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The politics of renewal: the process and record of Paul Chan's Waiting for Godot in New Orleans

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THE POLITICS OF RENEWAL:
THE PROCESS AND RECORD OF PAUL CHAN’S
WAITING FOR GODOT IN NEW ORLEANS

by

Emily Wilkerson

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES

May 2012

Copyright 2012 Emily Wilkerson

ii

Epigraph

“All artworks, even the affirmative, are a priori polemical.”

-Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

iii

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to my thesis committee: Anne Bray, for infinite levels of inspiration, for
supporting my interests in and love for New Orleans, and for having fun while working
hard; Alexandro Segade for your humor and encouragement—it has been a pleasure
working with you this year as your faculty assistant; and to Richard Meyer, for your
support and guidance during this process.

Thank you to Rhea Anastas and Noura Wedell for your insight and for supporting my
interests, ideas and opinions. Also, thank you to Joshua Decter and my colleagues for
creating an engaging learning environment in Los Angeles.

Thank you to Cauleen Smith and Barbara London for your generous contributions to my
research, and to Malik Gaines for sharing your writing on performance and your theory
of quadruple consciousness—it inspired a great deal of my research.

I’d also like to express my gratitude to my family, Matthew Dupre and close friends for
your support, as well as Emily Eichhorn-Nye, Anna Kryczka, Amy Mackie, Mikeila
Nagura, Mari Rodriguez, Brettany Shannon and Sara Wilkerson—amazing women
curating, creating and making wonderful things happen on a daily basis. Thank you for
your encouragement, guidance and friendship.

iv

Lastly, thank you to all of the artists and individuals I have met and worked with in New
Orleans for your warmth, for sharing your talent and for your inspiration—I look forward
to our future encounters.

v

Table of Contents

Epigraph ii

Acknowledgements iii

List of Figures vi

Abstract vii

Introduction 1

Chapter One: “You Gotta Leave Something Behind for the Community” 6
A Play in Two Acts, A Project in Three Parts 10
Redevelopment Rhetoric 16
Chan’s Artistic Practice | Chan’s Activist Practice 22
Recognizing Double (or Quadruple) Consciousness 32

Chapter Two: Remembering – Reforming – Revisiting 36
The Live Project 39
The Mediated Record 45
Politics of Distribution 64
Creating, Engaging and Renewing Publics 68

Conclusion 72

Bibliography 77

vi

List of Figures

Figure 1. New Orleans home and Waiting for Godot in New Orleans sign 5

Figure 2. Paul Chan, Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, 2007 15
Figure 3. Paul Chan, April note, 2007 35
Figure 4. Cauleen Smith, Frame grab from The Fullness of Time, 2008 48
Figure 5. Cauleen Smith, Frame grab from The Fullness of Time, 2008 49
Figure 6. Waiting for Godot in New Orleans installation at MoMA, 2011 53
Figure 7. Paul Chan, Voices and Sounds as audioguides… 2010 54
Figure 8. “Street work” page for Waiting for Godot in New Orleans sub-site 57
Figure 9. “Shadow Fund” page for Waiting for Godot in New Orleans sub-site 71

vii

Abstract

This manuscript presents a critical analysis of authorship, participation, distribution and
perception of Paul Chan’s project Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Play in Two
Acts, A Project in Three Parts and its afterlife, highlighting the contradictions of working
in this genre of art production. In 2007, Chan organized an experiential project in New
Orleans in response to the loss experienced and lack of recovery exhibited in the wake of
Hurricane Katrina; presently, this project exists as multiple records and objects
circulating within the art sphere. Examining Chan’s project and its mediated afterlife, this
study navigates the tensions present before, during and after the transformation from
project to archive through the intersection of art and politics. It presents a response to
growing concerns of how to responsibly document and exhibit socially engaged practices,
as well as an interest in methodologies for critically analyzing these practices.

1
Introduction

Among the hundreds of projects presented in the “Living as Form” archive on
Creative Time’s website, Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, a multi-part project initiated
by artist Paul Chan in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, is represented by an image of a
damaged house and a sign depicting stage directions for the play, Waiting for Godot. In
2011, New York City-based art organization Creative Time hosted their third annual
summit dedicated to socially engaged contemporary art practices—practices and projects
around the globe that address pressing societal and political issues. The “Living as Form”
summit (2011) highlighted practices that engage publics in ways reaching beyond the
traditional aesthetic object focus of the art sphere. The summit proved that there has been
an escalation of art practices engaging society for many years and a growing recognition
of these types of practices within an art discourse, as well as the issues one faces when
documenting and exhibiting them. From projects that address issues regarding
immigration and the environment to the mobilization of alternative economies and
education, the lines between art and life, and art and politics, are constantly blurred in the
“Living as Form” archive. When the work discussed here is classified as an art project,
rather than an educational workshop or political campaign, for example, we are faced
with many contradictions in efforts to examine these works critically. The projects beg
the question of interpretation and categorization as aesthetic objects or works, or social
practices that support political positions. By virtue of their multimodal approach, such
projects occupy multiple spheres of influence. These projects define themselves through

2
particular rhetorical strategies, as well as through a designation of authorship or
collaboration and intention, that are found within their processes and documentation.
These projects have been categorized recently as “social art practice” or “socially
engaged art practice,” terms stemming from a dialogue that began centuries ago as artists,
curators and cultural producers developed projects away from the institutional setting of
museums and galleries, creating works within public space that sought to engage
particular publics in more direct ways, often through collaboration. This dialogue focused
on site-specific projects, relational practices and works engaging community politics by
theorists such as Nicolas Bourriaud, Miwon Kwon, Suzanne Lacy, Claire Bishop and
Grant H. Kester. Each has focused on defining terms for these practices, offering the field
a vocabulary and critical questions to consider working within public space. The artistic
practices I have described here serve as the basis for my investigation, embodying
concerns regarding rhetoric, collaboration, intention and documentation.
This study mines the double consciousness of creating socially engaged art
through both theoretical and curatorial methodologies, engaging in a critical analysis of
authorship, participation, distribution and perception in Paul Chan’s project, Waiting for
Godot in New Orleans: A Play in Two Acts, A Project in Three Parts.
1
The concept of
double consciousness calls into question what we want to do or accomplish in regard to
what forces beyond our control will support, charging us to make important, often ethical,

1
“Double consciousness” is a term used by author and civil rights scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois. He wrote about
this concept of a double-self, or double consciousness, as a main characteristic of a Black American’s life in the late
1890s and early 1900s, describing its presence as how a person imagined oneself through the eyes of others, versus
how one lived through his or her own gaze—a concept that can be applied to many situations, but has strong
undertones of racial inequality. The concept functions as a call to action, to move beyond the limitations of the set of
contradictions. See W.E.B. Du Bois, “Strivings of the Negro People,” Atlantic Monthly 80, no. 478 (August 1897), in
Du Bois on Reform: Periodical-based Leadership for African Americans, ed. Brian Johnson (Lanham, MD: AltaMira
Press, 2005), 21.

3
decisions concerning the contradictions inherent to producing a socially engaged project,
as well as the processes of documenting and distributing it. Amid destruction wrought by
Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Chan entered a fragile community in 2006, organizing a free
experiential art project in public composed of staging a historical plays in New Orleans,
Louisiana, and processes of community engagement and organizing. Chan’s project,
Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, raises questions about how, as an artist, he has
developed and responded to the documentation and distribution of this work; as well as
how curators or cultural producers are challenged to responsibly document social works,
and how and to whom the works are then shown.
Presently, Waiting for Godot in New Orleans exists as a publication, an archive-
installation, a film, online archives and through myths and memories, each contributing
to the project’s afterlife. While the project in New Orleans has received great acclaim for
creating multiple platforms for engagement and collaboration within the community, I
have chosen to focus equally on the elements of documentation of the project, as these
materials contest issues of authorship, sustainability, audience, history and the future—
much of which has not undergone examination to the extent of the project itself.
Positioning this work as a case study within an ongoing investigation of critique in regard
to socially engaged practices, I juxtapose an exploration of the project and its afterlife
with art and politics. This manuscript explores the ways in which art and cultural
projects, especially socially engaged practices, position themselves within both aesthetic
and socio-political discourses. These ideas are the focus of Chapter 1, along with an
examination of Chan’s artistic practice and political activism in relation to his work in

4
New Orleans. In Chapter 2, I deconstruct Chan’s project in New Orleans in relation to the
ideas presented in Chapter 1, while also navigating methodologies to analyze the tensions
that exist between the aesthetic art object, often created through documentation, and the
interaction and collaboration embedded within socially engaged practices.
While many projects began contributing to the redevelopment of New Orleans in
2005, both through cultural production and other types of physical and psychological
rehabilitation, many did not contribute sustainably, leaving the city within a year of the
storm or dissolving soon after. This manuscript focuses on the projects that worked in
response to notions of disaster capitalism, and instead contributed to society and continue
to do so today, rather than those that used the city as merely a platform for display or
commentary. Using arguments by contemporary theorists that focus on the opportunities
for renewal present after a disaster, as well as those that inform us of contemporary
practices in the public sphere, this manuscript engages in a critical analysis of Waiting for
Godot in New Orleans and the inherent complexities of the live and mediated.
Throughout this project, Chan attempted to balance an art project, his political and
activist interests, processes of community engagement and documentation—each
demanding a definite level of consciousness. Through an exploration of multiple
instances of double consciousness, I dissect the questions plaguing socially engaged
practices regarding their composition and the distribution of their afterlife through the
intersection of art and politics.

5

Figure 1. New Orleans home and Waiting for Godot in New Orleans sign. This image
represents the project Waiting for Godot in New Orleans in Creative Time’s “Living as
Form” summit archive (2011). The signs were made by Chan, and posted throughout the
city.

Source: Creative Time:
http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2011/livingasform/archive.htm

6
Chapter One: “You Gotta Leave Something Behind for the
Community”

During his visit to New Orleans, Louisiana, in 2006, artist Paul Chan decided to
site a project in the city in response to the loss and lack of recovery he witnessed a full
year after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. Within six months of his original visit
to speak about his work exhibited in Breathing Time: Works from the Debra and Dennis
Scholl Collection at Tulane University’s Newcomb Art Gallery in New Orleans, he
moved to the city and began working among the community providing outlets for
conversations, gatherings and remembrance. Developing a series of productions of
Samuel Beckett’s tragicomedy Waiting for Godot on the streets of the city, Chan began a
project focused on the socio-political environment of New Orleans in the wake of
disaster. The development of this project and distribution of its afterlife demands a
juxtaposition of the live elements against those mediated by Chan and curators or
producers with an intersection of art and politics, the two main concepts that fueled and
inhabit the project.
Beginning this project, Chan first made a pointed decision to site productions of
Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot in public, free of charge. Examining Chan’s
work in New Orleans and specifically with individuals in the Lower Ninth Ward and
Gentilly—two neighborhoods that accrued some of the highest levels of damage from
Hurricane Katrina and also where Chan chose to site the public productions—we must
first address the overarching socioeconomic impact of the storm. On August 29, 2005,
Hurricane Katrina made landfall in south Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish. The Gulf

7
region incurred masses of damage from the storm, which was registered by the United
States government to have the greatest economic impact of any storm in the country.
More than a thousand individuals died as winds blew through the region, and by August
31, 2005, two days after Hurricane Katrina hit the coast of Louisiana, 80 percent of New
Orleans was under water due to levee failures on Lake Ponchartrain.
2
According to the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), “The combination of strong
winds, heavy rainfall and storm surge led to breaks in the earthen levee after the storm
passed, leaving some parts of New Orleans under 20 feet of water.”
3

A deep history of civil rights is embedded within New Orleans and the areas
where Chan chose to site the plays. Black Americans have primarily occupied both the
Lower Ninth Ward and most of the Gentilly area, signaling ties to racial compositions of
neighborhoods and increased levels of destruction from the storm and floods from the
levee failures.
4
In New Orleans, a city encompassing Spanish and French settlement,
Native American inhabitants and histories of racial conflict and economic hardship, we

2
National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, “Hurricane Katrina,” http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/special-
reports/katrina.html (accessed October 20, 2011). Also, the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center compiled
information from various sources to produce a fact sheet detailing measurable impacts of Hurricane Katrina. The figure
regarding deaths above was taken from this fact sheet, stating, “Hurricane Katrina and the levee failures resulted in the
deaths of at least 1,464 Louisiana residents. The major causes of death include: drowning (40%), injury and trauma
(25%), and heart conditions (11%). Nearly half of all victims were over the age of 74.” More information, including
figures on flooding, displaced residents and population fluctuations from before and after the storm can be found at
Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, “Hurricane Katrina Impact,”
http://www.gnocdc.org/Factsforfeatures/HurricaneKatrinaImpact/index.html (accessed January 2, 2012).

3
National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, “Hurricane Katrina,” http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/special-
reports/katrina.html (accessed October 20, 2011). For information on the levee failures, see Joby Warrick and Michael
Grunwald, “Investigators Link Levee Failures to Design Flaws,” The Washington Post, October 24, 2005.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/23/AR2005102301200.html (accessed January 2,
2012).

4
These facts also lend to ties of a greater number of displaced residents. See Greater New Orleans Community Data
Center, “Lower Ninth Ward,” http://www.gnocdc.org/NeighborhoodData/8/LowerNinthWard/index.html (accessed
January 2, 2012), and Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, “Filmore Neighborhood,”
http://www.gnocdc.org/NeighborhoodData/6/Filmore/index.html (accessed January 2, 2012).

8
must consider both quantitative research as well as oral and written histories that date
back to the city’s founding in 1718 to gain a true understanding of the site. The city has
been home to organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panthers
and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and is
where they developed and organized methods of reform and revolution beginning in the
1950s.
5
Through both non-violent protests, such as Freedom Rides and sit-ins by SNCC,
to vibrant, often violent imagery of injustice and revolution by the Black Panthers in their
widely circulated publications, these civil rights groups worked to establish equality for
all races and ethnicities in the south and beyond.
In their essay “Views of Changing Landscapes,” Demond Miller and Jason Rivera
describe the situation in New Orleans during and after August 2005 as the “Katrina
malaise.” Comprising emotions of fear, anger, shock and psychological depression,
among many others, this descriptor also acknowledges the layers of failures and abilities
present in the city before and after the storm. “These failures include a failure to prepare,
a failure to respond, and a failure to rebuild. Ultimately, disasters reveal the differentials
among group resiliency and the allocation of resources for reconstruction.”
6
When Chan
visited New Orleans in 2006, the images he, like many others, had seen across the 24-
hour news coverage lingered on the streets, even through they had faded from the media.

