[YUN-FEI JI] I never think of myself as a traditional painter.
[ZAROUHIE ABDALIAN] It was never my intention to work with blighted properties in New Orleans--
there's plenty of opportunities for that.
[KERRY JAMES MARSHALL] When I talk to other artists
I'm interested in hearing how they
read their subjectivity, and how it drives
and motivates what they do.
[The Prospect.3 biennial showcases the work of 58 artists at 18 venues across New Orleans]
We come from different positions
at different times
and we mean to make it work for different purposes.
[TUAN ANDREW NGUYEN] In Vietnam, there was a long period of this traditional kind of music
and then all a sudden, modernization kind of happens,
and you're here with all of this at once.
[MARSHALL] When you're making artworks, you're not just making artwork for yourself;
you making artworks because they fit into a narrative structure
that purports to define what kinds of things have value.
[Artist to Artist: Kerry James Marshall at Prospect.3]
The biennial shows are just more an opportunity
to try out something more experimental for myself,
than to, kind of, do what I've been doing
for the last, you know, thirty years, I guess.
And some of that has been about the absence of the black figure
in the art historical image bank
when it comes to representation of an ideal
and ideals that point to ideals of beauty,
ideals of grace, ideals of form--
all those things.
So that's in the paintings I make,
and in a lot of the photography I do.
[MARSHALL] Do you have all your materials?
Or did you gave to go looking for stuff while you were here?
["Chanson du ricochet", Zarouhie Abdalian]
[ABDALIAN] I had a lot,
but, yeah, I went to Home Depot and Lowe's about a hundred times, so...
[BOTH LAUGH]
[MARSHALL] I must have passed you then!
[ABDALIAN] Yes!
[MARSHALL] Because I was in there two or three times a day.
[ABDALIAN] Oh my gosh. Goodness!
[MARSHALL] You were born in New Orleans?
[ABDALIAN] Yeah. After Katrina, I moved to Philly for a little while.
I live in Oakland now.
[CALM VOICE PLAYING THROUGH SPEAKERS]
[New Orleans African American Museum]
[MARSHALL] How are you powering your audio?
[ABDALIAN] With a gas-powered generator, so...
[MARSHALL] I don't hear it anywhere, so it's a really quiet...
[ABDALIAN] Yes, we went...
We worked really hard to make that the case.
[VOICE CONTINUES THROUGH SPEAKERS]
[ABDALIAN] They're all mirrors that I made
that are, sort of, fit in to function
as the elements of the building we replaced.
[MARSHALL] They're hyper modern, in a way.
They suggest a kind of future potential.
[ABDALIAN] The land here was Claude Tremé's land--
it's the Morand plantation.
I was interested in the properties themselves
and their histories--and the history of, you know, labor--
as its evidenced in the materials at this site.
I wanted to focus the project on the built materials
and having these one's that stand out.
[MARSHALL] We're in an institution now that's closed...
[ABDALIAN] Yeah.
[MARSHALL] With buildings that are already,
you know, fairly dilapidated.
[ABDALIAN] From what I've been told, these will be renovated.
[MARSHALL] They will?
[ABDALIAN] That's the story.
When I was conceiving of it,
there was this activity, there was this movement--
slow movement--but movement towards this goal of having
a world-class museum that would be throughout this campus,
and rebuilding the properties and restoring the ones that exist.
We think it functions more as an indictment now
because of the condition of the property,
but it was never my intention or interest
to work with blighted properties in New Orleans.
There's plenty of opportunities for that.
[MARSHALL] For that, yeah.
[Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans]
[MARSHALL] Like, is this a part of a continuing narrative?
Or do you go from story to story?
[YUN-FEI] For the, it's sort of on-going, really.
The reason I'm making it because I'm so troubled by what's going on.
So many Chinese villages are, kind of, dying--
they're disappearing.
Like, in this case, it's a village that had all their bees die.
So they're pollenizing trees with their hand...
[MARSHALL] Oh really?
[YUN-FEI] ...flower by flower.
[MARSHALL] One flower at a time?
[YUN-FEI] One flower at a time.
[MARSHALL] In the end, instead of people tending to the crops,
looks like you have ghosts.
[YUN-FEI] Yeah, so there's a lot of ghost stories.
The city already is so polluted
that you go to the country and see the last little retreat
has its own problem.
