History in the remaking: continuing its artistic engagement with a complex local past, the 2002 Spoleto Festival once again featured a controversial brand of community-based work - Report From Charleston

Art in America, Dec, 2002 by Eleanor Heartney

Caravella, by New York-based Marc Latamie, was clearer in its conception but suffered from a sense of displacement. Extending his long-standing interest in trade and exchange, the artist designed a small store whose dimensions were taken from the slave cabins at a local plantation museum. Despite this reference, the work was not inspired by slavery but by Charleston's history as a trading center and port town. The building was designed to conjure up a small company store on a Martinique sugar plantation, a memory from the artist's childhood. It was stocked with familiar goods from the island: bottles of rum, rice, coffee, soap made from goose lard, condensed milk, Uncle Ben's rice, canned corned beef, canned butter. These items were on display but not actually for sale because of customs regulations. In fact, the only items that visitors could purchase were bottles of local Middleton spring water; Laramie had altered the label, transforming the Neo-Classical nude into a Creole woman.

The work raised a variety of issues: the endangered nature of the neighborhood grocery store, the port as a conduit of goods and cultural ideas, trade as a cultural unifier. Though Martinique shares Charleston's slave history, there seemed little logical connection between the two locales beyond the artist's past and current experiences. Meanwhile, the creation of an inactive store did little to advance the larger mandate of "Evolving History" to foster cross-cultural interactions and reinvigorate endangered communities.

Latamie's second project had a more performative aspect. It was situated in a restaurant serving Charleston's special dishes at Middleton Place, a plantation turned tourist attraction. Latamie arranged for two chefs from Martinique to fly in and create a new menu that used local ingredients in traditional Martinique recipes. Offered to patrons during the chefs' two-week residency, the fusion cuisine was meant to highlight food as an agent of cultural exchange. This notion, however, was expressed in such a subtle manner that the work was perceived simply as a special menu rather than performance art.

Other projects were scattered throughout the city. The most perplexing was Yinka Shonibare's Space Walk, comprising a pair of mannequins dressed as astronauts. Suspended above the seats in a dark theater, they were attired in space suits fashioned from the artist's trademark faux-African fabric and attached by a "life-support" cord to a half-scale fiberglass and polyester resin Gemini space shuttle graffitied with the words "Martin Luther." Local critics differed as to whether this referred to the area's dominant Protestantism or to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but neither interpretation did much to explain why these Africanesque astronauts should be floating overhead. This attempt at postcolonial commentary was lost in space.

At Drayton Hall, Charleston's oldest preserved plantation, Kim Sooja created Planted Names, a set of black-and-white carpet runners placed in rooms surrounding the Great Hall. Woven into the fabric were the names of local African-American residents culled from Drayton Hall's historical records. The names of slaves, freed blacks and current citizens were intermixed, and a perusal revealed certain recurring surnames. Most intriguing were the slave names--some of the slaves had apparently retained their African sobriquets, while others were given descriptive titles or simply provided with the last names of their masters. Though it was interesting to speculate on possible relationships suggested by the names, the work was ultimately a rather simplistic and formally drab exercise in historical revisionism.