5
For more information regarding civil rights movements in New Orleans and the region, see Jarvis DeBerry, “Civil
Rights: The Times-Picayune Covers 175 Years of New Orleans History,” The Times-Picayune, February 1, 2012,
http://www.nola.com/175years/index.ssf/2012/02/civil_rights_the_times-picayun.html (accessed February 4, 2012).

6
Demond Shondell Miller and Jason David Rivera, “Views of Changing Landscapes,” in Hurricane Katrina and the
Redefinition of Landscape, eds. Demond Shondell Miller and Jason David Rivera (Lanham, Maryland: Lanham Books,
2008), 93.

9
Perhaps the “Katrina malaise” was more notable at this time as a year had passed and
many individuals had not returned since evacuating, or were waiting for support to
reconstruct both their homes and lives. The bleakness of the city, characterized by the
lack of individuals moving around their neighborhoods and the concrete slabs where
houses once stood, served as a ghostly reminder of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for
Godot, inspiring Chan to begin conversations with organizations within and outside the
city to develop productions of the play in New Orleans.
Working within particular neighborhoods and communities as sites of production,
artists and curators must be responsive to recognizing that a place encompasses existing
homes, memories and societal structures, and in the case of New Orleans after Hurricane
Katrina, a restructuring of each of these elements.
7
Understanding the changing landscape
of New Orleans after the storm, consider the importance of fostering history and culture
in efforts to make changes in society as we return to Shondell and Rivera’s writing on the
storm in 2008. “Hurricane Katrina offers lessons not only in environmental change but
also in social change. Not only were there several physical changes, but Katrina has also
set the stage for changes in both the processes and social structures that have yet to
unfold.”
8

7
A study in occupied and abandoned houses conducted by the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, released
in October 2011, details the number of houses occupied in each neighborhood of New Orleans in 2000 and 2010. In the
Lower Ninth Ward, 4,820 of the houses were occupied in 2000, and in 2010 this figure dropped to 1,061. In perspective
to the city as a whole, the overall number of vacant houses rose from 26,840 in 2000 to 47,738 in 2010, and over the
ten-year span, there was a 29.1% decrease in the overall population of Orleans Parish. See Greater New Orleans
Community Data Center, “Housing Development and Abandonment,” Greater New Orleans Community Data Center,
http://www.gnocdc.org/HousingDevelopmentAndAbandonment/index.html (accessed January 2, 2012); and U.S.
Census Bureau, “State and Country Quick Facts: Orleans Parish, Louisiana,”
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/22/22071.html (accessed October 20, 2011).

8
Demond Shondell Miller and Jason David Rivera, “Views of Changing Landscapes,” 91.

10
A Play in Two Acts, A Project in Three Parts
After a series of conversations, the work of producing Waiting for Godot in New
Orleans: A Play in Two Acts, A Project in Three Parts began, organized by Paul Chan in
partnership with Creative Time. The New York City-based organization is known for
producing and organizing works of art in the public sphere, and their partnership was a
strong element of infrastructure needed to produce a project of this scale at this time.
Chan’s idea began with the staging of four productions of Samuel Beckett’s tragicomedy
Waiting for Godot in the Lower Ninth Ward and Gentilly. A classic tale of two
individuals waiting, for what or whom we are uncertain, Chan felt the themes present in
Beckett’s Godot resonated in the desolate streets of these neighborhoods, where many
citizens continued waiting for years, not knowing who had the answers and resources
they needed. Who could one turn to find displaced relatives, or to provide shelter while
they waited to hear from insurance companies, and waited for resources to rebuild their
home? From the project’s inception, it is important to note that Chan set out to
“reimagine how art—as the form freedom takes without the use coercion of force—can
become a means to enter and engage with the myriad dimensions of life lived in the midst
of ruin.”
9

Emphasizing art as the main instrument for working within New Orleans, Chan
and Creative Time first began working with the Classical Theatre of Harlem (CTH) to
produce the plays. Actors from the region, as well as Wendell Peirce, an actor born in
New Orleans, played the roles of the main characters. The intersection of Forstall Street

9
Paul Chan, “Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: An Artist Statement,” in Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Field
Guide, ed. Paul Chan (New York: Creative Time, 2010), 27. Chan’s artist statement is dated June 2007.

11
and North Roman Street was the stage for the production in the Lower Ninth Ward,
surrounded by barren land where houses once stood. With the addition of a small tree, a
shopping cart with many found items and a bicycle, the stage was set through prop
direction by Chan, and lit by large lights located behind stadium-style bleachers and
chairs for the audience. Due to the masses of people attending the productions on
November 2 and 3 in the Lower Ninth Ward, a third production was staged on November
4, 2007, at the same location.
The following weekend, the play’s stage relocated to a damaged house in Gentilly
for productions on November 9 and 10, 2007. As audience members sat in bleachers
positioned on the streets, the actors moved throughout the front yard and inside the house,
utilizing the broken windows as spaces of appearance. Every performance began with a
gumbo dinner prepared by a local chef and a brass band performance by local musicians
such as The Big 9 Social Aid and Pleasure Club and Rebirth Brass Band in efforts to
create a traditional New Orleans experience for the thousands in attendance.
While Chan, Creative Time and CTH were preparing for the productions a year
prior to their execution, Chan began conversations with local individuals, embodying an
ethical drive to do more than use the landscape of the city as a stage for theatrical
performances. In a conversation with Ronald Lewis, a resident of the Lower Ninth Ward,
Lewis told Chan, “You gotta leave something behind for the community.”
10
Lewis urged
Chan that if he were to begin a project in the city, among the havoc and the waiting, that
he developed something that could continue contributing to the existing community after

10
Ronald Lewis in conversation with Paul Chan, “Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: An Artist Statement,” in Waiting
for Godot in New Orleans: A Field Guide, 27.

12
his project came to an end. This conversation led to the inception of a fund from which
local community organizations would benefit. Matching the production budget of the
plays at approximately $50,000, Chan established a fundraising initiative called the
Shadow Fund. Organizations such as the Neighborhood Story Project, the New Orleans
Kids Camera Project, The Porch Seventh Ward Cultural Center, The Neighborhood
Empowerment Network Association and the Community Book Center—all differing in
ways they act as catalysts for re-development—have all benefited from the Shadow Fund
through $1,000-5,000 awards and in-kind donations.
11

With the productions in their planning stages and the Shadow Fund established,
Chan began working across disciplines of art, education and religion, and with various
cultural institutions through community organizing efforts. In the fall of 2007, Chan
began teaching two seminar classes at universities in New Orleans, and each was cross-
listed with other colleges and universities in the city and open to all artists living in New
Orleans for the semester. At the University of New Orleans, Chan taught the
“Contemporary Art Seminar,” which focused on a series of figures in contemporary art
“as a departure point to explore issues and ideas that affect art, society, and culture
today.”
12
During this class, Chan lectured on artists, writers and theorists such as Kara
Walker, Theodor Adorno, Martha Rosler and Temporary Services. At Xavier University,
Chan led the “Art Practicum,” which was designed to share “a critical and practical
perspective on the field from a practicing artist,” by teaching artists and students how to
document their work, strategies for developing a successful portfolio and providing them

11
“Shadow Fund,” excel spreadsheet, 2007, in Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Field Guide, 301.

12
“UNO Syllabus,” pdf, 2007, in Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Field Guide, 108.

13
with technical tools, such as how to write an artist statement and press release.
13
Chan
established a pedagogical platform for his project through these classes.
Beyond the university classroom, Chan also organized workshops and lectures in
high schools and local cultural organizations, discussions among artists and potluck
dinners. Over the course of five months, Chan worked closely with more than six schools
and universities, as well as dozens of cultural organizations—many of which became
beneficiaries of the Shadow Fund—hosting workshops with CTH and talks with students.
In October 2007, Chan participated in the roundtable discussion “The Art of Renewal,”
which was moderated by New Orleans artist and Xavier professor, Ron Bechet, and
included local artists Willie Birch, Dawn DeDeaux, Courtney Egan and Robert Tannen
.14

During this discussion, Chan shared a great deal of insight on what led him to his project
in New Orleans—an overarching question for how to create a process of working in a
community that would be locally sustainable, as well as one that would prompt a
dialogue about working and living in New Orleans both before and after Hurricane
Katrina.
15
During the same roundtable, Chan refers to an artist, writer and theoretician as
he revisits notions of recovery and lack of recovery in the wake of the storm, quoting
Theodor Adorno, saying, “the way out is through.” Chan’s project of three parts took on
the forms of theatrical performances, direct financial contributions and community

13
“Xavier University syllabus,” pdf, 2007, in Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Field Guide, 112.

14
Roundtable discussions from the project are available on Creative Time’s website. See Creative Time, “Waiting for
Godot in New Orleans: Street Work,” http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2007/chan/streetwork.html (accessed
September 20, 2011).

15
Paul Chan in “The Art of Renewal,” artist roundtable, October 29, 2007. See Creative Time,
http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2007/chan/streetwork.html (accessed September 20, 2011).

14
organizing, all in efforts to find a way out of devastation, by working through,
contributing to and responding to the community and its resources.
Presently, the project exists as memories of the audiences and participants in the
project, and through five additional outlets—a film made by Cauleen Smith titled The
Fullness of Time (2008); Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Field Guide, a publication
on the project, edited by Paul Chan and published by Creative Time in 2010; an archive
in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York’s collection of Media and
Performance Art; on the artist and Creative Time’s websites and through writing about
the project. Working with Chan and others in New Orleans in 2007, Smith created a
metaphoric science fiction melodrama about her relationship to New Orleans and the
layers of loss and joy she experienced and witnessed when visiting the city. While the
film takes on a more emotional, narrative format, the book and installation each act as
archives of the project.
16
Published in 2010, Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Field
Guide acts just as its title suggests, as a composed guide to the entire project. The book
includes documents and photographs, as well as essays that support the project and its
many elements. Similarly, the archive at MoMA includes props, drawings, magazines,
posters, stickers, notes, receipts, audio recordings, video documentation and voices of
New Orleanians accompanying the various objects.
17
Exactly why and how these records
were formed and which audiences they address, are vital questions to consider when

16
Smith describes this personal format as a method for allowing individuals to communicate their loss through the
recognition of emotions and experiences of an ‘other’—the main character. I will return to this idea in Chapter 2. This
information is from e-mail correspondence between Cauleen Smith and the author, February 23, 2012.

17
Information from e-mail correspondence between Barbara London, Associate Curator, Museum of Modern Art,
Department of Media and Performance Art, and the author on February 9, 2012.

15
analyzing the afterlife, or mediated elements, of Chan’s project—questions I will explore
in-depth in Chapter Two.

Figure 2. Paul Chan, Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, 2007. Photo by Frank Aymami
(Creative Time). Image published on Art21blog, depicting the audience for a production
of Waiting for Godot in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans.

Source: Art21 Blog, http://blog.art21.org/2010/12/16/5-questions-for-contemporary-
practice-with-nato-thompson/ and Creative Time,
http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2007/chan/shadow.html.

16
Redevelopment Rhetoric
Returning to the history of New Orleans and considering its role in the fight for
civil rights, it is not surprising that there was an increase in community action to re-build
the city and reestablish culture after the storm. Many organizations formed after
Hurricane Katrina responding to a lack of government and institutional support by
addressing the city’s unique creative culture and fostering its history and future.
Examining organizations that developed after the storm, we are able to gain a greater
understanding of the environment in which Chan was working, as well as the way in
which organizations and projects positioned themselves as catalysts for change through
social, economic, aesthetic and rhetorical strategies.
2005 on welcomed many art and cultural projects to New Orleans, composing a
“burgeoning alternative arts sector” in New Orleans that ranged from cultural support to
monetary donations and community development.
18
From an international art biennial to
studies on soil contamination, financial support to government recognition, New Orleans
became a hotbed for cultural experimentation and support; some projects proving more
culturally and economically sustainable than others. Transforma Projects began working
with individuals and organizations in New Orleans in 2005, providing direct support for
art and cultural organizations. A “National Resource Team”—comprised of Jessica
Cusick, Sam Durant, Rick Lowe, Robert Ruello and Jess Garz—developed the project

18
Sue Bell Yank addressed the topic of redevelopment through the arts in New Orleans in her master’s thesis for the
University of Southern California’s Master of Public Art Studies program. The thesis provides a source of
organizations and individuals that contributed to what she referred to as a “burgeoning alternative arts sector” in New
Orleans after Hurricane Katrina (page 32). The manuscript centers the biennial Prospect.1 New Orleans as a main force
for this movement, although I would argue that the biennial was not the centripetal force and that many individuals
migrated to New Orleans after the storm (many working in the art community) before the biennial began, and many
continuing today. See Sue Bell Yank, “Biennial rising: Prospect.1 New Orleans and the post-disaster arts movement”
(master’s thesis, University of Southern California, 2009).

17
out of a series of meetings with community members as well as local and national
stakeholders in the art community, ranging from those active in the redevelopment of
New Orleans to artists and curators. Aimee Chang describes the objective and process of
the project in her essay, “New Models for Creative Public Practice.”
Recognizing the vitality of projects happening on the ground in New Orleans and
wanting to use their talents to support a larger framework rather than to carry out
individual art projects, the founders envisioned a multipronged initiative
supported by the skills and resources of a “national resource team,” “a diverse and
fluid group of professionals, local and national, that provide the structural
background for the initiative,” of which they would be a part.
19

Transforma shaped their initiative by funding and supporting three pilot projects and a
series of mini-grants over the course of five years, while holding a variety of forums at
local spaces and online. The three pilot projects were Operation Paydirt/Fundred Dollar
Bill Project, organized by Mel Chin; Home, New Orleans?, organized by faculty from
Tulane, Dillard and Xavier Universities; and the Plessy Park initiative, organized by Ron
Bechet and Suzanne Lacy with their students at the respective universities, Xavier
University in New Orleans and Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, as well as
local residents. Transforma framed itself as an initiative that worked in “collaboration
with other professionals to rebuild New Orleans both physically and psychically,”
20

therefore adopting a social practice model emphasizing community growth by fostering
history and the future, but also acting as an economic imperative.

19
Aimee Chang, “New Models for Creative Public Practice,” pdf (2010). Transforma Projects, “Transforma Projects,”
http://www.transformaprojects.org/ (accessed September 15, 2011). In this section of her article, Chang’s quotes refer
to artist and Transforma founder Rick Lowe speaking in a conversation from September 5, 2009. Organizations and
individuals participating in Transforma’s community meetings, called convenings, ranged from the New Orleans City
Council and City Planning Commission; to artists and curators outside of New Orleans, such as Tom Finkelpearl, Mel
Chin and Suzanne Lacy; and artists within the city, such as Ron Bechet, Robin Levy and Don Marshall.

