Ry Rocklen, Tree of Knowledge, 2012, mixed-media installation. Barnsdall Municipal Art Gallery .

Welcome to The Fringe, a twice-monthly column curated by Kristin Juárez connecting Atlanta to the international art world. See the curator’s note below to learn more.

“Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.”
—Frank Lloyd Wright

Hollywood, blonde hair, surfing, traffic, smog, sprawl, immigration, rap music, race riots, and gangs. As an icon in popular culture, Los Angeles might not be recognized as a very old city or a place with a long cultural history, but it certainly has a reputation, and a seemingly schizophrenic one at that. Few cities have been more loved or more hated or even more theorized than LA. Depicted as El Dorado by 1920s boosterism and then as a dystopian nightmare by 1940s film noir, this sprawling metropolis has been called everything from “a city where you can go and find whatever in a sense you want” (artist David Hockney) to “a sunlit mortuary” (social historian Mike Davis).

Needless to say, the culture of Los Angeles is not easily definable, in large part because Los Angeles remains a series of social archipelagos. The city’s sprawl and car-crazy culture allow people to remain isolated. It is not rare to get from home to work without interacting with another person, and this ultimately keeps different groups of people separate. But because celebrity sightings, beach bums, and migrant workers are all so deeply rooted in our definition of Los Angeles, they’re all a part of our daily consciousness despite the limited interactions we have with each other. The multiple and often divergent cultural influences—from artifice and spectacle to migration and labor politics—that have informed the city’s identity have congealed into one seemingly disjointed history, creating a culture that is layered and complex, and most importantly, one that is distinctly LA.

Made in L.A. 2012, Los Angeles’s first official biennial, followed on the heels of the Getty’s city-wide initiative, Pacific Standard Time (PST), which spread across 60 Southern California institutions and offered a crash course in the history of the California art scene (as Lilly Lampe reported for BURNAWAY last year).  Like PST, Made in L.A. also took a city-wide approach opening at three venues throughout the city: the Hammer Museum at UCLA, LAXART, and the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park. The weekend biennial in Venice Beach acted collectively as an intervention in public space by participating within the existing informal cultural economy of sidewalk vendors selling art and wares.

From June 2 through September 2, 2012, Made in L.A. presented the work of 60 artists currently working in Los Angeles. Many of the works were created specifically for the biennial with financial support from the Hammer. Exhibiting a diversity of media, the exhibition was conceptualized as a large-scale survey of art (with a focus on emerging or underrecognized artists) in LA and ultimately became a reflection of a city whose identity represents a collective multiplicity. This multiplicity not only informed the curatorial choices, but served the curatorial approach as well. In determining the criteria for the biennial, the five curators sought to maintain their distinct experiences and perspectives, each choosing a key concept to structure their selection of artists: archaeology, materiality, mythology, theatricality, and subjectivity.

Camilo Ontiveros’s El Pedón, 2012, photo documentation.

Without a tour or a close read of the catalogue essay, this exhibition framework was lost, appearing more as a hodgepodge or top ten list of emerging artists working in Los Angeles. Despite the seeming randomness or lack of an evident curatorial cohesion, there were a number of interesting and provocative pieces in the show. There were two works I found particularly emblematic of the overall exhibition because they reflected the heterogeneity of LA as well as the contemporary, global issues that are very real in this city, and how Los Angeles residents engage in those matters.

One example is Camilo Ontiveros’s El Pedón, which comments on the realities of immigration policy in this country, an increasingly significant part of the public’s consciousness. With the introduction of controversial laws like Arizona’s SB1070 and Georgia’s HB87, legislation allows for the harassment and deportation of undocumented residents. For the commissioned project, Ontiveros had a pedon—a technical term for the smallest unit of soil that contains all soil layers from ground surface to bedrock—removed from Mexico in hopes of displaying it in Made in L.A. 2012. What made the piece poignant was that the soil never actually made it to the Hammer Museum. What you do see is an empty wooden platform across from a video showing a group of men removing soil from Nayarit, Mexico. Next to the video is a shelf with a stack of papers documenting the artist’s attempts to bring the soil into the U.S., which ultimately failed.

Camilo Ontiveros’s El Pedón, 2012, installation view.

As Ontiveros came to learn, there is a statute that prohibits the transfer of soil into the United States because “it can create a pathway for the entry of dangerous organisms across national borders.” (This PDF explains some of the policy.) The absent soil is a poignant commentary on the relations between the U.S. and Mexico that not only affect objects, but also, as curator Cesar Garcia noted, “the lives and conditions of many individuals who reside and work in Los Angeles.”  It is sad, troubling, and ironic that the same laws applied to soil are applied to human beings and that the language of this benign agricultural policy artfully encapsulates the fear and irrationality of groups like the militia men guarding the U.S.-Mexico borders.

