THESE DAYS, VOLUNTEERS IN NEWORLEANS'S Lower Ninth Ward can be foundtrimming, uprooting, and generally hacking atvines, ferns, and feral shrubbery. Louisiana has alot of "exuberant vegetation," as one Tulane biolo-gist has put it, and when you contemplate thealacrity with which nature is reclaiming theLower Ninth Ward, you do sense a certain creepyvegetable enthusiasm. Many buildings have beendemolished, and many that remain are vacant.Particularly after nightfall, when the few illumi-nated homes glow like oil platforms in splendidisolation, the overall impression is of one vast seaof weed sretching as the eye castretchingn see–allthe way to the downtown skyline, with its rook-ery of high-rise hotels. You can easily imagine thatit's just a matter of time before the cypresses andthe tupelo gums and the alligators and thearmadillos come back, and the whole placereverts to swamp.

And the swamp does return, in a manner ofspeaking, in Adam Cvijanovic's Bayou, 2008,which is one of the more than 280 works inProspect.1, New Orleans's first biennial of con-temporary art. In three rooms on the second floorof a small, rickety house in the Lower Ninth Ward,Cvijanovic has painted wrap-around murals

depicting a pristine wetland in all its glory: skeinsof moss drooping toward placid water; birdsalighting under massive, gnarled trees; densefoliage filtering sunlight into a chartreuse gloam-ing. The house itself seems abandoned, empty offurniture, the ceilings mottled with water stains.Signs of domestic and mercantile life are arrayedthroughout the rooms: a mirror propped against awall; a carton of blank sales receipts; a few glassChristmas lights on a mantelpiece. Most of theserelics appear to be decades old. (One yellowedcalendar, decorated with little nosegays, is dated1923.) All of them are on the cusp of returning todust, making way for the scene that seems to bellyinto the room like a sail, barely contained by thedark wooden moldings that frame it.

Cvijaanovic's swamp, in otherwords, registers not as prelapsarian but as post-lapsarian, which may be the source of the dreadfascination it exerts. On a smaller scale, it articu-lates the same vision as Alan Weisman's 2007book, The World without Us, in which the authorexplains exactly how microbes, plants, and ani-mals will, upon our eventual extinction, slowlyb reak down everything we've wro u g h t .Apparently, people are drawn to such projections:The book was on the New York Times best-sellerlist for six months. Perhaps when Weltschmerzreaches a certain level, the only way to soothe it isto imagine the Welt without us–to remind our-selves that someday, nature itself will soften thecontours of our failures and mistakes and finallyefface them. In any case, Weltschmerz is probablyclose at hand for most visitors to the Lower NinthWa rd, or indeed to New Orleans, wherereminders of our recent collective failures remainabundant and, to those who have had no oppor-tunity to become inured to them, shocking.

As if to articulate this fre e - f l o a t i n greproach, someone has posted a handwritten sighon a telephone pole near Battle Ground BaptistChurch that reads THINK THAT YOU MIGHT BEWRONG. Battle Ground Baptist–also in theLower Ninth Wa rd and the site of anotherP rospect.1 work, Nari Wa rd's Diamond Gym;Action Network, 2008–is a low-slung brick build-ing whose unprepossessing appearance belies itslong history: It was established in 1869 inFazendeville, an African-American community in

nearby St. Bernard Parish. In the early 1960s,after the federal government expro p r i a t e dFazendeville's land create a park, the churchmoved to the Lower Ninth Ward, where it per-sisted until August 2005.

When I visited, the double doors stoodwide open, spilling light onto the lawn andrevealing Wa rd's sculpture: a hulking, gem-shaped metal armature filled with a jumble ofd e relict exercise equipment. Voices could beheard, getting louder as I approached, but onceinside, I saw that no one else was there–not evenas attendant or guard. The sounds were comingfrom speakers, and they gradually resolve them-selves into a layered composition of music andspeech fragments: Martin Luther King Jr. ,Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey. Torqued mirrorswere installed behind the piece, creating a disori-enting thicket of reflections.

It's hard to convey how eerie it was tothink of Ward's sculpture sitting there, keepingits own murmuring counsel in an abandonedchurch in a silent, empty neighborhood. In itscommanding inscrutability, it was weirdly remi-niscent of the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey,

the one that is discovered on the moon and turnsout to be a communications beacon. But if thework was calling former residents back, itsmagus-like presence offered no assurances thatthey would find aid or comfort when theyarrived. Diamond Gym seemed simply to beinsisting on an absolute imperative toreturn–insisting, that is, that history hasn't yetcome to an end in this particular place. And yet,while there are people and organizations insist-ing the same thing, and making valiant efforts torestore inundated neighborhoods, the concertedfederal support that was promised has neverreally materialized. Which is why, more thatthree years after Katrina, nature is still offeringits melancholy dispensation to the Lower NinthWard.

