Off Center

The Guardian has an excellent slideshow of work from the four shortlisted artists, as well as a video, taken from a group exhibition that has just gone on view at the Tate Britain.

The British newspaper opines that year’s quartet is “the most obscure shortlist in the history of the prize,”established in 1984 by the Tate Britain. If that’s so, perhaps rather than merely affirming talent, the museum is trying to gain credibility as one who makes it - not unlike one notable British innovation that spawned a phenomenally successful American franchise.

The four artists are Goshka Macuga, Cathy Wilkes, Mark Leckey, and Runa Islam (one of whose works’ title was recycled as the title for this post), and the Guardian includes brief bios as part of its extensive coverage of the prize, which is taken very seriously in the UK, with bookies getting in on the action (apparently, the lone male of the group is currently favored).

Looking back at a list of previous winners and nominees, it does seem that many Turner artists were better known when they won the Prize (and many have work that’s in the Walker’s collection or has been seen in its galleries: Gilbert and George, Derek Jarman (subject of a special tribute during our Expanding the Frame cinema series in January/February - keep an eye on our Film/Video page for details), Yinka Shonibare, Tony Cragg, Rachel Whiteread, Christ Ofili, etc.)

However, it’s also worth noting that this year’s shortlist artists are not so obscure as to be confined by the boundaries of the UK. Islam, Leckey, Wilkes, and Macuga have each had shows Stateside, if that means anything in a now-thoroughly-globalized art world.

The 2008 Turner winner will be announced December 1, and it’s tempting to wonder if viewer input from the Tate exhibition has any bearing on this decision. In any case, we should probably write a whole other blog post on on the American counterpart to the Turner Prize and speculate on why it doesn’t garner nearly the attention - its 2008 winner was announced last week.

The science of decay: Part Sally Mann’s What Remains, part Corpse Farm, our friends at the Science Museum of Minnesota are liveblogging the decomposition of a pig — all in the name of science. By Day 8, I’ve got to add: Gross-out alert!

Kitundu on NPR: A few days ago, NPR interviewed MacArthur “genius” grant winner and former Walker Performing Arts residency coordinator Walter Kitundu. Listen here as he describes how the phonoharp he invented works, how “trial and terror” experimentations lead to a few exploded turntables, and more.

Military “Muse”: Artworks from Suzane Opton’s “Soldier’s Face” billboard project are now on view at LA’s Stephen Cohen Gallery. The series was scheduled to appear in the Twin Cities to coincide with the Republican National Convention, but the local billboard company pulled the plug, fearing viewers might think the boards show dead soldiers (my colleague Chris Steller reports that one version was ultimately produced here). The LA Times‘ Christopher Knight offers an (ahem) dead-on explanation of the vulnerable, horizontal heads Opton features: They derive from Brancusi’s emblematic “Sleeping Muse” sculptures. Beautifully, Knight writes that Opton’s “vulnerable images depict the always shocking youth of soldiers who, like the Greek Titan who stole fire from the gods in Brancusi’s title, have witnessed devastating power up close. They seem almost shell-shocked, caught between the fragile beauty of youth and the desperate gravity of adulthood.”

Free form: Deerhoof (SM&M 2003 and last fall’s Walker concert) offers a free mp3 of its new single “Fresh Born” — and an invitation for fans to download the song’s sheet music, modify it, upload it to fans’ blogs and link to it on their site More than 30 people have already done so. Culture Bully has the “Fresh Born” video.

“Everything must go! Sofa-sized oils!” Twin Cities-based painter (and 2006 Whitney Biennial artist) Todd Norsten’s having a “massive inventory reduction sale and funfest,” tomorrow evening in St. Paul. Download the invite.

