Ogden Museum of Southern Art, “Southern Master Series” Artist Robert Tannen
Contact:
Ogden Museum: Sue Strachan, 504.539.9614
Bob Tannen Studio: Jessica Dore 504.218.4807
RETROSPECTIVE OF SOUTHERN MASTER ROBERT TANNEN
OPENS AT OGDEN MUSEUM OF SOUTHERN ART IN NEW ORLEANS
August 2 – September 30, 2008
Additional Exhibitions Coincide with Prospect.1 New Orleans Biennial Opening Nov 1
Robert Tannen’s Original Visions have Influenced Artists,
Planners and Cities
Artist, designer, and urban planner Robert Tannen has interwoven his art with visionary urban plans, and environmental, social and urban commentary for close to 50 years. For the 71–year old Brooklyn born artist, who emerged from the East Village scene in the 50s and became New Orleans’ leading conceptual artist since he moved there to help rebuild after the 1969 hurricane, addressing what ails the world—and solutions— is inseparable from his art.
This summer and fall, Robert Tannen’s work will be featured throughout New Orleans. The artist will have a major solo show at The Ogden Museum of Southern Art (August 2 – September 30). Then the artist’s work will be featured in exhibitions and projects throughout the city during Prospect.1 New Orleans– the city’s first international biennial, including a solo exhibition at Studio 529, at 529 Julia Street in the Arts District, and a showcase of local emerging artists at The Studio at Colton School in the 8th Ward the artist is co-organizing. In addition, Tannen’s design for a modular shotgun house called Mod Gun is on display in uptown New Orleans at 4518 Camp Street.
RETROSPECTIVE AT THE OGDEN MUSEUM
Stardust: Objects, Ideas and Proposals opens at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art on August 2 and runs through September 30, 2008. The opening night of the exhibition will coincide with the “White Linen Night” gala, one of the most celebrated events in New Orleans. The retrospective exhibition features a range of media and work representing the span of Tannen’s career and that encompasses themes of nature, habitat, love, loss, preservation, and change. This exhibition is part of the Ogden’s ongoing Southern Masters series, which showcases the works of artists who have made longstanding contributions to the art of the region.
Tannen’s work has long spanned a wide range of disciplines including fine arts, urban planning and design, industrial design, environmental analysis, poetry and prose. “It is unusual in this era of increasing specialization that a person will function as a generalist exploring and attempting to integrate the worlds of art, design, science, language, and technology,” said Ogden Museum of Southern Art Curator, David Houston.
Featured in the exhibition will be Robert Tannen’s seminal “Shotgun House” sculptures crushed to represent the effects of a Category 5 storm just weeks before Hurricane Katrina in 2005. One room is dedicated to the variety of ways he has used the shotgun form since 1977. In 1978 after working in the Middle East, he piled large 9’ long by 4’ high galvanized sheet metal shotgun houses on top of each other reflecting the practice of building on top of older buildings he had seen in Iran. His concrete block work, which also began in 1977, such as towers and pyramids, will also be represented in the show.
Smaller works use discarded objects and materials used to produce “function less” appliances, tools and accessories such as toasters for book warming, wrapped hand tools, and jewelry of oyster shells, rocks and debris, and metal hangers used for “drawings”. In addition, the exhibit displays more delicate works that he creates at his kitchen table every morning including hundreds of drawings made with crow feathers and Japanese ink, as well as etchings from early in his career created by scratching plates with his fingers. These works, as well as many that incorporate words and poetry, reflect various notions of calligraphy.
Stardust, Robert Tannen’s latest work, is an outdoor installation of large-scale boulders presented at Lee Circle facing the Ogden Museum that serves as a compass to the city and reminder of the city’s cultural legacy.
Tannen has consistently invited artists and other creative workers to participate in his exhibitions and events, and the Ogden exhibit is no exception with collaborative works by several artist friends including Frank Gehry, Linda Benglis, Raphael Ortiz, Tina Freeman, Mitchell Gaudet, and Maya Lin. In keeping with not separating his activist work from his artwork, Tannen has also invited Luisa Dantos and Michael Boedigheimer to include their film “St. Joe” within the exhibition. The film documents the demolition of 4,500 public housing units that survived Katrina, along with photographs by Fred Conrad.
A film about Robert Tannen and his work by filmmaker Winston Riley will also debut at the Ogden in the first week of September. Winston Riley is best known for his portrayal of Walter Anderson, the water colorist from Biloxi. He is also working on a film about Walker Percy.
ABOUT ROBERT TANNEN
Born 1937 in Brooklyn, Tannen began his career as one of the youngest artists in the midst of the hot Tenth Street art scene in the East Village, New York City in 1956. In the 1950s, his father, Jack Tannen was a partner in the legendary rare book store Biblo and Tannen nearby on 4th Avenue. At several 10th Street galleries and the Great Jones Gallery, Robert Tannen explored the conceptual art practice that would continue throughout his career featuring sculptures using wood and stone debris from Coney Island beaches, large paintings on 10 by 150 foot rolls of paper painted using household mops, and wrapped sculptures of furniture and other objects.
Tannen has been an “artists’ artist”, collaborating and influencing peers with his experimental process and practice. His balanced wood and stone pieces preceded his gallery mate Di Suvero’s work. His wrapped objects, beginning in 1957 were a predecessor to Christo’s work. Later his vertical fish sculptures and “archisculpture” work would be shared by his friend, architect Frank Gehry.
