Visual Arts

In the dawn of the Walker blogs, I had the privilege of writing the first post on the Visual Arts site. Some of you, our faithful readers, may remember my little adventure in the Mojave Desert in search of a used airplane part. You may also remember the very slow march of the elephant sculpture down the Hennepin Avenue through the Walker’s main entrance, down the sloping Hennepin Lounge, then up the stairs into Gallery 4. Both of these rather unusual manoeuvres were accomplished in preparation for the 2005 exhibition House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective, which the Walker chief curator/deputy director Philippe Vergne and I organized. In the last two years since the end of its run in January 2006, I’ve been often approached by our local audiences, who told me that it was one of their favorite exhibitions at the Walker (despite the fact that they knew nothing about the Chinese-born, Paris-based artist).

You may be surprised to learn that the exhibition is still on view. The airplane cockpit, the elephant, and other works have traveled to three subsequent venues, rather slowly but surefootedly, across the North American continent then crossed the Pacific Ocean: first, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) in North Adams, then the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC, and finally the spanking new Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, opening on March 22, 2008. Yes, that’s right–Beijing, China. Founded by Guy & Miriam Ullens, dedicated Belgian collectors of Chinese contemporary art who long dreamed of bringing their collection to the country of its origin, the Center is an ambitious institution that strives to bring international art to the heart of the emerging superpower and also to give in-depth treatment to the important contribution Chinese artists have made to global art in the last three decades or so. The center opened its doors in last November, and House of Oracles is only the second exhibition. The magnificent exhibition space was remodeled from a former ceramics factory in an East German-built industrial complex known as 798, now also known as the Dashanzi Art District.

My first visit to 798 was a little more than two years ago, in November 2005. The district had been in existence for a couple of years by then, and the future Ullens Center was a cavernous, evacuated space, with a soaring (I’m guessing, about 50-60 feet-high) ceiling and a now defunct industrial kiln/chimney. The on-site engineer explained to me how the space will be remodeled–a big exhibition hall here, a smaller gallery there, the office up there, etc.–which I, while nodding politely and sympathetically, could not really visualize. Many things had happened between the 2005 visit and when I attended the opening of the Center in November 2007. Certain things were still the same, or more and more of the same–for instance, the acrid yet strangely fragrant, hallucinogenic smell of burning coals and leaded gas that hover over the sprawling metropolis. And the proud capital city of People’s Republic of China keeps on expanding in a clearly measurable way but with a mind-blowing velocity. Beijing is one of the most centralized and organized cities I know of (I realize that that sounds totally paradoxical), with the Forbidden City and the Tian’anmen Square at the dead center and concentric circles of “ring roads” rippling out into yesterday’s suburbs and surrounding villages and quickly turning them into today’s peripheral hubs. In late 2005, the area around 798, which is located on the northeastern corner of the city between the Fourth and the Fifth ring roads, still felt a bit sparse. In late 2007, it was as busy as any other business districts far closer to the city center. Trying to recall what things were like a month ago in China these days is a completely futile exercise. I digress.

Late night on March 17, I arrived again in Beijing after a 15-hour-long flight from Minneapolis via Tokyo. The next morning, I walked from my hotel to the Ullens Center. All looked very familiar since I had been there only four months prior. Except that a giant sand storm engulfed the city--something that happens in the Northern part of China as winter changes into spring. Brutal. At the Center, the installation of "House of Oracles" had been going on for almost two weeks, with the artist and two of our veteran exhibition technicians, Phil Docken and Bob Brown. I have to admit that I was a little worried when I first saw the Ullens' spectacular main gallery, which had been left more or less intact from the original structure, because a lot of space with a high ceiling isn't necessarily a good thing for showing art. That is, even when art is the size of an airplane. It was rather ironic that even Huang's "Bat Project 4"--the sculpture that actually incorporates the used airplane cockpit we found in Northern California--seemed dwarfed by the hangar-like space. Yes, their gallery is that big. Nonetheless, Huang is a master at dealing with spaces (as anyone who saw the exhibition at the Walker or at any other subsequent venues would know). He designed a couple of enclosed rooms inside the mammoth hall, and I was immediately struck by the incredible sightlines he was ingeniously creating with various combinations of works in the exhibition.

