One man's show
Artist creates curbside exhibit from the ruins of his home
By Doug MacCash
Art critic
Times-Picayune, September 30, 2005

A dozen black mannequin heads atop wooden stakes stood on the grassy median in the 4100 block of St. Claude Avenue on Monday, like a scene from "Apocalypse Now" rendered in Styrofoam.

Nearby rested a sheet metal coffin filled with floodwater amid wooden crosses, a mirror marked with the words "9th Ward RIP" and piles of moldering rugs, furniture, paintings and other works of once-submerged art.

Everything was webbed with orange caution tape, draped with carnival beads and touched with spray-painted graffiti. Although in many ways the detritus blended in with the endless roadside debris in the 9th Ward, this debris was different: It was an art display, perhaps the first of post-Katrina era New Orleans.

Hand-made flyers distributed in the French Quarter announced the "Toxic Art" display in the 4100 block of St. Claude Avenue, with a reception scheduled for Monday afternoon.

The National Guard checkpoint at St. Claude and Elysian Fields no doubt contributed to the low attendance at that outdoor opening, but artist Jeffrey Holmes felt the exhibit was a worthy endeavor nonetheless.

"In New Orleans, there's always something beautiful in the desperation and the trash," he said. "That's where the culture comes from.

"Even if only five people show up," he said, "we should still do it."

More than five attendees showed up in the exhibit's first intensely hot, humid hour: a friend from the neighborhood, an insurance adjuster, three nurses from San Francisco, three of the army of journalists still swarming the city, and a man on a bicycle. Some helped themselves to the iced beers and bottles of liquor in a small blue cooler.

Holmes, a slight, raw-boned man of 40, with gothic-style tattoos coursing up his forearms, explained that the exhibit was made of the furniture and artwork that was submerged in the flood that followed the hurricane.

"Everything's toxic because it's been in the water," he said. "The art has to be thrown away. It's my collection and my wife's collection. I wanted to see it one more time."

In the 1950s, artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns turned away from conventional paint-on-canvas art. Instead, they created artwork assembled from discarded junk. To them, it seemed more real than illusionist paintings and sculpture. Holmes' "Toxic Art," made from the remnants of his shattered and soaked life, is realer still. If Holmes' were to receive a review, that would be it.

Apparently, however, not all reviews of this impromptu art exhibit are as glowing.

At approximately 4 a.m. Tuesday morning, Holmes said he woke to the sound of vehicles in the street below his second-floor home. A National Guardsman exited a Humvee and removed the mannequin heads from the sticks in his outdoor exhibit. When he asked what the soldiers were doing, he was told that some of the guardsmen found the installation offensive, believing that the black foam head had negative racial overtones.

Holmes argued that he meant no such thing and that it was his right to freely express himself anyway. After further quarreling, the guardsmen departed, replaced in a few minutes by New Orleans police officers who called Holmes to the street and arrested him for drunkenness and disturbing the peace.

He was released from the makeshift jail at the Union Passenger Terminal later in the morning. The show is still there, but Holmes let the mannequin heads stay on the ground where the guardsmen had tossed them.