Paddy Johnson at the Brooklyn art blog Art Fag City reports that the Chelsea Art Museum has cancelled its November opening of The Aesthetics of Terror and its chief curator has resigned in protest. Museum president Dorothea Keeser reportedly felt the exhibition — which was to include artists like Jenny Holzer, Harun Farocki, Martha Rosler and the Chapman brothers — “ glorified terrorism and showed disrespect for its victims,” according to Josh Azzarella, one of the show’s artists. CAM chief curator Manon Slome has, according to Johnson, left over the cancellation.

The museum has deleted mention of the exhibition, which was to run Nov. 21 though Jan. 31, but a cached version (with the title The Dialectics of Terror) is still available.

UPDATE: The Chelsea Museum of Art has released a statement [pdf], which contradicts the above. It states that Chief Curator Manon Slome resigned for “personal reasons.” It continues: “Upon resigning, she unilaterally decided to cancel the exhibition The Dialectics of Terror (formerly The Aesthetics of Terror) and informed all the participating artists without prior discussion with Dorothea Keeser, Chelsea Art Museum’s Founder and President, or any Museum personnel.”

Reached by email on Friday, Keeser said that the exhibition will go on, but likely not at her museum. “As the show is ready to be installed and the catalogue is ready, it surely will be shown somewhere,”she said. “For the time being, we are too hurt to show it here after what happened and was said about us.”

UPDATE 2: Johnson interviews Keeser and offers a note from former CAM chief curator Manon Slome.

MORE: “The Chelsea Art Museum’s Dialectics of Terror Catalog Raises More Questions” (with catalogue pdf)

A description of the show after the jump:

(click for more…)

This article from the New York Times by Nicolai Ourousoff about the new California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, designed by Renzo Piano and across the park from Herzog & de Meuron’s deYoung, was just too beautiful not to share, particularly the opening and closing paragraphs. Ahh, I remember those African Hall dioramas well:

Not all architects embrace the idea of evolution. Some, fixated on the 20th-century notion of the avant-garde, view their work as a divine revelation, as if history began with them. Others pine for the Middle Ages.

But if you want reaffirmation that human history is an upward spiral rather than a descent into darkness, head to the new California Academy of Sciences, in Golden Gate Park, which opens on Saturday.

and

The museum has also preserved its African Hall, with its gorgeous vaulted ceiling and dioramas of somnolent lions and grazing antelopes, integrating it into the new design. Built in the 1930s, this neo-Classical hall is a specimen of sorts. Its massive stone structure reflects colonial attitudes about the civilized world as a barrier against barbarism. It was intended as a symbol of Western superiority and a triumph over nature.

By contrast, Mr. Piano’s vision avoids arrogance. The ethereality of the academy’s structure suggests a form of reparations for the great harm humans have done to the natural world. It is best to tread lightly in moving forward, he seems to say. This is not a way of avoiding hard truths; he means to shake us out of our indolence.

Images, of course, from the New York Times.

Park(ing) Day last Friday was a resounding success in Minneapolis and nationally. According to local organizer Shanai Matteson, participation was good, but, better yet, the event gave her an opportunity to meet people and raise critical issues. In an email, she writes:

I think the most interesting thing for me was that the park became an excuse to talk to strangers about the city and the public spaces we do (and don’t) share. A number of people who passed by stopped to hang out for a bit, and when they did, we started talking. More than a few of remarked that it was great to see even a little bit of green downtown, and that they enjoyed the fact that they could talk with strangers about things like public space, politics (there happened to be a rally for Barack Obama just down the block), environment, or anything else that the park made them think of. One woman - a longtime resident of Minneapolis - told stories about how the city has changed in the past 20 years. It was fascinating! Park(ing) Daywas successful in that regard. I believe it made an impression, even upon those people who peered suspiciously from the skyway above.

See photos from Minneapolis interventions here.

Thanks to help from those connoisseurs of often obscure but always excellent wordsmithing at Rain Taxi Review of Books, we’re welcoming a quartet of flarf poets at the Walker this Thursday night. Flarf, as you may have heard, exploits search engines, chat rooms, and other Internet nooks and crannies to create poetry that can be gloriously tacky, strikingly modern, uncannily touching, or any other number of adverb/adjective combinations (do your own Internet search!).

