NP - Prospect.1 - New Orleans Biennial

[David Morris]

Funny thing is, your amusing quote below is so bereft of context that
it might mislead those who don't read the New Yorker review of
Prospect.1

Here is the context:

"Souped-up biennials and other manifestations of festivalist
aesthetics have become routine. "Contextual" practice has proved,
after sufficiently abundant experience, to be long on con and short on
text. "Prospect.1" is unexceptional on this score, but with a pointed
and refreshing candor. Featuring few big names and nary a masterpiece,
it is my favorite biennial since the nineteen-eighties, when biennials
ceased to be innocently serious roundups of recent art and became
heavily engineered spectacles. The show's curator, Dan Cameron, a
veteran in the field, put it to me flatly: "I'm a tourism promoter."
Contemporary biennials are machines for bringing people to places,
funded by parties with vested interests in the migration. [...] The
trick is to have a place that speaks, and seduces, for itself, and to
select art and artists congenial to it—rather than, in the more common
vein, to advertise the host city (São Paulo, Kwangju, Istanbul) as a
cookie-cutter capital of new pep and future prominence."

This is the context for the reviewer who says this about the "context"
of Prospect.1, the City of New Orleans (basically negating his own
cute statement):

"I went to review "Prospect.1," the inaugural New Orleans Biennial,
which represents eighty-one artists from thirty-four countries in
about thirty ad-hoc locations, and which took the whole of a three-day
sojourn to explore in full. (A car is essential.) Some of the
offerings are keenly rewarding, but the best thing about the show is
the sprawl, which affords a wide and deep immersion in the city's
complicated charms. Be it ever so small and poor, and despite
catastrophic displacements, New Orleans can't help but remain New
Orleans, which is to other cities what a poem is to prose. The
phantasmagoria of high and vernacular architecture, polyglot flavors,
omnipresent music, exuberant cemeteries, and geographical
unlikelihood, of a seaport largely below sea level, stokes continual
wonderment. Desire isn't only a street name there. A municipal
tradition of giddy impulsiveness, shadowed by recent tragedy and
chronic woes—including a high incidence of crime—has got to many of
the invited artists in "Prospect.1." In the friskily hyperbolic words
of a review by Walter Robinson, the editor of Artnet Magazine, the
show "takes the reprobate scallywag nihilists of the contemporary
avant-garde and converts them . . . into goody-two-shoes
bleeding-heart believers in the nobility of humankind." You may
disdain the frequent sentimentality in the show if you can suppress
your own uprushes of sentiment. I could not."


On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 7:58 PM, Robin Landseadel
<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
>> "Contextual" practice has proved, after sufficiently abundant experience, to be long on con and short on text.
>>
>> http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/artworld/2008/11/24/081124craw_artworld_schjeldahl
>