The Life is Art Foundation is a local New Orleans artist's collective dedicated to making site-specific installations and performance art. The entire city is, in essence, a canvas to be either used, or discovered. Last Friday saw the opening reception of the the foundation's most recent endeavor, the Eiffel Society Commune. For years a restaurant from the real Eiffel Tower has sat on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, reclaimed time and again for various purposes. It seems as if now the building has found a purpose worthy of it's recycled history.
The concept is simple: artists will take up residency inside the building and make art. In the meantime there will be an urban garden built on the grounds, the yield of which will be used to feed future customers at the restaurant and bar which will open in September and coexist in the same space as the art. It is an ambitious prospect, almost too ambitious for the city of New Orleans.
Friday's opening was only a preview of the first group of artists and curators who inhabited the building for a month. Twenty-four works of art adorned the walls, floors, ceiling, windows, and even the elevator; although, since subtlety seems to have been the operative device, one would have been hard pressed to find all of them. The sum total of all of the work was summarized in the single piece Compass in Four Points by the collaborative project Generic Art Solutions: four light boxes in the four opposing corners of the skylight reading, respectively, 'Is this Art?', 'This is Art', 'Are you Here?', 'You are Here'.
Most of the work was made out of recycled or found materials. Benevolent Kings Chair by Steven Soltis dominated the center of the room. Essentially, it is a throne made from the lower trunk of a salvaged, unearthed pine tree. It sits at the head of a long, furnished dining table, attached to which is a cable thread through a pulley, holding up another piece of the same pine trunk above the throne. Sitting in this chair, one can intuit the weight of the enormous chunk of wood looming above.
One of the most successful works in subtlety is Chandelier, a series of antique Edison light-bulbs hanging in the center of the room. Apparently, the artist Benson Trent fabricated the filaments in each bulb to look like objects as various as leaves and webs.
No work received as much attention, though, as The Vital Contour of U + Us, a work by Lisa Lozano and Benjamin Heller. At first the works blended into the background, as they are two booths covered with mirrors and closely resemble decorative columns. On closer inspection it was found that each booth had an entrance. The interior of the first has a ceiling of seventy-two light-bulbs, and the walls are covered with mirrors, bouncing the reflection of the occupant into infinity. It is not until entering the second booth one realizes there are seven hidden cameras in the first booth, and the monitors to each are placed in the walls of the second. So one can literally experience themselves in infinity, while another watches it happen.
This show is a welcome relief from the everyday art of New Orleans; art which is a commodity, art which is essentially merchandise. The question is: Is New Orleans, a city reliant on tourism and a souvenir economy, capable of embracing a different form of contemporary art from which it is accustomed? Well, certainly the answer to that is up to the individual, and his/hers level of commitment to progressive thought. One could say that the New Orleans art scene has entered the era of A.P.1. 'After Prospect.1'. The art biennial was New Orleans' first step after Katrina in embracing a new wave of creativity. If handled properly, the Life is Art Foundation could become a significant next wave.
For more information on the Life is Art Foundation go to www.lifeisartfoundation.org.
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