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.
It may be a bit belated, but I wanted to share some of my favorite works from La Force de L’Art, a state-sponsored exhibition championed by Jacques Chirac which ran at the Grand Palais in Paris for a little more than a month before closing Jun. 25. I saw the mega exhibition back in June, when it was still being criticized among the local art community for being too “official”. Made up of more than 300 works of art by 200 artists (and rather hastily thrown together in less than a year), the mega exhibition carried the stated aim of bringing back France’s relevance as a center of contemporary art. By dividing the exhibition into 15 sections or “points de vue” (one curated by our very own Philippe Vergne), the exhibition’s organizers attempted to put some method to the madness, though inevitably the pieces within sections could ultimately sustain more of a conversation than the exhibition as a whole. To see all my photos of the exhibition click here.
Unfortunately during my brief stay in Paris I didn’t manage to squeeze in a visit to another important art destination that’s been causing a stir lately. Namely, the Musée du Quai Branly, a newly christened museum of “primitive art” situated on the banks of the Seine. Also a pet project of Chirac, the museum (showing more than 300,000 works from Asia, Africa, Oceania and the Americas) has been accused of utterly failing to distinguish between the 21st-century multiculturalism it claims to aim for and good old fashioned high-minded colonialism. Setting the tone is the museum’s design, planned by Jean Nouvel, which hides the building within a deep forest of exotic flora. To read more see the NYT: Heart of Darkness in the City of Light.
Well, the conference in Bilbao is now over, but I’m still chewing on all of the ideas people tossed around over the course of the three days. I’m happy to report that my talk on our civic engagement work went over very well. (The translator only told me to slow down ONCE, and that was when I deviated from my script to explain what Capture the Flag is since I cited OPEN-ENDED (the art of engagement) as an example program. I got a little carried away.) I wasn’t sure how our ideas about the town square and our definition of civic engagement would play out in Europe, since I am picking up on a different approach to these concepts from over there.
None of the European museum people addressed the term civic engagement directly, but we did spend a lot of time talking about access, which is a primary concern for several of the musuems present and it seems to fall under the broad category of civic. Lisa Moran, Curator of Education at the Irish Museum of American Art talked about issues they have with access and funding that are quite different from ours. IMMA is almost entirely publicly funded and thus all of their programs are free, including gallery admission. This is fantastic for accessibility, but aparently this money comes with strings attached. Those strings are the social service agendas of the Irish government which seeks, rightfully, to give arts access to underpriviledged individuals. This relationship drives programs that serve only particular audiences, rather than funding arts access for everyone, including people that don’t fall into a category of “underprivileged.”
Another difference between the Walker’s work and that of several European institutions that this conference cemented is in our definition of “civic engagement.” At the American Association of Museums Conference this spring in Boston I attended a panel on European examples of civic engagement, which is how I first learned about the programs of IMMA. While the programs presented in that panel were excellent, I was curious to hear that the core of them was the engagement of so called “excluded audiences” rather than an effort to drive attention to civic issues. At the Walker we are striving to use art to encourage engagement with social, political, and cultural issues of RIGHT NOW. Access to the museum and the creation of a welcoming enviornment is also part of our town square concept, but a major component of our c.e. work relates to social and political concerns.
I came away from this conference wondering if that is a particularly American concern. We are all accutely aware of the current divisions in American politics and opinion, and indeed these frictions were part of the motivation for the civic engagement process in the first place. As I explained to my Spanish colleagues, there is an anxiety in the States right now that one feels no matter where they sit on the political spectrum. Everyone thinks the country is going in the wrong direction and these opinions are causing trouble from the family dinner table to the Senate. Every place in the world has political struggle, the Basque region certainly included, so it strikes me as curious that connecting people to political issues through art was not a concern I heard at the conference from my European colleagues.
I’m off for a little vacation now after the conference, which will include a lot of museums visits so stay tuned for more reports.
It is rainy and cloudy in the northern Spanish city of Bilbao where I am for a conference on artists, museums, and interpretation held at the Guggenheim. Tomorrow I’m speaking on the Walker’s Civic Engagement Initiative, which I hope will be a good follow-up to today’s discussion about the gallery as a civic space, presented by museum historian and sociologist Tony Bennett. He was the first speaker of the day, bright and early (well not bright, but gray with drizzle) and it was a power punch to start the day.
Among many things, he talked about how the civic function of museums shifted in the late 19th century from centering on the civic improvement of all social classes (this is still a classist notion–the goal was apparently to make better citizens out of the rowdy lower classses by introducing them to rational thinking through science and other objects) to social sites for the new European middle class. (This is discussed at length in his book The Birth of the Museum.) He used this historical analysis to talk about how the civic function of museums today have shifted to include “technologies of tolerance,” or all of our aims to draw in racially and culturally diverse audiences.
