For centuries, artists of all persuasions have tried to portray the character of New Orleans, but the place resists capture. Its essence is to have innumerable essences, the prodigious layers of irreplaceable history both hidden and everywhere evident. It is an enigma and a paradox, a city of joy and a collection of sorrows.
Only an artist deploying such varied mediums could hope to approach the complexities. With I will keep my soul, Helen Cammock, who uses film, photography, poetry, and performance to examine her subjects, blends perspectives on how New Orleans’ varied past informs its present. A British artist who shared the 2019 Turner Prize with three others, she spent time in 2022 in the city and the archives of the Amistad research centre. The result is a large-scale exhibition currently at Art + Practice in Los Angeles (in partnership with the California African American Museum), which will travel to New Orleans from October to December 2023, where it will be expanded to multiple sites with film, outdoor installations of his textual work, musical performances and the work of artists who influenced his appreciation of the city. The accompanying book is lavishly published by Siglio Press in conjunction with the Rivers Institute for Art and Thought and CAAM.
The book is a journey. Cammock inadvertently captures the modus operandi of her project – she describes the layers of everyday sounds that have long since rearranged themselves into music in her ear as “the composition of energies”. He ventures near and far to collect representative “energies” of New Orleans: the lingering ghost of the bloody Southern cotton and sugar trade, the work and ethos of African-American artist Elizabeth Catlett. (including his 1976 commission for a statue of Louis Armstrong, to reside in the eponymous park that also surrounds Congo Square, the region’s historic slave meeting place), Catlett’s posters benefiting Angela’s struggle Davis against imprisonment and the cohesive powers of music for generations of black citizens. A subtext throughout is the importance and fruitfulness of the archive, a mass of evidence. In this case, proof of the inflexible perseverance of an artist, and of the essential role of art in activism. By extension, we must understand Cammock’s practice as militant in nature, just as Catlett asserted of her art. By taking his work and his words as subject matter, the latter artist thus claims the former as a direct predecessor.
To this end, the book is teeming with reproductions: correspondence, scores, extracts from news and leaflets. A manifesto by James Farmer, co-founder of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and organizer of the first freedom tower, gives the title to the exhibition and to Cammock’s book. Outlining the goals of the protest and the treatment its participants received in prison, his statement ends with a prisoner’s resilient cry against the guards’ retaliatory tactics, which included the removal of mattresses: “Come and get my mattress.” , he shouted. “I will keep my soul.”
The book is above all a hymn to this type of resilience, which is conveyed most dramatically by its photographs of contemporary New Orleans. The young musicians take the brass, as if they came directly from the hand of Louis Armstrong. People continue to walk the same paths as their creative ancestors: images of feet and sidewalks, and streetscapes, recur like the chorus of a song. The book opens with a photo that sums up its origin story: the disembodied hands of a black individual pull out the drawer of a card catalog. This is where we must always begin, he suggests, in the collected evidence of our strength.
How does the static format of a book capture the temporal and ever-changing nature of the gesture, the thought, the music, all the movement that defines social history? By doing something very close to what I will keep my soul accomplishes: breaking through the fourth wall of the page. We’re not only prompted to switch between visuals, but we have a way to mediate them. Several transparent pages are interspersed. When rotated, they seem to introduce a blurry scrim of time falling on the cool clarity of the present – and when paged to sit on top of the image in front, they reverse time. It sets the stage for how layers of time are sequentially dug into the archive, the very enterprise that underlies the artist’s multi-level project.
When Cammock came to NOLA more than half a century after sculptor Elizabeth Catlett, she would find herself somewhat of a shadow for Catlett. Or is Catlett her shadow? Both operate from a belief in the inherent advocacy power of art, how it brings the intellect and heart needed to advance a cause. In a 1961 speech, Catlett said that in the contemporary climate “[n]neither the Negro artist nor American art can afford to take an isolated position. It’s a continued necessity in 2023, Helen Cammock indeed agrees. Each page of his project accumulates in confirmation.
I will keep my soul gives a depiction of the rich cultural history of silt that has been deposited in the Mississippi Delta, evoking the back and forth of natural and unnatural forces. The fluid musicality of its composition reminds the viewer of a truth as central as anyone can be about a kaleidoscope-like New Orleans: it always kept moving, and always to its own beat.
I will keep my soul by Helen Cammock (2023) is published by Siglio Press and is available online and in independent bookstores.
