John T. Scott and Martin Payton Spirit House (2002) Commissioned by the Percent for Art Program, City of New Orleans Administered by the Arts Council of New Orleans ©John T. Scott and Martin Payton

We need a thinking that does not fall apart in the face of horror.
-Georges Bataille

The work itself is about the place and about art’s place in the place.
-Lucy Lippard

I confess: I am a process-oriented artist unabashedly convinced that the creative process can inspire psychological healing and affect social change. This is my bias, these are my concerns. This methodology has its roots in my personal experience as a survivor of trauma; the long dramatic tale of my life of survival is not of interest here. This is the story of how the devastation of my community, home, archive, and subsequent exile from New Orleans (as a result of the federal levee breaks of Hurricane Katrina) informs my work as an artist and activist in this specific post-disaster climate. Though I am neither an authority on the visual arts community of New Orleans (which is mighty and complex) nor an expert anthropologist of post-disaster culture, I do understand the value of being compassionately engaged in one’s community and how to cope with the socio/political situations generally found in conjunction with events of shocking crisis, i.e. poverty and isolation. Moreover, I am admittedly a woman convinced of the value of her vision—which means, I suppose, that I have credence as a type of authority here.

Prior to Hurricane Katrina I was making interactive installations in New Orleans exploring the artist’s role in the aftermath of crisis and disaster. My personally devastating experience of Hurricane Katrina only galvanized my commitment to this investigation. Compulsively haunted by what seemed unanswerable questions (How do I get back home? What use will I be when I get there?), the answer manifested in the form of what became my ongoing project, ArtInAction (AiA), which continues to reply, “Get out there and listen/make something to give away.” Let me explain.

AiA is a community-based project consisting of site-specific installations built only in areas of the city that were hit hard by the levee breaks. It began with Pink Tree Pink, my 2006 installation in the Gentilly neighborhood, and grew into what is now a sustainable and proactive movement. In 2007, 24 artists participated and at least 15 are committed to contribute in 2008. All of the work, sculptural or performative, exists outdoors and is ephemeral. None of it is “about Katrina” yet it must grow from an intimate relationship with the New Orleans of the present. With my support, contributors (re)explore traumatized areas of the city and cultivate reasons beyond the formal for choosing their sites. Relationships with citizens are initiated, permission is secured, and the process becomes emotive, unpredictable, and communal. “Unveilings” are promoted as fine art events, local businesses donate refreshments for everyone, and contact is maintained after the event is “over.” In this way, issues of site/place, connectivity, authorship/spectatorship, commodification, and the artist’s role are explored. For everyone witnessing the installations, the act of looking/seeing becomes informed by something other than tragedy, which begins a quiet alchemical process—transmutating poison into medicine, opening the heart to unexpected joys.

Elizabeth Underwood Pink Tree Pink (2006) Documentation of ArtInAction public art action New Orleans

Frankly, AiA is a simple manifesto and not original: art as action versus idea—egalitarian, social, free. And despite its obvious similarities to community-based public art (beautifully executed in the pre-K work of New Orleans sculptor John Scott in his Spirit House installation, for example), AiA resists gestures toward permanence in a way that public art projects generally do not. Ideally AiA art works disappear, as progress in all its forms (ravaged houses are finally bulldozed or nature simply runs its course) manifests. Witnesses to the appearance and disappearance of the work remember that change can be good, even reflective of one’s own needs. When AiA work is working it is delicate—virtually invisible—yet the positive effects resonate outward in ways that cannot be linearly tracked or contained.

I am not the first artist/activist to realize this formula in a post-disaster climate. Numerous related projects have organically sprung up in post-K New Orleans, driven by the passion of local artists responding to the disaster they have endured. Some of these projects were initiated soon after the levee breaks, others in the following years. Examples include Robert Vicknair’s The Neighborhood Project, a quarterly series of temporary group installations in vacant gutted houses. Home, New Orleans?, an ambitious multi-media event in Lakeview, was a resounding success for Jan Gilbert and her Vestiges Project. Ron Bechet and Willie Birch initiated the prescient “Local Heroes”, a series of screen-printed posters of local icons “exhibited” on telephone poles in the 7th Ward, free for the taking. On a national level, Creative Capital sponsored Paul Chan’s heroic public staging of Waiting for Godot in the Lower 9th Ward and Gentilly. And the Brad Pitt-initiated “Make It Right/Pink Houses” brainchild continues to bring radical progress to the Lower 9th Ward. Similar future projects set for New Orleans include Michael Manjarris’ Sculpture for New Orleans, the Prospect 1 biennial organized by the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center, and the Arts Council of New Orleans’ sponsorship of a series of public sculptures commissioned by local contemporary artists. The phenomena of this type of work springing up in post-K New Orleans is, I assert, the result of two conditions:

1. New Orleans provides an established cultural context for public, experiential, creative ritual (Mardi Gras, second lines, Day of the Dead celebrations, jazz funerals, shrines, Christmas Eve bonfires, hurricane parties, and so on, and;
2. Contemporary artists are realizing that concepts heretofore generally existing as theory are a valid response to the challenging realities of life in the 21st century. I will even hazard to say that for a certain breed of artist this is the only way to function in a world where uncontrollable and incomprehensible violence really happens to their personal and universal families and the sacred spaces they call home.

Sean Derry An Interlude to Stillness (2007) Partial view of 35 inflatable car bodies Documentation of ArtInAction public art action New Orleans

In November of 2007, Pittsburgh-based artist Sean Derry came to New Orleans under the AiA umbrella to premier an installation culminating a year’s work. For five days in the struggling Mid-City neighborhood of an abandoned Robért Market, 35 hand-made, life-size, pastel-hued “automobiles” were inflated via a sophisticated bellows system Derry constructed himself. An area once flooded with approximately 12 feet of water, this neighborhood—primarily blue collar, middle class, and African American—is a shell of what it used to be. Children walk to school on streets lined with rotting buildings, many businesses remain shuttered, and the homeless population (which has doubled in New Orleans post-K) squatting nearby are constantly under threat. In part because of Derry’s project, the Robért Market landowners were reinvigorated to tend to their property. By partnering with AiA, Derry connected with the area’s residents who generally do not feel welcome at galleries and museums and do not feel empowered to participate in the raging dialogue regarding the future of their neighborhood. Families living in abominable tenement conditions uninhibitedly interacted with the art, a faithful contingent of homeless people joined the team and contributed priceless skills, and local businesses donated food and coffee for the neighborhood’s enjoyment. Furthermore, members of the press visited and documented the event (and subsequently the current condition of the neighborhood), university students and professors held tutorials on-site, and established artists and art enthusiasts engaged with a struggling area of the city they might normally avoid. An all-encompassing sense of pride was restored and for a brief yet unforgettable moment something else happened in a place that has become synonymous with tragedy.

I suggest that artists working in site-specific, community-based, process-oriented genres, or anyone presuming that art that improves the human condition, will agree that this is a logical and rewarding way to work—not just in post-disaster situations but in general. AiA creates an arena in which the things we proclaim about ourselves can become consonant with what we actually do. Yet artists (and art administrators) must resist the outdated modernist myth that the artist is a neutral autonomous individual and that art’s worth is measured by the profits it earns. To those of who live in the post-K landscape it is graphically obvious that hierarchical capitalistic structures that Western culture banks on can be terribly destructive. In a world in which my favorite 100 year-old grocery store, family of lovable alley cats, hard-earned peaceful homes, and elders who only ever wanted to enjoy their porches can be obliterated in one day, I have no appetite for art that follows the same structures that, upon analysis, are revealed to be at the root of such tragedies.

So what is the artist’s role in this rough and tumble present? This is a gigantic question—one that yearns for an answer that transcends the familiar, pushes outside the boundaries of established mores, and puts the artist in direct contact with the complications and intensity of graphic emotion and real life. I believe that by bringing art directly to those hurting the most—by physically and creatively connecting with haunted landscapes that have endured mythic trauma—visual art realizes its grandest potential and artists are serving nothing short of a noble purpose.

Elizabeth Underwood is an artist and musician who initiated ArtInAction in 2006 while living in a temporary trailer in New Orleans. Upcoming installations and performances will take place in the Treme, Lakeview, and Hollygrove neighborhoods.

www.artinaction-nola.blogspot.com

Anyone interested in participating/contributing to ArtInAction please contact Elizabeth Underwood at:
artinaction@elizabethunderwood.net