Ry Rocklen’s work, like Onitveros’s, is also rooted in the culture of the city, but embraces a very different side of Los Angeles. As you enter the gallery at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG), you are greeted by Rocklen’s Tree of Knowledge. Made from cement, copper pipes, and unspooled VHS tape, the work sits atop a checkerboard floor he compiled from paintings purchased at flea markets and thrift stores. A “tree of knowledge” literally made of film points to the idea that Hollywood is the center of knowledge (or power) in this city, but his work also alludes to a more general attitude of Angelenos. As mentioned in the exhibition catalogue, Rocklen adds a “touch of bling” to thrift store paintings, and they become works of art; many people in LA hope to make similar transformations.  His work references the ever-present idea that with small (or given that we’re talking about Hollywood, sometimes large) additions, ordinary objects can become extraordinary. Further, choosing to locate Rocklen’s piece in the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery, which is situated between Sunset and Hollywood Boulevard, speaks to the conditions of the city itself, not just its residents. This section of Hollywood has become a long-forgotten relic of the city’s allure. Through special effects and backdrops, however, Hollywood becomes an imagined place that no longer resembles the gritty reality of this section in LA.

While Onitveros’s work comments on border politics and the conditions it dictates for thousands of people living in Los Angeles, Rocklen’s work points to conditions and attitudes of an entirely different subset of people living in the same city, and yet both distinctly encapsulate LA.  This range of reflections on our city, from transnational law to the glitz and glam of Hollywood, reflects the curators’ attempts to be rooted in a discussion pertinent to the city. Just as layered and diverse as the city’s identity, the curatorial results appeared so diverse that the unifying thread became invisible, at times losing clarity within the galleries. A reality that is not unlike spatial dynamics in the city itself. As Michael Sorkin put it, “L.A. is probably the most mediated town in America, nearly unviewable save through the fictive scrim of its mythologizers.”

Camilo Ontiveros’s El Pedón, 2012, study drawing.

In spite of, or even because of the murky curatorial intentions, the exhibition successfully represented a diversity of attitudes and experiences in Los Angeles, and ultimately celebrated the artists living in this city.  As Hammer Director Anne Philbin notes in the catalogue introduction, Los Angeles has become an international art capital, and this project offered the Hammer, which has a long history of supporting the local artists, the “opportunity to play a larger and more meaningful role within the city’s ever-burgeoning art scene by providing support and opportunities for artists and also by documenting their practices and placing them in a broader context for future generations.”

I have heard numerous gripes that the “lady doth protest too much,” but Made in L.A. was so much more than simple self-validation (although, some validation is well-deserved). This city-wide biennial supported local, underrecognized artists by introducing them to a larger audience and—an important, often-overlooked fact—by providing the funding to tackle projects that would have otherwise been pipedreams. I should note that the artists also retained complete artistic license.

This aspect of the exhibition speaks to a larger role an art institution can play in a city. It doesn’t have to be just a place to view art; it can also be a place that fosters cultural innovation and exploration, and a place that truly inspires reflection and creativity.

About this column:

The Fringe seeks to make greater connection between Atlanta and the art world at large. Now with writers contributing from around the country, the column continues to follow contemporary art that addresses the unique qualities of the natural, built, and social environments. The Fringe will unfold as several collections of articles bound together by a theme.

This article continues the collection I have named “Life as Form” after Creative Time’s second annual summit. The correlating exhibition entitled Living As Form combined artists, theorists, curators, and activists to consider how creative projects can restructure relationships between people and the places they live. Similarly, BURNAWAY will reflect on artistic form and public engagement in projects based in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Charleston, Berlin, and Atlanta.
—Kristin Juárez

Image courtesy visualarts.emory.edu.

Seven years ago, arts critic Rebecca Dimling Cochran was beside herself, navigating the first National Critics Conference in Los Angeles. Presented by the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, as well as several professional associations for critics in music, theater, and the arts, the gathering marked a turning point for Cochran’s view on the culture of art writing.

“I found it incredibly important professionally. Arts writing is a very solitary endeavor. For me to sit down with people from Chicago, Boston, and California who were experiencing the same things I was—it was inspiring in many ways,” Cochran says. She wanted a repeat. Cochran approached the International Association for Art Critics (AICA), wondering when an event like that would happen again. It wouldn’t—not really.

“They were more interested in doing these regional events,” Cochran says. “I said ‘Fabulous, when are you going to come down to the Southeast?’ They said, ‘When somebody like you decides to organize it for us.’”

As a freelance critic who has contributed to national publications such as Art in America, as well as Atlanta’s own ArtsATL.com, Cochran was initially uncertain about taking on the role of event planner. But her passion for the scene won out.

“There has been an explosion of art being created in Atlanta. There are people exploring and experimenting all over the place—there’s really a building of an arts community here. There’s also an explosion of new writers who could probably also benefit from this kind of event as much as I could.”

So for the first time, this weekend marks Off/Center: Art Writing from the Regions, a symposium on writing in the visual arts—all of it—arts journalism, criticism, interviews, catalogs, print, online. Taking place at Emory University September 20–22, the event features keynote speaker Lindsay Pollock, editor of Art in America; panels including writers, artists, and curators; as well as a day of exploration. That’s right: pre-registered attendees to the conference will receive a locally guided tour of one of Atlanta’s art-centric neighborhoods, plus hear presentations by Flux Projects, Atlanta Celebrates Photography, and the High Museum.

Rainey Knudson photo courtesy glasstire.com.

