About This Set
This set is a resource for teachers, tour guides, and visitors to enrich their experiences in the exhibition Event Horizon. Just as one encounters the exhibition by traversing through three galleries, entering the occassional secluded room, and spending time with monitors and headphones, this presentation has dividers to signify these thresholds. In addition to a glimpse at the show's visual aspects, this presentation offers information about several artists, artworks, meanings, and interpretations that can be encountered during one's visit. Many of the artworks are contextualized and illuminated by supplemental resources that have been integrated into the presentation.
Tips: How to Navigate the Presentation
Hover your mouse over an artwork's image to engage the zoom tool, a +/- slider and thumbnail that allow you to magnify any detail of the image.
Click the "More Info" button located at the very bottom of most slides. This will open up the Work of Art Detail page. Scroll down and use the blue tabs to investigate the scale of the work or read how other ArtsConnectEd users have tagged or commented on the art work.
About the Exhibition Event Horizon
Highlights and hidden secrets of the Walker’s contemporary art collections are presented in a lively sequence of rotations that unfold throughout the exhibition’s run. Inspired by the idea of the event horizon, a term that describes the edge of observable space, this exhibition threads together major themes and developments in contemporary art, while showcasing works in the context of the events that produced them. In changing over time, it reflects the many voices, perspectives, and programs advanced by the Walker over the past half-century, while acknowledging the continual evolution of art collections as works are added to the mix.
In addition to showing the Walker’s remarkable holdings of postwar art, from avant-garde film of the 1960s to newly created environmental works, the Event Horizon galleries serve as sites for performances, public dialogues, and screenings—all significant aspects of the art of today.
The exhibition includes more than 80 works, including pieces by Bruce Conner, Joseph Cornell, Olafur Elisasson, Cao Fei, Thomas Hirschhorn, Andreas Gursky, Mike Kelley, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol, and Kara Walker.
Curators: Darsie Alexander and Elizabeth Carpenter, with Philip Bither, Sheryl Mousley, and Sarah Schultz
For Walker events related to Event Horizon, visit http://calendar.walkerart.org/canopy.wac?id=5269
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Enter Gallery 1
Event Horizon
Two simple words form the title of this exhibition and frame its contents: "events" are episodes of life, while "horizons" mark their outer limits. Event Horizon presents the Walker Art Center's holdings of postwar art in the context of the events and times that produced them. A president dies. A bomb drops. A dancer leaps. A girl finds a second life. The exhibition showcases works by artists who mediate these realities with striking individuality. By examining, manipulating, or critiquing images and ideas, phenomena, and circumstances, they transform the certainties of their lived experience into complex testaments.
Events, regardless of their intimacy or magnitude of scale, are by nature temporal occurrences that drive developments in art. The passage of time is reflected in pieces that have been used, worn, and otherwise handled and bear signs of this history on their surfaces. Other works become documents of performances enacted in the studio, in front of the camera, onstage, or in the street.
Change is essential to this multidisciplinary exhibition, which unfolds over the course of more than two years. A rotating projects space, for example, features selections from the film collection, and then later becomes a stage for a live dance performance. Through the introduction of these more transient elements, the exhibition positions us on the threshold of possibilities and eventualities, inviting us to think, act, and react.
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Artist: Daniel Buren
Date: 1966
Medium: Paintings
Size: framed 90.875 x 79.375 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2007.60
A visit to a Parisian market in 1965 marked a defining moment in Daniel Buren’s career. There, he came upon the materials that would henceforth define his practice: rolls of preprinted awning fabric with alternating white and colored stripes in green, red, yellow, blue, orange, brown, or black. At a standardized 8.7 centimeters, the equal distance between stripes meant that he was able to dispense with the traditional figure/ground distinctions in painting and make a flat and neutral work. As he asked in a 1969 manifesto, “. . . can one create something that is real, nonillusionistic, and therefore not an art object?”
For this work, Buren attached the fabric to a stretcher and painted the sides white*. He reasoned that without his visible mark-making, viewers would consider this a “readymade,” implying an unwanted connection to Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp’s practice of turning everyday objects into art by placing them in the context of a gallery or museum.
* Zoom in to inspect the image's left or right border. Can you differentiate the painted edges from the preprinted fabric?
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Contextual information for Daniel Buren's Peinture acrylique blanche sur tissu rayé blanc et orange (White acrylic painting on white and orange striped fabric):
Left: A photo of an awning made from the preprinted fabric with alternating white and colored stripes, as used extensively by Buren.
Right: Daniel Buren's installation for Art Unlimited at Art Basel, 2007.
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Artist: André Cadere
Date: 1977
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: overall 71.5 x 1.25 x 1.25 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2001.209
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Artist: Thomas Hirschhorn
Date: 2000
Medium: Paintings
Size: overall 85 x 120.5 x 12.5 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2001.22
Thomas Hirschhorn is known for working with an expanded idea of sculpture that operates in a variety of social spaces, including the gallery, the museum, the street, or specific urban communities. Abstract Relief: Archaeology appears at once to be a comment on the aesthetic history of painting, a quasi-abstract map, or a viral cell that points toward the fraught interconnectivity of things. Its components are inexpensive packaging materials, which facilitate the endless circulation of commodities across the globe, and images that simultaneously evoke death, antiquity, and commerce. This approach is in keeping with his tendency toward confrontational juxtapositions of radically antagonistic histories, images, and forms.
