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New Year News!
I am at this very moment ensconced and enraptured during my month long residency at A Studio In The Woods in Lower Algiers Louisiana. Words can't begin to convey the depth of this gift - in every imaginable way this residency is tailored to the needs of the Katrina survivor/artist and the experience, in just 5 days, has already transformed me. I wish everyone could live here! From the environment you are surrounded by, the harmonious connection between the buildings and the land, the truly brilliant support and company of Lucianne and Joe Carmichal, not to mention Lucianne's transcendentally healthy and delicious cooking - I can say with all humility that I am being healed. More to follow - about my time thus far in New Orleans and what's in the future - but for now I'm off to the woods.
2007-02-05
"Art In Action" In New Orleans
“Art In Action” is a long-term, collaborative, community art project to begin in New Orleans this October. Multi-media artist Elizabeth Underwood is spearheading this project with sponsorship from University of New Orleans’ anthropology department. Believing the creative process to be a powerful tool for affecting social change and healing from trauma, the underlying agenda of “Art In Action” is to re-animate New Orleans with positive, progressive energy and to support the community’s ongoing efforts at renewal.
“Art In Action’s” primary focus is to galvanize a wide variety of creative artists and community groups to create an on-going interactive treasure hunt of site-specific art and performance throughout the city. A corresponding downloadable map with accompanying audio narrative will be available on an “Art In Action” blog; the map will also be available in printed brochure form, making the treasure hunt open to everyone. All participants will be encouraged to share their experiences via the blog, which will then function as a library for this project. Plans for a corresponding book and exhibit are currently underway.
With New Orleans at such an archetypal crossroads, there is a deep need for personal involvement in its physical, psychological, and political landscape. Given the current crucial phase of the preservation and redefinition of the New Orleanian identity, engaging with New Orleans via work of this nature (as a “builder ”, “seeker”, or “documentarian”) is vital on many levels. Every aspect of this treasure hunt will connect this valiant community to a worldwide audience in a truly constructive way. Ultimately, “Art In Action” can function as a model for how communities might respond to the long-term challenges of future catastrophic man-made/natural disasters. “Art In Action” will motivate empowered regeneration and set in motion an inspired process that can perform itself under multiple guises for many years to come.
2006-09-20
Katrina Anniversary Event
I apologize for not writing here about the anniversary event any sooner. Between that and getting myself back to New Orleans things have been amazingly busy. Here's the rundown:
With the levee sculpture jarred up, the space opened with a resonance crying out for voicing. A shrine was built honoring the victims, incorporating elements of voodoo, Catholic, and Native American traditions. In the great Austin tradition, Whole Foods donated a ton of coffee, pastries, and water. Local CBS and NPR reporters were present, documenting the event. The CBS profile can be found on this site under the "Texts" category: "New Orleans Artist Pays Tribute To Katrina Victims".
At 9:35, the time at which the Paris Avenue levee broke and filled my neighborhood with deadly water, I rang a bell and began reading the names out loud. The reading was shared by a number of volunteers, New Orleanian exiles, Austin compatriots, kids, elders, poets, etcetera The list of names we read from numbers appx. 1900. We also read the names of those who remain missing, which numbers appx. 1800. Also honored in the reading were the unnamed/unidentified, all of the animals, flowers, and fauna that perished.
The mood was serious and the emotion was palpable. The intention was to create a safe space for people to express and process their grief and I feel confident in saying that this goal was achieved. We finished the reading by 11:45 a.m. and though we all still carry our own burdens a very real sense of release, of a lightening of the burden, could be felt in the air. I gave away the jars of the levee sculpture, which contain the marble chips, salt, and sugar from the sculpture as well as the hand-written names of the victims.
Photographs of the cycle of the levee sculpture and the reading will be uploaded to this site soon: you will be able to find them in "Installations" in the folder "Come Hell Or High Water".
I am in New Orleans now/again and will be writing here about the ArtWorks Projects I am initiating in the city beginning next week.
2006-09-10
Come Hell Or High Water
The Dougherty exhibition opened without a hitch. I continue to be impressed with the Austin community's capacity to open up, dialogue, engage with this sort of work. Decomposing journals, wounded blue skies, some strange schematic built on the floor with stones and salty sugar.
This was interesting: I built the floor piece so it'd just jut into the pathway of anyone walking the parameter of the walls with my art on them. A metaphor: it's New Orleans, it's a cemetary, it's there even if you don't see it, you knock against it without malice, collide with it and come away with a stain of powder on your shoe. One man tipsy fell into New Orleans East. I reassured him he'd done nothing wrong (how can you honestly put something on the floor like that and not work into the trajectory of the piece some damaging of it by the audience? I mean, that's part of how you turn the audience into participants, right? That's part of it for me at least ...)
and he still felt bad. Tipsy people are inordinately apologetic. He was speaking to one of the other artists exhibiting and she reiterated what I had said: it's ok, some collision was meant to happen, he shouldn't feel bad. And what he said to her? "Art is weird." Tell me how much I love that!
