If these Refrigerators Coudl Speak: Death in New Orleans
Gandalf Grey
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January 29, 2006
Op-Art
If These Refrigerators Could Speak
By ANDREI CODRESCU and NILS JUUL-HANSEN
Baton Rouge, La.
WHEN New Orleanians returned to their homes after the Storm they were struck
by a smell that has no equivalent: a stupefying blend of decaying flesh as
layered as the city's history. The sweet rankness of animal and human death
floated around the city as it might have in the aftermath of a yellow fever
epidemic in the 18th century, but added to it was the putrid efflorescence
of 20th-century grocery store meat inside thousands of refrigerators.
For a week or so after the storm, when the city wallowed in its filth and
misery without help from the United States of America, which it had
mistakenly believed it was part of, people helped one another drag the
taped-up fridges outside. Rows and rows of white metal boxes cradling
generations of maggots began to fill the narrow byways of one of America's
oldest cities. Waves of putrefaction rolled over the streets. New Orleans
sank into the funk like a corpse into the embrace of the earth.
The rows of fridges lining the streets looked by moonlight like primed
canvases ready for painting. The city's artists, who have been enthralled
since John James Audubon by New Orleans's embrace of decay and death
(Audubon purchased all his American birds dead from the French Market), were
not long in reacting.
New Orleans music and art had always been inspired by funk: rotting
vegetation, blooming night jasmine, the faint smell of the dead wafting from
the city's above-ground cemeteries, rotting crustaceans, transpiration and
sex. Now here was all this funk, magnified a thousand times. And here were
all these metal tombs stretching as far as the eye could see, more numerous
than the graves they resembled. The art appeared instantly and it was,
appropriately, political.
"Chem Trails Are Real: Weather Control Is Here," was scrawled on a
refrigerator below a drawing of a jet leaving behind what looked like a
trail of poison. Another fridge warned severely: "Do Not Open: Cheney
Inside." Inside others one could find President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Ray
Nagin and Michael Brown doing obscene things with the maggots and with each
other. In a short time, there were thousands of art works in the city, an
exhibition that stretched for miles, that had no official opening, that was
constantly in progress.
Today most of the show is closed. National Guardsmen, volunteers and city
workers have incinerated the art after hauling it to vast refrigerator
graveyards. New Orleans always renewed its armies of ghosts after every
disaster of its 500-year history, but this last addition came with its own
unique, absolutely new style. - ANDREI CODRESCU
Andrei Codrescu is the author, most recently, of "New Orleans, Mon Amour: 20
Years of Writing from the City." Nils Juul-Hansen is a photographer based in
Austin, Tex.
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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
--Thomas Jefferson