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Artist: Mike Kelley
Date: 2002
Medium: Mixed media, Media Arts, Multimedia
Size: sculpture 35 x 69 x 69 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2003.10.1-.5
Mike Kelley, based in Los Angeles, has created a provocative and far-reaching body of work that includes performance art, installation, and sculpture. His work treads a highly charged terrain of desire, dread, and dysfunction in everyday American life while attempting to dispel the cynicism and self-satisfaction that has accompanied the triumphs of the "American century." He often reinvents childhood toys and everyday objects, investing them with subversive meanings. A raging satirist, Kelley has used the freewheeling intermedia approach of Conceptual Art to forge a series of inventive works that challenge prevailing notions of taste, influence, moral authority, social responsibility, and art's transcendent function.
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Artist: Sherrie Levine
Date: 1990
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: 33.25 x 115 x 65.25 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1992.156.1-.8
La Fortune (Luck)* is a 1938 painting by Surrealist artist Man Ray that depicts a lawn-green billiard table jutting out into the sky. Sherrie Levine took the image and used it as the basis for a three-dimensional sculpture that captures the feminine curvature and masculine aura associated with the billiard table in Man Ray’s painting. Her rendering is not exact—Man Ray’s
version was more elongated, befitting the dreamlike distortion of scale typical of his work. A direct challenge to notions of artistic originality and authorship, Levine’s work aligns with a wider set of appropriation practices associated with a disparate group of artists that includes Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Louise Lawler, who have since become known as the “Pictures Generation.” While many of these artists concentrated on images of popular culture, Levine has generally drawn from works found within the canon of art history, principally by male artists associated with modernism and the early 20th-century avant-garde.
*To see an image of Man Ray's painting, the referrent in Levine's sculpture, follow this link.
Label information for La Fortune (Luck):
Artist: Man Ray (1890–1976)
Date: 1938
Medium: Oil on canvas
Collection Whitney Museum of American Art
Photo: Geoffrey Clements
Copyright 2009 Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Socienty (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris
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Artist: Robert Indiana
Date: 1962
Medium: Paintings
Size: each unframed 60.25 x 60.25 x 1.875 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1963.45.1-.2
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Artist: Raymond Hains
Date: 1959-1960/2002
Medium: Paintings
Size: overall installed 79.75 x 114.375 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2005.33.1-.4
In 1949, Raymond Hains and his occasional collaborator Jacques Villeglé began excavating layers of torn advertising and political propaganda posters found on the streets of Paris, which they brought back to their studios and claimed as their art. Some 10 years later, Hains began collecting large, sheet-iron fence panels, visible here in Untitled, with posters
affixed to them. The artist often used a putty knife to further compose or manipulate the layers.
Hains’ works were made as if in collaboration with the countless people from a vast array of backgrounds who had pasted, touched, or torn at the posters on the street. Produced at the height of France’s postwar identity crisis—when the nation was divided about the best way to deal with a war of independence in its colony Algeria and was experiencing new waves of materialism and modernization—the posters within the work bear witness to this turmoil. In fact, a 1961 exhibition by Villeglé and Hains was titled simply La France déchirée (France in Shreds).
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Artist: Günther Uecker
Date: 1964
Medium: Paintings
Size: unframed 34.5 x 34.5 x 2.75 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1964.41
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Artist: Niki de Saint Phalle
Date: 1964
Medium: Mixed Media, Multiples, Other
Size: framed 28.375 x 21.3125 x 2.8125 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1966.16
Niki de Saint Phalle was part of a movement in Europe called Nouveau Réalisme (New Realism), which included Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni. Like the "Neo-Dadaists" in New York, the Nouveaux Réalistes favored the grittiness of everyday life over the elegant simplicity of 1950s abstraction (seen in the Walker's previous collections exhibition, The Shape of Time, in the works of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman). In 1960 the Nouveaux Réalistes signed a manifesto calling for "new approaches to the perception of the real."
That same year, inspired by a child's dart game, de Saint Phalle invented a provocative technique for creating her paintings. She attached bags of colored pigment to the canvases and shot them with a .22 caliber rifle. The impact of the bullets released the paint, which splattered and ripped across the surface in unpredictable ways. She used this method to create numerous works during the 1960s, often before an audience of invited guests who were encouraged to take part in the shooting.
Wikipedia article on Niki de Saint Phalle
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Artist: Franz West
Date: 1997
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: overall 25.625 x 11.75 x 11.75 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2001.65.1-.3
And yes, just like you see demonstrated and explained in the video, visitors are invited to pick up and carry these objects. As you physically interact with the artwork, consider their weight, surface qualities, structure, and "anatomy."
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Artist: Andy Warhol
Date: 1964
Medium: Paintings
Size: unframed 80.375 x 64.375 x inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1968.2
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For Warhol and fellow Pop artists, reproducing images from popular culture was the visual means for expressing detachment from emotions, an attitude they regarded as characteristic of the 1960s. Like droning newscasts, repetition dissipates meaning and with it the capacity of images to move or disturb. Warhol created 16 Jackies in response to the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, an event whose mass-media coverage reached an unparalleled number of people.
The four images of Jacqueline Kennedy, each repeated four times, were enlargements of news photographs that appeared widely and continually in the media after the assassination. Taken from issues of Life magazine, the images depict, from top to bottom: Jackie stepping off the plane upon arrival at Love Field in Dallas; stunned at the swearing-in ceremony for Lyndon B. Johnson aboard Air Force One after the president's death; grieving at the Capitol; and smiling in the limousine before the assassination. 16 Jackies combines a number of themes important in Warhol's work, such as his fascination with American icons and celebrities, his interest in the mass media and the dissemination of imagery, and his preoccupation with death.
