Carrion Birds: Part Three
Measured against the scale of the human misery and suffering of New Orleans, post-Katrina, the idea of an embedded artist operating from a repurposed trailer seems to me about as useful as a mime artist jumping out a helicopter into Lake Pontchartrain with an imaginary parachute and an invisible backpack full of sachets of electrolytes, so the people “down below” can rehydrate on the way to their next experiential clusterfuck. This kind of artwork is a Pirates of the Caribbean ride for middle-class intellectuals who wouldn’t dream of stepping into Disneyland ‘cos they thinks it’s tacky and inappropriate; yet have no problem patronizing a project that uses more resources and money than many of the Katina survivors have yet to see, and merely proffers the victims with yet another in a series of hare-brained non-solutions to their problems.
“But!” I hear you shout - and let me stop you right there; before you tell me how the project is a metaphor, or an ironic analogy, or a piece of conceptual art. Or before you tell me that it’s not the artworld’s fault what happened – neither the hurricane itself or the woeful government response - and this is just a fine example of artists getting down off of the artworld pedestal and creating socially-engaged work with resonance and clarity and compassion.
Let me stop you there because I’ve trundled all this rote guff out myself; when I worked as a professional curator and producer for 17 years on a variety of somewhat similarly noble art interventions. I too believe in art that has relevance, and all of those other woolly manifestos that you were about to bleat at me for daring to question the logic of this insipid dispassionate contrivance. Site-specific non-gallery socially-concerned art can exist and engage…
… but only if the art’s any good. Putting it out there isn’t enough in itself. All the things that can help truly amplify the successes of a good public art work – context, community, history – are the same things that can magnify the failings of a bad public art work. As a young curator my inspiration was a trailblazing Irishman called Declan McGonagle, a man who turned the sectarian divided northern Irish town of Derry into an external art laboratory of sorts, steering public art projects into a variety of complex and often potentially incendiary contexts. When somebody once asked him why he had, in effect, abandoned the “neutral” white space of the gallery, he replied something along the lines (I’m paraphrasing) that “Nothing is neutral. A gallery may look like just a white box but it’s also the product of a series of values – philanthropy, financial support, advocacy, cultural definitions.”
And if you reverse that same truism, you also end up realizing that if nothing is neutral than everything is political. Which confers inordinate responsibilities on artists who seek to insert themselves into loaded socio-political contexts. Even if the Emergency Response Studio manages to attract one Katrina survivor inside, and make them feel important because someone wants to hear their story: then that’s a lie, because the wider society – from government to agency to insurance companies – has so clearly demonstrated that these people’s stories don’t seem to matter one jot. This piece of conceptual art (which also fails at a basic conceptual level, because the artist couldn’t procure an actual FEMA trailer, so what he has is merely an ersatz prop) operates at best as a rose-tinted panacea. And at worst…
What Mr. Villinksi and the project curators are saying to the people of New Orleans with this conceptual art is: you don’t count. Instead of building this trailer, if our primary concern was your wellbeing, we could have done something much more direct. But God knows then we’d be aid workers, or community workers, or something, or have to have you people stay on our couches, and that’s such a… discreet gesture that has nothing to do with what we do, which is art. We travel the world parachuting installations in to loaded contexts, chattering about globalization and diasporas over our martinis, before we ship them back home in immaculate customized crates and try and flog them to some dealers; and if you’re lucky and get a job in the French Quarter then the economic regeneration aspects of the biennial mean that maybe you’ll get some trickle down voodoo fiscal benefit in the form of an extra big tip when the biennial drones swarm us in November, or pick up some additional security work to stop the art trailer being ripped off for materials. Otherwise the only trickle down is what you already had when the levees ruptured. Not our fault: the issue is much bigger than anything we could do. We’re on your side, and believe in your right to repurpose as you see fit (other than the trailer). We hope that our sympathetic (even empathetic) explanation of the human wonder of this project might impart some small sense to you that your struggle matters; because we are really nice people and truly feel your pain. Should the levees ever break again, don’t hesitate to call us for the emergency artist, who will probably get there days before the National Guard and the health services. Unless the trailer is out of the country at the Sao Paolo biennial. In which case, revert to what you did last time.
IN PART FOUR: some closing thoughts on potential new disaster art possibilities. To China and Myanmar and beyond.