Visual Arts

by Betsy Carpenter, Doryun Chong, Peter Eleey, Siri Engberg, and Yasmil Raymond, visual arts curators

Philippe Vergne is a brilliant curator and that rare combination of sparkling intellect, humor, and grace. He has an infectious love of art and an incredible, innate gift for working with artists--understanding them, connecting with their creative process, and communicating that to audiences in fresh, sensitive, and unexpected ways. He absolutely believes that a contemporary art center can and must keep the artist at the core of its thinking, a vision that has gone far in shaping our department, our exhibitions, our collection, our institution, and has had significant impact on artists themselves. He also fiercely believes that a museum is a place where artists and their audiences share, around works of art, their uncertainties and dreams and has strove to make and protect an environment at the Walker where, on scales large and small, everyone could experiment.

Philippe excels at the basic, but difficult, art of installation, and organized some of the most essential Walker exhibitions of the last decade. The highlights include: Let’s Entertain: Life’s Guilty Pleasures (2000), How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age (2003), Shadowlands: An Exhibition as a Film (2005), House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective (2005), Cameron Jamie (2006), and Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love (2007). If there is a trademark to his exhibitions, it is that they consistently invite us to see the familiar in a new light, and make the unknown positively beguiling. In his tenure here, he has been able to keep sight of both the Walker’s edge and its rich history; its reputation as a veritable petri dish for young artists, filmmakers, and performers; and its extraordinary collection, which has at its core a mandate to form relationships with artists for life. He immeasurably enriched the Walker's collection by bringing important young and emerging as well as established and historical artists' works, from around the world.

His aspirations, however, were always broader than whatever single project or acquisition he worked on, because they involved those of the larger institution. The ambitions of his staff became his own. He embodied so many aspects of the work we do, and the values that underscore that work. In the trust he bestowed upon his colleagues, the respect he accords his audiences, the faith he places in artists, and the vigor of his curiosity, he set a simple and powerful example. All of this he did with a remarkable degree of modesty, an incisive wit, and a spirit of generosity.

Philippe has been the perfect mentor, colleague, and friend for all of us over the past years. He encouraged us to take greater and greater creative risks and keep "gambling" to build upon the Walker's legacy of risk-taking and experimentation. At the same time, we have relished his ingenious and adventurous mind, hilariously quirky and unashamedly egalitarian view of the world. It is obvious that we are "not dancing" (as he often says) about his departure, nor can we express our appreciation by making him a knight. The French government already did so in 2004 when it honored him with the medal of the Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. What he will forever have from us is our respect, admiration, gratitude, and love.

Photo: Philippe Vergne with Judy Dayton, long-time Walker supporter

As Minneapolis inaugurates the third largest annual Pride Festival in the country this weekend, New York based artist Sharon Hayes is visiting the Twin Cities to launch Revolutionary Love 2: I Am Your Best Fantasy, a public performance that will involve 70-100 local participants coming together to publicly demonstrate the relationship between love and politics during the 2008 Republican National Convention (September 1-4).

In the spirit of Stonewall-era gay liberation movements, Hayes plans to intervene at both the Democratic National Convention in Denver, CO, and the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis, MN by instigating readings of texts that address the relationship between political and personal desire, and queer issues, by 75 to 100 people in unison. Blending the techniques of performance art and political rallies, her work addresses the complex historic construction of love and politics.

This weekend and throughout the summer Hayes will be recruiting volunteers to take part in the performance this September. Please tell your friends, relatives, gaybours, and anyone this sounds right for - it's an ambitious project and we need a lot of people to realize it. On one day during the Convention (September 1-4), approximately 70-100 people will speak a text about love, politics, gay power, and gay liberation, written by Hayes for the occasion. We are looking for volunteer performers to recite (as a chorus) a 10-15 minute text, repeated multiple times over a period of approximately two hours. The performance will take place in a public space in proximity to the Convention (Creative Time will send you more details once the site is confirmed).

To be part of the project you need to submit the following information by email to rnc@creativetime.org:
1. Contact information: Phone (home/cell) & e-mail address
2. Do you have any additional resources that you would like to bring to the project?
3. Are you affiliated with any organizations that would be interested in spreading the word?
4. Do you have any technical or stage management skills?