20
Ibid.

18
In 2008, New Orleans hosted the largest international biennial in the United
States, Prospect New Orleans. Prospect.1 (2008-2009) included eighty artists from more
than thirty countries working in twenty locations across New Orleans. Dan Cameron, the
founding director of the biennial and curator of both Prosepct.1 and Prospect.2 (2011-
2012) described his intentions for starting the endeavor in the city soon after the storm in
his essay for the Prospect.1 catalog.
If the international art community visits New Orleans in the numbers anticipated,
this will signal both that antipathy toward new art is waning, and that the
objective of bringing the world’s art together in a single place may be less about
the art than about the place itself. In New Orleans, the challenge of visualizing a
sustainable future for the city might fall partly to the creative imaginations of
artists, whose charge is, finally, to bring something unprecedented into the
world.
21

Cameron’s agenda was not only to increase cultural tourism in New Orleans, but it also
challenged the role of the international biennial by proposing a model that emphasized a
place alongside the contemporary art it was hosting. Shifting to Prospect.2, we see the
importance of hosting an international biennial in New Orleans opening beyond a
traditional biennial art exhibition including a typical roster of artists—Prospect.2
highlighted the existing contemporary art community in the area. The exhibition included
a greater number of artists from the city and state than the first, and it drew attention to
the local art organizations through off-site projects and by recognizing organizations on

21
Dan Cameron, “A Biennial for New Orleans,” in Prospect.1 New Orleans, exhibition catalog, eds. Barbara J.
Bloemink and Dan Cameron (Brooklyn: Picturebox, 2008), 23. The concept of this biennial traces an increase in
biennials across the globe, many of which have been founded in response to large political and societal transformations.
In her essay, “The Global White Cube,” (2005) Elena Filipovic states, “A number of [biennials] find their origins in
contexts of profound political and cultural transition, for example, Documenta and German postwar reconstruction, the
Gwangju Biennial and the democratization of South Korea, the short-lived Johannesburg Biennial and the end of the
apartheid, or Manifesta, European Biennial of Contemporary Art and the fall of the Berlin Wall.” See Elena Filipovic,
“The Global White Cube,” in The Biennial Reader, eds. Elena Filipovic, Marieke Van Hal and Solveig Ovstebo
(Bergen Norway: Bergen Kunsthall, 2010), 326.

19
the published maps for the exhibition.
22
Functioning primarily as a financial initiative for
the city, Prospect also serves as a catalyst for increasing local artists’ visibility around the
globe.
23

Considering ongoing cultural projects in the city, we can turn to organizations
such as the Porch 7
th
Ward Cultural Center, the Creative Alliance of New Orleans
(CANO) and local art collectives to gain further understanding of the types of
organizations that began before and after the storm, and are still functioning in New
Orleans today. Establishing presence as soon as citizens were able to return in 2006,
smaller organizations such as the Porch 7
th
Ward Cultural Center saw the time directly
after the storm as an opportunity to nourish the cultural history of a specific area.
24
The
Porch began as an outlet for carrying on and honoring the rich cultural traditions of the
neighborhood, such as the historical street performances by the Mardi Gras Indians.
However, the organization also sees their role as fostering a clean slate on which
neighborhood youth can move forward, abandoning dangerous pasts and
misconstructions—offering classes and workshops, a space to gather together and

22
Both the map for Prospect.1 and Prosepect.2 listed a variety of existing cultural organizations and art spaces that
were not sites for Prospect exhibitions, but were hosting exhibitions of their own. This signals the biennial’s support for
the existing local visual and performing arts community; however, far fewer organizations and spaces were listed on
the Prospect.2 map. In response, many galleries and spaces created their own collective map to distribute during the
biennial to visitors and local individuals.

23
Joshua Decter presents an examination of Transforma Projects and Prospect.1 in New Orleans in his article “Art and
the Cultural Contradictions of Urban Regeneration, Social Justice and Sustainability: Transforma Projects and
Prospect.1 in post-Katrina New Orleans,” Afterall 22 (Autumn/Winter 2009): 17-34. Decter’s preamble of questions is
an important roster of the issues I bring up in this manuscript, facing the contradictions present using art to enter a
community after a disaster and foster redevelopment. Decter also highlights the ethical and political decisions presented
in this type of practice.

24
As they state on their website, The Porch 7
th
Ward Cultural Center is “a community-based organization that is using
the arts to affect social change. A grassroots organization instigated, post-Katrina, in New Orleans’ 7th Ward, the Porch
serves the community bounded by St. Bernard Avenue, N. Claiborne Avenue, Elysian Fields Avenue and St. Claude
Avenues. The Porch builds on cultural assets of the 7th Ward neighborhood.” The Porch, http://www.theporch-7.com/
(accessed October 20, 2010).

20
guidance, the Porch is a space that believes it can contribute to a decrease in crime
working with youth from an early age in cultural development. This organization
exemplifies one of the many community-oriented pedagogical projects in the city.
25

In a similar manner, dozens of artists have united to form artist collectives in the
city in the past few years. Collectives such as The Front, Good Children Gallery, Antenna
Gallery and T-Lot all began within the past five years. Each operates differently, but all
share a same purpose of mutual support, often through monthly exhibitions of members’
work. Their missions exhibit a desire to foster the dynamic contemporary art sphere of
New Orleans, a DIY-aesthetic and free programming for the public, and they also all
support the exhibition of experimental work by artists living in and outside of New
Orleans.
26

Focusing on the cultural industry’s impact on the city’s economy, New Orleans
resident Jeanne Nathan began the Creative Alliance of New Orleans (CANO). The non-
profit “works to enhance the career opportunities of creative artists and producers in New
Orleans, and to stimulate greater understanding of the key role our creative economy
plays in the city.”
27
While Prospect, the Porch, the many art collectives and CANO all
support creative practitioners and cultural growth in the city, their missions and

25
Information on The Porch’s founding and goals was provided during an interview with Ed Buckner, Program
Coordinator for The Porch 7
th
Ward Cultural Center, and the author in New Orleans, LA, on October 29, 2010.

26
Information on each of the collectives mentioned here can be found on their websites. The Front,
http://www.nolafront.org/. Good Children Gallery, http://goodchildrengallery.com/. Antenna Gallery, http://press-
street.com/antenna/. T-Lot, http://t-lot.tumblr.com/. In the past two years, additional organizations and spaces such as
Parse Gallery (http://www.parsegallery.com) and the Staple Goods Collective (http://www.
postmedium.org/staplegoods) have also formed.

27
Creative Alliance of New Orleans, “About,” http://cano-la.org/about/ (accessed January 2, 2012).

21
methodologies for doing so differ greatly.
28
As acknowledged in their mission, CANO’s
focus is stimulating the economy through cultural production, and igniting this
relationship. The organization fosters programming that breeds an economy around
artists and cultural practitioners, providing opportunities for collectors to learn about
practicing artists in the city, and opportunities for artists to participate in workshops such
as those hosted by New York-based Creative Capital, while also developing spaces for art
production and reception. The organization frames itself through a business model,
focusing on creating capital.
Each organization or project I’ve described here uses, or used, a particular
rhetoric to define its function and mediate its reception within the city of New Orleans
and its cultural climate. Whether to foster culture and contribute to the city through a
capital-driven model, support a neighborhood through a community-oriented pedagogical
practice or to create an experience for artists and art enthusiasts by offering space,
support and free programming, cultural organizations responded to the damage wrought
by the storm and floods in various ways. Among these organizations and projects, Chan’s
project ignited the intersection of art and politics through tactics of theatre, community
organizing and direct financial support, utilizing a temporary platform focused on
pedagogical practice and creating experiences within the community. The project, funded
by a non-profit art organization based in New York City, developed as many of the
organizations I’ve described here, outside of an institutional context. Due to this decision,

28
We can also consider here organizations such as NOLA Rising, which is a non-profit focusing on “using the visual
arts to revitalize a city devastated by one of the worst disasters in U.S. history,” as the artists working with the
organization believe that working within the visual arts “empowers the individual by facilitating creativity and aiding in
the discovery of personal potential.” NOLA Rising, “About,” http://nolarising.org/about/ (accessed February 12, 2012).

22
the project was able to function without a reliance on funding from the government or
concern for specific qualifications the project would need to meet to be granted funding
and other methods of support—larger constraints institutions and corporations often
apply. Whether still in existence today, or through the creation of sustainable, but
temporary, models of support, each of these organizations and projects decidedly focused
on moving forward and providing opportunities that didn’t exist prior to, or after, the
storm. In the introduction to her book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary
Communities that Arise in Disaster, Rebecca Solnit points out that, “disasters provide an
extraordinary window into social desire and possibility.”
29
Often when faced with
disaster, societies realize that cities, communities and many existing structures will be
forever altered, and quickly welcome the opportunity of renewal associated with loss,
what Solnit refers to as an “ability to embrace contradiction.”
30

Chan’s Artistic Practice | Chan’s Activist Practice
As discussed earlier, the state of New Orleans took New York-based artist Chan
by surprise in 2006, and in turn, prompted a multi-faceted project. To examine Chan’s
construction of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Play in Two Acts, A Project in
Three Parts and its afterlife in regard to the relationship of art and politics, we must

29
Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York: Viking
Adult, 2009), 6. In this book, Solnit describes the slate of renewal and shared draw to progress in communities after
disaster as she outlines five disasters that have shaped the last century in her book. Examining the 1906 earthquake and
fires in San Francisco, the harbor explosion in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1917, the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, the
attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001, and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Solnit
explores community reaction and support systems in response to each of these events.

30
Solnit, 15.

23
dissect the artist’s background, artistic practice and political work. Together these guide
one’s understanding of the project’s inception and focus on renewal.
Chan was born in Hong Kong in 1973 and moved to the United States during his
youth with his parents, settling in Nebraska. Four years after earning an M.F.A. from
Bard College in Film/Video/New Media in 2002, museums and galleries across the globe
held solo exhibitions of the artist’s work, exhibiting his drawings, installations and video
works that addressed issues of politics, sex, society and their numerous intersections with
theory. In 2007, the Serpentine Gallery in London and the New Museum in New York
published the catalogue, Paul Chan: The 7 Lights, in conjunction with his exhibition
highlighting the light series, as well as digital animations, drawings and collages.
It is with The 7 Lights I would like to anchor a discussion on Chan’s career, as it
was a large solo exhibition constructed by two established and internationally-recognized
art institutions and also because it included works that signal ties between the artist’s
overall practice and his work in New Orleans. In the “Director’s Forward” of Paul Chan:
The 7 Lights, the directors of the exhibition describe Chan’s light works as projections
and drawings “that ‘hallucinate’ the seven days of Creation from dawn to dusk,”
exploring “themes of the sacred and the profane, and temptation and renunciation, in
relation to the iconography of the contemporary world.”
31
These works were positioned
on floors and creeping onto walls, altering the onlooker’s typical association of viewing
works displayed at eye-level. In some instances, a window frame appears projected, as if
the viewer is looking outside onto gusts of wind whirling cell phones, leaves, hammers,

31
Julia Peyton-Jones, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Lisa Phillips, “Director’s Forward” in Paul Chan: The 7 Lights, eds. Julia
Peyton-Jones, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Lisa Phillips (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König; London:
Serpentine Gallery, 2007), 2.

24
boxes, machine guns, birds and chairs around, or falling. Many of the light pieces recall
elements of Chan’s past works, such as Happiness (Finally) After 35,000 Years of
Civilization (After Charles Fourier and Henry Darger) (1999-2003) and My
Birds…Trash…The Future (2004), both color video animations also in the exhibition.
As Scott Rothkopf describes in his 2006 article for Artforum, “Embedded in the
Culture,” Chan’s practice stems from a combination of topics, methodologies, theories,
imagery and media. Rothkopf, describing this hybridization, points to Happiness… and
My Birds... Trash… The Future, stating, “Happiness’s lush greenery gives way to a
barren field dominated by a huge dead tree, which recalls the setting of Waiting for
Godot.”
32
This explicit reference points to the presence of Beckett in Chan’s work well
before New Orleans, the writer’s influence running much deeper than the title of the New
Orleans project and visual language in his animation works suggests. Before analyzing
more elusive parallels, we should turn to two additional works by Chan, made prior to the
light works, which support his work in New Orleans as a political gesture.
In 2000, working in an oeuvre of single-channel video work, Chan created the
video animation Now Let Us Praise American Leftists. Using FACES, a computer aid
used by law enforcement to produce sketches of criminals, Chan “attempts to fashion a
more inclusive collective portrait of generalized types: The Black Panther, the Industrial
Unionist, the May 12 Activist, the AIDS activist, and many others,” by simply changing
the individual’s facial hair.
33
Considering this work among Chan’s body of works,

32
Scott Rothkopf. “Embedded in the Culture,” Artforum 44 (Summer 2006), 306.

33
Carnegie International, Paul Chan biography, http://www.cmoa.org/international/the_exhibition/artist.asp?chan
(accessed October 20, 2011).

25
Rothkopf notes, “Chan, we might say, does not so much illustrate our contemporary
mediascape as inhabit it”
34
—exemplified also by his work The People’s Guide to the
Republican National Convention (paper and digital map, 2004). Together with the group
Friends of William Blake, Chan created this map to use as a guide for individuals to visit
or avoid the 2004 Republican National Convention in Manhattan. As one pays careful
attention to the words and phrases for destinations on the map, point-of-interest headings
like “War Profiteers” falls between “RNC Corporate Sponsors” and “Legal Resources.”
While it takes no upfront affiliation with a political party, the back of the map provides
information on how to gather legally in protest in the city. The title of the piece, using the
specific words “The People’s Guide,” exemplifies activist language of the seventies, such
as that used by Emory Douglas as a member of the Black Panthers, specifically noted in
Douglas’ article, “Art for the People’s Sake.”
35
Here, through the use of language, we can
return to Now Let Us Praise American Leftists, a work in which Chan references the
Black Panthers among many other activist groups visually. This latter video was included
in The 7 Lights exhibition, using visual elements to exert a political language, a tactic
echoed in many of Chan’s works.
George Baker, beginning his discussion on Chan’s use of actual light in the pieces
and the title of the series that strikes out “Light,” addresses a pivotal piece of literature to
explain his understanding of Chan’s process and work—Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing

34
Rothkopf, “Embedded in the Culture,” 308.

35
Emory Douglas. “Art for the People’s Sake,” published in The Black Panther in 1972. See Art and Social Change: A
Critical Reader, eds. Will Bradley and Charles Esche (London: Tate, 2007), 168-173.

