Left to right: Mylinh Trieu Nguyen (Los Angeles); Andria Hickey (St. John's, Newfoundland);Dan Byers (Newton, Massachusetts); Noa Segal (Haifa, Israel) Photo: Gene Pittman

This is a longer version of the interviews with visual arts fellows Dan Byers and Andria Hickey, from a story in the July/August issue of Walker magazine. Design fellow Noa Segal has posted her interview and Mylinh Trieu’s over on the design blog.

For nearly three decades, the Walker has been recruiting recent graduates and junior professionals to work as fellows in its design and visual arts departments. As full-time, full-fledged staff, fellows experience the entire scope of graphic design and curatorial work in a museum, while bringing with them fresh energy and new ideas. A number of Walker fellows have also gone on to prominent positions at museums and design firms around the world. As their time here draws to a close, the 2008-2009 group talks about what brought them here, what they’ve experienced, and what’s in store as they move on.

= Daniel Byers =

I got into this line of work because … after some time as a studio art major in college (mostly painting, some textiles stuff), I realized I wasn’t the sort to of person who could be by himself in the studio for hours on end – people, and collaborative work are very important to me. Working with artists and Ian Berry, the curator at Skidmore’s Tang Museum, provided a model for being engaged with artists and artwork – as well as writing – in a collaborative, experimental environment. In a way, I was also attracted to a line of work where taste, aesthetics, theory, history, craft and the sense of sustaining public culture all connected.

My first impressions of the Walker came from …

I’ve known about the Walker since I was an undergraduate at the Tang Museum, and admired the publications (from the magazine to the beautiful catalogs) that came across my desk. It always seemed a sort of beacon of — to use an abused word — maverick integrity, creativity, and commitment to artists. Since working at the Fabric Workshop and Museum I’d always hoped that I’d end up at the Walker one day.

While working here, I contributed … to catalogs for two Walker-organized exhibitions: The Quick and the Dead and the forthcoming Abstract Resistance (opening in February 2010). Equally import were the many, many meetings and discussions with fellow visual arts staff and staff from other departments, which more often than not allowed real discourse — and a good amount of humor.

Other high (and low) points … Quick and the Dead catalog writing and crazy work before its deadline (this was a simultaneous high and low point!); discussions with curator Yasmil Raymond about Abstract Resistance; karaoke with selected Walker curators (they know how they are) at the Art of This benefit; laughing at lunch with the visual arts department.

I love what I do because … I get to work with interesting people, I get to research and write, I get to talk about art, and most important, I participate in the creation of public culture. Curating, is, at its core, enabling artworks — culture — to enter the public discourse, in a public space. I’m committed to the relevance of art exhibitions the same way I’m committed to the survival of newspapers, public space in cities, public radio, small businesses as community meeting places, music venues — anything that allows people to meet around information, opinion, and expressions of culture. We need these spaces more than ever, and sadly they are withering as private culture and personalized content dominate our sense of how to engage with the world.

A Twin Cities image that will remain with me is … walking to work in January: two dead squirrels on the sidewalk, frozen from the cold, separated by a few blocks. Good thing I had a heavy coat.

After leaving the Walker … I will be working as an assistant curator of contemporary art at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh–a position I would not have gotten without my experience at the Walker.

An exhibition I have in mind … involves Charles Burchfield and a few artists from younger generations. Burchfield’s work is hard to place and its incredible otherworldliness has interesting analogs with artists working through the 60s to today.

= Andria Hickey =

Before coming to the Walker . . . my experiences working with artists really centered around my involvement with artist-run centers in Newfoundland and Montreal as a programmer and board member. In Canada these centers form an extensive part of the national contemporary art scene. I’d followed the Walker for a long time, mostly by way of the Web site and catalogues, and I had always admired how it maintained an artist-centric mission. When I received a travel grant from my school (Concordia University in Montreal) to do some research for my master’s thesis on Kara Walker, I jumped at the opportunity and soon discovered the fellowship program–it seemed like a dream job. One thing led to another, and two years later, here I am. It’s been an incredible opportunity to work with and for some of the most exciting artists of our time.

I wanted to come to the Walker because . . . Besides getting to work with some of my dream artists and on dream exhibitions, joining the curatorial team is a very rigorous experience that has challenged me to think outside the box, push myself and my ideas harder. Just observing ways that different curators work is an incredible experience, and as a fellow I really became part of a family at the Walker. I’m not sure if the chemistry comes from the level of dedication, creativity, and brains in the building, or from the extreme cold–winter in Minneapolis is colder than Canada!