Artist: Walker Art Center
Date: 1999
Medium: Commentary, object label
Institution: Walker Art Center
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I heard the news over the radio when I was alone painting in my studio. I don't think I missed a stroke. I wanted to know what was going on out there, but that was the extent of my reaction.... Henry Geldzahler wanted to know why I wasn't more upset, so I told him about the time I was walking in India and saw a bunch of people in a clearing having a ball because somebody they really liked had just died and how I realized then that everything was just how you decided to think about it. I'd been thrilled having Kennedy as president; he was handsome, young, smart--but it didn't bother me that much that he was dead. What bothered me was the way the television and radio were programming everybody to feel so sad. It seemed like no matter how hard you tried, you couldn't get away from the thing.... John Quinn, the playwright ... was moaning over and over, "But Jackie was the most glamorous First Lady we'll every get."2
For Warhol, the visual means for expressing detachment from emotions, an attitude he regarded as characteristic of the 1960s in general,3 was through the replication of images. Like the droning repetition of newscasts, the device dissipates meaning, and with it the capacity of images to move or disturb: "The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away and the better and emptier you feel."4
The sixteen faces of Jackie Kennedy in Warhol's painting were blown up from four news photos that appeared ubiquitously in the media after the assassination. From top to bottom, the images are of Jackie smiling at Love Field on arrival in Dallas; stunned at the swearing-in ceremony for L.B.J. on Air Force One after the president's death; grieving at the Capitol; and in the limousine before the shooting. The top three appeared in the 24 November and 6 December 1963 issues of Life magazine: the first by an unidentified photographer; the second and third by Cecil Stoughton and Fred Ward, respectively; the source for the bottom one has not been identified, although a U.P.I. photograph similar to it was reproduced in Newsweek. Eventually, in Warhol's view, these images became so familiar that neutral identification is all that the viewer experiences.
Warhol make this point by repeating each of the four image of Jackie four times, in a simple well-designed non-sequential alternation of strips of "before and after" pictures. The high-contrast, low-information pictures, each as different from the others as one reproduction from another, are cropped to focus on Jackie's face, rhythmically directed one way along one row and then the other along the next. A deliberately careless look gives the painting a sense of chance and hurry, suggesting the quick duplication and dissemination of images.5 Additionally, expressivity is, in a sense, absent from the images themselves. Public expectation forces the face of the politician's wife into a perpetual, meaningless smile, while shock renders the widow as inexpressive and numb as one of Warhol's somnambulant superstars. The two faces, perceived by Warhol as equally unreal, have been further sapped of meaning by the mythologizing American culture and the techniques of reproduction, and are finally emptied of meaning by the artist's stylization.
1 See Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, PoPism: The Warhol '60s (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 36.
2 Ibid., p. 60.
3 Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), p. 27.
4 Warhol, PoPism, p. 50. It is interesting to note that 16 Jackies ignited the passion of a vandal who inscribed the words "HOGWASH/USA" on the panel third from the top on the leftmost column and "BLACK" on the panel second from the top on the rightmost column in ballpoint pen in November 1967; the inscriptions were successfully removed by Daniel Goldreyer in New York by late January 1968.
5 Warhol describes the silkscreening process he used, which allowed him to turn the work of reproducing the design over to Gerard Malanga and other assistants: "You pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different each time. It was all so simple-quick and chancy;" Warhol, PoPism, p. 22.
Artist: Walker Art Center
Date: 1998
Medium: Commentary, catalogue entry
Institution: Walker Art Center
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After President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Andy Warhol began his series of "Jackie paintings" in response to the media blitz that followed the incident. 16 Jackies is a grid of four different images based on news photos of Jacqueline Kennedy from international press coverage of JFK's death.
As in Brillo Boxes (1964/1969, also on view here), the artist elevates commercial iconography to the status of fine art. In so doing, Warhol allows his viewer to consider the overlap of things that American culture values: wealth and success, human emotion, and artistic expression.
Artist: Walker Art Center
Date: 1998
Medium: Commentary, object label
Institution: Walker Art Center
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Artist: Richard Flood
Date: September 1999
Medium: Commentary, curatorial commentary
Institution: Walker Art Center
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Artist: Paul Shambroom
Date: 2005
Medium: Photographs
Size: framed 43 x 63.875 x 2 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2007.13
To view the image and read more about this photograph, follow this link: http://www.artsjournal.com/man/2007/05/acquisition_shambroom_at_walke.html
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LANDMARK WALKER PERFORMANCES
In the 1960s, avant-garde theater and dance artists began creating works outside of traditional theater or gallery spaces, resulting in a type of public “event” that established a new genre of site-specific performance. Using the unique historical, environmental, and architectural properties of specifically chosen sites, these works would often result in spectacular, highly resonant public art. Dance artists Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, and Twyla Tharp and interdisciplinary artists Meredith Monk, Robert Wilson, and Peter Schumann, for example, were at the forefront of this practice.
In support of these practitioners and others, the Walker has produced many elaborate site-specific events over the past 40 years. Trisha Brown Dance Company’s Group Primary Accumulation on Rafts was performed in Minneapolis’ Loring Park in 1974 and 2008, and her groundbreaking Man Walking Down the Side of a Building was restaged at the Walker in July 2008. Elizabeth Streb’s Bounce was presented on the infield of the Metrodome before a Minnesota Twins/New York Yankees baseball game. The most ambitious such production in Walker history was Merce Cunningham and John Cage’s monumental Ocean, which was remounted in September 2008 at the Rainbow Quarry in Waite Park, Minnesota. This landmark performance spectacle featured the entire Cunningham Dance Company on a circular stage, surrounded by 1,200 audience members and 150 classical instrumentalists playing Cage’s score.
