Visual Arts

Part of: blogs.walkerart.org

 

Author: Paul Schmelzer

Nine-year editor of Walker magazine (1998-2007), Paul writes on art, media, and activism for publications including Adbusters, Alternet, Ode, Utne, Cabinet, Raw Vision and others. He blogs at Eyeteeth, Minnesota Monitor, and wherever else anyone will let him. His interviews with architect Cameron Sinclair, artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, and activist Winona La Duke appear in the book Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook (Royal Society of Arts, 2006).

Email: paul@eyeteeth.org
My Website: http://eyeteeth.org


 
by Paul Schmelzer at 8:28 pm 2007-09-16
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The curatorial office Latitudes — guest editor of the new issue of the art magazine UOVO, which includes Walker curator Doryun Chong’s interview with artist Haegue Yang — has also made available a wonderful conversation between Walker curator Peter Eleey and artist Michael Rakowitz [pdf]. In his project Return, Rakowitz re-opened the import-export business run by his Iraqi-Jewish grandparents in New York, with the plan — which Rakowitz saw as “bad business” that made for “great art” — of importing Iraqi dates. Read the store’s blog.

 
by Paul Schmelzer at 7:54 pm 2007-09-16
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When Brave New Worlds opens October 4, it’ll include the piece Blind Room by Korean artist Haegue Yang. Each time she installs the piece, a multisensory installation that with lights, smell and sound, she buys all the components of the piece, including blinds, locally.

For the new issue of the Turin-based magazine UOVO, Yang discussed her recent work with Brave New Worlds‘ co-curator Doryun Chong. The issue was guest-edited by former Walker curatorial fellow Max Andrews with Mariana Canepa-Luna, known for their work on the intersections of art and ecology. Their curatorial practice, Latitudes, has made the full interview available as a pdf.

An excerpt from Chong and Yang’s conversation:

Doryun Chong: We can start playing a bit of word game. I said, 'ecology', and you said, what about 'eco-il-logy' or 'eco-illogical'. Can you say more?

Haegue Yang: The word is derived from the Greek οικος (oikos, 'household') and λόγος (logos, 'study'), and I'd like to draw our attention to a somewhat contradictory notion to 'logos': pathos. I would like to propose a new term for our contemporary language, ‘eco-motional', which would encompass pathos, and this new supplementary term, in my mind, allows the complexity of ecological matters to be redefined and extended. We would not only need to mobilise our consciousness and rationality but also our emotional involvement around issues of ecology, because ecology requires somewhat abstract and long-term thinking.

When we briefly exchanged our initial thoughts about ecology recently, I talked about my experience of suddenly coming upon dozens of windmills while travelling on a train through northern Germany. The landscape in that area is not particularly spectacular, but some die-hard nature lovers would appreciate its unique, lonesome and melancholic features, I'd imagine. The presence of these windmills, however, very much ‘damaged' the landscape. At that moment, a sudden sense of loss came over me. I felt as if the presence of the windmills almost took away the possibility of one being fully, yet naturally absorbed into the landscape and nature. Images and perceptions are part of our ecology, and they clearly contribute to our engagement as organisms in our environment, not only addressing our physical habitats but also our mental and intellectual territories.

DC: Your answer, then, confirms my feeling about your recent video trilogy - Unfolding Places (2004), Restrained Courage (2004), Squandering Negative Spaces (2006). Each one, almost twenty-minutes long, is a sequence of images of mostly ‘insignificant' moments; the kinds of images that perhaps occupy the majority of our physical space and perceptual grid in actuality, but that one's visual and mental focus is usually not directed on. In the meantime, the narratives, which are written by you but read by a different voice in each one, ruminate on different notions, manifestations, and experiences of - I'd guess the best word would be - the pathos of living and going about in this world.

I know that you are inspired by the cinematic methodology of, especially, Chris Marker, and the whole point is to have no clear relationship between images and narratives. But is it too much of an assumption if I were to suggest that a kind of narrative seems to emerge when you put the three titles together? Could we interpret this from an ecological point of view?