But what kind of dispensation can a contem-porary art biennial offer? What kind should it bein the business of offering? These are the ques-tions raised by Prospect.1. The exhibition, curat-ed by Dan Cameron, is the largest internationalcontemporary art biennial ever organized in theUnited States. It contains works of every conceiv-able description by eighty-one artists from six-

teen countries, installed at more than two dozenvenues, from the vast Palladian pile that is theNew Orleans Museum of Art to the disused IdealAuto Repairs garage (where there is a grungilybeautiful installation of silver-black abstractionsand ghostly monochrome wall paintings byJacqueline Humphries). It is an enormous show,and Cameron has not made any attempt to unifyit via a particular thematic or theoretical scheme.What unifies it, rather, is its map–not the typicalno-frills biennial site guide, but a colorful, AcmeNovelty Library–ish document replete with side-bars and small blocks of text explaining the histo-ries of the various venues. The sites themselvesare marked on the map by lettered disks that looklike the keys on an old-fashioned typewriter, andin a curious way the constellation they formseems like Prospect.1's real curatorial statement.

The alpha and omega of this exhibition is NewOrleans itself, and, not surprisingly, many of theworks address the events that recently transpiredthere, putting forward a kind of material rhetoricstripped down to the most basic propositions.

First and foremost are the houses.It's basic thing, a house–a fundament of Maslow'shierarchy of needs, its foursquare representationknown to every kindergartner. Yet in Prospect.1,it's as if houses are more like giant squid–entitieswhose very existence strains credulity, and somust be affirmed again and again. They're all overthe exhibition: houses as medium, dream houses,n i g h t m a re houses. At the Contemporary A r t sCenter, one of the biennial's main venues, MonicaBonvicini's big black-and-white drawings bringthe grainy cast of old crime-scene photography toimages of flooded homes, while on the roof of theNew Orleans Museum of Art she has mounted anenormous illuminated sign that re a d sDESIRE–conjuring thoughts of Te n n e s s e eWilliam's play, though one wonders if evenBlanche DuBois's powder, perfume, and paperlanterns would have been enough to diffuse therealities of a FEMA trailer. (There's one of those,too–repurposed by Paul Villinski as a mobile artstudio.) The House That Herman Built, 2003–,also on view at the CAC, illustrates one way ofcoping with the realities of a six-by-nine-footprison cell: It's an installation documenting thelong-term collaboration–part architectural project,part fundraiser, and part artful correspondence–between New Orleans-based artist Jackie Sumell

and Louisiana State Penitentiaryinmate Herman Wallace, who hasbeen held in solitary confinementfor decades for a murder it seemslikely he did not commit. If

Wallace is ever released, he may find himself liv-ing in a traditional Louisiana-style A-frame houseand lounging by a swimming pool with blackpanther design on the bottom of it. For every suchredemptive vision, however, there are others thatdo the work of mourning–the dim, empty bunga-low in Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla'smesmerizing video A Man Screaming Is Not aDancing Bear, 2008, for instance, or the moth-col-ored latex cast of somebody's decimated cottagethat Takashi Horisaki has hung from the ceiling ofthe Hefler Wa rehouse, another central venue.Sewn together with big wire stitches, it's moregarment than building–a shroud, registering themulticolored stigmata of mold.

And then there are the boats. There is anark–Mark Bradford's Mithera, 2008–constructedout of locally salvaged materials and beached ona lawn in the Ninth Ward. There is a giant orangeboat, Miguel Palma's Rescue Games, 2008, filledwith water and motorized, so that it rocks ponder-ously; you can climb up on a scaffolding and peerdown and watch the water rolling fore and aft inan endless, hypnotizing wave. There is a peculiarvessel, made of wooden staves and not particular-

ly watertight in appear-ance. Its eccentric,branching shape is basedon a map of NewOrleans's waterways:Various pseudopods rep-resent the SeventeenthS t reet Canal, theMississippi River GulfOutlet, and so on. Thiswork A l e x a n d reA r rechea's MississippiBucket, 2008–is to befound in front of Harrah'son the downtown waterfront, a short walk fromthe Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. Anothergiant illuminated sign–CASINO–looms above it, areminder that you take your chances when you goto sea in sieve, as when you build a city on aflood-plain and let its barrier islands wash away.

