Minnesota Funk is on view in the Nash Gallery through January 12.

Minnesota Funk at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery functions like a show within a show.  The perimeter of the gallery is filled with a mix of work by Minnesota artists that range widely in form and material—painting on canvas, ceramics, lithographs, cartoony maps, mixed media on paper, video, steel and found material/altered sculpture. These pieces also vary in their interpretations of “funk.” Some employ bright colors and playful imagery, while others display their attitude in the form of humor or absurdity.

Jim Dryden. Courtesy of the Nash Gallery.

In the center of all this is a mini-exhibition by Chris Larson with yet another, distinctly different sensibility. Larson’s room contains three works: sturdy wooden beams whose center sections have been burned and polished to reveal sculptural knots and curves lean against the walls; a large wooden panel covered with a grid of black and white photographs which display a pinhole camera image of an artist’s workspace; and a wall-sized video projection.

Jenny Schmid. Courtesy of the Nash Gallery.

The latter is the centerpiece of the whole show, though not necessarily because it is the funkiest piece in the lot. What begins as a seemingly simple recording of the artist working in his studio becomes a fascinating set of events that, all together, upturn the viewer’s perception of the very reality created by the frame of the camera and the walls of the studio. The raw sound of Larson’s video pervades the entire exhibition — in effect, a soundtrack featuring the rather un-funky noise of the human work that accompanies the making of all things.

Still from Chris Larson’s video, on view in Minnesota Funk at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery through January 13.

Related exhibition details:

Minnesota Funk is on view at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery in the Regis Center for Art, University of Minnesota through January 12, 2013.

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Sarah Peters is a Twin Cities-based artist, writer and arts programmer who is interested in public engagement with the arts and critical issues of our time.

Viewfinder posts are your opportunity to “show & tell” about the everyday arts happenings, interesting sights and sounds made or as seen by Minnesota artists, because art is where you find it. Submit your own informal, first-person responses to the art around you to editor(at)mnartists.org, and we may well publish your piece here on the blog. (Guidelines: 300 words or less, not about your own event/work, and please include an image, media, video, or audio file, and one sentence about yourself.)

Jeanine Durning. Photo Courtesy Deborah Hay Dance Company.

Jeanine Durning’s inging is the cri de coeur of a dancer, choreographer and actor struggling, with every cell of her being, to smash any distinctions between those three identities while, more importantly, refuting any notions that body and mind, spirit and sensation, voice and physicality, emotion and intellect are separate.

During most of the hour-long work — presented twice on December 11 at Soo Visual Arts Center in Minneapolis — Durning talks. Rapidly. Nonstop. Compellingly. And in a “proprioceptive cascade” (as the press material brilliantly puts it) through which she investigates, implores, humors and agonizes over such separations, from the pronouncements of Descartes on.

Her body, in its entirety, is present throughout, and whole; this, despite Durning’s lamentations that she’s been split in two, halved. She provides her audience — seated on metal chairs and two wood benches she’s methodically scattered throughout the gallery — with physical, as well as verbal, demonstrations of her bifurcation. She leans over the table at which she sits, its horizontality splitting her into upper and lower. She slides her foot beneath a door, while wishing the opening were larger, to accommodate a larger portion of her body. Back at her table is a black Mac laptop, from which three prerecorded videos of her talking are projected on the gallery wall. On top of a stack of books (by Jung, Keats, Beckett, and there’s one on performance)—a Tower of Babel—a camera records her.

The tiny camera screen, too, faces the audience, so we see her performance documented as she’s performing. She is, no question, split—her selves in array throughout the room. Holding it all, and her selves, together is her Babel, her single voice in which she’s embedded a profusion of story, cliché, history, adage, politics, quote, reference and autobiography that seamlessly morphs in an Escher-esque flow of argument, refutation, revelation.

Durning in “inging,” courtesy of Soo VAC.

“It’s good to come to a point,” she says midway through. “This is not the time.” She slips through streams of thought, time and space; segues through facile wordplay; repeats “I do, I do, I do” until she’s in tears; sings; cajoles; entertains; brings others to tears; stutters; and scratches through phrasing like a DJ working vinyl. Her face twists, sneers, crumples, opens, invites, dismays.

