Getty has sponsored nine art museums[i] to lead the pilot stage of what has been termed the Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (you’ll hear it referred to around here as OSCI). Through innovative web-based architectures, each awarded institution will present visitors prodigious access to artists’ works in the permanent collections.

At the Walker, we’re conceptualizing our own interpretation of what this new online space could be.

Considering that technology has enabled institutions to digitally preserve and activate a greater fraction of the 85% of its history that is otherwise considered ephemeral, buried, or disappeared, collection catalogues are up against a new set of expectations these days. There is a colossal amount of uncovered content to work with, not to mention the mega quantities of incoming material produced by still living contemporary artists that make up the greater part of our collection. So the traditional implication of “collections catalogue” has become a tenuous one. They can no longer be as delimited, static, impervious, finite. They shouldn’t be outdated before being published.  And this is where the OSCI takes up its task of archive mining and creative programming: thinking up appropriate ways to select from and to dynamically assemble unprecedented amounts of available information into a viable user interface.

Though the Getty Initiative is only in its planning stages over the next year, what is certain at the moment is that this next idea for the catalogue will be flexible, interactive, sensorial, and host a variety of media. It will invite visitors to experience works in the collection on significantly new levels of amplitude and proximity, while making visible the Walker’s relationships with artists over time, and emphasize courses of invention, adaptation, mutation, reanimation, and even erasure.

Tomás Saraceno, 32SW Stay Green/Flying Garden/Air-Port-City, 2007. Pillows with pressurized air, webbing, covered with black felt, grass, solar flexible panels, electrical cables, battery, solar pump, water supply system. 192-15/16 in. diameter. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

What is less certain is what it’s going to look like. Rethinking the potential of communicating the Walker’s collection of contemporary art to the public raises some good questions: how does an arts organization that is known for accessioning work from outside of the traditional artistic canon (Japanese Gutai, Viennese Actionism, Brazilian Neoconcretism), from artists who cross disciplines (Pierre Huyghe, Trisha Donnelly) and use ever-advanced, ever-bizarre, or ever-decaying technologies (Cao Fei, Kris Martin, Tomás Saraceno, Bruce Conner), and from collaborative and community-based projects (Sam Durant, Nari Ward), suitably reflect these energies through the OSCI? Rather than exist as antithetical to or stifle the content it encompasses, the new catalogue project has to appropriately sync its identity with the distinct creativities that compose the Walker’s collection. Talked about issues include indeterminateness, multiplicity, scale, totality, decentralization, temporality, motion, means of entry, hierarchies, authorship, and translation. These conversations are crucially influential to forming a proper vision for the OSCI catalogue’s design and functionality.

Elucidative to the development of this project are the larger art historical discussions on the topic of the archive. Of late, institutions have been in a tizzy over what an archive of contemporary art even is, and how can one rationalize the typologies output by cataloguing and using database structures to represent content that often exists only to repel such “normalizing” devices. Essential questions recently raised by Tate Modern’s Archiving the Artist symposium  (September 2009); Monash University’s Archive/Counter Archive conference (July 2009); CAA’s panel on What is Contemporary Art History (February 2009); Berkeley’s Archiving the Avant Garde consortium (2001), and by exhibitions such as Every Version Belongs to the Myth (Project Arts Centre, 2009); Working Title: Archive (Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, 2008); The Order of Things (MuHKA, Ghent, 2008), and artist projects including Helke Bayrle’s Portikus Under Construction film (2001-2008); Walid Raad’s The Atlas Group Archive (1999-present); Armin Linke’s Book on Demand (2003-present); Lev Manovich’s Soft Cinema (2000-2005); Carlos Amorales’ Liquid Archive (1999-present) continue to shape OSCI project, albeit through bouts of both illumination and bewilderment. But invaluable to the sensible and sensitive making (and unending tweaking) of this collections site is the exchange of insights from partner art spaces, people at the Walker who have worked with artists in our collection for decades, and from the artists themselves.

Nari Ward with members of the Lao Family Community of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 2000

During Phase 1 of the project, with a year or so for us to all meet, mull and experiment on how this new collection catalogue will turn out (and in trying to ultimately find a nice balance between idealism and practicality), there is much exciting work to be done…

I’m Brooke, by the way, new here as the Getty fellow for the OSCI project. I flew in last week from San Francisco and arrive to the project with a recent Master’s degree in Exhibition and Museum Studies from San Francisco Art Institute. The past few years I’ve spent working on the theorization of contemporary art archives. It’s superb to be at the Walker, working with the Visual Arts and New Media departments, and to take part in this initiative where I can shift momentum from a world of mostly thinking/talking/writing to one that welcomes the fun of creating.

