed Guadeloupean French Soprano Magali Léger, London-based Jamaican dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson and Martinican poet Édouard Glissant.
Poetics of Relation will be moderated by Score & Script exhibition curator Claire Tancons.
Free, with gallery admission: $5. $3 for students, seniors. FREE for CAC members and children under 15 every day.
For information, call (504) 528-3805

LOSS. RITUAL. RELIC. RESIDUE. the archive

November 1, 2008-February 28, 2009
Newcomb College Center For Research on Women (NCCROW) Library and Archive
62 Newcomb Place, New Orleans, LA 70119
Free and open to the public. OPENING WEEKEND and WEEKLY HOURS: Monday-Friday
9am-4pm, or by appointment. WEEKEND HOURS: call (504) 251-4968 or visit
thevestigesproject.org on the web for more information.

The VESTIGES Project, a New Orleans-based and inspired artist/writer collaborative, is celebrating its
25-year anniversary with a kickoff installation at Newcomb College Center for Research on Women
(NCCROW), opening November 1, 2008 and on view through February 28, 2009. Located in
NCCROW’s Library and Archives on Tulane University’s campus, LOSS. RITUAL. RELIC. Residue:
The Archive is part of the VESTIGES Project’s roving 3-year residency at New Orleans’ Contemporary
Arts Center and is co-sponsored by the CAC. The opportunity to present in Newcomb College’s
research library and archive and work with its scholars and students is most appropriate as three of the
VESTIGES Project cofounders met while attending graduate school at Tulane/Newcomb, and many
participants have similarly attended school, taught and lectured on campus.

VESTIGES Project artists’ musings upon the vestigial landscape and culture of New Orleans began long
before Katrina. Artist Jan Gilbert, a VESTIGES Project cofounder and curator of both its CAC

recycling at white linen night

thank you Pheonix Recycling! a few things to see among many others:
1.Robert Tannen's retrospective at the Ogden
2.Adrian Price's catwalk parade of flimsy and solid colliding in the City Stage show at the CAC
3. Vestiges Project's "THINK TANKS-Flood Lines" window installation on the St. Joseph's St. side of the CAC building- a poignant, socially relevant, very effective presentation of image and text.

overdue

When Dan Cameron curated his first CAC show, Elizabeth Underwood and I tried some "video blogging" and interviewed some of the artists at the opening. Those posts can still be found in mostly in the February and March archives. What I neglected to do was finish the series by posting the curator's statement (!)
I decided now is as good a time as any to rehash what we've seen, in anticipation of what's to come. For the show last January, titled "Something from Nothing," Elizabeth and I were very curious to find out what "nothing" was. It turned out that "nothing" was the stuff of community. While I think the title stung a bit, the show had some great work dealing with issues and ideas timely to new orleanians. As you will hear in the clip, "situational aesthetics" within the context of an alternative economy is the ground of Dan Cameron's concept. The Victor Burgin text from 1969 "Situational Aesthetics" is dense with ideas about art as institutional critique, art as activity, art existing in a psychological space as much as a physical space... I'm curious about how this idea will play out with Prospect 1, with the biennial as the institution and a "differently-functioning" city as the context.

Peter Sarkisian at CAC

Extruded Video Engine: Katrina Series
through Oct 6, 2008
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans

When I saw the Extruded Video Engines at the CAC they wowed me with their fun pseudo 3-D video-projection-on-vacuform effect. I thought they were playful but then I started listening to them. The gears and cranks (with the exceptions of the bubbles - they add a Frankenstein factor) suddenly seemed retro , like a celebratory nostalgia for a past in which things worked. Combined with the audio of news media reportage from 2005, the effect became sinister. I recalled the moment on Sept 2nd 2005, when any leftover belief I had in what the media said was shattered. The specter of the inner workings, the gears and such, allude to outmoded forms of machination, and function as a purposely outdated metaphor for how things happen (supposedly Sarkisian videotaped the crazy mechanical things at Los Alamos). The pieces insist on transparency, but it's false - a "look, this is really how things work" feel, when we know that this is NOT at all how it works, and it's just an illusion. It's the illusion of civil organization, of democracy, of an unbiased media. Each wall piece felt like a blob with some knobs and gears hot-glued on the top of it to make it appear official. The sinister aspect of the pieces is the part that works for me.
An art-going pal told me that he'd seen the work before in NYC, but without the Katrina reference. That made me wonder: are these pieces like a template over which anything would work? an illusory machine that has an input and an output, and whatever comes in is transformed when it comes out? Whatever the case, I think it works to add in the Katrina references, but hey, talk about preaching to the choir. Will the Extruded Video Engine: Katrina Series show outside of the Gulf Coast? Or is the engine just like the media machines it parodies, endlessly going from one opportunity to the next?
Here are my ratings, on a scale of 1(worst) to 10(super-duper best):
gee-whiz factor: 10
shoe-horn factor (making it fit in New Orleans) 10
tacky: 10
techie: 10

Artspeak Tonight

Marjetica Potrč, Water and New Orleans

The artwork of Marjetica Potrc, the Slovenian artist whose work with New Orleans architecture firm FutureProof is in the CAC "Something from Nothing" show (a rainwater filtering system is introduced by Dan Cameron in the video above), presents an alternative to convention wisdom in the rebuilding of New Orleans. An eco-friendly shotgun house prototype, with solar panels and cistern, was shown in a gallery in Chelsea recently, and Marjetica gave a talk at the New School called Future Talk Now: Learning from New Orleans, the Western Balkans, and Acre, Brazil. In an interview with MetropolisMag.com, it's obvious that Marjetica understands New Orleans' fragile condition in relation to wetlands loss, but she is also concerned about something many New Orleanians take for granted - the availability of water. Yesterday, National Public Radio ran a piece about the leaching of 50-90 million gallons of water a day from our system of 100-year old pipes that are in desperate need of replacement; however, FEMA can only "restore to pre-storm conditions," and pre-storm, N.O. was probably leaching similar amounts of water. And, due to decreased population, the Sewerage and Water Board, millions of dollars in debt and going deeper, is not selling enough water. "Don't conserve" is their message, according to NPR, so the utility can sell enough to financially stay afloat. These conflicting approaches by city administrators, artists and actors are just a section of the confusion in our attempt to re-imagine a major city.

Something from Nothing: Bruna Esposito

Elizabeth Underwood of Art in Action interviews Bruna Esposito with New Orleans artist L'Oreal Evans about olfactory pleasures in Bruna's artwork.

Something from Nothing: Paula Hayes

Paula Hayes and local crochet-er Mary Summers are interviewed by Art in Action's Elizabeth Underwood about working together.

Something from Nothing: Mario Rizzi

Mario Rizzi and Art in Action's Elizabeth Underwood discuss Mario's work with the local Latino community to create his installation in the Something from Nothing show at the CAC.

Jarbas Lopes on Camp Street

Join artist Jarbas Lopes tomorrow, Saturday February 23, at 10am, at 828 Camp Street, for the mudding of his “barraco” to the sounds and smells of Brazil.

Rio-based artist Jarbas Lopes spent two weeks in New Orleans last January to build a “barraco”, a small hut made out of bamboo, for Something from Nothing, a group exhibition curated by Dan Cameron that opened at the CAC on January 18 and will remain on view until March 23. Lopes is back in New Orleans this week for the completion of his project with a day-long performance of cooking and dancing while the walls of the barraco are filled with mud.

For more information about the performance, contact Claire Tancons, Associate Curator, at (504) 528 3870 or via email at ctancons@cacno.org.

Something from Nothing: the experience of participating in Ellen Harvey's project

Elizabeth Underwood of Art in Action interviews Shannon Citanovich, who sent painter Ellen Harvey a detailed written description of a box of photos she lost in the flood. 2:10 minutes

Something from Nothing: Henrique Oliveira

Elizabeth Underwood of Art in Action interviews Sao Paulo artist Henrique Oliveira, the creator of the cloud of bedding that hangs in the CAC atrium. 3:30 minutes

Artspeak