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Today at the Walker Art Center
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What's happening today at the Walker
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Light Manipulators : Workshop
Influenced by years of travel, Eero Saarinen envisioned specific light/color qualities when creating ethereal church spaces or sleek furniture designs. In this art lab, participants are invited to make pendant lamps inspired by Saarinen's techniques of manipulating color for dramatic effect, led by University of Wisconsin design instructor Jada Schumacher.
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Tetsumi Kudo: Garden of Metamorphosis : Exhibition
The first solo U.S. museum exhibition of Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo's work includes more than 100 works of diverse media and scale--objects, sculpture, installation, drawing, and painting--covering the entire trajectory of his career, from the late 1950s through the late 1980s. Also featured will be a study room, in which viewers can explore a timeline of the artist's life and work and examine historical documentation, posters, and ephemera, as well as studies for some of his larger-scale works. Kudo was a rare artist who bridged many disparate artistic tendencies in the latter half of the 20th century--including French Nouveau Realisme, international Fluxus, Pop art, 1960s anti-art tendencies, and 1980s Japanese postmodernism--without specifically belonging to any of them.
Throughout his life and career he remained an eccentric and enigmatic figure in postwar art. In his stance and approach, temperament, and philosophy, the contemporary artists he perhaps shared most with were figures like Joseph Beuys, Paul Thek, James Lee Byars, and Yayoi Kusama. But the significance of Kudo's work lies not only in art history but in postwar culture and thought more generally. Throughout his career, he remained particularly Japanese, while his art and vision were consistently and uniquely transcultural, international, and cosmopolitan. Deeply concerned with the fate of humanity in the wake of nuclear attacks on his native land and the dawn of the global arms race, Kudo sought to develop a universal humanist language of creativity and regeneration until his untimely death in 1990.
A catalogue accompanies the exhibition.
Curator: Doryun Chong
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Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future : Exhibition
The Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts jointly present this first major museum retrospective of architect Eero Saarinen's short but prolific career. Saarinen was one of the most celebrated, unorthodox, and controversial masters of 20th-century architecture. In many ways he was the architect of what has been dubbed "the American century," the post-World War II era when the United States emerged as an influential world superpower.
Although Saarinen's most iconic and publicly recognizable design is the soaring Gateway Arch in St. Louis, his work spanned many different areas of architectural practice, including the design of airports, corporate and academic campuses, churches and private residences, and furniture. Although criticized by his peers at the time for having a different style for each project, Saarinen rejected the dogma of an orthodox modernism and instead adopted a varied approach to architectural design, letting the subject and site guide his inventive solutions. His resulting body of work includes such masterpieces as the sweeping concrete curves of the TWA Terminal (1956-1962) at New York's JFK Airport; the grandeur of General Motors Technical Center (1948-1956), dubbed an "industrial Versailles" by the media; and the iconic Womb Chair and Ottoman (1946-1948) or the innovative Pedestal (1954-1957) series of tables and chairs, both for Knoll and all classics of mid-century modernism.
Featured in the exhibition are never-before-seen sketches, working drawings, models, photographs, furnishings, films, and other ephemera from various archives and private collections. Exploring his entire output of more than 50 built and unbuilt projects, it provides a unique opportunity to consider Saarinen's innovations in the use of new materials, technologies, and construction techniques within the larger context of postwar modern architecture.
In this collaborative presentation, the Walker Art Center will feature Saarinen's furnishings and residences as well as his designs for churches and academic and corporate campuses, while the Minneapolis Institute of Arts will present his designs for airports, memorials, and embassies, as well as his early work within the context of its modernist design collection.
A catalogue accompanies the exhibition.
Curator: Donald Albrecht, independent curator and curator of architecture and design at the
Museum of the City of New York
Walker Coordinating Curator: Andrew Blauvelt
Minneapolis Institute of Arts Coordinating Curator: Jennifer Komar Olivarez, Associate
Curator of Architecture, Design, Decorative Arts, Craft & Sculpture
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Statements: Beuys, Flavin, Judd : Exhibition
Joseph Beuys, Dan Flavin, and Donald Judd were contemporaries of thought rather than form. Each took sculpture off its pedestal--literally and figuratively--and expanded the conventions of what constitutes a work of art, influencing scores of artists to do the same. Grouping Beuys, Flavin, and Judd in a new exhibition from the Walker's collection provides "a snapshot of a vital moment in postwar cultural production," says assistant curator Yasmil Raymond, and allows viewers to trace the influence of their ideas in contemporary art. "With this exhibition, visitors will see three different 'statements' that reflect distinct positions towards art-making and the ways in which these artists addressed the autonomy of art, its nature, and its social power. These are concerns that this generation of artists set in motion and continue to have relevance for artists today."
Beuys was an artist, teacher, and political activist who became one of the art world's most discussed, celebrated, and controversial postwar figures. He wanted people to see his objects as "stimulants for the transformation of the idea of sculpture." He pursued this goal by using organic materials and focusing on the process of creation, allowing chemical reactions, fermentations, and decay to render his objects constantly in a "state of change" and evolution. His preoccupation with the collective memory and trauma of European culture and civilization led him to label his objects as "vehicles" for transformation, healing, and action.
Judd paved for himself a path between painting and sculpture, with singleness or wholeness as a key pursuit. In direct contrast to Beuys' expanded notion of art, Judd championed a new sculptural aesthetic of bare geometrical shapes he termed "specific objects." By 1965, he began commissioning industrial fabricators to weld and manufacture his works in a wide variety of "new" materials--stainless steel, galvanized iron, anodized aluminum, brass, plexiglass, Formica, and plywood--he observed as "either recent inventions or things not used before in art."
Like Judd, his close friend, Flavin also rejected the Minimalist label many critics and curators placed on his work. He worked with generic fluorescent lighting to make horizontal and vertical sculptures along walls and floors--including corners, baseboards, and stairwells--dedicating his career to combining "traditions of painting and sculpture in architecture with acts of electric light defining space." His challenge of artistic convention extended to the labels "sculpture" and "environment," which he abandoned in favor of creating "proposals" and "situations" in barren rooms. This last practice is a direct predecessor to the work of contemporary artists such as Tino Sehgal, whose "constructed situations" recently received their first Walker exhibition.
Raymond cites several threads connecting the artists in Statements, including their consideration of the space surrounding their work and the removal of their own hands from the production process; they took on the function of architects providing specifications for others to fabricate the piece or, in the case of Beuys, by transforming the creative process into a collaboration. They operated in "a different manner but toward similar goals," she says. "There is also a shared confidence, an earnest conviction in both forms and ideas guiding their work. They weren't interested in flamboyance and monumentality. Each of them experimented with new alternatives and presented concrete statements despite the unwelcome reception by mainstream culture at the time.
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Mythologies : Exhibition
Including works by Joseph Beuys, Mary Esch, Katharina Fritsch, Anselm Kiefer, Paul McCarthy, Julie Mehretu, Sigmar Polke, Charles Ray, and Paul Thek, this exhibition assembles a variety of media around the idea of historical or contemporary mythologies. For instance, Beuys, Kiefer, and Polke reflect on troubled history and the notion of national identity, and Charles Ray shapes a conflicted monument to the late 20th century in his wrecked car entitled Unpainted Sculpture.
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 Thursday, 04 December 2008
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