Off Center

I really enjoyed Walker photographer Gene Pittman’s recent post about his portrait of skateboard videographer Ty Evans.  I immediately got excited when I saw that old school Powell Peralta ripper graphic, and I commented that the graphic was one of the images that got me interested in art.  As a fiery young dork imprisoned in small town USA, I was riveted by the danger and recklessness that the image represented.  As an added bonus, Ma absolutely HATED it.  It got me thinking about other images that inspired my creative path in life.  Here are some, in no particular order:

Oh no, what have I started?  I had better stop now.  What are your influential images?  Post them in reply.

Walker staff members Nancy Gross and Michele Tobin have been on the mother of all shopping trips in New York – including, first and foremost, several days at the New York International Gift Fair. With several thousand designers, artisans, craftspeople, etc. exhibiting their wares, this gargantuan buyers’ mart takes up not just the entire Javits Center, but also Piers 90, 92, & 94. Nancy just sent this update as they prepared to make their final rounds at the Fair before returning to Minneapolis tonight:

“In spite of the current state of they economy, and light attendance at the show by vendors and buyers, we have found some great new merchandise for spring and summer. Some highlights include Alessi’s adding to its already successful line of “Banana Brothers” products by Stephano Giovannoni. We loved the collection, including the placecards, corkscrews, canisters, toothpick holders, etc.

Monday evening, we were invited to a special dinner event hosted by Alessi. We enjoyed connecting with our colleagues from Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (Mark and Maxine) and our Alessi rep, Diane O’Donnel. And for the pasta course, the chef demonstrated Alessi’s ingenious “Pasta Pot”: a crock-pot-like appliance designed by chef Alain Ducasse and designer Patrick Jouin, which allows vegetables, pasta and sauce to cook together and go straight to your table.

One of our favorite companies, Kid-O toys (mentioned in our last blog post), introduced a new, well-designed wooden memory game and also an interactive depth perception toy. Look for them in the Walker Shop in June.

Some other fun things we found were a Ipod speaker with a Lego-like look, a roll of packing tape with Shepard Fairey-inspired graphics, real “Wee Plants” the size of a fingernail that grow in a glass vial, and specialized lenses for your camera phone that create special effects (wide angle, kaleidoscope,etc.).

A fresh color trend we found was citrine yellow combined with grey – a look that we’ve incorporated into our spring assortment of Chilewich placemats. Turns out that Michelle Obama’s Inauguration Day outfit was right on trend!”

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.

What happens when an art lover tiles his bathroom?

You may have seen work by graphic designer Christoph Niemann in Wired magazine, the New York Times, or the New Yorker (he’s done a number of covers for that last publication). Like most illustrators, he’s developed a range of styles, one of which involves rendering images in pixel form.

So in designing a bathroom for their home, Niemann and his wife decided it’d be fun to translate a famous piece of art into pixel form, then render that image using colored ceramic tiles. The hard part, as you’ll see from his post on the process, was deciding which artwork to use (after all, it’s not like they could just take down this “art” if they got tired of it).

Turns out they considered works by a host of artists – Richter, Indiana, Hockney, Rothko, and others – who’ve shown at the Walker, and/or who have works in our permanent collection. The winning work for their shower tiles was this Pop classic from the collection, on view in The Shape of Time through November 16.

For the tub, they translated a more esoteric work, Corner of Fat, by another Walker favorite, Joseph Beuys (his works are also on view in the Friedman Gallery through next summer). Niemann thought it was a “terrifyingly perfect” idea to do a bathroom-tile version of this work, which originally involved several pounds of butter; his wife’s reaction, he reports, was the quote used in this post’s headline. Luckily, she came around and agreed. Bathroom tiles are one of those crucial matrimonial decisions.

I’m pretty excited to announce that out of the plethora of answers to the game I posted, nobody got all the answers right. I’m happy to report that this black and white interior picture (fig. 1) stumped everybody. I’m lucky to have found it; there aren’t many pictures available online of the interior of Monsanto’s House of the Future. Opened in Disneyland’s Tomorrowland in 1957, it was demolished in 1967, when they decided, ten years later, the white, plastic, Modernist future previously depicted was just not tomorrow enough.