In Cochran’s welcome letter to participants, published on the event’s website, she wrote that the symposium was crafted for those “who are interested in hearing how publishers, editors, and writers are working to highlight visual art created outside commercial art centers on a local, national, and international level.” So it is not without a bit of irony and a great deal of malaise that this major conversation on the future of arts writing is taking place at Emory, a liberal arts institution that just last week announced the planned ending of their visual arts department and journalism program.

Echoes of the past reverberate with news like this. We recall the early days of a plummeting economy, when magazines were losing pages, and staff positions became a luxury. The at-times uncertain future of arts journalism has been a dominant topic for years at many a conference. But what’s more interesting, Cochran notes, is the variation in multiple website formats—those that have been around for a while and new ones popping up, all catering to different aspects of the arts writing conversation.

Arts website publisher reflects on regionalism

It is fitting, then, that among the many talented professionals sitting on panels this weekend, Rainey Knudson, founder and director of the nonprofit online magazine Glasstire will be in attendance. Glasstire launched in 2001, covers the entire state of Texas, and recently, Southern California. She plans to discuss her work at the noted journal, which is one of the oldest arts websites in the country. And she definitely plans to weigh in on the idea of art writing as a regional pursuit.

“I hate that word,” Knudson says. “I think regionalism as an idea is entirely defensible and a good thing. But when you hear the term regionalism, what people really hear is provincialism, and more specifically, not-New-York-ism. The truth is, everywhere in America is a region including New York—writers in New York are covering a region.” She goes on, “This notion that if you don’t live in New York or even Los Angeles, that somehow you’ve screwed up or you can’t cut it—it fails to acknowledge what’s wonderful about regional differences.”

Coming from a print magazine background that highlighted Dallas and Houston, Knudson quickly saw the “cross-pollination” among artists throughout Texas. “There were artists in Houston who were exhibiting in Dallas and curators in Austin who were showing artists from San Antonio. It was one, big, loosely organized art scene, I felt.”

At a time when launching a new print magazine wasn’t as treacherous as it sounds today, Knudson thought a website just made better economic sense. The idea to expand to another market had been ruminating for years, Knudson says. The Los Angeles area was a good fit given one editor’s fellowship at USC, associations with the Annenberg school, and, Knudson says, the fact that many Texans relocate to Southern California. And then there’s the art.

“LA is in many ways the most exciting art city in the country right now, in terms of the artists working there. The museum scene is a mixed bag. But I felt like LA—like everywhere, quite frankly—needed more coverage. Everywhere needs more arts journalism.”

High hopes for growth

More coverage in Atlanta, and more coverage of Atlanta artists and art happenings on a broader scale, is just what Cochran wants from this symposium. “My huge hope is that writers in Atlanta have an opportunity to expand the outlet for their writing. We are good at the local thing. I think we need to take that to the next step and expand to national and global. And we as critics can help the artists and institutions expand their audience.”

The ecosystem Cochran describes, where artists create work and writers publish content that allows audiences to experience that work, is becoming increasingly decentralized in Knudson’s view. “When I started out, I don’t think there was a general perception that interesting art could be made anywhere, that artists could live anywhere, and I think that has changed because of art fairs and the internet,” Knudson says.

Atlanta is certainly one of those places where art and art writing thrives. If Cochran has her way, Off/Center will help push the momentum forward. As it stands now, Knudson doesn’t have a definitive way of describing Atlanta’s art scene. More than ten years have passed since she’s visited the city where she once considered launching a new publication. “I’m very excited to have the opportunity to freshen up my knowledge of the art scene there,” Knudson says.

Says Cochran, “I wanted this to be a chance to show off our city.”

Pre-registration is now closed.
Thursday, September 20: Keynote, Lindsay Pollock, Art in America. Free and open to the public.
Friday, September 21: (walk-up registration welcome) Conference panels.
See the symposium website for more details.

Dr. Rosalind Mance interviews Stewart Ziff in Reality Show, an exhibition produced by Alexis Hudgins. Photo by Jon Ciliberto. Courtesy Poem 88, Alexis Hudgins, and Stewart Ziff.

There’s been a recent boom of television production in Atlanta recently, but none quite like Alexis Hudgins’s Reality Show, a performance and exhibition recently filmed at {Poem 88} over the past few weeks (August 4-18, 2012). Hudgins, a Los Angeles-based artist and recent MFA graduate from UCLA, was collaboratively paired with her subject, artist and Georgia State University new media professor Stewart Ziff, by {Poem 88} director Robin Bernat.

Everyone still wants 15 minutes of fame, right? Not so, according to Ziff, who struggled with self-reflexivity and creative anxiety over the course of the entire project as an artist-turned-reality-TV subject. Throughout 10 days, the gallery was monitored 24/7, and in true Truman Show fashion, while Ziff was present during gallery hours for his artist residency-cum-panoptic experiment, all cameras were focused on him.

Stewart Ziff sits among the “props” of his temporary studio. Photo courtesy Poem 88, Alexis Hudgins, and Stewart Ziff.

Images from surveillance camera accompany documentation recorded by Alexis Hudgins: “08/11/2012 15:16: As Stewart continues to set up the printer, Robin is on her computer typing. Photo courtesy of Poem 88, Alexis Hudgins, and Stewart Ziff.

