Off Center

A year ago this week, I made my first blog post for the Walker and wondered aloud what audiences want from a museum blog and how the medium could serve our various communication needs (I posted on the “museoblogosphere“–a neologism that, alas, hasn’t taken off–here, and the discussion was followed up by Eric here, here, and here). Today there are around 60 museums blogging, according to Ideum, and the news stories about this trend have shifted from “Look, museums are blogging!” to broader discussions of challenges, opportunities and conflicts inherent in this kind of institutional channel for informal communications.

In a thorough and thoughtful piece in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, David Ng digs into the topic. “Museum blogs suffer from a kind of split-personality syndrome,” he writes. “Are they civic forums or glorified marketing tools? Should they humanize the museum or enforce an authoritative distance? Perhaps all of the above.” Offering no definitive answer, he cites challenges of blogs like the Science Museum of Minnesota’s Science Buzz and their discussions around allowing political content–commenters who opposed the use of human cadavers in the touring Body Worlds exhibit or refuted the theory of evolution in a display of T-Rex bones–in a scientific blog, for instance. (We had similar discussions when commenters questioned the use of live animals in our exhibition House of Oracels: A Huang Yong Ping retrospective; we opted for transparency and openness, but decided to close comments a month after the exhibition concluded.)

At this one-year anniversary, I want to revisit some of my early questions in hopes that some of our own concerns–lack of robust debate in the comments, intermittent posting by Walker staff, etc.–can be clarified. What do you, blog reader, like about our blogs and what would you like to see more of? Got a favorite post? A criticism? Lay it on us.

• Rirkrit rocks: As cross-disciplinary as ever, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s latest project is theatrical in nature–he was the artistic director for Ramakien, a music-theater take on the Thai version of the Ramayana, held at Lincoln Center this weekend. Featuring Thai rock bands, Sek Loso, the Photo Sticker Machine and Modern Dog, the piece was met with mixed reviews, including the New York Times , which called it both “grandly ambitious” and “overstuffed.” (Also: a recent profile I wrote on Tiravanija.)

• Art Shark? This new boardgame offers a curiously pessimistic view of the art world: “Use your sneakiest tricks to make a fortune collecting art. Switch fakes with original art. Outbid other players at auction. And discover 64 masterpieces as you play.” Via Modern Art Notes.

• Pumpin’ for the man: A fascinating article from last month on SFMOMA’s Drawing Restraint exhibition. I love this passage on trucker Jim McKinney: “His rig was laden with 1,600 gallons of liquid petroleum jelly for a 10-ton sculpture by artist Matthew Barney, who has made the greasy goop a prime ingredient in the shaping of his strange and alluring visual world. McKinney, a down-home Tennessean who usualy hauls hazardous stuff like butyl ethanol, had never heard of Barney… He said he was just there ‘to do the pumpin’.” Via Gregg Chadwick.

• Typing restraint: SFMOMA’s marketing campaign for Drawing Restraint has some interesting components: text-messages, projections featuring visitors’ reactions to the show, busboard and banners, etc. The key to it all is a website where visitors can type in their feedback on the show with a small catch, they’re “restrained”–get it?–to a certain number of characters.

• Beirut dispatch: Artist Walid Raad offers perspectives on the war in Lebanon from the inside: “There is no such thing as targeted/surgical shelling in a city with hundreds of thousands of homes, built cheek to cheek… Do we need to open more morgue doors to reveal yet another mangled body, yet another weeping parent, yet another angry relative denouncing this or that government? this or that policy?” Via NewsGrist.

• TM2: Yesterday Tate Modern unveiled plans for its Herzog & de Meuron-designed addition, a ziggurat that Jacques Herzog says can “be interpreted in two ways: as the erosion of a pyramid and, in contrast, as a pyramid in the process of emerging.” The structure will include 10 galleries, six cafes and bars, two shops, and educational spaces–and a whole lot more.

• HIJACK “bombs” in Philly: When Twin Cities dance favorites HIJACK went to the aptly named DanceBoom festival in Philadelphia last month, airport officials dubbed one part of their work incendiary enough to temporarily shut down the airport–a fake bomb used as a prop in their performance, broken down and stashed throughout their luggage. When they explained themselves, over four hours, it probably didn’t help that when asked the name of their company they had to answer, “Hijack.”