Earlier this year, a set of drawings used for the planning of the House of the Future showed up on Ebay(and sold for $8000.) All the twitter about this find on various blogs notes the strong Eames influence evident in the drawings. They are quite gorgeous, and just like many fashion sketches, look more stunning on paper than they did in practice (fig. 2.)

Saarinen was a long-time collaborator and lifetime friend with Charles Eames. In fact, Eames was inspired by Eliel Saarinen, Eero’s father, and was invited by him to attend Cranbrook to further study architecture. The group at Cranbrook at that time included Florence Knoll and Ralph Rapson (of Guthrie fame). For their first collaboration, Eames and the younger Saarinen designed a winning entry, a molded plywood chair (fig. 3) for an organic design competition organized by the Museum of Modern Art in 1940. The influence of the basic industrial structure of this chair’s design can be seen in the rest of both the designers’ careers.

Saarinen created a range of beautiful furniture with Florence Knoll. They designed such staples as the Tulip Chair and the Womb Chair, which will look familiar to millions and millions of people because of their inclusion in the best-selling PC game of all time: The Sims, a human-life simulation game. Stay with me, here–I can’t remember exactly how and when I became familiar with the Eames furniture by name; it might have been from visiting various museums as a child, or maybe some art history 101, but I do know that to millions of people who have never heard the names Saarinen, Knoll, or Eames, this modernist furniture is going to look very familiar. There is no doubt that IKEA has been evoking 40s and 50s furniture design in their extremely streamlined and industrial giant European operations, and that might give people a point of entry, but I swear I’ve furnished some of my Sims’ houses with a Knoll Saarinen Coffee Table, Tulip Chairs, and Stools multiple times (fig. 4.) Of course, these items aren’t named like so, but they are essentially identical. I don’t own the game anymore because my computer is too old, and the Walker decided not to buy a new graphics card for me even though it’s for work-related purposes so I don’t have any images of my perfect modernist house, but I sure wish I did.

Notably, however, people have taken it upon themselves to teach the Sims-playing world about the history of furniture design. There are millions of downloads available online for people who create their own furniture for the Sims, to be imported into the game and played with. Shino & KCR, a featured ‘artist’ at one of the biggest download sites, The Sims Resource, has a whole line of Eames inspired furniture (fig. 5). The Sims, already one of the biggest blurs between reality and technology, has recently engineered deals with H&M and more recntly, IKEA, to bring clothes that are available in real life and furniture that is available to purchase for your own home, into the game so you can purchase them for your own home. But on the computer.

And, with the steep dollar prices that accompany any Saarinen-designed furniture, a tulip chair in The Sims will only cost you a couple hundred Simoleons.

Extra, extra: This amazing featurette on Monsanto’s House of the Future. Part 1 and Part 2.

Answers: A, D, E, G, and H are Disneyland. B, C, F, I, J are Saarinen.

Here’s a fun game I came up with as an introduction to the upcoming Eero Saarinen exhibition.

To play:

Guess if each image shows a) something designed by Saarinen or b) something in Disneyland’s Tomorrowland.

A little bit of introductory information:

Eero Saarinen, known as a key modernist designer and architect in the 20th century. He often collaborated with Charles Eames and famously used sweeping architectural arches and curves.

Disneyland opened in 1955 and Tomorrowland was given a total makeover in 1967. The new Tomorrowland famously used sweeping architectural arches and curves to reflect the modernist view of the future.

Leave your guesses in the comment section!

a.

b. (click for more…)

Two weeks after the foofarah (I can now cross that word off my “to use” list) stirred by The New Yorker’s Barack Obama cover, bloggers are now blogoplectic over a poster advertising Obama’s speech tonight in Berlin. One conservative gasket-blower has compared it to a poster of Adolph Hitler, though a blogger at Mother Jones is doing his part to balance the hyperbole, saying the poster “may be the finest piece of contemporary mainstream political art I’ve ever seen.” Read into it what you will — and many are reading into it — at least the Obama poster, unlike this one for John McCain, doesn’t communicate he’s a candidate to become God.

