conversations on allison smith

adam and jill talk art (over beer)

6. on procession: the donkey, the jackass, and the mule.

on procession.

what’s happening?

on procession is an art “happening” that will take place in Indianapolis on April 26, 2008, starting in fountain square. basically, smith is organizing (or maybe instigating) a parade commisioned by the indianapolis museum of art. she created several donkey pull toys with herron school of art students which will be pulled in the parade. anyone can enter their art as long as they can pull it for a mile. (we’re thinking about going as art interpreters to decode all the “artspeak” that will inevitably be flying about. ha ha.)

so what’s with the asses?

allison smith is interested in donkeys right now for several reasons…

for one, the donkey as the symbol of the democratic party is a definite reference made in her work. like her other works, smith is using the donkey as a platform to talk about current issues. certainly the election must be at the forefront of most hoosiers’ minds right now, so that seems an obvious connection for her to make. but what else is she talking about?

it is also possible that smith is drawing inspiration from jesus riding into jerusalem on a donkey. this could also explain her current interest in parades.

though smith the organized the parade, there are several other projects associated with the parade. first there is the “project” by fritz haeg, the choreographer of the parade. his idea was to create an event that would in some way reconnect the two parts of the city whose relationship basically destroyed by the construction of interstate right through the heart of the city, thus the east meets west interchange overpass parade. then there are the other artists who have submitted their work to the parade. you can look at them here.

http://www.fritzhaeg.com/studio/projects/indianapolis-parade.html

while smith organized the parade, to us it seems much different that her project as the organizer of the muster. The muster had a common theme that guided each of the artists installations. the works in on procession do not seem to have any guiding theme. Perhaps this is the result of the parade being sponsored by the ima and smith being commissioned to work on the project?

there’s a pretty good article that talks about the ima exhibit portion of the event:

http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=11∫_new=23023∫_modo=2

community involvement? maybe if you are an artist…

we went to a talk by rebecca uchill and larry smallwood who are working on the parade. rebecca is the assistant curator of contemporary at the indianapolis museum of art. She put the whole pull toy donkey thing into context. She said she’s noticed that artists from all around the world are suddenly interested in this parade idea. she mentioned and showed some slides of other artists involved with this idea of ‘on procession.’

we think this idea of bringing art out into the streets is exciting in theory. but we wonder how much this is really art on the street, or if the street is just temporarily the gallery. In other words, because this event was commissioned by the IMA, does it really reflect the “community.”

It seems like Allison Smith has really made an effort to look around Indy and draw local connections into her work…but not really to draw from the city. That is, there are natural connections, especially because of the election, but it’s not really site specific. Basically, the only reason it’s in Indianapolis is because the IMA is footing the bill. We’re not saying there’s anything wrong with that, perse. and larry made sure we all understood that nothing this big happens without institutional backing (cough). but maybe touting the event as engaging, serving or being important to the community is a little much. really, it is important only to the art community. no attempt has been made to draw on other communities in the city. interestingly, some of the “on procession” artists mentioned by rebecca did try and bring together various communities.

2 Comments »

Allison Smith wrote @ April 29, 2008 at 3:43 am

Hi Adam and Jill,

Thanks for putting together this website and blog. I am moved by the generosity and insightfulness of your comments and by your interest and enthusiasm toward my work.

I wanted to respond to this post in order to clarify a few things, and there has been little information circulated about my ideas for the parade and how my project relates to the communities of Indianapolis.

First, I must clarify that, unlike the Muster project, I was not the organizer or the curator for the On Procession parade. That was the IMA curator Rebecca Uchill’s job. I do, however, believe that the parade was inspired, at least in part, by my Muster project. But in this case, I was able to enjoy being just a participant, and the IMA commissioned me to create one of the featured projects.

To me, there were two parts to my project: the sculptures, and the performance. With generous funding from the museum, I was able to work as an artist-in-residence with Herron sculpture students and faculty to create the three large-scale wooden pull-toys: The Donkey, The Jackass, and The Mule. In order to bring these sculptures to life, I partnered with Freetown Village Living History Museum, an organization whose mission includes educating the public about African American lives and culture in Indiana through living history performances. Freetown Village depicts a symbolic community of composite characters representing approximately 3,000 African American men, women, and children identified on the Indianapolis census of 1870, just five years after the American Civil War ended.

