Visual Arts

Reports on the burning of Hélio Oiticica’s work have been somewhat exaggerated: The artist’s work is not a quite a near-total loss. Stories a couple of days ago cited that “90%” of the work made by Oiticica, a major figure of the Brazilian avante garde in the late 1960s and early 1970s, had been destroyed in a fire at the home of Oiticica’s brother César in Rio de Janeiro. Now César and others been able to look more closely at the damage, reporting that a number of works were spared and for others, restoration is possible. No word yet on how such devastation could occur — reportedly the storage spaces had humidity control, sprinklers, and fire alarms — but no doubt more is yet to come with this story. In related and bittersweet news, Oiticica’s CC5 Hendrixwar Cosmococa, acquired by the Walker in 2007, goes on view here on February 27, 2010.

"Big Self-Portrait," Chuck Close, collection Walker Art Center

The man who brought us (Chuck) Close: A recent story in the Akron Beacon Journal delves into the history of Linda, a Chuck Close portrait that’s considered a key piece in the collection of the Akron Art Museum. Turns out that Rosenkrantz’s husband, Christopher Finch, is not only a former associate curator at the Walker, but according to the Beacon Journal story, Finch is responsible for Close’s Big-Self Portait becoming a key piece in the Walker’s collection: “in 1968 [he] had persuaded the museum to buy a Close, which, as it happened, was the first Close to go into a public collection.”

Take the “Collector Challenge”: This nifty game at PBS.org tests your eye based around the collection of Dorothy and Herbert Vogel—the librarian and postal worker who became renowned for amassing a hugely important collection, mostly of conceptual and minimalist works. Now they’ve dispersed that collection to 50 museums in 50 states; the Vogels selected the Weisman Art Museum in Minnesota. To Have it About You: The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection opens there this Friday.; you might also want to check out the documentary film Herb and Dorothy.

Photograph: David Levene, via The Guardian UK

“It embraces you with a velvet chill”: So says the Guardian about How It Is, Miroslaw Balka’s new installation in the Tate Modern’s cavernous Turbine Hall, which is basically a gigantic, raised steel box that visitors can walk under—or inside (see video here). The latter choice means you get swallowed by darkness — unless giggling youths illuminate the interior with their cell-phone cameras. Is that the equivalent of ignorant theater-goers interrupting a performance when their cell phones ring?

Remembering visual arts curator Robert Murdoch: Back in 1965, he was the Walker’s first curatorial intern to serve in a program supported by the Ford Foundation, and he returned here from 1983 to 1985 as chief curator. In the ‘70s, as the first curator of contemporary art at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Murdock organized the first solo museum show for Richard Tuttle. Read more in the New York Times’ obituary, and in this Star Tribune piece. Annie Murdock, Robert’s daughter, wrote to us to note that his family has made arrangements for donations in his memory to be made to the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. “This is the first time that the foundation has done anything like this,” she said, “and we hope it will result in building a fund for Emerging Artists in Robert’s memory.”

Artist's portrait by Cameron Wittig

Galleries 4, 5, and 6 are getting prepped for the arrival of work from Dan Graham: Beyond, which closed on Sunday at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The Los Angeles Times called this retrospective “witty, surprising, smart and engaging” (the show originated at the Museum of Contemporary Art there), and Art in America noted that it “perhaps says as much about popular culture of the last 40 years as about Graham himself.”

Peter Eleey, who is organizing the Walker’s presentation of this show, has noted a pretty consistent binary quality that runs through Graham’s otherwise incredibly diverse body of work: It’s in the low/high, inside/outside take on the ways in which Graham views culture, and in the ways viewers see Graham’s work (and often in how the work itself is configured); in the artist’s ideas about both the production and the consumption of culture; and in the various combinations of transparency and reflection that form the crux of many of his projects.

This oppositional way of reading his work, coupled with its lack of a signature “style,” can combine to make Graham’s art seem elusive. But once you tap into the frequency on which he’s operating, the artist’s vision really does cohere. In fact, that consistent vision, coupled with a restless curiosity—thus the “beyond” of the exhibition title—is what led the Walker to follow Graham’s career and collect his work for decades, acquiring its first piece by the artist in 1978.

That means there’s a fair amount of material on our websites about this artist—a convenient source for background on Graham before the retrospective opens on October 31. You might start with this profile of Graham, plus a selection of his works from the Walker collection. The biography is taken from the catalog for Let’s Entertain—a Walker exhibition curated in 2000 by former chief curator Philippe Vergne that featured one of Graham’s pavilions, New Space for Showing Videos (shown here), which offers bean bag chairs and the prospect of watching videos of other people watching videos in the same pavilion. That piece will also be on view in Dan Graham: Beyond. (Graham’s work has also been included several other Walker-organized exhibitions: American Tableaux, Artists’ Books, The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography, 1960-1982, and Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes.)

“New Space for Showing Videos,” installed at the Walker's 200 exhibition, "Let's Entertain"

See also:

Don’t Trust Anyone Over 30 — Six years after his work appeared in Let’s Entertain, the Walker co-commissioned and presented this splashier Graham spectacle: a rock opera performed by puppets. Since collaboration was at the heart of Don’t Trust Anyone, Graham participated in a discussion (if you’ve got more than 10 minutes, there’s a 45-minute video here) with several other artists who worked on the piece, including Phillip Huber, who created its puppets (and those for another notorious work, Spike Jonze’s film Being John Malkovich), and members of the punk duo Japanther (who return to play at the opening-day talk with Graham on October 31).

Two-way Mirror Punched Steel Hedge Labyrinth — this Walker-commissioned pavilion is on permanent display in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, and is probably second only to Spoonbridge and Cherry in terms of popularity.

The annual Student Open House on October 29 — includes this year a preview of Dan Graham: Beyond, and should be a spectacle of its own sort, as it’s inspired by Graham’s passion for rock and punk (see Japanther, above).

Get a closer look at other Graham works in the Walker collection on ArtsConnectEd.org, including his groundbreaking Homes for America project from the 60s. And on mnartists.org, you can get a hint of Graham’s influence locally with this description of a project at the Art of This gallery last month, and an interview with artist Aaron van Dyke, who runs a gallery out of his St. Paul house.

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.