More updates soon.

"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.”

Two untitled portraits from a series by Melba Price appear on a new Walker postcard.

We recently featured the Walker’s Collectors’ Council Acquisitions Fund (CCAF) in the July/August issue of WALKER magazine. The CCAF was established in 2006 to create a way for members to participate in the Walker’s acquisition process, including the opportunity to vote on an artwork they acquire as a gift to the Walker each year. The fund is unique in that it’s dedicated to acquiring “first works” – works by artists who are new to the Walker’s collection. In this way, the fund draws on the institution’s long history of engaging artists early in their careers and following them throughout their journey.

This year, we created postcards to commemorate the art purchased by the Collectors’ Council Acquisitions Fund, which for 2009 is a series of five gouache-on-paper portraits by St. Paul artist Melba Price. (Interestingly, Price based the portraits on anonymous digital images that she selected from online photo websites like gettyimages.com.) The Walker will create a new card each year in honor of the new addition to our permanent collection. Postcards featuring Adam Helms’ Untitled (48 Portraits) (purchased in 2007) and Tomás Saraceno’s Flying Garden/Air-Port-City/32SW (in 2008), along with the Price postcards, are all available in the Walker Shop. Stop in and check them out!

Collectors’ Council members met in April to vote on their 2009 selection.

A special thanks to those who participated in the Collectors’ Council Acquisitions Fund this year:

Front row from left: former Walker curator Doryun Chong, curator Siri Engberg, Tasha Marvin, John Cullen, Collectors’ Council co-chairs Sally Blanks and Randy Hartten, Leni Moore, Walker curatorial fellow Andria Hickey, former Walker curator Yasmil Raymond, and chief curator Darsie Alexander

Back row from left: Director Olga Viso, Alan Polsky, Kate Kelly, Maurice Blanks, Joe Gibbons, Sanders Marvin, David Moore, Jr., and curator Betsy Carpenter

Not pictured: Robert Bras and Julie Matonich, Toby and Mae Dayton, Nazie Eftekhari, Ron Lotz, Tim and Kim Montgomery, Joan and John Nolan, Rebecca and Robert Pohlad, and Susan and Rob White

Thanks also to Lowry Hill, generous long-standing sponsor of the Collectors’ Council.

The Collectors’ Council is open to Walker members at the Patron’s Circle level ($2,000) and is a great way to more deeply engage with contemporary art. For more information, contact the Walker’s development office at 612.375.7642 or e-mail donors@walkerart.org.

Elizabeth Carpenter and Darsie Alexander planning the collection exhibitions. Photo: Cameron Wittig

Darsie Alexander’s office is a mess. The walls are plastered with hundreds of photocopied images, from Warhol’s Sixteen Jackies to Beuys’ Felt Suit to a giant photograph of a boxing match by Andreas Gursky. Punctuating them is an assortment of Post-Its marked with cryptic notes, ideas in formation, and arrows pointing to visual relationships—relationships that will play out in the galleries when the Walker’s new collection exhibitions open on November 21.

Conceiving of and assembling this expansive series of installations—which will fill five galleries—was a priority for Alexander after arriving as the Walker’s new chief curator last winter. Opening dates were already set, so she barely had her e-mail set up before delving into an intensive study of the 11,000-plus artworks, films, and performance documents that make up the Walker’s collection. Getting a feel for its pulse involved the help of her fellow curators, plus a lot of time spent walking around the galleries and exploring art storage. And then there are her office walls. “All of these color copies are a modest way of living with the work and its ideas. They enable me to practice a few visual relationships in miniature form,” says Alexander. “Still, nothing compares to the excitement of bringing the art into the galleries and witnessing how ideas play out in real time, in real space. With such an extraordinary collection of works in all media, I know the collection installation will deliver a plethora of themes, some of which we’ve planned but others I can only guess at. That’s part of the fun.”

