From the House of Lords to Rehab: Celebrity in the Las Vegas Landscape

“There was a time in fabulous Las Vegas when Hollywood starlets mingled with world class entertainers, when comedians gathered after shows to laugh, drink and dine the night away, when brandy and wine flowed and succulent steaks were cooked to perfection and served not only with a smile, but a meaningful conversation. It was common to see Frank, Dean, Sammy ad Peter singing to guests while the sound of champagne bottles popped and the feeling of good times filled the room.” -Plaque at the Entrance to the House of Lords, Sahara Casino

Sahara Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas.

The Sahara’s House of Lords restaurant discretely inhabits a corner of its disintegrating casino. If the restaurant were representative of the Sahara’s present state, the casino’s closure in less than one month would be surprising—the House of Lords stands in pristine condition, its subtle fountains circulating beneath a shimmering, faux night sky, surrounded by a circle of booths backed with golden minarets. A more recent incarnation of the restaurant that originally opened in 1954, this House of Lords avoids the dire fate of the rest of the casino, which suffers from abandoned towers full of severely aged rooms, a swimming pool surrounded by empty fountains and a row of shops pushing sales of discounted halter tops and rhinestone flip-flops.

The House of Lords, Sahara. Image from vegastripping.com

The Sahara represents one of the last casinos on the Las Vegas Strip with ties to the city’s past image as a haven for celebrities and Los Angeles’s elite to escape Hollywood . Outside of their stage time, performers were known to frequent the casino floors and restaurants, providing an image of Las Vegas as a place uniquely accessible to the stars. The long defunct, tiki-themed Don the Beachcomber restaurant was the best known restaurant in the Sahara for celebrity sightings during the mid-century era, more so than the original House of Lords.

The current House of Lords integrates aspects of its own history with that of Don the Beachcomber to create a constructed time capsule aimed at an audience nostalgic for “old Las Vegas” and its celebrity-filled associations. Its overtly dark lighting, small number of tables, and seclusion within the casino communicates exclusivity, while the circular positioning of the booths creates the sense of intimacy often absent from contemporary Las Vegas restaurants. Photo murals of the casino’s original architecture and the stars who frequented the Sahara surround the room, offering a meager substitute for the unsurprising absence of celebrity presence at the present-day, modest casino.  The mid-century Las Vegas Strip was a place to become glamorous by association; the House of Lords attempts to bring back that moment as best it can within a vastly different Las Vegas landscape.

Postcard image of Don the Beachcomber restaurant, Sahara. Image from hmdavid on flickr.com

In contrast to the more observation-based celebrity experience valued by the Baby Boomer generation, the current Millennial generation now coveted by the Las Vegas Strip casinos integrates participation with their concept of celebrity; these Americans want to be the celebrity. The Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, located several miles from the Strip, embodies this newer attitude, beginning upon arrival at the casino’s porte-cochere. Since the 1970s most casinos have amplified the porte-cochere feature of their entrance: the MGM Grand maintains an enormous, bulbous cover loosely referencing its overblown Art Deco décor, the tropical Mirage incorporates a thatched roof-like texture and oversized flowers, and seventeenth century oil painting reproductions hang salon style from the ceiling of the Venetian’s roundabout.

Hard Rock Casino, Las Vegas. Image from handycrafuniqe.com

Entering the Hard Rock through the back taxi entrance, in contrast, evokes the Hollywood red carpet arrival: shining mirror panels cover the porte-cochere surfaces, accented with white incandescent bulbs that suggest the  camera flashes of paparazzi at-the-ready. The hotel’s website describes the rooms as “designed with the discerning rock star in mind.” Once per week, guests can engage in tabloid-worthy activities at Rehab, the Hard Rock’s enormously popular pool party that initiated a city-wide trend of young adult-oriented pools and pool night clubs. The most prominent image throughout the casino is the Hard Rock’s trademark celebrity memorabilia. Worn jackets, sparkling costumes and floating instruments fill museum-like display cases every several yards: Shaun White’s flag-print jeans from a Rolling Stone cover shoot, Gwen Stefani’s pink, rhinestone halter top, Kurt Cobain’s signed guitar. Famous objects live here, devoid of their owners, the celebrity role open for casino guests to fill.

Hard Rock Casino interior, Las Vegas.

