Forgive my recent lapse in writing: extenuating circumstances have prevented me from posting all week. After a trying few days, I am back in Minnesota for the weekend, and with a free afternoon on my hands today, I decided to view the recently-completed expansion of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. For those of you who are not familiar with the Walker, it rates as perhaps America's preeminent twentieth and twenty-first art institution located outside New York and Los Angeles. In other words, it is the crown-jewel of Middle America's contemporary art scene.
So it was not without some excitement that I returned to an institution which I used to frequent before my move to the east coast, and prior to Herzog & de Meuron epic transformation. And as far as my reactions to the structure are concerned, they certainly befit a museum of its stature. Whereas the preexisting Walker was a drab brick bastard child of modernisme, the Swiss team's glass and aluminum skin makes for a compelling visual landmark in what is otherwise a sea of pavement. If part of the conceptualization is the museum as an interface with the neighborhood, they can't be faulted too much for their meager surroundings -- at at least the structure offers striking vistas of Minneapolis's glass and steel skyline.
Yet, if the structure itself provides a fine example of urban sculpture -- and the interior follows the Gehry-centered trend toward fractured, irregular cavernous spaces (though eschewing that architect's dependence upon curvilinear surfaces) -- the contents of the Walker itself reaffirm many of the most insidious tendencies of contemporary American and European art. In a quintet of thematically-grouped selections from the center's permanent collection -- The Shape of Time, Shadowland: An Exhibition as a Film, Urban Cocktail, Mythologies, and Elemental -- as well as two additional groupings of key mid-century scene-makers, the Walker inadvertently makes a case for the high-charlatanism of this most recent epoch. Without the context of your Cezanne's, Picasso's, Pollock's, and even Duchamp's, the work of their largely-inferior followers is presented as though it speaks for itself -- and suffers as a result. What one sees most, I would submit, is the adoption of style without substance. When it is in service of the mind, it no longer consults the eye, and vice versa.
Consequently, it is those media that the twentieth-century fine arts establishment most aggressively struggled against -- in conceptual terms -- that trump even the most interesting pieces of painting and sculpture in the museum. Put another way, the film and photography on display in the Shadowlands exhibit best most other pieces on display in the reconstituted museum. In terms of photography, the brilliant Jeff Wall naturally rises to the top with his cinematic "Morning Cleaning, Mies van der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona" (1999), which like his best pieces construes an open-ended narrative through its accumulation of detail and action -- in this case the titular cleaning. Also of note are pieces by Sharon Lockhart, Catherine Opie, Wing Young Huie, and fellow traveler painter Gerhard Lockhart. For instance, Opie's series of icehouses (2001) -- a fitting subject for an Upper Midwestern museum, if ever there was one -- reproduce the idiom of minimalism in the photographic medium, reducing the space to a single overwhelming white field surrounding small flecks of bold color deep in the image's recesses.
Yet, if photography offers an instantiation of the art of the eye, finding in nature and architecture compositional grace -- composition is also a key motif in many of the museum's paintings though often devoid of or in deference too an ostensible subject beside itself -- then it is film which continues its reign as the queen of the plastic arts. The most interesting piece, perhaps in the entire Walker, is a twenty-five screen instillation of Chantal Akerman's 1993 "D'Est," here co-titled "Bordering on Fiction." If most pieces inspire thought before feeling, Akerman's travelogue approaches things from the other end, producing a sensorial experience of this particular time and place as captured in her extended travelling shots and as registering on her many subject's faces.
Beyond Akerman's monumental instillation, the museum also feature's Derek Jarman's final work, "Blue" (1993), a single blue screen that corresponds to a maximal soundtrack, and Shirin Neshat's "Soliloquy" (1999), which by virtue of its dual-screen set-up establishes its female protagonist's alienation both from her Turkish motherland and her Albany home. If she longs for the former, her experience of Turkey remains that of an outsider. In the end, these superlative works of cinema not only propose a concept, but they likewise affect a visceral experience that is sadly lacking in so many other works of the contemporary scene.
However, it must be remembered that the non-photographic arts did experience a crisis with the advent of photography. If photography was reflected in Courbet, allegorized in Manet, challenged in Cezanne, and finally lamented in de Kooning, among others, then what we see in the Walker is an art that no longer deals with the crisis but one that seems all-too-often to be feeling around, with its eyes closed, for a brand-new form. It is a year zero art, a dark ages formula that may someday lead to its new Gothic cathedrals or rather inspire a clean Renaissance break. Either way, the visual arts as evinced in this grand new structure are diseased, or to be far more gracious, represent a year zero which will be inevitably eclipsed.
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