Even before she arrived at the Walker, Alexander was in touch with its curators, gaining their perspectives and insights in phone meetings and via e-mail. Visual arts curator Elizabeth Carpenter has played a central role as the exhibitions’ co-curator, given her deep connection to the institution’s holdings. Her knowledge of Walker history, coupled with Alexander’s fresh perspective, make for a strong and complementary duo. “This is my third major reinstallation of the collection since I came to the Walker, and it never ceases to amaze me how remarkably rich it is, and the number of histories and narratives we can draw from it,” says Carpenter. McGuire senior curator for performing arts Philip Bither, film curator Sheryl Mousley, design curator Andrew Blauvelt, and education and community programs director Sarah Schultz have also been vitally important in talking through ways to represent the multidisciplinary nature of the collection in a single show. “They’ve all offered great advice on keeping the gallery spaces dynamic,” Alexander says. “While the exhibition in galleries 1, 2, and 3 will run for nearly three years, we want new experiences to unfold over that time span—fresh discoveries for regular visitors that will reinforce the fact that, as a multidisciplinary arts center, change is ongoing here.”

The notion of change became essential in working out the key themes of the exhibitions, given the experiential, performative, and temporal nature of the art of the 1960s and ’70s, particular areas of Walker strength and interest. Alexander is also thinking about the arts’ connections to real-life events, such as philosophical, social, and political shifts, global conflict, or the seemingly inconsequential facets of the everyday. Art has always responded to life, she says, but in contemporary practice the lines between the two are especially porous.

Other kinds of change will be quickly apparent to visitors. “There will be a notable contrast to the look of the galleries as they appear now—spare, elegant, and loosely chronological,” Alexander notes. “In November, we’ll be using the collection to create a changeable thematic exhibition, one that will have a range of subplots and visual contrasts.” She anticipates that people will find new rhythms in the galleries, with some feeling very dense and active and others rather quiet, like a deep, cleansing breath.

Yes, this week everyone’s talking about 1969 and some sort of summer music jamboree, but we’re going to bump ahead a couple of years, into the next decade:

“The paint on the walls was barely dry when Robert Irwin was invited to conceive a piece that would ‘challenge’ the Walker’s new building, which was designed by architect Edward Larrabee Barnes. The year was 1971 and then-director Martin Friedman’s exhibition, Works for New Spaces, included such other preeminent artists of the moment as Siah Armajani, Larry Bell, Lynda Benglis, Mark di Suvero, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Robert Rauschenberg, and Richard Serra.

“Irwin’s response was one of the most unforgettable yet little-seen installations in the Walker’s history. The untitled work, presented here only twice since the opening, in 1984 and 1989, now makes its fourth appearance in these galleries.”

So wrote curator Betsy Carpenter in the July/August issue of Walker magazine, the occasion being the August 6 unveiling of Slant/Light/Volume, the new installation (seen above) of this Irwin work. Below are some fantastic images of the artist 38 years ago (we love it when librarian Barb Economon pulls these kinds of things from the archives). Come to think if it – if you can access stories from your own long-term memory files about seeing this piece back then, please share via the “Comments” box below.

Looking to the (near) future, fans of early-’70s art will want to make a mental note about the upcoming Abstract Resistance, opening February 27, 2010. Curated by Yasmil Raymond (who is sorely missed, having recently left the Walker for an amazing opportunity at the Dia Art Foundation), this show features a new installation of a large-scale piece by the aforementioned Lynda Benglis for Works for New Spaces — and like this Irwin installation, it’s a knockout.

Irwin (and an unidentified man) at work in Gallery 1 in 1971

Irwin and his completed installation in 1971

When I arrived at the museum as its new librarian in 1983, there was no actual collection of artists’ books. Seeds had been planted, however, in the form of a few pieces acquired from a 1981 exhibition, Artists’ Books, that had been organized by then chief curator Graham Beal—including the aptly titled Book by Lucas Samaras, currently on view in the exhibition Text/Messages: Books by Artists. This signaled to me that artists’ books were on the radar screen at the Walker, and worthy of serious consideration. Having taught printmaking and photography at a liberal arts college, I knew a little something about artists’ books myself, and decided that the development of the library’s collection would have to include them. After all, why shouldn’t artists with paintings or sculptures in our permanent collection also be represented by their book works?

A couple of key events in those early days helped me to build the collection. One was a gift in 1986 from Sol LeWitt: a $500 donation to be matched by the Walker and to be used at Printed Matter, a nonprofit shop in New York that has been a key source since the ‘70s for publications made by artists. That doesn’t sound like much now, but it was exceedingly generous; back then, I suspect you could acquire any of Ed Ruscha’s books for $15 or less. I also acquired 112 books, including an early work by Richard Prince, from Judith Hoffberg in California, who has for years published Umbrella, a reviewing source for artists’ books.