Mr. Lucky’s 24-7 resides in an alcove off of the Hard Rock’s circular gaming area, posing as a “retro” diner from an indiscernible era. Aged signs from motels and restaurants and motels line the walls, interspersed with archival photographs of Elvis, the Rat Pack and the other mid-century Vegas icons seen on the walls of the House of Lords. The most recent incarnation of MTV’s series The Real World, the reality television show in which a cast of seven unknowns become instant celebrities while their lives are filmed for six months, the cast inevitably inhabits the Hard Rock Hotel; countless scenes of these readymade celebrities take place inside Mr. Lucky’s 24-7.

Mr. Lucky's 24-7, Hard Rock Hotel and Casino.

In the background of several shots of the show hovers vintage “H” and “R” neon signs, abbreviating “Hard Rock.” Anyone familiar with the Las Vegas landscape would recognize the letters’ distinctive font; they came from a sign once spelling “Sahara.” The signifiers of celebrity in Las Vegas have been similarly changed: reorganized, restored, polished and painted. Ultimately, indicators of celebrity, both past and present, represent a fascination still ever-present in the American fantastical landscape.

Every Signifier on the Las Vegas Strip: Fifteen Days, Endless Simulacra

This week, I begin a fifteen day trip to Las Vegas, Nevada, to seek and document art experiences within the notorious mecca of American popular culture. While turning a critical eye to Sin City and its cacophony is far from novel (someone else also happens to be doing a similar project at this exact moment), the motivation behind this trip is to document the art, architecture and visual culture of the current Las Vegas Strip more comprehensively, and with greater reflection, than is possible in the standard three-day visit.

Over the past several months, I have selected and booked fourteen of the most culturally significant casinos on the Las Vegas Strip,* based on their relationships to American history and culture. As I work my way through this experience, Peripheral Vision be turned over to the documentation process, returning to its regularly scheduled programming after April May 29.

Image from wildnatureimages.com

*The “official Las Vegas Strip” refers to the 4.2 mile portion of Las Vegas Blvd. South between Sahara Ave. and Russell Rd.

Pop Culture on the Rocks: Lost Guggenheims, Fallen Showgirls and the Liberace Museum

The last time I visited the Liberace Museum, an older woman invited me to try on a giant, patchwork coat. Providing the requisite opportunity for participation the way almost all American museums now do, this coat allowed visitors to feel the added weight Liberace experienced while parading across the stage in one of his elaborate garments.  The woman overseeing the coat was a museum volunteer and clearly a lifelong Liberace fan.  As I tried on the 40 lb garment and posed for the camera, she let us know the coat’s cacophony of shimmering  fabrics were handmade by another volunteer and consisted of fragments from the ensembles of former showgirls.

The room in which I tried on the coat was the highlight of the museum: the costume gallery. Spread across two buildings in a strip mall on east Tropicana Avenue, the Liberace Museum showcased five primary collections; biographical photographs, a handful of vehicles, and a melange of pianos were displayed in the building nearest Tropicana Avenue, while the space on the other side of the parking lot housed the costume collection and selections of Liberace’s Baroque home furniture.

Costume gallery, Liberace Museum, 2008

This week, the Liberace Museum closed indefinitely. While many news sources have reported on this closure since its announcement in early September, I suspect few people under the age of fifty actually visited the physical space.  Dave Hickey’s seminal essay “A Rhinestone as Big as the Ritz” in 1997 book Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy provided incentive to visit and reconsider the value of Liberace to American society’s acceptance of the gay community. Likewise, Lady Gaga’s popularity and overt derivations from the piano star’s approach to celebrity suggest Liberace remains relevant to contemporary audiences (see Eric Felten’s “Lady Gaga and Liberace: Separated at Birth?”). Yet, the two instances I visited suggested there was not an enormous body of Las Vegas visitors clamoring to get into the modest space so far east on Tropicana Avenue that the museum ran free, hourly shuttles to and from the hotels on the Strip.  The one occasion I took the shuttle back to the Strip (as opposed to taking a $30 cab ride or renting a car; public transportation is reportedly not for tourists) the only other party enjoying the footage of Liberace performances shown on the shuttle’s TV was a group of three from Australia visiting Las Vegas for a week.

