Visual Arts

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.

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.

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.