The visitor in Event Horizon will encounter monitors and listening stations that feature excerpts from performing arts events. The monitor in Gallery 1 presents excerpts from the following works:
Bounce by Elizabeth Streb
Group Primary Accumulation on Rafts by Trisha Brown
Man Walking Down the Side of a Building by Trisha Brown
Ocean by Merce Cunningham
Total running time 16:39 minutes for all excerpts.
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Artist: Elizabeth Streb (American, b. 1950)
Date: 1997
excerpt: 4:21 minutes
Performed at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, Minneapolis, 1997
Follow this link for a brief glimpse at Streb's work and to hear her considering the notion of humans' ability to fly in which she poses the question, "how long do you have to stay in the air" to fly?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kttA8Bc7vWA&feature=related
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Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (pictured left, media embedded from YouTube.com)
Artist: Trisha Brown (American, b. 1936)
Trisha Brown Dance Company founded 1970
Date: 1974
excerpt: 4:14 minutes
Performed in Loring Park, Minneapolis, 1974 and 2008
Also to be seen in Event Horizon, but not pictured here:
Group Primary Accumulation on Rafts
Artist: Trisha Brown (American, b. 1936)
Trisha Brown Dance Company founded 1970
Date: 1970
excerpt: 3:29 minutes
Performed at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2008
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Artist: Merce Cunningham (American, 1919-2009)
Date: 1991
excerpt 4:35 minutes
Performed at the Rainbow Quarry, Waite Park, Minnesota, 2008
Walker Commission
The media seen in this slide is about Cunningham's conceptualizing of Ocean.
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Artist: Tetsumi Kudo
Date: 1970-1972
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: overall installed 78.75 x 59.4375 x 21.625 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2008.50.1-.24
After a tumultuous early career in postwar Japan, Tetsumi Kudo moved to Paris in 1962, where he participated in a number of Happenings, multidisciplinary events in which he performed absurd rituals for his audience. However, Kudo was primarily known as a highly individualistic sculptor whose work seemed to belong to a post-nuclear ecology of day-glo colors, desiccated body parts, and (somewhat hopeful) metamorphosis.
Olympic Winners Platform was first exhibited at an art festival accompanying the 1972 Munich Olympics. In addition to the universally known Olympic logo, the other graphic symbol represents the brand specific to the Munich edition of the games. Many of the props were repurposed from the film
Mire (1970), for which Kudo served as art director. Treating the alienation of modern man, the film was based on a work by absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco, who ended up clashing with Kudo on the set. The face and body parts seen here represent Ionesco himself: the decomposing fragments
of the anti-humanist European intellectual ironically adorn a platform associated with human tenacity and a “community” of nations.
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Artist: Jim Hodges (American, b. 1957)
Date: 2004
Medium: mirror on canvas
Collection Geri and Darwin Reedy, Dellwood, Minnesota
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Enter Gallery 2
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Artist: Claes Oldenburg
Date: 1962
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: overall installed 118 x 60 x 60 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1979.24.1-.35
Upside Down City is a prop, a painting, a relic, and a sculpture. It is among the first of Claes Oldenburg’s famous “soft sculptures” in which he took everyday objects such as hamburgers or electric plugs and transformed their scale, texture, and mood. Seeking to reimagine the subject of art, Oldenburg embraced the “poetry of everywhere” and infamously announced in a 1961 manifesto, “I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself . . . that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.”
In 1962, Oldenburg organized a series of events in New York City’s East Village in a rented store he called the Ray Gun Manufacturing Co. The performances were not narrative but associative, and sometimes deliberately provoked the discomfort of the tightly packed audience standing amid the action. Playfully alluding to the upcoming 1964 New York World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, Oldenburg’s final event, World’s Fair II, was deliberately lowbrow, ending with the performers hanging Upside Down City from the ceiling, set to the tune of a slowed-down recording of a Scottish bagpipe march.
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Artist: Jeff Wall
Date: 1999
Medium: Photographs
Size: overall 81.125 x 145.75 x 10.25 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2000.109.1-.8
In the late 1970s, Canadian artist Jeff Wall emerged as one of the most influential figures working with the medium of photography. The body of his work radically questions the meaning of photography and its relationship to both life and art. Touching on the fields of art history, advertising, cinematography and, most recently, computer technology, he has opened new possibilities in the genre of narrative photography.
Wall is best known for his innovative use of the light box in creating large-scale Cibachrome transparencies distinguished by vibrant colors and clarity of detail. Reminiscent of illuminated advertising displays, his works often contain disturbing, unsettling elements. The seemingly familiar world he depicts is a deliberately constructed reality, an elaborately detailed mise-en-scene that addresses contradictions in today's culture of spectacle.
Pictured here is the Mies van der Rohe pavilion in Barcelona, Spain, an archetypal model of modernist architecture (the building, demolished in 1930, was rebuilt in 1959 to its original 1928-1929 design). Instead of celebrating the building's iconicity, Wall captures a moment of everyday life that would otherwise go unacknowledged. This documentary yet metaphoric image simultaneously unveils the realistic and the conceptual aspects of the artist's photographic language.
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Artist: Daniel Spoerri
Date: 1964
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: overall 21.25 x 25.1875 x 11 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2001.126
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Just inside Gallery 2 there is a dedicated space where a rotating selection of films, performances, and programs will unfold throughout the exhibition’s run. From the opening of Event Horizon through February 7, 2010, this space will be occupied by a projection of Bruce Conner's CROSSROADS.
Conner's film repurposes military footage of atomic bomb testing at the Bikini Atoll in which we witness the ominous and iconic mushroom cloud usurp the sky. Conner has created a hypnotic sequence by splicing together shots from several angles and manipulating the speed of the replay.