HY: In the entire video essay, the voice-over repeatedly speaks about various forms of deprivation in human relations. The absences of connections often cause melancholia, the state in which one feels like s/he is in a chasm. The feeling of being thrown out of a community and the sentiment of lonely dislocation dominate the narrative structures as well as the scenarios in the video essay. The confessional tones and the various images of reflection - such as puddles, rain drops, different kinds of light sources - constitute an allegorical rhetoric. I chose to bring a certain self-reflection to issues in real life without fragmenting them. Ecology is normally defined as an individual's relation with other beings and his/her environment, but for me, it is nothing but a lack of 'commonness' that inevitably brings us into an existential struggle to be connected.

In Unfolding Places, most of the attention focuses on unfolding a negative of real space, in order to be able to navigate oneself and known one's own position within an environment - instead of being absolutely flexible and floating around as our contemporary society often demands. The second video, Restrained Courage, is a painful and shameful confession of one's failure to relate oneself to others, and aspires for radical action that goes beyond typical neo-liberal negotiations of social relations and thus avoids the deceitful, unreliable stipulation of a happy ending.

 
by Paul Schmelzer at 2:02 pm 2007-09-14
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Doryun Chong, assistant curator of Visual Arts and co-curator of the exhibition Brave New Worlds wrote this reflection for the September/October issue of WALKER magazine. Brave New Worlds opens October 4.

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Curatorial research trips can be grueling. When traveling, we curators tend to city-hop, going from one artist’s studio to another, with meetings often extending through dinners and into the wee hours. I’m certainly not complaining — to be able to meet new artists and learn their ways of thinking and seeing the world is not only a job but a privilege. But I often wish there was more time to learn the larger context in which these artists work.

Last September, my Walker colleague Yasmil Raymond and I got that rare chance. We found ourselves in the city of Cluj-Napoca in Romania as part of a two-week, four-country, five-city research trip for the exhibition Brave New Worlds, which opens on October 4. Located in north-central Transylvania, bordering Hungary, Cluj-Napoca is the third largest city in the country but wasn’t even part of it until the end of World War I. During World War II, the region was repatriated to Hungary, only to be restored again to Romania in 1947. The long history of tussles between the neighbors is still visible in the city, where nearly 20 percent of its population identify as Hungarian.

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We first got interested in the city through the remarkable journal IDEA: arts + society and we wondered how this city, far off the beaten path of the contemporary art scene, could produce such a rigorous, well-informed publication. I realized that this is a rather Western-centric view, and the purpose of such travels is to challenge preconceived notions about what constitutes and who contributes to contemporary art.

research-trip-warsaw-bucharest-istanbul-180.jpgAfter several days visiting art venues and studios, we decided to take a day off. It was Sunday, and we met up with Mircea Cantor, a Brave New Worlds artist who
lives and works nearby part of the time. We headed to an open-air market to buy fresh produce to make brunch. Mircea guided us through rows of vendors, joking and bargaining with women who hawked everything from juicy grapes to bags of brilliantly scarlet paprika, while Roma women in elaborately patterned pleated skirts wove through the crowd. We bought cheese from a young shepherd and his father, who both wore small conical top hats, typical apparel for Transylvanian goatherds, I was told.

After a huge meal, our guide took us to the Ethnographic Museum of Transylvania on the edge of the city. Founded in 1922, the museum is an outdoor park dotted with transplanted and reconstituted buildings — shingle-topped houses, thatched roofed barns, and mills (sometimes all of those in one structure!), and churches with incredibly steep steeples. While rustic, theseb uildings were complex and surprisingly ingenious. The wood carvings adorning them, both rough-hewn and delicate, were exotic to my eyes and also had universal resonances. After all, isn’t Romania the land of Constantin Brancusi, that peasant turned arch-modernist sculptor, and Mircea Eliade, the religious scholar who interpreted diverse world traditions through the shared cultural experience of “sacred and profane”?