Despair is at the core of the work, its only resolution silence. The hope, happiness and transcendence of which she speaks remain elusive; or do they? As Durning slowly turns off all of her selves, each person in the room is left with themselves in a quiet booming with resonance — which reverberates still.

Noted performance information:

New York performer Jeanine Durning, the daughter of actor Charles Durning, first presented inging in Amsterdam, Leuven, Belgium and Chambersburg, PA. She presented the work twice here in the Twin Cities, at Soo Visual Arts Center in Minneapolis, on December 11. In January, she’ll perform inging at American Realness in New York. She recently collaborated with Deborah Hay in works presented at the Walker Art Center, has danced with David Dorfman among many others, and has created choreography for Zenon Dance Company and dancer Leslie O’Neill.

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Camille LeFevre is a Twin Cities arts journalist and dance critic. 

Viewfinder posts are your opportunity to “show & tell” about the everyday arts happenings, interesting sights and sounds made or as seen by Minnesota artists, because art is where you find it. Submit your own informal, first-person responses to the art around you to editor(at)mnartists.org, and we may well publish your piece here on the blog. (Guidelines: 300 words or less, not about your own event/work, and please include an image, media, video, or audio file, and one sentence about yourself.)

Richard Barlow, “There’s Only One,” 11′ x 50′, chalk on blackboard paint, 2012.

Wedged between the student mailboxes and Einstein Bagels inside the student center at Augsburg College is a sliver of a gallery that Richard Barlow has transformed into a forest. Or, more accurately, he’s made a subtle, delicate, and stunning representation of a forest rendered in white chalk on blackboard-painted wall: There’s Only One.

The shape of the gallery makes it difficult to see the temporary wall drawing as a whole; reflections on the glass walls that encase the space obscure the view from afar, but if you stand in the door jam, you can take in the fullness of what is a masterfully executed 500-square-foot-plus piece.  Efficient chalk lines and smudges outline tree trunks that grow up out of a forest floor dappled with light. Up close the work looks abstract, but seeing the piece from a distance (such as the small space allows, anyway) places the viewer intimately inside an old growth forest.

There’s Only One is part of a series, Welcome to the Open, for which Barlow appropriates the imagery of nature used in SUV ads for Hummer and Jeep. His co-co-opting of the very scenes used to sell us an experience of the natural world – access the sublime through better auto travel! — adds a provocative conceptual dimension to the work’s already impressive form.  And that source material makes the fragility of Barlow’s work all the more poignant, for unlike the enduring environmental effects of driving a Hummer, Barlow’s photographic drawing is here today and gone tomorrow – quite literally. His intricate chalk drawing will simply be wiped away at the close of the exhibition this weekend.

Barlow’s work here has the effect of a well-executed sleight of hand – immersed in his painstakingly rendered forest-of-chalk the viewer is genuinely transported, if only temporarily. If a walk at Afton State Park isn’t in your pre-holiday schedule, I highly recommend stopping by for a dose of forest therapy in the heated comfort of the Augsburg commons this week.

Exhibition postcard courtesy of Augsburg College.

Related exhibition details:

Richard Barlow: There’s Only One — a site-specific, 50-foot chalk-drawing from his series Welcome to the Open – is on view at Christensen Center Art Gallery at Augsburg College in Minneapolis through December 19.

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Sarah Peters is a Twin Cities-based artist, writer and arts programmer who is interested in public engagement with the arts and critical issues of our time.

Viewfinder posts are your opportunity to “show & tell” about the everyday arts happenings, interesting sights and sounds made or as seen by Minnesota artists, because art is where you find it. Submit your own informal, first-person responses to the art around you to editor(at)mnartists.org, and we may well publish your piece here on the blog. (Guidelines: 300 words or less, not about your own event/work, and please include an image, media, video, or audio file, and one sentence about yourself.)

TWA Terminal, New York International (now John F. Kennedy International) Airport, New York, c. 1962. Photo: Balthazar Korab. © Balthazar Korab Ltd.

With its sensuous curves, arcs, and swoops, mid-century modern architecture can have a dizzying effect (martini not required)—and never more so than when captured in the iconic images of architectural photographer Balthazar Korab. So it’s no surprise that, in the 1960s, when presented with an opportunity to climb atop and photograph from the private rooftops of Rome, Korab did so. The result was 3,200 photos, some of which made it into a portfolio titled “The Rooftops of Rome.” In turn, images from that portfolio are included in the exhibition, Circumstantial Evidence—Italy Through the Lens of Balthazar Korab, on view in the HGA Gallery in the University of Minnesota’s Rapson Hall.

From “The Rooftops of Rome” series published in 1970 by Balthazar Korab. © Balthazar Korab Ltd.

Texture, line, and shape abound in these black-and-white photographs, which to a 21^st-century eye are imbued with a nostalgic desire for “la dolce vita.” Korab shot the images while living with his family in Florence; he’d just won the AIA Gold Medal for Excellence in Photography in 1964, and after living in the US for nine years (and operating a photography studio for five), he was ready for some time abroad. Looking at Korab’s pictures, a viewer can imagine a young Sophia Loren or Marcello Mastroianni cavorting just out of view, between takes of the latest film by Fellini, Visconti or de Sica.

Eero Saarinen-designed architecture, photograph by Balthazar Korab. © Balthazar Korab Ltd.

The sweet life, indeed: Made sweeter by the fresh energy and new kinetic modernism coursing through post-war Europe. Korab no doubt felt that burgeoning sense of promise acutely. As John Comazzi writes in his new book, Balthazar Korab: Architect of Photography, the Hungarian-born photographer fled Budapest while an architecture student, and he was familiar with war-torn cityscapes. Korab went on to study architecture at École des Beaux-Arts in Paris before immigrating to the US where he became Eero Saarinen’s staff photographer.

Comazzi, a faculty member in the University of Minnesota’s School of Architecture, offers a mesmerizing look into Korab’s oeuvre—particularly his mid-century modern work. Comazzi’s book is the first such retrospective on Korab’s life and career, and it includes more than 100 images, as well as fascinating case studies on two of the photographer’s most notable subjects: the TWA Flight Center and the Miller House.

Korab once said, “I am an architect with a passion for nature’s lessons and man’s interventions. My images are born out of a deep emotional investment in their subject. Their content is never sacrificed for mere visual effects, nor is a polemic activism intended to prevail over an aesthetic balance.” Korab’s well-conceived balance of spirit and intellect, reverence and curiosity, nature and the built environment is clear in every one of his images, to which Comazzi’s book and the architecture school’s exhibition both bring fresh attention.

Related links and exhibition details:

Circumstantial Evidence—Italy Through the Lens of Balthazar Korabis on view in the HGA Gallery in Rapson Hall at the University of Minnesota for one more week, through Saturday, December 15.

University of Minnesota School of Architecture professor John Comazzi’s book, Balthazar Korab: Architect of Photography, was recently published by Princeton Architectural Press and is available in bookstores everywhere.

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Camille LeFevre is a Twin Cities architecture writer and the author of Charles R. Stinson Architects: Compositions in Nature.

Viewfinder posts are your opportunity to “show & tell” about the everyday arts happenings, interesting sights and sounds made or as seen by Minnesota artists, because art is where you find it. Submit your own informal, first-person responses to the art around you to editor(at)mnartists.org, and we may well publish your piece here on the blog. (Guidelines: 300 words or less, not about your own event/work, and please include an image, media, video, or audio file, and one sentence about yourself.)

Installation view of “A Sense of Place in Artist Books”. Photo courtesy of the author.

On the second floor of Rapson Hall on the University of Minnesota campus sits a quiet haven of bookish delight. It is the Architecture and Landscape Architecture departments’ library, so its stacks are filled with beautiful books and the furniture is designer-made and lovely. More urgently, for the next week (my apologies for the late notice) the library is also chock full of a curious assortment of artist books that take up architecture’s familiar preoccupation with place.

A Sense of Place in Artist Books is one of a series of collaborative efforts among university departments this fall; the sprawling table-top exhibition contains nearly 100 literary portals to elsewhere. The concept of “place” at play in all these artist books is only minimally defined in the exhibition description, and the territories covered in the material on view are as varied as the book forms themselves: tiny and coffee table-sized, photocopied and letterpress-printed, flat and sculptural, handmade and machine bound.

“A History of the Airfields of Lincolnshire II” (2000) Simon Cutts. Photo courtesy of the author.

Not surprisingly, many of the places these books ponder are natural sites. Flipping through page after page, I find myself immersed in islets in the River Thames, the bends of the River Axe, the forested Rookeries, hillsides in Croatia or Norway; there are several meditations on the sky. These landscapes are rendered in drawings, photographs and text.

A particularly poignant text-based work is a small, purple cloth covered book, simply titled One Hundred Scottish Places, with a list of place names translated from Scots and Gaelic into English: e.g., Field of Driving Rain, The Little Loch of the Trout. Each page contains just the one phrase, cumulatively making a composite portrait of place that reads like something out of a fairy tale.

“SEAL Medium: Japanese Esoteric Buddhist Text” (2012) Ryuta Nakajima. Photo courtesy of the author.

On a table nearby another small volume claims to enlighten the reader on A History of the Airfields of Lincolnshire II, but instead contains a ribbon of letterpress-printed green text running atop each page comprised only of the word “flax” and the letters “f” and “x.” I learn nothing about Lincolnshire II nor its airfields, but am pleasantly surprised by the artist’s typographic horizon line.

An emphasis on travel permeates the show. Some epic journeys are documented in text and image (e.g., a 121-day bike ride to and from Iceland, a American cross-country road trip) ; other travelogues are more fictional than documentary. My favorite of these is a book by Gracia Haby of altered, fantastical postcards, and letters from an unknown traveler that become more surreal as the journey wanders on:

You never came, but in your place, a moose, an elk on a ramshackle bicycle, a wolverine and a pair of lynx from Gästrikland. They spoke to me of the weather, their plans, their likes and their loves.

Of course, a “sense of place” is not only about romantic engagements with the sublime in nature, or escapist dreams of world travel. A smaller number of books on display investigate “place” as a locus of labor, the mundane: domestic interiors, neighborhood streets, hotel rooms. Of these, my eye is drawn to Paulette Myers-Rich’s  urban industrial landscapes, elegantly printed images of abandoned buildings in St. Paul and Minneapolis where she and members of her family once worked.

“Good Evening” (2008) Gracia Haby. Fictional travelogue with text and altered postcards. Photo courtesy of the author.

After spending the better part of an afternoon reading these books, I realize that any of the volumes, individually, might well have been enough to pull me from my bearings; but altogether, they caused a total (if temporary) loss of any sense of my own time and place.

I look up at the clock to find it has sped farther ahead than I anticipated. Where am I again? My surroundings reemerge. I am in a quiet library on a gray day in an Eames chair paging through a portal to elsewhere.

“The Physical Boundaries of an Island” (2004) Imi Maufe. Photo courtesy of the author.

Exhibition details:

A Sense of Place in Artist Books is on view through December 12 at the Architecture & Landscape Architecture Library, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis campus. Find a symposium about the exhibition and its topic online here.

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Sarah Peters is a Twin Cities-based artist, writer and arts programmer who is interested in public engagement with the arts and critical issues of our time.

Viewfinder posts are your opportunity to “show & tell” about the everyday arts happenings, interesting sights and sounds made or as seen by Minnesota artists, because art is where you find it. Submit your own informal, first-person responses to the art around you to editor(at)mnartists.org, and we may well publish your piece here on the blog. (Guidelines: 300 words or less, not about your own event/work, and please include an image, media, video, or audio file, and one sentence about yourself.)

From “Counting Time” by Art Gillespie. Photo courtesy of Douglas Flanders Art.

We use numbers in an attempt to measure precisely, to know exactly of how much of something we have.  It’s perhaps ironic, then, that we use numbers to measure time, as numerical values are at once infinite, in the universal sense, and extremely limited in the personal sphere, our clocks always running.  Either way, how much time is there? The work on display in Counting Time: Recent Work by Art Gillespie at Douglas Flanders Art explores this conundrum in a brain-tickling way.

From a distance, Gillespie’s pieces are exemplary of clean, black and white precision.  But when you get up close, you notice the chafed, uneven surface — how it looks beat up, disintegrating.  Gillespie starts with a piece of black tar paper, paints it white, and then, using stencils, painstakingly scrapes and removes the white to once again reveal blackness surrounding the letters and numbers. The dark areas are rough and full of texture, at odds with the numeric precision.  Seeing the work in person, I wondered how the pieces might be changed by digital reproduction, if the black areas lost their texture and dimension to the smooth sheen of a print. A glossy, flat rendering of his images would likely make the illusion of using numbers to communicate precise temporal information more believable: the line would be cleaner, allowing for less doubt. Which makes it all the more interesting that he’s chosen to leave room for that very sort of uncertainty, with the rough, uneven textures of reality; he’s left visible the marks of physical labor behind the works’ creation, of craftsmanship, and in so doing, he’s reintroduced the messiness of human struggle into the ideologically orderly world of scientific measurement.  His aren’t fixed, static measures; there is a neurotic, anxious life in Gillespie’s numbers.

Fortunately, Gillespie was in the gallery when I visited the exhibition, so I could ask him directly about the work. He said he’d been thinking about how he could use letters and numbers to form a line, about using them as content, and that in these works he’s exploring that idea.  That is, we know exactly what we are looking at, a letter or a word; we recognize these things. But taken together, the words become abstract, meaningless, lost in the sea of numbers, in the unyielding flow of time they are trying to represent, to capture. In this way, counting time is like trying to hold a flowing river in your hands: the water passes through your grasp, and any idea that you’re actually holding something in your hand is an illusion.

Gillespie said each piece took approximately a month to create, which means that the current show represents a year of labor. Looking around the gallery, seeing the accumulation of works as individual months of his life gathered on the wall, I felt a touch of vertigo, as if I were standing in a room surrounded by every one of those days.

I highly recommend you experience this subtle, mind-bending show for yourself. As with most independent galleries, admission is free and the gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, from 11 am to 6 pm. If you find yourself in Lyn-Lake or Uptown Minneapolis, or anywhere nearby, you should stop in and give your mind a spin via the engaging work of Art Gillespie.

Noted exhibition details:

Counting Time by Art Gillespie is on view through December 29 at Douglas Flanders Art, 910 West Lake Street, Minneapolis, MN 55408

Jay Orff is a writer, musician and filmmaker living in Minneapolis. His fiction has appeared in Reed, Spout, Chain and Harper’s Magazine.

Viewfinder posts are your opportunity to “show & tell” about the everyday arts happenings, interesting sights and sounds made or as seen by Minnesota artists, because art is where you find it. Submit your own informal, first-person responses to the art around you to susannah(at)mnartists.org, and we may well publish your piece here on the blog. (Guidelines: 300 words or less, not about your own event/work, and please include an image, media, video, or audio file, and one sentence about yourself.)

Last weekend the Northeast Minneapolis arts district threw open its doors for their annual cool-weather art crawl, Art Attack. In a gallery on the third floor of the Northrup King Building, tucked away amidst painting, clothing, and ceramic studios, the weary art wanderers found an entirely different experience. REwork: Participatory Art Projects was a weekend-long exhibition that featured interactive works that had previously been enacted elsewhere.

REwork: Participatory Art Projects, “What Makes You Participate?” Photo by Sam Thompson.

Curators Molly Balcom Raleigh and Kirsten Wiegmann wanted to give artists an opportunity to see how their projects would shift when restaged in a different context. In some cases, that change of environment proved considerable. Several of the works in the show were originally created for Northern Spark—the sleep-deprived festival that injects art into public spaces in the middle of the night. These projects include Balcom Raleigh’s table for eating and talking via virtual portal to elsewhere called FEED/FEED, Susy Bielak’s call for McSweeney’s-inspired sleep positions, and Jonathan Zorn’s text-based work that was scripted to facilitate responses between participants and the activities, crowds, and architecture of the Minnesota Center for Book Arts during the Northern Spark festival.

Pritika Chowdry’s “Memory Leaks,” photo by Sam Thompson.

At REwork, those projects shared space with Pritika Chowdry’s “Memory Leaks,” an installation of hanging copper pots that viewers could fill with water and watch it drip into platters on the floor containing burned papers. Nearby, Robin Garwood’s freestanding sculpture, Blind, aimed to illustrate the dizzying effects of Moiré patterns by inviting viewers inside a three-sided, cloth covered frame. Rachel Jendrzejewski created a space that served as the atmospheric headquarters for a roving interactive performance, oneir0nautics, where dancers interpreted fragments of dreams that visitors had written on scraps of paper and then taped to the wall. Lastly, the exhibition’s only non-local artist, Emilia Javanica dressed herself in a nylon “birthday suit” complete with male genitalia to embody “Buoj iz Jeb,” a curious and amenable character. Jeb — a professional life drawing model — invited viewers to draw him with props and costumes they selected from his closet.

A room at the back of the gallery contained project didactics and artist bios, which functioned as a necessary contextualization for visitors unfamiliar with REwork’s intentions.

Balcom Raleigh’s virtual portal to elsewhere, “FEED/FEED.” Photo by Sam Thompson.

Overall, I found that each project created a distinct environment – some more lively and engaging that others. Naturally, the works that involved a human conduit contained the most energy. FEED/FEED’s half-circle table full of people chatting with pixilated Seattleites on a screen dominated the sociality of the space (in no small part due to the pumpkin bars with whipped cream that were part of the project) and set a tone of comfort and conviviality. Meanwhile Javanica’s unignorably charming character made the intimidating acts of life drawing and social interaction with a (fake naked) stranger feel intimate.

Emilia Javanica performs as “Buoj iz Jeb,” a life-drawing model, while a visitor sketches. Photo by Sam Thompson.

The quiet works held their own grace, particularly Chowdry’s venerable copper pots, and Zorn’s poetic scripts:

“humming
beneath the cacophonous
murmur of the crowd
sustaining a gentle tone”

As I wandered around the space during my visit I overheard several people walk into the gallery and mutter under their breath to their companions, “What’s going on in here?!” Indeed, after rooms full of paintings and pottery, REwork made for a refreshing and active art attack.

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Sarah Peters is a Twin Cities-based artist, writer and arts programmer who is interested in public engagement with the arts and critical issues of our time.

Viewfinder posts are your opportunity to “show & tell” about the everyday arts happenings, interesting sights and sounds made or as seen by Minnesota artists, because art is where you find it. Submit your own informal, first-person responses to the art around you to katie(at)mnartists.org, and we may well publish your piece here on the blog. (Guidelines: 300 words or less, not about your own event/work, and please include an image, media, video, or audio file, and one sentence about yourself.)

In his current MAEP exhibition, Broc Blegen plays three parts: artist, curator and collector. He fulfills each of these roles through their traditional tasks: he makes the art, he forms a “collection,” and then he curates it for display. Except for the fact the art he made isn’t his own.

Coming Out Party: Selections from the Collection of Broc Blegen is comprised of re-created artworks by famous, mostly male, artists including Felix Gonzalez Torres, Robert Mapplethorpe, Glenn Ligon, Andy Warhol, Richard Prince, Jonathan Horowitz, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman and Jim Hodges. Jenny Holzer holds court as the one woman artist re-presented. On the didactic panels that sidle up to each piece—written by Blegen as part of the overall project—the dates given for each of the works include the original date of production and the current year, i.e., 1978/2012.

Broc Blegen, Jenny Holzer, If You Aren’t Political Your Personal Life Should be Exemplary, 1998/2012, Bronze plaque, 5″ x 10.” Photo courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Some clear themes arise immediately. As the title of the exhibition indicates, these works epitomize lightening rod moments in the critical conversation about sexuality and identity politics in art, from the Gonzalez-Torres’ empty booty-shaking stage to McCarthy’s Chair with Butt Plug to Nauman’s provocative neon word-play “run from fear, fun from rear” to Mapplethorpe’s mesh-covered mirror that asks us to stare at our own desirous gaze. We also see an appropriation of the appropriators, in particular Richard Prince’s joke painting and Ligon’s brilliant work Red Portfolio, which is itself a recreation of the texts describing Mapplethorpe photographs that were circulated by the Christian Coalition at the height of the 90s culture wars.

All of the works on display in this “collection” are goldmines of cultural rebellion, hitting hard on the issues that are still tearing our politics apart: sex, religion, gender, representation. They have incredible power and presence, even as facsimiles.