Liberace Museum, 2008

In general, Americans do not visit Las Vegas for the form of culture found in museums. Some have suggested that the closing of the Liberace Museum might be attributed to its isolated location, away from the tourist areas of the city. While the free shuttle was one solution to this concern, the closure of museums throughout Sin City over the past decade demonstrates that its site was not the only reason for the Liberace Museum’s demise.

In some ways, museums seem a natural fit for Las Vegas between of the constant flow of people in and out of the city and the high concentration of resident performers, architects, designers and other creative individuals required to support the entertainment excess for which Vegas it is known. Considering how the shopping, dining, sexual opportunities, spectacle and general branding as a place where one can do anything without regret play a significant role in Las Vegas “culture,” it is easy to forget that gaming is the single reason for the city’s position as a destination in America.  Gambling makes all other things Las Vegas is known for possible, and ultimately, all roads in the city’s tourist districts lead to (and are paid for by) gaming.  This situation creates an interesting relationship with culture, particularly because Las Vegas has spent so many decades creating a culture around gambling that makes it appealing to a mass audience, as opposed to only those who consider themselves “gamblers.” Contemporary popular culture is essential in Las Vegas’s ability to sell itself, and hence the city is designed to reflect the most present of moments in American consciousness.

In the 1990s Sin City capitalized on the public desires for “edutainment” and family friendly activities through the addition of cultural amenities to casinos.  A few remnants of this era still exist, including the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art and the Mandalay Bay’s American Zoo and Aquariums Association accredited Shark Reef. The Venetian Casino opened two museums affiliated with the Guggenheim and designed by Rem Koolhaas in 2001: the Guggenheim Las Vegas and the Guggenheim Hermitage.  The Guggenheim Las Vegas exhibited only The Art of the Motorcycle before its closure in  2002. The Guggenheim Hermitage lasted until 2008, showing works from the collection of its namesake Russian institution and the New York affiliate by big-name modern painters, such as Picasso, Lichtenstein, Mondrian and Kandinsky, among others.

Guggenheim Hermitage, Venetian Resort Casino, 2001, image from rex-ny.com

When the Guggenheims opened in the Venetian, they made sense in terms of the casino’s theme through their adherence to the American perception of Italy as a place for high culture and artistic mastery. Yet the permanence and preservation that  define museums are antitheses to the way visitors approach Las Vegas, as a place without a past, consequences or a future that is definitive; anything can happen with a roll of the dice. Likewise, museums defined by history struggle to find a place in the community (both tourist community and residential community) of such a place; here, “Las Vegas history” is merely a theme equated to the “French Riviera,” “Old West” and “Tropical Islands” represented within the casinos .

The role of Las Vegas’s history is made clear on the Zeigfield Stage in the Bally’s Casino, where Jubilee! continues as last remaining showgirl production on The Strip.  Similar to the fate of its museums, Las Vegas has seen a dramatic loss in the showgirl productions that once dominated the city, beginning most prominently with the closing of the Stardust’s famed productions in 1999 and the end of the Tropicana’s Folies Bergère in 2009. 

Jubilee! perseveres in an almost parodic production that includes an original “Titanic” number that borders on the absurd; when I attended a performance earlier this year I found myself surrounded almost entirely by tourists from Asia.  The vintage styling of the rhinestone costumes, pronounced smiles and homemade backdrops now appear more like the “living history” component of a historical museum than a contemporary performance. If the inclusion of former showgirl outfits in the participatory coat at the Liberace Museum isn’t evidence enough, the showgirl production’s relationship to museums is made even more pronounced by the opportunity to take a formal tour of the Jubilee!’s wardrobe and sets on select days of the week.

Jubilee!, Bally's Casino, image from nytimes.com

As a physical manifestation of popular culture and mainstream American interests, Las Vegas is known to exist in a state of constant flux. Even the community-based Las Vegas Art Museum shut its doors in 2009; hence while Liberace’s legacy may have suggested the museum he built would have an endless audience in Las Vegas, the city in which his career was cemented, a part of me was not surprised when the announcement came that it too would disappear. Las Vegas is not nostalgic, only temporal.  Popular culture does not remember; if it did, at least a portion of the hoards of Lady Gaga fans that visit Las Vegas annually could be expected to flock to Liberace’s pianos and costumes as a means for better appreciating their favorite star.  Instead, I suspect a very small minority of the Little Monsters even know who Mr. Showman was.