The gallery was temporarily transformed into a light version of a reality television set. As a whole, the exhibition would have benefited from a total gallery takeover, becoming a spectacle heightened to the level of an immersive installation (yet understandably more demanding of time and resources). Ziff was provided with space to use as his working area, and a confessional-style interview area was informally demarcated by moving blankets operating as a rug and including pink plastic chairs facing each other. On the other side of the gallery, an L-shaped wall was constructed to conceal the production room where Hudgins sat watching seemingly endless surveillance footage and diligently keeping field notes (subsequently bound in a book and to be later published as part of a larger document). Such notes reveal the infamous dramatization of the mundane inherent to the reality TV genre—take for example, “16:12 pm, Stewart continues drawing on the board and takes another bite of his burger,” or “12:00 pm, Day two in the gallery, Robin sits at her desk on her computer, we wait for Stewart to arrive”—and also Hudgins’s long professional experience working for reality television programs in Los Angeles.

Perhaps most successfully operating as a case study in collaboration and how individual personalities can affect group dynamics, these notes and surveillance footage provide insights not only into Ziff’s experience and working process, but also Robin Bernat and the gallery’s daily business. Hudgins, as producer, is thereby afforded emotional distance to translate such subjective experiences into formalized documents and footage.

Stewart Ziff’s working materials included maps of the moon. Photo courtesy of Poem 88, Alexis Hudgins, and Stewart Ziff.

Additionally, instead of the traditional interviews that supplement a reality program’s daily drama (usually conducted by one of the show’s producers), Hudgins alternatively opted for a local psychiatrist, Dr. Rosalind Mance, to interview Ziff periodically throughout the project. Hudgins, who originally studied psychology at Emory, believes that reality TV offers a situation that is no longer considered ethical within the psych world. This added context helps to transcend the basic conversation about the TV genre.

Ziff installed certain elements, or “props,” from his studio into the gallery in order to facilitate his temporary and (perhaps) forced art-making. Ziff initially installed an oversize chalkboard to brainstorm lists and make preliminary, temporary sketches. A worktable complete with a computer, a printer, and a large archive of photographs were present early on (Ziff was working through how to print a photograph two-dimensionally and then cut and mount it as a three-dimensional object). But later, towards the end of the show’s run, this equipment was removed and replaced with some of his former works and an even larger and quite impressive archive from his youth, consisting of NASA photographs, vintage Science magazines, geologic maps, and specific atlases of the moon, among other things.

Documentation for an interview segment reads: “08/11/2012: Rosalind Mance, MD, interviews Stewart Ziff.” Photo courtesy Poem 88, Alexis Hudgins, and Stewart Ziff.

During a fretful moment in one “episode,” Ziff confessed to Dr. Mance that he felt an overwhelming performance anxiety to produce a completed artwork at the end of the project’s duration. This conversation became a continuing thread and source of therapy for Ziff; once the experience became more participatory and less performative (in his mind), his viewpoint shifted, and it seemed to resolve itself by the end. Perhaps Ziff realized the process was product.

In reality TV programming, normally these confessional interviews serve as private moments to reflect on the day’s events (the “reality show”). Ziff is not allowed this luxury, however, and thus must compose these moments publicly with a psychiatrist and a palpable audience of gallery visitors watching his every move, glance, and nervous laugh. Instant gratification and passive voyeurism, which service the viewer so richly in reality TV, does carry over into these therapy interview sessions, yet because the viewer is also live and present, you can feel conversely exposed by taking part in this constructed economy of exchange.

Reality Show quite successfully drew attention to an artist’s studio practice and the anxiety that can accompany the private becoming public. And what evolves from a studio practice without the studio? As maybe Hudgins suggests, it becomes a theatre—artist as actor can now maneuver with said props, stage, set, and lights. And if Ziff functions now as actor, how can we determine authentic reality? Reality Show offers an opportunity to think on this question. Representation is always subjective, and Ziff’s authenticity (to himself, to his actor persona, to the project), and the blurring between true reality and the constructed representation of reality, are positively called into question through Hudgins’s pervasive lenses.

Click here to view more photographs by John Ramspott documenting Reality Show posted to BURNAWAY’s Flickr account.

{Poem 88} opens their fall programming with 1961, a solo exhibition of Nikita Gale’s photographic series created while in residence at The Center for Photography at Woodstock in Woodstock, New York, on view September 7-October 13, 2012.

Corian Ellisor dances in Be(A)stie, a performance he cocreated with Alex Abarca that debuted Saturday at Atlanta's Beacon Hill Theater. Photo by Bobbi Jo Brooks.

A dancer is not a racehorse, but the two career paths can have discomforting parallels. After many hours, months, and years spent in strenuous training, both perform for relatively brief periods in the light of public admiration. Both earn accolades for excellence; injuries take them out of sight to some depressing pasture we never have to see; and when performance is no longer possible, we call for younger, fresher, less broken specimens. We applaud exertion and prize certain individual attributes, but the performer often remains wordless, even somehow anonymous.

Dancers, however expressive, often lack a literal, declarative voice in the space where they perform. This problematic dynamic is not just a relic of the past: controversy erupted recently in Los Angeles when performers—mostly young dancers—were asked to work in depersonalizing circumstances for low pay under the creative direction of Marina Abramović at MOCA’s annual gala (click here for an article from ARTINFO.com).

