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Artists Who Wish They Were
Dead
II: A Group Show
Curated by Dan Tague
Commentary by Kathy Rodriguez:
In January of 2010, the New Orleans Saints passed
their cup of tears to a battered Brett Favre, as they prepared
for their first-ever (and only) Super Bowl victory. The
atmosphere in the city tingled with love. Unlike any other
time in history, New Orleans filled with the smiles of
strangers, shaking hands and embracing. The murder rate slowed
and dropped off. The mild winter followed a mild hurricane
season, and the early Mardi Gras easily flowed from the months
of football revelry, its barbecue and beer.
It’s not to say that New Orleans didn’t deserve this golden
moment. But, while Haiti crumbled under an earthquake, the
citizens of this city, still recovering from its own disaster,
danced in its one-way streets. Such extremes indicated a need
for balance. In the same month, Martina Batan of the Ronald
Feldman Gallery in New York curated an exhibition at
Barrister’s Gallery titled I Wish I Was Dead. D. Eric
Bookhardt noted the irony in a review, and suggested the show
attempted to re-establish the equilibrium of New Orleans’
darker, under-worldly sensibilities.
Andy Antippas, owner of Barristers, notes the “semi-suicidal”
act of art making indicated by this evocative title. The
artistic persona is both literally and metaphorically
self-destructive. It is dangerous on many levels to delve into
the artistic psyche, either personally or vicariously, as
Freud did to da Vinci. The risk is in getting lost. But the
artists included in I Wish I Was Dead took that journey, and
laid a path for others to pursue, with an appropriate amount
of fear and anxiety evident in the work.
Nineteen months after its first manifestation, the show – with
a slightly altered title – continues to explore themes of
creativity and self-destruction, and a myriad of causes and
effects of the creative process. Curated by local visual art
phenom Dan Tague, Artists Who Wish They Were Dead II moves the
focus away from the first person to third, suggesting a
narration or survey of the ways in which death and destruction
affects the creative individual. These artists might bear this
death wish because true recognition comes only after dying, or
because of the keen anxiety that defines the artistic process.
It might also be that the struggle to survive usually
necessitates some other means of income than image making,
though the artist would rather be dead than have to leave the
studio. It’s a little like the adage about rather being
fishing.
Since the scale of the founding idea of the exhibit has grown,
so has the exhibition space. The work of thirteen artists
fills both Barrister’s and the University of New Orleans St.
Claude gallery, a few doors down from the original site. The
singular character and design of each space lends itself to
different kinds of work. Primarily two-dimensional pieces hang
from the walls at Barrister’s, where gesture drawings and
paintings by Horton Humble fill to the corners in the anxiety
of horror vacuii. A series detailing the Stations of the Cross
by Daphne Loney narrate the last tragic moments of bunnies.
Surreal desert landscapes by Amy Guidry diminish the human
form from one painting to another. In one of her meticulous
paintings, a hare’s gaze confronts the viewer from its perch
on the gashed belly of a prone figure; in the next, the hare’s
skull merges with a human skeleton. One final vertical
composition positions the lone human skull beneath a network
of animal heads, suggesting an imbalanced relationship between
man and nature.
The penultimate icon of mortality, the human skull, recurs in
a series of plaster casts by John Walton. Three of the
gold-leafed skulls rest on pedestals at Barrister’s; the
remaining dozen or so line a shelf at UNO St. Claude, facing a
painting of eyeballs that stare into the casts’ empty sockets.
At UNO, Walton’s sculptural work joins other three-dimensional
pieces by Stephen Kwok, Stephanie Hierholzer, and Ashley
Robins. Kwok’s giant scroll is a record of the futility of
categorizing everything, an act fraught with obsessive
compulsion – much like the desire and need to survive, or to
create. Hierholzer’s figurative photo-montages are
collaborations with Paige Valente, who is the figure
represented in the work. Valente is also the author of the
text applied to the surface of the photos. The images
incorporate this visually aggressive poetry that leeches
throughout the rooms where the vulnerable nudes gently
struggle against the presence of the words.* Robins’ coat and
hat of skinned teddy bears, draped over a human-scale wooden
frame, is linked to the destruction of the artist’s pristine
childhood imagination, and her revenge on the toys that did
not come to life as they were supposed to do.
These works join obsessive paper sculptures by Jeffrey
Forsythe, postcard-sized photographs and video by Christine
Catsifas, photographs and installation by Meg Turner,
documentary photographs by Steven Spehar, and paintings and
prints by Bobby Panama and Pippin Frisbie-Calder. Though these
artists’ works may not specifically confront the specter of
death and the anxiety that can accompany this fact of life,
they are part of the local population that perpetually hungers
for creative catharsis. It might be likened to the way local
football fanatics expulse their emotions. Sheer,
uncontrollable dedication brings their painted bodies and
meticulously designed costumes to bars, to the Superdome, to
all areas of the country and the world each week despite the
trials of fall and winter. The pre-season has begun by the
time this show opens. The difference is, no season can contain
the artistic drive to create, regardless of the ways in which
it destroys.
Kathy Rodriguez, M.A.,
M.F.A., is an instructor in the Department of Visual Arts
& Art History at the Univesrity of New Orleans. *The author apologizes to
Valente who was neglected mention in the original text.
