The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Do cities count as art? I am not talking about public monuments and architecture, street art and gallery scenes, landscaped parks and sparkly fountains--but the city itself, any city--that often chaotic, messy mosaic of neighborhoods and highways and strip malls that make up an urban space.

Robert Tannen, artist and urban planner, would say yes, unequivocally.

"Stardust: Objects, Ideas, and Prospects," a 50-year retrospective of Tannen's long and richly varied career, was on view at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, when I visited the city for the first time on a weekend in late September. Tannen, now in his seventies, moved to New Orleans decades ago, in 1969, when a hurricane had struck the city and help in re-construction was direly needed. For Tannen, the city itself is an ongoing, collaborative, never-ending work of art: in his mind, urban planning and art making are intertwined, and the city, quite literally, becomes his medium for assembling likely and unlikely bricolages.

In one of his most recent projects, Tannen transformed Lee Circle into a giant compass. As Doug MacCash writes for the Times-Picayune, "With the permission of the city, Tannen placed a coffee-table-sized boulder at the foot of each of the monument's four staircases, each marked with a polished metal letter: N, S, E and W. Tannen said he created the giant compass to draw attention to the beautiful yet little-used park that surrounds the Lee monument. But there might be more to it than that. By orienting New Orleans to the compass, Tannen reminds us just how disorienting New Orleans can be. The West Bank is east of Lee Circle. The French Quarter is north. The Lake is west. Uptown is south."

A disorienting place, indeed. And yet--there might still be more to this compass than MacCash allows for: Tannen, like so many other New Orleanians, had to leave the city when Katrina hit. The art detailing his temporary displacement consists of folded pieces of paper, in white and orange: ordinary materials, cheap, and readily available. The pieces, pinned to the museum walls like strange specimens of boredom and impotent longing, look like doomed paper airplanes, unable to take off, stunted, ephemeral, and oddly expressive of the yearning for home when forced into travel and exile.

Thus, the transformation of Lee's Circle into a giant compass serves as a tool for a different kind of re-orientation, too: that of the artist coming home to his urban palette in a poetic re-assessment of where it is that the citizens, returning to a city transformed by Katrina and its wake, now stand.

 

Across the street from the Ogden, a light box installation, displayed in three windows of the Contemporary Arts Center, shows photographs by artists associated with the Vestiges Project, accompanied by Michele White's words: "Unless I remind myself to look, I don't see the black flood lines anymore, and it may be that we have to keep such marks visible and in tension with our daily lives in order to connect our histories to our possible futures and try to fix things."

White's words struck a chord with me as a first time visitor to the famous city. Strolling through the French Quarter, avoiding the noisy tackiness of Bourbon Street, it is so easy to be seduced into forgetting the "natural and unnatural disasters," as The Vestiges Project puts it, that have hit the Crescent City in recent years. But then you happen to cross Poydras Street and, turning, see a curvilinear structure in the distance: the now notorious New Orleans Superdome. Passing underneath the Pontchartrain Expressway, it is impossible not to notice how high its bridges are and how useful that would be in case of a flood. But people were not allowed to leave. Those wearing uniforms were instructed that protecting property from potential looters came before people.


New Orleans has always catered to nostalgia--for authenticity, the roots of jazz, a cultural mix unlike any other in the United States. In a post-Katrina New Orleans, this nostalgia has been affected if not replaced by a nostalgia for pre-Katrina New Orleans, the Big Easy in the days untainted by the legacy of becoming a permanent stain on this administration's record. While Bourbon Street does its best to wrap itself in alcohol-induced amnesia and colorful beads, serious and concerned visitors are offered "Misery Tours" or "Katrina Devastation Tours." (I was not there long enough to get over the implied voyeurism and hunger for tragedy as spectacle.)

But while there is no denying the myriad private tragedies in the wake of disaster; tragedy, traditionally, pits the individual against the unavoidable. In tragedy, we struggle, we try, we fail. But New Orleans is not failing, let alone dying.

