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Regional |
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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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Chris Schlichting; Maia Maiden and Ellena Schoop : Dance
Chris Schlichting: love things
For Chris Schlichting, exploring the definitions of dance is as much the point as developing the choreography itself. He came to the field first as a break-dancer and through the resurgence of swing dance in the late 1990s. He later joined Ethnic Dance Theater, which focuses on traditional folk steps, and at the same time soaked up a lot of the experimental contemporary work happening in the Twin Cities. He has also performed with past Momentum artists Hijack, Morgan Thorson, and Justin Jones.
In love things, a kinetic dialogue with images of America in the 1970s and '80s, Schlichting pulls from vernacular and formal dance as well as Top 40 songs, videos, and treasured objects from his youth to consider the construct of fantasy evoked by pop culture. "The work begins by thinking through our dance histories, thinking about the movement as a conversation and how it speaks differently today than it did then," he says. "It's about what attracted us to dance initially and also reformulating that to where we are now."
Maia Maiden and Ellena Schoop: The Foundation, et cetera
In early 2007, Maia Maiden had her DNA analyzed to better pinpoint her West African roots. Results in hand--she learned of family stemming from Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea Bissau--she set about creating a dance work that would "do some exploring of ideas between what I'm calling the African generation, the civil rights generation, and mine, which is the hip-hop generation. The civil rights generation is very aware of its history, but with my generation, lots of people want no connection to history and the people who came before. So we're trying to show those perceptions and also show what we have in common; we're trying to show the struggles of the generations through the eyes of both generations."
Maiden, who grew up in South Minneapolis and cofounded Apple Valley High School's first hip-hop dance troupe, created The Foundation, et cetera with fellow choreographer Ellena Schoop, whose experiences in theater and Caribbean and Senegalese dance balance Maiden's background in hip-hop and step dance.
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Big Ideas for a Small Planet : Film
This series of documentaries created by the Sundance Channel focuses on innovative ideas for transforming the planet's future, offering creative green solutions to some of the world's looming challenges. Winner of the 2007 Environmental Media Award for Best Documentary, Big Ideas for a Small Planet features those designers, products and processes that are at the innovation forefront for transforming the planet's future, with themes from water, potentially our most scarce resource; to power and the multiplicity of alternative sources; to green design. Programming assistance provided by the Sundance Channel. 2007, video, 30 minutes each.
Schedule:
June 3-22: Episodes Fashion and Decorate
June 24 - July 13: Live and Grow
July 15-20: Water
July 22 - August 10: Transport and Power
August 12-31: Recycling and Business
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Design for the Other 90% : Exhibition
Of the world's 6.5 billion people, 90 percent have little or no access to most of the products and services many of us take for granted. In fact, nearly half do not have reliable access to food, clean water, healthcare, education, affordable transportation, or shelter. The exhibition Design for the Other 90% features more than 30 projects that reflect a growing movement among designers, engineers, and social entrepreneurs to create low-cost solutions for everyday problems. Through local and global partnerships, individuals and organizations are finding unique ways to address the basic challenges of survival and progress faced by the world's poor.
Design for the Other 90% showcases designs that use conventional and unorthodox methods, new and traditional materials, and ancient and innovative technologies to solve myriad problems--from cleaner-burning sugarcane charcoal to a solar-rechargeable battery for a hearing aid, from a portable instant water-purification straw to a $100 laptop. By understanding the available resources and tools as well as the lives and needs of their potential users, these designers create simple, pragmatic objects and ingenious, adaptive systems that can help transform lives and communities.
Situated in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and free to the public, the objects on view are housed in a collection of Global Village Shelters created by Ferrara Design, Inc., which provide a lightweight, prefabricated alternative for emergency housing.
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Walker on the Green: Artist-Designed Mini Golf : Special Event
Open Wednesday-Sunday, 10 am-8 pm (weather permitting). Open Friday, July 4 and Monday, September 1.
In the mockumentary film This Is Spinal Tap, bassist Derek Smalls suggests that the difference between miniature golf and regular golf is the size of the ball. While the ball remains the same, virtually everything else about mini golf grows--at least on the course of Walker on the Green: Artist-Designed Mini Golf. Small packages hold big ideas in this rebirth of a favorite Walker feature from the summer of 2004. Artists and designers answered an open call to create green-themed holes, pitching ideas destined to challenge players' senses as much as their games.
"The last course was artists and the Walker having a lot of fun. This one is fun with a message," says Christi Atkinson, an associate director in the Walker's education and community programs department, who coordinated the entries. "Most proposals incorporate a lot of ideas. We just had to make sure the courses will stand up to four months of weather, not to mention an enthusiastic, club-wielding public."