A dancer’s humanity has always been a central aspect of any dance, but only recently have contemporary artists begun to resist the old dynamic by pulling identity out from the dark wings and into the light of the stage. These performative acts are not necessarily meant to be confrontational, corrective, or admonishing. Nor are the best such works merely self-revelatory. They show a new interest in using dance performance to examine the individual lives of dancers themselves, and in doing so, they create a space for audience and performers to contemplate a complicated, often unexamined relationship.

Click above for a video excerpt from Jérôme Bel’s Veronique Doisneau for the Paris Opera.

Perhaps the most well-known recent example is Jérôme Bel’s Veronique Doisneau in which a low-ranking member of the Paris Opera Ballet stands alone on the stage of the Palais Garnier. On the eve of retirement (literally, that evening was her last performance), she speaks in short, declarative sentences about her life and career, and she dances several of the high and low points from memory. It’s almost unbearable to watch Doisneau assume the motionless pose of a corps member in Petipa’s famous choreography for Swan Lake. On a crowded stage, the pose is one element of a lovely picture; performed alone on the same stage by a dancer who had dreamed of better roles, it’s something else entirely. “I think I was not talented enough,” she says, “and too fragile physically.”

Jerome Bel's performance for the 2010 Spoleto Festival examines the private frustrations of a contemporary dancer. Photo by Jaime Roque de la Cruz.

Bel’s more recent piece Cédric Andrieux—which was performed at this year’s Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, and likewise takes its name from the dancer performing it—deals with the life of a dancer trained in the Cunningham technique. For all its strengths, for all its modernity, the famous technique is not particularly known for a touchy-feely concern with dancers’ interior lives. Andrieux makes it clear that his immersion in such contemporary performance practice—though it had its moments of clarity and triumph—was often marked by confusion, frustration, and humiliation. “For me it was totally depressing,” he confesses about the hours of daily Zen-like repetitive movement demanded by Cunningham.

Helen Hale's choreography for Dashboard Co-op's ANTI-MANNERS is one of many local examples of a trend towards communal artwork devoted to personal themes. Photo by Dylan York.

In Atlanta, recent works created by dancers (as both choreographer and performer) also have shown a remarkable interest in making dancers’ identity and interior life part of the show. This year, Greg Catallier’s TEMPO: A Non-fiction Dance Performance examined the nature of time—its scientific mysteries and its subjective effects and accumulation in Catallier’s own personal history. The list of local examples continues: Zoetic Dance Ensemble, who contemplated the aftermath of unfinished emotional conflicts in Undone; dancer Helen Hale, whose piece presented by Dashboard Co-op for Art on the Beltline, ANTI-MANNERS, manifested a personal, idealistic vision of an earthy communal feast; Juel Lane and Ursula Kendall Johnson, who created an ambitious ensemble work that examined difficult and often unspoken issues within the African American community in What Cha Don’t Wanna Tap Into; and Emily Christianson, who examined her abiding fascination with the James Bond films in Shaken.

Alex Abarca and Corian Ellisor, Be(A)stie, 2011, at Beacon Hill Theater. Photo by Bobbi Jo Brooks.

Alex Abarca and Corian Ellisor, Be(A)stie, 2011, at Beacon Hill Theater. Photo by Bobbi Jo Brooks.

Most recently, Corian Ellisor and Alex Abarca performed Be(A)stie this past Saturday and Sunday at Beacon Hill Theater. The autobiographical show examined their longtime friendship in the competitive world of professional dance: Abarca and Ellisor trained together at University of Houston, and they both are current members of the Decatur-based CORE Performance Company.

Be(A)stie opens in darkness with Ellisor and Abarca taking their places in folding chairs, as they sing an a cappella version of Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” adding a funny, ironic gesture of shining flashlights on little silver handheld disco balls. But the bubble-gum lyrics also carry a hidden, genuinely plaintive note: “When the night falls / my lonely heart calls / I wanna dance with somebody.” Their linked, tangled needs for companionship and performance became an underlying theme of the work that follows.

The show alternates between precisely choreographed, concisely articulated dance segments and looser, chatty, improvisational spoken word. Two contemplative solos, one for each dancer created by the other, compliment several up-tempo duets—including a psych-out gunslinger duel, set to the Beastie Boys’s “Intergalactic,” in which neither dancer quite trusts the other to put away his weapon, flinching to a quick draw just when it seems mutual trust has been achieved.

Alex Abarca and Corian Ellisor, Be(A)stie, 2011, at Beacon Hill Theater. Photo by Bobbi Jo Brooks.

When not dancing, the performers answer questions from an off-stage interviewer. At first, Abarca and Ellisor share stories in a relaxed, improvisational style, describing the intricacies of their friendship with some affectionate jokes and self-deprecating jibes. Then the questions take on a slightly more invasive, menacing context when the dancers are separated and interviewed individually. Seated alone in a chair in a spotlight, the subjects speak of longtime fears and anxieties: “being alone” was a big one.

In a sequence near the end, the dancers chat amicably as they don hazmat suits. “This is really unflattering,” says Abarca. The two suddenly become impersonal after they put on animal masks, dancing to a slow, creepy, acoustic version of “Intergalactic.” Like the first song, the lyrics take on a new significance that speaks to the nature of performance: “Don’t you tell me to smile / You stick around I’ll make it worth your while ….”

