Visual Arts

Left to right: Mylinh Trieu Nguyen (Los Angeles); Andria Hickey (St. John's, Newfoundland);Dan Byers (Newton, Massachusetts); Noa Segal (Haifa, Israel) Photo: Gene Pittman

This is a longer version of the interviews with visual arts fellows Dan Byers and Andria Hickey, from a story in the July/August issue of Walker magazine. Design fellow Noa Segal has posted her interview and Mylinh Trieu’s over on the design blog.

For nearly three decades, the Walker has been recruiting recent graduates and junior professionals to work as fellows in its design and visual arts departments. As full-time, full-fledged staff, fellows experience the entire scope of graphic design and curatorial work in a museum, while bringing with them fresh energy and new ideas. A number of Walker fellows have also gone on to prominent positions at museums and design firms around the world. As their time here draws to a close, the 2008-2009 group talks about what brought them here, what they’ve experienced, and what’s in store as they move on.

= Daniel Byers =

I got into this line of work because … after some time as a studio art major in college (mostly painting, some textiles stuff), I realized I wasn’t the sort to of person who could be by himself in the studio for hours on end - people, and collaborative work are very important to me. Working with artists and Ian Berry, the curator at Skidmore’s Tang Museum, provided a model for being engaged with artists and artwork - as well as writing - in a collaborative, experimental environment. In a way, I was also attracted to a line of work where taste, aesthetics, theory, history, craft and the sense of sustaining public culture all connected.

My first impressions of the Walker came from …

I’ve known about the Walker since I was an undergraduate at the Tang Museum, and admired the publications (from the magazine to the beautiful catalogs) that came across my desk. It always seemed a sort of beacon of — to use an abused word — maverick integrity, creativity, and commitment to artists. Since working at the Fabric Workshop and Museum I’d always hoped that I’d end up at the Walker one day.

While working here, I contributed … to catalogs for two Walker-organized exhibitions: The Quick and the Dead and the forthcoming Abstract Resistance (opening in February 2010). Equally import were the many, many meetings and discussions with fellow visual arts staff and staff from other departments, which more often than not allowed real discourse — and a good amount of humor.

Other high (and low) points … Quick and the Dead catalog writing and crazy work before its deadline (this was a simultaneous high and low point!); discussions with curator Yasmil Raymond about Abstract Resistance; karaoke with selected Walker curators (they know how they are) at the Art of This benefit; laughing at lunch with the visual arts department.

I love what I do because … I get to work with interesting people, I get to research and write, I get to talk about art, and most important, I participate in the creation of public culture. Curating, is, at its core, enabling artworks — culture — to enter the public discourse, in a public space. I’m committed to the relevance of art exhibitions the same way I’m committed to the survival of newspapers, public space in cities, public radio, small businesses as community meeting places, music venues — anything that allows people to meet around information, opinion, and expressions of culture. We need these spaces more than ever, and sadly they are withering as private culture and personalized content dominate our sense of how to engage with the world.

A Twin Cities image that will remain with me is … walking to work in January: two dead squirrels on the sidewalk, frozen from the cold, separated by a few blocks. Good thing I had a heavy coat.

After leaving the Walker … I will be working as an assistant curator of contemporary art at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh–a position I would not have gotten without my experience at the Walker.

An exhibition I have in mind … involves Charles Burchfield and a few artists from younger generations. Burchfield’s work is hard to place and its incredible otherworldliness has interesting analogs with artists working through the 60s to today.

= Andria Hickey =

Before coming to the Walker . . . my experiences working with artists really centered around my involvement with artist-run centers in Newfoundland and Montreal as a programmer and board member. In Canada these centers form an extensive part of the national contemporary art scene. I’d followed the Walker for a long time, mostly by way of the Web site and catalogues, and I had always admired how it maintained an artist-centric mission. When I received a travel grant from my school (Concordia University in Montreal) to do some research for my master’s thesis on Kara Walker, I jumped at the opportunity and soon discovered the fellowship program–it seemed like a dream job. One thing led to another, and two years later, here I am. It’s been an incredible opportunity to work with and for some of the most exciting artists of our time.