Designers range from independent artists and architects to members of established companies and design collectives. All are registered with mnartists.org, an online clearinghouse and resource for Minnesota artists of all stripes. The Walker and mnartists.org are partners in Walker on the Green.
Alchemy Architects of St. Paul created Water Hazard, which employs dozens of dangling water bottles as "an observation of the less-than-ecological practice of bottling and shipping drinking water." Sculptor Zoran Mojsilov cut a groove into the branches of storm-damaged trees, culled from the Pig's Eye landfill, to serve as a track for the ball. Maura Rockcastle, a former member of the Walker's Teen Arts Council, teamed with Regan Golden to build a hilly landscape pocked with mounds that appear as inverted holes. Kevin Kane collaborated with his students to create a rainwater garden and a hillside of pop-bottle bottoms. You can sink a ball into the mouth of Theodore Roosevelt--if you can maneuver past a 12-foot Paul Bunyon--created by artist Andrew MacGuffie. The Big Kahuna, by Michael Keenan, is a huge, single-breaking wave covered with recycled glass. The hole designed by Ed Hernandez plays like Pachinko, a Japanese version of pinball.
This year Walker on the Green will bring twice the fun: two seven-hole courses with a shared grand finale--a unique layout that not only embraces the wealth of strong designs, but also allows more people to play throughout the day. There are no advance reservations; play comes on a first-come, first-served basis. The course also includes a golf shack featuring a selection of food and refreshments from Wolfgang Puck's Gallery 8 Cafe. In the end, Atkinson sees many who are drawn to Walker on the Green stepping inside the Walker, some for the first time. "Mini golfers and people who like contemporary art aren't necessarily different," she says. "Sometimes it just takes something different to inspire someone to visit."
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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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Trisha Brown: Planes : Dance
Planes is a 1968 dance which is presented in-gallery on Thursdays and Saturdays as part of the exhibition Trisha Brown: So That the Audience Does Not Know Whether I Have Stopped Dancing. Local dance companies, along with student-dancers from the University of Minnesota, trained with Trisha Brown during her visit to the Walker in April. Each week a different company performs the piece, which finds the dancers scaling a wall upon which a film is projected. As the dancers move, the clarity with which one perceives "up" and "down" fades, and suddenly one is watching bodies suspended or falling through the air.
Performances are on the half-hour beginning at 6:00 pm on Thursdays, 11:00 am on Saturdays. (On days when Planes is not performed live, a recorded performance is displayed on a monitor.)
April 17 & 19: The Ballets Rousses
April 24 & 26: Wil Swanson/DANCEWORKS
May 1, 3, 8 & 10: Maggie Bergeron & Company
May 15 & 17: Wil Swanson/DANCEWORKS
May 22 & 24: Catalyst
May 29 & 31: Morgan Thorson, Anna Marie Shogren, Emily Johnson
June 5 & 7: Black Label Movement
June 12, 14, 19 & 21: Hijack
June 26 & 28: Black Label Movement
July 3 & 5: Time Track Productions
July 10 & 12: Morgan Thorson, Anna Marie Shogren, Emily Johnson
July 17 & 19: Time Track Productions
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Trisha Brown: So That the Audience Does Not Know Whether I Have Stopped Dancing : Exhibition
While Trisha Brown (b. 1936) is best known for her innovative choreographies that revolutionized modern dance, she has for many years made drawings and other works beyond the stage that integrate the performing and visual arts. Trisha Brown presents a particular occasion to consider the lesser-known visual arts practice of one of the most acclaimed contemporary choreographers at a moment of increasing interest in the broad sweep of her work and its influence. Drawing has long featured prominently in Brown's maverick practice, shifting from a tool for schematic composition into a fully-realized component of her broader investigation into the limits of her own body.
Among the most active artists to have emerged from the multidisciplinary avant-garde of 1960s New York, Brown pioneered within dance the idea of the body as a field with varying centers, encouraging her performers to conceive of dances in which movement could begin in a variety of locations throughout their bodies, by turns embracing and defying gravity. Early in her career, Brown created works in which performers walked on the walls of a gallery or down the exterior facade of a building--rather than on the floor. The exhibition takes inspiration in its structure from Brown's interest in reorienting the performer and audience, with a performance installation that places live dancers on the wall of the gallery, and a participatory audio work that invites visitors to lie on the gallery floor and contemplate the ceiling. The former work, Planes (1968), is a major early performance that includes a film by Jud Yalkut and soundtrack by Simone Forti; the latter, Skymap (1969), was Brown's one attempt to engage the ceiling as a performative surface.