The four poets include Gary Sullivan, who, according to this wikipedia entry probably coined the term “flarf.” Or at the very least he plays a key role in the flarf “origin myth” posted on boingboing, by having submitted this jubilant bit of badness to the vanity enterprise known as Poetry.com (FREE POETRY CONTEST - YOUR POEM COULD WIN $10,000) :

Yeah, mm-hmm, it’s true
big birds make
big doo! I got fire inside
my “huppa”-chimp(TM)
gonna be agreessive, greasy aw yeah god
wanna DOOT! DOOT!
Pffffffffffffffffffffffffft! hey!
oooh yeah baby gonna shake & bake then take
AWWWWWL your monee, honee (tee hee)
uggah duggah buggah biggah buggah muggah
hey! hey! you stoopid Mick! get
off the paddy field and git
me some chocolate Quik
put a Q-tip in it and stir it up sick
pocka-mocka-chocka-locka-DING DONG
fuck! shit! piss! oh it’s so sad that
syndrome what’s it called tourette’s
make me HAI-EE! shout out loud
Cuz I love thee. Thank you God, for listening!

Then there’s Sharon Mesmer, whose flarf mines rich veins of Internet obscenity; you can preview her performance via clips from Flarf Festival 06 on YouTube.

And here’s an excellent overview of the genre from Buffalo, NY’s Artvoice , which covers both flarf’s controversial standing in the broader context of poetry genres, as well as the work of both Sullivan and poet #3, Nada Gordon.

Rounding out the quartet is K. Silem Mohammed. According to a blogger on |||AS/IS²|||, which is devoted to “poetics as practised in the 21^st.C.,” he is the author of “possibly the first flarf masterpiece if I have any idea what flarf is about. It’s [Deer Head Nation] certainly a terrific book in any case.”

So hey! hey! you stoopid Mick! get off the paddy field and git here Quik!

Seeds of discontent: Minneapolis-based painter (and onetime Walker employee) Rich Barlow touches on a topic near and dear: political seed art — something I once dubbed “agit-crop” — at the Minnesota State Fair and how this year’s offerings, perhaps due to the Republican National Convention hosted just a few miles away, had a sharper sense of urgency.

Ominous: I missed the irony of this when it happened: As the U.S. was seeing history’s biggest bankruptcy, that of Lehman Brothers, last week, Damien Hirst’s The Golden Calf, a biblical symbol of false idolatry, sold for 10.3 million pounds at auction, a new record for Hirst.

KAWS queried: In a recent New York Times Q&A, Brooklyn artist KAWS reveals an affection for the music Bonnie Prince Billy — who’s coming to the Walker in March — and the late great H.C. Westerman.

Emin’s bronze sparrow flies off (again): Who keeps swiping the bronze sparrow atop Tracy Emin’s Liverpool sculpture The Roman Standard? The bird was taken and returned twice in three months.

File under: Flaccid vagaries disguised as intellectual engagement: Regina Hackett offers proof that artspeak is alive and well in a gallery press release that discusses how an artist’s “structural examination of totalities and their constituent fragments — particularly viewed as kindred — is amplified by the presence of several works with family roots.”

Best headline: “They gave me a Pritzker and all I got was this lousy toilet.” Via C-Monster, who keeps the theme going with links to bathroom graffiti, a musing on the theme of feces in art, and a link to a review in which Jerry Saltz calls Andres Serrano’s Shit “crap.”

Maybe you’re an artist, or maybe you just consider yourself artistically inclined - in either case, there’s a plum opportunity for you to show your stuff and support the arts at the same time. Vote Yes Minnesota is accepting submissions for one more week in its Poster Design Contest (and a Walker Art Center membership is part of the first prize).