Yes, there is undeniable evidence of struggle and do-goodery: on gaudy posters, Donald Trump announces the imminent construction of a new Trump Tower, bringing much needed revenue to the city, no doubt; but, in the process, making New Orleans a little more like all those other American metropolises. Yet despite such prominent gentrification projects, the city, trickster-like, manages to survive, against all odds, buoyed by a curious mix of irreverence and ease, charm and sauciness, drink and religiosity. Mardi Gras, that Catholic ritual of release that allows for an annual if temporary reversal of social hierarchies and norms of propriety, has left an indelible mark on the Lebensgefühl--the feeling of life--that the place seems to radiate.

In the bricolage that is New Orleans, Catholicism's morbidity, its predilection for baroque excess along with its innumerable saints, has seamlessly merged with older spiritual presences: take Erzulie, for example, the perfumed, promiscuous, and perennially jealous Vodoun spirit of love. Folded into the symbolism surrounding the Virgin Mary (which could not be more ironic, given that Erzulie is married to three husbands--and not in any immaculate sense), Erzulie is associated with the ocean, jewelry, dancing, and beauty. This spiritual syncretism is nowhere more apparent than in the whitewashed geometry of St. Louis Cemetery, just outside the French Quarter, where tombs sit on sand saturated with seashells, and wrought-iron crosses next to melting Mounds bar sacrifices. Should New Orleans ever need an allegorical persona, it would have to be Erzulie.


Another likely candidate for embodying New Orleans' incorrigible spirit was buried the very weekend I visited: Coleen Salley, whose elaborate jazz funeral procession wove through the streets of the French Quarter. A children's book author and storyteller par excellence, Coleen was also known to swear like a sailor--especially in the mornings--and to ride out Mardi Gras in an elaborately modified shopping cart, pushed by her faithful posse, clad in T-shirts that read "Hail to the Queen" and "Queen Coleen." Each year, she celebrated Christmas with seven trees, in an irresistibly loving camp version of the holiday. I did not know Coleen but, on the flight out of New Orleans, was treated to her story, complete with photos from a long and joyously irreverent life, by the person sitting next to me.


Queens of all sorts abound in New Orleans. In On The Other Hand, a second hand store in Carrollton, the proprietess, clad in a lavish outfit that defies any one period but sparkles, glitters, and looks quite exquisite with a long cigarette holder, offers compliments, piano soirees, and fashion advice to customers and friends, while a stylish water fountain gurgles politely in the back room. "Feel that fur, honey," she purrs, "and bring all your friends tomorrow."


New Orleans is a gender-bending shape-shifter of a city, by geographical necessity, it seems. Its many transmogrifications--a.k.a. miraculous transformations--do not stop in the commercial or in the spiritual realm: Where else would the fleur-de-lis, a once dreaded symbol burnt into criminals' skin in feudal France, become a token of regional pride and cultural celebration?

Outside, a monument becomes a compass needle for a city. Inside, transmogrifications abound as well: at the Ogden, there is Ersy's homage to the Society of St. Anne's Mardi Gras parade, where figurines of animal-headed creatures blow on strange horns and celebrate on carriages drawn by harnessed human figures. A fountain pen becomes a flute and nothing, Ersy suggests, is ever what it seems in New Orleans.


In Merman by George Duncan, another quasi-mythical creature emerges gracefully from shades of blue, while Beauvais Lyons' prints for the Association for Creative Zoology evoke the art of the prank in the tradition of the Museum for Jurassic Technology: fishy creatures with tiger stripes sprout legs and manage to poke fun at evolution and creationism alike.


Seeing Tannen's work inside the Ogden is a little ironic: it is work that belongs outside, in a sense. But pieces such as Crucifish, Marlin Brando, and Whatever Happened to Father Goose? lose nothing of their cheeky humor indoors.


Since late August, New Orleans is home to five (some sources claim six) new pieces by Banksy, the mysterious street artist, all of them poignant reminders of what happened here in 2005. The flood lines may have become invisible, but the memories of those days live on--along with the no less pressing realities permanently displaced people still face every day. Yet the city, this obstinate, labor-intensive work of art, insists on celebrating life and the art of survival. As Gerald Vizenor, a trickster closer to home, might put it, what is at stake here is survivance: the joyful celebration of beating the odds, again and again, on this tricky sandbar, where states of emergency seem to transmogrify into states of emergence and transformation. I agree with Robert Tannen: this city is indeed is a work of art.