Thus I was reminded of how fortunate and privileged I was to be part of the incredible journey of this project. I got to see the enormous "Bank of Sand, Sand of Bank"–a scaled replica of the 1920s’ colonial Beaux Arts-style building in Shanghai made out of a mixture of sand and cement–going up four times, and slowly crumbling each time, as a regenerative metaphor of the enduring legacy of colonialism. In Beijing, thanks to the ample space we had, we were finally able to erect this 20-ton work completely in the round (in the three previous versions, the backside had to be against an existing wall of the building). I got to see “Python,” a more than 50 feet-long wood skeleton of a cosmic serpent, rising and falling, dancing up and down in four different spaces. And I got to see four reincarnations of “Theater of the World,” a gladiatorial arena filled with insects and reptiles left to their own devices that sparked at-times heated exchanges between our blog readers (the piece was shut down by the British Columbia SPCA on the day of the exhibition’s opening in Vancouver).

The opening of this Beijing presentation, I can say, was a truly historic occasion, because this was not only the first Walker-organized exhibition to go to China (in fact, Asia), but also the first full-scale retrospective exhibition of a Chinese artist to take place in China. Thanks to the incredible commitment on the part of the Ullens, the comprehensive monograph the Walker published to accompany the exhibition was translated in full into Chinese--another first for us. I don't want to sound too self-congratulatory here, but this exhibition and tour has been a truly special event of which Philippe and I couldn't be more proud.

At the same time, I feel a little bit sad. Perhaps it's only natural. Having witnessed the exhibition's evolution over more than four years, I was seeing its final arrival in perhaps where it all started and where it always meant to come back to. And I was able to this in the company of a remarkable artist–the most generous and wise soul I know of. (Most Chinese audiences who came to the exhibition's opening called him "Huang Laoshi," i.e., "Master Huang.") But you can't have too much of a good thing. All good things must come to an end. So I bid you farewell, Master Huang.

À bientôt.
Zai jian!

Last week I met someone who, upon learning I’m a curator, asked me what I do at work every day--a reasonable question. Right now, I'm currently finishing up installing the exhibition Trisha Brown: So That the Audience Does Not Know Whether I Have Stopped Dancing with our esteemed crew. (The show opens Thursday night with a live performance drawing by the artist: http://calendar.walkerart.org/event.wac?id=4323)

Putting a show together is what I might describe as the spatial voodoo part of what we do. It can often feel like trying to decorate a house while you are still designing it, or building a musical instrument that you can't try to get a sound out of until all the pieces have been assembled. It becomes easy to obsess over the tiniest details. This is because--as one of my colleagues put it--there are an infinite number of choices you can make, and at the same time, really only a few right ones.

The most difficult section of the show to hang has proven to be a large wall of archival posters from Trisha's performances over the past three decades, which is the first thing visitors will see when they walk into the gallery. In order to visualize it, we marked off the wall dimensions on the floor, and figured out the configuration within that area. Periodically, I went up in a small lift to get a better view down onto the posters. In the course of about 24 hours, I probably tried three or four different approaches, and each one felt almost right to me. But the best solution eventually made itself clear.

As curators we often have ideas about how to install an artist's work (whether by itself or with other things) to emphasize different aspects of it, or to best express certain ideas. But when it's up against the wall, the art tends to tell us what it wants to do, refining its own image in our minds. The voodoo element of our jobs, I suppose, is everything up until that moment.

**

Installation photos by Gene Pittman

Nobody takes a good idea and makes it his own like Richard Prince, who has carved his place in contemporary art by recycling, reflecting, and reframing the imagery of others. His unique art of appropriation–from biker culture to car culture, comedians to cowboys, pinups to pulp fiction–redefined the creative process for a generation of artists.

Organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Richard Prince: Spiritual America opens next week in galleries 4, 5, and 6. Tickets for the After Hours preview party on Friday, March 21 are still available.

