"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.”

Sharon Hayes, ‘In the Near Future, London, 2008′, Multiple-slide-projection installation, 3 actions, 3 projections; 243 slides, Courtesy Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin

As some of you might know, the Walker Art Center is a local partner, with the Unconvention, in Creative Time’s presentation of Sharon Hayes’ participatory performance project, Revolutionary Love 2: I am your best fantasy, which will take place at the State Capitol Grounds at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul on September 1, 2008. To organize this mass-effort, Sharon has made several trips to the Twin Cities to get to know our community and has been in contact with many of the individuals who have volunteered to participate in her performance. The conversations have been both insightful and inspiring. Sharon recently sent an email to people who have shown an interest in her project. I’m pleased to share this correspondence with you and encourage you to join us in this exercise of free speech, political and gender equality, and love.

Hi there. I’m Sharon Hayes.

Thank you for your beginning interest.

It is strange to be working in a city that is not my own, inviting people, from afar, to come out onto the street with me and speak a text that I’m writing. I hope that this letter will begin a conversation between me and you all and hopefully, begin to explain where I am coming from in this work:

Revolutionary Love 1 & 2: I am Your Worst Fear, I am Your Best Fantasy.

The practicals you may know already but in case not:

The piece is a two-part piece that will take place in Denver, Wednesday, August 25th on the occasion of the DNC (the Democratic National Convention) and in St. Paul, Monday, September 1st on the occasion of the RNC (the Republican National Convention).

I am inviting 75-100 people to come out onto the street and to speak an 8-12 minute text in unison. The text will be written by me and will address gay power, gay liberation, love and politics. I am asking people to “ dress their best” in the style of dressing up for Pride, dressing your most queer, your most outrageous, your most yourself.

This particular project comes, in part, out of the work that I’ve been doing recently. [See my website, www.shaze.info for more information. In particular, the two projects: Everything Else Has Failed! Don't You Think It's Time for Love? and I March in the Parade of Liberty but as Long as I Love You I'm Not Free.] In this recent work, I stood on the street in New York City and spoke a love letter to an anonymous “ you.” I stand on the street, in one piece, with a microphone and a small amplifier and, in the other piece, with a bullhorn. I look like I’m doing “ public speech” but I’m speaking to a lover who I’ve been separated from for some reason that the texts don’t quite explain. While I’m talking about love and desire, I am also bringing up the war and the way in which the war interrupts and doesn’t interrupt our daily lives, our activities, our desires, our love. For me, this work attempts to speak about certain intersections between love and politics that aren’t so often talked about.

It is a similarly complicated intersection between love and politics that I’m interested in in the piece I’m hoping you’ll be apart of.

In November 2007, MIX, the experimental queer film festival in New York City, asked me to put sound to 33 minutes of silent footage of the 1971 Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade and Gay-In. The footage was shot by the Women’s Liberation Cinema, a group that included Kate Millet, Susan Kleckner, Robin Mide, Lenore Bode and others, but it had never been cut into a film. Kate Millet still lives in New York and I contacted her and asked her if I could record her commenting on the footage she and the WLC shot over 30 years ago. The footage is familiar in many ways, a band of queer people walking together up a street, strutting, hugging each other, blowing kisses to the camera. But it was also very interesting to see the scene through Kate’s eyes. At one point she said, “ It was a very different parade then, in those days. I mean we were very afraid. We didn’t know what would happen to us.” They didn’t know if they would make it to Central Park, she said.

And I found myself thinking about “ Gay Power.”

It was reported that people in the crowd outside of Stonewall started yelling “ Gay Power”…taking up the language of resistance used in the Black Power movement. Weeks after the riots in June 1969, a group of activists came together as the group, Gay Liberation Front, describing themselves as “ a militant coalition of radical and revolutionary homosexual men and women committed to fight the oppression of the homosexual as a minority group and to demand the right to self-determination of our own bodies.” In the name Gay Liberation Front, the group aligned themselves not only with active liberation struggles inside the U.S. but also with the national liberation front in Vietnam. Gay Liberation began in the midst of the Vietnam War.

