British artist Angus Fairhurst committed suicide on Saturday, March 29, 2008. He was 41 years old. This tragedy is a tremendous loss to the art world, and of course to those who knew him. As one of the “Young British Artists” who brought international attention and excitement to a much quieter London art scene in the early 1990s, Fairhurst was perhaps not as well known as his contemporary Damien Hirst. But Fairhurst’s extraordinarily smart, inventive and often provocative works spoke with a louder voice than his own.
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.
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 exhibition that’s now on view in the Walker galleries, Picasso and American Art, argues that Pop artists of the 1960s responded to Pablo Picasso's art. But was Picasso himself a sort-of Pop artist? When Robert Rosenblum came to the Walker to give a lecture "Cubism as Pop Art" in conjunction with the Picasso show at the Walker in 1980, he argued that Picasso was indeed thinking Pop. I listened to a cassette tape of his lecture when I was searching in the archives for sound bites to put in our Picasso audio guide. We didn't end up using any of the stuff I dug up, but this talk by Rosenblum was just too good to put back in the basement. So I decided to post audio of his lecture. (And despite the fact that we didn't officially use any of the archival sound clips I found, Robin, our New Media guru, did have my voice appear on Art on Call reading some of the artist's names, which was a pretty cool consolation prize.)
(more…)
When the Walker expansion opened in April 2005, a familiar mural had found a new home: Sol LeWitt’s Four Geometric Figures in a Room (1984) moved from the first level of the Edward Larrabee Barnes-designed building to Gallery 8 Cafe several floors up (you can see it during lunch hours, Tuesday through Sunday). In preparation for an article on the mural for the September/October issue of Walker, I interviewed senior registration technician Dave Bartley on the complex installation of the mural. The work, owned by the Walker, exists in the collection as a certificate that outlines in exacting detail how the work is to be recreated without the aid of the artist. In the Walker’s collection catalogue, LeWitt is quoted as saying that
“when an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.”
Hearing Dave recount the installation–precision taping followed by nine layers of paint applied painstakingly over two weeks with folded-cloth “buns” and supervised by LeWitt’s installer–suggests that the process was anything but perfunctory.
Here’s a photographic chronicle of one wall of the mural:
All photos: Dave Bartley, except the top one, by Cameron Wittig