As a participating performer, we are asking that you:

1. Attend one rehearsal to practice delivering the spoken text with other performers, to be held approximately 3-4 days before the performance and directed by Hayes. (Note: you will be given a choice of multiple rehearsal dates/times, and asked to attend the one that best fits your schedule.
2. Memorize the 10-15 minute text in advance of the first rehearsal.
3. Agree to be recorded and depicted in video, sound, and photographic documentation of the project (you will be asked to sign an image release form).

Sharon Hayes has produced challenging work in performance, video, and installation for over a decade. Staging protests, delivering speeches, and organizing demonstrations, she creates interventions that highlight the friction between collective activities and personal actions. Employing the artistic and academic methodologies of theater, film, anthropology, linguistics, and journalism, Hayes has made work that engages history, politics, and public space. She was an artist in PERFORMA05 and her work has been shown at the New Museum, P.S. 1/MoMA, Art In General, Artists Space, Parlour Projects, Andrew Kreps Gallery, Dance Theater Workshop, Performance Space 122, the Joseph Papp Public Theater, and the WOW Café in NYC. In addition she has shown at the Tate Modern in London, Museum Moderner Kunst and the Generali Foundation in Vienna, at many other national and international exhibition spaces, as well as in 45 lesbian living rooms across the United States. Her collaborative piece, 9 Scripts from a Nation at War, showed in Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany this past June.
For more information on Hayes' work, please visit www.shaze.info.

More information on Hayes' project and Democracy in America is available at www.creativetime.org/rnc .

Revolutionary Love 2: I Am Your Best Fantasy is the second in a two-part project by Hayes taking place at both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. The first performance, which will take place at the DNC, is titled Revolutionary Love 1: I Am Your Worst Fear.

Revolutionary Love 2 is presented by Creative Time with the Walker Art Center and the UnConvention as part of Creative Time's 2008 national public art initiative Democracy in America: The National Campaign.

Questions?
Please contact rnc@creativetime.org or 212.206.6674 x214

In the dawn of the Walker blogs, I had the privilege of writing the first post on the Visual Arts site. Some of you, our faithful readers, may remember my little adventure in the Mojave Desert in search of a used airplane part. You may also remember the very slow march of the elephant sculpture down the Hennepin Avenue through the Walker’s main entrance, down the sloping Hennepin Lounge, then up the stairs into Gallery 4. Both of these rather unusual manoeuvres were accomplished in preparation for the 2005 exhibition House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective, which the Walker chief curator/deputy director Philippe Vergne and I organized. In the last two years since the end of its run in January 2006, I’ve been often approached by our local audiences, who told me that it was one of their favorite exhibitions at the Walker (despite the fact that they knew nothing about the Chinese-born, Paris-based artist).

You may be surprised to learn that the exhibition is still on view. The airplane cockpit, the elephant, and other works have traveled to three subsequent venues, rather slowly but surefootedly, across the North American continent then crossed the Pacific Ocean: first, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) in North Adams, then the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC, and finally the spanking new Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, opening on March 22, 2008. Yes, that’s right–Beijing, China. Founded by Guy & Miriam Ullens, dedicated Belgian collectors of Chinese contemporary art who long dreamed of bringing their collection to the country of its origin, the Center is an ambitious institution that strives to bring international art to the heart of the emerging superpower and also to give in-depth treatment to the important contribution Chinese artists have made to global art in the last three decades or so. The center opened its doors in last November, and House of Oracles is only the second exhibition. The magnificent exhibition space was remodeled from a former ceramics factory in an East German-built industrial complex known as 798, now also known as the Dashanzi Art District.

My first visit to 798 was a little more than two years ago, in November 2005. The district had been in existence for a couple of years by then, and the future Ullens Center was a cavernous, evacuated space, with a soaring (I’m guessing, about 50-60 feet-high) ceiling and a now defunct industrial kiln/chimney. The on-site engineer explained to me how the space will be remodeled–a big exhibition hall here, a smaller gallery there, the office up there, etc.–which I, while nodding politely and sympathetically, could not really visualize. Many things had happened between the 2005 visit and when I attended the opening of the Center in November 2007. Certain things were still the same, or more and more of the same–for instance, the acrid yet strangely fragrant, hallucinogenic smell of burning coals and leaded gas that hover over the sprawling metropolis. And the proud capital city of People’s Republic of China keeps on expanding in a clearly measurable way but with a mind-blowing velocity. Beijing is one of the most centralized and organized cities I know of (I realize that that sounds totally paradoxical), with the Forbidden City and the Tian’anmen Square at the dead center and concentric circles of “ring roads” rippling out into yesterday’s suburbs and surrounding villages and quickly turning them into today’s peripheral hubs. In late 2005, the area around 798, which is located on the northeastern corner of the city between the Fourth and the Fifth ring roads, still felt a bit sparse. In late 2007, it was as busy as any other business districts far closer to the city center. Trying to recall what things were like a month ago in China these days is a completely futile exercise. I digress.