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It’s easy to romanticize a context one doesn’t fully comprehend, and that’s a risk inherent in such short excursions into the unknown. Miscomprehension, in a sense, is an inevitable condition we always work within, but it could generate illuminating conversations, as long as one approached it with a willingness to understand other cultural heritages, historical experiences, and political spheres. Mircea may very well be sick of hearing foreign curators like me asking him about Brancusi and deposed dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. But he patiently responded to our questions, and we came away with a renewed understanding, if only partial, of where he comes from.

Should you meet Mircea when he’s in Minneapolis in October, there’s one question you won’t need answered: Vlad the Impaler — the historical basis for Bram Stoker’s Dracula — is not from Transylvania, but Wallachia, a neighboring region to the south.

Photos (top to bottom):
1. Doryun Chong and Yasmil Raymond at the Ethnographic Museum of Transylvania, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Photo: Mircea Cantor
2. Mircea Cantor explaining the totem pole made by Hungarian peasants in Transylvania. Photo: Yasmil Raymond
3. Doryun, artist Adrian Ghenie, and Mircea Cantor. Photo: Yasmil Raymond
4. Doryun and Yasmil enjoying the fresh air and meadows in the museum ground. Photo: Mircea Cantor

 
by Paul Schmelzer at 3:29 pm 2007-08-24
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Before Thursday night’s opening of the exhibition Triangle of Need, photographer Cameron Wittig captured artist Catherine Sulllivan and curator Doryun Chong putting the final touches on the multi-screen installation.

 
by Paul Schmelzer at 1:48 pm 2007-07-19
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7716600.jpgWhen sculptor David Smith was attending art school, he worked at a steel mill to pay the bills. But seeing metal sculptures by Pablo Picasso in 1931 was the "liberating factor," he said, in realizing that steel could be his art, instead of merely a way to fund his education, which at that point focused on painting. Picasso's work has had a powerful influence on generations of artists who found inspiration in his rule-breaking ethic, unorthodox aesthetic, and groundbreaking techniques. The exhibition Picasso and American Art visually illustrates this impact. Following is a verbal rundown of the Spaniard's influence as told by painters and sculptors of yesterday and today.

"You must have heard that there was an exhibition of 400 paintings by Picasso. It was so beautiful, and it revealed such genius and such a collection of treasures that I did not pick up a paintbrush for a month."
--Louise Bourgeois, 1939

"I remember one time I heard something fall and then Jackson [Pollock] yelling, 'God damn it, that guy missed nothing!' I went to see what had happened. Jackson was sitting, staring; and on the floor, where he had thrown it, was a book of Picasso's work."
--Lee Krasner, 1969

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by Paul Schmelzer at 10:40 am 2007-07-06
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0705070906_m_070507_frida3.jpgOne hundred years ago today, Frida Kahlo was born. In Mexico, the occasion is being marked with the opening of the exhibition Treasures from the Blue House, Frida and Diego, featuring never-before-seen items locked away in trunks at Kahlo and husband Diego Rivera’s house, Casa Azul (now the Frida Kahlo Museum). The show includes 22,105 documents, 5,387 photos, 179 pieces of clothing and more than 6,000 magazines and books owned by Kahlo. Much of the material was locked away at Rivera’s request; he asked that her personal effects not be exhibited publicly for 15 years after her death in 1957. The AP reports:

But Dolores Olmedo, a patron of Rivera, kept them closed, believing the trunks could contain personal information that would compromise the couple’s image, said her son, Carlos Phillips Olmedo, who runs several museums, including The Blue House.

In 2004, a year after Olmedo’s death, curators opened the trunks.

Inside they found corsets Kahlo used to support her back, after she fractured it in a bus accident as a young girl.

Curators also found snippets reflecting Kahlo’s daily life, including a trolley car ticket with a scribbled note, a napkin stained with a lipstick kiss, letters from European artists and 102 never-before-seen drawings by Kahlo.

