One of Milwaukee’s under-heralded outdoor art sites is tucked away in the middle of the East Side, hidden from street view but for the sight of a mustachioed frog on the south face of a building on East Kenilworth Place. Site-specific art that is integrated seamlessly into the urban landscape is often the easiest to overlook and the most satisfying to stumble upon.
Black Cat Alley’s sinister-sounding title somewhat belies the reality of its circumstances. Located between Prospect and Farwell just south of North Avenue, it is indeed an alley, and it may be visited by the occasional stray cat, but pinched between a Colectivo coffee outlet, the Oriental Theatre and a new amusement bar where one pays to throw axes, it’s more outdoor gallery and cultural theater than interventionist intersection.
Indeed, the Alley is programmed with concerts, art shows and other social events. This past weekend, in fact, they celebrated “The Black Cat Alley Mural Festival,” featuring new murals by Ken Brown, David Najib Kasir and Byada Meredith. The site isn’t pretending to be 5Pointz, but its boast as a “unique street art destination” might make some purists nostalgic for the embattled streets of East Berlin or the South Bronx in the late ’70s.
Recreating Pablo Picasso’s Montmartre, the Cedar Bar in 1951 or New York City in the ’70s is impossible. These are our cultural Gardens of Eden; we’re forever expelled from them. Culture depends on the germination of artistic experiments into future mythologies. Black Cat Alley’s seeds are the practices of local lifers like Stacey Williams Ng (of mustachioed frog fame), Brandon Minga, John Kowalczyk, Jeff Redmon and others who continue to propagate work and ideas that will shape Milwaukee’s culture for years to come.
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Across the river, south of the city in the Boerner Botanical Gardens, the shadowy fantasy of Black Cat Alley meets its theatrical match in the form of an incandescent spectacle of simulated Chinese culture on a Las Vegas, Walt Disney or, perhaps, well, a Chinese scale. The China Lights Festival offers glowing pandas feeding on illuminated bamboo shoots in the company of electrified pagodas and teams of mythical Chinese creatures lit up Griswold-style.
On the night of its opening, the event slowly swelled to a dazzling phosphorescent crescendo of cartoons brightening against a shrinking, early autumn sunset. It was as sublime as anything James Turrell could ignite in his imagination. Nature and culture locked horns, and nature was vanquished in spectacular (and ironic) fashion. Historically accurate Chinese culture didn’t fare much better. Yet thousands of families, mine included, delighted in an astounding display of electrically engineered sensuality.
Where Does Art End and Simulacra Begin?
So, what to make of such a sensational visual spectacle? And of visual experiences derived from more natural, historically and culturally authentic circumstances? From my end, it’s easy to point out deficiencies from inside the art world proper. But what about cultural examples less proximate; say, a farm-to-table restaurant in a gentrified downtown neighborhood or a chic moonshine distillery with an accompanying Appalachian roots band? Where does art end and simulacra begin? These aren’t questions to answer but to ponder as an ongoing mental therapy. It’s like asking yourself what the meaning of life is; the question, itself, is a step toward supreme wisdom.
On the final exam in my contemporary art class, I ask my students to make the case that Taco Bell’s Nacho Cheese Doritos Locos Taco Supreme is both the best and the worst food ever imagined. There’s no objective answer, of course, but I always hope they’ll consider that something designed from volumes of focus-grouped data might be missing something essential. But also, I hope they won’t turn into righteous vigilantes for authenticity, forgetting that experience ends, finally, with a reception by living humans hoping to enjoy the fruits of history’s labor.
I can’t stop thinking about this guy I saw playing air drums on the lip of a table at the strip mall sushi restaurant we went to after the China Lights Festival. The Ramones were playing. My cones and rods hadn’t even adjusted from the light show. It was truly surreal. I considered for a second that he might be imagining himself as Marky Ramone at CBGB in ’77. And that seemed just fine to me—as long as he knew that CBGB isn’t a T-shirt company owned by Hot Topic.
Openings
Entanglement: Seeds and Papermaking Workshop
Sept. 29
Lynden Sculpture Garden
2145 W. Brown Deer Road
Lynden’s teachers-in-residence (Sue Pezanoski Browne and Katie Hobday) are offering a hands-on workshop for educators (suitable for all K-12 teachers) on this year’s theme—entanglement. This relaxed, informal workshop is designed to encourage open-ended experimentation with materials, processes and concepts (new materialism, principles of possibility, artful thinking routines) within the context of arts-integrated, place-based education.
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The workshop begins with seeds, moves through plant identification and then on to root systems and water resources. Participants will visit the pollinator garden to understand plants and the food chain and learn about practical uses of plants in medicine and art. A combination of artmaking, nature observation and practical skills, the workshop seeks to build connections across the curriculum between art and science. For more information, visit lyndensculpturegarden.org.