Now it's way past the opening and the floor sculpture's been deconstructed. Not with water as originally envisioned but by shoveling (rusty borrowed hand-shovel) it all into a wide variety of glass jars. Including some lovely haunting blue perfume bottles FedEx'd to me from New Orleans, rescued from a flooded Lakeview house.
So about 60 glass bottles and jars, filled to the brim with this powdery pebbly salty white concoction, now line the walls underneath the exhibition of water logs (my flooded journals), collage, paintings, and drawings. I will give the jars away during the Katrina anniversary event I am spearheading at the Dougherty. I want to just give it all away, I felt bad about the idea of dissolving the names. The way this action/ritual is different from the hurricane's aftermath is that there is something material remaining in THIS aftermath that can be held onto. These names (that I wrote out by hand, every single one) were not washed out to sea. By giving it all away we share the burden and there's a little less weight on me.
And what is this Hurricane Katrina anniversary event I am spear-heading, you ask? Well to hell with Congress - I don't need the United States government to teach me how to be a human being: and I'd planned this event long before they failed to honor the anniversary of Katrina with any rituals of national rememberance: I just believe that it's a good thing: remembering:
On Tuesday August 29th I will be reading aloud the names of New Orleans' victims (identified and missing) of that hurricane/the man-made disaster that hurricane instigated. I will be reading their names out loud beginning at 9:30 a.m. There will be a chair there, just one chair, a bottle of water, and me reading the names out loud. Oh! I have begun to receive a number of requests by people wanting to share this process with me and that will be really really good. And anyone who wants one will get a jar to take away, filled with dusty salty sweet New Orleans, doused with lavender oil, infused with the ribbons of names.
I will have hot coffee for the drinking and I hope at least some Krispy Kreme doughnuts. I'd have gumbo and beignets if the world were perfect and I had a pocket full of twenties. However I do not, the world is not perfect and all I've got in these pockets are seeds from the Texas succulents I have come to love, but all the same: some hot coffee and a doughnut isn't a bad thing to offer, especially on a day when eating in and of itself is going to be a miracle, for me at least.
So that will be what it will be and it appears that WKUT is going to be running their interview with me on air in conjunction with this event - I'll post a link as soon as one is made available. And photos of the installation and its transition thus far will be up shortly. And now I lay me down to sleep.
2006-08-20
Marble Salt Sugar
As the exhibition approaches my car fills with 50 and 60 lb bags of various materials. I think of it as a creative desire, a weight I gladly carry until I can open up and pour it out. And my car's driving a little like a speed boat with a small group of rowdy pals drinking cans of beer in the back. I drift from lane to lane, wrapped in dry dusty hotness, looking for a place to put the anchor down.
My main devotion with this Dougherty exhibit is to its deconstruction. On the anniversary of the levees breaking and swallowing up our city, our feral cats, our elders, restaurants, and porch swings I will be there, scooping up the names of our dead with salt and sugar into glass jars to give away so that everyone may carry something of this tragedy with them. To put on a shelf or on the back steps to remember to pause to participate in the turning of the soil. It's a simple thing really, it's a bird I want to return to the wild.
2006-07-24
Lost (and) Found
What is important to me is that my simulation (the August exhibit) of what happened to New Orleans on August 28th 2005 be in some way beautiful. Horrific as it was, gutting my sense of what I will and will not have, graphic as our utter debasement, the land, the people, the animals and buildings - the important thing for me is to say, yes, it was hideous, it is hideous. And doesn't that have the same potent beauty that everyone gladly hands to the nude and the flowers?
To work with the power of the abject the way some people work with beeswax. To turn remnants, artifacts of death and destruction into tangly conversations in the smoky meadow at night, with the moon leaking down, that's my goal. A simple trope, really, the one I gladly ride round and round on. It's the one I find most entertaining, really, in the long run: make something other out of Other, make it this - more than that. The joke's on me, the joke's on us: there is a joke there, it's so Dada it's almost (but I hope not) pedantic.
To me, in my eyes, this isn't the alchemy some people claim it to be. It's not a trick, to reveal something difficult as seductive. It's just the unveiling of what is always there, just under the fear and grief and ignorance. Tell the survivor they're a victim and see what that gets; tell the survivor they're gorgeous and watch a big spark get lit. That's it, really. A small punctuation in a big world of pain, a minute where maybe we can just sit because, well. For a second - there it is, outside, and it's lovely and odd and photographable and inside I can just have a rest.
2006-06-14
Fight/Flight
"You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm."
