Homage to a Krewe

by Simeon Hunter, New Orleans Art Review

IN HER LATEST piece, Hommage to Ste. Anne, Ersy Schwartz delights, surprises and

Ersy: Hommage to Ste. Anne, detail, 2003, mixed media

intrigues us, offering an open invitation to share her very particular vision of one of New Orleans’ most diverse and surprisingly little known Mardi Gras parades.

We see an impossibly tall, unreasonably long mahogany table; a complete parade of bronze figures and their floats walks around its perimeter. The foot-high artist’s signature on the wall together with the years in which the piece was undertaken and completed, shed light on the extent of Ersy’s personal investment in this epic, yet curiously hermetic, work.

Ersy is perhaps best known for a practice which makes very direct, often deliciously perverse, references to the Surrealist tradition. In Hommage to Ste. Anne it seems that a complex new understanding, a maturity of both art and artist, has emerged, bringing in its wake an abdication of playful references to art and its histories, revealing instead an understanding that art, at its best, may achieve a merging of self with subject.

This artist is also known for the extraordinary quality of her craft, and her Hommage is no exception. What is perhaps surprising is the way in which she has constructed these exquisite figures. The bronze paraders and their chariots are cast from cheap plastic children’s toys which have been cut down and reassembled to complete the absurd, baffling identities which here are shown not as mask or costume but rather as fully fledged mythical creatures which elude identification whilst resonating deeply with a half forgotten tradition. The artificial paraders, like those who enact this ritual each year in person, are made to look as though they are very refined, highly finished, very beautiful.

The decision to work in bronze overlays the subjects with implications of value and permanence alike. The everyday found objects from which they derive remind us that the riotous costumes we see in the real parade are fabricated with huge care from scraps of fabric and deliciously mis-used items acquired with gleeful perversity as sources as diverse as Home Depot and Fifi Mahoney’s.

Ersy: Hommage to Ste. Anne, 2003 mixed media, 56 x 144 x 36 inches.

The falsity of the mask has as its only function the revelation of unspeakable truths. Ritual serves to tame the overwhelming, to remind us of that which we must forget we think we know in order to fully understand. The aesthetic of a piece immaculately crafted in bronze and hardwood reveals a sense of history and at the same time locates our contemporary behavior within a mythology which, whether real or imagined, must be understood to carry revelations of frightening, archetypal truths in a form which we may contemplate without the abdication of control. The artist’s careful deployment of traditional values in the representation of our wildest desires makes it possible for us to look at our own madness with astonishing calm.

Some of the founding members would include Jon Newlin, “sage” and Henri Schindler, designer for Rex and Commentator for the Meeting of Courts as broadcast on WYES Mardi Gras night, each of whom are honored with individual “portraits”, not forgetting the Krew’s guiding spirit, Paul Poche. More recent member, friend and fellow sculptress,

Elizabeth Shannon is also rendered in portrait.

The Krew of Ste. Anne is an aspect of this city’s culture which is familiar to many within the both the gay and art communities. Indeed it could be said to lie at the heart of a certain understanding of Bohemia as practiced here, as the epicenter of an enactment which is at once representative of the intoxicating and intoxicated beauties for which we are celebrated and at the same time shot through with a joyous sadness which overcomes us in the light of personal tragedy. This is a parade which mobilizes much of the most creative talent in the city to perform their respective identities with a vigor and an exuberance which the accidental witness would find difficult to believe.

Every Mardi Gras this joyous, committed, hard won, expression of love for life in all its richness coagulates into the lightest of collective madnesses as it wends its way through the Bywater to the Marigny and on through the quarter along Royal Street to Canal, where it waits, with remarkable patience, for Zulu and Rex to pass. This is where the real complexity of this city’s representational culture is revealed. Embracing all those whose attachment to the joys, troubles, amazements and terrors of life hold real beauty, this most celebratory of parades proceeds to the Mississippi, transmogrifying itself into an emotive Jazz funeral, pausing to reflect upon the lives of fallen members, whose ashes are sent to join the force of our great river, to wash the world clean of prejudice, conformity and blindnesses of the soul, to undertake the unending burden of the dead and remind us how to live.

The Krew of Ste. Anne demands, and very rightly receives, that its members perform their identities in ways that, however diverse, enact representation through masquerade at an advanced aesthetic level.

Everyone involved exercises their creative prowess differently. Everyone involved, whether as participant or spectator, experiences this performance in their own way, relating its details to their own lives, their own sense of who they are in the world. This sense may be seriously distorted by the time the parade arrives in the Quarter. But even on Mardi Gras day, even for tourists desperately seeking to have care forget them, this parade is an experience which cannot be cheapened or ignored.

In this new piece, Ersy very generously shares her own, particular, experience of this event with us. She brings us literally face to face with it by placing the many bronze figures almost at eye-level, emphasizing our participation in the act of spectatorship.

Her experience is deep rooted and particular. If the parade is an epicenter of Bohemian culture, the artist representing it has grown to womanhood cloaked by that culture. Her French Quarter home is a kind of conversation in which the substance other art and the fabric of the city merge in an architectural space which is quoted throughout her oeuvre, not least in this new work.

Hommage to Ste. Anne is, above all, an enactment of representation through masquerade at an aesthetic level whose audacity goes beyond any yet attempted by a member of the Krew.