Philippe Vergne is a brilliant curator and that rare combination of sparkling intellect, humor, and grace. He has an infectious love of art and an incredible, innate gift for working with artists--understanding them, connecting with their creative process, and communicating that to audiences in fresh, sensitive, and unexpected ways. He absolutely believes that a contemporary art center can and must keep the artist at the core of its thinking, a vision that has gone far in shaping our department, our exhibitions, our collection, our institution, and has had significant impact on artists themselves. He also fiercely believes that a museum is a place where artists and their audiences share, around works of art, their uncertainties and dreams and has strove to make and protect an environment at the Walker where, on scales large and small, everyone could experiment.

Philippe excels at the basic, but difficult, art of installation, and organized some of the most essential Walker exhibitions of the last decade. The highlights include: Let’s Entertain: Life’s Guilty Pleasures (2000), How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age (2003), Shadowlands: An Exhibition as a Film (2005), House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective (2005), Cameron Jamie (2006), and Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love (2007). If there is a trademark to his exhibitions, it is that they consistently invite us to see the familiar in a new light, and make the unknown positively beguiling. In his tenure here, he has been able to keep sight of both the Walker’s edge and its rich history; its reputation as a veritable petri dish for young artists, filmmakers, and performers; and its extraordinary collection, which has at its core a mandate to form relationships with artists for life. He immeasurably enriched the Walker's collection by bringing important young and emerging as well as established and historical artists' works, from around the world.

His aspirations, however, were always broader than whatever single project or acquisition he worked on, because they involved those of the larger institution. The ambitions of his staff became his own. He embodied so many aspects of the work we do, and the values that underscore that work. In the trust he bestowed upon his colleagues, the respect he accords his audiences, the faith he places in artists, and the vigor of his curiosity, he set a simple and powerful example. All of this he did with a remarkable degree of modesty, an incisive wit, and a spirit of generosity.

Philippe has been the perfect mentor, colleague, and friend for all of us over the past years. He encouraged us to take greater and greater creative risks and keep "gambling" to build upon the Walker's legacy of risk-taking and experimentation. At the same time, we have relished his ingenious and adventurous mind, hilariously quirky and unashamedly egalitarian view of the world. It is obvious that we are "not dancing" (as he often says) about his departure, nor can we express our appreciation by making him a knight. The French government already did so in 2004 when it honored him with the medal of the Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. What he will forever have from us is our respect, admiration, gratitude, and love.

Photo: Philippe Vergne with Judy Dayton, long-time Walker supporter

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 dawn of the Walker blogs, I had the privilege of writing the first post on the Visual Arts site. Some of you, our faithful readers, may remember my little adventure in the Mojave Desert in search of a used airplane part. You may also remember the very slow march of the elephant sculpture down the Hennepin Avenue through the Walker’s main entrance, down the sloping Hennepin Lounge, then up the stairs into Gallery 4. Both of these rather unusual manoeuvres were accomplished in preparation for the 2005 exhibition House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective, which the Walker chief curator/deputy director Philippe Vergne and I organized. In the last two years since the end of its run in January 2006, I’ve been often approached by our local audiences, who told me that it was one of their favorite exhibitions at the Walker (despite the fact that they knew nothing about the Chinese-born, Paris-based artist).

You may be surprised to learn that the exhibition is still on view. The airplane cockpit, the elephant, and other works have traveled to three subsequent venues, rather slowly but surefootedly, across the North American continent then crossed the Pacific Ocean: first, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) in North Adams, then the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC, and finally the spanking new Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, opening on March 22, 2008. Yes, that’s right–Beijing, China. Founded by Guy & Miriam Ullens, dedicated Belgian collectors of Chinese contemporary art who long dreamed of bringing their collection to the country of its origin, the Center is an ambitious institution that strives to bring international art to the heart of the emerging superpower and also to give in-depth treatment to the important contribution Chinese artists have made to global art in the last three decades or so. The center opened its doors in last November, and House of Oracles is only the second exhibition. The magnificent exhibition space was remodeled from a former ceramics factory in an East German-built industrial complex known as 798, now also known as the Dashanzi Art District.

My first visit to 798 was a little more than two years ago, in November 2005. The district had been in existence for a couple of years by then, and the future Ullens Center was a cavernous, evacuated space, with a soaring (I’m guessing, about 50-60 feet-high) ceiling and a now defunct industrial kiln/chimney. The on-site engineer explained to me how the space will be remodeled–a big exhibition hall here, a smaller gallery there, the office up there, etc.–which I, while nodding politely and sympathetically, could not really visualize. Many things had happened between the 2005 visit and when I attended the opening of the Center in November 2007. Certain things were still the same, or more and more of the same–for instance, the acrid yet strangely fragrant, hallucinogenic smell of burning coals and leaded gas that hover over the sprawling metropolis. And the proud capital city of People’s Republic of China keeps on expanding in a clearly measurable way but with a mind-blowing velocity. Beijing is one of the most centralized and organized cities I know of (I realize that that sounds totally paradoxical), with the Forbidden City and the Tian’anmen Square at the dead center and concentric circles of “ring roads” rippling out into yesterday’s suburbs and surrounding villages and quickly turning them into today’s peripheral hubs. In late 2005, the area around 798, which is located on the northeastern corner of the city between the Fourth and the Fifth ring roads, still felt a bit sparse. In late 2007, it was as busy as any other business districts far closer to the city center. Trying to recall what things were like a month ago in China these days is a completely futile exercise. I digress.