["The Peach Blossom", Yun-Fei Ji]
You know, you might expect something lyrical and subtle,
but when you look closely, it's actually much more disturbing.
[MARSHALL] The social realist's work
is a kind of part of the propaganda machine.
[YUN-FEI] Yeah.
[MARSHALL] And that work has a public--a really public--kind of...
[YUN-FEI] Function.
[MARSHALL] Function.
[YUN-FEI] Yeah.
All of the work that was made in the past
are related to these ideas of Taoism or Confucius ideas;
though, it discredited it, actually.
[MARSHALL] This kind of painting?
[YUN-FEI] This kind of painting.
[YUN-FEI] Mao's whole social program was anti-old,
so this is representing these old paintings.
So later, when I was discovering for myself
this Buddhist narrative painting,
they connected to me in a deeper way.
[MARSHALL] I like what you're doing.
There are people who would abandon this
because it may not seem modern...
[YUN-FEI] Right.
[MARSHALL] ...on the surface.
[YUN-FEI] Right.
[MARSHALL] And it is modern, you know?
[YUN-FEI] Yeah yeah yeah!
[MARSHALL] The idea of what is modern
is a particularly Western idea.
So, I'm always really interested in how that idea of modernity
could evolve in those cultures outside the West,
on a kind of self-conscious path.
[MARSHALL] How long is it?
[NGUYEN] About 20 minutes.
[MARSHALL] 20 minutes?
[NGUYEN] Think you could last?
[MARSHALL] I think I could do 20 minutes.
[NGUYEN LAUGHS]
[CHRISTOPHER MYERS] It's dark in there.
[MARSHALL] Is there a sofa?
[ALL LAUGH]
[MARSHALL] Don't let me near it.
If I get too close, it's over.
[ALL LAUGH]
[SOUND OF A BRASS BAND PLAYING]
[MATT LUCERO] The first time I experienced it
was, like, three in the morning.
I wake up. I hear, like, some horns and some drums,
and I'm like, "What is that?"
It's in the middle of, like, in Saigon.
And so look out my bedroom window, and I see a procession.
["The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music", The Propeller Group]
And they're carrying a casket, and everybody is dressed in white
in marching band, like, sort of, uniforms.
Full on brass band.
[MYERS] This brass band tradition has traveled all around the world.
And has, sort of, you know, bubbled up in all these places.
And when you ask the Vietnamese guys, like,
"Where do you get this from?"
They'll say, "Oh, we got this from China."
And I'm like, "I know you didn't get this from China."
[NGUYEN] They don't know where it came from.
[MYERS] Yeah.
[NGUYEN] They don't know...
[MARSHALL] That seems sort of typical, though.
In New Orleans, they won't know where that came from.
They'll say it came from some guy down the street,
but that's not really where it came from.
[SOUND OF A BRASS BAND PLAYING]
["Echo in the Bones", Christopher Myers]
[NGUYEN] In the U.S., you have very distinct moments where music shifts.
In Vietnam, there was a long period of this traditional kind of music,
and then, all of a sudden, modernization kind of happens,
and you're here, with all of this at once.
[MYERS] Like New Orleans, it's just a blend of cultures
where cats don't really necessarily have the straight through line
of where the tradition is from.
[SOUND OF ANOTHER BRASS BAND PLAYING]
["Silent Parade...or The Soul Rebels Band Vs. Robert E. Lee", William Cordova]
[MARSHALL] Did you place them here so that
you could get that Robert E. Lee statue in the back?
[CORDOVA] It's a duel.
They're basically dueling with him.
Brass bands are very popular, so it's politicizing the brass band
beyond the fact that it's already politicized.
You know, the whole project is about monuments, about transformation.
[Dillard University]
There is no representation of anything other than
the Civil War Confederate heroes.
I remember back in 1995 when you came to visit
the School of the Art Institute of Chicago,
and I didn't have a studio--
I didn't have a class at the time.
But I, you know, managed to get all my materials
and you were going on the way from one place to another.
You had seven minutes...
[MARSHALL LAUGHS]
You told me you'll give me five because you needed to eat something.
And, I begged and pleaded with you,
and you went in there and just cut right through the b.s.
and told me, "This is decorative."
"Pursue this; the text piece that you're doing is a lot more genuine."
And that really made what I've been doing up to that point much clearer.
