Quintron and Miss Pussycat have been keeping New Orleans weird for years now with their respective art—Quintron as electro-musician/inventor and Panacea Theriac, a.k.a. Miss Pussycat, as puppeteer. The husband/wife duo help each other with their creations—the background music to her puppet shows and videos is composed by Quintron, while Miss Pussycat adds colorful flair to Quintron’s shows, shaking maracas and contributing vocals.
Their home is a reflection of their separate-but-shared work. There is a comfortable living space for the two of them, then a dark, sort of industrial basement where Quintron composes his electronic beats and constructs his sleek and surprisingly large Drum Buddies. In a completely different space (with pink walls, no less), puppets of different shapes, colors, sizes and species crowd around, leaving only enough room for a small walking path. These seemingly different creative worlds run parallel to each other, which is exactly how Miss Pussycat came up with the theme for their upcoming exhibit at the New Orleans Museum of Art: Parallel Universe.
“We needed a title that sort of incorporated both of us,” Quintron says. “We work very separately but we’re always together. So it had to be oblique enough to have some connection to what I was doing and what Miss Pussycat was doing, and also tie it together.”
It’s pretty hard to imagine a display of ornate Faberge eggs lined up next to sweaty, shirtless Quintron spinning his Drum Buddy at a show, but these two completely different realms of art have come together thanks to the discriminating eye of Miranda Lash, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at NOMA. Amongst the Monets, Renoirs and Picassos, Quintron and Miss Pussycat will have their own space exhibiting the surreal clash of underground electronic music and subversive puppetry.
The idea of putting an exhibit together came after Miss Pussycat met Lash at a party. “We just hit it off and started talking about paintings and art,” Miss Pussycat says. “Later she called and wanted to hang out. We met at Angelo Brocato’s and she asked if I wanted to do something at NOMA. Basically, anything.”
“She left it pretty open to discussion for what we wanted to do,” Quintron says. “So this is our brainchild.”
In Miss Pussycat’s gallery, some 200 of her puppet creations will be on display in glass encasements. She has created “Spirit Hair,” a new episode for her ongoing puppet series Trixie and the Treetrunks. She created some new characters for “Spirit Hair,” and the episode will only be shown during the run of the exhibition.
The next gallery will feature several examples of Quintron’s patented invention, the light-activated synthesizer known as the Drum Buddy. They will be under glass as works of art. “It would never, ever occur to me to make a sculpture, ever,” says Quintron. “But I will make a musical instrument, and try to make it as beautiful as possible. It doesn’t need to have these fine wooden cabinets and beautiful, metallic acrylic tops. But I really wanted it to be this Ferrari of musical instruments.” In addition to the display of Drum Buddies, visitors will be able to create their own Drum Buddy beats.
“I’m building an interactive Drum Buddy arcade kiosk,” he says. “I wouldn’t say it’s a game because there are no points and you can play forever. There’ll be headphones and buttons. It’ll be behind glass, but you can make it work by remote.” The Drum Buddy gallery will also feature paintings by Michael Frolic, a deceased local artist who bequeathed much of his work to the Ninth Ward’s Saturn Bar.
The next gallery over will be the final exhibit—Quintron himself. “This was his idea,” Miranda Lash says, laughing. “When he told me, I could not believe it. How can you say no? He’s going to be here five days a week, from 10 to 5, for three months.” As far as Lash, Quintron and Miss Pussycat know, nothing like this has been done before at a museum. The nearest thing to it at NOMA was back in the 1970s when sounds from the expressway were piped into the gallery.
Visitors will be able to watch Quintron at work, but will not be allowed to interact with him since the primary purpose of his being there is to create a new album. “I have no plan at all,” he says. “I’m going into it with a completely blank slate. I have no songs written, no idea whether it’s going to be one long orchestral, instrumental movement of ambient music or whether it’s going to be 50 punk songs.”
Quintron wanted to incorporate some of the museum’s existing art into his exhibit, so they took to the vaults.
“When we started out, we looked at antique furniture, we looked at china dolls, we looked at decorative porcelain,” says Lash. “We looked at everything. It was really fun for me because even I don’t get to spend a lot of time in storage. It was good to have a reason to just be with art.” Finally, Quintron decided to surround himself with an audience of 19th Century portraits—”As many as we can cram in there,” he says. “Salon-style.”
For Lash, the decision to present such a seemingly unlikely show in NOMA was an intuitive one. “You have to ask yourself, ‘What is the most interesting project in the room?’” she says. “It’s this one. It’s a leap of faith.”
The traditional NOMA patrons are not necessarily the types of people who go to Quintron and Miss Pussycat’s shows, and Lash isn’t sure how the museum’s audience and their audience will come together. “You can never predict,” she says. “I think that people who have loved them for a long time are definitely going to come out. There may be negative reactions, but that’s true of every good show. If I had to guess, I think people might say, why are you showing them? They’re not classically what you would think of as visual artists. Why not give it to a painter? Why music and why puppets? Why something so lowbrow?”
Lash then answers her imagined critics with her own set of rhetorical questions. “I mean, what is ‘highbrow’ and what is ‘lowbrow’? If young people without a lot of money like it, does that mean it’s not as important? Does that mean they don’t know better? Can we only trust someone with a higher education?”
The unspoken answer that reverberates within Miss Pussycat’s whimsical Puppetland and pounds out of Quintron’s light-speckled Drum Buddy is a resounding no. So, what’s the point, then? Miss Pussycat laughs and says, “To make weird stuff.”
“Fueling of any discussion is good,” Quintron adds, “but my point of view [is] it’s not a statement about lowbrow or highbrow art. Like what [Miss Pussycat] says all the time, what we make are really useful things. They’re not made, necessarily, as art objects. Especially puppets.”
Miss Pussycat expands on this. “I like things that are really kooky but are very practical, like maraca warmers,” she says. “And you know, puppets are kind of like a tennis racket or a frying pan or a fishing pole. It’s something you do something with. It’s not something that just sits here and you don’t touch. I mean, they’ll be under glass at the museum because they have to be.”
Whether Quintron and Miss Pussycat meant for their creations to be termed art is now beside the point. Those who came to NOMA for the Disney show may never deign to call what they do art, but a trip to the museum will at least force them to consider it. And who knows? They may very well enjoy a voyeuristic look into a universe they didn’t realize paralleled their own.
The opening reception for “Parallel Universe” is January 29 from 5:30-9 p.m. at NOMA. The show will be up from January 20-May 2. For details on a screening of Miss Pussycat’s puppet films and a Quintron listening party, go to NOMA.org. For upcoming Quintron and Miss Pussycat shows, check our listings.