When it comes to acquiring artist’s books for the library, I am, like the Walker’s visual art curators, constantly trying to balance the need for new works with an attempt to acquire out-of- print and historical material that might represent a significant period or style of bookmaking. One of our goals is for the library to have books by all artists represented in the Walker’s permanent collection who have made books, so in an effort to fill those gaps, I’m always scanning the lists of offerings that antiquarian dealers send around. That’s how we came to acquire, last year, a copy of Der Blaue Reiter, a 1912 almanac with illustrations by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. First and foremost on my current list of desiderata is Dieter Roth’s Literaturwurst (Literature Sausage) from the 1960s, made from an actual sausage recipe and substituting a ground-up novel for meat. There were only 50 made, so this is quite an elusive work.

Over the years, many books have come into the collection as a result of artists bringing in their latest work. I remember Laurie Coughlin, a book artist and graphic designer from California, coming to the library carrying a small cooler: inside were artificial ice cubes, a pear, and several ice cream sandwiches—that is, books made to look like the real thing. It was a charming way to get my attention, and several works from her Motormouth Press came into the collection that morning.

The visual arts staff is another source for artists’ books, passing on those they receive or that they pick up during their travels to far-flung places. Curators also make their own gifts to the collection, as former chief curator Richard Flood did with Sigmar Polke’s huge book, Daphne, which is on view in Text/Messages. Other gifts in the show include one from Ellsworth Kelly, who donated his Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard; and Salvador Dali’s Alice in Wonderland, a gift from the estate of Phoebe Hansen.

Recently, we made our first acquisitions of artists’ books by bidding over the phone at an auction from the estate of the legendary Eugenia Butler, whose gallery was the first to show work by Dieter Roth in Los Angeles. Along with the books were prints and objects, and the prices climbed, in many cases far beyond what I had thought feasible. As a result of that nail-biting session, we managed to get three out-of-print books, two by Roth, whose work has been extensively collected by the Walker, and one by James Lee Byars.

Today, the library’s collection of 35,000 books includes about 1,600 artists’ books. Simon Cutts, a great bookmaker and publisher of other artists’ books through his Coracle Press, recently quoted an overheard and intentionally misheard question: “What’s the difference between artists’ books and books made by artists that are not artists’ books, and books?” It is indeed a confusing topic—but one that is endlessly enjoyable for me as I continue to sort it out.

Robert The, Readers' Digest (cake book), 1998, Walker Art Center Library Collection

For instance, Readers’ Digest (cake book) at first glance looks like a generous slice of layer cake resting on a robin’s-egg blue plate. On closer examination, we notice that artist Robert The created the piece from a two-volume bound set of Reader’s Digest magazines, jigsawed into a wedge and delicately frosted with wax. It’s not just a clever take on the adage about “having one’s cake,” but also on the “ingestion”—and perhaps more important, digestion—of knowledge.

Despite its title, Xu Bing’s Red Book is actually a line of cigarettes packed into a neat little red case, each printed with quotes from Chairman Mao’s Chinese classic. It presents a tough choice: Keep the leader’s timeless words literally close to one’s heart in a shirt pocket, or send them up in smoke for a fleeting nicotine fix.

The self-help genre of books becomes a theme running through many works in Text/Messages. Katherine Ng’s Fortune Ate Me (a play on “fortunate me”) is a series of boxed paper “fortune cookies” imparting advice from her father such as “If you can’t find time, make time.” A similar self-improvement impulse unspools from Angela Lorenz’s Maxims by the Yard, a length of ribbon woven with phrases, ready to wrap up as that little something extra on a gift.

Many of us hope to gain great insights through reading classic or legendarily difficult novels, if only we had the time. The amusing Literary Essences by Wendy Fernstrum offers an alternative: composed like a set of healing flower essences, each bottle is filled with tiny paper “pills” punched from the pages of a particular book. Then there’s that perfect cube by James Lee Byars—what kind of enlightenment might be gained by meditating on its hundreds of pure white pages? And how might a seeker undertaking this project interpret the final pages, which actually do contain text? It’s possible that those last words are simply Byars’ reward for a certain kind of reader: the one who can’t resist skipping forward to a book’s ending.

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.