They also discovered 30 photos that Kahlo’s father, photographer Guillermo Kahlo, had taken of himself, possibly inspiring Kahlo’s self portraits which she used to deal with her accident, her tumultuous marriage and her inability to have children.

Closer to home, the Walker, in association with SFMOMA, is commemorating Kahlo’s birth year with the first American traveling Kahlo traveling exhibition in decades. Frida Kahlo will open at a preview party in Minneapolis on October 26. Curated by the Walker’s Betsy Carpenter and guest co-curator (and Kahlo’s official biographer) Hayden Herrera, it features some of Kahlo’s best known paintings, art her works inspired, and a room of photos from Kahlo’s personal albums, many never exhibited before. The show will travel to the Philadelphia Museum of Art this winter and SFMOMA next summer.

Above: Kahlo poses with Guadalupe Marin, onetime wife of Diego Rivera.

 
by Paul Schmelzer at 2:55 pm 2007-06-27
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Kinji Akagawa, a sculptor whose work is in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, was just honored by the McKnight Foundation for his four decades as a Minnesota-based sculptor and public artist. As its 2007 McKnight Distinguished Artist, Akagawa will receive a $40,000 prize and recognition for his work as “a model Minnesota artist,” in the words of McKnight board chair Erika Binger.

His sculpture Garden Seating, Reading, Thinking, commisioned for the 1988 opening of the Walker’s sculpture garden, is a good example of his notion of public art’s focus on “pluralistic activities and the ecology of everyday experiences.” A bench made from locally sourced cedar, green basalt, and granite, the piece offers visitors a place to stop, think, and relax. “I made the piece, but not just as a bench for physical rest. Intellectually, you have to rest within that kind of context; emotionally, you have to rest looking at all the sculpture,” he says. “I used familiar, Midwestern materials: fieldstone and basalt from St. Croix. The bench provides psychological rest, intellectual rest, and physical rest.

The piece, like much of his recent work, melds the elegance and simplicity of the traditional aesthetics from his Japanese background with the specifics of a particular public space: how it is used, where it is located, and how an artist can intervene there. “The world is dysfunctional,” Akagawa says, “but artists try to make it functional by interpreting it.”

According to the Star Tribune, Akagawa’s got plans for the prize funds:

The award includes $40,000 from the McKnight Foundation. Akagawa plans to use it for two long-dreamed of projects. He intends to travel to Scandinavia with his wife, artist Nancy Gipple, to study buildings by Finnish architect-designer Alvar Aalto, whose elegant wood-and-glass structures are reflected in Akagawa’s own work.

He also plans to build a little “study house” for his boxes, benches, furniture and other creations, “like a tea house, which is a Japanese tradition for moon viewing. It is a little bit of poetry in a kind of dwelling, and I’ve thought that if I have a little bit of money I might do it in my back yard.”

A longtime Walker member who has collaborated with the Walker’s visual arts and education departments (for the Walker’s 1986 Tokyo Form and Spirit show he transformed the Art Lab into a Japanese studio), Akagawa is also an educator: since 1973, he has been a professor of fine arts at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He’s been in Minnesota since 1967 and lives in Afton.

From all of us at the Walker, congratulations, Kinji.


 
by Paul Schmelzer at 10:40 am 2007-06-11
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7750600.jpgMark Stevens, critic and co-author (with his wife, Annalyn Swan) of the book de Kooning: An American Master, wrote the following review for New York magazine for the Whitney’s showing of Picasso and American Art. With the exhibition’s Minneapolis debut, June 16 through September 9, Stevens and New York have allowed us to adapt and reprint his essay in the May/June issue of Walker magazine.

