A postscript of sorts to our earlier post about Elizabeth Peyton’s brand-new portrait of Michelle and Sasha Obama, which was added to Peyton’s survey at the New Museum after our soon-to-be brand-new president was elected (and will also travel with the exhibition, which arrives here in February). That portrait was commissioned by W magazine in conjunction with its November issue, which is dedicated to all things cool and cutting-edge in the art world and therefore features a profile of the Walker’s director Olga Viso.
The story, while brief (it’s also a profile of Madeleine Grynsztejn, director of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art), offers a solid overview of Viso’s background, and also allows her to air her views on multidisciplinary/interdisciplinary art, as well as the contemporary art market. The latter was described in the piece as “exploding,” though keep in mind, glossy magazines work on very long lead times …
Meanwhile, plenty of artists and others are commenting on what the financial meltdown portends not just for the art market, but for art itself. More on that soon.
Leave it to Paul Schmelzer, the former chief blogger on Off-Center, to find the fine-art connection in Minnesota’s infamous Senate ballot recount.
On his own blog, Eyeteeth, he’s mentioned how the “Lizard People” write-in vote on one ballot made waves last week, thanks mostly to MPR’s excellent “Challenged Ballots: You Be the Judge”, a feature that provided an all-too rare occasion for election transparency.
But more to the point at hand, in a story for the Minnesota Independent, where he works as managing editor, Schmelzer talked to photographer Paul Shambroom about capturing the mind-numbing process of (re-)counting thousands of ballots. Shambroom, whose Meetings series masterfully - even majestically - documented small-town civic proceedings across the USA, said that if he were to return to his days as a news photographer, he might try “try to embrace the boredom” of such a task.
That got me trying to think of works of art that might “try to embrace the boredom” of something. What about Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things? That ’s the “situation” by Tino Sehgal where a single person writhes slowly and soundlessly, kind of starfish-like, on the floor of an empty gallery; it played out last winter in the Walker’s Medtronic Gallery as part of Sehgal’s largest “show” to date in the first U.S.
Other examples of tedium-as-art? Send a comment below.
Calvin Tomkins has a lengthy piece on Elizabeth Peyton and her “pictures of people” (as she prefers to call her portraits), in the October 6th New Yorker. It’s pegged to a new survey of her work, Elizabeth Peyton: Live Forever, which opened yesterday at the New Museum in New York, and arrives here at the Walker on Valentine’s Day.
The article traces the evolution of Peyton’s style, from her early years of painting mostly from photographs (she used to have a day job as a photo researcher), to her recent focus on doing live sittings with people who are part of her life. Tomkins, who writes of sitting for Peyton along with his wife, Dodie Kazanjian, also delves to some degree into the personal life of Peyton, whose biography enters her work most markdly through her renderings of close friends and lovers.
The article is available only in print (and no one has put it elsewhere on the Web that I can find), but the New Yorker website features a web-only slide show of 9 images, ranging from one of her early works, a charcoal portrait of Napolean, to a recent likeness of Matthew Barney.
charcoal drawing by Elizabeth Peyton
Also: here’s a 10-minute audio interview on the New Museum’s website, in which Peyton talks with curator Laura Hoptman; and a few notes, courtesy of WWD, on the “fashion flock” who attended the Tuesday night preview in New York: you know you want to read it!
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.
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 21st.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!
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?
Last month Kristina Fong provided an entertaining tour of the latest works by Herzog & de Meuron, architects of the Walker’s 2005 expansion. Now we can add one more stop: On the heels of a spectacular performance by their “Bird’s Nest” stadium at the Beijing Olympics, the Swiss team has revealed the design for a new building in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood. Moving from a globally scaled gathering space to this project - the firm’s first residential tower - represents quite a shift in scale. But with its series of glass boxes cantilevered one over another, stacked to reach 57 stories, the building promises drama of a different order.
This former YBA, like Madonna, knows the value of regularly “shocking” the public. Last year, you will recall, he put up for sale a diamond-studded skull sculpture titled “For the Love of God,” with a $100 million price tag.
