Tonight is the first performance of Permanence Collection, a short play written by Ed Bok Lee and Kira Obolensky that meanders through the Walker’s Permanent Collection installation. Yes, I know we have a state of the art theater for performance work, but the galleries have always been the intended stage for this collaboration between the Walker and the Playwrights’ Center.

The project started over a year ago at a brainstorming lunch between myself and Todd Boss, Director of External Affairs at the Playwrights’ Center. I was interested in a project the center did with the Minnesota History Center where playwrights penned monologues inspired by objects in the MHS collection. We thought that model could translate well to contemporary art and that actors in the galleries could create a new, if not surprising, kind of interpretation for visitors.

A year later, we have Permanence Collection. Performed by actors Annie Enneking, Stephen Cartmell, Kurt Kwan, and Ariel Dumas, with sound design by Craig Harris and direction by Playwrights’ Center Artistic Associate Hayley Finn, this site-specific play muses on the very experience of museum-going. There is a lot packed into the 30 minute piece: ideas about the passage of time, permanence, and nostalgia wrapped up in a meditation on the practice of both looking at art and writing plays.

To provide insight into the artistic process of the folks who put this together, I’ve asked the writers and director a few questions about the project. I’ll be posting their answers over the next several days, but to entice readers for now, here is Ed Bok Lee’s take on the project:

“Many of the Walker's permanent collection pieces have been around longer than the viewers who come to see them, and all, unless destroyed, will probably outlive everyone alive now. But eventually even those will move on...

The passage of time and eras was an especially interesting challenge in this play. At one point, I tried to see the project through one giant imaginary Walker security camera--a century's worth of footage--time-lapsed over one hyper hour, with all the different artworks, shows, gallery visitors, and renovations that have taken place since the museum was founded. And I began to see the whole place and human endeavor to preserve art as a kind of giant metaphysical clock whereby a museum's visitors are like the ever-moving seconds hand; the actual walls, rooms, and structures containing the art in sum make up the less transient minute hand; and the art on its eternal journey comprises the slowest-moving hour hand.

From the first gallery to the last in the permanent collection, you can wander through a century or so of Western aesthetic consciousness in a matter of minutes. And then you step out of the lobby doors and it's gone. How to articulate this abstract, rather bemusing sense of history and time-passing, dramatically, on the most human levels possible, (and very succinctly, in non-subtle ways due to the conditions of the venue), was a particular challenge for me.”

The performances take place TONIGHT and next week, Thursday, May 15 at 7 and 8 pm here at the Walker. Come see it!

Last week, I was giving a tour to a small group of artsy academics in town for a meeting. One of my usual tour stops in the Permanent Collection galleries is at a small work by Yoko Ono in Gallery 2 titled Painting to Hammer a Nail. I like to talk about Yoko Ono as a musician, an important conceptual artist, and her role in the Fluxus movement, etc. But this time, in the middle of my Ono spiel, a woman in the group mentioned that she had been Yoko’s roommate in the 60s. She went onto tell us how it was John Cage who first encouraged Yoko to meet the Beatles because they were composing music in non-traditional ways. She also mentioned that she had given Yoko her first Beatles album as a gift and told the tale of the two of them spotting Paul McCartney on the street, chasing after him, but never catching up. Fact or myth? Who knows? But we all had a very Yoko-esque moment imagining how the world might have been changed if Yoko had met Paul before she met John.

Thursday nights at the Walker are more blind date than play date, but we took Baby J and O to see the Brave New Worlds exhibition last Thursday and had a nice time. I previewed the show before we took the kids, and was happy to find more than a few things a five-year-old could appreciate.

If you're thinking of visiting Brave New Worlds with kids, here are a few things my kids liked. Maybe yours will like them, too.

The curious origami figures, puffs of fog, and blinking lights in one section of Haegue Yang's Blind Room reminded O of an airport. The materials were (relatively) common - mini blinds, clumps of mini lights - but from kid's-eye-view, it must have looked magical.

We spent a long time in Artur Zmijewski's installation of three videos that document the daily grind of three women workers in Poland. Regular life in a house and at a job- with similarities to and differences from O's regular life in our American house.

We were all spell-bound by Runa Islam's Time Lines which combines shots of real tourist attractions with footage of models of the rides. O got a little impatient with the long shots of the cables moving against the blue of the sky - but stuck with it. The suspense - Where's the car going? Where's the tower? What are those people waiting for? - kept him watching.

The big messages of the show - what it means for artists to be politically responsible, how artists address the complexities of our "brave new worlds"- mostly escaped our little group. But I like that O got a bit of perspective on how people live and work in other parts of the world. And I liked that it didn't take a cartoon character, frenetic action, or wacky dialogue (all staples of children's media) to get him interested.