– Colette
As I remain unslept, the ideas for the August exhibition at the Dougherty Arts Center (in Austin) collide with my ideas for how I'm going to manage to continue to live. With my small collection of possessions packed up into storage soon; my sorrow and ambition will come with me as I ramble Austin a little longer, then back home for a few months of art making in the streets, then to northern Michigan to get some nurturance. I'm not ready to choose a place other than New Orleans to call home. A friend said today that he believes that the "feeling of security" we speak of not having exists only as a contemporary cultural "artifact". When did you last have it, for real?
I've begun a long list of fight/flight iconography, which are making it into line drawings but might also become vinyl paintings or prints of some sort. The levees I want to build swing from aluminum to sugar to aluminum to sugar to paper to yarn. The pieces that will hang on the walls swing from embalmed rotting journals (recovered from having been underwater for 3 weeks, they remain wrapped in plastic I thought was hermetically sealed but if it were how could the water be getting the air it needs to feed the mold that's growing?), to paintings of treacly blue skies all wrecked with black lines, to the drawings of fight-or-flight icons, and back to embalmed rotting journals.
I do know that I will soon begin writing the names of New Orleans' dead and missing onto beautiful paper I made last week, white and toothy. I'll use water-soluble ink. I'll shred those names into tiny ribbons and embed them in the sugar/salt/glass bed that will live on the floor, spilling and glinting. How the red water will be swallowed by all that sugar and crushed glass will be all that's left as the names will also dissolve. This is the turning round and round I've become. Everything is fluid only I wish I could sleep.
2006-06-07
Found/Lost/Found (Paradise)
June 2, 2006
“The right way to wholeness is made up of … fateful detours and wrong turnings. It is a longissima via, not straight but snakelike, a path that unites the opposites in the manner of the guiding caduceus, a path whose labyrinthine twists and turns are not lacking in terrors.” C. G. Jung
We’re having open studios at IDEA this coming weekend. I always enjoy the experience; you couldn’t ask for a more supportive, insightful audience than Austin’s. That said, every time I participate in these studio tours the loss of my archive affects me all over again. I do not have a body of work to reinforce myself with. I think in some ways this gives me an edge, a deeper understanding of certain philosophies I have about art & art-making. All the same, I feel the flimsiness of it all. Not just because it’s not that much stuff but also because I continue to be graphically reminded of how temporal "it" all is.
Given the general thematic concerns of my work, the relevance of feeling this way is not lost on me. My art has always been informed by a desire to unsettle the viewer’s sense of permanence/place in time and to rescript that experience as beautiful versus horrible. And with all of my site-specific work, constant change and “destruction” are built into the process:
I come up with a concept and execute it. I generally include audience participation in the process, this helps to dismantle ideas about the precious "Artist" and the precious "Art work". It also opens up my experience like a blast of cayenne. I've dealt with everything from people crying with relief in my arms to people screaming angrily at me and wrecking the environment and every reaction is valid. Whatever is created is "destroyed" (burned, buried, thrown in a river). It's process oriented work after which all that's left is the memory and any documentation. By ritualistically destroying "a thing" I illustrate that “destruction” inherently creates something new, something else. Possibly something as-or-more beautiful than the original artifact.
So now, post-Katrina, I am poised as a literal representative for this artistic methodology. No separation between art and artist. How “healing”, how “psychologically empowering” the experience of “destruction” can be is now reflected by my own life. I become not just a survivor, more than a spokes-person, but an actual product of the process I endorse. This isn't a high-falutin' idea either, and it's not unique to me. It was while teaching art workshops to survivors of domestic violence, with kids and women who had no prior experience with "art making", or with the homeless population of Detroit or New Orleans, that I found participants who really "got it", who weren't afraid of this process, and who understood the benefits of initiating this process of their own volition.
I didn’t set out to work within these parameters because of a premonition of Hurricane Katrina. It was the result of my life prior, the experience and survival of a whole garden-variety of human trauma, not to mention my organic conceptual exploration of art-making - which is generally fueled by a desire to just make people feel "something, anything". So I've decided that "letting go" produces something as beautiful, as worthy as the thing that’s released. That I am personally in the thick of processing a phase of gigantic loss means my work has the potential to genuinely describe that process and to also create a means toward my own healing. It's all built-in, ready-made and connected.
So. At my studio there's piles of rock salt, Led lights, and limestone; photographic light-boxes; collages made of rescued items from the flood; pencil drawings of stags trumpeting blood; drawings and paintings on thin glass panes; and magic marker drawings of strange levee-like labyrinths. I’m working with common media like markers, pencils, rubber cement, spray paint, and rocks in what feels like my attempt at remaining mobile, at being creative without enforcing any ideas of permanence, and getting back to the smells and feelings that drawing and building things gave me when I was just a kid. Cuz I am just a kid.
2006-06-02