• How do you wheatpaste posters on a traditional Rwandan hut? The Design Altruism Project on the challenges of mounting a get-out-the-vote campaign for Rwanda’s first democratic elections in 2001.

• Designing Protest: Five winners of this year’s National Design Awards for communication design declined an invitation to the White House for the awards ceremony because Laura Bush is gala chair. While that might’ve been the end of it, a fascinating comment thread at Design Observer is keeping the debate about politics and design going, with designers like Chip Kidd, Michael Beirut, and Andrew Blauvelt weighing in.

• High, low: ECP guest blogger Maggie Perez interviews Takashi Murakami on art, commerce, and how many Japanese “are surprised by the rigid and pretentious Western hierarchy of ‘high art.’”

• Artists in times of war: While Howard Zinn’s book Artists in Times of War definitely seems worth a re-read these days, the Lebanese Association of Plastic Arts puts out a plea for aid. “[G]iven the aggressively interpretive role the news media play in representing and managing the positions and perspectives of dominant agents [in the current conflict], it is imperative for us to provide the realities of alternative personal, intimate, and more nuanced narratives of those living and looking in the midst of a this devastation of a nation’s accomplishments and dreams.”

The public television series Great Museums made a stop at the Walker recently to film for an upcoming episode (to air this fall). View the trailer here, as well as clips from shows on MoMA, the Met, the Boston Children’s Museum and others. Check out the entire series, created to commemorate “2006: America’s Year of the Museum.”

A cat who buys Giant Robot magazine, a cigarette-smoking snowman, a dog adept with a chef's knife, a raccoon who visits a pawnbroker: the characters created by comic-book artist Sara Varon live in an adult world but have a childlike appeal. They're “whimsical, yet avoid being nauseatingly cute,” says one reviewer. Like her illustrated colleagues, Varon seems to walk a fine line between being an adult kid and a kid-like adult. At 35 years of age, she manages projects of a decidedly grown-up scale, from a two-book deal with youth publisher Scholastic (see her first one here) to her work with the Walker--the creation of an illustrated identity for family programs as well as a custom comic book, stationery, T-shirt, and collectible buttons sold at the Walker Shop. Yet, shy and prone to calling her work “stuff,” she seems to approach art (and life) with perpetual fascination. “I always feel like I’m 12 years old,” she says.

In her clever comics, collected in the book Sweaterweather, Varon's quirky imagination converges with a keen eye for the details of her Brooklyn neighborhood and memories of that 12-year-old self. In one strip, a Q-Bert video game makes an appearance along with an unlikely adjective-- zaftig--and a magazine rack packed with hip titles like Paper, Bust, and Bitch. But it’s the animals that hearken back to Varon's childhood in suburban Chicago where as a “totally geeky, quiet kid” she dreamt of being a zookeeper or veterinarian. Ever since, her art career has involved all kinds of furry, scaly, or barking companions. Even her recent Walker project, a magnet she created to commemorate the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden in 2004, included a family of bunnies and a pink-shelled turtle standing beside Spoonbridge and Cherry.

What’s so appealing about these animals is how they keep finding themselves playfully solving problems. In one scenario, a turtle and bunny take refuge from winter’s bluster by crawling inside the turtle’s shell, where they knit hats and scarves. In another, a cat enviously watches birds and planes flying by her window. She invites a trio of pigeons over for dinner and receives a gift of feathers in thanks. Once the plumes are planted in a flower pot and grow to cat-size dimensions, she harvests them to make strap-on wings, then soars in the sky with her new friends. This persistent inquisitiveness makes Varon’s creatures perfect stars for a Walker-themed comic, says Ashley Duffalo, Family Programs manager. “Snowman, rabbit, turtle, and Sara's entire cast of adorable animals possess a lovable curiosity toward life and learning, which we find true of all of our audiences, but especially families. It's with this spirit in mind that we'd like to encourage their explorations of contemporary art at the Walker.”

Creating such endearing characters was a concerted choice. During her time as an MFA candidate at the School of Visual Arts in New York, popular illustrators such as painter Mark Ryden, underground comic artist Kaz, and makers of “cute, gross” Japanese animé and the South Park series were placing sugary-sweet creatures in frightening situations. “People in my illustration class were saying, ‘More violence! More violence!’” she says. “I couldn’t do it because I didn’t want bad things to happen to them. I would've felt so bad. I do feel like they're my friends, like I need to protect them.”