Beyond the prizes, there’s the visibility factor: The posters will be used by Vote Yes Minnesota throughout the Cities and all over the state (and here at the Walker) to create awareness of the Clean Water, Land, and Legacy Amendment. The “legacy” portion of the amendment is a reference to Minnesota’s long and outstanding history of arts and culture - and the question of whether we, as citizens, want to extend that legacy for future generations.

In addition to supporting arts and culture, funds raised by a sales-tax increase of three-eighths of one percent will combat water pollution in the Land of 10,000 Lakes and protect and preserve forests, parks, trails, and game and wildlife habitat. In other words, Vote Yes Minnesota is a campaign to support and safeguard our culture and our environment - two key reasons for living here.

Vote Yes Minnesota has designated several themes for posters; you can pick one for your design and get the other guidelines here.

Finally, as noted, the deadline is next Friday, September 26, so you should really get on it.

And here is the wording that you’ll see on your ballot on November 2:

Shall the Minnesota Constitution be amended to dedicate funding to protect our drinking water sources; to protect, enhance, and restore our wetlands, prairies, forests, and fish, game, and wildlife habitat; to preserve our arts and cultural heritage; to support our parks and trails; and to protect, enhance, and restore our lakes, rivers, steams, and groundwater by increasing the sales and use tax rate beginning July 1, 2009, by three-eighths of one percent on taxable sales until the year 2034?

Hamilton’s Heinz: Ann Hamilton (whose long history with the Walker most recently includes her June 2008 collaboration with Meredith Monk) has won a prestigious Heinz Award. Created by Teresa Heinz to “celebrate the accomplishments and spirit of [her late husband, Sen. John Heinz] by recognizing the extraordinary achievements of individuals in the areas of greatest importance to him,” the prize awards a medallion and $250,000 in unrestricted funds. Via art:21.

Two to see: San Francisco’s Ratio 3 is now showing A Moment for Reflection: new work by Lydia Fong — an unannounced show by Barry McGee, through October 18. Rirkrit Tiravanija’s commissioned “Demonstration Drawings” — straightforward renderings of protest imagery from the International Herald Tribune, created by commissioned Thai artists — is on view at The Drawing Center through election day.

Kureishi on the battle for America: Pakistani English novelist/screenwriter Hanif Kureishi, subject of a 2001 Regis Dialogue and Retrospective, recently discussed sex, old age and politics with NPR. A Londoner visiting the US, he weighed in on the American elections: “I have to say that, having been in America for less than a week, it’s fascinating and absolutely riveting for someone like me to come and see what a struggle there is going on, really, for the soul of the United States. After all, the United States that I loved in the post-war period was really the United States of Jimi Hendrix and of Dylan and of Kerouc and of Ginsberg and so on. On the other hand, there’s a very small-town, kind of narrow-minded religious gun-toting America, too. And to come here and to see what a conflict there is now, represented between Obama and Sarah Palin — and to see how heavy and serious it is– is really fascinating for us outsiders to see.”

GOP togs: Thank you local blogger Karl Pearson-Cater for showing me these Vans-style McCain-Palin shoes — as well as these: 1, 2, 3 — a followup to his post on Obama sneakers.

Tyler Green points out a somewhat sad commentary on the state of things: A sculpture by street provocateur Mark Jenkins set off a suspicious packages alert. “The bomb squad promptly arrived, a poetic but misguided, out-of-proportion response to a non-existent threat,” Green writes. “Throughout the day DCist chronicled other polar bear sightings, including this one pushing a shopping cart with a globe in it around the National Mall. And later I found that Wooster Collective had posted a couple pictures on its site that seem to indicate that this whole ‘public art’ thing was nothing more than a tree-hugging-style environmentalist stunt.” Indeed, Greenpeace has revealed it that it teamed up with Jenkins to raise awareness of the “shared plight of polar bears and humans in the face of global warming.”

For more images, see the project’s Flickr pool. And, after the jump, a Washington Post photo of the bomb squad doing its thing. (click for more…)