Education and Community Programs

As Chuck Olsen’s interview with Bruce Sterling from last week goes online at the NYC vlog Rocketboom and our webcast of Sterling’s discussion with Rirkrit Tiravanija hits the Walker Channel, I’ve got a good excuse to sing the praises of Education’s Sarah Peters (or “sp” as her blog name goes), whose introduction last Thursday night was superb. How she tied together a semi-itinerant Thai “relational aesthetics” artist and a cyberpunk author whose current obsession is the “internet of things” is…Things.

Tonight we are here to watch two people sit on a stage and talk about stuff. It's a bit old-fashioned, when you think about it, since we have blogs and vlogs and videoconferencing and MySpace for social interaction and learning these days. Why haul down here and pay for parking when you can watch a lecture like this on the web (as some people are doing tonight)? I get paid to be here, so you all out there are the ones who can actually answer this question, but I think it has something to do with the necessity of human interaction. Which has everything to do with the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Rirkrit, as we all have the permission to call him, is an artist who works with environments rather than objects. He is said to have “transformed the notion of contemporary art by taking his environments out of the museum to the ends of the earth, literally.” In the early 90s he made a name for himself by creating installations during which he cooked curries for gallery visitors and staff. He has created low-power pirate radio stations in museums, a pirate television station in Italy, and built a replication of his entire New York City apartment in a gallery that was open 24 hours a day for visitors to use in whatever way they pleased. His ongoing, long-term project called The Land is a site located 20 minutes outside of Chiang Mai, Thailand that was envisioned as an open space without the concept of ownership. Activities on The Land consist of growing and harvesting rice, gardening, yoga, and performance workshops. This site was not intended to be labeled "art," yet with the development of so called "relational aesthetics" and The Land's various artist-initiated projects that blend environmental sustainability with architecture and video, the art-world has tuned-in to the endeavor. This is not to say that the art market has figured out it, as collectors are happy to purchase the soiled cooking utensils of Rirkrit's food-based installations. But who could blame them, really. If you can't purchase a moment, you'd do best to settle for a dirty frying pan.

Bruce Sterling, on the other hand, likes to talk about objects. His recent book published by MIT press called Shaping Things outlines his thoughts on the future of environmentally sustainable, track-able, user-alterable objects. He calls them "spimes," and insists that they are coming and we will need them to live. This book is the product of a year her spent as the Visionary in Residence at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Sterling is foremost a science fiction writer, a genre where his interests in technology, culture and environmentalism merge in fictional futures where massive global-warming induced tornadoes threaten the Midwest, cyber-security experts join the U.S. government to fight against terrorism, and people live in a post-television world.

Back in the present, he is the founder of the Viridian Design movement which strives to popularize ecologically sustainable design. An obsessive blogger, Sterling lives online, blogging his way between speaking engagements in Switzerland, Belgrade, and Texas, giving us web readers the impression that he is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere.

There are numerous connections between the ideas and practice of tonight's accomplished guests, yet their thinking presents us with a interesting conundrum: Sterling claims that the future of spimes and the "Internet of Things" will fundamentally change our relationship to objects, while Rirkrit's environment's ask us to change our relationship to other humans. In what direction are we really headed, and what sort of interaction do we really need? Let's let the visionaries figure it out. Please welcome Bruce Sterling and Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Photo: Tiravanija and Sterling in the exhibition OPEN-ENDED (the art of engagement).

One week and a few hours from now, Chrissie Iles from the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Walker’s own Philippe Vergne will be in the house to talk about curating the 2006 Whitney Biennial. This is the show that everyone loves to hate, or at least loves to criticize. Well, get ready because this will all be rolled into the act. As part of their presentation, Iles and Vergne plan to respond directly to some of the published criticism of the show. Here in Public Programs we’ve spent the past few days culling articles and highlighting quotes from the likes of Michael Kimmelman, Jerry Saltz and of course Tyler Green in preparation for the talk.

It all happens on Monday, April 3 at 7 pm. Tickets are $5–that’s cheaper than a movie for just as much drama and action! If you can’t physically manifest yourself at the Walker on that day, catch the whole thing online at the Walker Channel.