Some of my high points . . . hanging the Richard Prince show with Philippe Vergne; burying a skeleton and working out the “spatial voodoo” of The Quick and the Dead with Peter Eleey; trying to fly a homemade hot air balloon at 5 am in rural Minnesota with Tomás Saraceno, Yasmil Raymond, Alberto Pessavento, and James Flaten, followed by a “traditional” Perkins breakfast.

Julie Caniglia: How did this show begin for you?

Peter Eleey: I wanted to do an exhibition about the things we don’t know, the big questions and deep mysteries in life, and our desire for experiences that transcend those we have every day. These are things that science, philosophy, and religion deal with perhaps more obviously than contemporary art does, but throughout history, art has offered us ways of thinking about things beyond the here and now. We expect to see objects when we visit museums, and yet this show allows us to consider things beyond what we can see. It’s very much about all that is “more than meets the eye.”

Pierre Huyghe's "Timekeeper"

JC: So is that where the connections to conceptual art come in?

PE: In a sense, although the show’s not about conceptual art per se. Artists from the heyday of that movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, such as Bruce Nauman, Adrian Piper, George Brecht, and Robert Barry, had a keen interest in those big questions and deep mysteries. Brecht, for example, was a research chemist before he became an artist. Barry wanted to make things that could last forever and expand infinitely-he worked with materials from science supply stores. Lygia Clark made foldable sculptures that could be turned repeatedly inside out. They are like personal models of the universe.

JC: Can you talk a bit about how those relationships between art and science play out in the exhibition?

PE: Well, there are works by a few actual scientists, like a 1966 drawing a mathematician did to illustrate how we could turn a sphere inside out without breaking it. Looking at it alongside one of Clark’s sculptures, it becomes clear that at right around the same time, science and art were both finding new ways to think about space. A group in Los Angeles called the Institute for Figuring was founded in 2003 by a science writer and an art historian to explore the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of math and science. They have used knitting and crochet-crafts, really-to model an extra dimension called hyperbolic space. They’re coming to the Walker on July 30 to teach people how to crochet their own models of this dimension.

JC: So this show is going pretty far afield from conceptual art and that popular notion that it doesn’t actually offer anything to look at. After all, The Quick and the Dead fills three sizable Walker galleries.

PE: Well, there are some invisible things, like an electromagnetic energy field, which you simply have to trust exists. But there is a lot to look at, from films to performances to sculptures to paintings and drawings. The earliest piece is a 1933 photograph that Harold Edgerton took of a glass of milk shattering; the most recent is a sound installation that Susan Philipsz has made for the Walker parking ramp.

JC: A number of other works are placed outside the galleries. Why?

PE: A lot of the artists in the show explore different ways of expanding time and space beyond the present moment or location. For example, Simon Starling has “borrowed” some sunlight from a desert in Spain to make his site-specific painting on the ceiling of the Hennepin Lobby. So it made sense to also expand visitors’ experiences beyond the physical space of the galleries. In addition to Philipsz’s work, other sound-based works in the show include John Cage’s Organ2/ASLSP. The Basilica of Saint Mary will host organ performances of the piece on selected Thursday nights. A Nauman work in the gallery broadcasts sound from the interior of a tree located outside the museum. And there are two works buried outdoors, along with some other things that we want people to discover once they’re here.

Roman Signer's "Rad (Wheel)"

JC: Getting back to the idea of mysteries, right? So much of the art in this exhibition hinges on things out there that are simply unknowable. Which pieces do you think are ultimately the most confounding-or mystical? And conversely, in the course of curating this show, did you find any artworks that seem to clarify something-about the world, the universe, our lives?

PE: I’m a romantic, and I find great beauty in works such as Jason Dodge’s simple bundle of cloth sitting on the gallery floor. The artist asked a weaver in Algeria to make it for him using the length of yarn it would take to go from the surface of the earth to where the weather ends-essentially the border with outer space. Though it leads your mind to the outer reaches of the atmosphere, the cloth turns out to be much smaller than you might think. But I don’t think the works in the show clarify anything-like Jason’s cloth, they instead offer expansive ways of thinking about things that are much bigger than themselves.