Music by Patrick Gleeson and Terry Riley.
36 minutes
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LANDMARK WALKER PERFORMANCES
Many Walker-commissioned performing arts pieces—by wedding formal artistic experimentation with immediate social themes and the personal with the political—have drawn from and spoken powerfully to their times. In very different ways, choreographers Bill T. Jones and Ralph Lemon and have investigated the legacy of slavery, questions of racial justice, and American history and culture in their works, while composer-singer-theater artist Cynthia Hopkins used her own background as a template to refract issues such as global and environmental devastation through her darkly comic Accidental Trilogy. Working through the violence-ravaged modern chronicle of his country, Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula examined questions of global inequity through a charged historical lens while critiquing Western stereotypes of Africa during his Festival of Lies residency at the Walker.
Within recent decades, performing artists have sought to question the space between process and final realization—as the influential Judson Dance Theater collective did in the late 1960s and early ’70s. This legacy is revisited and celebrated here by dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov in Homemade, a performance of one of Judson member Trisha Brown’s early “equipment” pieces. Artists supported by the Walker often experiment with new technologies to explore hybrids of interdisciplinary practice. Vanguard theater director Richard Foreman’s enigmatic, Walker-commissioned videoplay City Archives, which utilized leading figures of the Twin Cities arts
communities of the late 1970s, is one example.
The monitor in Gallery 2 presents excerpts from the following works:
City Archives by Richard Foreman
Come home Charley Patton by Ralph Lemon
Gallery performance by Faustin Linyekula
Homemade by Mikhail Baryshnikov
Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land by Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane
The Success of Failure (or, The Failure of Success) by Cynthia Hopkins
Total running time 27:23 minutes for all excerpts
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Artist: Bill T. Jones (American, b. 1936) and Arnie Zane (American, 1948-1988)
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company founded 1982
Date: 1990
excerpt: 5:56 minutes
Performed at Northrop Auditorium, Minneapolis, 1990 Walker Commission
Among the most significant of Jones’ Walker-commissioned works is The Promised Land, the final segment of the uncompromising Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which took on the complex topics of slavery, racism, homophobia, American history, AIDS, and religion. The Promised Land developed into a massive community-based initiative, with workshops, discussions, and community members participating as part of its cast.
For an image and synopsis ofThe Promised Land visit: http://performingarts.walkerart.org/detail.wac?id=2764&title=Artists%20in%20Residence
Bill T. Jones has conducted several artist-in-residence projects at the Walker Art Center.
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Artist: Cynthia Hopkins (American, b. 1973)
Date: 2009
excerpt 4:02 minutes
Performed at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2009
Walker Commission
In the media seen in this slide, Cynthia Hopkins talks about the conceptualization of this work and her own personal mythologies that are acted out in her creations.
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Artist: Ralph Lemon (American, b. 1952)
Date: 2005
excerpt 4:02 minutes
Performed at the Pantages Theatre, Minneapolis, 2005
Walker Commission
An article about Ralph Lemon on the Walker Web site: http://performingarts.walkerart.org/detail.wac?id=3003&title=Articles
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Artist: Bruce Conner
Date: 1970 second edition (first edition, 1966)
Medium: Prints, Edition Prints/Proofs
Size: sheet 7.125 x 21 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1998.28
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Artist: Bruce Conner
Date: 1954-1961
Medium: Drawings and Watercolors, Unique Works on Paper, Mixed media
Size: framed 63.875 x 49.625 x 4.125 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1992.37
This work of art has a reverse side which is can also be displayed. At times this work has even been installed so both sides can be viewed at once.
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Artist: Akasegawa Genpei
Date: 1963
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: overall 14 x 9.5 x 7.5 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2009.1
The objects presented in this vitrine serve as artifacts of the most notorious scandal in the history of Japanese postwar avant-garde art. Akasegawa Genpei, who founded a trio of performance artists known as Hi Red Center, addressed the fundamental questions of art’s authorship, value, and “place” in the realm of everyday society—issues that operated with special significance for these works. In an attempt to operate outside of the gallery system, he created fake banknotes in 1963, which he used as gallery invitations and as “packaging” for everyday objects, sparking a criminal investigation for currency fraud. A highly publicized trial ensued in 1966, which the artist and his defense team used to leverage courtroom dialogue about art’s status and value. Ironically, while Akasegawa is commonly positioned within a conceptual anti-art discourse, the trial resulted in art’s legitimation, though the artist himself was found guilty of fraud. As if in defiance of these results, Akasegawa went on to generate more currency, this time in the form of “Greater Japan Zero-Yen Notes”—his version of “no-value money.”
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Artist: Akasegawa Genpei
Date: 1967
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: jar 13 x 8.5 x 8.5 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2009.2.1-.8
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Artist: Robert Rauschenberg
Date: 1960
Medium: Paintings
Size: overall installed 90 x 118 x 5 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1970.1.1-.4
Any incentive to paint is as good as any other. There is no poor subject. Painting is always strongest when in spite of composition, color, etc., it appears as a fact, or an inevitability, as opposed to a souvenir or arrangement. Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.) A pair of socks is no less suitable to make a painting with than wood, nails, turpentine, oil, and fabric. A canvas is never empty. --- Robert Rauschenberg, 1959
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In the early 1950s, Robert Rauschenberg devised a radical new form, blending two- dimensional collage techniques with three-dimensional objects on painted surfaces. Definable neither as sculpture nor painting, these works were dubbed "combines" by the artist to describe their interdisciplinary formal roots. Rauschenberg's combination of found imagery and gestural brushwork places these works between two movements in painting: Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.
