State of the Art NOLA

 https://www.noareview.org/uploads/4/3/5/8/43585085/noar-spring-2018-lay.pdf   The third iteration of Prospect.3 – and its last as a biennial – took on curatorial themes of identity and “search” in the work within the exhibit.   The Propeller Group’s The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music – a multi-media installation including video, photography, and sculpture – was especially effective at communicating this theme, as it related to global affinities between New Orleans and South Vietnam. Using the tradition of the jazz funeral as a subject, the artists revealed the stunning similarities between the two cultures.   Within the video and half of the UNO-St. Claude Gallery, morphed instruments served as symbols for a shared space conversed through the language of music, and a transgender performer acted as a guide through the amorphous and liminal area.   Carlos Rolón’s solo exhibition at New Orleans Museum of Art, “Outside/In,” shares similar content.   He explor

  Brooke Pickett’s 2005 painting, Everybody Wants You to Be Special , lurks around a corner in her exhibition The Center Cannot Hold at the Contemporary Arts Center. The focal point of the piece is a large, brain-shaped field of pink oil paint slicked into thickly textured strokes. That pink is total Philip Guston – the renegade painter who left abstract expressionism to seek truth in then-degenerate figuration. It is bright, fleshy, jarring, delightful and verges on painful.   Earthy browns and yellows offset the bruised violets and deadened grays that further emphasize this area, recalled the muted palette of the Ab-Ex Guston that hangs in New Orleans Museum of Art.   Pickett’s painting is like a memorial to him.   Guston is special. He is somewhat recently regarded with the art-world adulation that he left with his official exit from abstract expressionism in a controversial 1970 show at the Marlborough Galleries in New York.   That show featured abstract figu

    A recently posted Starbucks sign at the corner of St. Claude and Bartholomew streets that promised, “Coming Soon,” was painted over with the word TROUBLE. NOLA Defender recently revealed the sign is a hoax, but it still implies a visceral apocalyptic panic - it heralded the coming of the coffee shop, the harbinger of gentrification, the end of the era.   It also opened a kind of semiotic approach to interpretation.   Even though that sign is false, its presence instigated a dialogue, however anonymous, of how it has meaning. The combination of painted text and sign becomes a single symbol of the fear of potential cultural meaninglessness. But it is also a sign of a battle between a northern power and a South struggling to maintain its identity.     We commemorate the anniversary of the Civil War this year. This interpretation is not meant to slick over the issues that surrounded the war, but to suggest that perhaps at least some of those issues might be perpetu

  The documentary Herb and Dorothy , directed by Megumi Sasaki and released in 2008, opens with busy New York streets and quick shots of PaceWildenstein Gallery in Manhattan, a well-known bastion of contemporary art founded in the 1960s. In the next shot, two hunched figures, a man and a woman both in their 70s, emerge toward the street from the back seat of a taxi.   Their backs are then turned toward the camera as they approach the gallery doors, and the man mutters, “Oh, it’s crowded already.” That tinge of aggravation sensed in his tone is really the tremble of excitement.   In the next shot from the interior of the gallery, this man exclaims from his seat amidst crowding figures, “It’s extraordinary!”   The couple is Herbert and Dorothy Vogel, perhaps the greatest collectors of art from the 1960s in the United States.   In the documentary, the Vogels and the artists whose art formed their collection – currently approximated at more than 4,000 works - explain ho