Last October, Darsie Alexander’s sprawling retrospective of Austrian sculptor Franz West opened at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), where she had been senior curator of contemporary art. Now, as the Walker’s new chief curator overseeing programs in exhibitions, visual arts, design, performing arts, and film/video as well as the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, Alexander is charged with bringing the institution’s multidisciplinary vision to life. Here she talks about her path in contemporary art and impressions of the Walker as she transitions onto its staff.

Was there one particular thing that made you say, “I absolutely must take this job”?
The projects on the horizon, the staff, the extraordinary collection, and the collegial climate within the museum are just a few factors that had me leaning heavily in favor of seizing this opportunity. The “absolute must” became ever more apparent with my getting-to-know-you visits to the Walker. Even for first-time visitors, it’s clear that this is a special place.

You’re coming from an “encyclopedic” museum to an art center that is not only devoted to contemporary work, but also to interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary programs. What kinds of changes does that mean for you as a curator?
It widens the scope, to be sure. Understanding the relationship of contemporary art to the past as well as the future is an important part of my curatorial perspective, and clearly one informed by my time in Baltimore. But the Walker’s embrace of such a vast array of art forms in the present allows for tremendous experimentation. I am thrilled to be working at a place that puts performance, film/video, and visual arts on an equal footing.

How and when did you become involved with art?
My interest in art grew slowly, and usually revolved around some social outlet or space. The fine art studios were adjacent to the theater in high school, where I spent a lot of time, so there was a natural overlap. The ceramics studios doubled as our makeup and changing room, and we could hear our cues from the stage. Sometimes there would be long stretches before going out onstage again, so a lot of time was spent looking at what the art students were doing. I guess this was my first intent, quiet observation of student artwork.

Like a lot of kids, I was also exposed to art through books and magazines and postcards. I was introduced to Utrillo, Renoir, and other recognized names that way, and always retained a fascination with various forms of reproduction and dissemination. With the Internet, the scope and complexity of dissemination has grown exponentially, and the Walker’s attention to these outlets reflects a keen awareness of how art travels into people’s lives—now virtually.

Were there other art careers besides curatorial work that intrigued you?
For two or three years I wrote art reviews and features for several Boston newspapers, and edited a small journal called VIEWS. Writing so much, usually under deadline, was a great experience. I would see something in the morning, or do a studio visit, and then go home and distill my impressions. While I didn’t have time to process my reactions and thoughts with as much depth as I can enjoy in an exhibition catalogue, I gained a degree of freedom during that time that improved my writing and sharpened my capacity to assess work.

What were some key points in your development as a curator?
Working at MoMA as an assistant curator played an enormous role, both as my curatorial boot camp and my introduction to people who would be very important personally and professionally. I don’t think I could pinpoint exactly what I learned there; it went far beyond learning how to fill out a loan form or present an object to the acquisitions committee.

Close relationships with artists have also had an enormous effect. For example, teaching with people like Carrie Mae Weems and Coco Fusco at the University of Pennsylvania has been a great experience; their participation in final critiques produces profound moments for all of us, not just the student standing there trying to absorb their comments.

How did you come to focus on contemporary art and photography?
While photography will always hold a very special place for me, at a certain point I wanted to look toward the future; photography is, almost by definition, attached to the past (the second an image is captured, it’s gone, etc.). At the same time, I have always enjoyed contemporary art for its immediacy and the opportunities to work with living artists. So the shift from photography to contemporary art seemed natural, and when I became head of the contemporary department in Baltimore in 2005, I brought my passion for still images with me.

Curiously, I find that with contemporary art, I am drawn to extremely ephemeral works, often with a limited lifespan: conceptual or performance-based works, or pieces that are made with what conservators call “inherent vice”—they assert deterioration or change as part of their materials and meaning. Art’s relationship to time has been an undercurrent of the various projects I’ve organized.

With your retrospective on Franz West just ending its run at the BMA and traveling to Los Angeles, what would be your next dream exhibition(s)?
That’s a hard question. I have been so involved in this exhibition for so long. When Franz and I were talking about titles for the show, he said, “What about, ‘A Lot of Pressure?’ ” It sounded good at the time—and accurate! On the heels of a big one-person sculpture show, I’ll probably opt for something or someone quite different. You’ll be one of the first to know.