Late night on March 17, I arrived again in Beijing after a 15-hour-long flight from Minneapolis via Tokyo. The next morning, I walked from my hotel to the Ullens Center. All looked very familiar since I had been there only four months prior. Except that a giant sand storm engulfed the city--something that happens in the Northern part of China as winter changes into spring. Brutal. At the Center, the installation of "House of Oracles" had been going on for almost two weeks, with the artist and two of our veteran exhibition technicians, Phil Docken and Bob Brown. I have to admit that I was a little worried when I first saw the Ullens' spectacular main gallery, which had been left more or less intact from the original structure, because a lot of space with a high ceiling isn't necessarily a good thing for showing art. That is, even when art is the size of an airplane. It was rather ironic that even Huang's "Bat Project 4"--the sculpture that actually incorporates the used airplane cockpit we found in Northern California--seemed dwarfed by the hangar-like space. Yes, their gallery is that big. Nonetheless, Huang is a master at dealing with spaces (as anyone who saw the exhibition at the Walker or at any other subsequent venues would know). He designed a couple of enclosed rooms inside the mammoth hall, and I was immediately struck by the incredible sightlines he was ingeniously creating with various combinations of works in the exhibition.

Thus I was reminded of how fortunate and privileged I was to be part of the incredible journey of this project. I got to see the enormous "Bank of Sand, Sand of Bank"–a scaled replica of the 1920s’ colonial Beaux Arts-style building in Shanghai made out of a mixture of sand and cement–going up four times, and slowly crumbling each time, as a regenerative metaphor of the enduring legacy of colonialism. In Beijing, thanks to the ample space we had, we were finally able to erect this 20-ton work completely in the round (in the three previous versions, the backside had to be against an existing wall of the building). I got to see “Python,” a more than 50 feet-long wood skeleton of a cosmic serpent, rising and falling, dancing up and down in four different spaces. And I got to see four reincarnations of “Theater of the World,” a gladiatorial arena filled with insects and reptiles left to their own devices that sparked at-times heated exchanges between our blog readers (the piece was shut down by the British Columbia SPCA on the day of the exhibition’s opening in Vancouver).

The opening of this Beijing presentation, I can say, was a truly historic occasion, because this was not only the first Walker-organized exhibition to go to China (in fact, Asia), but also the first full-scale retrospective exhibition of a Chinese artist to take place in China. Thanks to the incredible commitment on the part of the Ullens, the comprehensive monograph the Walker published to accompany the exhibition was translated in full into Chinese--another first for us. I don't want to sound too self-congratulatory here, but this exhibition and tour has been a truly special event of which Philippe and I couldn't be more proud.

At the same time, I feel a little bit sad. Perhaps it's only natural. Having witnessed the exhibition's evolution over more than four years, I was seeing its final arrival in perhaps where it all started and where it always meant to come back to. And I was able to this in the company of a remarkable artist–the most generous and wise soul I know of. (Most Chinese audiences who came to the exhibition's opening called him "Huang Laoshi," i.e., "Master Huang.") But you can't have too much of a good thing. All good things must come to an end. So I bid you farewell, Master Huang.

À bientôt.
Zai jian!

Last week I met someone who, upon learning I’m a curator, asked me what I do at work every day--a reasonable question. Right now, I'm currently finishing up installing the exhibition Trisha Brown: So That the Audience Does Not Know Whether I Have Stopped Dancing with our esteemed crew. (The show opens Thursday night with a live performance drawing by the artist: http://calendar.walkerart.org/event.wac?id=4323)

Putting a show together is what I might describe as the spatial voodoo part of what we do. It can often feel like trying to decorate a house while you are still designing it, or building a musical instrument that you can't try to get a sound out of until all the pieces have been assembled. It becomes easy to obsess over the tiniest details. This is because--as one of my colleagues put it--there are an infinite number of choices you can make, and at the same time, really only a few right ones.