Trophy II (for Teeny and Marcel Duchamp) is one of a series of five combines, all called "trophies," which alluded to the unconventional creative spirit of artists whose work Rauschenberg greatly admired: in this case, Marcel Duchamp and his wife, Teeny. Using found objects, photographs, and paint, the artist considered himself "a collaborator with objects." In this way, he sought to avoid excessive autobiographical readings and instead refers to the dynamics of the urban landscape.
Walker solo exhibition: Robert Rauschenberg: Painting, 1965
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In the early 1950s, Robert Rauschenberg devised a radical new form, blending two-dimensional collage techniques with three-dimensional objects on painted surfaces. Definable neither as sculpture nor painting, these works were dubbed "combines" by the artist to describe their interdisciplinary formal roots.
Trophy II is one of a series of five combines, all called "trophies," which alluded to the unconventional creative spirit of artists whose work Rauschenberg greatly admired. Using found objects, photographs, and paint, the artist considered himself "a collaborator with objects." In this way, he sought to avoid excessive autobiographical readings and instead refers to the dynamics of the urban landscape.
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Artist: Walker Art Center
Date: March 1998
Medium: Instructional Material
Institution: Walker Art Center
To download a PDF of this instructional material from within the presentation mode, click the "More Info" button below, then click "next" to scroll through the four page views until a "download PDF" command appears.
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This installation features a stage set used in one of Ron Vawter’s most celebrated performance pieces, Roy Cohn/Jack Smith. Cohn, a notoriously homophobic attorney involved in McCarthy-era anti-Communist activities, was actually a closeted homosexual. Smith, an openly gay filmmaker-performance artist, influenced legions of underground filmmakers, theater artists, and members of the New York drag culture in the 1960s and ’70s. Vawter wanted to examine these two extremes of gay sensibility, noting that the two men met the same end: both died from AIDS in the 1980s, a fate to which the artist also succumbed in 1994.
During the 1980s and ’90s, Vawter became known for his work with the iconoclastic Wooster Group theater ensemble in New York City. For this piece, he played the dual roles of the characters featured in the title. On view in this gallery is the Jack Smith segment of the work, a reconstruction by Vawter of Smith’s 1981 performance based on his text “What’s Underground about Marshmallows.” Vawter was as faithful to the original as possible, even preserving Smith’s tendency to miss lines and his neurotic fidgeting and fussing with costumes, props, and lights.
Ron Vawter American, 1948–1994
Roy Cohn/Jack Smith stage set 1992
set elements from the play Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, first performed by Ron Vawter at the Performing Garage, New York City, May 1992
Set design: Gregory Mehrten, Clay Shirky, Ron Vawter, Marianne Weems
Chaise design: Elizabeth Murray, based on a design by Jack Smith
Costume design: Ellen McCartney
Video documentation: Jill Godmilow, Ruben/Bentson Film and Video Study Collection
Gift of the Pomodori Foundation, 1995, Gregory Mehrten, Rosemary Quinn, and Ron Vawter, founders
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Artist: Jasper Johns
Date: 1972
Medium: Prints, Edition Prints/Proofs
Size: sheet 44 x 29 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1985.167
The artwork installed in the exhibition Event Horizon is Johns' original painting, Fool's House, which he later re-interpreted in the lithograph pictured left. In the print we see representational likenesses of objects from Johns' studio. However, to make his painting, Johns plucked actual objects from his surroundings and physically secured them to the painted canvas: a broom, a stretcher, a towel, and a cup.
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Artist: Rudolf Schwarzkogler
Date: 1975–1982
Medium: Photographs
Size: each of 60 25.375 x 19.6875 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2001.211.1-.67
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Artist: Rudolf Schwarzkogler
Date: 1975–1982
Medium: Photographs
Size: each of 60 25.375 x 19.6875 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2001.211.1-.67
“Every expressive manifestation of his was covered by a beauty that extended far into sadism. The cruelty of his actions was beautiful. He was the aesthete among us.” —Hermann Nitsch on Rudolph Schwarzkogler
Rudolf Schwarzkogler was one of a number of Viennese artists, including Hermann Nitsch, Günter Brus, and Otto Muehl, who in the early 1960s began to mount “actions”—planned yet seemingly spontaneous live events in which the body was used as material. Known as the Viennese Actionists, they positioned their work within the context of a conservative postwar Austria suppressing its traumatic past. The actions included live defecation, blood play, urination, and self-mutilation (both staged and real), all of which communicated their contempt for the reactionary climate of their time. Reviled by some and applauded by others, they exploited taboos related to the body, testing society’s complacent acceptance of traditional values and behaviors. Schwarzkogler made six actions in the 1960s, all
documented in a portfolio from which this selection was chosen. They were customarily performed in front of the camera before a small group of invited friends.
To view a complete portfolio of images (referenced above), visit http://collections.walkerart.org/item/object/10524.
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Artist: Rudolf Schwarzkogler
Date: 1975–1982
Medium: Photographs
Size: each of 60 25.375 x 19.6875 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2001.211.1-.67
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Artist: Rudolf Schwarzkogler
Date: 1975–1982
Medium: Photographs
Size: each of 60 25.375 x 19.6875 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2001.211.1-.67
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Artist: Trisha Donnelly
Date: 2008
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: each of 2 35.5 x 21.125 x 60 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2009.4.1-.3
The Whitney Biennial's Artist Directory (2006) provides a brief profile on Trisha Donnelly.
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Artist: Jay Heikes
Date: 2005
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: overall 83 x 17.5 x 2 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2006.13
The Whitney Biennial's Artist Directory (2006) provides a brief profile on Jay Heikes.