Want to learn more? Read an interview with Iles and Vergne in the March issue of Walker.

Slacking off! That could certainly be the charge levelled against me. But that’s not quite the case. I took a break from the Walker blogs - Walker events, really, my main fodder for blogging - to handle the recent adoption of my retired racing greyhound, Kiba.

Good thing for me that Lara and SP are willing to take up the slack.

Not that I haven’t been thinking of, or pining away for, my Walker Art Center. Just thinking of all the Women with Vision films that I’ve missed is enough to make me raise my fist to the sky in righteous indignation. Curses!

But….she’s worth it, right?

This Thursday, March 23, artist Rirkrit Tiravanija and science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling will take the stage for another rendition of Contemporary Art in Conversation. One of the goals of this lecture series is to put an artist and an important thinker from a different field in the same room together to watch their ideas intersect. It is particularly exciting when the two speakers have not formally met, as is the case with Tiravanija and Sterling. While Sterling wrote for a catalog/interpretive publication from Tiravanija’s retrospective at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the two of them have apparently never sat down for a chat. This makes you and I the lucky ones on Thursday when we get to see their first conversation live.

It’s hard to tell what they will talk about. They’re both involved with complex, genre-bending projects that make their work hard to sum up. Tiravanija is the guy everyone talks about when they talk about “relational aesthetics.” In other words, when artworks are evaluated based on the social interactions they encourage, rather than the aesthetic value of the objects in the work. He is best known for installations in which he cooks Thai food for gallery visitors and staff (which was a big bonus to people who worked here during his Walker residency in the 90s), but has moved on to other social, interactive projects: a pirate TV station in Italy, radio broadcasts in NYC, and the replication of his New York City apartment in a gallery that was open 24 hours a day for visitors. Perhaps his most exciting work is an ongoing project called The Land that he co-founded with another Thai artist in 1998. Located near Chiang Mai, Thailand this site brings together art, architecture, agriculture, alternative energy experiments and a space for community gathering.

Now onto Sterling. Every description of Bruce Sterling that I have read labels him a science fiction writer. This is true. But for all of you out there who hear those words and immediately tune-out: keep listening (or reading, rather) because Sterling’s purview is much broader that of a stereotypical “aliens and space-ships” novelist. His interests in technology and culture include sustainable design, objects and how they function in a hyper-tech world, environmentalism, and really, a million other things. (Check out his profile on Wikipedia). Past and current Sterling projects include The Dead Media Project, a collection of "research notes" on dead media technologies like old video games and home computers from the 1980s, and the Viridian Design Movement, an attempt to inject environmentalism into design. He talks about techie stuff at conferences all over the world, and blogs about it at Wired.com.

With all that, who knows what topics will come up: aliens? architecture? jet lag? If you can’t come listen in person, we’ll be webcasting live on the Walker Channel. And for more and more information about both Rirkrit and Bruce, head over to the Off Center section of the Walker Blogs. See you on Thursday!

On Monday several education department staff members leave on an excursion to accompany 15 Walker Art Center tour guides for 10 days exploring the art scene in Beijing and Shanghai. Why China? Some of the motivation for our trip emerged in the wake of the Walker exhibition House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective, a show that examined the body of work of one of the most active and thought provoking contemporary Chinese artists working today, Huang Yong Ping. Huang Yong Ping was part of the Xiamen Dada movement, a conceptual movement that adopted the philosopies of the early 20th century movement of the same name, led in a large part by Marcel Duchamp.

Another exhibition influential on our travel plans is from a few years back, How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age. The “Latitudes” show examined the new globalism in contemporary art, and featured artists from around the world, including several from China, such as Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen.
As with technology, building, and everything else, the visual art scene in China has exploded in the past several years. What will we discover in China? It remains to be scene, but surely our plans to visit both contemporary galleries and artists’ studios, as well as more traditional museums and sights will provide us with a new insight into not only the work of contemporary Chinese artists, but artists from across the globe.