26
of the Disaster.
36
Baker suggests that the disaster Chan may be referring to in his works is
not only that of September 11, 2001 for the United States, but explains that there are also
“other endgames and other catastrophes to which Chan’s projections respond. Perhaps
they make the endgame and catastrophe the very condition of their production.” In
response to this statement, he sites Chan in a conversation in October 2006, explaining,
…Epochs and events flow in and out of our time, carrying away the debris of
every prophecy and every catastrophe that promised to reveal to us the nature of
things. The end never comes. We only know how tired we feel. We feel this and
know the end must be near. But sometimes we don’t know. Either by works or by
faith or by sheer, dumb luck, we come toward the end not knowing we are near
the end, or that we are in fact at the end. This is called power.
37

Baker points to Chan’s idea of an end that never comes, considering the choice of video
display through an infinite loop and unidentified spaces and events in his work. The
folding, unfolding and re-folding associated with Blanchot’s text on disaster is apparent
in Chan’s process of re-visiting his earlier works. Chan’s use of the Godot-like tree, an
international literary symbol of waiting, appears time and again in his work, bringing up
contested histories and situations regarding where the play has been performed, as well as
an idea of return to find something one’s been waiting for, as the play infers.
Furthermore, in many of his works, the lack of recognition of a particular time or place
proposes a space of contemplation for the viewer to imagine his, her or their past, present
and future.

36
George Baker, “Paul Chan: The Image from Outside,” in Paul Chan: The 7 Lights. (Cologne: Verlag der
Buchhandlung Walther König; London: Serpentine Gallery, 2007), 6. Also see Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the
Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).

37
Paul Chan in Baker, “Paul Chan: The Image from Outside,” 7. This excerpt was originally published in “Andrea
Bowers and Paul Chan: Power,” The Wrong Times (October 2006), 9. This text was part of Chan’s response to the
following five questions: “1. Who has the power? 2. Where do you believe power comes from? 3. Can you change
people’s opinions? 4. Who are you fighting against? 5. Art: What is it good for?”

27
In his book Chronology, Daniel Birnbaum discusses Chan’s practice amid
contemporary works that alter a typical chronological order by addressing the elapsing of
time in film, cinema and other artistic practices. Birnbaum describes the shadows, falling
objects and fading and returning colors of light in The 7 Lights. He also points out the
two elements of each animation, daylight and nighttime, as well as imagery of a
crumbling world that eventually returns to a calm, pure light—a repetition of renewal.
38

Examining Chan’s past work and writings on his exhibitions, references to Waiting for
Godot in New Orleans begin to surface. The same year the artist’s work was included in
the Newcomb Art Gallery’s exhibition, which prompted his visit to New Orleans, Chan
was also included in the Whitney Biennial, exhibiting 1
st
Light (2005). It is unknown
whether his visit to New Orleans shaped in some way 2
nd
Light (2006), in which a dark
shadow of a tree that blocks out light simultaneously asks visitors to contemplate the
contemporary.
Responding to Chan’s 7 Lights, Birnbaum asks,
Does the work have a political dimension, or is the exploration of the world of
mesmerizing shadows an end in itself? “Art or politics?” some critics have asked,
stubbornly insisting that the line must be drawn even in these times of radically
messianic politics.
39

38
The description Birnbaum presents in this text is also reminiscent of Johanna Burton’s 2005 review for Artforum for
the artist’s work at Greene Naftali Gallery in New York. Burton drew on the allegorical to explain Chan’s use of time
and how he addresses contemporary issues through imagery and references of previous decades. She comments,
“Chan's chaotic landscape is punctuated by moments of quiet, reminding us that these are appropriated stories that
(however wretchedly) document the persistence of faith despite the loss of reassuring objects.” Interestingly, Burton’s
article opens with, “Act I. A country road. A tree. Evening. Act II. Next day. Same time. Same place.” Johanna Burton,
“Paul Chan,” Artforum 46, no. 5 (January 2005), 181-182.

39
Daniel Birnbaum, Chronology (New York: Sternberg Press, 2005), 195.

28
In his conclusion, Birnbaum suggests, “Perhaps it is more rewarding to consider how the
work of this artist, who also happens to be a particularly fearless political activist, makes
obvious that productive contamination is a more rewarding path to follow.”
40

Birnbaum’s point that critics constantly draw the line between art and politics is
especially important for an examination of Chan’s work, for he himself draws a
distinction between his art practice and political activism. The ideological terms Chan
assesses in his writing are intertwined with his political practice, and very much inform
his work in his private studio, and also informed his public work in New Orleans.
Chan’s writing in publications such as the E-Flux Journal and his participation in
published interviews are keys to understanding his critical thinking on social and political
concepts and how these affect his art practice. In an interview with Neil McClister for
BOMB Magazine, Chan describes his interest in “participatory politics,” the importance
of collective action and how he views his art making in relation to power.
Collective social power needs the language of politics, which means, among other
things, that people need to consolidate identities, to provide answers, to create a
social cohesion that would give them the power and the responsibility of a bloc of
people to move things, destroy things, to make things happen. Whereas my art is
nothing if not the dispersion of power. To never consolidate. To always disperse.
And so, in a way, the political project and the art project are sometimes in
opposition. Which isn’t bad.
41

Opposition is a key element of Chan’s practice,
42
and while he may not believe that art
and politics are opposite, per say, he acknowledges his reasoning of the two as distinct.

40
Birnbaum, Chronology, 195.

41
Paul Chan in Neil McClister, “Paul Chan,” BOMB Magazine 92 (Summer 2005),
http://bombsite.com/issues/92/articles/2734 (accessed November 4, 2011).

42
McClister in “Paul Chan,” BOMB.

29
“Whether or not it is true that politics and art are separate, it’s very productive for me to
imagine that they are, so that my allegiances are clear and I can work productively at both
without reducing one to the other.”
43

Rothkopf, in his article “Embedded in the Culture,” explains Chan’s philosophical
grounding for this separation of art practice and political activism, saying, “[Chan] sees
his politics and his art as pursuing two fundamentally different aims, the former
practically addressing present social conditions with specific ends in mind, the latter
ambiguously posing ‘new questions for possible futures.’”
44
The question for Chan, then,
is one of intention and desired effect. While political activism adopts a charged language
to engage audiences and participants in action, art practice offers ambiguous conclusions
and spaces for continued thought—Chan’s separation becomes complicated when the two
ideas and intentions are intertwined in his work, such as the case in Waiting for Godot in
New Orleans.
Martha Rosler, in a conversation with Chan in 2006, addresses this separation,
referring to it as “self-delusion.” To this, Chan responds, “I think I say it as provocation.
But it might be self-delusion, too.”
45
This provocation grows from Chan’s desire to
“diversify whatever political art is.”
46
While his work addresses political and social
injustices and inequalities, the law and history, among many other topics, he believes a
different methodology from art production is necessary for making political change.

43
Chan in “Paul Chan,” BOMB.

44
Rothkopf, “Embedded in the Culture,” 306.

45
Paul Chan and Martha Rosler, Paul Chan, Martha Rosler: Between Artists Series (New York: A.R.T. Press, 2006),
42.

46
Chan in “Paul Chan,” BOMB.

30
However, Chan does acknowledge the tension present between the two, noting that art
projects and political projects often exist “in opposition”—a consciousness that is a key
element to this analysis of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans.
47

Examining Chan’s writing, we can also understand theoretical and literary
influences on his work. Freedom, estrangement and history consistently resurface in his
written and visual practices. In his writing, one often comes across Theodor Adorno,
Alain Badiou, and at times Georg Hegel, as well as literary figures such as Samuel
Beckett and Bertolt Brecht. References are often as blatant as a slightly altered title,
which is the case for “The Unthinkable Community,” Chan’s 2010 article for the E-Flux
Journal, which we can directly associate with Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative
Community and Maurice Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community.
48
In “The Unthinkable
Community,” Chan focuses on New Orleans and collective art practices as a case study
for his argument that, “In the vernacular of contemporary community, change is a matter
of exchange.” Not only does the collective action of a group charge its power, but in
Chan’s idea of New Orleans, the individuals there chose “to risk interrupting the
seemingly entropic drift of things by organizing themselves against the current.”
49
During
this article, Chan also references Jean-Luc Nancy’s “compearance,” a gathering process

47
McClister begins his article about Chan for BOMB noting the elements of opposition in his practice. See McClister,
BOMB (2005).

48
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland,
and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 11. In his book Nancy posits that
“community, far from being what society has crushed or lost, is what happens to us—question, waiting, event,
imperative—in the wake of society.” In conversation with Nancy’s text, I would also recommend Maurice Blanchot,
The Unavowable Community, translated by Pierre Joris (1983; repr., Barrytown, NY: Stanton Hill Press, 1988), as it
takes on a more agonistic approach to the topic of community.

49
Paul Chan, “The Unthinkable Community,” E-Flux Journal 16 (May 2010), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/144
(accessed June 4, 2011).

31
that leads to one understanding and position for the group, which is offered as a definition
for “community.”
50
The exchange of knowledge is a foundation for Waiting for Godot in
New Orleans—both in its process and afterlife.
In an earlier writing by Chan for the E-Flux Journal, “What Art Is and Where it
Belongs,” he identifies his interest in Theodor Adorno, and specifically the work
Aesthetic Theory.
51
Echoes of Adorno are scattered through the majority of Chan’s texts
and interviews, and traces of his theories can be connected to Chan’s visual work.
Furthermore, estrangement and alienness, which we find in Chan’s written and visual
works, are key factors to both Beckett and Brecht’s oeuvres.
Chan uses writing as a tool of critique, addressing the art sphere, society and his
own work. He constructs a very clear dialogue on “political art” through his willingness
to speak and write about his views and his artistic process. Simultaneously, his writing
also serves to position his work within a specific theoretical discourse. Chan uses his
writing to frame and contextualize his past work, as well as current conditions, often
proposing a particular reception. Furthermore, he posits his work disperses power and
knowledge about society, while simultaneously constructing an idea of power through
collective action. Understanding his position on art and politics, his practice and his
project in New Orleans, we can return to Chan’s interview in BOMB Magazine during

50
Chan describes this term in “The Unthinkable Community,” saying it is when “the public appearance of a group of
individuals working together that makes for their first time their ‘co-appearance,’ or ‘compearance.’” Chan’s
discussion on community recalls earlier conversations on art in public space, specifically those sited within
communities and their political charge. In her work on site-specificity, Miwon Kwon addresses many of the
particularities of working in public space, levels of awareness, and the fact that the rise in socially engages practices
has led to “the community, generally understood as a collective body that mediates between individual subjects and
society,” becoming “a highly charged and extremely elastic political term.” See Miwon Kwon, One Place After
Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 112.

51
Paul Chan, “What Art Is and Where it Belongs,” E-Flux Journal 10 (November 2009), http://www.e-
flux.com/journal/view/95 (accessed August 1, 2011).

32
which he stated, “culture develops by mutating tradition, making it new again.”
52
In New
Orleans, Chan organized ways to prompt community members to begin reconstructing
their culture through gatherings, classes and performances, framing the project with the
idea of renewal.

Perhaps Waiting for Godot in New Orleans is one project in which
Chan’s desire to disperse power can be seen, as it focuses on creating space for
community members to develop their vision of the future—and in Chan’s style, doing so
primarily through a historical, artistic lens. However, the project also exemplifies the
complication inherent to his desire to separate his art practice from political activism—
two elements that are interlaced in Waiting for Godot in New Orleans and its afterlife, as
the project addresses present social and political conditions while also posing possibilities
for the future.

Recognizing Double (or Quadruple) Consciousness
Examining Chan’s artistic and activist practices, we find a focus on renewal in the
face of disaster resurfacing, returning to an earlier discussion by Rebecca Solnit. The
contradiction that Solnit describes in her book, A Paradise Built in Hell, also supports a
notion of the double consciousness introduced by W.E.B. Du Bois in the late 1890s.
Often using the form of periodicals to address the public, Du Bois, a writer, scholar and
activist in the early 20
th
century, wrote about Black Americans and the underrepresented,
focusing on education as a primary means of reforming social injustices in America.
Introducing the concept of a double-self, or double consciousness, as a main

52
Chan in “Paul Chan,” BOMB.

33
characteristic of a Black American’s life in the early 1900s, Du Bois explained the
concept as how one viewed him or herself, while simultaneously recognizing how he or
she was being viewed by others. The concept was a call to action to break through this
contradiction.
53
Recently, the concept of double consciousness has been addressed by
artist, writer, educator and curator Malik Gaines who has proposed the notion of
quadruple consciousness in today’s society—doubling the double conscious of Du
Bois—through an exhibition in Philadelphia, Quadruple Consciousness, and his doctoral
dissertation in 2011.
54
Although the concept strays from Du Bois’ in that it proposes no
unified subjectivity, it stresses the recognition of feeling alien as a member of a marginal
community and supports the notion of split subjectivities. Using these frameworks to
examine Chan’s work in New Orleans, we can recognize the roots in the original use of
the term, both through history of place and the tactics of education and reform the artist
employed in this project, in relation to Du Bois’ concepts of reform. New Orleans’ strong
history of racial inequality, and the storm’s proving of continued race and class tensions
and inequalities, as well as the tensions that accompany socially engaged projects, are the
reasons for which I have turned to this concept of contradiction to describe Waiting for
Godot in New Orleans.

53
Du Bois stated, “After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort
of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no
self-conscious, but only lets him see him self through the revelation of the other world.” W.E.B. Du Bois, “Strivings of
the Negro People,” Atlantic Monthly 80, no. 478 (August 1897), in Brian Johnson, ed., Du Bois on Reform: Periodical-
based Leadership for African Americans (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2005), 21.

54
See Malik Gaines, Quadruple Consciousness (Philadelphia: Vox Populi, 2011). Gaines idea to double Du Bois’
double consciousness is based on the idea that a split subjectivity applies to more individuals today, addressing issues
beyond race such as power, gender, sexuality, class and so on. We can also consider Chan in light of this idea of
multiple subjectivities—born in Hong Kong, he moved to Nebraska at an early age. Chan currently lives in New York
embracing a political activist practice, as well as a writing and visual art practice. Another subjectivity can be added to
this equation when he moved to New Orleans to work among the community.

34
Considering these ideas, and the recognition of there being no “one” subjectivity
today as Gaines posits, we can propose Chan’s multiple levels of consciousness for his
project in New Orleans were shifting between the production of a socially engaged
project, the record of this project, framing the project as ‘art,’ and political action in a
time of need in New Orleans. Working within the public sphere, artists and curators are
faced with numerous contradictions. Between ideas and these contradictions, tensions
exist that revolve around funding, time and abilities, such as communication and
infrastructure. In New Orleans, Chan created an interactive project based on cultural
production and pedagogy, but also recognized that the city was in a fragile state of repair,
lacking important infrastructure and support. What he could offer the residents of the city
compared to what was most needed at the time created tensions in decision-making and
action. Chan’s work in New Orleans supported his ideological stance on social equality
as he simultaneously worked through the art sphere to develop the project, creating a
double consciousness of political activism and art production through intentions and
process.
55
The complexity of this intersection of art and society, and art and politics, is
perhaps the tension that also underpins one’s ability to critique this project beyond its
initial social value.