It was just those five minutes of your time.
[MARSHALL] Dillard and Xavier University--
two colleges that are historically black colleges--
are not normally on the tour guide
as destinations for looking at contemporary art.
[HOLLEY] I had a month's residency at the Rauschenberg Foundation.
[MARSHALL] Yeah.
[HOLLEY] So I got a chance to play in every little thing--
from the clay, to the welding,
to my found-object assemblages,
to my paintings--all at one time.
[MARSHALL] That's a lot!
[HOLLEY] I didn't get a chance to do no cooking,
because I was a chef before I became an artist.
[MARSHALL] So would you be cooking as art?
[BOTH LAUGH]
[HOLLEY] I don't see it being no different.
[MARSHALL] No different than making art, yeah?
[HOLLEY] I think that's the way you feel
when you're in the kitchen, right?
[MARSHALL] It's creating something.
[HOLLEY] You want to do the very best that you can do...
[MARSHALL] And you always do.
[HOLLEY] And it turns out to be delicious.
[MARSHALL] Alright!
[HOLLEY] I could've done this piece so many different ways.
I could've just dropped everything on the horn
and say, "Louis Armstrong blows no more."
"Because the organ player refused to play."
But this is not the title of this.
"Vox Humana"...
[MARSHALL] Oh, is that the name of the organ?
[HOLLEY] That's the name of the organ.
[MARSHALL] But these are really elaborate titles.
[HOLLEY] Yes.
[MARSHALL] From "Vox Humana II" to "Information and Instructions"
"(Music Is Still Strong After Being Torn to Pieces)"
[MARSHALL] Boom, that's a lot!
[HOLLEY] That's a lot.
[MARSHALL] Yeah.
[HOLLEY] No matter what you do to my music--
how you tear it apart--
you can do all the harm that you want to do to the instrument,
but the music is in the human.
All of this material that you see came together,
and then each piece laid out its own story.
[MARSHALL] I hadn't been to New Orleans in a long time.
And the last time I was in New Orleans, I don't think Ashé was in existence.
[Ashé Cultural Arts Center]
I was asked to make something specifically for these windows
at the Ashé Cultural Center.
[CELL PHONE RINGS]
[MARSHALL, ON PHONE] Hello?
Oh hi, how are you?
Yes and no...
What the piece wants to do is
to cut against the grain of a kind of abjection
that people associate with the recovery from Katrina.
I'm doing work that sort of purposefully avoids
participating in any kind of conversation that points to--
or dwells on--
being impoverished, or being under some kind of stress.
Okay.
Alright, bye.
Right, and then hold that end...
Ready?
[MAN] Yes sir.
So far, so good.
[MARSHALL] I feel like I'm reorienting myself
towards a kind of use of form and space,
that I can describe as future-oriented.
-But let's go outside and look at it from outside,
see what it looks like in front of the window.
You know, and so one of the functions of
the gold mirror Plexiglass, I think,
is to create this otherworldly kind of space.
I mean, it's sort of way outside the norm
to have an environment that is just so rich
and reflective with that gold color.
The kind of ostentatious quality the gold,
and the reflective quality of it.
All of those things are really important, I think.
Just in the raw materials for the thing
cost an arm and a leg to make it.
So, why would you do something like that,
that had no particular resale value--
that was only going to cost you?
Well, you would do it because you want to see what happens.
You only want to see what happens.
I'm only interested in what happens
so I can think about what I'm going to do next.
[MARCHING BAND BEGINS PLAYING]
["The Manifold Pleasures, and such...", Kerry James Marshall]
In these alcoves, there are simple things.
There are greeting cards.
You know, wrapped packages that look like presents.
The combination of the way the angle of the mirrors,
creates the reproduction.
And then if you look up or you look down,
it's almost like you're looking into an infinite space.
So, there's something about that space
that really encourages a kind of
"flight of fancy" kind of speculation.
You know, "dreaminess,"
you know, or something like that.
But all those things are things that point to celebration--
celebrations yet to come.
I've been interested in Black history for a long time,
and I still am.
But, if you're constantly being reminded of
the ways in which your history and your narrative as a people
were kind of rooted in loss and decay,
then you're in deep trouble.
Once you make a certain kind of peace with the past,
you know, then you should be completely oriented towards
speculation about the future.