Jonah Emerson Bell

BYWATER - Rising from the rubble of an old Creole cottage on Piety Street, an entire village of sculpture and sound is starting to take shape. 

Later this month, the downtown art collective New Orleans Airlift will reveal an installation called “The Music Box: A Shantytown Sound Laboratory,” which features nearly a dozen different architectural structures created from salvaged materials and outfitted with various forms of amplified music making.

Over the last few weeks, a ragtag band of artists and musicians from around the country have gathered at 1027 Piety St., transforming the empty lot into a sprawling landscape that transcends both blight and beauty, creating their own world from old wood, brick, glass, and scrap metal.

The Music Box is a stepping stone for an even more ambitious project conceived by the New Orleans Airlift and Swoon, an international artist whose work as a street artist catapulted her into museums and galleries around the world - including our own.  Swoon has since used her influence to support other artists on the fringes of the art world. After visiting New Orleans in 2008, she proposed the musical house, a one-of-a-kind architectural marvel incorporating instrumentation built into the walls, ceilings, and floorboards. The Airlift found a Creole cottage from the 1790s decaying on Piety Street and decided to move forward with the project, but the house crumbled before they could begin.  Now they’re starting from scratch. The Music Box gives the collaborators a chance to experiment with the integration of sound and sculpture as they continue working toward the original goal.

While not officially associated with Prospect New Orleans, the Music Box will be listed as a “satellite” of Prospect 2, and the opening and closing dates run roughly concurrent with those of the citywide art biennial. The Airlift will host the performances at the Music Box on Oct. 22, another on Nov. 19, and Dec. 10. On non-performance weekends, the shantytown will be open for the public to wander and explore.

NoDef got a sneak peek at The Music Box with Delaney Martin, director of the New Orleans Airlift and curator of the Music Box, along with some of the artists working onsite.

“This is sort of our proof of concept, even to ourselves,” said Martin. 

While she admitted that the shantytown might be an “over-the-top backdrop for a prototyping of instruments,” part of the idea is to gather artists and musicians for a performance. 

“And if we’re going to throw a concert,” she said, “we might as well be in a beautiful setting.” 

For the concerts, musicians will come in to “play” the structures, creating a sound-art orchestra that will be conducted by Quintron, the neighborhood noise maker who has long straddled the line between performance and art.

While Swoon was involved in developing the idea, the execution has become a true collaborative effort, which Martin says is one of the most unique traits of the project.

“It’s just so fun to have all these people having ownership of the project,” she said.  “The idea of the Airlift is always to bring artists to the city who are going to make projects with other people.”

Aaron Taylor Kuffner is one such artist. Kuffner lived in New Orleans in the mid-90s, but this is his first time back in over a decade. NoDef got a tour of Kuffner’s “Pendopo at the End of the Universe,” a gazebo-like structure inspired by traditional Indonesian pendopos, historically used as ceremonial sites.  Housed in the pendopo is what Kuffner calls a “fully robotic Indonesian gamelan orchestra,” referring to the musical ensembles of Indonesia made up of flutes, gongs, and xylophones.  Kuffner’s orchestra can be manipulated by buttons and switches, or it can operate on its own, like a player piano.

Jonah Emerson-Bell and Rainger Pinney, a team of Brooklyn, NY, based artists, find inspiration closer to home.  Their structure consists of small chamber outfitted with an amplification device attached to a “Leslie” speaker, which is a rotating speaker that distorts sound using the Doppler effect.  The chamber will also have a stethoscope-like device that will allow a musician to broadcast his heartbeat, using his own vital signs like a metronome or rhythm track.

Ranjit Bhatnagar is working on a small house with wooden floorboards that move like piano keys and creak at various pitches. Martin used this work as an example of the way musicians will make the art their own. 

“I’ve already seen musicians come and play the creaking floor boards, like [New Orleans bassist] James Singleton and Nicky Da B, a bounce rapper, and they treat those floor boards really differently and play them in a way in that’s musical,” Martin said.  

Elizabeth Shannon is one of the local artists contributing to the Music Box.  Shannon has been part of the contemporary art scene in New Orleans for years, and she was one of the founding members of the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center in the mid-70s.  Her work was recently featured in the CAC exhibition Then & Now which included work from artists involved with the CAC over the last 35 years.

For the Music Box, Shannon and New Orleans artist Micah Learned are designing and building a tall, octagonal structure that will house a large steel bell-shaped instrument created by and Austin, Texas, artists Angeliska Polachek and Colin McIntyre. Shannon added big glass windows to the structure so as not to obscure the piece-within-the piece, again demonstrating the collaborative spirit of the work.

Shannon told NoDef that she thinks Airlift is doing “good for the neighborhood, and good for the community,” carrying the torch of the arts community that first moved across Elysian Fields in the early 1980s.  Shannon praised Martin for “doing it right” by getting the necessary permits and enlisting the support of the neighborhood.

For Martin, it’s all part of a mission to get the Bywater artists to take themselves more seriously and recognize that there is a bigger audience for the work they’re doing.  While the Airlift has been known to throw a party or two at the Piety Street lot, Martin insists that this is not that.  The Music Box, she says, is art, a performance, and she hopes audiences will treat it like a day at the museum or a night at the symphony.

When asked what she hopes to accomplish with the Music Box, how success will be measured when the whole thing comes down at the end of the year, Martin said, “Success will look like winning our neighbors over to the idea that a musical house is a nice thing to have in your neighborhood; the razzle-dazzle that we see in kids’ eyes; good publicity that will help us move on to the next phase.” 

And, she said, “Success would mostly be the city getting excited about this notion of what I think could a landmark sculpture, a thing that people come from far and wide to see.”