Alex Abarca and Corian Ellisor, Be(A)stie, 2011, at Beacon Hill Theater. Photo by Bobbi Jo Brooks.

In Atlanta as elsewhere, artists are contemplating the conventions that all too often demand that performers leave their personal identities in a loose pile by the stage door. The urge to create shows that shape the dynamic differently is clearly common. In all of these works, you can identify a desire for—and perhaps a parallel resistance to—exposure, a longing for communion, and an urge to manifest the personal and to put it into the context of the communal. Perhaps these are the same impulses that motivate someone to dance in the first place?

The part that’s particular to Atlanta, though, is an unabashed and unapologetic delectation in performance, friendship, and community. We the audience may be a little late to this party, but it’s clear we’re being graciously welcomed to the table nonetheless.

De Wain Valentine (American, born 1936), Gray Column, 1975-1976, polyester resin, 355.6 x 222.3 x 24.1 cm (140 x 87.5 x 9.5 inches). © De Wain Valentine. Lent by De Wain Valentine. Image courtesy the J. Paul Getty Museum.

On a recent trip to Los Angeles, I was able to see some of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980, a cross-institutional series of exhibitions celebrating the history of contemporary art in L.A. The brainchild of the Getty Foundation, the six-month event is composed of 68 museum exhibitions and over 70 galleries featuring more than 1,300 artists. As I wandered the rooms at the Getty Museum admiring Judy Chicago’s Car Hood and Ed Ruscha’s The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, I wondered if this sort of collaboration could happen in Atlanta.

The exhibitions comprising Pacific Standard Time delve into broad themes including politics and music. Exhibits such as Trouble in Paradise: Music and Los Angeles, 1945-1975 at The GRAMMY Museum were broad in theme but still thoughtful in execution. Others were extremely focused, such as From Start to Finish: De Wain Valentine’s Gray Column, a single-room show at the Getty that explains the creation and conservation of the artwork. Several of the shows deal with issues of race and gender in the postwar period, giving focus to the conditions of minority artists and architects and the contributions they made.

The art is fantastic, and the exhibitions are well thought-out. The only thing more impressive is the effort put into organizing such an expansive region-wide collaboration. Planning for Pacific Standard Time began a decade ago, and its realization has been a truly collaborative exchange of resources and permanent collections between the Getty and participating institutions.

As someone invested in the Atlanta art scene, Pacific Standard Time seems to stand as a challenge. In her review for The New York Times, Roberta Smith writes that a message to take away from Pacific Standard Time is “that New York did not act alone in the postwar era.” It seems everywhere that isn’t New York is burdened with the knowledge that New York is the center and apex of art. If Pacific Standard Time successfully challenges that, what does it mean for other art-making regions, and how are they supposed to respond?

I posed this question to James Meyer, associate curator of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery of Art and former associate professor of art history at Emory University. He replied via email, “Pacific Standard Time indeed poses questions for other areas of the United States. Southern California stands out as the other major art scene [second to New York], though by no means the only one. Atlanta is far behind other cities, much less L.A., for historical reasons that are well known. Dallas, Houston, Miami, and Chicago are much more interesting.”

“There is a lack of civic will or vision,” Meyer continued. “The city leadership allowed the only local art school, ACA [Atlanta College of Art], with a respectable 100-year history, to fold. The facilities were handed over to the for-profit SCAD [Savannah College of Art and Design] without a fight. Emory is unwilling to support a serious studio program. A city needs to invest in culture for culture to flourish. Atlanta understands music. But not art.”

De Wain Valentine doing the final polishing of Gray Column in 1976. Every effort has been made to identify and contact the photographer whose work may still be in copyright, or their estates. Anyone having further information concerning copyright holders should contact the Getty. Courtesy of De Wain Valentine. Artwork © De Wain Valentine.

Meyer’s list of weaknesses in Atlanta’s art scene is a familiar one, with certain truths behind it. Indeed, in her review Smith cites the influential art schools in Los Angeles as a major factor in the expansive growth of the postwar years. By contrast, SCAD is often regarded as a ruthless upstart, enacting manifest destiny in the state of Georgia.

SCAD does bring resources to the area, however, with its galleries and labs as well as exciting faculty and a decent population of new art students. In that regard, SCAD still has to prove its longevity and ability to grow in ways that sustain dedicated artistic practice in the area.

The greater discussion on Atlanta’s weaknesses often centers on conservatism surrounding the High Museum, mainly the lack of institutional support beyond it and its focus on blockbusters rather than groundbreaking exhibitions.

The recent Radcliffe Bailey retrospective (click here for BURNAWAY’s review), however, drew effusive praise for showcasing an Atlanta artist, and the High’s partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA) for the series Trading Places is also a step in the right direction. And in case it hasn’t been said enough, WonderRoot, Possible Futures, Idea Capital, and other arts advocates are a crucial shot in the arm for Atlanta arts.