Ultimately, the outcry of the press regarding the Liberace Museum’s closure has been surprisingly pronounced for an institution that received relatively little notice when it was doing anything but closing. While there is a natural inclination blame the Las Vegas environment for its lack of recognition of the past, that would be the easy way out. Las Vegas, as a money-driven city, feeds from mainstream trends and culture.  In the case of the Liberace Museum’s closure, the question to ask is the following: what it is that prevented us, the Americans who created what Las Vegas has become, from remembering to visit, or simply remembering at all.

Bifocal 10: Vogue Italia and Hyperreality

“The industry of the Absolute Fake gives a semblance of truth to the myth of immortality through the play of imitations and copies, and it achieves the presence of the divine in the presence of the natural –but the natural is ‘cultivated’ as in the Marinelands.”

Excerpt from essay “Travels in Hyperreality” by Umberto Eco, San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1975.

Image: “Water & Oil,” photographed by Steven Meisel, model: Kristen McMenamy, image from theworldsbestever.com.

The Heartland Machine and Other Concepts from the Future

Parked inside in a small gallery of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art is a Heartland Machine. Heartland Machine is a mobile sculpture that began as a speedboat.  Conceived by Detroit-based Design 99, over a period of ten days the boat was dragged around the mid-west and interacted with independent arts organizations based in Minneapolis, Detroit, Omaha, Kansas City, St. Louis and Chicago.  The final sculpture included videos, printed materials, metal signs and other objects from the boat’s journey, assembled inside the Smart Museum.  In addition to the work’s title, cartoon-esque speeding lines affixed to the back of the vehicle evoke the animated trail left behind Doc Brown’s famed time machine as it disappears in Back to the Future.  The notable difference is, in place of a flux capacitor, Heartland Machine is fueled by artistic fusion across communities.

Design 99, Heartland Machine, 2009, mixed media installation including audiovisual equipment, fiberglass boat, found materials, silkscreened posters designed by Nina Bianchi and printed by Tim Eads; ephemera and video (color, sound) supplied by regional independent cultural infrastructures. Courtesy of the artists. Image from the Smart Museum.

Heartland Machine is part of the Smart Museum’s (whose Adaptation traveled to the Henry Art Gallery last year) group exhibition Heartland, a collaboration with the Van Abbemuseum that focuses on artists working from and responding to the center of the United States.  The simple concept behind Heartland is what makes it poignant. The “region” of this exhibition was based on the course of the Mississippi River as a geographical guiding force; in the exhibition catalog, the curatorial team describe the area as “…heart drawn on a map of the United States with its point in New Orleans, extending up to Minneapolis in the northwest and Detroit in the northeast” (Esche, Niemann and Smith 12). This selection, based on the curators’ series of road trips across America from 2007-2009  bypassed the traditional “Midwest”  or “Bible Belt” definitions of region, suggesting the arbitrariness of such boundaries in this context.

Regional exhibitions are commonplace, but in the field of contemporary art, rural America in particular can be something of a persona non grata. Although they may have migrated from elsewhere, many of this country’s well-known artists are based on the coasts, with limited exceptions for the larger (Chicago, Minneapolis) or particularly arts-friendly (Santa Fe) cities. The middle of the country is more often seen as a place to escape rather than a focal point for creative inquiry.

In the Chicago Reader’s recommendation of Heartland, Noah Berlatsky writes,

“I’m particularly looking forward to seeing the installation by Carnal Torpor, a KC art collective that makes klutzy, burpy grindcore music when they’re not creating collages indebted equally to Pushead and Day of the Dead ofrendas. The group…has an aesthetic I appreciate not so much because it’s weird as because it seems familiar and right. But then, I live here.” (Chicago Reader, “Fall Arts Guide 2009“)

Carnal Torpor’s installation Purifications of the CalmDome is comprised of a white, plastic pod approximately ten feet high, similar in shape to a deformed soccer ball with overlapping circular patterns inscribed in its surface.  Viewers can remove their shoes and enter the structure through a small hole in the back.  Once inside, the space becomes isolating, the smallest of sounds shut out, the only light coming from the entry hole and a small, silent television near the top of the dome.