In the thirties, the obscure painters who would one day transform American art liked to spend the night in shabby New York cafeterias discussing art over nickel cups of coffee. The subject was painting, all painting. They talked about the painters of the past, Uccello, Piero, Michelangelo; about the pioneering modernists, especially Cézanne; about their great near contemporaries, Miró, Matisse, Mondrian. But the artist they talked about the most--the one who seemed to drink their coffee before they did--was Picasso. Not because he was the biggest or best: others were arguably as important. But the others kept to their games, working within boundaries. They did not possess modernity itself. They did not, like the omnivorous Spaniard, seem to fall upon and ravish every corner of the modern world. They were inspiring uncles, not a devouring father.

Picasso and American Art is an ambitious examination of how this great father-monster shaped the modern American imagination. The way serious artists influence one another is always a subtle and complex subject, especially when the interplay occurs, as it does here, among strong, independent figures rather than between a leader and his followers. In an exhibit where space is limited and curators cannot display less-visible forms of influence, such as the moral or personal sway of an artist, the focus inevitably narrows. Picasso and American Art juxtaposes paintings--it does so brilliantly. Those who like to look closely at individual works will savor the show, entering a state of compare-and-contrast bliss. And, more mysteriously, they may gain a better sense of what’s peculiarly American.
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by Paul Schmelzer at 10:52 am 2007-06-08
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zak.jpgOne of the gems on display at the Walker now is Paper Trail, a great but low-profile showcase of works on paper added to the Permanent Collection in the last decade. Among standout works by Amy Cutler, Glenn Ligon, Adrian Piper, Thomas Hirschhorn, Santiago Cucullu, and Elizabeth Peyton (who did a sweet portrait of Rirkrit Tiravanija as a boy) is Olafur Eliasson’s Your House, a hand-bound, editioned laser-cut book that renders the negative space of the artist’s house at a scale of 85:1.

Zak Smith’s 2004 book-inspired piece, Pictures of What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, is also in the show. Just as the title says, the work features one drawing for each of the 755 pages of Pynchon’s thick tome (detail at right). Smith’s drawings are now compiled in a book of his own: Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow. At the Amazon.com listing for the book, Minneapolis resident J. Vculek makes a plug for the Walker’s show:

If you live anywhere near Minneapolis get yourself over to the Walker Art Center, where every single one of Zak Smith’s drawings/paintings/sculptures (yes, some are three dimensional) for this project are displayed on one wall. (All are in the permanent collection of the Walker.) How do I know it’s all 750+ artworks? Because I counted. 45 columns by 17 rows. You could spend hours staring at them and not exhaust this monumental project. I’m not sure how long they’ll remain on display so don’t put it off.

The answer to that last question: Paper Trail closes September 23.

Update: Taylor finds this shot of Smith’s Walker installation, winner of a Beautiful Capture Award, on Flickr.

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by Paul Schmelzer at 11:00 am 2007-06-06
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Minneapolis-based painter Frank Gaard, whose work is on view in the current exhibition Paper Trail: A Decade of Acquisitions, shared his thoughts in an upcoming issue of Walker magazine on Pablo Picasso’s influence on his work. With the opening of Picasso and American Art just over a week away, here’s what he had to say:

"Most of my pals in high school called me Pablo or Picasso even in signing the yearbook. Steve wrote me from Viet Nam as Pablo. Breaking free of Picasso's pervasive influence was a concern. His pop image was often like the clown who entertains the aristocrats with his foolish antics. Some of the artists Picasso had influenced were of interest in our younger art school days--Matta, Wilfredo Lam, and most of all Arshile Gorky. Most importantly perhaps Pollock and de Kooning seemed to remain deeply taken with Picasso, so much so that Pollock really never broke through 'til he abandoned Picasso. It was Pop Art that changed everything: art became fun and less European. At least we could proceed as if the water had been changed in the bath tub and Pablo was down the drain. The influence of Picasso's diminished stature was the birthplace of my art when the School of Paris gave way to Andy Warhol's Factory."

 
by Paul Schmelzer at 2:39 pm 2007-05-30
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In 1998, Italian conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan hired an actor to put on a Disney-mascot-sized Picasso head and the painter’s signature striped shirt and then hang out, jingling a cup of coins, near the MoMA entrance. At the time he said he liked “the contradiction of Picasso begging,” but offered little more on the subject. Notorious for his pranks, Cattelan doubtless had an intent that hovered somewhere between homage, critique, and a joke at the art world’s expense.