And yet in one's peregrinations from pointto point– in the process of navigating the exhibi-tion–these ostensibly stable constructions, thesehouses and boats, come to seem unsettled, contin-gent, and adrift. The map's lettered disks are bigenough to read easily, but too big to indicate pre-cisely the location of the works. not all of whichare easy to find. Mississippi Bucket, for example,was supposed to be in a place called the Plaza ofGood Fortune, but no on I spoke with–not theparking valets at Harrah's, not the security guardwho got on his radio and asked if anyone listen-ing had ever heard of such a plaza, not theconcierge at the hotel across the street–had anyidea where that might be. Uptown at Tulane, Iwent looking for a work that, it turned out, hadnever actually been completed; mystified admin-istrators kept directing me to the campus sculp-ture garden, full of steely '70s geometries. RobinRhode's fountain like Contemplation Piece, 2008,at the watery edge of the Ninth Ward, proved aselusive as Ponce de Leon's Fountain of Youth.Though fixed on the map, the works in realitywere unmoored in the general flux of the citywhich–judging from the profusion of "For Sale"and "Going Out of Business" signs, on the onehand, and the constant sound of construction andsmell o sawdust on the other–seems to be rebuild-ing and disbanding at the same time.

But this unrest also imparts a certain fron-tier ambience, and the contemporary art scene ingeneral is thriving, as art scenes will in suchatmospheres. Artist-run galleries, such as GoodChildren and the Front, are opening up in vacantbuildings. The city has turned the Charles J.Colton School, a mold-encrusted white elephant,over to artists, who have transformed it into aw a r ren of studios and impromptu exhibitionspaces. (Cai Guo-Qiang's Prospect.1 project, BlackF i reworks, 2008, a light show whose silentp y rotechnics can be watched from massagechairs, has been installed in the musty auditori-um.) The young director of the George and LeahMcKenna Museum of African American A r t ,Shantrelle P. Lewis, has started a contemporaryprogram showcasing, when I visited, the work ofNew Orleans painters; group shows of localartists at the nonprofit venue and residency centerLouisiana ArtWorks and in a disused furniturestore–the former curated by Mia Kaplan, the lattera salon-style expo spearheaded by gallerist AndyA n t i p p a s – w e re full of impressive work. Theimprovisational spirit makes for some bizarre jux-tapositions: The furniture store, for instance,shares a building with a police station, and there'sno wall separating the two spaces. Cops can beseen standing around the sergeant's desk drinking

coffee, just steps away from the art. Later, a friendto whom I described all this said that it sounded"like Berlin after the wall came down." It's an opencity, in other words, with all the prospect ofadventure that that implies (for some). But it isstill roiled by violence, poverty, and corruptionscandals. When you walk around experiencingthe dazedness that seems to persisteverywhere–not just in the Lower Ninth Ward,however much it is fetishized as the locus of catas-trophe–you sense that the city is open also in thesense of agape, like a mouth.

Some Prospect.1 artists have chosen to putwords in that mouth, as it were, using fabulationor narrative to rearticulate histories both recentand not-so-recent. At the New Orleans Center forCreative Arts, Nedko Solakov presents an antic,poignant installation that combines videos, loopi-ly scrawled wall texts, his trademark little draw-ings, and an amalgam of medieval Bulgarian andcontemporary Creole kitsch. To make a long andconvoluted story short, Solakov's conceit is thatKatrina was actually caused by Baldwin, Emperorof Flanders whoa died in 1205 but who lives on asa vengeful ghost, wreaking hydrogeologic havocaround the world. Sanford Biggers's sculptureBlossom, 2007, at the Old US Mint, alludes to JimCrow atrocities: A player piano, slowly plinking

out a rendition of "Strange Fruit," is smashed intothe trunk of what the artist refers to as "TheHanging Tree." And Skylar Fein's harro w i n ginstallation at the CAC, Remember the UpstairsLounge, 2008, uses signage and red flocked wall-paper to re-create the interior of a New Orleansgay bar where, in 1973, thirty-two men died in afire that probably caused by arson. On the wallsare snapshots of the dead and a graphic newspa-per photos of the fire's aftermath. (In one, a manwho is evidently in shock stares calmly at hishands, which appear to have melted.) In a moreoblique way, too, the many Prospect.1 works thattrade in ornament and in a carnival logic of mis-rule and masquerade (e.g., amazing, enormoustapestries by Shawne Major at the CAC, whichchime with the lately ubiquitous El Anatsui's, atthe Old US Mint; the campy comedy of KalupLinzy; a demented Hall of Presidents created byStephen G Rhodes) resonate with the strategies bywhich the city has traditionally formulated poly-phonic refusals of speechlessness–whether thekind that is symptomatic of shock, or he kind

imposed via political and geographic marginal-ization. And then, finally, there are works thathave nothing whatsoever to do with New Orleansbut just seem to be there because, presumably,Cameron likes them and thinks viewers will aswell. Which is fine, but the show is undoubtedlystrongest where the work speaks directly to whatan NGO worker would call "conditions on theground."