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Artist: Nelson Leirner
Date: 1967
Medium: Paintings
Size: framed 71.125 x 48.875 x 1.375 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2007.76
Nelson Leirner was actively involved in a continuous project to challenge the way in which the art world grants critical and commercial value to objects. In São Paulo, Brazil, in 1967, he presented the exhibition Mass Production of Painting—Pictures at Cost Price, which featured a series of multiple paintings titled Homage to Fontana. The artist insisted that the works, composed of colored fabrics and zippers, be sold for no more than the cost of materials. At the same time, he alluded to the contemporaneous success of Italian artist Lucio Fontana, celebrated for his ruptured, sliced, and perforated canvases. Originally, Leirner invited the audience to use the zippers and thereby join him in the creation of multiple formal configurations, turning the romantic gesture of the solitary artist into a participatory and reversible one.
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Artist: Peter Fischli, David Weiss
Date: 1995-1996
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: see element sizes
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1996.132.1-.156
Peter Fischli and David Weiss have collaborated since 1979. Their works often celebrate ordinary things that tend to be overlooked or undervalued. This installation follows in the long artistic tradition of trompe l’oeil— translated literally from French as “deceive the eye”—in which hand-painted images appear to be real. Though it looks as if the installation crew has not yet finished working and has stored their gear under the stairs, in fact each of these items was carefully made by the artists in polyurethane (a material similar to Styrofoam) and then painted. The objects were modeled on bits and pieces found in the Walker Art Center’s basement during the production of its 1996 Fischli and Weiss retrospective as well as on things from the artists’ Zurich studio.
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Peter Fischli and David Weiss
David Weiss: For me the main focus with the objects is that you "see something" that you also know is not there. Of course, it is there, but the chair is not a chair, the table is not a table. Or it's not there as what we usually know about these objects. You can't use them because their functions are lost.
Peter Fischli: It is just the surface of these things that you make believe is there.--from a conversation with Rirkrit Tiravanija, 1996
Walker solo exhibition: Peter Fischli and David Weiss: In a Restless World, 1995
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Enter Gallery 3
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Within Gallery 3, a secluded room offers an intimate viewing of work by photographer Peter Hujar and assemblage artist Joseph Cornell. The two are rarely linked art-historically, working at different times, in different ways, to different themes, but the presentation invites an appreciation of the nuanced parallels in their respective practices and visions. Both were life-long New Yorkers who had a deep affinity for what Cornell termed "metaphysique d'ephemera," the magic of the fleeting and the everyday.
Artist: Joseph Cornell
Date: circa 1960
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: overall 7.625 x 12.9375 x 3.5 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1993.223
Artist: Peter Hujar
Date: 1985
Medium: Photographs
Size: sheet 19.8125 x 15.8125 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
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Artist: Joseph Cornell
Date: 1953–1956
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: overall 14 x 7.75 x 3.75 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1971.1
Joseph Cornell's boxes, like reliquaries or Victorian shadow boxes, combine found objects that symbolically memorialize cherished moments or memories. Replete with references to astronomical constellations, European resorts, children's games, Symbolist literature, and Hollywood glitterati, the boxes transform everyday objects into miniature, phantasmagoric worlds of poetry, myth, fantasy, and willful naiveté.
Cornell, who was born on (and forever enamored of) Christmas Day, intended his boxes to be personal gifts that could be held and manipulated by the viewer like puzzles or games. Through them, the artist allowed viewers to visit the mystical nexus where the ordinary becomes the sublime.
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Joseph Cornell: Additional Resources
This link will take you to an article about Cornell's boxes and his pursuit of the "metaphysique d'ephemera": http://www.generatioaequivoca.com/?m=200911.
Another article offers additional background on Cornell, touching upon his passions for natural history museums and ballet, and even cites the Walker Art Center as a destination to see his work.
The Smithsonian offers an archive of Joseph Cornell's correspondence, accessible online.
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Artist: Udomsak Krisanamis
Date: 1998
Medium: Paintings
Size: unframed 72.0625 x 48 x 1.5 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1998.115
Udomsak Krisanamis is a Thai artist, now based in New York, who came to the United States in 1991 to pursue an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since then, he has gained a reputation as one of the most interesting abstract painters of note to have emerged in the past decade.
To make paintings like this one, Krisanamis pastes thousands of newspaper strips onto a fabric support and then obsessively inks them out, leaving only selected letter forms: every "O," for example, or the enclosed forms within the letters "P" and "B." What results is a densely layered, mottled, shimmering surface of dark and light suggestive of a night sky or a teeming city after dark. His work has been compared to Robert Rauschenberg's black paintings, Jackson Pollock's all-over compositions, and Robert Irwin's dot paintings, and it also recalls Jasper Johns' early encaustic canvases, which had surfaces similarly built up over newspaper strip collages. The technique grew out of Krisanamis' method of learning English: while reading the newspaper, he would cross out each word he knew, leaving the "blank spots" to be looked up.
Krisanamis' painting fits well within the context of the Walker's collection of postwar abstraction, which often has a personal or allusive content (including work of Vija Celmins, Lucio Fontana, Brice Marden, Kazuo Shiraga, and Yayoi Kusama). The acquisition also supports the museum's mission to collect the work of emerging artists and to purchase work made outside the boundaries of the United States and Europe.
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The method Krisanamis employed for making his early paintings grew out of his way of learning English. While reading the newspaper, he would cross out each word he knew, leaving the "blank spots" to be looked up. As his English improved, the newspaper became more and more illegible.