In preparation for the Walker’s June 16 opening of the Whitney-organized exhibition Picasso and American Art — which features Picasso’s art alongside work by artists including de Kooning, Pollock, Johns, Warhol, and others — I asked Cattelan to share his musings on Picasso’s impact. His emailed reply, a lengthy list of lines that began “Picasso is,” appeared to be either the result of free association or of a Google search of the phrase. Here’s an excerpt from that email:

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picasso is missing
picasso is a communist
picasso is an elderly cat with clipped ears
picasso is a docudrama and immortal beloved is a tragedy
picasso is not the sort of car that leaps to mind when you think ‘road trip’
picasso is not the world
picasso is the only artist i know of that is mentioned in a devo song
picasso is 20th century art
picasso is one of the rare gold
picasso is being picky about eating and seems to be sulking
picasso is the greatest artist of the twentieth century
picasso is situated in the heart of historic paris
picasso is also equipped with a wealth of stowage space
picasso is much more controversial than Rembrandt
picasso is born in malaga in 1881 and died in the south of france in 1973
picasso is rather unique
picasso is a struggling artist
picasso is a feature film written and directed by stephen kijak with an ensemble cast including alexis arquette
picasso is a registered domain trade name of max corporation
picasso is not shown to have a remorseful bone in his body
picasso is known for his etchings
picasso is an interactive drawing tool in the style of unix idraw or macdraw
picasso is considered by most authorities as the greatest artist of the 20th century
picasso is soon to become a reality
picasso is the name of this ladybird
picasso is built in vigo
picasso is the greatest art genius of the twentieth century
picasso is a coloring book and creativity package for children
picasso is a womanizer
picasso is a 1994 westphalian gelding
picasso is interesting because everything about his life is related to his art
picasso is classified as a refined

Join us for the Picasso preview party, June 15. Images courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

 
by Paul Schmelzer at 12:14 pm 2007-04-26
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peter-eleey.jpgFrom Christo’s Gates to the Statue of Liberty, New York is a tough place to compete in the realm of public art. But one organization, Creative Time, has been doing it, boldly, for 33 years, bringing fantastic explosions to the skyline above Central Park, moving images of Donald Sutherland and Tilda Swinton to MoMA’s facade and a Chinese artist’s quiet intervention -- delivered with a pot of water and a Chinese calligraphy brush -- to a downtown sidewalk.

At the helm for these projects by Cai Guo-Qiang, Doug Aitken, and Song Dong was Peter Eleey, who left Creative Time in March to become the Walker’s new Visual Arts Curator. Eleey took a moment away from organizing his first show here, a multidisciplinary exhibition of Trisha Brown’s dance and visual art scheduled for April 2008, to discuss his past projects, “magical thinking” in art, and the question of success and failure in a curator’s work.

Your last job was at Creative Time, an organization that since the early 1970s has used public spaces and spaces not often used for art to present temporary installations. This challenges what we traditionally think of as the art-viewing experience.

It's true, unless we expect art to be shaking up exactly those expectations. There's a great thing that happens when art surprises us, and that drama can often be easier for artists and arts presenters to create outside a museum. But in some ways the key to surprise is just understanding what people's expectations are in a given situation, and of course we have all sorts of expectations inside a museum. Though I was working over the last few years largely outside of those institutional frameworks, I gradually became curious about the challenges of curating with those "interior" expectations in mind.

As seen from New York, what was it about the Walker that you found appealing?