Left: Cody Critcheloe, BOY, 2009. Right: Carnal Topor, Purifications of the CalmDome, 2009. Courtesy of the artists. Installation view at the Smart Museum of Art. Image from the Smart Museum

I did not want to like Purifications of the CalmDome.  Its proliferation of the desire to escape from one environment into another seemed too easy. Yet whenever I try to conceptualize Heartland, I keep coming back to the experience of climbing into the dome. As a former resident of the midwest, something about this piece articulated my determination to escape that part of the country at my first opportunity.  Stepping inside the installation feels like a direct connection to the mind of the artist, or maybe to anyone frustrated with the monotony and absence of personality in places like the suburb in which I grew up (Naperville, IL).  There is not much to be found inside Purifications of the CalmDome, but there is a sense that the interior is at least distinct from the exterior, if nothing else.  As Berlatsky suggested, Purifications of the CalmDome was highly familiar and exactly right.

Carnal Topor, Purifications of the CalmDome, 2009, Mixed media installation including architectural elements, electronics, paint, soundproofing materials, and video. Image from the Smart Museum.

The northernmost and southernmost boundaries of Heartland are Detroit and New Orleans.  The connections between these two damaged cities are readily seen within the photographs by two artists in the exhibition. Slovenian artist-architect Marjetica Potrc portrays scenes of the Lower 9th Ward against the backdrop of New Orleans’s vacant businesses; Scott Hocking documents series of pyramid structures within Detroit’s Fisher Body Plant building  as they crumble into their surroundings over time.  Seeing these works in the context of Heartland, an exhibition largely focused on the communities of their region, begged the question of why a relevant exhibition like this was not selected to be on view in place of the highly controversial Dreams Come True: Art of the Classic Fairy Tales from the Walt Disney Studio at NOMA.

Scott Hocking, Ziggurat—East, Summer, Fisher Body Plant #21, 2008, Archival digital print. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Hilberry Gallery, Ferndale, MI.

Questions of finances and ethics aside, one of the most unfortunate aspects of Dreams Come True is its irrelevance to a city struggling to rebuild itself. As a museum limited on staff and resources, the easy solution may appear to be the all-inclusive Disney exhibition that comes at no financial cost to the institution.  Yet it still comes at the expense of staff time, gallery space and marketing efforts, among other resources.  In place of Dreams Come True, NOMA could have found an alternative solution more similar to Heartland, smaller in scale but providing more content and ideas that are meaningful to the city rather than artifacts from Disney productions associated with with the false promises and imitations of life that led to the term “Disneyfication”; it is difficult to imagine the opportunities for dialogue princess movies bring to a city striving to create a sense of community.

The corporately-created exhibition is particularly disconcerting in a time when the focus should be on recognizing the importance of local culture and creativity to the city of New Orleans.  Although not everything in Heartland is equally provocative, the resonance of particular works suggest the show’s more community-based model is successful and something that should be considered more often in place of the impersonal (and often irrelevant) traveling blockbuster exhibitions so common in museum practice.  In this regard, Design 99′s Heartland Machine may be seen as a mode of thought, rather than a mere device, sent to us from the future.

Bifocal 4: Fisher Body and WALL-E

“At once avant and pop, horrendously bleak and cheerfully cute, WALL-E is the quintessential twenty-first-century motion picture. Celebrating (or embalming) an obsolete technology, it’s the 2001 of 2008–a postphotographic film set in a posthuman universe.”

Excerpt from “21st Century Cinema: Death and Resurrection in the Desert of the (New) Real” by J. Hoberman, Artforum International Dec. 2009: 210-29. Print.

Image: Scott Hocking,  Ziggurat—East, Summer, Fisher Body Plant #21, 2008, Archival digital print. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Hilberry Gallery, Ferndale, MI.

Bifocal 3: Diamond Dust Shoes and the Airport

“The ‘00s really began on December 12th, 2000, the day the Supreme Court blocked Florida from recounting ballots and anointed George W. Bush. Other bad days were to follow—most famously 9/11. But we never recovered from 12/12, spent the rest of the decade trying to forget it and mostly succeeded. Before you knew it, we were at the airport, waiting in line to take off our shoes. Why? Who knew? We just were.”

Excerpt from “A Decade of Lost Chances” by Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone Issue 1094/1095 December 24, 2009-January 7, 2010: 15-16. Print.