Installation photo by Cameron Wittig

Can writing do justice to the art of Tino Sehgal, or should we only make utterances? How do we preserve Sehgal's work, or is there nothing to preserve — only an endless series of originals? Even after three months, there are still so many questions: Is this good? New? Propaganda?

In 1956, the Situationist Guy Debord called out for an "educative propaganda," on account of "the emergence of productive forces that necessitate other production relations and a new practice of life….that must encompass all the perpetually interacting aspects of social reality." Who knew such serious education could be so funny? So tongue-in-cheek? Though, physical comedy has always been a social leveler.

And it takes up space, which makes it sculptural, where "we mold and shape the world in which we live" (Joseph Beuys). Not unlike planting thousands of trees or moving a mountain of sand. Only without the trees and without the mountain of sand.

Yet, we are not deserted. All is not lost. Between production and de-production, between absence and presence, between object and viewer, between you and me, an endless reverberation. A (sub)liminal sublime.

The way you keep singing the song you woke up with in your head. The way each movement can be broken down and put back together. The way you know what this is before I even have to tell you. It's not a headline but a broadcast--a conditioned choreography in which the audience is on/in demand.

Your attention need not be long, but should you accept the invitation — should you give of yourself the time and place — you will see this is not a "dance problem," per se, like a man bouncing in the corner. It isn't even about the not-so-hidden camera rolling on the floor. No, it has to do with something more sustaining.

In a 2001 interview, the artist Mel Chin described his remediation project Revival Field (1991-94)--a Superfund site-specific work that took place at Pig's Eye Landfill on the outskirts of St. Paul, Minnesota--as "driven by some kind of poetry. That poetry of plants having the capacity to transform a system...[yet it] was also driven by pragmatism. I think you have to have both."

What is the poetry of Tino Sehgal? What is the pragmatism? The answers are in the questions, I think, but they are also between the lines. And what we will be left with, what will remain, will soon blend into the landscape and be invisible, but still here.

Images:

Joseph Beuys, La rivoluzione siamo Noi, 1972, phototype on polyester ink, ink stamp; edition 7/180. Published by Modern Art Agency, Naples, and Edition Tangente, Heidelberg. Alfred and Marie Greisinger Collection, Walker Art Center, T.B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1992

Francis Alÿs, selection from Cuando la fe mueve montañas (When Faith Moves Mountains), 2002-2003, acrylic, graphite, masking tape on vellum. Collection Walker Art Center, T.B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2004

Bruce Nauman, Bouncing In The Corner, 1968, Video. Collection Walker Art Center, T.B. Wlaker Acquisition Fund, 2002

Dan Graham, Roll, Filming Process, 1970, Super-8. Courtesy of Andre Goeminnie Collection, Nazareth, Belgium

Mel Chin, Revival Field, 1991-1994, Pig’s Eye Landfill, St. Paul, Minnesota. Courtesy greenmuseum.org

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.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

It is often the norm that exhibitions take a great deal of time to conceive and to organize and very little time to be experienced. This is not the case with the Brave New Worlds, an exhibition that includes more than a dozen of videos and 16 mm and 35 mm films, or to be really precise, 3 hours and 33 minutes and 96 seconds of moving image. While imagining the show, my colleague and co-curator Doryun Chong and I sketched out the floor-plan of the pieces in relationship with one another formally and conceptually but also chronologically, taking into consideration their duration in relation to other pieces. We roughly estimated that it could take at least four hours for a visitor to see the entire show, maybe without reading labels. It might seem like a large amount of time to spend in the galleries but we imagined the exhibition as a journey of investigations, where the juxtaposition between time-based pieces along photographs, sculptures, drawings, and paintings allow for shifting levels of contemplation as one walks through each room.