I always thought of “ Gay Power” as being about visibility and in that, it always seems a little “ power-lite”. I didn’t think about it in terms of the “ power” of Black Power or liberation movements, I saw it as pride and in that it seemed useful for the day but perhaps not too much longer. Black Power seemed to have teeth, Gay Power a kind of posing. But looking at that footage from 1971 made me understand more clearly that the nascent tribe of liberationists, gay liberationists, was also constructing new set of relations between love, sex and politics. Because the expression of love, sexual desire, queer sexuality was under constraint, love, sexual desire, the expression of queer sexuality was a tool of our resistance. Fucking was not ancillary to our politics, not a libidinal excess to the liberation work, it was totally integral to it. Living this queer love was a strategy toward being able to be and live as “ our true selves” and also a strategy toward overthrowing the violent oppression of heteronormativity. That is why those bodies taking to the streets in 1971 were so particularly threatening and vulnerable.

When I looked again at those images of that vulnerable becoming-tribe that wasn’t quite sure if it would make it to the end of the event, to Central Park, I realized how wisely they exerted their precise power to fuck and to love, to chant about loving and fucking, to dress one’s best, to look beautiful, to strut and twirl and shake and kick, to seduce the camera, seduce the public, seduce the homophobe.

It is this relationship between love and politics that I am interested in re-inserting into the current dialogue about queerness and politics in 2008.

SO…not the whole story but a beginning point so you know a bit more about where I’m coming from. Thank you a ton for being game to join a little band of queers to make/re-make a little revolution!

Best,

Sharon

Sharon Hayes, ‘In the Near Future, New York’, 35mm slide installation, detail, 2005

To become a participant in Revolutionary Love 2: I Am Your Best Fantasy at the State Capitol Grounds in St. Paul, Minnesota on September 1, please visit:

http://www.creativetime.org/rnc/

In the spirit of Stonewall-era gay liberation movements, Hayes plans to intervene at both the Democratic National Convention in Denver, CO, and the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis, MN by instigating readings of texts that address the relationship between political and personal desire, and queer issues, by 75 to 100 people in unison. Blending the techniques of performance art and political rallies, her work addresses the complex historic construction of love and politics.

This weekend and throughout the summer Hayes will be recruiting volunteers to take part in the performance this September. Please tell your friends, relatives, gaybours, and anyone this sounds right for – it’s an ambitious project and we need a lot of people to realize it. On one day during the Convention (September 1-4), approximately 70-100 people will speak a text about love, politics, gay power, and gay liberation, written by Hayes for the occasion. We are looking for volunteer performers to recite (as a chorus) a 10–15 minute text, repeated multiple times over a period of approximately two hours. The performance will take place in a public space in proximity to the Convention (Creative Time will send you more details once the site is confirmed).

To be part of the project you need to submit the following information by email to rnc@creativetime.org:

1. Contact information: Phone (home/cell) & e-mail address

2. Do you have any additional resources that you would like to bring to the project?

3. Are you affiliated with any organizations that would be interested in spreading the word?

4. Do you have any technical or stage management skills?

As a participating performer, we are asking that you:

1. Attend one rehearsal to practice delivering the spoken text with other performers, to be held approximately 3-4 days before the performance and directed by Hayes. (Note: you will be given a choice of multiple rehearsal dates/times, and asked to attend the one that best fits your schedule.
2. Memorize the 10-15 minute text in advance of the first rehearsal.
3. Agree to be recorded and depicted in video, sound, and photographic documentation of the project (you will be asked to sign an image release form).

Sharon Hayes has produced challenging work in performance, video, and installation for over a decade. Staging protests, delivering speeches, and organizing demonstrations, she creates interventions that highlight the friction between collective activities and personal actions. Employing the artistic and academic methodologies of theater, film, anthropology, linguistics, and journalism, Hayes has made work that engages history, politics, and public space. She was an artist in PERFORMA05 and her work has been shown at the New Museum, P.S. 1/MoMA, Art In General, Artists Space, Parlour Projects, Andrew Kreps Gallery, Dance Theater Workshop, Performance Space 122, the Joseph Papp Public Theater, and the WOW Café in NYC. In addition she has shown at the Tate Modern in London, Museum Moderner Kunst and the Generali Foundation in Vienna, at many other national and international exhibition spaces, as well as in 45 lesbian living rooms across the United States. Her collaborative piece, 9 Scripts from a Nation at War, showed in Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany this past June.

For more information on Hayes’ work, please visit www.shaze.info.