Image: Andy Warhol, Diamond Dust Shoes, 1980, silkscreen ink and diamond dust on paper. Image from Georgetown.edu

Bifocal 1: Rolling Stone and Krispy Kreme Doughnuts

“Beckman, now fifty-six, has been hiding in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where, until recently, he has been serving donuts for seven dollars an hour. A look into his eyes will tell you what you already know: there isn’t a more punishing zero than the sugary naught of a Krispy Kreme Hot Original Glazed. And yet Beckman is emerging, and doing so in one of the worst economic climates of our times.”

Excerpt from “The Disappearance of Ford Beckman” by Michael Paul Mason, The Believer Nov./Dec. 2009: 29-34. Print.

Image: Rolling Stone Issue 1094/1095. December 24, 2009 – January 7, 2010. Cover concept by Chip Kidd; logo type by Jim Parkinson; design by Joseph Hutchinson. Image from Rolling Stone.com

The Things that Didn’t Work

i. 9th Floor by Robin Rhodes

ii. Happily Ever After by Ghada Amer

iii. Tabula Rasa by Jose Damasceno

i. I knew what was behind the blue walls of the freestanding public restroom situated in an empty field– New Orleans’s Times-Picayune included a brief mention of it in their coverage of Prospect.1.  When I read the write up, I expected to agree and find the broken art installation  (the water stopped working weeks ago) unenlightening.  But the  otherwise subdued driver of a Prospect.1-sponsored van visiting the various installations in the Lower 9th Ward went inside with us.  The cement restroom had no roof or doors.  The driver told us we were not really supposed to be getting out, but because there were only 6 of us in the van and we were ahead of schedule, he was going to let us walk through. As we formed a wordless circle around the dry stones and upturned pipe, he told us how 9th Floor (created by artist Robin Rhode) is one of the few places he could come to quietly contemplate the devastation of Katrina and that even without the water, it created a place where people could want to be, unlike any other public restroom in the world.  As we walked back out, he paused to point out the rusty waterlines around the walls, showing the various levels the flooding inhabited before eventually draining.

Robin Rhode. 9th Floor. 2008. Lower 9th Ward, Prospect.1 New Orleans.

ii. Ghada Amer‘s Happily Ever After was intended to be covered in foliage by the time I saw it over closing weekend of Prospect.1.  Residing beside the levee, most of the surrounding area is full of home sites where the foundation lines and naked parking lots are the only indicators of the way the neighborhood once was; nearly everything else is still absent.  With the exception of a few government rebuilds, a few straggling trailers, a handful of oddly contemporary homes constructed by Brad Pitt’s Make it Right Foundation, and a church giving out food every Sunday to anyone who comes by, there is little left standing in this area of lowest elevation within the Lower 9th.

Since returning from the Biennial, I have seen photos of Happily Ever After during its installation at Sudeley Castle in 2005, covered in green vines.  Seeing it first in New Orleans, barren and accented by dry fields, it was strikingly more fitting than the way I could envision the green, optimistic version once seen on the grounds of a luxurious castle transplanted to this place.  Contemplative, like 9th Floor, in its circularity, when following the words from the center, the viewer encounters the straightforward view of the place surrounding the words rather than seeing an image obstructed by temporary growth and blossoms.

Ghada Amer. Happy Ever After. 2005.  Lower 9th Ward, Prospect.1 New Orleans.

Ghada Amer. Happy Ever After. 2005. Sudeley Castle.  Image from Artnet.

iii.  The Studio at Colton School was opened by the Creative Allicance of New Orleans at the junction of the 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th Wards. Walking there from the Warehouse District, transitions between neighborhoods are hard and immediate; beyond the obvious architectural differences, the quantity in businesses open and functioning goes from fairly standard city blocks in the Warehouse/Central Business District, to the density of the tourist industry in the French Quarter, to only occasional restaurants and small convenience stores in the area surrounding the Colton School. The most active business was a gas station, where cars were lined around the perimeter and several radios and conversations could be heard from across the street.  The Colton School has been closed since Katrina due to severe decreases in enrollment; I didn’t realize this until the end of my time there.  Based on the state of the rooms that were not being used as art spaces,  I thought it must have been closed since the 70s.