His ultimate argument (and I’m skipping over a great number of points here) is that while musuems have done a lot of work to expand audiences to include racial diversity, this diversity mainly comes out of the middle, upper, and professional classes. He presented research where white British citizens and British citizens of Indian, Pakistani and Afro-Carribbean ethnicity were interviewed about their professions and their likelihood to visit museums. The findings showed that people mostly likely to visit museums worked in “professional” jobs, or, jobs that depend on knowledge rather than labor, or people from weathly families. Class was much more of a dividing line than race.
Hmmm. Something we sorta already know, right?
He left us with a big question: “What civic value can be derived from museums that serve only half of the population?” I’ll make no attempt to answer this tomorrow, but I´m hoping that our discussion about civic engagement and inclusion in the museum might creep us closer to ideas on how answer it.
Stay tuned…
PS: Sorry there aren’t many pictures or links to entertain readers in this post. There are a great many things I can’t figure out with this Spanish-language keyboard; cutting and pasting and saving images to the desktop are some of these things! Thanks for your text-only patience.
Before the new Walker opened, there as a lot of talk internally about what our open hours should be. We looked at all the numbers of when people tended to visit the museum and discussed being open later, or earlier, etc. But I don’t think anyone suggested being open until midnight on Saturdays like the British Museum is doing during their run of Michelangelo Drawings: Closer to the Master. In order to give all of their interested viewers access to the show, the museum is staying open every Saturday until midnight throughout the exhibition.
Of course, this decision was made for this special circumstance, to meet a huge audience demand. But it brings back the conversation about when audiences use museums, and when they would like too if we were open. The Palais de Tokyo in Paris is open from noon to midnight everyday except Monday. Are their galleries packed at 10:30 at night? Would people hang out at the Walker at 11 pm on a Saturday night without the lure of a preview party or cocktails at the bar? Maybe, maybe not. I’d go to see Michelangelo at midnight—I’d even come here to see Diane Arbus at midnight. Would you?
For those who like to gawk at big-name celebs, I recently went into the glitter-strewn trenches at the Whitney Art Party, an annual silent auction benefit in New York. Among the sightings were Chloe Sevigny (She gets around — I saw her on my block the other week during the Tribeca Film festival), Eva Mendez (whom I didn’t recognize but is incredibly beautiful) and Moby, who later jumped up on stage during a live “karaoke” performance.
As glamorous as it may sound, it’s no fun circling around hawk-like trying to snap pretty people’s pictures (especially when you’re not even sure who they are). Though the party did take a turn for the better when a bombshell singer took the stage to do a dead-on rendition of Janis Joplin's "Take a Another Piece of My Heart". For the full blow-by-blow click here.
In other Whitney-related news, I saw a great performance by Matmos and So Percussion at a Whitney Live event (sort of like Free First Thursdays but with a longer wait time to get in). Matmos is an experimental electronic music duo made up by Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt. Schmidt is part of the conceptual art department of the San Francisco Art Institute and together the two have worked with Bjork on a number of projects. Teamed up with So Percussion, an experimental (you guessed it!) percussion group, they rocked the house to a packed crowd, and served as the perfect intro to an evening of wandering through the galleries and catching a last few moments with this year’s (also somewhat wayward) Biennial.
Update: For those who just can’t get enough, I finally uploaded the pictures from BOTH these events (Art Party and Matmos) to my flickr site. Enjoy!
Education & Community Programs kicked up their heels and did the holidays right over at Bryant Lake Bowl with beer and bowling. Not to mention, some of the best brownies ever baked - a BLB specialty. A good mix of the skilled and the pathetic bowlers: there were timid approaches, a couple lofted balls, some cursing, a few serious and dedicated souls that would not be distracted by their goofier co-workers, and an amazing backwards-between-the-legs shot that ended in a strike. No joke.
Susan and Reggie start right in with the drinks!
Witt readies his “#1!” fingers as the ball heads down the lane.
Superhuman, top bowler of the night, Lara, bowls so fast the camera can’t catch it.
Let it never be said that ECP can’t properly down a beer or embarrass themselves at a bowling alley.
For the last six days a friend and I have been touring the east coast visiting museums. By far the most impressive day consisted of a trip to upstate New York's Dia Beacon and Northeast Massachusetts' Mass MOCA. Both of these institutions are set in monuments to the industrial age, industrial factories. Irony can be found in the fact that at one time an assembly line dedicated to the manufacturing of cardboard boxes now houses drawing grids by Sol LeWitt and recessed 20 feet deep steel cubes by Michael Heiser.
These unusual settings for such monumental works pose interesting questions. What impact do these newly formed institutions have on rural communities? Is the art being shown at these institutions relevant to the people of Beacon and North Adams? And who benefits from them - day-trippers from New York City and Boston or the dairy farmer on the outskirts of North Adams?