Do you think that Walker shows are different from those at other contemporary art spaces, and if so, how?
The Walker is known for innovative exhibitions, its integration of technology, and for being the first to recognize artists who are now considered leaders in the field. Then there’s the fact that the shows are situated against a much broader backdrop that includes performing arts, film, design, and video. The collection provides a backdrop, too—curators can draw upon, react to, or expand the institutional frame of the Walker, including its new galleries. It’s a place with a history that remains deeply committed to the future.

The Walker has been called “a safe place for unsafe ideas.” How do you interpret that description as someone new to the place?
I think there’s a freedom people feel within the institution to try any path, no matter where it might lead. One of the great things about the Walker is that it embraces a range of ideas, from the generally accessible to those that speak to a sophisticated art audience who welcome experimentation and radicality. I think it’s important to maintain that spectrum; what may be a safe idea for one person may be a very daring idea for another person. This flow, this rhythm and pitch between ideas as they are played out in an exhibition calendar or in a series of performances, is why the Walker is so dynamic. But it’s not just a place for ideas. It’s a place where ideas are made manifest in space—where they are hammered out and given some kind of form, even if the form is virtual.

A shorter version of this article was originally published in the January/February 2009 issue of WALKER magazine.

Three Day Sky uses convoluted means and a great deal of time to create a simple painting, relocating, as it were, a “piece of sky” from the desert onto the gallery ceiling. In the first part of this piece, two large solar panels were used to harness energy over a period of three days in September, just outside the secure confines of the Solar Platform of Almeria. This “stolen” energy from the sunniest place in Europe has been transported to the Walker in two large batteries, which we received last week, and on this occasion I spoke with the artist about the project. He will use the batteries to run a spray gun at the Walker in April, crudely recreating the sky over the Spanish desert in a section of the exhibition galleries; the three days of desert sun captured in the batteries will allow for just over one hour of spraying time. The Walker will be the third venue for this on-going work that has previously been installed at the Modern Institute, Glasgow and the Museum for Contemporary Art, Basel, each time using the same batteries.

Solar panels, Tabernas desert, Spain, 2008. Photo Uffe Holm, courtesy Simon Starling.

How long does it take to fully charge the battery on this journey?

It can be done in 3 days of full sunshine. Inevitably the amount of energy varies depending on the cloud cover etc. The more blue sky in Spain the more blue sky in Minneapolis – it’s a very simple equation.

Does the quality of the light in different parts of the world have any effect upon the energy that is stored in solar cells, or the speed with which it they are charged?

I like the idea that the energy stored is in some sense culturally specific. The Tabernas is the home of the Solar Platform of Almeria, a European research initiative, chosen of course for its sunshine hours. It’s no coincidence in the work that the Tabernas Desert served as an ersatz ‘wild west’ for Sergio Leone – a cheap and cheerful Arizona. I was originally drawn to the Tabernas desert when working on Kakteenhaus at Portikus in Frankfurt – its there I found the cereus cactus I transported to Frankfurt in my Volvo estate car.  I once gathered solar energy in Suriname to use to power a boat around the canals of Amsterdam – on the equator batteries charge up very quickly, I filled battery on a 2 day boat trip from Paramaribo to the Afobaka Dam.

So you could quite easily charge this at home in Copenhagen, right? In other words, there isn’t anything special about the light in this part of Spain, is there?

Where’s the drama in that? It’s exactly that questionable ‘belief’ in the specificity of light that gives the work its absurdist sense. It’s as much about the journey as anything – this notion of the repeated ‘pilgrimage’ I’ve talked about in the past.

Likewise, how similar to the Spanish sky is the blue color you’ve chosen for the paint that will be sprayed in the gallery?

The first time a went to the desert to store energy, I took a series of color swatches (from a collection developed for a paint manufacturer by Le Corbusier in fact) I held a lot of these up to the midday sky and selected the closest match – that then become to color for ‘Three Day Sky’.

What works of yours do you think have the most in common with this piece?

It of course relates to the other works using solar energy  that I’ve mentioned already, things that I’ve been doing since 1998, but further than that it could be seen to relation to other more directly sculptural works like ‘Work, Made-ready, Kunsthalle Bern’ (1997) which involved making a bicycle out of a chair and a chair out of a bicycle. The metal in this case takes on a sense of specificity. I always think of this work in relationship to the ‘bad science’ in Flann O’Brien’s ‘The Third Policeman’ in which atoms transfer from a bike to its rider and vice versa. Slowly the bike takes on human characteristics and its rider starts leaning against walls. I would also think that ‘One Ton II’ has a very close relationship to ‘Three Day Sky’. This involved a journey to South Africa to photograph one of the largest platinum mines in the world. One of these images was then printed as many times as possible using the platinum that can be extracted from one ton of ore – five 20 x 24 inch prints were made.