Late night on March 17, I arrived again in Beijing after a 15-hour-long flight from Minneapolis via Tokyo. The next morning, I walked from my hotel to the Ullens Center. All looked very familiar since I had been there only four months prior. Except that a giant sand storm engulfed the city--something that happens in the Northern part of China as winter changes into spring. Brutal. At the Center, the installation of "House of Oracles" had been going on for almost two weeks, with the artist and two of our veteran exhibition technicians, Phil Docken and Bob Brown. I have to admit that I was a little worried when I first saw the Ullens' spectacular main gallery, which had been left more or less intact from the original structure, because a lot of space with a high ceiling isn't necessarily a good thing for showing art. That is, even when art is the size of an airplane. It was rather ironic that even Huang's "Bat Project 4"--the sculpture that actually incorporates the used airplane cockpit we found in Northern California--seemed dwarfed by the hangar-like space. Yes, their gallery is that big. Nonetheless, Huang is a master at dealing with spaces (as anyone who saw the exhibition at the Walker or at any other subsequent venues would know). He designed a couple of enclosed rooms inside the mammoth hall, and I was immediately struck by the incredible sightlines he was ingeniously creating with various combinations of works in the exhibition.

Thus I was reminded of how fortunate and privileged I was to be part of the incredible journey of this project. I got to see the enormous "Bank of Sand, Sand of Bank"–a scaled replica of the 1920s’ colonial Beaux Arts-style building in Shanghai made out of a mixture of sand and cement–going up four times, and slowly crumbling each time, as a regenerative metaphor of the enduring legacy of colonialism. In Beijing, thanks to the ample space we had, we were finally able to erect this 20-ton work completely in the round (in the three previous versions, the backside had to be against an existing wall of the building). I got to see “Python,” a more than 50 feet-long wood skeleton of a cosmic serpent, rising and falling, dancing up and down in four different spaces. And I got to see four reincarnations of “Theater of the World,” a gladiatorial arena filled with insects and reptiles left to their own devices that sparked at-times heated exchanges between our blog readers (the piece was shut down by the British Columbia SPCA on the day of the exhibition’s opening in Vancouver).

The opening of this Beijing presentation, I can say, was a truly historic occasion, because this was not only the first Walker-organized exhibition to go to China (in fact, Asia), but also the first full-scale retrospective exhibition of a Chinese artist to take place in China. Thanks to the incredible commitment on the part of the Ullens, the comprehensive monograph the Walker published to accompany the exhibition was translated in full into Chinese--another first for us. I don't want to sound too self-congratulatory here, but this exhibition and tour has been a truly special event of which Philippe and I couldn't be more proud.

At the same time, I feel a little bit sad. Perhaps it's only natural. Having witnessed the exhibition's evolution over more than four years, I was seeing its final arrival in perhaps where it all started and where it always meant to come back to. And I was able to this in the company of a remarkable artist–the most generous and wise soul I know of. (Most Chinese audiences who came to the exhibition's opening called him "Huang Laoshi," i.e., "Master Huang.") But you can't have too much of a good thing. All good things must come to an end. So I bid you farewell, Master Huang.

À bientôt.
Zai jian!

Last week I met someone who, upon learning I’m a curator, asked me what I do at work every day--a reasonable question. Right now, I'm currently finishing up installing the exhibition Trisha Brown: So That the Audience Does Not Know Whether I Have Stopped Dancing with our esteemed crew. (The show opens Thursday night with a live performance drawing by the artist: http://calendar.walkerart.org/event.wac?id=4323)

Putting a show together is what I might describe as the spatial voodoo part of what we do. It can often feel like trying to decorate a house while you are still designing it, or building a musical instrument that you can't try to get a sound out of until all the pieces have been assembled. It becomes easy to obsess over the tiniest details. This is because--as one of my colleagues put it--there are an infinite number of choices you can make, and at the same time, really only a few right ones.

The most difficult section of the show to hang has proven to be a large wall of archival posters from Trisha's performances over the past three decades, which is the first thing visitors will see when they walk into the gallery. In order to visualize it, we marked off the wall dimensions on the floor, and figured out the configuration within that area. Periodically, I went up in a small lift to get a better view down onto the posters. In the course of about 24 hours, I probably tried three or four different approaches, and each one felt almost right to me. But the best solution eventually made itself clear.

As curators we often have ideas about how to install an artist's work (whether by itself or with other things) to emphasize different aspects of it, or to best express certain ideas. But when it's up against the wall, the art tends to tell us what it wants to do, refining its own image in our minds. The voodoo element of our jobs, I suppose, is everything up until that moment.

**

Installation photos by Gene Pittman

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.