Things Fall Apart

Paul Chan. Initial drawing for what it might look like, 2006. Pencil and charcoal on paper. 9” x 11". Courtesy of the artist and Green Naftali

Winkleman Gallery - New York

January 16 - February 21, 2009

By Natalie Sciortino-Rinehart

Turning and turning in the widening gyre,?

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;?

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;?

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,?

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere?

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst?

Are full of passionate intensity.

- W.B. Yeats The Second Coming (1920)

Arriving on the heels of Prospect.1 New Orleans, “Things Fall Apart” opened at the Winkleman Gallery in New York.  Conjuring up the renowned Second Coming by Yeats (1920) through the exhibition’s title, the reference to an era’s zeitgeist on the brink of a Great Depression and reeling from war is clearly one that parallels our own. The exhibition provided a provocative cross-section of our current social climate through a group of artists whose homelands and subject matter reflect these trends of upheaval. Curator Joy Garnett brought together artists from a variety of places including Croatia, Russia, Morocco, and Colombia. 

Garnett also addressed the continuing story of New Orleans - a most appropriate city for the concerns of the show.  The efforts to engage a collaborative dialogue with the bereft city were well executed by including work from Paul Chan and the New Orleans-based collective, The Front. The selection of drawings, prints and photographs from the Front centered around a powerful small drawing by Chan - one of the first works the artist made for his New Orleans Waiting for Godot production in the fall of 2007.

The visual grouping of Chan’s work amidst the collective continues to be part of the artist’s growing legacy in the city. The artist’s work in the city went far beyond his own art - offering free classes, organizing community meetings and exhibitions for local emerging artists. Artists from these classes organized and continued to meet, eventually forming the Front Collective and transforming an abandoned shop in the Ninth Ward into a thriving gallery space. Chan continues to stay connected to these artists, donating work and time in support of the Front’s efforts. The collective is only one example of many artist-initiated efforts in the city towards a self-sustainable and reinvigorated art scene. Other such artist-run spaces have opened up around New Orleans like the Good Children, and Antenna galleries alongside the Studio at Colton, where artists have turned a dilapidated school building into exhibition and art educational space. These artists prove the truly transformative power of art - resurrecting dead spaces within traumatized neighborhoods, offering a solid glimpse of hope even amidst Yeats’ widening gyre.

Natalie Sciortino-Rinehart is an artist and writer living and working in her hometown of New Orleans. She has had works published in the New Orleans Art Review, ArtForum online, and Art Voices magazine. She holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans.