Off Center

Creative Company, North Mankato, MN

Photo: James Dayton Design

In May 2005, Metropolis wrote that Minneapolis “seems poised to become a major design mecca,” citing the new Walker, our myriad advertising, design and architecture firms, and rich cultural offerings. The American Institute of Architects seems to agree: they just named Minneapolis-based James Dayton as one of six recipients of their Young Architects Awards for 2006. Dayton, who appeared here in October as part of our ongoing series Drawn Here: Contemporary Design in Conversation (available in the Walker Chanel archives), was recognized for being an architect (licensed less than ten years) who has made a “significant contributions to the profession early in their careers.” Mentored by Frank Gehry, Dayton’s projects include the future MacPhail Center for Music and the Bookmen Lofts, both in Minneapolis. Congratulations, James.

Drawn Here continues February 16 with Charlie Lazor, creator of the FlatPak home featured in the current Walker exhibition Some Assembly Required: Contemporary Prefabricated Houses. The talk will be broadcast on the Walker Channel.

One of the more eclectic personalities to visit the Walker in awhile, Jon Langford in a punk rocker (The Mekons), country music fan (Waco Brothers), visual artist, activist, drummer, guitarist and producer. In anticipation of his February 10 and 11 Walker performances of The Executioner’s Last Songs, we asked him to participate in 8-Ball, a Q&A that runs in each issue of our print magazine. Here are the outtakes:

What was your worst job and why?

Corporate employee /musician signed to major label–crippling self-doubt, uncertainty, loss of self-esteem.

What’s the last (or favorite) book you read?

Moby Dick.

When did you realize you wanted to be an artist?

Every time The Mekons got signed to a major label. When I moved to Chicago in 1992, I had a lot of time on my hands–my wife was in grad school 16 hours a day and my band was dispersed across the globe after being dropped by A&M–so I started painting again.

What is one of the most unexpected influences on your art?

Dreadful contemporary Country & Western Radio.

What was your most character-building experience?

Getting up on the stage of the Double R Ranch in Chicago’s loop with a band called The Sundowners and singing Johnny Cash covers to really scary American drunks and surviving.

They say dogs and their owners tend to look alike. What kind of dog would you own?

I have a Chicago street mutt named Billie Bones and we don’t really look much alike but I believe we share something like 87% of the same DNA. I have no idea if that’s true but I believe it.

When writing about artists whose work deals with issues of citizenship and patriotism for our March issue of Walker (mentioned here and here), I encountered a conundrum. The piece references works by choreographer Bill T. Jones and poet Sekou Sundiata, but I couldn’t illustrate it with photos from those performances because they’d be used elsewhere in the magazine. Plus, the story is about the broader issues artists face when dealing with “political” subject matter.

Enter: Walker photographer Cameron Wittig, who created this photo illustration, a perfect metaphor for the difference between active citizenship and superficial patriotism. As Sundiata told me, “I have never been interested in patriotism. I am interested in a citizenship of conscience. The first proposes a kind of uncritical blindness; the other proposes a look at America that does not flinch or blink.”

Look for the essay in two weeks in the print issue of Walker. Details on Jones’ March 10 performance Blind Date here, and info on Sundiata’s the 51st (dream) state, March 31 and April 1, is here.

Innovative media artist Nam June Paik, who has had a long, rich history with the Walker, passed away last night at his Miami home. Details to come…

Among other curious work at the Art Shanty opening last week was robotic ice carver by Jesse Hemminger & Bruce Shapiro. A PC sends horizontal and vertical directions to the carver much like it would direct a pen plotting printer, but this printer doesn’t have ink, it has a two cycle weed eater motor spinning a router bit. The result is a series of computationally drawn holes in the ice.

The Art Shanties are on view on Medicine Lake, and there is a full schedule of programming in defiance of the unseasonable warm streak of that’s flustering most of us here in Minnesota.

(click for more…)

Artnet invited curators and artists to list their predictions for the new year. The list runs from the cryptically grim (Maurizio Cattelan: “Things can only get better.”) to the absurd (Aura Rosenberg, who references the recent Walker gig Don’t Trust Anyone Over 30: “The producers of Sesame Street will approach Dan Graham about directing a new puppet segment called “Wild on Sesame Street.”). But one item, from frequent Artnet contributor Charlie Finch, stands out.

Glenn Lowry will head the Metropolitan Museum, Kathy Halbreich will head MoMA, and Gary Garrels will head the Walker Art Center.

Does he know something we don’t?

A cynical how-to by London-based pomo-prankster architecture firm FAT.

The Swarm exhibition at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philidelphia juxtaposes new media generative artists with well known contemporary artists. Featured in the show are some artists with connections to the Walker including Julie Mehretu, Sarah Sze and Matthew Ritchie who are in the exhibition with less established artists Casey Reas and Jason Salavon. I found the Walker’s site had rich information about several of the artist featured in the Swarm exhibition.

Julie Mehretu

Mehretu’s collaboration with entropy8zuper! was featured in the exhibition How Latitudes Become Forms and is currently hosted by the Walker. In 2003 the Walker showed Julie Mehretu: Drawing Into Painting. It looks like the catalog is still available as well.There are also three segments of an opening day talk featuring the artist available through Art on Call. (1, 2, 3)

Sarah Sze

Grow or Die was a 2002 commission for the Cowles conservatory. The Art on Call page has two files where the artist describes Grow or Die ( 1, 2).

Matthew Ritchie

Ritchie’s project The Hard Way hosted by the Walker as part of da’web, there is more info on the Walker’s Collections and Resources page.

source:Generator.X

“If Michelangelo takes a block of marble and starts to make a David, he carves it and carves it. The art is this idea transformed into reality. But what happens if your material isn’t marble, but a toxic, dead medium–earth that can’t sustain life? Scientific process, not artistic process, has to be the tool. To take that soil and make it live again, to sculpt a diverse ecosystem from it–that to me is beautiful.”

In 1990, as part of a Walker residency, sculptor Mel Chin began a work every bit as monumental as Michelangelo’s but far less visible: with USDA scientist Rufus L. Chaney, he planted hyperaccumulators, plants that can extract and store heavy metals from soil, at the Pig’s Eye Landfill in St. Paul, a plot so polluted by incinerator ash that it’s on the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency’s Permanent List of Priorities. The work, a fenced-in area reminiscent of a crop circle, was called Revival Field and consisted of a target-shaped square of land circumscribed with a circle with an X in the middle, a reference to the project’s pinpoint cleanup. As Pruned quotes:

The divisions are also functional, separating different varieties of plants from each other for study. In the circular field the intersecting paths create four fields where six types of plants and two pH and two fertilizer tests can occur in each quadrant. The land area between the square and circle functions as a control plot where plants will be seeded with local grasses. The design for revival field facilitates the chemical analysis of each section.

When the project concluded in 1993, research showed that Alpine pennycress was the best at leeching heavy metals, although no plants were effective enough at cleaning up the land. But it did seem to provide an expansive definition of art. Chin said, “For a time, an intended invisible aesthetic will exist that can be measured scientifically by the quality of a revitalized earth. Eventually that aesthetic will be revealed in the return of growth to the soil.”

Revival Field

Mel Chin

1990

blueprint on paper, mounted on Foamcore

For more on Land Art, visit the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s catalogue of projects.

One man’s art: The fungal counterpart to Chin’s art might be mycoremediation, the use of mushrooms to clean up everything from oil spills to pesticides to chemical weapons and deal with problems from termite infestation to roads destroyed by logging operations.

(Thanks, Alex and Pruned.)

Architects of the Walker Art Center expansion and the de Young Museum in San Francisco are interviewed by Dean Harrison Fraker. Most of the lecture is about the new de Young with a few related projects in the beginning.

Interview page on the Berkley site.

The interviews are in Windows Media format. Macintosh users can download the new Windows Media component for Quicktime from Microsoft to see the videos.

source:de Young video page