A significant thread throughout modern art is the shift from illusionism to literalism, from making a nice painting of something, say, to just calling that something art. Is this an illusionistic piece–a painting of the sky in Spain at a particular moment–or an effort to give us something of the sky itself?

It’s a more generic piece of sky – more of a sign than a specific moment or place. I’m not a painter in that sense. It’s more Greek Taverna than J.M.W. Turner.

Do you think more about Tiepolo’s painted heavens or Duchamp’s bottle of Parisian air?

Tiepolo for form. Duchamp for concept.

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.

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…

How did that idea of risk-taking factor into your work at Creative Time?

The commissioning of new artworks is always a risky proposition, because you never know what you are going to get. That’s certainly also the rewarding part of it. But some projects are riskier than others. Cai Guo-Qiang’s Light Cycle, for example, was a fireworks event we organized in Central Park in 2003 to celebrate the park’s 125th anniversary. We were working with relatively untried technology, in which we had a microchip in every single shell to control its timing so Cai could draw in the sky.

I’m curious about that project. The chips make it so he can alter the trajectory of the pyrotechnics as they go through the air?

Cai worked with a fireworks company to pioneer this technology that allows you to control the timing of the explosion, so if you calculate for the velocity of the shell you can basically figure out at what height you want it to explode. You don’t change the trajectory, but you can nevertheless choreograph something with that information. It isn’t failsafe, however, which brings us back to your earlier question: the project was risky because we were inviting lots of people and then setting off a huge amount of these inherently unpredictable explosive devices, but also because, frankly, we just didn’t know if the piece would actually work. Here we’d trained the entire city’s attention on this five-minute event, and, in fact, it didn’t totally work, which raised a lot of complicated issues.

One thing that seems to tie some of your outdoor projects for Creative Time with your indoor gallery work — linking, say, the ephemeral projects like Jenny Holzer’s projections or Doug Aitken’s sleepwalkers to Strange Powers, the show you curated with Laura Hoptman — is the transient. I think of Song Dong using Chinese calligraphy to record time with water on the sidewalks, which evaporated almost as soon as he did it. Or in Strange Powers, you called it “ magical thinking,” visual art that has the power to conjure something invisible.

I guess you could say that, though transience and invisibility are of course very different things, and not necessarily related. I do think, however, that conjuring is a valuable way to consider our experience with art. The way I thought of the work we did at Creative Time was very much as a series of conjured events — and indeed much more as events than as objects, even when we were dealing with objects. I suppose that lends itself somewhat to ephemeral things. Everything Creative Time does is temporary. Obviously you can do a huge temporary sculpture (some of which I also did), but it happens that a lot of the projects I worked on were ephemeral, not least because it’s complicated to drop big objects into New York City. As it turns out, there actually are relatively few public spaces in New York. So at a certain point it became clear that one of the ways we could serve artists was to try engaging them with the city in more ephemeral ways, just from a practical perspective. But to your larger point, I don’t know if I have a specific predilection towards ephemeral things. Maybe it’s something I should watch out for.

I suppose asking a curator to look back on favorite projects or artists is like asking you to pick a favorite child. What are some of the projects that really stand out?

One of the best aspects of my work at Creative Time was the opportunity to work on projects at a range of scales, and all of them were favorites. Projects like Doug’s or Jenny’s or Cai’s were all exciting as major spectacles, but the smaller ones were just as thrilling for me. Michael Rakowitz did one of those smaller projects last fall; it was particularly beautiful in its balance of intimate and global experience, and lends itself well to description. Michael wanted to reopen the import/export business with Baghdad that his grandfather had operated in New York until 1960, and to import dates from Iraq for sale through the store. His grandparents were Iraqi Jews who left Iraq in the 40s. Of course, this is a country we now have cordial diplomatic relations with, and we hear much from the president about how trade should be encouraged with Iraq, how essential it is to the country’s eventual stability. Michael thought it was worth taking advantage of this, in part to expose the challenges involved in testing this proposition, and the challenges were many. For the project, Michael opened a store on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn in a strip of other Arab stores, and his dates ended up being the first retail goods from Iraq available for sale in the US since 1991.