Not everyone is pessimistic about Atlanta’s place in American art. In a recent conversation with art critic Catherine Fox on the subject of Noplaceness: Art in a Post-Urban Landscape, the first book in the Atlanta Art Now series, she brought up Pacific Standard Time. “I was in L.A. and went to see Pacific Standard Time,” Fox said, “and, as I was walking through the MOCA, I thought to myself, we [the writers of Noplaceness] are doing the fieldwork for the historians of the future. It was interesting to me that a lot of the issues were similar, and the way [the artists] were responding to their environment made it a distinct body of work as diverse as they were.”

Fox continued, “I think we could do a show like that now. I think there’s plenty to write about and a story to tell.”

I posed the same question to Joey Orr, a founding member of the local collective John Q and graduate student at Emory University (click here for BURNAWAY’s interview). His response was thoughtful, but he didn’t embrace the idea. “While I’ve certainly enjoyed some of the short films produced by Pacific Standard Time,” he said, “it’s always interesting to feel what kinds of vibes a place wants to cultivate, especially when they become city-wide campaigns. These kinds of things can be motivated by many different agendas, though not necessarily all instrumental, of course …. I’d hate to see Atlanta take a defensive stance, though, as if it needs to explain or defend its particular scenes or ways of exchange. Or, for that matter, merely step into a pre-existing formula.”

Is the South ready for a regional retrospective? What would that look like? Would the history of contemporary art in the South start with the Civil Rights Movement, or should it be some other milestone? What should appear on a timeline of influential exhibitions and art movements from the South?

Josh Ente and Bob Weisz's music video celebrates a New Orleans that's moved beyond Hurricane Katrina.

Until now, I’ve approached this column with my blinders on and my sleeves rolled up, focusing on heavy art-world discourse instead of opening the discussion to other media. But now the promise of warm weather has me looking outward, and my eyes are wandering to New Orleans, where my college roommate from the Northeast has recently moved and, like me, is adjusting to life as a newcomer to the South. Relocating from Brooklyn (by way of Wilmette, Illinois), filmmaker Josh Ente was lured to the bayou to work on location as a set dresser for Beasts of the Southern Wild. After the production wrapped, he decided to make New Orleans his home.

Josh Ente wades through the bayous of Louisiana during the filming of Beasts of the Southern Wild.

Ever since college, Ente and I have been exchanging notes on our experiences in cities around the world. Now that both of us have settled in the South with some permanence, we now walk parallel paths navigating through new cultural landscapes. As a newcomer to New Orleans, Ente’s perspective gives me a unique insight into the city and the visual culture experienced there every day.

My consciousness of New Orleans has been almost entirely informed by Hurricane Katrina. Art events like Prospect.1 (click here for BURNAWAY‘s article from 2009) and projects by the TRANSFORMA collective have contributed to a visual culture that continues to revolve around the profound effects of the hurricane.

But the city also has developed a myriad of local institutions that defy the disaster tourism inspired by Katrina and the BP oil spill. These groups thrive despite it all. Life is Art Foundation (formerly KK Projects), for example, initially came to fruition by commissioning installations in homes destroyed by the hurricane, but today that effort has transformed into a multi-disciplinary nonprofit committed to site-specific installation art, urban gardening, and community-building.

Click above to watch the music video for “Y’all Get Back Now.”

Josh Ente and Bob Weisz recently directed the debut music video for Big Freedia, a queer transgendered Bounce performer, that has received critical acclaim from Stereogum and Vimeo. Although technically a product of club culture, Bounce has become the focus of cultural and social analysis that addresses issues of public, performance, and space — issues I regularly harp on, but through examples in an entirely different medium.

The following is a transcript of my interview with Ente mapping the course of his negotiation of visual culture of New Orleans, and how it differs from the New York art scene.

Kristin Juárez: How were you approached to direct Big Freedia’s video for “Y’all Get Back Now?”

Josh Ente: The reason this music fell into my lap is because I’m part of Court 13, a group of filmmakers in New Orleans. And because DJ Rusty Lazer, Freedia’s de-facto manager, lives two blocks away. I became a part of Court 13 by making the movie, Beasts of the Southern Wild, and even more a part by staying in New Orleans and now having been a director. It is a support system, and I wouldn’t have had the opportunity without them.

KJ: How were you introduced to Bounce culture, and how would you describe it?

JE: I came to Bounce through this project. Bounce is carefree. It’s not bogged down, and it doesn’t seek the problematic in a way that academic approaches to cultural movements can do. It’s approached in a way that is affirming and inclusive. This allowed me be a part of it even without realizing how big of a culture it was here, because I was pretty new to the city.

After I said I’d like to learn more, there immediately was space for me in the culture. It was not a feeling I was familiar with coming from New York or Wesleyan University where everyone stakes out their identity, clings onto it, and can be protective, withholding, and guarding of it. Here, Bounce is an “everyone invited” sort of thing, and that’s what I tried to put out there in the video. My participation in Bounce culture is the exact point of it. It’s a participation-based experience: musically, with the call-and-response of the actual songs, and through dance, which most obviously defines the experience.

Especially when it comes to the dancing which is so hyper-sexualized, it’s for you as the dancer. You’re not performing for other people; you’re performing for yourself, for the solidarity and freedom of your body, and for the expression of that. It’s a powerful movement to be a part of — movement in the cultural sense and movement in the very literal sense when I’m being shouted out by Freedia to put my hands on the floor and put my ass in the air.

