Prospect.2 New Orleans Beating Heart Biennial By Emily Nathan
At last weeks preview of Prospect.2 New Orleans
, Oct. 22, 2011-Jan. 29, 2012, art impresario Dan Cameron looked exhausted. As everybody knows by now, the founding director of the largest U.S. biennial, which debuted in 2008 to great critical acclaim, has had some difficulties.
Cameron calls himself a survivor of the East Village, and he has certainly demonstrated a survivors grit, weathering storms both literal and figurative in his fight to bring the New Orleans art scene to the international stage. I have been waiting for something meaningful and profound to take place in the art world, and I dont see it happening in New York or Los Angeles, he explained, a bit smugly, to a group of press gathered at the New Orleans Contemporary Art Center, one of P.2s hubs.
With him from the start and still along for the ride is his knight-in-shining-armor Toby Devan Lewis, the biennials founding benefactor, who one suspects may have had a hand, despite her loyalty, in Camerons decision to step down as artistic director for Prospect.3, which is slated for 2013. He has named LACMA contemporary art curator Franklin Sirmans as his successor, bequeathing him a project of great promise -- and a slew of financial woes.
In the meantime, though, the beating heart that is Prospect.2 New Orleans beats on, one year late and significantly reduced in size, bringing a formidable list of 27 local, national and international artists to roost in 16 venues spread throughout the Crescent City. Beyond its international stars and national heroes, Sophie Calle, Ivn Navarro and Francesco Vezzoli among them, P.2 includes a host of local talent, whose work is spiced with the citys Southern soul.
That soul came together on the morning of Oct. 22, 2011, as crowds gathered in the Marigny districts Washington Square Park for the P.2 ribbon-cutting ceremony. Ms. Lewis presided, brandishing a pair of oversized blue scissors, and with a quick snip the fluffy pink bow designed for the event by local puppeteer Miss Pussycat burst open, spilling out its cotton and confetti stuffing, and ushering in the biennials inaugural performance, the Marigny Parade.
Inspired by the citys long-standing tradition of marching bands, New Jersey-born new media artist R. Luke DuBois enlisted the help of 350 budding musicians from local high schools. Separated into groups, they began their musical march from five different points in the city; each group played the same music and kept time with synchronized metronomes, finally converging all at once in the Marigny triangle and overwhelming the crowds with an onslaught of surround sound. Or, that was the idea. As it turns out, in art -- as in life -- even the most genuine attempts at harmony often result in something more like cacophony.
After that pleasantly dissonant start, the festivities continued; New Orleans has never needed an excuse to celebrate, and the evenings P.2 events intersected here and there with satellite performances, unscheduled (and early) Halloween parades and unaffiliated art projects. At sundown, a hotly anticipated mobile performance by celebrated interventionist William Pope.L set off from the ravaged Lower Ninth Ward. Titled Blink, it involved scores of volunteers taking turns at pushing an otherwise immobile black-painted ice-cream truck through the city until sunrise the next day. A screen installed on the trucks back illuminated the dark with a slideshow of photographs sent in by New Orleans residents, all in response to the question, When you dream of New Orleans, what do you dream of?
by: aarenbrowns
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