I wanted to come to the Walker because . . . Besides getting to work with some of my dream artists and on dream exhibitions, joining the curatorial team is a very rigorous experience that has challenged me to think outside the box, push myself and my ideas harder. Just observing ways that different curators work is an incredible experience, and as a fellow I really became part of a family at the Walker. I’m not sure if the chemistry comes from the level of dedication, creativity, and brains in the building, or from the extreme cold–winter in Minneapolis is colder than Canada!

Some of my high points . . . hanging the Richard Prince show with Philippe Vergne; burying a skeleton and working out the “spatial voodoo” of The Quick and the Dead with Peter Eleey; trying to fly a homemade hot air balloon at 5 am in rural Minnesota with Tomás Saraceno, Yasmil Raymond, Alberto Pessavento, and James Flaten, followed by a “traditional” Perkins breakfast.

In reference to Claes Oldenburg’s The Garden, this humorous image was passed along to me and needs to be shared.

Sad Lemon, by Todd Balthazor

The sad lemon was drawn by Todd Balthazor, a student at the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul and a guard at the Walker.

Many might wonder what processes we “art handlers” go through to recreate a famous piece of art that is part performance. My latest experience installing the microphone in the tree for his 1971 Microphone/Tree Piece in the current Walker Art Center exhibition The Quick and the Dead, made me hark back to my earlier experiences with the Nauman camp. Me and Nauman, we go way back. This piece calls for sinking a microphone deep inside a tree sending the audio signal back to the gallery. Back in the early nineties, when I was still fairly new to gallery AV installations I was faced with the planning and execution of a major Bruce Nauman retrospective. I was younger then and less experienced but I was excited by the challenges of working with this major artist in an exhibition personally curated by our new director Kathy Halbriech. Because the show would travel internationally I had to design a rather lavish technical manual clearly outlining all the details of numerous complex AV installations. While supervising and participating in the installation I also had to produce the multi-screen slide show that used to accompany each major exhibition and welcome visitors in the now nonexistent “Information Room” off the main lobby.

The Nauman studio had made a request that was very difficult to fulfill. He wanted to inspect and approve of the various types of monitors we would be using. He was trying to achieve a somewhat vintage look. I had to search to find boxy looking models (this in the days before “searching” was possible via the Internet). I had to cajole my vendors to secure demo models and practically assure them that I would be buying from them (while keeping my fingers crossed that that would in fact be the case). Once I assembled all that and presented it to Mr. Nauman, I found him refreshingly decisive. Or maybe I was just relieved he approved all my selections on the spot.

One of the pieces I worked on back then resonates with Nauman’s mic-in-a-tree piece in the current show in several ways. I refer to the Audio-Video Underground Chamber which actually came later in 1972. This piece called for the sinking of a tomb-sized concrete box buried underground at a location in the Sculpture Garden across the street. It was to have a camera at one end and a microphone at the other. I was to somehow channel the live audio and video signals back to the gallery. In that case we were able to piggyback on an unused security line through the security office to the gallery.

There are intriguing parallels between these two pieces. As in the case of the Microphone/Tree, the Underground Chamber had been done only once before. Just as the Underground Chamber still resides under the surface of the garden, the microphone will remain inside the tree (on the advice of the tree expert) in a sense listening silently for the rest of the tree’s life. With both of these pieces I felt imbued with a historic responsibility! As I’ve since learned it is typical to receive only sketchy information from artists and their galleries. I only had some photos to go from, which I studied intently. As I looked a question began gnawing at me. Yes, I can see the microphone in the image from the video camera. But what is providing the light.? Nauman’s sketch and brief instructions didn’t account for that. I sent the question back to the artist through his very astute assistant Juliet Meyers. I have since run across descriptions of this piece which include mention of a lamp, but at that time they said they couldn’t remember. It was up to me to figure out some way to provide a light source at six feet under. I came up with numerous ideas including fashioning a light fixture which would slide down a tube – retractable in case the bulb needed changing. But our security camera expert suggested we try a camera that probably didn’t exist the first time this piece was installed – an infrared camera. It required no actual light but used it’s own array of LEDs which ringed the lens. The image looked natural. Seemed to work. Okay we’ll go with it. Its downside didn’t become apparent until a month or so into the show, but it wasn’t too critical a breech of accuracy when condensation formed on the mic which interacted with the infrared camera in such a way that each water droplet appeared as a tiny bright light. It kind of compromised the piece a bit.