The reference to an NGO worker is in factgermane. For if Prospect.1 lacks an overarchingtheme or unifying frame, if does have a single rai-son d'être, by which it interpolates itself not onlyspatially but politically and economically into theterritory it maps. The biennial's altruistic purposeis to provide New Orleans with what it so clearlyneeds: money. The Prospect.1 website is verydirect. Under the heading "Why a biennial forNew Orleans?" it asserts that the exhibition "seeksto base an entirely new category of tourism for thecity on the growing American interest in somepeople detect in Prospect.1. And yes, indeed,there's something off-putting in the image of well-

heeled art lovers trundling through the LowerNinth Ward in shuttle buses. Yet all biennials abetthe symbiosis of art and hospitality industry–eventhose that take place in cities that are already art-world centers. To criticize Prospect.1 for itsemphasis on tourist-driven revenue stre a m stherefore seems faintly absurd, because such criti-cism would imply either that all biennials arei n h e rently objectionable (a defensible positionperhaps, but not one that warrants singling outthis particular show) or that it is in the emphasisitself that Prospect.1 has gone astray–that its realfailure was a failure to dissimulate.

P e rhaps more problematic thanP rospect.1's relation to the tourism economy,though, is its relation to the tourist optic–adetached, indulgent mode of viewing that canand does aestheticize all that comes before it, themore picturesquely decrepit the better. All bienni-als that go beyond institutional walls, as most ofthem do, court this spectatorial mode, even asthey may try to counteract it by laying claim to thesimple moral authority of being there. Sometimesthe claims are explicit–the curatorial methodology

makes some overt attempt to establish a reflexivecriticality vis-a-vis the exhibition's relationship toits setting–but in the case of Prospect.1, it's implic-it. The unstated assertion is that context-specifici-ty or -responsiveness itself will neutralize thewholesale aestheticizing of the entire city,emblematized by that beguiling map: The workswill engender an ethical interaction betweenviewer and site that precludes imperious detach-ment and dissolves spectatorial guilt. This posi-tion is complicated, though, by the fact that"being there" is more difficult in some places thanothers. How does looking at site-specific workchange in a place as thoroughly mediated as post-Katrina New Orleans? There may in fact be sitesthat have been so extensively disseminated asimage that it is difficult to feel one can inhabitthem in real space at all –at least, if on is a tourist,someone unfamiliar with the place as it existedbefore all the cameras arrived. The virtual screenbecomes a permanent meniscus between percep-tion and reality, and we experience a kind of falseproximity.

It may be impossible to reconcile mediatedviewing with any immediate, lived experiencewithin New Orleans, and we could not reason-ably ask any curator or artist to perform that fearfor us. Indeed, no matter what curatorial inter-ventions Cameron had undertaken, responsibilityfor negotiating this irreconcilable diff e re n t i a lwould ultimately devolve to the viewer–who,after all, is the one doing the aestheticizing. As for

myself, I liked Prospect.1 very much, found itcompelling and frequently riveting–but couldnever quite shake the feeling that somethingMIGHT BE WRONG in my address of the workand the city that contained it. Cvijanovic's Bayouand Wa rd's Diamond Gym, for example, areamong the most powerful context-specific worksI've ever encountered, and I fully partook of theaffective charge they derived from their surround-ings. The works were haunting, uncanny–and yetthose very qualities bespoke a certain detach-ment. The uncanny itself is, after all, a by-productof image-production technology, if we are to taketheorists dating back to Walter Benjamin at theirword.

Certainly in the wake of Katrina, therewere constant invocations of the surreality of thescenes unfolding before our eyes on televisionand on our computer scre e n s – e x p ressions ofastonishment that were in some sense simplyamplifications of the unheimlich exoticism thathas always been associated with the city. Andwhen push comes to shove, as it did with Katrina,the Janus-faced nature of exoticism is alwaysrevealed; what is titillatingly strange becomes dis-turbingly so. " It looks like a third-world country,"was the refrain. What is perhaps most toxic in thatstatement is the underlying assumption that thereis some ontological distinction between Americaand a "third-world country"; and the notion thatcertain kinks of suffering, and sufferers, are ipsofacto un-American ("refugees"). And that is essen-tially the same geopolitical metaphysics that haslong served to reduce people to what has recentlybeen termed bare life. What else did Barbara Bushmean when she said that the Houston Astrodomewas "working very well" for the New Orleans res-idents who wound up there? She meant: For thesepeople whose humanity is so etiolaed that theydon't even desire privacy, palatable food, or amodicum of order in their lives, an MRE as goodas a feast. The worst-case scenario would be thatin viewing Prospect.1, in offering New Orleansthe ministrations of your dollars an your aston-ished regard, you are recuperating this logic. Thenagain, perhaps this is one thing that we actuallyhave the power to expiate. As Diane Arbus saidwhen asked how she composed her photo-graphs,"If I stand in front of something, instead of

arranging it, I arrange myself." This aphorism onthe way to approach artmaking may apply to theviewing of art, too. And that's the inversion thatProspect.1 may ultimately perform, a turning ofthe camera from subject to spectator. Viewer, healthyself.