Progressive political candidates should reach out more to the deep pool of world-class artists already down, at least in spirit, with the cause. It would probably take one phone call to get Eddie Vedder to write an entire album of tunes implicitly, if not explicitly, pointing the way to Obama. One artist didn’t wait for the phone to ring. Celebrated street artist Shepard Fairey, known chiefly for his Obey Giant guerilla public plastering efforts, approached the Obama campaign earlier this year about “appealing to a younger, apathetic audience” through a new series of posters. Fairey got the go-ahead. Here’s a point-by-point detail about what he went for in his design.

Still, as with the Berlin poster, some saw something more insidious. Meghan Daum of the Los Angeles Times opined: “There’s an unequivocal sense of idol worship about the image, a half-artsy, half-creepy genuflection that suggests the subject is (a) a Third World dictator whose rule is enmeshed in a seductive cult of personality; (b) a controversial American figure who’s been assassinated; or (c) one of those people from a Warhol silkscreen that you don’t recognize but assume to be important in an abstruse way.”

For his part, Obama seemed pleased. In a personal letter to Fairey, Obama wrote: “I would like to thank you for using your talent in support of my campaign. The political messages involved in your work have encouraged Americans to believe they can help change the status quo. Your images have a profound effect on people, whether seen in a gallery or on a stop sign.“

The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, at the Smithsonian, is among winners of the 12th annual Webby Awards — the Internet’s version of the Oscars — as Best Cultural Institution for its Web site for Design for the Other 90%. The exhibition opens May 24 in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. As it happens, Smithsonian Education was nominated in the same category, earning the People’s Choice award there. The National Gallery of Art earned nominations in two categories (Art and Podcasts).

The Museum of Modern Art won a Webby in the Art category for its illuminating site detailing Richard Serra’s 2007 retrospective. Throughout, you’ll find captivating video, vivid photography and revealing interviews with Serra, who opens his intensive process and gives a detailed tour of his work on video.

No other American arts institution earned a nomination in the Art and Best Cultural Institution categories.

It seems that each one of my posts here leads to the other. I spent the last bigger post yearning about ‘cool’ artists posses, or lack thereof, and now the Walker is inviting two really COOL artists, Chris Johanson and Jo Jackson, to speak on Thursday night, and screening the doc Beautiful Losers. In addition to that, Johanson & Jackson have an opening at the Art of This gallery on Saturday. COOL. WACTAC is cooler than cool. In the last couple years they have brought the coolest of the West Coast kids. First Ed Templeton, then the guys from Giant Robot, now Johanson & Jackson. I don’t know if they can get any cooler. That will also be the last time I use ‘cool’ in this entry.

After flipping through Johanson’s book, Please Listen I Have Something To Tell You About Whatis (Witt noted our Arty Pants installation kind of resembled Johanson’s own installations and suburban paintings), I was excited about him visiting. Further research into Johanson & Jackson revealed the phenomena of the “Mission School” movement that really gained steam in San Francisco a few years ago.

A little more research into these artists: Glen Helfand – The Mission school, Leah Modigliani – Marketing the Mission.

It is difficult, as is evidenced in both articles, to market these artists. Not conventionally avant-garde, their involvement with the graffiti community and familiarity with cul-de-sacs, as well as being on the “wrong coast,” lends an easy title: outsider art. But, Modigliani argues, “the very idea of an outsider is problematic and naively nostalgic – it assumes you are outside of something, presumably the artworld.” Well you might say they are outside the art world because they are not in New York. But there is no lack of an art community in California – by marketing a group who has gained popularity outside of the Bay Area as “outsider art,” it tells the rest of the world that the art community in California is just that – outsiders. This is not a good way to promote these Mission School artists and any future artists wishing to gain relevance in the rest of the country.

