Just around the corner from the National WWII Museum on Andrew Higgins Street in New Orleans, I found a small, transient installation at the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), worth mentioning. It should be said first that the D-Day Museum, aptly located in the old Higgins boat factory that produced so many of the boats that landed on the beaches of Europe, is itself a must-see. My husband loves to revisit it each time we come to New Orleans, and I have been three times myself. Still, there is nothing, for me, like running smack into the very creative, even irreverent cultural forces that are allowed to proliferate because so many men and women of the Greatest Generation dared to defy fascism; I crave the logical incongruity of an art museum just after my veins have been swelled with patriotic pride, and so I often go to the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, or the CAC, while my husband rehashes the beaches of Normandy. He is rediscovering how the free world was dearly bought, while I am preoccupied, in the borrowed words of Lorraine Hansberry's Asagai (from "A Raisin in the Sun"), with "what the New World hath wrought."
On this particular occasion, I happened into Thomas Woodruff's "Freak Parade" exhibition, described as an "ambitious and dazzling parade of images that celebrates beauty in aberrance. ...a reaction against the global standardization of culture."
Himself a tattoo artist with a cult following in the alternative art community, Woodruff "hybridizes vocabularies past and present, ...references sideshow banners, Pompeian wall frescoes, baroque religious paintings, theatrical posters, and Victorian penmanship charts to create a new yet oddly familiar world." Stepping into this world, my mental iPod cued up an album from Beats Antique, whose fans include members of the steampunk movement and others, like my husband, whose ears constantly itch for innovation and reinvention--for what is best in music from all times and places. This, it occurred to me, was the perfect auditory companion for the 34-piece parade of Woodruff's protesting imagination, congenial in its love of anachronisms and juxtaposition, borrowing much (and without apology) from surrealism and romanticism, and any other -ism you can draw connection with.
Almost as quickly, I yearned for the Ed Hardy t-shirt sitting in my suitcase in the hotel--a hand-me-up from my taller, younger sister who had found it on sale and decided it was too much for her. Another of my sisters, who had bought herself one during the same spree, had no such buyer's remorse, and bubbled about Christian Audigier's artistic vision and collaboration with tattoo artist Don
Ed Hardy to bring about rhinestone-studded, folk-urban, uncommonly attractive and too-expensive t-shirts that flaunted their cultural collage in the street. I decided it was not too much for me, and since it was free, I was spared the moral dilemma of how much it might have cost. I once heard literary critic Stanley Fish take this question head-on, however, and though he was speaking about preserving the intellectual freedom of the academy and the value of a liberal arts education, I think it can be applied here to art in general: "these things belong to an economy of waste, and that in itself is gorgeous and valuable."
I found myself wondering, while hearing Fish speak, and relishing Woodruff's canvases, what business an incarnational and patriotic worldview might have in the same room with the surreal, and the irreverent. And then I am reminded of Heironymous Bosch and his famous Garden of Earthly Delights triptych, or of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem "Pied Beauty." In each of these works, I find a deeply moral impulse, even though the aesthetic is very much centered on what is "counter, original, spare." The place of the surreal in the mind of the Christian seems tenuous, even nonexistent, when those who dominate the marketplace of Christian art insist on trying to "paint the world without the Fall" (Thomas Kinkade), or otherwise sanitize the problem of evil, suffering, the nature of God, and the person of Christ himself. But perhaps there is room for the strange, the other, if we consider the world of our own imaginations, and the world of dreams. One would be hard-pressed to name a single prophetic vision accounted in the Bible that didn't seem at least a bit surreal. I think that G.M.H. sums it up well in these lines, where he even seems to affirm that the created world itself yields up anomalies that, in their strangeness and imperfection, retain their beauty and dignity, and point to the original Mind that spoke them into being. If we do the same, we are no less imitators of God.
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Poems. 1918.
13. Pied Beauty
GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
All that said, I recommend that you do drop in to see the exhibit for $3, which runs until 24 October.