55
Furthermore, his own vision of the intentions of the art project and political project created a double consciousness of
the purpose of his work in New Orleans as a call to action for individuals in the city and beyond to address the
inequalities present, as well as question future responses and actions.

35

Figure 3. Paul Chan, April note, 2007, pen on paper. Published in Waiting for Godot in
New Orleans: A Field Guide in the chapter titled “Organize.” This image depicts one of
the many types of documents included in the publication and record of the project, and
exemplifies Chan’s ideas such as “How to disarm race?” and “Cannot be slick or
finished: incompleteness!” pertaining to the project.

Source: Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Field Guide, ed. Paul Chan (New York:
Creative Time, 2010), 90.

36
Chapter Two: Remembering - Reforming - Revisiting

Chan’s project in New Orleans blurs lines defining socially engaged artistic
practice, political activism and community organizing. It focused on developing
situations for individuals to interact, learn from each other, and to remember what life
was like before Hurricane Katrina, as well as ways in which to move forward. Through
the staging of a historical play, lecturing on artistic practices and leading theatrical
workshops and seminars, Chan used art as a vehicle to work within the community of
New Orleans. These processes would later inform individuals beyond the city through the
distribution of various records of the project.
Defining the contradiction between what Chan was able to offer to the community
in 2007, in relation to what he wanted to do—both as an artist and an individual faced
with a bleak scene of loss and corruption—I’ve turned to the concept of double
consciousness. This concept also describes the reasons for which Chan engaged with
New Orleans, prompting discussions on life before and after the storm that allowed
individuals to look beyond the canon of disaster, and toward renewing life and culture; as
well as issues of creating a record of the durational project. Time, money, emotions and
infrastructure all lie within, and create tensions between, the double consciousness of
socially engaged practices and Chan’s project in New Orleans. While many believe we
are in an era of post-aesthetic critique, in which we have moved beyond focusing solely
on the art object as the center of critical analyses, questions still exist about how to
examine a project like Chan’s—one that existed for months as a durational project

37
embedded in the social, and later transformed into objects and images circulating within
an art sphere. Considering a long and complex history of writing on art practices in the
public sphere, we can turn to many writers and theorists for guidance on analyzing
practices through multiple lenses such as activism, site-specificity and collaboration.
56

Exhibitions over the past thirty years such as Culture in Action (Chicago, 1991-1993),
Uncommon Sense (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1997) and Living as
Form (New York City, 2011) have helped us understand that dialogue, between any
number of the individuals involved in socially engaged practices, is the foundation of this
genre—from a conversation between community members, to a disagreement between an
artist and a citizen, to a museum visitor examining documentation of a durational work—
as the works foster engagement. Borrowing methodologies from theorists and writers
Suzanne Lacy, Grant Kester, W.E.B. Du Bois and Rebecca Solnit, among others, we can
carefully analyze the mediated elements, alongside the live, of Chan’s work in New
Orleans—the intentions, audiences and benefits of the records of the project, beside those
of the live project in New Orleans.
In her introduction for her 1995 text, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public
Art, Suzanne Lacy confronts the changing field of art and the increase in artists working
in ways that resemble “political and social activity but [are] distinguished by [their]
aesthetic sensibility.”
57
Lacy describes this work as “new genre public art,” and qualifies
this genre by its roots in engagement and collaboration. Lacy’s work as an artist herself

56
For more information on these theorists and writers, see Mary Jane Jacob, Nicolas Bourriaud, Miwon Kwon, Tom
Finkelpearl, Claire Bishop and Grant Kester in the bibliography.

57
Suzanne Lacy, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, ed. Suzanne Lacy (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 19.

38
addressing identity politics, through both individual and collaborative performances,
informs her knowledge of this genre and her writing. As she expresses, working in public
alters the relationship of the audience and artist, blurring the boundaries.
All art posits a space between the artist and the perceiver of the work,
traditionally filled with the art object. In new genre public art, that space is filled
with the relationship between artist and audience, prioritized in the artist’s
working strategies.
58

More recently, Grant Kester has focused on artists working within communities,
analyzing case studies from across the globe on socially engaged and collaborative
processes, using “dialogical art practice” as the main term to speak about these works. A
term derived from Mikhail Bakhtin, “dialogical” practice works as a two-way experience,
recognizing different points of view. The projects Kester addresses in his book
Conversation Pieces: Community + Communication in Modern Art, “replace the
conventional, ‘banking’ style of art…with a process of dialogue and collaboration.”
59

Kester’s analysis of this work leads to a defining moment when he speaks about the
rising intersection of art and social practice found through a keen interest by artists and
organizations on issues such as poverty and education, among many others, and the new
role of the artist as “social service provider,”
60
but he also posits that “active listening and
intersubjective vulnerability play a more central role in these projects, as the artist does
not always occupy a position of pedagogical or creative mastery.”
61
Considering both

58
Lacy, Mapping the Terrain, 35.

59
Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community + Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2004), 10.

60
Kester, Conversation Pieces, 138.

61
Kester, Conversation Pieces, 151.

39
Kester’s and Lacy’s arguments and analyses of the dialogue existing within artworks in
the public sphere, I will borrow Lacy’s concentric circles of audience she describes in
Mapping the Terrain, alongside Kester’s notion of “dialogical art practice,” as evaluative
forces to examine Waiting for Godot in New Orleans and its mediated afterlife.
The construction of Lacy’s circles of audience depends upon the “degree audience
participation forms and informs the work—how it functions as integral to the work’s
structure.”
62
Beginning with the innermost circle and moving to the outermost in her
model, the circles describe audiences of “origination and responsibility,” “collaboration
and codevelopment,” “volunteers and performers,” “immediate audience,” “media
audience” and “audience of myth and memory.”
63
While the model is constructed from a
center to outer lying circles, it is non-hierarchical and individuals can move between the
various circles of audience assuming “different degrees of responsibility for the work.”
64

Using Lacy’s model, we can deconstruct the audiences of Chan’s project alongside an
examination of authorship and responsibility, as well as distribution processes of the
elements of the work, which will guide an understanding of original and lasting intentions
and outcomes of the project, from the live to the mediated.

The Live Project
Chan’s desire to provide an experiential project for New Orleans began with the
staging of Samuel Beckett’s tragicomedy Waiting for Godot on the streets of New

62
Suzanne Lacy, Mapping the Terrain, 178.

63
Ibid.

64
Ibid.

40
Orleans. However, it is important to understand the complexity of his decision to stage
Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, a play for which he is not the author, before
considering the audiences for the New Orleans productions. Beckett, who wrote amid a
time of war, is a formative author of texts that explore time, existentialism and the void
through poetic language in a minimalist vein. Between 1948 and 1949 he wrote En
attendant Godot, which was performed in Paris in 1953. In 1955 it was performed in
English in London, and later across the globe.
65
In Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and
Estragon, the characters around which the play evolves, are two individuals without a
home, waiting for a character named Godot who never physically appears. Entering the
play, there is a tree, an open road and it is evening. No exact place is stated or implied,
nor a time. Often making little sense in their witty conversations that quickly disintegrate,
Vladimir and Estragon are only silent for distinct moments that serve as reminders of the
task of waiting. The text implies that the two have been waiting for a long time, and as
such they share delirious moments that are interlaced with specs of despair and hope—
they remain, just in case something happens that could change their daily routine of
waiting. Each character maintains hope through the support of the other. The play’s
ending is unresolved, and the audience is left to imagine just what or who Godot is, and
why the two main characters continue to wait.
The play reverberated with New Orleans residents for many reasons, one being
the history of performance by the Free Southern Theatre in the city in the 1960s. The
Free Southern Theatre was a division of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

65
Gerry Dukes, “The Godot Phenomenon,” in Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for
Godot,” ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2008), 135.

41
(SNCC), and it was founded with the goal of providing theatre for mixed-race audiences
in an era of segregation and inequality. Eight months after Hurricane Katrina, Christopher
McElroen produced the play with the Classical Theatre of Harlem (CTH) in New York
City. McElroen and his team adapted the play by altering the physical stage, adding “a
15,000-gallon swimming pool on stage with a rooftop and a tree peeking out from the
water.”
66
Similar to Chan’s experience when visiting the city and envisioning the stage of
a Godot production, McElroen’s inspiration for the New York production came from
media images of individuals wading in the water and “dallying.”
Producing the play on the streets of New Orleans for the local public was an
opportunity for audience members to be embedded in the “stage” of which many in New
Orleans were familiar. The second act is set in Waiting for Godot: “Next day. Same time.
Same place.”
67
Chan’s choice to produce the play on the streets of New Orleans was
indeed a political decision, as the Lower Ninth Ward and parts of Gentilly were still in
poor condition two years after Hurricane Katrina. In Waiting for Godot, a tree renews
itself throughout the play and continues to produce leaves, staying alive amid a barren
landscape. This renewal—a central theme in Chan’s project in New Orleans and in many
of his previous works—spoke specifically to an audience of individuals grappling with
destruction without guidance. As we examine this work in its re-performance in New
Orleans, a 21
st
century city confronted with the aftermath of disaster, historical notions of

66
Christopher McElroen, “Directing a Post-Katrina Godot,” Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Field Guide, ed.
Paul Chan (New York: Creative Time, 2010), 51. I believe the New York production took a spectacular approach to
producing the play, borrowing images of destruction and despair and performing for a theatre audience in New York
City. This production ran from May – June 2006.

67
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1954), 47.

42
allegory and re-performance surface. Considering, for example, Craig Owens’ 1980 text
“The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” in which he outlines the
modes of allegory as “an attitude as well as a technique, a perception as well as a
procedure.” Owens states that, “a conviction of the remoteness of the past, and a desire to
redeem it for the present,” are fundamental to allegory.
68
In the case of New Orleans, I
posit that the condition of the city and individual stories of waiting can be read through
the performance of Waiting for Godot, and that Chan’s decision to produce the play in
New Orleans was a way to visually represent emotions, actions and ideas through an
imagery that existed elsewhere in time and place before New Orleans, recalling another
theme from his past works.
69

Chan’s project also points to an examination of the genre of performance work
and its relationship to the social and political climate. In Performance: A Critical
Introduction, Marvin Carlson outlines specific histories of performance and performance
art. In his book, Carlson discusses Dwight Conquergood’s concept of “dialogical”
performance, of which “The result sought is an open-ended performance, resisting
conclusions and seeking to keep interrogation open.”
70
This type of performance allows
different people to bring various backgrounds, interests and views into conversation
together. Considering Waiting for Godot, a play that offers no distinct ending or
conclusion, as well as Chan’s interest in community organizing within New Orleans,
Conquergood’s term—also used by Kester—creates an atmosphere for individuals to

68
Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” October 12 (Spring 1980), 68.

69
As Owens states, “allegorical imagery is appropriated imagery.” Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse,” 69.

70
Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction, 2
nd
ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004), 25.

43
respond as they wish. Waiting for Godot in New Orleans proposes a conversation that
invites questions, and it is this concept that bridges Waiting for Godot, as a text and
performance, to the process-oriented elements of Chan’s project.
Moving through Lacy’s rings of audience we can trace multiple audiences
involved in the production of the play, beginning with Chan’s inception of the idea in
2006. Creative Time and CTH inhabit the rings of collaborators and codevelopers, and
those that contributed to the productions occupy the ring of volunteers and performers.
The immediate audience was composed of those that were able to attend one of the five
performances in New Orleans, and a large media audience was present before, during and
after the performances. Finally, the outermost audience consists of those that carry on the
memory of the productions and project—all contributing to the authorship and taking on
varying levels of responsibility for the project.
Recalling concepts such as Hannah Arendt’s “spaces of appearance,” in which
citizens physically convene to speak about and enact reform, and Chantal Mouffe’s
concepts of agonistic spaces, or those that encourage differing opinions as a vital aspect
to successful public processes, Chan organized opportunities for gathering that, again,
blur the lines between those responsible for an event and those attending.
71
Teaching
classes at universities, Chan held lectures on particular artists that used their practice to
comment on social structures, using his own knowledge along with the work of other
artists as a pedagogical tool. Local artists and university students from across the nation

71
See Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves, “Hannah Arendt and the Idea of Citizenship,” and Chantal Mouffe, “Democratic
Citizenship and the Political Community,” in Chantal Mouffe, ed., Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism,
Citizenship, Community (London: Verso, 1992) for more information on the ideas I am referring to here.

44
attended the lectures as both audience members and participants who would then carry on
the information and energy initiated by Chan. Both the University of New Orleans and
Xavier University collaborated with Creative Time to produce the courses, therefore
extending the audience. A similar engagement with audience and participants applies to
the workshops Chan organized with local schools, cultural organizations and the CTH.
Moving outside of an educational setting or learning environment, Chan also
worked with local individuals to organize potluck dinners, roundtable discussions and
talks at art spaces and cultural organizations as platforms for gathering and enacting
change. For example, in the roundtable “The Art of Renewal,” the focus of the evening is
shifted to a few individuals participating in the discussion and how they interpreted what
was worth renewing in this time of change. The discussion was an outlet for artists and
residents to express how they would move forward, perhaps using the disaster, as
Rebecca Solnit, Demond Miller and Jason Rivera all describe, as a starting point for
change.
72
Each situation developed different audiences, some which existed prior to the
storm and the project, some new—all carrying on the memory and myth of the project in
person or through the project’s documentation.
As Lacy asserts in her model of audience rings, there is no hierarchy to the
various audiences, and members can move in, out and between the rings. While the
productions of Waiting for Godot on the streets of New Orleans provided a starting point
for the project, the gathering processes Chan implemented allowed participants to move

72
As New Orleans artist Dawn DeDeaux stated in “The Art of Renewal,” “we are rising from the ashes” though an
organic or natural process of renewal. Continuing, she recognizes that the city and the residents’ processes will not be
the same, but that “the way we’re going to get through all of this is united.” “The Art of Renewal,” artist roundtable,
October 29, 2007, http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2007/chan/streetwork.html.

45
about as participants, audience members and author, serving as the outlets for Kester’s
idea of dialogical art practices to unfold. Fundamentally unresolved, Chan’s project in
New Orleans allowed individuals to embrace their own ideologies and experiences,
opening antagonistic spaces; however, the record of the project, while attempting to
convey the collaborative nature of the project in New Orleans, carries an author’s mark.