For one, the Walker strives to be "more than a museum," and this sense of the institution as something more porous, with fluid boundaries, was very attractive. Most importantly, perhaps, the Walker is known as a place of unfettered experimentation and commitment both to artists and to audiences. So often arts presenters talk about giving artists the space to experiment and try new things, and we forget that the best contemporary museums should also be places where audiences feel they have the opportunity and support to challenge themselves. I think that's something Kathy [Halbreich, the Walker's director] in particular should be credited with -- an even-handed commitment to this kind of experimental risk-taking relationship on both sides of the table.

Interview continues…

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by Paul Schmelzer at 3:36 pm 2007-04-05
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wurm.jpgFor a show of works on paper, Paper Trail surprises with its ample doses of yarn: one room in the back features poster-sized drawings by Austria-born artist Erwin Wurm alongside a pile of plus-sized sweaters. The drawings instruct visitors to crawl into the stretched-out, sack-like knitwear and hold a pose for a minute to become sculpture.

Walker crew member Noah Wilson found the sweaters at area thrift stores, writes the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

Curator Siri Engberg declared his purchases — orange, aqua, lime and a crimson-burgundy herringbone — perfect. After discussing how they were to be washed and hang-dried to stretch out, Engberg explained that the sweaters were an interactive element in a “drawing” by German artist Erwin Wurm. The Walker owns little ink sketches by Wurm that have been scanned, enlarged and posted next to a low pedestal on which the sweaters will be piled. The enlarged drawings show people in sluglike postures struggling into and out of sweaters, and the idea is to entice museum visitors to do goofy things with the garments — pull them onto their legs, crawl through an arm. Wurm’s participatory performance art might prove more engaging in locales where sweaters are more of a novelty — Hawaii, perhaps? — but there’s something refreshing about the endearingly off-beat enterprise.

This morning, Michèle Steinwald demonstrated the piece for me, wurming into one of the more Cosbyesque sweaters (top) before letting me capture the performance using my digital camera’s video function (she was a shoe-in for the job: as a 17-year-old in Canada, she’d modeled artist Jana Sterbak’s meat dress). Her performance inspired others, including Walker staffers Jeff Hnilicka, Sara Nichol, Brett Smith and Chad Kloepfer, along with a few guys hanging out in the gallery, to give Wurm’s instant sculpture a try.

 
by Paul Schmelzer at 10:50 am 2007-03-22
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After 16 years, Walker director Kathy Halbreich has decided to step down. She informed staff at a Walker-wide meeting on Monday that her sabbatical last fall allowed her time to reflect on her future, and the fruit of that reflection was the awareness that she’s got “one more chapter left” in her professional career. She’s certainly accomplished much during her years here, a fact acknowledged by the success of the $100 million capital campaign and building expansion, a 2005 Award for Curatorial Excellence by The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and inclusion in ArtReview’s Power 100 list of the art world’s most influential figures.

She’s not sure what’s next, but decided to ponder that blank canvas with a bit of distance from the institution she began leading in 1991. Only the fourth director in the Walker’s history, Halbreich emphasized she’s not departing for another position, just to get spiritual and intellectual space to welcome her next opportunity.

The Walker board is conducting an international search for her replacement, but Halbreich has agreed to stay with us until November 1. Over the next seven months, a management team made up of chief curator Philippe Vergne, chief operating officer Dave Steglich, and development director Christopher Stevens will work with her to ensure continuity during this transition, she announced.

In one of the first articles on her departure, Carol Vogel assessed: “That the Walker is viewed as an adventurous institution, regularly organizing challenging exhibitions and artists' performances, is in large part owed to Ms. Halbreich's vision.” Staff, seemingly in agreement, gave a teary Halbreich a standing ovation as the meeting concluded.

Shortly after that meeting, word passed quickly to the press and across the blogosphere. Here’s a rundown of the coverage:

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by Paul Schmelzer at 3:42 pm 2007-02-26
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Photographer Cameron Wittig captured in silhouette while photographing Kara Walker’s Endess Conundrum this morning.

(Click for full-size image.)

 
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