At that time it occurred to me that no one but technicians were present at the actual burying of the chamber. No members of the public or media. It would have been very easy (and much less costly) to fake it; to “bury” it, say, in the basement and just announce that it is in the garden. Who would know? But in working on “The Quick and the Dead” one thing becomes clear about conceptual art: it’s all about the going through with it. Even if it’s only a contraption that only works for a brief time (see Michael Sailstorfer’s yarn device, “800M, or Steven Pippin’s “Fax69””), you must expend the energy to actually make the attempt to make it happen. You must put aside your feelings that you are engaged in an absurd spinning of wheels.

My ability to shake off that feeling was stretched with Microphone/Tree. I was skeptical that you would hear ANYTHING from a mic buried deep inside a tree. I would be doing all this work for the sound of NOTHING. Although I could see the Yoko Onoish poeticism in this action it seemed there was a joke, and it was on me. As with the chamber the temptation to fake it again presented itself. I could just shrug and say, yes, I plugged it in but hey there’s nothing to hear. Save a lot of trouble. Again, who would know? But I was determined to make sure it happened.

copyright 2009 Walker Art Center, Photos by Cameron Wittig

copyright 2009 Walker Art Center, photo by Cameron Wittig

When this piece was conceived I’m sure Bruce Nauman was probably thinking there’d be a tree right outside the gallery. The expanded Walker sprawls out over a city block with the only mature tree at the far southeastern corner of the property. This posed a logistics problem. I conceived a plan to relay the signal through the nearby security office converting the audio signal to tap into the cat-5 network wiring system serving other needs of the building. This plan ran into a snag when we discovered the zigzagging between various control rooms would extend the run beyond the 1000 ft. minimum for this method to succeed. We had to switch strategy to a much more complicated and expensive method of encoding it from analog to a digital signal, which would eliminate the distance issue altogether. It struck me as particularly ironic that we were forced to use 21st century technology for a piece conceived in 1971. The signal is there. And by George if you can’t hear some vague traffic noises emanating from within that tree!

With his item titled “Walker on a photo-acquiring mini-spree,” Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes gives the skinny on some of our newest acquisitions, including this giant Gursky, almost 7′ x 8′ — and, as always, a few nuggets of his always-unvarnished opinion.

Look for stories and blog posts coming up about some of these works and other pieces destined to become part of our collection. For now, here are links to a few previous articles about acquisitions: an overview about “Composing the Contemporary Collection”; Phillippe Vergne’s pithy and piquant take on a recently acquired piece by Richard Prince (in conjunction with his retrospective here last summer), and a piece on Joann Verburg, whose survey traveled here last winter, and whose photos are mentioned by Green.

Yesterday morning a group of staff looked on as Tomás Saraceno and and gallery crew installed Saraceno’s Iridescent Planet. Our photographer Cameron Wittig documented the install and we’ve put the images on flickr:

The work itself is made of an iridescent foil material provided to Saraceno by 3M and is constructed in a manner similar to Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, allowing solar panels to be suspended inside the balloon. The balloon is anchored to the top of the Barnes tower and the ground along Hennepin Avenue. Saraceno’s work was first seen at the Walker in Brave New Worlds in 2007, and in 2008 he brought Museo aero solar to the Twin Cities.

Iridescent Planet is being installed for the opening of Tomás Saraceno: Lighter than Air, happening Thursday May 14, and will be re-installed, weather permitting, for Rock the Garden as well as the Free First Saturdays in June, July, and August.