There was a sense of stark abandonment within the crumbling teachers’ lounge and fading  bulliteon boards.  Mirroring the functioning businesses surrounding the Colton School, the rooms alternated between classrooms that looked like they had been evacuated twenty years ago and functioning spaces, which in this building included CANO studios and the Prospect.1 sites.  Off to the side of a former lunchroom now filled with upturned pianos and Mardi Gras floats was a small classroom that hosted Jose Damasceno’s Tabla Rasa: a simple, grid-like calculator constructed on the floor out of sticks of classroom chalk.  By this point, a few pieces comprising the buttons had rolled out of place, possibly from a misstep or a draft through the open window.  In another location, the subtlety of the disjointed grid may have meant little, but in the disintegrating Colton School, the precariousness of routines and objects we subconsciously expect to continue working resonated from a few pieces of chalk on the floor.

Jose Damasceno, Tabula Rasa, 2008, Colton School, Prospect.1 New Orleans

Prospect.1 was not successful because it had the best or most innovative art ever created. Experiencing as much as I could in a single day (the public transportation of the biennial was incredible; without a car, I was able to see 8 venues between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m.) in no way made me an authority on the state of New Orleans.  I only saw art, and I saw the city.  In her essay “Being There”  in January’s Artforum, Elizabeth Schambelan identifies exoticism and spectatorial detachment as problems for Prospect.1:

“Perhaps more problematic than Prospect.1′s relation to the tourism economy…is its relation to the tourist optic–a detached, indulgent mode of viewing that can and does aestheticize all that comes before it, the more picturesquely decrepit, the better.”

Over-aestheticizing the city is certainly possible, particularly when looking at it from the window of a Prospect.1 shuttle, or simply as someone who has never been inside a public school in Louisiana previously.  There is a Gray Line tour of New Orleans that visits areas of the city made famous by the media as it filled with water.  Seeing the city through Prospect.1 seemed different from the idea behind the Gray Line tour because Prospect.1 was about seeing how things are now across locations with a range of associations and understandings, rather than merely revisiting sites recognized by the past.   The installations that had malfunctions or imperfections were among the most meaningful because they indicated how those of us viewing the biennial were not gaining a complete understanding, but we were seeing something; we were seeing a response to a city most Americans understand as representative of their country in some way, yet most know it only from newscasts and media imagery.  Although some of the most unassuming works were the ones that remained in my mind after the biennial ended, it was not because they relied fully on common images or made a spectacle of simplicity.  Rather, the most affective pieces in Prospect.1 worked within their constructed spaces as well as within the city of New Orleans, provoking a deeper engagement with those of us looking from the surface.

Strangers in Our Own Worlds

I’m dying to see Doug Aitken’s Migration: 365 Hotel Rooms, which Tyler Green recently blogged about in relation to the Carnegie International 2008 and Roberta Smith cites as one of the few pieces in Life on Mars that succeeds in exploring the exhibition’s concept as well as the catalog’s essays manages to do. The decay and rebirth of a constructed space through the use of animals seems to be an interesting consideration of use and function through the repurposing of ordinary objects humans no longer think about because they assume to understand those objects so well. The still representing the piece most frequently depicts an owl perched on a hotel bed, feathers floating around the room. Images like this show the sublime’s quiet takeover of these previously confined spaces, slowing infringing upon the known like the gentle flurries that eventually cause avalanches.

There is a strange likeness between what I imagine Aitken’s Migration is like and the natural takeover of a Disney World hotel posted on boingboing last month.

Of course the unfinished hotel now flooded with wild grasses was a wing of the Pop Century hotel. Now ghost-like, watching plants slowly consuming this unused representation of popular culture and 90s prosperity is particularly fitting in this moment of history, much like the Stardust in Las Vegas was the decaying moment of 80s glamor.

The Stardust had my favorite neon sign in sin city. The once highly dynamic masterpiece now lies in pieces in the Neon Boneyard, hoping to once again glow as an intrinsically-valued artifact rather than as pure advertisement and Las Vegas excess. And what now stands in the Stardust’s place? Supposedly the Echelon will someday, but with the current state of the economy in Nevada, I am not convinced anything substantial will replace the Stardust within the next decade.

Speaking of repurposing spaces, I just noticed Motel Motel Motel’s website has updated the status of Motel #3: “The one night only maiden voyage of an illuminated art regatta” will take place in Greenlake in September. Spectacular.