Performance art offers its viewer what other visual forms can’t: a direct address in real time. Yet in the years that follow its realization, the medium is susceptible to misremembering, or worse, indifference; its curators frequently resort to displaying a work’s discards in an effort to recreate the experience of its unfolding after the original audience has, quite literally, moved on. When it comes to Louisianian artist Tina Girouard, much of the imagined audience was never there in the first place. Girouard’s difficult-to-classify performance work—she remains best known within the art world for her collaboration with Carol Goodden and Gordon Matta-Clark on the restaurant-cum-happening FOOD—transpired primarily in downtown New York in the 1970s, and until recently almost none of it trickled down to the Bayou, an unfortunate fact given how prominently the region figured in her own artistic mythology. The artist’s method of repurposing the same materials in performance after performance inadvertently complicated the task of future curators and archivists who might hope to recreate specific iterations. Foremost among her props were eight twelve-foot lengths of floral-printed silk, on which she bestowed the typically mythical-sounding name “Solomon’s Lot,” and which she used in many of her performances throughout the 1970s. …

Eighteen venues, scattered around New Orleans. Huge distances between them. A rusty pedal brake cruiser bike. And two and a half days to see it all. This is now the third official Prospect New Orleans since the biennial was inaugurated in 2008. In actuality this is the fourth incarnation of the show I have seen and the second I have written about: there was a mini-version titled Prospect.1.5 that was held in a few venues in 2010. Do the math and you’ll immediately note that Prospect has never been a biennial—a chronically postponed event, it has always been, in fact, a triennial. Prospect staff fudged the books in a more significant way when, in self-congratulatory fashion, they announced at the exhibition’s press conference that Prospect.3 would be free and open to the public, except for entrance to venues—the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), and the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA), among others—that charge general admission. According to the posted admission rates at these institutions, to see only these three main venues of Prospect would set back a single adult $30, and a whopping $82 for a family of two adults with two school-aged kids. Not free. Communication …