The most difficult section of the show to hang has proven to be a large wall of archival posters from Trisha's performances over the past three decades, which is the first thing visitors will see when they walk into the gallery. In order to visualize it, we marked off the wall dimensions on the floor, and figured out the configuration within that area. Periodically, I went up in a small lift to get a better view down onto the posters. In the course of about 24 hours, I probably tried three or four different approaches, and each one felt almost right to me. But the best solution eventually made itself clear.

As curators we often have ideas about how to install an artist's work (whether by itself or with other things) to emphasize different aspects of it, or to best express certain ideas. But when it's up against the wall, the art tends to tell us what it wants to do, refining its own image in our minds. The voodoo element of our jobs, I suppose, is everything up until that moment.

**

Installation photos by Gene Pittman

British artist Angus Fairhurst committed suicide on Saturday, March 29, 2008. He was 41 years old. This tragedy is a tremendous loss to the art world, and of course to those who knew him. As one of the “Young British Artists” who brought international attention and excitement to a much quieter London art scene in the early 1990s, Fairhurst was perhaps not as well known as his contemporary Damien Hirst. But Fairhurst’s extraordinarily smart, inventive and often provocative works spoke with a louder voice than his own.

In the obituary published in the New York Times today, Hirst called Fairhurst a great artist and friend: “He shone like the moon and as an artist he had just the right amount of slightly round the bend. I loved him.”

What is “slightly round the bend” about his work is what makes it so great–a puckish dark humor situates it on the line between comedic good fun and unapologetic existentialism.

The Walker first exhibited Fairhurst’s work in “Brilliant!” New Art From London in 1995, and owns several of his works including The Birth of Consistency (2004), a bronze and stainless steel sculptural rendering of a gorilla gazing narcissistically into a mirror, currently on view in the Fiterman Garden Gallery just up the stairs from the Levitt Hennepin Lobby.

Nobody takes a good idea and makes it his own like Richard Prince, who has carved his place in contemporary art by recycling, reflecting, and reframing the imagery of others. His unique art of appropriation–from biker culture to car culture, comedians to cowboys, pinups to pulp fiction–redefined the creative process for a generation of artists.

Organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Richard Prince: Spiritual America opens next week in galleries 4, 5, and 6. Tickets for the After Hours preview party on Friday, March 21 are still available.

Installation photo by Cameron Wittig

Can writing do justice to the art of Tino Sehgal, or should we only make utterances? How do we preserve Sehgal's work, or is there nothing to preserve — only an endless series of originals? Even after three months, there are still so many questions: Is this good? New? Propaganda?

In 1956, the Situationist Guy Debord called out for an "educative propaganda," on account of "the emergence of productive forces that necessitate other production relations and a new practice of life….that must encompass all the perpetually interacting aspects of social reality." Who knew such serious education could be so funny? So tongue-in-cheek? Though, physical comedy has always been a social leveler.

And it takes up space, which makes it sculptural, where "we mold and shape the world in which we live" (Joseph Beuys). Not unlike planting thousands of trees or moving a mountain of sand. Only without the trees and without the mountain of sand.

Yet, we are not deserted. All is not lost. Between production and de-production, between absence and presence, between object and viewer, between you and me, an endless reverberation. A (sub)liminal sublime.

The way you keep singing the song you woke up with in your head. The way each movement can be broken down and put back together. The way you know what this is before I even have to tell you. It's not a headline but a broadcast--a conditioned choreography in which the audience is on/in demand.

Your attention need not be long, but should you accept the invitation — should you give of yourself the time and place — you will see this is not a "dance problem," per se, like a man bouncing in the corner. It isn't even about the not-so-hidden camera rolling on the floor. No, it has to do with something more sustaining.

In a 2001 interview, the artist Mel Chin described his remediation project Revival Field (1991-94)--a Superfund site-specific work that took place at Pig's Eye Landfill on the outskirts of St. Paul, Minnesota--as "driven by some kind of poetry. That poetry of plants having the capacity to transform a system...[yet it] was also driven by pragmatism. I think you have to have both."

What is the poetry of Tino Sehgal? What is the pragmatism? The answers are in the questions, I think, but they are also between the lines. And what we will be left with, what will remain, will soon blend into the landscape and be invisible, but still here.

