Off Center

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…)

On Friday it’s all hail the impromptu green space, and strike a (temporary, verdant) blow against the hegemony of the automobile! September 19 is Park(ing) Day 2008, a day urban interventionists convert parking stalls into parks, complete with rolled-out sod, lawn chairs and potted foliage. The brainchild of multidisciplinary arts collective REBAR and The Trust for Public Land, Park(ing) Day actions are happening all over the country, including here in the Twin Cities.

I got in touch with Shanai Matteson, who’s organizing the event locally. She says she’s asked people to look for (or ask the city to put hoods on meters, for a fee) parking spaces in downtown Minneapolis. She’ll be greening up a pavement swath on Nicollet Mall and another one outside the Community Design Group on 3rd Avenue. While it all sounds so guerrilla, each team will be responsible for plugging the meters the entire time they’re there. For maximum exposure of the parking/parks idea, most participants are keeping their spots at least through the lunch hour.

Check back here later, or take a look at the project’s Flickr pool to see how it went. Or, if you’re taking part, don’t miss the post park(ing) happy hour with our friends from Solutions Twin Cities.

Pictured: Park(ing) Day 2006 in Minneapolis, by Landform Minneapolis.

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 …

Creative climate: Culture Bully is running an interview with M.anifest, the Twin Cities-based Ghanaian emcee who performed at this year’s Music & Movies series. Here’s his reply when asked how Minnesota’s climate — culturally and otherwise — affects his work: “Music has a lot to do with vibes and energies – the unseen. The cold affects my social movements and my movements at different moments inform what I write. I tend to be more introspective and nostalgic in the winter. I have way more references/punchlines about the weather than I ever expected – it’s probably part of my adjustment process; talking about it that is.”

Can you say that in a dance review? In an article about last night’s dress rehearsal of the Walker-cosponsored performance Ocean by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, journalist Jeff Severns Guntzel colorfully sets the scene for a modern dance work performed in a granite quarry. Instructed not to review the performance, he says only, “Dance transfixed and reigned in the quarry last night until it didn’t.” (He’s attending Saturday night and will hopefully write up a review.) His essay may offer a historic first — the use of the terms “butt crack” and “thong” in a piece on modern dance.

Reflecting on 9/11: Dwell magazine’s blog commemorates today’s 9/11 anniversary with a look at the memorial and museum now in construction at Ground Zero. Reflecting Absence, by architect Michael Arad and landscape architect Peter Walker, is “a sobering reflection for sure: Two massive square-shaped pools are set within the footprints of the Twin Towers, into which the largest man-made waterfalls in the country will cascade with meditation-inducing power.” Here’s a video of the project, which should be completed by the tenth anniversary of the attacks.

A YouTube Pulitzer? YouTube and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting are teaming up to award $10,000 to a videomaker covering under-reported stories of global importance. Begun Sept. 8, the contest will give its winner funds for travel, production aid from the Pulitzer Center, high-end equipment and distribution on YouTube.

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.

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.

They’re still cleaning up in Beijing, but a couple of days ago British officials announced the initial Olympics-related spectacle for their 2012 games in London: a $75 million, pan-British arts and culture festival to kick off on September 26 and continue for almost four years. Key components of the Cultural Olympiad include a World Shakespeare Festival and a dozen “cutting-edge” art commissions to be selected from proposals made this fall.

Much has been made of the Brits’ ambivalence about hosting the Olympics, and at least one blogger seems only more bitter about this tacked-on arts extravaganza. “And here is London 2012 roping [the arts] into the patriotic bonanza, coarsening, travestying and betraying things that really matter,” writes Jonathan Jones, the Guardian’s arts writer.

One Cultural Olympiad launch event especially rankles him. Sebastian Coe, the former politician and chair of the London 2012 Organizing Committee, will take part in Work No 850 at the Tate Britain. This “sculpture” by Turner Prize winner Martin Creed involves runners sprinting, in four-hour shifts, through an 86-meter-long gallery devoted to neoclassical sculpture. (Coe won track and field gold medals in the 1980 and 1984 Olympics.) Maybe it’s because Jones is a juror for the 2009 Turner Prize?

I can appreciate his crankiness, but it is quite something for a politician (and a conservative at that) to sprint repeatedly through a museum as part of an artwork. Imagine, say, John McCain arriving at the Walker to sing, slow-dance, or speechify as part of Tino Sehgal’s exhibition earlier this year.

Alas, McCain did not visit the Walker to see or be art. But our Twin Cities did just witness frenzy of cultural activity related to a large (if not quite Olympian) spectacle in St. Paul; in fact, even though the RNC circus has left town, many related projects and events continue at least through Election Day:

– I Approve This Message films (scroll down to see submissions)

– an exhibition of portraits of People Who Speak the Truth, opening September 18

–a group show at Form+Content through October 4

– clever, witty, and/or scathing yard signs designed by your fellow citizens, which you can order or print for yourself.

(a full list is at the UnConvention.com)

The thing is, politicians love the arts insofar as they’re considered an economic booster. How many mayors and governors have read (or been briefed on) Richard Florida’s The Rise of Creative Class? So maybe Jones is defending the arts as valid in and of themselves, not needing to be tied to a sports spectacular four years hence. He might believe that the arts, rather than bringing new insights to mass spectacles, simply get overwhelmed by the main attraction and become a sideshow. But even if that’s the case, is it necessarily a bad thing?

(Speaking of art as sideshow, here’s a recent, highly controversial example.)