Now, in a protean burst of creativity (it helps when you have five factory/studios full of workers helping out), Hirst has amassed a body of 223 new pieces that go up for auction at Sotheby’s next week, on September 15 and 16. Regardless of how crass many people find the contemporary art market, it does still observe certain protocols - like having artists sell their new work through galleries. So to have one of the brashest of contemporary artists bypass his middleman dealers and go straight to market himself is not just shocking; it could, some fear, throw the entire market into turmoil.
Whatever one thinks of his art (Robert Hughes blasts Hirst once again in his BBC documentary on money and art, to be broadcast later this month), Hirst has quite a head for business - or so it would seem. Turns out that this shocking auction idea comes from one Frank Dunphy, a man who has served as Hirst’s business manager since the mid-90s, after Hirst won the Turner Prize. While Dunphy has been instrumental in amassing his client’s billion-dollar fortune, this could be the duo’s riskiest gambit yet.
And what became of that $100 million tchotchke, which is set to go on a world tour? Depending on what you read, the skull either remains unsold (but is not part of the auction), or Hirst himself is a part of the “investment group” that purchased it. Not to tout my own head for business, but it does seem rather oxymoronic to buy art from oneself …
New York is abuzz with the news of a successor to Met director Philippe de Montebello, but we are just as excited to announce the appointment of a new chief curator, Darsie Alexander. Joining us on November 10, Alexander comes to the Walker from the Baltimore Museum of Art, where she most recently served as senior curator and department head of Contemporary Art.
Like the Met, the BMA’s collection of 90,000 objects includes works from an array of periods and places, and her experience at that museum is part of what made Alexander the best candidate for the Walker’s chief curator job, which will have her overseeing programs in the visual arts, design, performance, film/video, and the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. As Walker director Olga Viso observed, “having successfully expanded the contemporary program within an encyclopedic institution, I know that within the Walker, which is clearly committed to the present, Darsie will thrive nurturing new art across the creative disciplines represented here.”
You can read more about Darsie Alexander in today’s Star Tribune, New York Times, or over at artforum.com; for this blog post, though, we thought we’d offer another view on her, via links to a couple of the many exhibitions she’s organized.
One that is particularly relevant to the Walker, given our interdisciplinary bent, is SlideShow, an exhibition from 2005 that blended aspects of photography, film, and installation art in exploring the history of projected slides in post-1965 art. There’s an audio tour of sorts as part of National Public Radio’s coverage; a review from the Washington Post, and a summary on the Baltimore Museum of Art’s website (scroll down and click on “more”).
Another of Alexander’s major exhibitions, Franz West, To Build a House You Start with the Roof: Work, 1972-2008, will open in a month at the Baltimore Museum of Art (and may travel to the Walker). With more than 120 works, it’s a major retrospective on this internationally renowned Austrian artist, who has had considerable influence on a younger generation of artists.
We’ll be posting more on Alexander once we’ve had a chance to meet her - we’re looking forward to watching as she builds on the innovations and experiments of the Walker’s previous chief curator, Philippe Vergne (who recently become director of Dia Art Foundation).
The Walker has been the site of some pretty swell shindigs over the years, and the Vanity Fair-Google party last Thursday has to rank right up there - after all, the hosts were two media powerhouses, old and new. (How did Vanity Fair get its name to come first?) Walker staff watched for two days as party planners decked our halls with white leather furniture, tons of pillows, elaborate A/V gear, and trompe l’oeil window clings in the Cargill Lounge.
Vanity Fair’s “Politics & Power” blog has a post on the party (RT Rybak stopped by to comment!), which leads with the alluring image above, from Andy King/WireImage.com. Seeing as how it is “non-partisan” and all, the blog also has a post on the bash that VF and Google threw for Democrats in Denver the previous week. Not having attended either, I’d still wager that one had the better setting, while the other had better guests - or at least more glamorous celebs.
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