Images:

Joseph Beuys, La rivoluzione siamo Noi, 1972, phototype on polyester ink, ink stamp; edition 7/180. Published by Modern Art Agency, Naples, and Edition Tangente, Heidelberg. Alfred and Marie Greisinger Collection, Walker Art Center, T.B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1992

Francis Alÿs, selection from Cuando la fe mueve montañas (When Faith Moves Mountains), 2002-2003, acrylic, graphite, masking tape on vellum. Collection Walker Art Center, T.B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2004

Bruce Nauman, Bouncing In The Corner, 1968, Video. Collection Walker Art Center, T.B. Wlaker Acquisition Fund, 2002

Dan Graham, Roll, Filming Process, 1970, Super-8. Courtesy of Andre Goeminnie Collection, Nazareth, Belgium

Mel Chin, Revival Field, 1991-1994, Pig’s Eye Landfill, St. Paul, Minnesota. Courtesy greenmuseum.org

Thirty years ago I was in the painting studio at school, an undergraduate art student, working away along with my fellow art students, while our teacher D.J. Hall walked through the studio and read from Tom Wolfe's slim volume The Painted Word. D.J. made photorealist paintings (I especially liked her painting Thanks for the Memories) and in our class she had us try several different painting styles. In the strictest sense, the objective of the photorealist style was to make a painting that looked as much as possible like a photograph. It was considered a kind of "hyper-realism" given the shared belief that photographs were the ultimate expression of realism.

This always seemed a little strange to me. I always thought of photographs as fictions, like all other ways of making images and telling stories. Some people started making paintings that looked like "distorted" photographs and that seemed very interesting - to make a very carefully rendered painting of a distorted image produced by a camera. It called into question the reliability of realism. Were such paintings less realistic? But how could that be if they were faithful copies of the photograph?

The Painted Word was a slightly hysterical attack on modern art in general and Conceptual art in particular. It was strange because Wolfe's earlier book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a novel about San Francisco in the 1960s and the Merry Pranksters - ("are you on the bus or are you off the bus?") was so cool. Perhaps Wolfe had started the decent into masculine middle age which often seems to be paved with disappointments, broken dreams, and fear of impotence which is then translated into a longing for a more dependable past when art was art and there were universally-accepted standards of quality, or so they say.

Photorealism appeared at the end of The Painted Word as a kind of realist rebellion against the tide of Conceptual art. It gave such pleasure, an in-your-face revenge for Wolfe to note that "[Richard] Estes is reported to be selling at $80,000 a crack" in the galleries of New York or London. The greatest artistic absurdity imagined by him would be an exhibition in the year 2000 in which the words of art critics would be reproduced in huge panels in the gallery while the artworks under discussion — by Jasper Johns and Morris Louis — would appear as visual footnotes to the text, little postage-stamped sized reproductions. Actually, that sounds to me like it could be an interesting exhibition, although to tell you the truth I think an exhibition of photorealist paintings could be interesting, or an exhibition of work by Jasper Johns or Morris Louis could likewise be interesting.

The greater absurdity to me is the stratospheric heights of the art market. $80,000 for a painting by Richard Estes sounds so quaint in this moment of hyper-capitalism we inhabit. The auction houses routinely display their latest broken records in the art magazines; a million dollars for this photograph, a few million dollars for that painting - not for "blue chip" artworks but for recent work by living, younger artists. The magenta heart by Jeff Koons is probably very impressive but was it worth twenty-five million dollars? Who knows, maybe it cost thirty million dollars to produce and the artist and his investors took a five million dollar bath at auction. Not to be outdone, Damien Hirst achieved the coveted distinction of producing (and investing in) the highest priced artwork by a living artist: the diamond-covered skull that sold for one hundred million dollars. Perhaps art has lost its power to shock and the only shock that's left is the price at auction. I'm waiting for the artwork that will sell at auction for one billion dollars.

A week ago I walked into the Medtronic Gallery at Walker Art Center and encountered a work by Tino Sehgal. A young man, following the directions issued by the artist, was sort of crawling, sort of turning around on the floor of the empty gallery. He was moving his body in slow-motion and had his hands up to his face, sort of framing his field of vision with his fingers while he looked straight ahead or closed his eyes. I asked him what he was doing and he said something, so quietly, that I couldn't quite understand him. Maybe he said "I see it there" or maybe he said "Tino Sehgal" or maybe he said something else, I'm not sure.