KJ: How mainstream is Bounce in New Orleans?

JE: It’s not necessarily mainstream, but it’s everywhere. Freedia will perform at sports bars, strip clubs, bars in the hood, wherever. It can happen anywhere. I even saw a show she did at a printmaking shop. Bounce makes space for itself, within the culture and physically in any room.

Bounce has been around as a genre for about 20 years, and Freedia is part of a handful of queer transgendered performers. You can’t find them on the internet; you have to go to the corner store and get a burned CD. The notion of making space for self-expression is what’s really going on at a Bounce show — and in my neighborhood, The Bywater, which the reason why I’m here. Life just happens in the street here. I don’t know if it’s because it’s hot and everyone wants to be outside, but I’m fortunate enough that, in my neighborhood, there are a lot of gallery spaces and performances venues that don’t put limits of what can happen there.

Establishing shots in Big Freedia's music video show recognizable characteristics of New Orleans street culture. Here, neighbors startle at the sound of some giant invading their city.

Citizens look up to see Big Freedia stomping through downtown New Orleans like a glittery Godzilla.

KJ: How would you characterize the art scene in New Orleans?

JE: There’s art on the street, people selling art on the street, and opportunities that are the product of a city where people like to stand out on the corner at a bar. Everyone’s really creative and interested in discussion, and, out of that, there comes a space where cultural production happens. This is a small city where there is no epicenter. But all things happen in moments and in small scales, and it’s woven into the fabric of the city. Everyone is invited to participate. You are welcome if you make yourself welcome. If you go to Bounce show, you don’t have to pop your ass. But you will want to, and that’s okay. You’re invited.

There’s a big thing about reciprocity here, and that limits and discourages damaging appropriations of different cultures. If you’re going to take, you better give. Bounce is something that is worth considerable academic thought. But the great thing about being in New Orleans is that it’s not about finding the problematic. It’s about doing what’s good, taking it seriously, and having it be viable, meaningful, and complicated. That’s something I’ll be a part of.

Josh Ente finishes some dirty work on the set of Beasts of the Southern Wild.

During our interview, Ente raised several relevant issues concerning self-expression, performance and performativity, and reciprocity as it relates to the arts in New Orleans and his position within the city. With inspired insight, he continues to map out this new space, defining the streets as sites for cultural production where New Orleans’s  mainstream and subcultures overlap.

The art scenes of New York and Los Angeles, the cities that Ente and I left behind, are certainly steeped in history and clout, but our experiences in New Orleans and Atlanta allow us the freedom to forge new paths — largely because of the openness and generosity of these communities. Southern hospitality is alive and well.

Kristin Juárez is a recent transplant from Los Angeles conducting a fellowship at the High Museum of Art. This column maps her exploration of Atlanta’s art scene as a newcomer. With one foot testing the water of local arts practice and the other firmly planted in a greater landscape of cultural production, Juárez uses both to gauge the potential of the visual arts to impact our lives. How can art provide meaningful, sustained discourse that will help us articulate, and be held accountable for, what is at stake in the world today?

Note: Kristin Juárez will return to BURNAWAY in June after taking short vacation from writing. Check our archives to read more columns from The Fringe.

Detail of Water Shed mural at Atlanta's Lake Claire Land Trust, ca. early March 2009.

Following a lead in a column of Artillery magazine’s March/April print edition, “The sad, slow death of LA’s freeway murals,” I spent some time today researching the street battle between LA taggers and muralists—and the courtroom battle between artist Frank Romero and the state authorities of CalTrans.

To tell you the truth, I’ve given up on outdoor public art.
—Frank Romero (Artillery)

In 2005 Romero oversaw an “intensive” restoration of his Going to the Olympics (originally completed 1984). But in 2008, the state painted over and effectively destroyed the mural altogether, to remove the all-consuming tagging built up in just three years’ time. In 2006 Los Angeles County spent $30 million in graffiti abatement; over the same year, CalTrans spent $5 million in graffiti clean-up for freeways in Los Angeles and Ventura counties alone.

John Wehrle, Galileo, Jupiter, Apollo, somewhat decayed. Today it looks worse.

Despite what I’ve said in previous writings on graffiti and Atlanta murals, the article compounds the argument against blind spending (and instead for greater sustainability) in public art. John Wehrle, whose own mural is dying a “death of a thousand cuts” due to graffiti, explains that,

Restoration of murals was a noble but ill-conceived effort that was doomed to failure because it didn’t include a serious plan to protect and maintain the murals once they were restored …. As soon as they figured out that maintenance crews were more reluctant to paint over graffiti on murals, it was open season on murals.

In Atlanta we’ve had our own recent clash between taggers and murals. Tom Zarilli posted this quip on ARTNEWS last month:

The massive watershed mural in Lake Claire was tagged a few weeks ago. Over a year of work and considerable funds went into creating what may be one of the largest murals in the city. I contributed to the wrok [sic] my wife worked for weeks on it. The damage is done but does anyone know whose tag this is. I think there should be a bit of public shame attached to this damage. The Neighborhood association is working on fixing the damage and I believe there is a protective coating on the work, but the repair is no easy job.

I saw volunteers working on restoring the Water Shed mural yesterday; murals like that one constitute a real value to the community. Why tag over them?