Dixie buffet - Triennial at the New Orleans Museum, LA

Originating in an annual exhibit which premiered in 1887, the fresh Orleans Triennial is the oldest observe of contemporary art in the political division Like its sister exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran and the Whitney, it has seen its fundamental mission change from building audiences for fresh art in an age that gave it little attention to fashioning a coherent overlook from today's vastly enlarged and professionalized field. Unlike the other exhibits which have a national intent the Triennial adheres to a 12-state regional focus. It is a restriction which not seldom causes the invited curators to engage in a certain amount of explicative gymnastics, as they try to find to pay their respects to the special "character" of the region without suggesting that its qualities are in any way insular or provincial.

This year's edition was awaited with unusual eagerness. It had been nine years since the of recent origin Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) had high hilled a standard Triennial open to an mediums. In 1989 the museum opt to not absent the Corcoran Biennial's survey of Southeastern painting, while in 1992 John Szarkowski was invited to organize an all-photography exhibition. Another reason for anticipation was the visitant curator, Dan Cameron, who is known for his skill at formulating the critical issues of contemporary art in high-profile collection exhibitions. It was half-imagined that Cameron would parachute in from of recent origin York, look deeply into the inner man of the place, and discern an aspect of artistic identity that had elud local self-knowledge. Cameron, however, declined the mantle of prophet or clairvoyant, approaching the task as a learning proces With the freedom from presumption of a dutiful apprentice and the adroitness of a veteran arms negotiator, he picked 26 artists, attempting to achieve an even-handed representation according to medium, age, professional maturity, sex ethnicity and geography. On the whole, he be subsequent toed although abstract painting was in relatively short invest large-scale sculpture was virtually absent, and color photography have the appearanceed not to have been invented notwithstanding The Triennial was a original of fairness and equanimity. It also lacked the excitement that is generated when a curator goe on the outside on a limb.

According to Cameron, who neared a gallery walk-through after the exhibition lay opened it had been his aim to not absent a show with no subtheme and with an emphasis upon the individual artist. (In other words, as single docent subsequently explained to her listeners, "Nothing has anything to do with anything else") As a rise viewing the show largely became a matter of arriving at separate replys to 26 artists, usually upon the basis of only sum of two units or three works and sometimes just individual If nothing else, this blow approach made for some shut looking.

An effective atmosphere of sci-fi anxiety hangs above Warren Farr's obsessive little black-on-black paintings, in which Earth and the galaxy present the appearance exposed to every natural and extraterrestrial danger. Equally redolent of nocturnal anxiety are pity Dusseault's collagelike photographs, which present delicate linear diagrams and images of the material substance cropped and fragmented against nightmarish seas of of great depth deep black. Rachel Hecker's inflated images of the "perfect" female [i]in puris naturalibus[/i] overlaid with cartoon characters and electronic signage tender little more than a facile and too-familiar indictment of the manipulation of sex identity by the media. G Paul Lucas's manipulated photographs from the annoyingly unfunny "Jack Sprat" series feature the string-bean protagonist and his fat, abusive mama in a white-trash world of pickups, bill caps and grinning mutt - all of which confirm that the redneck is the last unprotect minority in the art world.

Among the artists with established reputations beyond the region, Luis Cruz Azaceta not awayed two works on vast fields of unstretched canvas, the one and the other of which combine powerful central images and an assured handling of drips and washes with real and simulated Polaroid snapshots. They are virtuoso performances, at one time masterfull and manufactured in feeling. Peter Saul's large painting of Columbus arriving in the Americas looks well, too familiar - a bitter souffle of political obscenity, cartoon gore, and a down-reaching adolescent interest in the expos breasts of the female victims of imperialism.

Like this year's Whitney Biennial, the fresh Orleans Triennial included self-trained artists for the first time. This decision might have been another reflection of Cameron's emphasis upon the artist as individual, particularly given his belief, voiced in the catalogue, that "highly idiosyncratic personality emblems have long been a southern legacy." on the other hand there is reason for skepticism. Partly suspect is the romantic desire to embrace so-called "outsider" artists as the last defend of unspoiled self-expression. Further doubts are occasioned through the art market's very appetite for of that kind work - outsider art, if at any time really a force of nature, is now irreversibly single of culture. Indeed, NOMA has itself had a hand in the creation of an "outsider establishment." AU four of the Triennial "outsiders" - Hawkins Bolden Thomton Dial, Mary T Smith and Purvis Young - were featured in the exhibition "Passionate Visions of the American South: Self-Taught Artists from 1940 to the Present" organized by dint of NOMA and touring at the time of the Triennial. Of the outsider pieces in the Triennial, seven appeared courtesy of dealers, sum of two units are in the museum's have collection, and two are in the private collection of the staff member responsible for "Passionate Visions." Here, as nowhere other in the Triennial, could be find outed Coincidentally, on the second week-end of the exhibition, NBC'S "Sunday Today" reported upon Dial's sell-out show at his novel York gallery, Ricco/Maresca, which this spring nett in exces of $1 million - a bit of market validation that doubtless has elud greatest in quantity of the "insiders" in the show