I watched him for a while. It was beautiful. It felt like fresh air filling my heart and mind, reminding me of Stevie Winwood's high, thin voice singing "Can't Find My Way Home." Just when I thought the art market had stolen from art its power to shock, I was shocked by this project. I was shocked by its subtlety, its quietude. Watching the piece was like reading a poem. The poem operates at a different standard of time than the one we normally inhabit. Reading the poem forces us to get out of that normal time and into a slower time. Watching the piece stopped the normal time. It interrupted the normal expectations of what "should" happen in the gallery, and this was a great pleasure for me.

Why must everything constantly make sense? I loved Tino Sehgal's piece because it refused to make sense. The piece refused to make sense, and what shocked me was its subtlety, its quietude. I thought of other Conceptual or Performance artworks, other projects that were so different. I thought of Through the Night Softly, performed by Chris Burden in 1973, in which he crawled over broken shards of glass without a shirt and Vito Acconci's Seedbed from that same era, in which he was hidden under a ramp in the Sonnabend Gallery, masturbating. Such projects seemed to me like the artists had something to prove, kind of an artist-manhood hazing ritual. Chris Burden once said that he wanted to be taken seriously as an artist and having yourself shot in the arm with a .22 is certainly one way to do that.

I saw another piece by Tino Sehgal in the Burnet Gallery at Walker Art Center. I've seen this one performed several times, by different women wearing the gallery guard uniform, in which the guard sings sweetly "This is propaganda." Indeed, museum and gallery exhibitions are a form of propaganda — all art is a form of propaganda, including the piece by Sehgal which sweetly announces this dichotomy. Again, I loved the work for its quietude, its poetry, its music.

I thought of another project, The House with the Ocean View, performed by Marina Abramovic in the Sean Kelly Gallery in 2002. She lived in the gallery for twelve days without eating or speaking. It seemed to me to be a kind of purification ritual after the horror of the attack on September 11. There is a quiet tension in the work; the self-negation is balanced with an equally powerful self-affirmation. I find the quiet tension in these projects by Sehgal and Abramovic to be very powerful.

Our experience of an artwork occurs within the context of our own assumptions and expectations, our own hopes, fears, and ideologies. Perhaps I responded to Sehgal's work the way I did because of my need to counter the stratosphere of the art market, the hyper-capitalism of this moment we inhabit, the hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives wasted to prove a point that never can be proven because the point keeps changing. There is too much nonsense out there; I need something that doesn't make sense.

Conceptual art did not overturn the art market, but neither can the art market rob art entirely of its power even as it endlessly absorbs and converts art to higher levels of capital. Tino Sehgal's work is wonderfully atmospheric and ephemeral but neither is it immune from the market. It is now entering the market, where it will be bought and sold. Nothing is pure, clean or easy. But the work has the power to shock, in its own gentle, quiet way. It doesn't make sense and that is beautiful.

When Tino Sehgal has his way at the Walker Art Center, beginning December 12, you won't find any labels tagged to his work. You also won't find a catalogue, written biography or paper trail of any kind. Born 31 years ago in London and now living in Berlin, Sehgal has made a quick mark in the contemporary arts by intentionally leaving no mark.

He doesn't create objects, present video or stage performances (he also doesn’t allow any recording of his work). Rather, Sehgal calls on casts of characters - front-desk receptionists, security guards, tour guides, assorted performers - to play out his "situations." For his Walker debut, Sehgal is planning five "live" pieces involving more than 50 accomplices from the Walker staff and elsewhere. These singers, dancers and other artists will act as interpreters, confronting visitors from the moment they step to the admissions desk until they leave the museum.

Sehgal once commented that his work depends upon "action/reaction." He wants people encountering his pieces not only to react in the moment but consider their reactions, hoping his work inspires questions about the creative process and the cult status of object-based art. The New York Times wrote about Sehgal in November. Regardless of your response, Sehgal promises you'll make a personal imprint on a given piece.

"There's no possibility not to act, so everything you do, even if it doesn't seem like acting, produces an effect," Sehgal told the online journal Kulture Flash, in January 2007.

"In its classical form, the museum views you as a subject," he said. "There was a democratic process that constructed culture and, when you entered the museum, you received this culture, just as you would receive orders from the king. I don't think that's the case in our society. We are constantly constructing culture. So when you enter my work, you are also constructing it."

Sehgal cut his artistic teeth primarily through dance--he trained a decade ago under the French choreographer Jérôme Bel, an association that also exposed him to the minimalist, improvisational dancer Xavier LeRoy and the avant-garde composer John Zorn. Both artists informed Sehgal's fledgling esthetic, encouraging Sehgal to pave level ground with his performers and his audience. Sehgal has always targeted his work for museum spaces rather than theatrical stages.

