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.

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.

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.

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.

After 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”?

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

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.

“ 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

“ In my early cubist work, I was always afraid of looking like Picasso. The more I tried to evade his influence, the more self-conscious the paintings got and the more evident was the source.”

–Roy Lichtenstein, 1970

“ He’s always with me–certain artists are always with me. And surely Picasso is one of them.”

–Willem de Kooning, 1974

“ I remember the first Picasso I ever saw. . . . I thought it was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. . . . I didn’t realize I would have to revise my notions of what painting is.”

–Jasper Johns, 1977

“ I guess what I really like are those photos of [Picasso] sitting in one of his big rooms in a big ugly chair looking at the paintings he had done that day. . . . These were the late paintings, the ones Robert Hughes dismissed (what an idiot). I love the late paintings; they’re very cartoon-like–Cartoon Picasso. He would do four or five in a day. Then he would stack them up and maybe mix in an older painting and sit there and stare at them. The time sitting and staring at what you do is good time.”

–Richard Prince, Vogue, September 2006

“ There’s that wonderful Picasso self-portrait, crayon and whatever, of a big head with very big eyes and stubble all over. It’s such a great, great work, one of the last things he did. It looks like a skull. My self-portrait with beard stubble [1968's Big Self-Portrait, in the Walker's collection], which I guess was done a few years earlier than Picasso’s, is in the same spirit–non-heroic, not portrait-as-celebrity or the Warhol sense of superstars, but reality and awkwardness and painfulness and all of that stuff.

It’s hard to remember how late Picasso was trashed, as well as was late de Kooning. To really have an impact, an artist has to finish great. Had Matisse not done his cutouts, which he reinvented in Nice, I don’t think he would be considered a great artist today. You really need a great endgame. And when Picasso was marginalized at the end of his career by the critics, he had tremendous urgency for artists. Artists looked at that work and saw unbelievable energy and invention at a point where most artists are just content to plow the same field. Attitudinally he’s saying, vital to the end, inventive til the end, takes risks. It was extremely encouraging.

What you do is you go out and reinvent the whole God-damn ball game.”

–Chuck Close, Vogue, September 2006

“ Picasso’s famous painting of the whores [Les Demoiselles d'Avignon], inspired by African masks, was kind of influential. So Picasso, he’s the important guy, but my appreciation of what he was doing was slightly jaundiced–just slightly. He is the Big Daddy of everything, so maybe I just feel like denying him that privilege. I didn’t want to get too caught up in the romance of him.

For a little while, my work was sort of contesting the primitivist impulse in his work, or at least playing with it. But I was inwardly circumventing the Picasso connection, moving it toward something that embodied the fascination with black myths and primitives and sexuality and vitality–just from a less Picasso-like angle.

My attention always comes back to that one piece–since I’m not a French-speaking person, I call them damsels. That’s it in some ways for me and Picasso. I was fiddling around with the damsels when I was in graduate school, and I made something in response to it. I found an interesting porn magazine, with a photo essay of four black women pretending to engage in a big or small orgy. They were very poised. One of the images seemed to have been modeled on Picasso’s damsels. I chopped up the magazine for collage purposes, years ago. I still have some of the clippings floating around in my clipping file.

I’ve been thinking about collage a lot lately, and my lack of regard for it. I don’t trust my hand with it–layering and making very clean aesthetic and visual leaps between types of information. But in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been in my studio makging things that could possibly be called collages. Maybe the damsels will get into my new collages, but I don’t want to go head-to-head with Picasso. No, man. Not right now.”

–Kara Walker, Vogue, September 2006

“ Most of my pals in high school called me Pablo or Picasso even in signing the yearbook. 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 bathtub 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.”

–Frank Gaard, in an email, May 2007

Image: Roy Lichtenstein, Femme au Chapeau, 1962 (c) Estate of Roy Lichtenstein

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.

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.

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, Mir, 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.

To make the subject manageable, the exhibition concentrates on Picasso’s impact on ten Americans (Max Weber, Stuart Davis, John Graham, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, David Smith, Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns). Weber was the first American to respond powerfully to Picasso. He probably saw Picasso’s masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon when he was in Paris in 1908 and seems to have understood immediately that Picasso’s fracturing of space–and progression toward Cubism–represented a new way to convey the modern world. But he was no academic copycat. In a picture called Chinese Restaurant, he added American pizzazz to what, in Paris, still remained a fairly reserved and cloistered style.

The leading New York critic of the day, Henry McBride, emphasized the point: “[Weber] is as all-accepting as Walt Whitman, and at last we have an artist who is not afraid of this great big city of New York.” Stuart Davis was equally fearless, and, like Weber, he found in Picasso what suited the boisterous New World. Davis responded less to the intricate, inward-looking quality of Cubism than to the bold, brightly colored, and declarative planes in certain other pictures of Picasso’s. He further simplified Picasso’s ideas. He dickered with the scale. And, suddenly, if you hang a Davis near a Picasso, you begin to feel American art swaggering out of the studio. You know billboards, jazz, horns, and the strut of the street.

Just as artists grew accustomed to Cubism, Picasso radically shifted styles–entering, in the early twenties, his neoclassical period and, not long after that, shifting into Surrealist-inspired work. Picasso’s mercurial temperament was profoundly liberating to Americans: It embodied freedom, change, and possibility. He became a kind of enriching existential paradox: He’d done everything, but nothing was impossible. Without Picasso’s neoclassical Woman in White, we would probably not have Gorky’s great portrait of himself and his mother–or, probably, Gorky’s own shifting explorations of style. And without Picasso’s struggle with the female figure–in many forms and guises–we probably would not have de Kooning’s ever-changing American bitch-goddess.

Picasso’s extraordinary aura–enhanced by his confrontation with the horrors of war in Guernica–helped provoke American artists to reach for a grand achievement of their own. The Abstract Expressionist rooms contain some telling juxtapositions. Whereas a Picasso painting always seems to remain within the rectangle, behaving, finally, like a good boy, those of Pollock and de Kooning–as the scale of American art begins to expand–attack the frame, becoming increasingly tumid, unruly, and explosive. The Americans were always complaining about the fancy “cuisine” of European art, and here, where a Picasso and a Pollock share space, you can see what they mean.

By the mid-fifties, Picasso, though still active, no longer touched the quick of American painting. Young artists did not find themselves roiled by his example. Perhaps the last important artist whom he affected as a young man was Roy Lichtenstein. I had always thought that Lichtenstein’s Pop riffs on Picasso were just a kind of showy shuffling of the art-card deck, but, in fact, Lichtenstein, as a young soldier in Paris, revered Picasso. In the context of this show, with the earlier example of Stuart Davis still in mind, Lichtenstein’s Pop versions of Picasso suddenly become more revealing. They represent the kind of billboarding of art, artist, and celebrity that we now take for granted in American culture.

Most of these artists are, of course, well known. I can hear the moans. More Picasso? Pollock again? In this show, however, the eccentric angle refreshes the old hat. Some pictures are famous, others little known, even when they’re by Picasso. But all look different in this company. The end of the show [is saved for] Jasper Johns, who, in contrast to the other Americans, began to engage Picasso only late in his own American career, having already formed his own sensibility. There is something melancholy about the ending Johns makes. He is an artist who, in his work, often thinks of death. Picasso becomes, for him, an occasion for rumination. He remembers remembering.

Image: Roy Lichtenstein, Girl with Beach Ball III, 1977 Oil and Magna on canvas 80 x 66 in. (203.2 x 167.6 cm)

Collection Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Modern Art Foundation, Inc. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein Image

© 2006 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington

One 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.

“ 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.”