The Mediated Record
Within three years of Chan’s work in New Orleans, audiences both in New
Orleans and beyond were able to engage with the project in at least four ways, aside from
direct stories and personal ties. Much of the information we can gather about the project
presently is located in a publication, Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Field Guide;
on the artist and Creative Time’s websites; in an archive-installation at the Museum of
Modern Art New York; through a film made by Cauleen Smith during the span of Chan’s
project and through published writing about the project and its record. Examining each
aspect of the afterlife of the project through authorship, audience and distribution allows
us to understand how the record functions beyond New Orleans as a mediated version of
the project with each element embodying a different set of intentions and outcomes,
which, in turn, highlights a series of political decisions.
In 2007, filmmaker Cauleen Smith began working in New Orleans with Chan and
Creative Time. In a note published in the Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Field
Guide, Smith annotates an internal question and answer regarding her use of film as a
medium to document the city and the time, and a notion of double consciousness present

46
in her process. “How do we play the camera? Do we push past its limitations? Embrace
them? Or force the materials to reveal their limitations—an eye as fragile as the body it
examines.”
73
Considering Smith’s notes from September 2007, we can see the ways in
which melody and technique flow from her notes to her film, The Fullness of Time
(MiniDV and digitized, hand-painted, 35mm, color/sound, 52:00). In her essay in A Field
Guide, “Constellations Around the Making of The Fullness of Time,” she acknowledges
her turn away from creating a documentary and toward a melodrama, creating a film that
follows an individual’s journey. Through grainy images and quick cuts between scenes
and frames, the camera captures a surreal quality, creating a harmony between what the
camera is able to capture and the subject being shown, which Smith describes as “the
experience of New Orleans citizens who returned to their city after the waters—the
experience of alienation from things assumed familiar, the experience of distance when
near, the experience of time folded into the past and the future.”
74

An outsider of New Orleans herself, Smith found the dislocation of home, people
and belongings, and the state of the city unbelievable and unrecognizable at times.
Through conversations with local individuals and overhearing statements from people in
the city, she composed a storyline and film concept that spoke to the emotions and
processes of those in New Orleans, for whom her work was intended. As Smith explains,
the audiences she envisioned for the film were the individuals being asked to embrace

73
Cauleen Smith, “Excerpts from Pre-Production Notes For The Fullness of Time,” in Waiting for Godot in New
Orleans: A Field Guide, 255.

74
Cauleen Smith in e-mail correspondence with the author, February 23, 2012.

47
Chan and others’ projects in the wake of the storm.
75
Smith sets her film in the “post-
apocalyptic/pre-utopian landscape that presents itself as New Orleans,” drawing on,
again, the contradiction of loss and renewal.
76
Using the melodramatic science fiction
film as a means to communicate stories and shared experiences, she blurs boundaries of
time, space, race and gender. While it is an independent artistic project, it was produced
in collaboration with Chan, Creative Time and the individuals and students that helped by
filming and acting. The film was first shown at the New Orleans International Film
Festival and is available for sale on the artist’s website. In the archive of Chan’s project
on Creative Time’s website there is also a clip of the film to preview. This accessibility is
an important characteristic of the record of the project, allowing for multiple levels and
instances of engagement beyond the time and place of the project, for various audiences.

75
As Cauleen Smith stated about her film, “The intended audience was always the people who shared their stories with
me. New Orleans folk. And specifically the folk that were being asked to embrace Chan's project, people who were in
danger of being marginalized by the neo-colonial economic initiatives that many affluent citizens of the city blithely
assumed were good for everybody when in fact they are only good for a privileged minority.” Smith in e-mail
correspondence with the author, February 23, 2012. There is a reference to this notion in the film as the main character
finds herself on the set of Chan’s Waiting for Godot on the street, adding further confusion to her displacement.

76
Cauleen Smith, “Constellations Around the Making of The Fullness of Time,” in Waiting for Godot in New Orleans:
A Field Guide, 250.

48

Figure 4. Frame grab from The Fullness of Time, 2008. This image depicts the main
character of the film reminiscing after she has returned home. Film by Cauleen Smith.
MiniDV and digitized, hand-painted, 35mm, color/sound, 52:00.

Source: Cauleen Smith,
http://www.cauleensmith.com/CAULEEN_SMITH/2008_FULLNESS.html.

49

Figure 5. Frame grab from The Fullness of Time, 2008. This image depicts the surreal
texture of the film through Smith’s hand painting directly on the film. Film by Cauleen
Smith. MiniDV and digitized, hand-painted, 35mm, color/sound, 52:00.

Source: Cauleen Smith,
http://www.cauleensmith.com/CAULEEN_SMITH/2008_FULLNESS.html.

50
Turning to the book, Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Field Guide, published
by Creative Time in 2010, authorship is apparent through the detail on the cover of the
book that reads, “edited by Paul Chan.” An all-encompassing archive of the project, the
publication provides an in-depth look at Waiting for Godot, the performances, the
rehearsals, meetings, panels, classes and so on. The book operates as a collection of
ephemera associated with Chan’s project, news coverage, narratives on New Orleans and
the history of Beckett’s play. The chapters, aptly titled, are all imperatives—
“Remember,” “Picture,” “Relate,” “Organize,” “Appear,” “Play,” “Film” and “Reflect.”
For the purpose of drawing a comparison between this record of the project and
others, such as what exists within the archive at MoMA, we can turn to the inclusion of
the chapters that bookend the publication, titled “Remember” and “Reflect.” In
“Remember,” Chan, as editor of the publication, included coverage from national media
sources such as the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times and The Times-Picayune,
focusing on headlines that reached millions of readers.
77
The chapter also includes an
essay by Kalamu Ya Salaam, a writer, filmmaker and educator in New Orleans, “What to
do With the Negroes?”
78
In his essay, Salaam constructs an argument as a member of the
black population of New Orleans, describing this population as a particular ‘sub-culture’
of the city, while pointing to the neglect during and after the storm as a race-based
issue—a viewpoint that many New Orleanians and other individuals support. In this

77
Some of these headlines include, “Floods Ravage New Orleans: Two Levees Give way; in Mississippi, Death Toll
Estimated at 110;” “New Orleans Death Toll May Soar; Survivors Desperate; Looters Brazen;” “Glimmers of Hope
Emerge as Water Slowly Recedes.” All located in “What Happened?” in Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Field
Guide, 2-12.

78
Kalamu Ya Salaam, “What to do With the Negroes?” in Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Field Guide, 13-21.

51
chapter, Chan chose to focus on remembering the storm through images of the media, as
well as through the ideas and emotions of a particular individual.
Through interviews and conversations, Chan composed the final chapter of A
Field Guide titled “Reflect.” Two years after the project began, Chan held conversations
with individuals he worked with and this distance provided time to consider how things
had changed and how participants now felt about the project and the overall condition of
the city. Within this chapter, Chan speaks with Kathy Halbreich in an interview titled
“Undoing,” closing the text. Here he reflected on what led him to make the decisions he
did, as well as what he would have changed about the project or done differently—an
opportunity to undo and redo.
79

Published by Creative Time as the “final installment” of the project, Waiting for
Godot in New Orleans: A Field Guide includes a multitude of essays, photographs,
drawings and commentaries by various individuals, and in turn, authorship becomes a
complicated question.
80
Creative Time supplied infrastructural support for the project
when there was little if any at the time in New Orleans, as I mentioned previously, and
therefore claims a particular degree of ownership over both the project and its
documentation. Retracing Lacy’s concentric circles of audience, we find new audiences
engaging with the project, such as those individuals that weren’t able to attend the
performances in New Orleans (as well as many that were but want a physical record of

79
“Undoing: A Conversation Between Kathy Halbreich and Paul Chan,” in Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Field
Guide, 306-321.

80
This notion of the “final installment” is stated by Creative Time as a description of book. Creative Time, “Book
Shop,” https://app.etapestry.com/cart/CreativeTimeInc/default/category.php?ref=1362.0.104172605&pos=10 (accessed
November 2, 2011).

52
the project), each also becoming a member of the memory and myth audience.
Considering the format of the publication, individuals interact with the project at their
own discretion. They are able to pick up the book and put it down as they wish. It is an
object, just as the DVD on which Cauleen Smith’s film is written and each mobilizes the
project beyond New Orleans. While the audience of the publication cannot contribute to
the project as it was in New Orleans in 2007, these individuals can occupy new circles of
audience and participation regarding the history of the storm and the project.
Creating a record of the project in a different format, MoMA acquired the archive
of the project for their collection of Media and Performance Art in 2008. In-house
curators created an installation in consultation with Chan for the museum’s exhibition
Contemporary Art from the Collection (2010-2011). Stretching more than ten feet off the
ground, and reaching beyond the display walls, the installation created an atmosphere for
the project through the display of 243 items, “representing the organization of the event,
conditions surrounding the event, and the event itself.”
81
On the wall, a mural-like display
with a background image depicting street views of New Orleans stretches across two
walls meeting in a corner, as sculptural relics of the New Orleans performances, such as a
shopping cart full of bags and a twig-like tree, form boundaries for the installation.
Documents from the process of Chan’s work, including city permits, photographs from
events, Chan’s university syllabi, birds-eye photographs of a city submerged under water
and posters for the performances are displayed salon-style overlapping the mural
background on the wall. Pieces of blue tarp, reminiscent of those covering destroyed

81
Specific details, such as the collaboration between MoMA and Chan, and the total number of components to the
installation, were acquired through e-mail correspondence with Barbara London, Associate Curator of the Department
of Media and Performance Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the author on February 9, 2012.

53
roofs after the hurricane, hang above the installation on the walls, which look as though
they have been repaired with drywall putty. Small screens and headphones allow visitors
to watch and listen to multimedia elements of the installation, and voices of New
Orleanians guide visitors through the display in audio recordings. Smith’s film is not
included in MoMA’s holdings of the archive, which points to discrepancies between the
publication and archive at MoMA as records of the project.
82

Figure 6. Waiting for Godot in New Orleans installation at the Museum of Modern Art,
New York. This image depicts Paul Chan’s installation situated near the entrance/exit to
the exhibition Contemporary Art from the Collection (2010-2011) at MoMA (doors are
situated on the right in the photograph), individuals visiting the work, and the depth of
the installation from the tarps and large image to the props situated on the ground.

Source: Photograph by Emily Wilkerson (March 2011).

82
Information on the film not included in MoMA’s holdings of the archive was gathered through e-mail
correspondence between Cauleen Smith and the author on February 23, 2012.

54
The archive’s author is distinguished by the museum as Chan, although a team of
curators at MoMA composed the installation in consultation with the artist and many
contributed to the project in New Orleans. Considering the archive or installation an
object itself, it creates its own publics and experiences; however, if we consider it among
the entirety of the project—as an extension—the audience built around the installation is
like that of the book, one of myth and memories of the original project. Through a short-
term viewing experience, the audience is exposed to a record of processes and the play as
they look at and listen to the archive of the project.
83

Figure 7. Paul Chan, Voices and Sounds as audioguides for “Waiting for Godot in New
Orleans” Installation at MoMA (July 2010 – September 2011). This image is a 3D mock-
up of the installation at MoMA by Chan. Each number highlights an element of the
installation that visitors to Chan’s website, National Philistine, can visit below the mock-
up image, linking to mp3s of the audio. All audio is composed and edited by Chan.

Source: National Philistine, http://www.nationalphilistine.com/nola_mp3/.

83
According to Carrie Lambert-Beatty’s 2011 article in Parkett, Chan stipulated that the archive at MoMA be available
to the public. A response from Barbara London detailed that the public only has access to the archive when it is on
display. From e-mail correspondence between London and author, February 25, 2012. See Carrie Lambert-Beatty,
“Essentially Alien: Notes from Outside Paul Chan’s Godot,” Parkett 33 (2011), 77.

55
The archive at MoMA is similar to A Field Guide Chan composed with Creative Time in
that documents and information weigh heavily in its composition, as well as photographs
and the voices of others—equalizing the process-oriented elements of the project, to the
productions of Waiting for Godot in the record of the project. Interestingly, on Chan’s
website, the National Philistine, he documents the project with an abbreviated mock-up
of the installation at MoMA, each element corresponding to an audio piece recorded by a
participant in the project in New Orleans, which you can listen to on Chan’s website, as
well as a list of documents you can view related to the project.
84
On his site, he also
provides links for purchasing A Field Guide, a link to an article he wrote originally
published in the e-Flux Journal in 2010, “The Unthinkable Community,” and an article
written by Carrie Lambert-Beatty for Parkett in 2011, titled “Essentially Alien: Notes
from Outside Paul Chan’s Godot.” These articles and elements are a particular
construction of the history of the project as well. Chan is the author of his website, and
his audience is most likely composed of those interested in his artistic or activist practice.
Through links to either the articles or the sound files, the audience experiences the project
through a few distinct documents on Chan’s site compared to the project in New Orleans,
the installation or the book. The audience’s intersection with the work is carefully
structured here to very precise elements—in a way, similar to the proposition by Cauleen
Smith, who created a specific document displaying the surreal landscape and flood of
emotions after the storm in New Orleans, and her involvement with the project.

84
For the mock-up of the MoMA installation, see Paul Chan, “Voices and sounds as audioguides for Waiting for Godot
in New Orleans installation at MoMA (July 2010-September 2011), National Philistine,
http://www.nationalphilistine.com/nola_mp3/. To view the documents and archive of the project on this website, see
Paul Chan, “How we do what we do; November 2006 – December 2007; in no particular order and not complete,”
National Philistine, http://www.nationalphilistine.com/nola/index.html.

56
The record on Creative Time’s website falls somewhere between the two polar
formats of all-encompassing archive of the publication and installation, and the precise
construction presented on Chan’s website. Concurrent to the project, and as time passed,
Creative Time developed a sub-site for Waiting for Godot in New Orleans by adding
information about the project and documentation of events, creating a history of the
project that describes its elements, collaborations and the background of the project,
reflecting their mission and goals.
85
As the organization’s mission declares, Creative
Time is “guided by a passionate belief in the power of art to create inspiring personal
experiences as well as foster social progress.”
86
The organization is interested in art that
leads to change on a personal and societal level and its main focus is on art production;
therefore, the sub-site for Waiting for Godot in New Orleans concentrates on the art, or
the content embodied in Chan’s three-part project. Creative Time’s audience across the
globe acts as the main audience for the site, as well as those exploring the “Living as
Form” summit of 2011, as the project exists within this Creative Time online archive as
well. Each iteration of the record of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans exists through a
particular mediation, bringing together various authors, audiences and intentions which
all reflect personal or institutional social and political positions framing the project
distinctly.