"If somebody is interested in acquiring one of my pieces, they can," Sehgal told Kulture Flash. "Museums, for example, could show them for years. It would take a lot of work, but restoring a painting also takes a lot of work."

David Bowen’s Networked Bamboo and Pete Driessen’s White Fleet are among works in the MMAA’s 3D II biennial exhibition.

You can drive by the Science Museum of Minnesota every day and be forgiven for overlooking the Minnesota Museum of American Art, the bastion of homegrown visual art that, until not long ago, shared walls with the jail in the Ramsey County Government Center.

The MMAA’s Minnesota Biennial is the only so-named exhibition in the Twin Cities. Two- and three-dimensional work get alternating showcases — the latest 3D turn, the museum’s first since 2002, opened Saturday. 3D II is at turns bright, trite, engaging, unpolished, unpretentious, flat, fatuous, funny and wholly unique on the local gallery and museum scene. A sole juror — Jennifer Jankauskas, associate curator of exhibitions at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, in Sheboygan, Wis. — winnowed down more than 150 artists to select the 27 in this show. 3D II closes February 3, 2008.

Jankauskas leans to the wry and socially relevant, emphasizing installation over static sculpture, and much of the work begs for direct interaction. At the well-attended opening-night party, visitors easily lost their heads the moment after walking in the door — Julia Kouneski’s pinhole cameras are like hexagon helmets. David Hamlow of Good Thunder, Minn., cast his life between 1994 and 1998 into a giant cardboard ball taped together from every box of cereal, crackers, soap, razors and other products he bought and used during those years. Friends and family weighed in with their own takes of Hamlow, made from the artist’s discarded materials.

My favorite pieces were David Bowen’s Networked Bamboo, an installation carrying deliciously creepy Borg overtones (the water-injected stalks make jerky, pained movements through light and electrical impulses) and an unnamed piece by Todd Severson of Minneapolis, a ceramic artist who created a web of figures in a frozen free-fall. I want to see more work from Pete Driessen, whose White Fleet, a stark comment on African colonialism, traces its influence to the work of Kara Walker.

3D II celebrates artists worth discovering.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

It is often the norm that exhibitions take a great deal of time to conceive and to organize and very little time to be experienced. This is not the case with the Brave New Worlds, an exhibition that includes more than a dozen of videos and 16 mm and 35 mm films, or to be really precise, 3 hours and 33 minutes and 96 seconds of moving image. While imagining the show, my colleague and co-curator Doryun Chong and I sketched out the floor-plan of the pieces in relationship with one another formally and conceptually but also chronologically, taking into consideration their duration in relation to other pieces. We roughly estimated that it could take at least four hours for a visitor to see the entire show, maybe without reading labels. It might seem like a large amount of time to spend in the galleries but we imagined the exhibition as a journey of investigations, where the juxtaposition between time-based pieces along photographs, sculptures, drawings, and paintings allow for shifting levels of contemplation as one walks through each room.

During the preparation process we switched the location of several pieces all the way until the last minute until we were able to feel the fluidity between the narratives and their movement. Afterwards, Doryun mentioned to me that he understood the exhibition as a musical piece in three movements. I’ve come to see it as a chart of proximities, like the one drawn in the bottom left-hand corner of Jorge Macchi’s collage Liliput (2007), where individual works of art are interconnected with one another in a number of common areas in each of the galleries where they meet and share sightlines, floor and wall spaces, sound, light reflections or a cast shadows from their neighboring pieces. As its title suggests Brave New Worlds is not a swift stroll through one world but a journey through a constellation of worlds, viewpoints, and moving images that range from the open sea to a public park, from a narrow corridor to a deserted road, and from a floating satellite to mesmerizing skies. I recommend to leave your watch at home.

Slate, the online magazine, has posted a brief but smart slideshow of Kara Walker. Several pieces are drawn from the Walker collection, with some photos shot from within the Walker galleries by our Gene Pittman. No mention in the accompanying text of Queen O beyond Slate’s headline.