During the preparation process we switched the location of several pieces all the way until the last minute until we were able to feel the fluidity between the narratives and their movement. Afterwards, Doryun mentioned to me that he understood the exhibition as a musical piece in three movements. I’ve come to see it as a chart of proximities, like the one drawn in the bottom left-hand corner of Jorge Macchi’s collage Liliput (2007), where individual works of art are interconnected with one another in a number of common areas in each of the galleries where they meet and share sightlines, floor and wall spaces, sound, light reflections or a cast shadows from their neighboring pieces. As its title suggests Brave New Worlds is not a swift stroll through one world but a journey through a constellation of worlds, viewpoints, and moving images that range from the open sea to a public park, from a narrow corridor to a deserted road, and from a floating satellite to mesmerizing skies. I recommend to leave your watch at home.

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.

The paintings of Frida Kahlo come to life this month at the Walker thanks in part to a new component of the exhibition–the Antenna Audio XP-vision™ multimedia player. This new handheld device goes beyond the traditional audio tour by allowing visitors to access archival images and rare film footage as well as audio interpretation and video interviews. Highlighting works in the exhibition, the tour touches on topics that include Kahlo’s life and times, her personal photo albums, and the importance of Mexican folk traditions as expressed in her art. You will also hear interviews with artists such as Kiki Smith and Dulce Maria Nuñez; singer Patti Smith; novelist Carole Maso; and exhibition co-curators Hayden Herrera and Elizabeth Carpenter, who consider different aspects of Kahlo’s legacy.

The tour was produced by Antenna Audio in collaboration with the Walker Art Center and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The price of the tour is $6 for the general public and $5 for Walker members. Available in English and Spanish.

TOUR SAMPLES
Exhibition co-curator Hayden Herrera on Kahlo’s painting The Two Fridas (audio only)

Kiki Smith on Frida Kahlo

As part of the exhibition Brave New Worlds, Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi has created a drawing installation in the stairwell outside of galleries 4, 5, and 6 featuring his incisive commentary in black marker. Gene Pittman took these shots of the entrance to gallery 4.

Paul previously posted videos here and here, but it is well worth a click to view the videos from Perjovschi’s recent MoMA show of the artist in action.

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.

Brave New Worlds opens tomorrow, and many of the artists have been in the Walker installing their work. Photographer Gene Pittman captured some images of the installation in process. There are a few more images on flickr, too.

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.

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.

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

Last week I had the privilege of spending an afternoon digging through the Walker's archives and managed to uncover several inches of files on the 1980 exhibition, Picasso: From the Future Picasso Museum, Paris. As someone who wasn't even alive when the Walker put on this exhibition, what I found out about its history was just fascinating...

In a settlement following his death in 1973, the French government selected a group of key works from Picasso's personal collection of some 45,000 objects, in lieu of inheritance taxes from his heirs. It was decided that these 700 works would form the basis of what we know today as the Museé Picasso in Paris. Little did I know that outside of France, the Walker was the very first museum to ever exhibit from that legacy collection, the second being the Museum of Modern Art in New York. After that, the works returned to the new Picasso museum and it was said that the chance of their ever traveling again was doubtful. Yet those who were among the Walker's record-breaking crowds in 1980 will recognize a few of those pieces back in the galleries for Picasso and American Art, including "The Shadow" (1953). And as it did in 1980, the Walker will provide extended hours for Picasso's final weekend, as follows:

Thursday-Saturday, September 6-8, 10am - 10pm
Sunday, September 9, 10am - 6pm

“The Shadow,” 1953

Did you also know that...

• In preparation for the 1980 exhibition, the Walker sold advance tickets for the first time ever. They also increased staffing for a number of departments, including maintenance crews whose job was partly to work overnight repainting walls that got dirty during the day.
• Marketing for the exhibition included daily, alternating menus in Gallery 8 that featured French and Spanish cuisine and a Metro Transit bus that was painted into what was called the "Picassomobile."
• An art graduate student was hired to decorate cake reproductions of works in the exhibition for the members' preview events. The cakes took one week to complete and were 4 x 5 feet and 48 inches in diameter. The frosting alone required 70 pounds of powdered sugar, 14 pounds of margarine, one quart of vanilla, one package of salt and two and a half gallons of whole milk.