As a result of the war, the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution brought four million people out of slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment conferred citizenship upon former slaves, and the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, granted voting rights to black men. Collectively, these Reconstruction Amendments are the post-Civil War legislative measures that effected a paradigm shift in American civil rights.

Although the fight for women’s suffrage had been going on for decades, the Fifteenth Amendment excluded women, which was a bitter disappointment for many. For the On Procession parade, historical interpreters from Freetown Village performed a protest against the Fifteenth Amendment’s exclusion of women. Participants rallied at Fountain Square at noon and took to the streets, chanting and carrying placards with slogans such as Sojourner Truth for President, Amend the 15th, and Marching on to Victory. This was a reenactment of a reenactment performed by Freetown Village during Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign in the 1980s. Conceived as fiction based on fact, I wanted to provide a pocket of history within the parade, with the signage connecting the past to the present through references to the Civil War, the Civil Rights movement, and the current presidential election campaigns. I also wanted to bring a moment of brevity to the parade, to create something beautiful and potentially moving, and to make a clear connection to contemporary events, i.e the importance of voting in the upcoming elections.

In conceptualizing this project for On Procession, I originally wanted to make reference to an archetypal procession, the Biblical story of Palm Sunday, in which Jesus rode on a donkey through the gates of Jerusalem as a political gesture of peace and humility toward onlookers who conversely waved palms as a symbol of military victory and heroism. For Indianapolis, a city that hosts the Indy 500 parade and more war memorials than any other U.S. city outside of Washington, D.C., I envisioned donkeys being pulled through the streets as a playful response to both Indiana’s car culture and the sculptural legacy of militaristic equestrian statuary. I also researched the donkey as a Democratic Party symbol, which originated during Andrew Jackson’s political campaign of 1828, when his opponents called him a “jackass” and he claimed it as his campaign symbol. (A queering gesture, I might add.)

Since Civil War-era Democrats were pro-slavery, the donkey would not have been a positive political symbol for African Americans in 1870. As a “beast of burden,” it may have represented their toil and the heavy load they had born under slavery, or the broken promise of “40 acres and a mule” made by Major General William T. Sherman as compensation to freedmen at the war’s end. It could also have represented the stubbornness and ignorance of Southern whites who would attempt to deter their freedom.

One of my first questions upon visiting Indy was how it came to be that a pro-Union, non-slave-holding state became the national seat of the Ku Klux Klan. I was very inspired to discover Freetown Village. It is the first African American living history organization I have ever encountered, and I have been researching this for many years. The Civil War reenactment world is pretty white, as one might imagine. As with any reenactment group, I am curious about what motivates people to perform history. In the case of Freetown Village, they have chosen to perform a moment of great hope and possibility, a time when African Americans enjoyed a newfound freedom and prosperity, before the Klan came in and attempted to take it all away.

This project was intended to resonate with our current political climate, the particular ways that race and gender are coming together in the ongoing presidential elections, and the tremendous paradigm shift that is possible now. It was perfect timing that both Democratic candidates Obama and Clinton were campaigning in Indiana during the parade.

Finally, I am interested in the ways symbols are unfixed and can carry multiple and often-contradictory meanings that change over time. What is the difference between a donkey, a jackass, and a mule? The answer is confusing and ambiguous. The word donkey translates to “easel” in several languages, and I am interested in making sculptures that are literally a support for ideas and dialog. This can be seen in my Muster and Notion Nanny projects.

It has been a great experience working on this project. Thanks to all of the readers who were a part of it in both large and small ways. If you would like to keep up with what I am working on, please visit my personal website, http://www.allisonsmithstudio.com, a work-in-progress. I will be posting photos of the Freetown Village performers this week.

Cheers,
Allison Smith

onparade2008 wrote @ April 29, 2008 at 5:36 pm

Wow! Definitions straight from the horse’s mouth! That was great to see Allison actually blog to this with her own words as to what was up with the three equine! Looks like I was pretty much right on with my own blog entry.