This is hard. We know what, in the past, has happened to artists who came from the “streets” into the gallery. I’m talking about Basquiat, Keith Haring, and most recently, that former trouble-maker Banksy who now is selling his stencil art for millions (and I love Banksy, I do). We’ve also all seen Style Wars (at least I have about five times), that documentary about the origins of hip hop, featuring graffiti artists who, in the early 1980’s, riding on the coattails of Basquiat, got a few gallery shows and then were abruptly tossed aside, only to reappear in exhibitions with the word ‘graffiti’ in them. In an episode of Art21, Barry McGee says: “Every time I do a gallery piece, I have to put 110 percent more outdoors, to keep the street cred. It’s the audience I’m most concerned with.”

Modigliani argues that most of the artists in this Mission School movement – a short list is Johanson & Jackson, Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, Claire Rojas – were educated in private art schools. In his opening essay, Aaron Rose, curator and director of “Beautiful Losers,” the exhibition and film of the same name, states, “All the artists included in Beautiful Losers have at some point broken the law in order to express themselves. No other past group of artists can boast this. That is not to say, of course, that there haven’t been situations in the past where artists have brushed with the law, but never has it been such an intrinsic element of their culture.” Is this statement, then quick clarification, what should bring them together?I prefer to associate them with this quote from Jack Hanley in Helfand’s article: “So many of the artists play music, it’s truly a community, and they see each other at more than just openings.”

Like I said, this is a really difficult subject, because I don’t think this roundabout logic and arguing should take anything away from the artists. Let’s go back to this group of West Coast artists – their work is fun, approachable, and aesthetically inviting. Their approach is organic, their influences recognizable, and they seem to have the ability to acknowledge the dilemma of being marketed as outsider graffiti artists or acknowledge it and move on. They’ve learned from the 80s. It is this ability that moves a group of artists, or anyone, really, from being a target for negativity and criticism, to that next level of “cool.” That’s why I love the artists of the Ferus Gallery so much. They are not necessarily making fun of themselves, because that can get tiresome too, but acknowledging something outside of themselves, showing that they are aware and intelligently incorporating these things.

See -“Drumming Circle,” 2003, by Chris Johanson (actually, I just found out this piece really is about the ‘rhythm of life’) and Barry McGee and Josh Lazcano’s animatronic taggers.

THAT is what makes them so cool. And, I suppose, the fact that their art is really, really COOL.

*Images from Deitch Projects, Stretcher, Banksy’s website.

** Also the title is a reference to Grease and not much else.

There are a couple notable distinctions to the May/June issue of Walker magazine. The first is the cover — or, more accurately, two covers. Open the front, which bows to the 20th anniversary of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, and you’ll find a second cover, featuring an untitled photo from Richard Prince’s cowboy series — a nod to the Walker’s Prince exhibition. Why two covers? The short of it: Twice the happiness. The medium of it: We recognize two programs worthy of the cover’s spotlight.

By the way, in house, we don’t call the first cover a cover (not if you want to preserve your kneecaps). It’s a wrap — the first in the short history of the magazine in its current format. It’s printed on rough paper stock and, if one were so inclined, easily pulled away from the glossy magazine proper. Hypothetically, one could carefully pull the wrap away and present the May/June issue with a Prince cover. Nobody would be the wiser (indeed, the issue date and magazine logo are reserved for the inner cover).

Who would do such a thing? And why? You could pin the entire summer slate of Garden-related events (they appear on the back of the wrap) on your refrigerator or on your bedroom wall, alongside your black-light posters. Perhaps you’d like a Prince keepsake on the cheap. The Walker doesn’t recommend engineering this cover separation at home — or at your own museum — nor is the Walker responsible for any ensuing injury.

The second distinction is the illustration adorning the wrap. Again, this is new to the magazine, which traditionally devotes the cover to artwork drawn from a current/upcoming exhibition or publicity still from a performance group or film. This tableau is drenched in PMS 802 — the official color of the summer-long Garden anniversary celebration. Dare to imagine your summer day in the sculpture garden bathed in day-glo green.