We visited the Minneapolis Institute of Arts this afternoon. The museum was full of fun activities for kids, but the thing that caught the five-year-old's eye was an exhibition of Ed Rusha's Stains (1969), a collection of 75 sheets of white paper, each stained with a different substance, from apple juice to vaseline to bleach.

I like Ed Ruscha's work, but didn't expect rows of mostly-white pieces of paper to be a real crowd-pleaser. I underestimated the depth of a five-year-old's fascination with the messy and the accidental.

At home we're always tidying things up. Accidents happen — glasses of juice tip over, popsicles drip down a shirt, milk splashes out of the cereal bowl - and we grab a napkin or a sponge or a roll of paper towels. But here was a whole gallery of spills that didn't get cleaned up: egg yolks, urine, sulfuric acid that actually burned the paper. He was fascinated and asked his dad to read what made each one of the stains. At bedtime, O talked about stains/Stains again. What about chocolate, daddy? What about melted chocolate?

I'm curious. Museums often create small displays or set up special activities just for kids. Some exhibitions are obviously kid magnets. But what exhibits or artworks have your kids loved that you never would have expected?

By the way, don't squeeze the juice box. After twenty-plus years, the apple juice stain turned a nasty dark brown.

May Free First Saturday went above and beyond this time around, featuring dancers from the Emio Greco | PC troupe that were at the Walker presenting their newest work Hell. While the dancers didn’t bring the Inferno to the Walker galleries and the wee ones wandering about, they were very enthusiastic to select art works in the galleries and perform impromptu dance responses. So cool.

I was at FFS to help with the story readings, but I managed to catch a few bits and pieces:

Dancer Marta Lopes (Portugal) dances next to a piece in the Thomas Schutte gallery as part of the Quartet exhibition.

Dancer Ty Boomershine (USA) dances next to a Kara Walker work as part of the exhibition, Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love.

Ty’s performance was very striking, and my favorite by far. He looked like a character out of one of my very best, Neil Gaiman-inspired day dreams.

Britney, I think Emio Greco | PC has the kind of dynamic kick that could drag even your (allegedly) drug- and booze-addled career out of the gutter. Just something to think about, s’all I’m sayin’.

I recently returned from Brussels, where I visisted Le Grand Hornu, an artfully rennovated, defunct coal mine-turned contemporary art venue. Since this was proabably my 7th trip to Belgium, but the first time I’d ever heard of Hornu, I wanted to share the revelation in order to guarantee that anyone with a yen to visit the lands of Memling, Horta, and Magritte, also appreciates Belgium for its contemporary art.

The show on view, Sisyphe: le jour se leve (Sisyphus: Day Breaks) was made all the more enjoyable for its inclusion of artists I see on a daily basis in the Walker’s permanent collection installation, The Shape of Time. To see On Kawara, Luciano Fabro, and Guilio Paolini in a small show (eight artists total) with a specific trajectory provided an entirely different perspective on their work. I had never previously associated Sysyphus–the ultimate existential image adopted by Sartre–with Arte Povera, the Italian movement in which both Fabro and Paolini took part. Now, however, when I look at Mimesi (Mimesis) I see the possibility for a darker exchange between the classically sculpted, white plaster models–an exchange more in the vein of Greek tragedy than comedy. Netiher, had Kawara’s meticulously sequential work ever so acutely suggested futility. One Million Years (Past), featured in the show at Hornu, consists of the last one million years printed on paper and bound into volumes encyclopeadia-style. Currently on show in The Shape of Time is Kawara’s TODAY Series, which I have always interpreted as meditative and ritualistic, but which is now opened up as a possible critique of pointless repitition. The existential tenor of the show at Grand Hornu was an interesting contrast to the luminous and airy gallery space, and particularly poignant in the context of a failed coal mine.

Artist Mankwe Ndosi led Matakwe, a group of young African American artists and activist in a critical and performative response to OPEN-ENDED (the art of engagement)

Tonight, for the first time since it opened, I began to sense what Open Ended is all about…not that I could articulate it clearly. But, seeing Tish, a young African American poet, read a poem about the difficult and moving relationship between a daughter and her battered mother in the Rirkrit corner; hearing a poetic response to the Ralph Lemon installation by another young poet; piling into the video booth to catch a poem inspired by Nakasako’s freedom piece; or listening in on a young dreaded kid dialogue with a silent James Baldwin and ask, “Help me out. You’re an artist. Tell me how I’m supposed to look.”…revealed some evanescent and fleeting aspect of engagement and dialogue. It is precious because it comes and goes. We make pictures ourselves in the galleries, as we move among the artworks. Tonight, I’m thankful to the Walker for the dialogic process that gave birth to this extraordinary exhibition but also to these brave young people who so selflessly gave themselves over to interpretation and engagement. Bravo Matakwe.