More information on Hayes’ project and Democracy in America is available at www.creativetime.org/rnc .

Revolutionary Love 2: I Am Your Best Fantasy is the second in a two-part project by Hayes taking place at both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. The first performance, which will take place at the DNC, is titled Revolutionary Love 1: I Am Your Worst Fear.

Revolutionary Love 2 is presented by Creative Time with the Walker Art Center and the UnConvention as part of Creative Time’s 2008 national public art initiative Democracy in America: The National Campaign.

Questions?

Please contact rnc@creativetime.org or 212.206.6674 x214

In the obituary published in the New York Times today, Hirst called Fairhurst a great artist and friend: “He shone like the moon and as an artist he had just the right amount of slightly round the bend. I loved him.”

What is “slightly round the bend” about his work is what makes it so great–a puckish dark humor situates it on the line between comedic good fun and unapologetic existentialism.

The Walker first exhibited Fairhurst’s work in “Brilliant!” New Art From London in 1995, and owns several of his works including The Birth of Consistency (2004), a bronze and stainless steel sculptural rendering of a gorilla gazing narcissistically into a mirror, currently on view in the Fiterman Garden Gallery just up the stairs from the Levitt Hennepin Lobby.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

On her next move (The New York Times):

Ms. Halbreich said she had no clear idea what she might tackle next. “ I can’t imagine any other institution capturing my talents and spirits so perfectly,” she said.

She added, “ Though this is scary, I do believe change will be really good for the Walker too.”

On her accomplishments (Pioneer Press):

During Halbreich’s tenure:

The Walker collection grew from about 6,100 works to almost 10,000 pieces.

Fundraising more than doubled, to $7.5 million a year.

The museum has been active in commissioning new performing-art works from artists across the community and around the world.

The Walker’s ambitious expansion doubled the size of the museum and added a 385-seat theater.

But Halbreich said she’s equally proud of what she described as an almost utopian work environment at the Walker, and the way the museum “began to understand how to serve a much wider audience, and became a spiritual home for a much more diverse audience.”

On hiring her replacement (Minnesota Public Radio):

Halbreich’s own advice for her replacement is to realize that the Walker staff is his or her greatest resource. She says her successor’s challenges will be to refuse to allow the status quo to exist, to protect the innovation and risk-taking of Walker programmers and “to make certain the support of artists is in place so that the cultural landscape of the future is as populated by great works as the past.”

On regrets and the future (Modern Art Notes):

Institutionally, no regrets. And I guess that’s one of the reasons why it feels like a good time to leave. I realize that there are also things I want to get back to which came from my recent sabbatical, and that has to do with being able to look at art exhibitions more than once. Having a different kind of stress in my life. I kind of thrive on it, but I’m willing to sort of say that a new challenge might have a different kind of stress attached to it.

But the thing that I really wanted to teach myself before but couldn’t is something I’ve learned from artists and Buddhists, and that is for a control freak the best thing she can learn is to cede some control and to live in the present. And I must say that much to my surprise, having made the leap into the void it’s also exhilarating. I realized that [I'm not] leaving Walker to go to some other place. I am leaving Walker so that Walker could continue to challenge the status quo. I am a person of commitment and I’ve got a chunk of time left to commit to something that I can have another professional love affair with.

Look for an interview with Halbreich here and in Walker magazine in the near future.

Other coverage: Artforum, Associated Press, Boston Globe, Star Tribune, part two of Modern Art Notes‘ Q&A.

Photo: Ingrid Young for The New York Times

After a long search, we’re pleased to announce the hiring of Peter Eleey as Visual Arts Curator. Currently a curator/producer at Creative Time, he’s organized public art projects including Cao Guo-Qiang’s Light Cycle (a pyrotechnic celebration of Central Park’s 150th anniversary in 2003), Jenny Holzer’s 2004 For New York City, and Doug Aitken’s film sleepwalkers (above), to be projected on the exterior of MoMA starting next Tuesday. He’s also worked with a range of fascinating artists, from interventionist Michael Rakowitz to Chinese artist Song Dong, who was featured in our exhibition How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age. He joins us officially on March 26. The New York Times writes that Nato Thompson, curator at MASSMoCA, will fill his shoes at Creative Time.

Peter has agreed to do a Q&A on his past work and what he hopes to do at the Walker, to be published right here in the coming weeks.

[Press release]