Dig into Christmas traditions outside the United States and you’re likely to find Santa Claus’ dark side. Artist Cameron Jamie did, traveling to the Bad Gastein Valley near Salzburg, Austria, to shoot footage of an annual ritual that occurs every December 5: roving bands of demon-like characters take to the streets to terrorize children, accost women, and wreak general havoc on the village; the following day, the feast of St. Nicholas (who appears accompanied by a basket bearer and an angel), is decidedly less creepy. Some say the Krampus is the evil alter-ego of Santa Claus, others that Santa and the Krampus are one in the same, but one thing is clear, the creature is a throwback to the pagan rituals of the pre-Christian era.

Jamie’s film, Kranky Klaus, is part of his eponymous exhibition opening at the Walker on Sunday. In it, footage of rampaging Krampusse–who, by one account “stalk young women, fondling them, throwing them over their shoulders and whipping them with wooden switches until their shins and thighs are black and blue“–is set to the music of regular Jamie collaborators, the Melvins (who also provide the soundtrack for the artists’ films on backyard wrestling and spookhouses, both screening during the show). If the pranks and perversions of the beasts aren’t frightening enough–and, if you watch the response from the kids in the film, they are frightening–their costumes should do the trick:

The wooden mask with genuine goat- and ram-horns, the sheepskin coat and the bell-belt are family possessions. The oldest Krampus masks are exhibited. They are carved wooden masks with pointed animal ears and fangs in a “Dracula-like style”.

The masks–or horns you can use to make your own–are sold on ebay, and the likeness of the Krampus, running from the impish and quirky to the downright Death-metalesque, have ended up on antique postcards (shown here), in books, and at the center of modern-day Krampus theme parties around the globe. The word Krampus comes from the Old High German word for “claw” (Krampen), and in terms of general spikiness, the depictions seem to bear out the etymology:

Cameron Jamie opens on Sunday, July 16. The films Kranky Klaus, BB, Spook House and JO run run in sequence beginning at 11:15 a.m. daily, repeating every other hour. In addition, the exhibition includes works based on a Japanese eating-contest champion, wooden Krampus masks (below), photographic portraits of face-painted backyard wrestlers, and the massive environment Maps and Composite Actions, a winding (and possibly treacherous) mountain path visitors navigate, one at a time, lighting their way only with a lantern.

• Tate broadband: In September, the Tate will launch Tate Media, a broadband arts channel that’ll work across platforms of the internet, television, public events, and print to share its content globally. “We put on shows but we have nothing to share with the audience once the show is gone,” says Tate Media head Will Gompertz. “The real value […] is in the ‘long tail’–the ability to access that information in perpetuity and for Tate to be able to offer it to them, whether it is an educational programme, whether it is downloadable in different formats or whether it is interactive.”

• Ruscha mural lawsuit: Lawyers for LA muralist Kent Twitchell will file suit today against a “nongovernmental entity” and a claim with a governmental department involved in the June 2 destruction of the gigantic Ed Ruscha Monument.

• The environmental impact of Christo: For their next project, Christo and Jeanne-Claude aim to hang seven miles of translucent fabric, hung from 1,000 steel cables, over the Arkansas River in south-central Colorado. The effect should be like “silvery waves,” says Jeanne-Claude, but the project (Over the River) probably won’t be realized til 2010 because the pair wants to commission a thorough environmental impact study before they do. Some residents fear the project will obscure their mountain views, while others worry about emergency access should another fire sweep the canyon near Deer Mountain, where in 2002, a blaze destroyed many homes. [via]

• Guggenheim Abu Dhabi: An island off the coast of the United Arab Emirates capital city will be home to the next–and biggest–Guggenheim project: Frank Gehry will design a 300,000-square foot modern art musuem that’ll “play off the blue water and the colour of the sand and sky and sun.”

• Graphic equalizer t-shirt: Batteries not included.

The biennial circuit goes rural in 2009: Yorkshire, England, will host the first ever Farmers' Biennale of Art and Agriculture as a way to spark “cultural investment in rural creativity.” The festival will focus on “commissions for artists working on farms and in disused farmers’ markets, field-art including crop circles and urban projects such as growing “corn fields in the cities.” [via]

Links: Free Soil, Futurefarmers, Pond, StrangeWeather, Platform.