The exhibition centers on a broad survey of Brown's drawings going back more than three decades, concluding with a large drawing to be performed by the artist at the opening for inclusion in the show. To a significant degree, the arc of Brown's work in drawing parallels her developments in dance, and footage of seminal performances is present throughout the exhibition. Whether she is working within the frame of a sheet of paper, on the wall, or on the stage, Brown delights in the play between structure and improvisation, between repetition and invention, and between choice and chance. "I get involved in the mystery of space," she says. "I have the same adrenaline and heartbeat going as I enter the paper as I do going on stage."
As an extension of the exhibition, the Walker is organizing a number of Brown's early performance works around the museum during the show, including a rare presentation of Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970), and a number of performances by the full company as part of the Walker's performing arts program.
Trisha Brown's work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions, most recently Documenta 12, and she has directed numerous operas. She is the first woman choreographer to receive the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and has been awarded many other honors including the National Medal of Arts in 2003. She was named Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the government of France in 1988; was elevated to Officier in 2000; and then to the level of Commandeur in 2004. Brown's Set & Reset is included in the baccalaureate curriculum for French students pursuing dance studies. At the invitation of President Bill Clinton, Brown served on the National Council on the Arts from 1994 to 1997.
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Richard Prince: Spiritual America : Exhibition
Nobody cannibalizes an image like Richard Prince, who has carved his place in contemporary art by recycling, reflecting, and reframing photographs, cartoons, advertisements, and other images already existing in the public sphere. It's a practice cut from 1970s and '80s SoHo--Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, and Sherrie Levine are among his contemporaries. But more than his peers, Prince sees himself as a funnel rather than a filter: he pilfers freely from the vast image bank of pop culture and recasts these appropriated images in a new light, embracing and at the same time critiquing a distinct American sensibility.
In 1977, Prince's simple yet controversial act of rephotographing advertising images and presenting them as his own ushered in a new, critical approach to art-making--one that questioned notions of originality. This plays out through his reframings of the Marlboro man, topless women atop Harley-Davidsons (culled from pictures in biker magazines such as Easyriders), comedians, cars, cartoons (hand-copied from The New Yorker and Playboy, among others), neglected landscapes, pulp fiction, side-by-side pinups of Hollywood starlets, nurses in surgical masks and, most recently, homages to the paintings of Willem de Kooning.
There are well-known pieces--the appropriated image of a naked Brooke Shields at age 10, which gives this exhibition its name, had a controversial history even before the artist cast a new light on it. The 1983 photo, Spiritual America, is quintessential Prince, playing to conflicting impulses--the seeking of attention while maintaining a high moral ground--that are at the heart of contemporary American culture. Prince also turned his fascination with celebrity culture inward with a series of paintings layered with his own canceled novelty checks.
While the Walker began collecting and showing the artist's work in 1984, Richard Prince: Spiritual America, organized by the Guggenheim Museum, New York, is the artist's first comprehensive retrospective since 1992. Philippe Vergne, the Walker's chief curator and deputy director, sees a "cruel elegance" threading Prince's work and considers the exhibition essential both to the Walker and to anyone interested in the visual--and visceral--dissection of Americana. "We have the cowboys, hoods, girlfriends, early photographs, the core of his career in our collection," he says. "What people will see now is a depth of practice."
While Pop Art has largely appropriated pop culture, Prince makes this process circular by creating art that appropriates and later becomes part of popular culture itself. Previous examinations of his art have emphasized its role in postmodern criticism. This exhibition and its accompanying catalogue not only focus on the artist's fascination with rebellion, obsession with fame, and preoccupation with the tawdry and the illicit, but also connect them to the fabric of our social landscape. Nancy Spector, chief curator at the Guggenheim, writes in the exhibition catalogue that Prince entered a metaphoric life of crime in 1977 and went underground, adopting aliases to evade identification and escape definition. "His specialty is a carefully constructed hybrid that is also some kind of joke, charged by conflicting notions of high, low and lower," New York Times critic Roberta Smith wrote of Prince in a September 2007 review of this show. "His work disturbs, amuses and then splinters in the mind. It unsettles assumptions about art, originality and value, class and sexual difference and creativity."
Controversial and seductive, edgy and classical, ultimately beautiful, Richard Prince: Spiritual America shows him as a chameleon in style and form. Through all his work, Prince compels his audience to notice the ordinary and see commonalities with the extraordinary. "He relinquished the role of artist as high priest, which he had originally aspired to in his reverence for Kline and Pollock, and took on that of the fugitive," Spector writes. "He even created an artistic alter ego known as John Dogg, who had his own exhibitions and fleeting 15 minutes of fame. . . . In the end, the question 'Who is Richard Prince?' is a rhetorical one."
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 Sunday, 20 July 2008
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