Where can we do a test inflation of a two-story balloon? That’s just one of a million questions that curator Yasmil Raymond is dealing with as she works on installing Tomas Saraceno: Lighter Than Air (opening May 14). In this case, happily, there was a ready answer: the McGuire stage (how’s that for an interdisciplinary solution?). Shimmering in the dark, its plastic quietly rustling, the balloon was a majestic and appropriately theatrical presence onstage early this morning. But its eventual destination - we’ll keep that a secret for now - will bring it much more exposure than this 350-seat house.

In the righ-hand image, with Saraceno’s assistant, Knut, you can see the solar-powered “nucleus” suspended within the balloon.

We’ve posted two additional videos about The Quick and The Dead. In this installment, Peter Eleey discusses Adrian Piper’s personal collection work, What Will Become of Me, and Lygia Clark’s folding sculpture, Bicho. The first two videos are also here.

Both videos have been shot in high definition, and you can grab the highest quality video from The Quick and the Dead page in iTunes U. Additionally, we’ve produced a number of audio tracks to help contextualize the exhibition, available in iTunes U and Art on Call.

One of the works installed in The Quick and the Dead is a piece by Claes Oldenburg called The Garden, originally concepted and proposed in 1968, but not realized until this exhibition. In general terms, the work consists of 100 objects buried in the ground and dug out and placed on display over the course of 100 days. For the installation at the Walker, we’ve used lemons as the object and are placing them on display in individual glass jars in the Bazinet Garden Lobby. Oldenburg’s instructions do not specify the objects to be used or the manner of display.

I caught up with Ellie McKinney who was tasked with digging up the first lemon:

Beginning to dig.

Found, about a foot down.

The object (lemon) in a jar.

The lemon on display in the Bazinet Garden Lobby.

Several days later, there are more lemons, and the first unearthed are beginning to mold:

A lemon rotting.

Lemons removed so far, with space for 95 more.

There is a lot of meaning you could assign to the various elements and acts of the work: burial and unearthing, decay and display, and the passage of time are all rich in metaphors and crossover. There is also an interesting connection between the grid on/in the ground and the grid that is being re-created on the lobby wall, re-representing time in different ways. The computer scientist in me can’t help but see a relationship between a grid of pixels, waiting to be turned on or off and a timeline, waiting to have the playhead moved along.

On a purely pragmatic level, Any work that changes over time and breathes extra life into an often static gallery space is welcome energy. Regardless, I am curious and will check in on the work as it progresses over time.

For The Quick and the Dead, we have put together several short video pieces, each looking at an artwork in the exhibition. The first two are available now:

All your last week’s desires by Tobias Rehberger

Timekeeper by Pierre Huyghe

Both videos have been shot in high definition, and you can grab the highest quality video from The Quick and the Dead page in iTunes U. Additionally, we’ve produced a number of audio tracks to help contextualize the exhibition, available in iTunes U and Art on Call.

While taking media folks on a preview tour of The Quick and the Dead this morning, curator Peter Eleey mentioned Walter Pater’s famous quote about “all art aspiring to the condition of music.” There’s the making of it, and the “performing” — or exhibition — of it. Installing an artwork for its performance, then (rehearsal? practice?), might lie somewhere in between.

And it’s probably not surprising that this exhibition has a number of works that are rather tricky to install, given its themes, not the least of which is exploring various odd manipulations of time and space. The Walker crew, however, unable to stop time, has been working long hours to get the show’s 91 pieces — which are located all over the museum, including its parking ramp, elevators, and the grounds outside — looking perfect for tomorrow night’s preview party; a number of artists have also come to install their work themselves. Cameron Wittig, our staff photographer, has been documenting some of them at work.

Ceal Floyer, installing "Suspense"

Mark Manders, with part of "Life-Size Scene with Revealed Figure" visible in background

Steven Pippin installing "Fax 69"

Paul Etienne Lincoln, with detail of his "Sousaphonograph" in foreground

Michael Sailstorfer in front of "Zeit ist keine Autobahn, Minneapolis (Time is No Highway, Minneapolis)"