Visual Arts

In an exhibition of artworks made using nontraditional materials including dust, expired packaged food, bamboo, an airplane fuselage, snakeskin, a pith helmet, and molded sand, add these to the list of Huang Yong Ping’s artistic media:

White-spotted geckos
Armadillo lizards
African giant millipedes
African emperor scorpions
Madagascar hissing cockroaches
South American pink-toed tarantulas
Ball pythons
2 albino rat snakes (aka “Bubblegum rat snakes")
Blood red legged tarantula
Feeder crickets

To fulfill Huang’s vision--especially the works Theater of the World (a panopticon/coliseum inhabited by insects, amphibians, and reptiles) and The Wise Man Learns from the Spider How to Spin a Web (which includes a light fixture that casts the shadow of a spider on the desk beneath it)--the Walker brought in Bruce Delles, 27-year owner of Twin Cities Reptiles in St. Paul. On-call 24/7 for the exhibition, he cares for the creatures daily, bringing in water and food for all species, including gelatinized food for the vegetarians and as many as 500 crickets per week for the others. The snakes are another matter: because snakes generally only eat once every 7 to 10 days in captivity--and they eat mice--he rotates eight snakes in and out of the sculpture, bringing four back to his store to be fed in a private setting.

Inspired in part by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s notion of the panopticon, a surveillance model whereby the watched can never see the watcher, the sculpture is indeed a place where gallery viewers can see the predator-prey relationship played out. But Delles says these interactions aren’t always as thrilling, or gory, as the Discovery Channel might suggest. “It gives people who go there and look at [Huang’s work] with an open mind the realization that, yes, they are predator and prey and they can cohabitate together--the lion sleeping with the lamb. Most animals don't kill for the sheer pleasure of killing. It's either defense or obtaining prey."

For more on Delles’ involvement with the exhibtion, look for the January/February issue of Walker, available in mid-December.

Photo: Delles at his store in St. Paul. By Cameron Wittig

"We walked up three flights of steep stairs, and there, at the far end of the narrow loft, was a huge black-and-white portrait of an unshaven, bar-shouldered young man. Standing next to it, greeting me apprehensively, was its towering, slightly glowering, six-foot-three painter, no less formidable-looking than his scraggly-locked image on the canvas." These words describe the first seconds of what would become a four-decade friendship between Chuck Close and Martin Friedman, Walker director from 1961 to 1990. The year was 1968. The painting was Big Self-Portrait, the first of Close's paintings using his trademark style and the first painting he ever sold. And Friedman ended up buying it for the Walker.

The recollection appears in his new book Close Reading: Chuck Close and the Artist Portrait (Harry N. Abrams, 2005), available in the Walker Shop. Coincidentally released just as the Walker-organized exhibition Chuck Close: Self-Portraits, 1968-2005 begins its national tour, the full-color volume is remarkable for both the intimacy and authoritativeness that comes from its author being an art historian and personal friend of Close. It includes a comprehensive biography of Close's life and work, from the 1988 illness that left Close paralyzed, and his recovery, to how he perfected the technique behind his epic-scale portraits, and includes interviews with many of his subjects, including Kiki Smith, Lucas Samaras, Cindy Sherman, William Wegman, and others. Looking back at that first encounter, Friedman recounts, "To this day, if I happen to be in the audience during a public occasion when he is being honored, Close never fails to mention the price the museum paid for his first self-portrait and, to his delight, my face never fails to turn bright red." The price: $1,300.

Having just closed at the Walker, Chuck Close: Self-Portraits, 1968-2005 makes its next appearance at SFMOMA, where it opens November 19. Click here to read an interview between exhibition curators Siri Engberg of the Walker and SFMOMA’s Madeleine Grynsztejn on the “topography of the face.”

Given Huang Yong Ping’s choice to create an elephant out of concrete, steel, and cowhide--rather than use an actual preserved pachyderm--I was surprised to meet Brad Reddick in the Walker galleries last week. Reddick runs Mid-America Taxidermy in Savage, Minnesota, where he’s stuffed all kinds of animals, including giraffe, hippopotamus, cape buffalo, and deer (no domestic animals; of memorializing Fido he says he’ll “leave that to the other guys”). He was called in by the Walker Registration department to seal small gaps caused by the shrinking of the sculpture’s cowhide skin and to replace the claws on the tiger (also a replica, covered with painted rabbit fur). But what does a taxidermist know about repairing fake animals?

Plenty, he says. The work he performed on Huang’s piece last week used both skills and materials--epoxy and fiberglass resin--he became familiar with through other projects, chief among them building replicas for zoos and natural history museums. A faux tree, constructed entirely of epoxies, can be seen at the Minnesota zoo, and Reddick’s artificial habitats--the dioramas on which mounted animals appear--are integrated into displays at the Sioux Falls Zoo and Museum.

Will he be there when the exhibition opens Sunday? Probably not; it’s hunting season after all.

An elephant can hit a top speed of around 24 miles per hour running, but the beast in Huang Yong Ping’s upcoming exhibition didn’t reach anywhere near that when it traveled from the Walker loading dock to Gallery 6 on September 30. Here’s a look at the journey of the 2,000-pound elephant (which is really a replica created out of concrete, steel, and painted animal skins).

After it was placed in the gallery, the elephant was conserved by a local taxidermist and the sculpture, dubbed 11 June 2002–The Nightmare of George V (2002), was completed: a replica of a tiger attacking a wicker seat was set in place. As Artforum wrote of the piece as it appeared in the 26th Sao Paulo Bienal:

The title identifies the hunter as King George V of England. Huang explains that in 1911 the king, while hunting in Nepal, killed four tigers in three days, a remarkable feat. One of the tigers attacked the king, and he donated this specimen to a museum in Bristol, where Huang found it. In Paris the artist located preserved animals from other treks. He attached to a wicker howdah on the elephant’s back a tiger in the documented position of attack, but he replaced the royal howdah–an emblem of empire–with the sort used to protect well-heeled tourists. The tableau looks back to the approaching end of the colonial period.

Here’s what it looks like today:

[Transport photos by Cameron Wittig.]