Tannen’s work has been shown primarily at museums and galleries in the northeast, New Orleans and California, with many installation works and outdoor sculptures shown on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River in New Orleans, including cars and NASA materials suspended from cranes, or on urban walls. His departure from New York at the age of 25 to help found Franconia College in New Hampshire, led to a pilgrimage of sorts throughout the northeast, and south, working and living in Cambridge, MA; Washington, DC; Texarkana, AK and TX, and the Gulf Coast since then. His work has built on his experiences consulting on health, community development, rural development, and neighborhood planning in all of these and other cities and rural areas.
Tannen became a permanent “southerner” after a consulting assignment for the coast of Mississippi in the wake of Hurricane Camille in1969. That experience focused his thinking on the dangers of development within high-risk areas, influencing his choice of homes on the Esplanade ridge in New Orleans and in a historic rural area of coastal Mississippi outside the flood plain in Delmas. In Delmas, the settlement of Native Americans who dodged the “Trail of Tears” evacuation of several Indian nations in the 19th century, and in the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans, the first African American neighborhood in America, Tannen has worked to sustain the historic roots of people with modest incomes but rich cultural legacies.
MORE ABOUT THE WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION
STARDUST - Public Installation of Boulders facing the Ogden Museum
STARDUST is an outdoor installation at Lee Circle in New Orleans, facing the Ogden Museum. Surrounding the sculpture of Confederate General Lee facing north, Tannen has placed four large-scale boulders around the circle, impressed with letters N, E, W, and S. The installation redefines the directional intent of the circle, and provides a “compass” for New Orleanians and visitors who are often confused by the city’s geography shaped by the curve of the Mississippi river and by the city’s diverse economic, political, social and moral viewpoints. Directions and viewpoints, he implies, are relative in this old port city. As he notes, people describe places as “towards the river”, or “towards the lake”, the two bodies of water that surround the city, and describe multi-layered, diffuse views of race, social equity, and environmental appreciation in a region known for its charming facade on darker realities.
The title “Stardust” refers to the recent discovery that our solar system was formed from the particles and debris thrown off by other dying stars. The artist warns about the loss of habitat, neighborhood context and cultural legacy: “The earth will soon be nothing but rock at the present rate of global warming, consumption, and mismanagement of its natural resources by man.”
Tannen is also using boulders and rocks in other works at the Ogden, and at Studio 529 at 529 Julia Street where many of his recent works will be also be on view during Prospect.1
Storm Warnings and Shot Gun Houses
Weeks before the cataclysmic citywide flood resulting from Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, Robert Tannen had the instinct to remove the large scale sheet metal “shotgun houses” from his garden, usually tethered for storm threats, and crush them as an early warning of the coming storm. He called the reworked sculptures “Cat 5”, referencing the official designation for the most powerful storm a region can experience.
The shotgun houses, crushed and stored in a studio in the 8th ward neighborhood known as St. Roch, were covered by 10 feet of water during the flood, leaving a rusty, caked patina on the sculptures. These houses, along with a wide range of other shotgun based works Tannen has exhibited since 1977 are on view in the Ogden exhibit.
Tannen is also debuting a collection of art jewelry for Mignon Faget Ltd, featuring the shotgun house form, his signature concrete blocks, and casts of meteorites, which are the remnants of the death and life of stars and planets.
Drawings and Prose
Robert Tannen’s works have often been narrative in nature, including drawings depicting stereo images of contemporary phenomena, two-page short stories on folded bright orange paper, boxed books written with one, two, three and four letter words, a book written with only commas from 1963, and An Autobiography for Everyone, that functions as a boiler plate for autobiographies.
Many of Tannen’s drawings incorporate text and are message -driven. His works of poetry, written almost daily for decades, celebrate his optimistic spirit and enjoyment of simple phenomena that balances his long-term concern for the Earth’s future.
Architectural Design – MODGUN, an affordable and sustainable take on the traditional Gulf Coast shotgun house form
Tannen’s recent design for a modular shotgun house, called MODGUN, was the first experiment using modular technology and the vernacular shotgun style of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. The MODGUN model is presently on display in uptown New Orleans at 4518 Camp Street, between Cadiz and Jena. New Urbanist Andres Duany characterized the “MODGUN” as the “best of post-Katrina modular designs” since it has the flexibility to expand, like cars on a train, for additional space as families recover from the storm.
Tannen arrived at this design after many years of working with urban planning and development issues in New Orleans. His planning work includes the design for the historic districts of New Orleans; plans for the redevelopment of the riverfront and area around the Superdome into mixed use project including cultural, retail, and office space; a plan for the location of a second bridge over the Mississippi that he placed in the same corridor as the pre-existing bridge, thus avoiding destruction of neighborhoods and historic landmarks.
Tannen decries an oft repeated, southern, and indeed American tradition of “clear cutting”. “It began with the lumber companies that found it more efficient to level virgin forests, leaving deforested fields then moving on to the next forest. It progressed to urban renewal strategies that leveled whole neighborhoods such as dozens of blocks of the Treme neighborhood that once stood where Armstrong Park is located near the French Quarter. And today, after the devastation of Katrina, the city continues to clear cut whole neighborhoods, thousands of units of public housing, hospitals and other public buildings, and ancient trees around levees. We seem to prefer the simplicity of widespread destruction to a more nuanced policy of selective restoration, rebuilding and respect for our architecture, landscape and culture,” stated Tannen,
Named a “Citizen Artist” by former CAC Executive Director and curator Adolpho Nodal, Tannen’s planning and art address the need to maintain the delicate balance of species and habitat throughout the planet.
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