Skylar Fein was the breakout success of the first iteration of New Orleans’ biennial Prospect.1.  Fein, who grew up in New York but arrived in New Orleans in 2005, came to prominence through his installation “Remember the Upstairs Lounge.” The piece was an exhaustive historicized installation of the tragic fire that killed many patrons at a famous French Quarter gay bar.

 For his current exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art, Fein looks at youth culture, particularly through the lens of punk and new wave music. The massive body of work being shown - sculptures, paintings, prints, T-shirts and multimedia objects - were all created in 2009 and mark a prolific output. A lot of the work reflects experimentation and a branching out from the more rustic look of the work seen in “Remember the Upstairs Lounge.”

 Surprisingly Fein began working as an artist relatively recently, around the same time he arrived in New Orleans.  His initial production included paintings on scraps of wood made plentiful by the demolitions following Hurricane Katrina. These pieces are countless and are derived from graphical imagery akin to clip art and advertising logos. In their graphic design they seem to date back to the 1950s, 60s and 70s, or earlier. They call up the re-consumption of old advertising on stations like Nick-At-Nite or other vintage TV shows. Painted on supports of ratty, stained wood, these paintings somehow seem even older. In Youth Manifesto a whole wall of them are included with stray ones punctuating the exhibition through out.

Another piece coming out of Fein’s earlier body of work is a black American flag, here taking on connotations of anarchy in reference to bands like Black Flag and Anti-Flag. Black Flag is a mixture of references, making for an interesting stew. There’s the anarchist punk connection, “a flag waved without nationalism,” states Fein in the handout. The obligatory Jasper Johns connotation one can’t escape brings up an interesting problem. Everyone is supposed to own the American flag, but as far as art is concerned, Johns seems to “own” it since he made the move to paint it back in the 50s. Fein’s black flag is also a menu board:  instead of stripes, one finds little slats of wood with hand-lettered specials like “CRAWFISH/$3.99” or “SMOKED CRISPY HOG JOWELS,” obviously Southern cooking. A piece like this also plays with the problematic unspoken cultural rules pertaining to the “ownership” of certain subject, particularly of race. A viewer familiar with art codes of identity politics could reasonably assume this was made by someone other than a white man.

All carefully crafted, with a unique touch that is tempting to credit to some sort of rustic sensibility but is probably erroneous, the works in the show are in various “finishes.” There are the wooden sings and the flag, but then there is the slick light box, Swoosh (Youth of Today) with a catchy graphic halftone enlargement of straight edge rock show. For a product like this you’d expect it to be manufactured to industrial precision. But here, no less flawlessly, the frames are handmade. It is far more interesting to see a light box made from carpentry than a fabricator. There is also something to seeing a ticket stub to an Adam and the Ants show monumentalized as a giant shiny object on the wall, far from a discarded bit of cardstock kept as a souvenir.

Level of craft is a key feature to Fein’s work. I couldn’t help comparing his Amp with the work of Kaz Oshiro, who makes uber-real objects, such as amps, out of stretched canvas and Bondo. At the opposite end of the spectrum of the high production value made-by-machines look of, say Jeff Koons, is Oshiro, whose work is so handmade it appears to be real. Both have that “gee wow” wonderment. With Fein, it is simple and straightforward; his amp has been made out of simple materials, wood and some rolling wheels. It’s form reduced to a box and the details silkscreened on it. It is well made, but not over the top, and there is something infinitely more attractive to this approach of making. It’s not a pathetic aesthetic, and isn’t a tour de force of skill. “Humble” isn’t the right word, but it’s the only word that comes to mind.

In Youth Manifesto there is a subtle sense of nostalgia mixed throughout the technology. In a line down the center of the first gallery are sculptures of boom boxes, radios, cassette recorders and even a phone with “mom” calling, spelled out on the digital display. What a funny period of time, the era of the car-phone envy. How luxurious! A phone in your car! Now it seems like such a useless place for a phone, and stupid since that’s the one place you aren’t supposed to use them. All of this is dwarfed by the stack of cassettes the size of refrigerator doors that greet you as you enter the show. I guess it is kind of a dumb thing; bootleg punk tapes originally made on the cheap with grainy photocopied booklets just made giant. But they work well as sculptural objects, and remind one of the minimalist sculptures of Anne Truitt and John McCracken on view in the adjacent galleries. But perhaps more to the point they make tangible that love of the music-object people used to so potently feel. It’s sad to think of kids now not experiencing music through a talisman like a CD, a cassette or an LP, or that time-honored magnum opus, the mix tape. For many people that was either the ultimate creative expression, or the thing that brought them into the world of art. When making a tape you have the dual responsibility of selecting the right tracks in the right order and in making a great insert for it, you can’t just jot down the names of the songs on the label Memorex included!

--Erik Wenzel

(Images: Skylar Fein, Harsh, wood, latex, acrylic, light kit; Bootlegs, silkscreen on paper, wood and acrylic; Grey Ghost & Poot Bunny, wood, latex, light kit; Courtesy of the artist and The New Orleans Museum of Art.  Photography by Michael Smith)