Broc Blegen, Bruce Nauman, Run From Fear Fun From Rear, 1972/2012, yellow and pink neon tubing with glass tubing suspension frames, two parts, each: 8″ x 46″ x 2 1/4.” Photo courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

There are many layers to this exhibition: the issues and aesthetics contained in the original works, the existing artwork remade as a kind of readymade, and the act of collecting. These layers are contained and revealed further considering the exhibition as a whole is a work of art, including the didactic labels that give Blegen authorship over the pieces and thus become key in contextualizing the project in its entirety.

This gives us a great deal to consider and discuss, but as the double crucifix and the plaque about personhood and the political linger in my mind, I realize that the strength of the exhibition comes from the power of the original artworks, rather than the questions raised by their context and recreation. In that sense I’m thankful for the art history lesson and the chance to engage with some giants of cultural production, yet I am left to wonder: Was all the re-work was necessary?

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Related links and information:

Sheila Regan’s piece on mnartists.org, “Art of the Steal,” also considers Blegen’s MAEP show

Coming Out Party: Selections from the Collection of Broc Blegen is on view through December 30, 2012, in the the MAEP Gallery at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Admission to this exhibition is free and open to the public.

Sarah Peters is a Twin Cities-based artist, writer and arts programmer who is interested in public engagement with the arts and critical issues of our time.

Viewfinder posts are your opportunity to “show & tell” about the everyday arts happenings, interesting sights and sounds made or as seen by Minnesota artists, because art is where you find it. Submit your own informal, first-person responses to the art around you to katie(at)mnartists.org, and we may well publish your piece here on the blog. (Guidelines: 300 words or less, not about your own event/work, and please include an image, media, video, or audio file, and one sentence about yourself.)

Kickstarter’s Yancey Strickler is exactly the type of guy you want repping for a creative digital startup. He’s amiable, smart and exceptionally witty. He knows his talking points, and he truly believes in what he’s doing. He glows with the hope of the digital world, all the while shunning the idea of growing his business like an MBA would.

Kickstarter Cofounder Yancey Strickler at the Walker Art Center, October 25, 2012. Photo courtesy of Katie Hill

I am assuming that, as a reader of this blog about arts, you know something about Kickstarter’s all-or-nothing funding model for creative projects, so I won’t go into details. According to Strickler, Minnesota is a Kickstarter-happy state: more than 400 projects have been funded $4.2 million at a 58% success rate, higher than the national average of 44 %. Worldwide, 98% of projects that raise over 60% of their goals are funded. Kickstarter has raised “over $400 million for quixotic art projects during the great recession.” Amid the barrage of statistics, Strickler told the individual success stories of Zak Sally’s Sammy the Mouse, Andy DuCett’s Why We Do This, and Alex Hawkinson’s SmartThings all of which reigned from Minnesota, with the latter project raising over $1 million.

Strickler’s presentation reflected the brilliance of the site’s design: it balanced data and numbers with personalized stories to promote tiny businesses, and it’s a lot more like a public grant application than a business plan. It also forced conversation about the commodification of artistic process. As a funder, do you care more about the reward or that someone out there is making something creative? As a project lead, is your audience supporting you because they like what you do or because they want something in return? If you are a working artist, is it worth the amount of marketing and PR you know you have to put into your Kickstarter to make it successful if your supporters are just going to take what you gave them and run? How much will running a massive two-month-long PR campaign cost your creative process and exhaust your Facebook friends’ generosity?

mnartists.marketplace, a joint effotr of mnartists.org and The Walker Shop, hosted a reception for local artists to share Kickstarter success stories and connect on creative entrepreneurship. Yancey Strickler enjoyed hearing about their specific projects made possible by his company. Photo courtesy of Katie Hill.

Because this lecture took place at a museum and not a tech summit crawling with venture capitalists, Strickler was able to focus on what Kickstarter does best: small creative projects. He talked about Kickstarter funding for independent comics, board games, video games and films that wouldn’t otherwise make it to production. He discussed that half of the Kickstarter team spent their time vetting the 300-350 projects that came in on a daily basis, to make sure that they followed the rules. It was fascinating to learn the ins and outs of the company’s success and hear about its creative spirit.