85
On the “Shadow Fund” page visitors can still make a donation to the Shadow Fund, which contributes a donation
(monetary or in-kind) to an organization or group listed on the site. Images and documentation of events and the
production, selected press for the project and an opportunity to buy a limited edition print—Untitled (After Robert Lynn
Green Sr.)—are all available on the project’s sub-site. It is not clear on the site who or what is directly benefiting from
the sale of these limited edition prints. Creative Time. “Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: Welcome,”
http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2007/chan/welcome.html.

86
Creative Time, “Mission,” http://www.creativetime.org/mission (accessed November 2011).

57

Figure 8. Screen grab of “Street Work” page for Waiting for Godot in New Orleans sub-
site on Creative Time’s website. This image depicts photographs of workshops and round
table discussions during Chan’s project in New Orleans, a list of partners in New Orleans
that the project worked with, and links to audio for the recorded roundtable discussions.
This screen grab was taken in January 2012.

Source: Creative Time website,
http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2007/chan/streetwork.html.

58
Considering the two phases of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans—the project as
it occurred in 2007, and its afterlife or record—a vital element in this examination is an
analysis of critical reception during its two phases. As Lacy notes, the work that is
produced through socially engaged practices is often difficult to measure in its
effectiveness, and depends just as much on understanding the qualifications and
expectations of the community within which one is working, as of the artist or activist.
The focus of an artistic critique, which would normally be on the object, shifts to
processes that are generally positive in intention. Often, it is not until a project has ended
or a few years have passed that a more critical lens can be applied to socially engaged
practices, as it provides distance from the initial work and allows for an opportunity to
find threads of change and signals of effectiveness. Writing closer to the time of the
project meant approaching the project closer to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, and
writing about the records of the project has meant writing with distance to the physical
destruction and flood, placing a greater emphasis on objects or relics. Each is equally
important to understanding the project, how the media facilitated a version of the work
and how the project’s critical reception informed and resonated with various audiences.
A few months prior to the productions of Waiting for Godot, The Times-Picayune,
the New Orleans-based daily newspaper, and the paper’s blog site, Nola.com, published
multiple articles informing readers of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and the play’s
connections to flooded New Orleans; the partnerships of the project; and anecdotes on the
project. Reporters living in New Orleans wrote most of these articles, often writing
through personal accounts and opinions—detaching emotions for many writers at the

59
time in New Orleans proved to be a difficult task, understandably.
87
However, in other
instances the writings acted as brief accounts of information such as when and where to
meet Paul Chan, where to wait to see Godot, information on the cast and background
information on Chan, such as his work with activist groups like the Black Panther Party
and Voices in the Wilderness.
88
While the main audience for these articles was regional,
the online blog was also accessible to an international audience.
In an interview with Eve Troeh on November 3, 2007 for National Public Radio
(NPR), Chan stated, “The sense of waiting is legion here.”
89
Concluding her interview,
Troeh shares that at the performances CTH reserved “seats for President Bush, Governor
Blanco, FEMA officials and others they called the Godots of New Orleans.” She also
added a statement by Lower Ninth Ward resident Robert Green who expressed that those
waiting in New Orleans understood Vladimir and Estragon’s persistence, “They have the
right to be sitting there and waiting, because, if you leave, you lose. If you give up, you
lose. If you decide to come back tomorrow, tomorrow might not come.” Articles like this
raised awareness of the political implications of staging this particular play in New
Orleans at the time, resonating beyond a live performance and into the project’s record.

87
For example, in “WAIT WITH ME: N.O. May Be the Richest Ravaged City in the World,” Ann Maloney writes in
response to her attendance at a performance in the Lower Ninth Ward, “I felt a camaraderie with the two men who
joked, hugged, cried and fought as they dealt with crushing disappointment and a yearning for better days.” As
Maloney describes a portion of the artistic landscape and the cultural responses that have built up within a year of the
storm, she also includes her personal feelings and thoughts. Ann Maloney, “WAIT WITH ME: N.O. May Be the
Richest Ravaged City in the World,” The Times-Picayune, November 8, 2007,
http://blog.nola.com/annmaloney/2007/11/wait_with_me_no_may_be_the_ric.html (accessed October 20, 2011).

88
Chan’s work with Voices in the Wilderness included a trip to Baghdad during which the group provided aid to city
residents, among other work. The U.S. government ordered the group to pay $20,000 for providing aid to Iraq. Chan’s
lawyer for this case lives in New Orleans. Paul Chan, “Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: An Artist Statement,” in
Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Field Guide, 5.

89
Eve Troeh, “Still Waiting on Repairs, New Orleans Hosts ‘Godot,’” Weekend Edition, National Public Radio,
November 3, 2007. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15855355 (accessed October 20, 2011).

60
A few pieces of critical reception in more widely circulated publications, such as
works by Alexis Soloski for Modern Painters and Ethan Brown for The Guardian in the
United Kingdom, provided more in-depth reports on the project.
90
In her November
article, Soloski began her coverage of the project contextualizing the play in its
performance history from San Quentin State Prison to Sarajevo, describing the parallel of
prisoners waiting to be released from jail and those in war-torn Sarajevo to New
Orleanians waiting for recovery. She also focused on Chan’s vision of the project as
renewal and “community development,” not “carpetbaggery,”

in this article.
91
Taking a
different approach in his article for The Guardian, Brown quickly connected the history
of place and the production, pointing out that, “more than 1,000 New Orleanians
representing seemingly every part of the city—from white uptowners to black residents
of the lower ninth—showed up at North Forstall,”

arguing that the play was a “powerful
symbol of the people’s spirit.”
92
Both Brown and Soloski’s writing support the positive
reception of Chan’s project in New Orleans as they focus on the main theme of renewal.
In his December 2, 2007 article in the New York Times, “A Broken City. A Tree.
Evening,” Holland Cotter moved beyond purely reportage of the events in New Orleans
attempting to describe the project. “Mr. Chan was, of course, the center of the New
Orleans project and the imagination behind what is essentially a time-based, collaborative

90
I am noting this in response to writing at the time such as Hilton Al’s brief piece in The New Yorker, which focused
only on the theatrical elements of the play and its cast. Hilton Al, “We Wait,” The New Yorker, November 26, 2007.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/notebook/2007/11/26/07 (accessed October 20, 2011).

91
Alexis Soloski, “Working Practice: Christopher McElroen,” Modern Painters (November 2007), 112.

92
Ethan Brown, “The Lower Ninth Ward Meets Samuel Beckett,” The Guardian, November 12, 2007, under “World
News: United States,” http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007nov/12/usa.media/print (accessed October 20, 2011).

61
work of performance art.”
93
A month after the performances may have allowed Cotter to
take a greater pulse of the project as a whole and attempt to categorize the work for
readers around the globe. However, he was unaware of the shape the project’s afterlife
would take, as MoMA would soon acquire its objects, and Chan would form a
publication of the archive for purchase.
94
As years have passed, additional authors have
attempted to place the artist, the project and its afterlife in greater contexts.
95
There is
now space for thought on how, and if, things have actually changed in New Orleans; how
Chan’s project is still being received in the city and beyond; and furthermore, how the
project was being recorded, and how its history was and continues to be framed.
Almost four years after its inception, Waiting for Godot in New Orleans began re-
surfacing in art criticism when the archive was included in MoMA’s exhibition
Contemporary Art from the Collection. In “MoMA’s Quest for Relevance,” Jason
Edward Kaufman described the museum’s collecting practices. Examining the elements
comprising the Waiting for Godot in New Orleans installation, from city permits to a cart
full of bags, Kaufman pointed out that, “in the museum they become existential
metaphors that stand on their own apart from the performance—which unfortunately is
presented on a wall-mounted video monitor that no one watches for more than a

93
Holland Cotter, “A Broken City. A Tree. Evening.” The New York Times, December 2, 2007.

94
In this same article, Cotter stated, “The kind of dispersed authority it represents runs against present trends, which
overwhelmingly favor the production of single objects in a capitalist marketplace.”

95
Consider here Shannon Jackson’s book that was published in 2011 focusing on collaborative performance in public
space, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York: Routledge, 2011), of which she dedicates an
entire chapter to Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, titled “Unfederated Theatre: Paul Chan Waiting in New Orleans.”

62
minute.”
96
Kaufman focuses on an issue of representation and time in this article, raising
important questions about the hierarchy of the elements within the installation and
questioning what the audience leans toward as core of the work. Furthermore, his focus
on time spent with different objects in the installation opens a discussion on how the
installation interprets or presents the archive of Chan’s project in New Orleans, and how
successful this method of display is, or perhaps was not, in presenting the project to the
museum audience.
Just before Kaufman’s piece was released, New York Times writer Karen
Rosenberg described the exhibition as one that was full of “performance leftovers.”
However, she states visitors were intrigued again with Chan’s archive-installation.
97

According to Rosenberg, visitors’ “emotions get lost in Mr. Chan’s exhaustive archive of
audio, video, photographs, maps and props. But they return, suddenly, with a scream.”
98

Both Rosenberg and Kaufman describe or hint at the depth of content, description and
meaning of the installation at MoMA. Their tones imply that it may be too much content
for the average visitor to absorb through a single visit. It is certain from the installation,
to the book, to the film and the project, each life of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans
requires and develops different relationships with on-lookers and participants based on
time, personal investment and interest.

96
Jason Edward Kaufman, “MoMA’s Quest for Relevance,” Art Info, August 6, 2010.
http://blogs.artinfo.com/inview/2010/08/06/momas-quest-for-relevance/ (accessed October 20, 2011).

97
Karen Rosenberg, “Commentary That’s Both Visual and Vocal,” The New York Times, July 1, 2010.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/arts/design/02contemporary.html (accessed October 20, 2011).

98
Ibid.

63
Most recently, in her 2011 article, “Essentially Alien: Notes from Outside Paul
Chan’s Godot,” Carrie Lambert-Beatty assessed the project as “less a model artwork than
a model of art’s relationship to its social world.”
99
This work of critical reception differs
greatly from those previously mentioned as it addressed the primary phases of the project
after five years passed. Lambert-Beatty also provided one of the only arguments that
approached a critical discussion of the project, raising questions regarding the project’s
intentions. Beginning by thoroughly describing Chan’s project in New Orleans, Lambert-
Beatty stated, “the reception history of this project includes an audience beyond those
present at the five performances, as must have been Chan’s wish, for his documentation
is both thorough and accessible.”
100
This afterlife, or continuation, of Chan’s project is
key to Lambert-Beatty’s investigation, as she focused her assessment on the amount of
extras and add-ons inherent to Chan’s project. Lambert-Beatty pointed to the degrees to
which Chan’s project unfolded from performance, to Shadow Fund and also community
organizing. In essence, she believes Chan continually asked the question, “What else
should we do?”
101
Her article brings to light an important point—what can we make of
the continuations of the project? For this analysis, I consider this question in regard to the
afterlife of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, which may stand as the largest addition to
the project, and how it alters initial and lasting intentions of the project.

99
Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “Essentially Alien: Notes from Outside Paul Chan’s Godot,” Parkett 33 (2011), 79.

100
Lambert-Beatty, 77.

101
Lambert-Beatty, 79. She addresses the add-ons of the project as, “Footnotes. Illustrations. Indices. These are the
add-ons, the extraneous parts of the textual apparatus that Jacques Derrida often focused on.” Lambert-Beatty also
presents two additional arguments in this text: she states that if we don’t wrap up Chan’s project in New Orleans and
label it as ‘art,’ “admitting that is has a structure of supplementation, we admit that art is not enough” (80).
Furthermore, Lambert-Beatty argues for a “limping assemblage of” art and politics (80-81), a subject that is the basis of
my argument, but rendered unequivocally to my position.

64
These works of critical reception point to either process or record, but none
analyze the transition of the project into its afterlife. As the project transitioned from
performances and processes to an archive, we can track a shift from the public sphere to
private, which simultaneously alters the works’ audiences. Issues of authorship become
more apparent in the record, as a collaborative process falls under the construction of one
signature. As Waiting for Godot in New Orleans continues to resonate with individuals
today, we must take into account how authorship and methods of distribution affect the
ways in which audiences experienced and continue to experience the project.

Politics of Distribution
As I’ve discussed, in contemporary writing on socially engaged practices in the
art sphere there appears to be a general reception of positivity for the work being done
and the artists’ processes.
102
However, as Theodor Adorno stated in Aesthetic Theory,
“All artworks, even the affirmative, are a priori polemical.”
103
Each stage of Chan’s
project in New Orleans acted to inform, inspire or to initiate change, and the ways in
which it did so were formed by charged decisions of distribution during and after the
project’s life in New Orleans. In the case of each element of authorship and record, we
must imagine who the main audience is, and how reception has been formed and for
whom.

102
Consider here the dialogue between Grant Kester and Claire Bishop in Artforum (and various other forms) in 2006.

103
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1997), 177.

65
Returning briefly to Cauleen Smith’s essay in A Field Guide, we are pointed to
the question of authorship—a political question working within public space, indeed. The
facts, figures, documents, photographs and images present in the film, publication,
archive and on the websites are presented by the author of the medium as methods for
audiences to engage with and understand Waiting for Godot in New Orleans. However,
Smith states that these only provide the viewer with “a frame.” She warns though, at
times, “The frame becomes so authoritative and impermeable that we cease to imagine or
consider that our subjects also imagine, and remember, and wonder, and dream.”
104

Smith’s interest in the frame is a reflexive notion of creating a work as an artist that
allows space for audience members to form individual relationships to a time, place,
artwork or situation. She addresses the role of authorship in art practice in terms of
authority, which directs us back to Lacy’s rings of audience and Kester’s dialogical
practices, both proposing a non-hierarchical relationship between artist and audience or
participant. Smith herself sees the production of her film in New Orleans, The Fullness of
Time, as a personal response, but one that can bring issues to bear that were local at the
instant, but global in reality, allowing a multiplicity of individuals to create their own
connection, memory and vision.
When we review the language Chan deployed in the documentation of Waiting for
Godot in New Orleans, notably in the book and around the archive-installation, we gain
insight on the double consciousness of initiating or inspiring an action of reform, and
realizing this reform or continuing to develop a message beyond a city or particular

104
Cauleen Smith, “Constellations Around The Making of The Fullness of Time,” in Waiting for Godot in New
Orleans: A Field Guide, 249.