The paintings of Frida Kahlo come to life this month at the Walker thanks in part to a new component of the exhibition–the Antenna Audio XP-vision™ multimedia player. This new handheld device goes beyond the traditional audio tour by allowing visitors to access archival images and rare film footage as well as audio interpretation and video interviews. Highlighting works in the exhibition, the tour touches on topics that include Kahlo’s life and times, her personal photo albums, and the importance of Mexican folk traditions as expressed in her art. You will also hear interviews with artists such as Kiki Smith and Dulce Maria Nuñez; singer Patti Smith; novelist Carole Maso; and exhibition co-curators Hayden Herrera and Elizabeth Carpenter, who consider different aspects of Kahlo’s legacy.

The tour was produced by Antenna Audio in collaboration with the Walker Art Center and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The price of the tour is $6 for the general public and $5 for Walker members. Available in English and Spanish.

TOUR SAMPLES
Exhibition co-curator Hayden Herrera on Kahlo’s painting The Two Fridas (audio only)

Kiki Smith on Frida Kahlo

As part of the exhibition Brave New Worlds, Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi has created a drawing installation in the stairwell outside of galleries 4, 5, and 6 featuring his incisive commentary in black marker. Gene Pittman took these shots of the entrance to gallery 4.

Paul previously posted videos here and here, but it is well worth a click to view the videos from Perjovschi’s recent MoMA show of the artist in action.

Thursday morning's press tour for Brave New Worlds brought out the heavy-hitters in Twin Cities arts journalism—City College News, MinnPost, yours truly. Not sure whether anyone donned the nametags awaiting reps from La Prensa or Arise! Bookstore. What struck me, beyond the ambition of the exhibition (more on that in a bit), were the no-surprise no-shows.

One stated reason--the unfortunate collision of timing with the press tour for the Georgia O'Keeffe exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Now, don't take this as a knock on O'Keeffe, her art or the MIA exhibition, but if you're a reporter tasked with learning something new, with seeing and hearing a little bit about something you'd otherwise have no chance to see or hear before the public, this is a no-brainer--you bag O'Keeffe and make it to Brave New Worlds.

O'Keeffe's life and career are well-documented in books, catalogs, Web sites, film and museum and university collections. In short, you don't need to personally tour the work alongside a curator to know it or get it. The opposite is so with the artists of Brave New Worlds--two dozen of them, from 17 countries--all unknown to most, perhaps everyone, in the Twin Cities to the runup of this show.

And this show is an ideal example of the Walker's gift to the community. We send two curators--Yasmil Raymond and Doryun Chong--around the world to find living artists steeped in social and political consciousness, then deliver a range of them and their fiery work to Minneapolis. Some are creating new pieces right up to today's scheduled opening.

It's rarified and precious, yet crackling with energy and grit, and I feel privileged as an arts journalist to take a sneak peek, meet artists tackling serious issues with such force, grace and wit, and help interpret the work for people who, going in, otherwise have no clue about it.

Multimedia installations and screening rooms abound--installers created a surreal, raked-seating theater for Erik Van Lieshout's "Homeland Security"--but some of the most penetrating work is simple in form and function.

Jorge Macchi of Buenos Aires recreated a world map through a random collage, tossing cutouts of the world's countries onto a flat surface, then detailing the distances between them on the kind of charts anchoring the corners of traditional maps. One implication is that by, say, the United States' new proximity to, say, Iran, the world falls under a new pecking order of politics and power.

Fernando Bryce, a Peruvian living in Germany, collects promotional material (i.e., propaganda) from the World Bank, USAID, the Department of International Development, food for peace programs--and juxtaposes their language with pen-and-ink drawings of iconic figures and world leaders. The interplay is stark and satirical, and Bryce has a knack for exposing the hypocrisy and motivational underbelly of organizations that operate under the auspice of world aid.

Gimhongsok of South Korea has reflected on his own rise as a contemporary artist to comment on the financial disparities between artists adopted by museums such as the Walker Art Center and those toiling without income. One of his pieces here is a raft fashioned as a blue boulder, embedded with objects--a fishing pole, lantern, empty soda bottles, books, a small kerosene stovetop, plastic moorings--he has collected along his museum-paid travels. In a brief conversation after the tour, Gimhongsok told me he still sees himself as a “community artist,” and this work represents the street-level survival of his fellow countrymen and peers and the guilt of his own emergence into the realm of pampered artist.

You can't appreciate this show by just breezing through. You have to stand, take in the strings of images, walk the paths, sit on the rickety chairs, soak up the sounds, take in the text stamped into gold and, in one installation, allow the cold and heat to touch your skin. These artists force you to engage in the work, and if you're paying attention, you can't come away without a little better understanding of our own privileged access.