We ended up not getting very many of them. Initially Michael contracted for 2,000 pounds of dates. It was hard to find someone who would agree to grow the crop because so many of the date palms have been completely destroyed by this war — and also by the 1991 war. It was harder, though, to find someone to transport the dates. The dates from our initial shipment never made it out of the country. They sat on the truck and went back and forth from the Syrian border to the Jordanian border for weeks on end, essentially mirroring the same sad trajectories of the internally displaced refugees who were trying to get out of the country.

We knew it was a conceptual undertaking from the beginning. I hoped we’d get the dates, but I wasn’t enormously optimistic. In the end the company that was shipping them for us took pity after the shipment spoiled in their truck, and they sent a few boxes by DHL. These sat in customs for probably two weeks. In a great final irony, we got them within days of the release of the Iraq Study Group report. So the timing worked out wonderfully.

That brings up a question I wanted to ask about the pyrotechnics that didn’t work as planned: is there such a thing as failure in curating or contemporary art? Or is that just a feature of the terrain of risk-taking and bold thinking?

That’s a good question. I think what’s always at issue for us as curators and artists is getting a handle on a set of criteria to evaluate a work’s success. Audiences think that there is a set of immutable criteria — that there are right answers and wrong answers. I think the Walker’s been instrumental in putting the lie to that notion. Even among colleagues we have visceral and intense debates about what kinds of works are successful and what are not. Was Doug’s project a success? The projector went on, people came, the film was finished on time, the basic practicalities worked. By any standard, I would consider the project successful, even if we still wish to debate its merits. Whether it works for everybody is always another question. I suppose that if the door is jammed shut for a show, it would be a failure because there’s no event and there’s no artwork to see and you’re asking people to come out to look at nothing — unless, of course, that’s the point.

With Cai’s project, this is something I still struggle with: the degree to which the project was a failure. It was certainly a failure in the mind of our sponsor. We never heard from them again after that. It was also considered a failure by the New York Times, which had been planning to put it on the cover of the national edition, until the photographer couldn’t get a good shot. In that sense, I guess it didn’t work either. But I know that for a great many people who came out in what turned out to be a heavy downpour, there was still an incredible thrill in seeing this project happen. In the end, it was OK for Cai, and ultimately for me as well. I just think we should have done more to frame the event as an experiment.

I’ve asked the same question, in a blunter form, to many artists from Rirkrit Tiravanija and Robert Storr to Tim Griffin and Thomas Hirschhorn: can art change the world? But maybe the question should be: what is art for?

We certainly want art to change the world. Jerry Saltz has a very nice take on this question in a well-blogged article published in the Village Voice — as it happens, a piece he wrote in response to Strange Powers. To the extent that art can in fact change the world, it does so in very incremental ways. Art changes our sensitivities in the way we experience things, the way we think about things. It’s disruptive in that way. It’s also sometimes ratifying. I think art is fundamentally a strange problem that if enthusiastically engaged, has great and fruitful implications for how we understand the world.

That’s an interesting way to take it: what is the magic of art that provokes people to freight it with these huge expectations? I don’t think people have the expectation that poetry or photojournalism is going to change the world.

But photojournalism really does have a much more immediate effect on the world, not least because it generally reaches a much larger audience. Part of our curiosity as to whether art can change the world comes out of the early history of the avant-garde, its conflation of art and politics, and its intimations of radicality. A certain hangover from those heady periods is still with us, combined in a complicated way with a nostalgic guilt we may feel about the elite associations attached to art, particularly in an era in which art can seem like it is more commodified than ever. I also think that in this day and age, we have an interest in things that shake us up, and yet in which we can find both intimacy and the sense of belonging to something bigger than ourselves. Art, and museums in particular, afford us that experience. Maybe movies or sports have that potential as well. I think that we once found something similar in politics, and I suspect that some part of our desire for art to be world-changing may be due to the failure of our political system to engage us in ways that we find meaningful. Perhaps in that sense, if baseball had any history of pretending to change the world, we might ask the same things of the Twins that we ask of contemporary art.

Images (top to bottom): Peter Eleey; Cai Guo-Qiang’s Light Cycle; sleepwalkers by Doug Aitken; Michael Rakowitz’s Return; Strange Powers (works by Pawel Althamer and Artur Zmijewski, Eva Rothschild, Center for Tactical Magic, and Friedrich Jrgenson)