In its ideal form, Kickstarter sounds really fantastic, and those creative projects are magnificent. But overall the company adheres to the project-only guidelines Strickler laid out somewhat inconsistently, or users interpret the guidelines rather loosely; I don’t think any proprietor of a Kickstarter-funded restaurant or publication wants to think of their endeavor as a “project with a beginning and an end.” Audience members also emphasized that Kickstarter appears to work with companies that may not benefit the little guys, as evidenced by their partnership with Amazon. But, as Strickler pointed out, Amazon had the right technology at the right time during Kickstarter’s development, and “half the sites on the internet are run by Amazon,” including Netflix.

As an avowed cynic, it was hard for me to believe the uber-charming Strickler when he thwarted questions about potential scams with, “You can feel who is sincere.” But I was a total sucker for his story of his favorite Kickstarter. He funded a Los Angeles 24-year-old’s sailing journey around the world (how this is a creative project and not a life experience, I’m not sure, but it’s very romantic), and received a Polaroid photo in return: “I gave her $15 and I have this photo from the South Pacific,” he said. “I’m part of her story. It’s not a commodity.”

But right next to Richmond’s Kickstarter video, you see the numbers behind it: 148 backers, $8,141 raised. It’s about the stories you tell as well as the monetary value you put on your adventures.

Viewfinder posts are your opportunity to “show & tell” about the everyday arts happenings, interesting sights and sounds made or as seen by Minnesota artists, because art is where you find it. Submit your own informal, first-person responses to the art around you to katie(at)mnartists.org, and we may well publish your piece here on the blog. (Guidelines: 300 words or less, not about your own event/work, and please include an image, media, video, or audio file, and one sentence about yourself.)

Carpet “drawing” by Scott Nedrelow. Photo courtesy of David Petersen Gallery.

Having missed the opening several weeks ago, I finally made it over to the new David Petersen Gallery on Lyndale Ave. Petersen, who years ago co-founded the experimental, artist-run space Art of This, has shifted pace with this new venture and opened a commercial gallery. Located in an inconspicuous storefront tucked behind the row of vitamin/pet/liquor stores across from the Wedge, the new space is clean, bright and tidy.

The gallery’s inaugural show, Make Hay, features six artists working in drawing, painting, photography and sculpture, as well as forms in-between. My curiosity was particularly piqued by Scott Nedrelow’s framed canvas of mundane-colored carpet, the same kind you’d find in a featureless model home or new office building. This re-contextualization of this boring domestic material took on another layer of meaning after I flipped through an artist book by Nederlow sitting on the back table in the gallery. The book contains color photographs of similar carpet with patterns, lines and vague forms “drawn” into it with a vacuum cleaner ; in the same way you can affect an almost dual tonality on new carpet when you brush your hand over it, you can also make stripes when you vacuum. After seeing the artist book, I could see his wall piece in the greater context of not just the happy childhood discovery of the effects of a hand swipe on fresh carpet, but the whole history of painting and minimalism.

Gala Porras-Kim. Photo courtesy of David Peterson Gallery.

A different kind of intrigue struck me as I looked at the work of Los Angeles-based multimedia artist Gala Porras-Kim. Her anthropological approach to investigating issues of language, culture and history is evident in three small wall pieces that sit, formally, somewhere in the arena of assemblage, sculpture, drawing and sound installation. Informed by a heavily research-oriented practice, these works are part of a larger project involving her study of Zapotec, an indigenous language spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico distinguished by its use of tonal sounds and whistles. Provocative and beautiful, her works contain worlds of information and history, like mini-museums of an artistic research process. But like the best didactics, her installations don’t reveal everything, instead giving just enough information to inspire intense curiosity.

The clean white walls of the new David Petersen Gallery may not invite the raucous art/party experiments of his previous project, but Petersen’s eye for conceptually rich, complicated art combined with his willingness to make a business venture out of it is much needed around here.

Related links and information:
Make Hay is on view through November 4 at David Petersen Gallery, 2018 Lyndale Ave S., Minneapolis.

Gala Porras-Kim, installation view. Photo courtesy of David Petersen Gallery.

Sarah Peters is a Twin Cities-based artist, writer and arts programmer who is interested in public engagement with the arts and critical issues of our time.