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Walker Art News |
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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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Open Studio Conversations : Tomás Saraceno and Alberto Pesavento : Artist Residency
Please joins us for a series of open studio conversations between the Museo aero solar creators Tomas Saraceno and Alberto Pesavento and students from the Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics (AEM) Department at the University of Minnesota and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. You can drop in anytime between 10am and 7pm from Monday, October 6 - Friday, October 10 at Laurel Village, which is located at 1250 Hennepin Avenue, Minneapolis.
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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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Journeys to Nowhere: Selections from the Collection : Exhibition
This focused gathering of works from the Walker's collection revolves around the ideas of adventure and discovery, dreams and imagination, as well as nature and environment. The centerpiece is the ambitious video installation A Journey That Wasn't (2005) by Pierre Huyghe (born 1962, Paris), which takes viewers on an expedition to Antarctica in search of a lost island and its elusive inhabitant--an albino penguin. Documentation of this perilous yet thrilling voyage is interspersed with footage from a spectacular operatic light-and-sound recreation, which the artist staged as a public event in New York's Central Park. A Journey That Wasn't premiered at the Whitney Biennial 2006: A Day for Night, curated by Philippe Vergne and Chrissie Iles and was jointly acquired by the Whitney and the Walker in 2006. Inspired by the artist's work, this exhibition explores the convergence of reality and fiction, memory and history, and various modes of cultural reproduction through the use of a diverse range of media, including film, video, sound, animation, sculpture, and architecture. Journeys to Nowhere also features works from the Walker's collection that resonate with the range of complex and contemporary social topics addressed and suggested by Huyghe's piece--in particular, humanity's simultaneous destruction of nature and yearning for utopia.
Curators: Elizabeth Carpenter and Doryun Chong
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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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The Shape of Time : Exhibition
Unfolding a chronological path through 50 years of art history, this exhibition begins with postwar abstraction, moves on to the historical and visual thrill of "alternative modernisms," and ends in the swarming and seductive experiments of the 1980s and 1990s.
Mid-Century Radical
The Shape of Time begins with postwar American and European abstraction. Chronological but never canonical, this installation of High Modernist painting and sculpture presents moments of classicism and radicality in the work of a selection of artists, including Lucio Fontana, Alberto Giacometti, Hans Hofmann, Ellsworth Kelly, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, Isamu Noguchi, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still.
Alternative Modernisms
Exploring in depth the turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s and the concurrent spirit of liberation and experimentation, this section offers a survey of aesthetic practices aimed at subverting the conventions of artmaking: Japanese Gutai, Viennese Actionism, Italian Arte Povera, the international Fluxus movement. Artists include Alighiero Boetti, Bruce Conner, David Hammons, Yves Klein, Marisa Merz, Hermann Nitsch, Nam June Paik, Giulio Paolini, Dieter Roth, Shiraga Kazuo, Tanaka Atsuko, and Hannah Wilke.
American Standard
The pervasive presence of American mass media, advertising, and consumer goods in the 1950s has proven to be a fertile subject for artists, most notably spawning Pop Art during the early 1960s. Drawing on the proliferation of brandname products, logos, billboards, popular press, television, and Hollywood films (not to mention the advertising industry charged with creating consumer desire for those goods), Pop artists such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg made work that rejected the otherworldly aspirations of the Abstract Expressionists. They embraced the banality of their environments and produced art that was resolutely of its time.
Two artists on view in this gallery, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, form a bridge between Abstract Expressionism and Pop, combining painterly abstraction with found objects, collage, and recognizable images. The stuff of modern life--classic Pop subject matter--populates the other works in this space. Oldenburg parodied fast food while Warhol appropriated grocery-store packaging and newspaper photos. Today, the work of these artists reads as both a celebration and critique of postwar American capitalism in all its ingenuity and blatant hucksterism.
Variations on Convention
For centuries the practices of both painting and sculpture have gone through numerous disruptions and transformations: painters have upended such traditional categories as figuration, abstraction, portraiture, and landscape; and sculptors have questioned the age-old uses of mass, light, and space. In the 1980s, a plurality of approaches emerged alongside and at times in opposition to one another, and though there was much talk of the oncoming "death of painting," the '80s and '90s proved to be fertile ground for its rebirth. Artists such as Chuck Close and On Kawara continued to innovate in the realms of figuration and conceptualism, while artists Richard Prince and Christopher Wool reinvented the rules by using a car hood as a support or bringing language into the picture plane. The same wildly divergent approaches were apparent in the realm of sculpture in Robert Gober's strange, handmade reinterpretation of a sink, or in Sherrie Levine's rethinking of Marcel Duchamp's iconoclastic fountain. In both mediums, these variations on convention turned the accepted and the familiar on their heads in a way that would open up a new field of inquiry for the coming generation.
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 Tuesday, 07 October 2008
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