66
timeframe. Examining Chan’s language used to frame the project, we see words reoccur
such as “renew” and “freedom.” Through these words, we see clear connections to the
play Waiting for Godot, and to histories of recovery and reform. Working in New Orleans
two years after the storm and floods, Chan was responding to a sense of hope and did so
through actions of renewal and the language of reform.
In the project’s documentation, Chan stresses the overall process was the
centripetal force of the project by including many texts about and documents from the
project. In Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Field Guide, Chan, as editor, went to a
great extent to contextualize the project among time and place, but also memorialized the
project in doing so, placing an emphasis on collaboration, freedom and reimagining or
renewing. Chan’s voice, ideas and opinions are present through his editorial choices, his
writing, to-do lists and drawings present in the book. How Chan organized the material,
and the exact material he offers, forms the reader’s reception. For example, in A Field
Guide, Chan included theoretical texts by Terry Eagleton and Alain Badiou on Beckett
and Waiting for Godot, as well as writing by Susan Sontag on her production of the play
in Sarajevo. Here, he is guiding the reader and audience to frame the work in New
Orleans in a particular way that aligns it historically with Sontag, Badiou and others.
Similarly, in “Next Day, Same Place: After Godot in New Orleans,” an article by Chan
published in The Drama Review in 2008, he states, “to imagine that the play was the
thing is to miss the thing,” referring to the complete project in New Orleans. Further

67
describing this notion, he adds, “We wanted to create, in the process of staging the play,
an image of art as a form of reason.”
105

From documents to photographs, an essay by Kalamu Ya Salaam to Dawn
DeDeaux’s voice, each element of documentation acts as both a frame for interpretation
and a personal account based on human interaction and communication.
106
Considering
the intentions of the archive-installation, to provide a representation of the project or
event, we see Chan’s role as author almost equal to that of the institution in which it is
housed, which controls access to the piece. While the installation represents the many
aspects of the project in New Orleans, it still carries Chan’s name as it is housed away
from the streets of New Orleans in the sterile museum.
107
Voices of New Orleanians
guide the audience to the objects included in the installation, providing this humanistic
connection through audio components, as if they are able to give life to a memory on
display. The construction of every voice and representation alters the messages
distributed to the various audiences, and therefore contributes to the overall experience of
each audience member in various instances. Considering the place of the installation at
the end of the exhibition, and its depth of content, it is uncertain how many people are
able to spend enough time with the installation and its many components to take note of

105
Paul Chan, “Next Day, Same Place: After Godot in New Orleans,” The Drama Review 52: 4 (Winter 2008), 3.

106
Kalamu Ya Salaam, a New Orleans-based poet and writer, appears in Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Field
Guide through his essay “What To Do With The Negroes?” 13-21. New Orleans artist Dawn DeDeaux’s voice is
present in the recording of “The Art of Renewal,” http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2007/chan/streetwork.html.

107
Consider here the essay by Elena Filipovic, “The Global White Cube,” written in 2005. In the essay, Filipovic
describes the legacy of the “white cube” aesthetic of the museum and its roots in the United States at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York, looking back to 1929 and the leadership of Alfred J. Barr. She describes how this aesthetic
structure separates the artwork from “the stuff of everyday life.” Published in The Biennial Reader, eds. Elena
Filipovic, Marieke Van Hal, and Solveig Ovstebo (Bergen, Norway: Bergen Kunsthall, 2010), 323-324.

68
the multiple voices represented and form their own—but it does present the opportunity
to do so on the occasion of its exhibition.
Through his language embedded in the publication, to choices of what to include
in the archive at MoMA and the way in which he frames the work beyond its
documentation, Chan closely engages the emotions of the reader through pointed
decisions. Each choice is informed by the knowledge that these works are being created
for other individuals, and with an awareness that they will carry on a specific history of
the project and place. What one learns about Hurricane Katrina and the levee failures, and
the masses of devastation people experienced of all different types in the city; what one
learns about Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot, and the performances on the street; who
Chan interacted with living in the city of New Orleans; the images, the things Chan
would change, the many voices of the project—all of these things are introduced and
serve as reminders to the audience of the project describing what exactly Waiting for
Godot in New Orleans was, is and hopes to be. While we can posit that Chan’s vision
was to carry on a project of renewal, highlighting a time, place and community, we must
recognize the ways in which authorship can affect the record of a work and process—
considering again, Chan’s separation of art and political activism, often functioning as a
framing device.

Creating, Engaging and Renewing Publics
From the site of the productions and organizing events, to the readers of The
Times-Picayune and The New York Times, the viewers of Cauleen Smith’s The Fullness

69
of Time and the visitors of MoMA’s Contemporary Art from the Collection (2010-2011),
Waiting for Godot in New Orleans formed a variety of publics, both temporary and long-
term. Defining the project’s temporary publics as the short-term publics involved with the
productions in New Orleans, events, readers of brief news accounts and individuals that
visited the installation at MoMA; and the long-term publics as those that engaged with
the project in ways that informed them beyond a momentary situation, I propose they are
both created from temporary situations due to the semi-permanency of each element of
the project. For example, as noted in A Field Guide, at least $45,000 of direct funding, in
addition to in-kind donations, was made to various organizations throughout New
Orleans through the Shadow Fund.
108
Although the Shadow Fund acted as a main
element of the project in New Orleans in response to the production budget for the plays
in 2007, the organizations and their constituents continued benefiting from these
donations beyond the productions. Furthermore, examples set by these organizations and
Chan regarding community organizing and rebuilding present themselves in accessible
ways to audiences through documentation of the project, and can be used as models of
contribution and action in other circumstances.
In the case of New Orleans, the sustainability of projects taking the city as their
site became a pertinent issue soon after the disaster. In some cases, direct financial aid
was not as sustainable as building knowledge and encouraging interaction—the
intersection of art, direct funding and activism in Waiting for Godot in New Orleans
played out not so much as an either-or situation, but a negotiation. An artist himself,

108
“Shadow Fund,” excel spreadsheet, 2007, in Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Field Guide, 301.

70
Chan addressed these issues working with a variety of individuals and focused on the
cultural and creative economy as the main sources of distribution. He worked to supply
ideas and inspiration to members of the community that were receptive to his invitations
to learn or work. Through the construction of many temporary publics, Chan’s project
was developed along the ideas of long-term change than parallel equality and social
reform, echoing his activist interests, and therefore his political beliefs.
Chan entered the existing New Orleans community in 2006, developing new
publics and audiences within it. Leaving New Orleans in 2007, he left inspiration for
those challenged with the task of renewal; funding for local cultural and art organizations
to carry on the traditions of the city as well as develop new ones; and gathering processes
for those interested in learning and working together to create change. As community
organizing, which is generally realized as a grassroots form of activism, functions,
Chan’s project set up systems for individuals to carry on, expanding audiences and
allowing for a multitude of different experiences. The complexities of the sociological,
political and personal of socially engaged practices are difficult to analyze in terms of
effectiveness and meeting an end goal, and examining their documentation complicates
and often contradicts original intentions and perception. Understanding the context in
which these projects are operating, as well as being aware of the artist’s process and
overarching practice, can aid our understanding of the goals and intentions of the artist
and those involved, as well as assist us in developing a critical methodology of inquiry.

71

Figure 9. Screen grab of “Shadow Fund” page for Waiting for Godot in New Orleans sub-
site on Creative Time’s website. This image depicts the story of the inception of the
Shadow Fund fundraising initiative, a drawing by Paul Chan (2007) and an option for
donating to the fund. This screen grab was taken in January 2012.

Source: Creative Time website,
http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2007/chan/shadow.html.

72
Conclusion

It is possible that process-oriented public art is most powerful when, as with most
visual art forms, it operates as a symbol. The relationship of demonstrable effects
to the impact of a metaphor must be grappled with as this work attempts to
function simultaneously within both social and aesthetic traditions.
109

-Suzanne Lacy, Mapping the Terrain, 1995

After his visit to New Orleans in 2006, Chan described his initial reception of the
city’s condition in relation to what he had seen and heard through the media and friends,
saying, “What surprised me about seeing New Orleans for the first time was that I
couldn’t put together a complete picture of the city. I expected comparative contrasts, but
not wholesale contradictions.”
110
Chan explained he was outraged by the lack of support
for the city’s residents during and after the disaster as he watched the news coverage
from afar. His drive for working in New Orleans traced his reasons for traveling to
Baghdad with the anti-war group Voices in the Wilderness just a few years prior—he felt
the treatment of individuals and the US government’s decisions were unjust. Embodying
a multiplicity of practices, Chan is a political activist, a visual artist, a writer and a
theoretician. Working within each practice, he is aware of the others, and although he
strives to separate his political activism from his art making, a double consciousness of
the two is evident in the decisions he makes regarding the relationship of, and tensions
between, the two.

109
Suzanne Lacy, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, ed. Suzanne Lacy (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 183-184.

110
Paul Chan, “Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: An Artist Statement,” in Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A
Field Guide, ed. Paul Chan (New York: Creative Time, 2010), 25.

73
Most socially engaged practices are driven by an interest in aiding someone or a
particular situation, be it a community or an organizational mission, and is rooted in the
artist, collective or organization’s ideologies. In turn, the values upheld become present
in the work as it takes on different forms. Whether it is a rehabilitation project that lasts
for a day, a trend to help the environment, funding to aid in rebuilding or actuating civil
rights legislation, the values are contained within decisions to act, in the process of the
project and in documenting the work. Organizing Waiting for Godot in New Orleans,
Chan’s particular decisions were fueled by a balance of his interests and intentions and
the city’s needs, which is evident in the process and documentation of the project.
Beginning Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, Chan created an action-oriented
response to a situation formed out of a natural disaster, man-made failures and a lack of
recovery that caused loss and injustice on many levels. The project was formed around
the idea of art being a tool to enter a community in a state of despair, but in a way that
would also contribute sustainably to the renewal process. Through theatrical productions
of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Chan offered a space for memory, as well as a
charge to bring waiting to an end. Through the Shadow Fund, he provided direct financial
support, and in some cases in-kind support, to local organizations by matching the
production budget of the plays through a fundraising initiative. Through meetings,
dinners and teaching, Chan created opportunities for individuals to gather and learn about
each other, igniting their ability to create collective power and ability to imagine
themselves beyond the loss and destruction of the disaster. The archive at MoMA, the
publication Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Field Guide, Cauleen Smith’s film The

74
Fullness of Time, the multiple iterations of the project online and the project’s critical
reception all carry on the processes and memories of the project, the city, Hurricane
Katrina and the people of New Orleans through different voices.
Waiting for Godot in New Orleans acts as a symbol of collective power, social
justice and attempts at understanding how the two operate together in efforts of renewal
in the face of disaster; however, the long-term social effects of the project are difficult to
measure as it was framed as a community-based pedagogical and experiential project.
Aligning the project with organizations in the city such as The Porch and artist collectives
through goals and similar methods of financial support, Chan’s primary desire to work
with and contribute to the New Orleans community through collaboration is apparent.
However, as the project transformed into multiple records created and controlled by
Chan, MoMA, Smith, Creative Time and others, each author informed a different
audience of distinctive aspects of the project and its context. As the audience of the
project’s record is often one beyond New Orleans, the transformation brings the original
intentions of the project into question. This manuscript has highlighted this moment and
how a shift from collaboration in process to author and audience in documentation can
occur during this transformation, altering both perception and reception.
In documenting and displaying socially engaged works, a main challenge exists
between maintaining the political and social efficacy of a project while creating methods
for individuals to access and understand the work. The difficulty of constructing and
translating conversations, experiences and working methodologies becomes apparent
through processes of documentation. In the case of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans,

75
the documentation may freeze images, events and stories; but I posit the record upholds
an ongoing conversation, one that remains unresolved like the project. While particular
voices are apparent, each element of the afterlife returns to Chan’s original intentions of
working in New Orleans—keeping Hurricane Katrina and its effects on New Orleans in
the public eye, while the project and its afterlife simultaneously propose ways to respond
to the double consciousness of disaster, charging New Orleanians and others to move
beyond the language and images of disaster and into stages of renewal.
I have proposed that Chan borrowed methodologies from histories of activism,
community organizing and his own work, and these in turn have affected the rhetorical
strategies, as well as processes, of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans and the project’s
afterlife. The artist’s interests and desires, however, are also examined in light of how
they may affect the documentation and overall reception of the project—and furthermore,
how the collection and display of contemporary performance and participatory works
affect the original intentions of the work and its reception. Chan proposes a separation of
art practice and political practice, and many writers and critics respond to his work
addressing this idea. In fact, both Rothkopf and Birnbaum, two writers I addressed in this
analysis, propose a “contamination” of the two when examining Chan’s work, while
others propose an “intersection” or an “assemblage.” However, my analysis of Chan’s
practices and his work in New Orleans proposes a view of this separation as Chan
recognizing a double consciousness of the two, responding to the tensions existing
between the art project and the political project. Referring back to Chan’s terms, the
project in New Orleans provided no conclusions and poses “questions for possible

76
futures,” and therefore qualifies as an art project, whereas the archive and records of the
project became a political project in their desire to address “present social conditions with
specific ends in mind.” Complicating this notion, the records of the project are circulating
as art objects, returning again to ambiguous conclusions through the legacy of the art
project. Waiting for Godot in New Orleans and the project’s afterlife, in particular, create
a contentious entanglement of Chan’s art practice and his political practice.
While the many records of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans alter the ways we
continue engaging with the project, shared political views on the rights of individuals and
respect that all humans deserve allow for an ability to disarm race, cross boundaries of
ethnicities and class, and resonate beyond a place, such as a traumatic or hopeful
situation, a book, an archive or a museum. As this examination of Waiting for Godot in
New Orleans exemplifies, in the case of managing the live and mediated of socially
engaged practices, art and politics are completely intertwined; and as artists, curators and
cultural producers, we must be aware of the multiple levels of consciousness we
inherently encounter in these practices and in the process of their documentation.

77
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This manuscript presents a critical analysis of authorship, participation, distribution and perception of Paul Chan’s project ""Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Play in Two Acts, A Project in Three Parts"" and its afterlife, highlighting the contradictions of working in this genre of art production. In 2007, Chan organized an experiential project in New Orleans in response to the loss experienced and lack of recovery exhibited in the wake of Hurricane Katrina

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Asset Metadata

Creator Wilkerson, Emily (author)

Core Title The politics of renewal: the process and record of Paul Chan's Waiting for Godot in New Orleans

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Public Art Studies

Degree Program Public Art Studies

Publication Date 04/27/2012

Defense Date 03/26/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag archive,art and politics,authorship,New Orleans,OAI-PMH Harvest,participation,Paul Chan,social practice,socially engaged art practice,Waiting for Godot

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Bray, Anne (committee chair), Meyer, Richard Evan (committee member), Segade, Alexandro (committee member)

Creator Email emilywilk1@gmail.com,ewilkers@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-16618

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