This technique can be seen as a metaphor for the challenges faced by immigrants who do not speak the language of their adopted country. Learning a new language is an important factor in establishing identity in a new culture, but it also is only a part of a complex, long-term, and at times difficult process.
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". . . Krisanamis works not so much with the meaning between the lines as with the voids within the words themselves. The tiny white circles and ovals that fill his often very large and otherwise monochromatic canvases are the spaces inside each letter O and each zero on the strips of newspaper he pastes together to form his grounds. The fantastic cityscapes and night skies we read into his images are composed of heavily applied oil paint combined with, literally, nothing."
--Charles Dee Mitchell, Art in America, 1997
Krisanamis' process for creating this work can lead to poetic associations with the concept of emptiness, voids, or spaces left blank. Or perhaps the holes refer to his obsession with golf. At the same time, the dense color around the empty spaces brings to mind celestial patterns, nighttime cityscapes, and other more visual associations. Also, Krisanamis gives his paintings titles from popular culture ("How Deep Is the Ocean?" is also the title of a song written by Irving Berlin in 1932, recorded by Rudy Vallee and Bing Crosby). This practice leads to more speculation about his work as a metaphor for his assimilation with American culture. Are these associations what the artist had in mind?
"Everything is in the painting."--Udomsak Krisanamis
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"Krisanamis' work dips at random from the eddies and flows of his own experiences, from his life in Bangkok to his love of golf. He names his works with familiar terms--song titles and phrases borrowed from music, golf, Hollywood, and other popular sources--opening a relaxed sense of identification for the viewer, as if, through the title, you somehow already know the work personally."
--Annetta Massie, Wexner Center for the Arts, 2000
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LANDMARK WALKER PERFORMANCES
In the latter part of the 20th-century, lines between theater, contemporary dance, and visual art became increasingly blurred as performing artists explored formal abstraction, probed light and dark spaces, and deeply investigated notions of beauty. In recent decades, the Walker’s global performance program introduced many leading innovators to Minnesota, and often presented their U.S. debuts as well.
Radical Italian theater-maker Romeo Castellucci, trained in the visual arts, employs highly painterly and sculptural forms. The influential Japanese theater collective dumb type presents elaborate, immersive video and sound design. Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, inspired in several key works by contemporary American composer Steve Reich, brings formal minimalism to life through rigorously constructed choreography. Japanese American dance/theater artist duo Eiko & Koma use their own meditative movement style to forge indelible live works and groundbreaking dance films.
A monitor in Gallery 3 presents excerpts from the following works:
[OR] by dumb type
FASE: Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker
Hey Girl! by Romeo Castellucci and Societas Raffaello Sanzio
Lament by Eiko & Koma
Total running time 22:04 minutes for all excerpts
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Artist: Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker (Belgian, b. 1960)
Date: 1982
excerpt 4:05 minutes
Performed at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2007
Left: A preview of the mesmerizing production, performed here by dancers Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Michele Anne De Mey. The media (left) is embedded from YouTube.com and distinct from the excerpt on view in Event Horizon.
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Artist: Romeo Castellucci (Italian, b. 1960) and Societas Raffaello Sanzio (Company founded 1981)
Date: 2006
excerpt 4:39 minutes
Performed at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2008
To see images from this performance, visit: http://performingarts.walkerart.org/detail.wac?id=3957&title=All%20Upcoming%20Performances&style=images.
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Artist: dumb type
Date: 1997
excerpt 5:05 minutes
Performed at the Guthrie Lab, Minneapolis, 1999
Click here to view a preview of [OR], distinct from the excerpt on view in Event Horizon.
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Artist: Gerhard Richter, German, b. 1932
Date: 1992
Medium: oil on canvas
Promised gift of Martha and Bruce Atwater, Minneapolis
An image of this painting is not available, but to view thumbnails of similar works by Richter, visit this page of the artist's website: http://www.gerhard-richter.com/art/paintings/photo_paintings/category.php?catID=5.
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Artist: Mark Bradford
Date: 2004
Medium: Paintings
Size: overall 125.5 x 125.375 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2006.24
The Whitney Biennial's Artist Directory (2006) provides a brief profile on Mark Bradford.
See video of Mark Bradford in conversation with Doryun Chong at the Walker Art Center on April 19, 2009. 1 hour 16 minutes
See a short video of Bradford creating as he explains his processes of collage and decollage. (Video produced by Art:21)
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Artist: Manfred Pernice
Date: 2004
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: overall installed 35 x 82 x 142 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2007.54.1-.16
Berlin-based artist Manfred Pernice has been making objects that look like models for containers, furniture, or buildings since the mid-1980s. His humble materials, such as particleboard, plywood, and cardboard, belie the deft engineering and meticulous details of his constructions. At first, his sculptures appear to be functional designs. However, they slowly reveal
themselves as wholly ambiguous and only vaguely utilitarian. The artist prompts us to question whether we are looking at a model or the final project, a pedestal or a sculpture.
Plateau (Mrs. Juice) was first exhibited in 2004 with a number of similarly scaled structures the artist refers to as “merzbanks.” “Merz” is the name Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters gave to his early 20th-century collage works composed of urban detritus and everyday found materials. In German, bank can mean both “bench” or “bank,” setting up a verbal play mirrored in the structure of the piece itself.
The link below supplies additional background on Kurt Schwitters, who is referrenced above.
Wikipedia entry on Kurt Schwitters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Schwitters
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Artist: Robert Gober
Date: 1992
Medium: Mixed Media, Multiples, Other
Size: unframed 4.25 x 15.75 x 14 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1994.162
This innocuous stack of papers--seemingly waiting to be recycled--was handmade in Robert Gober's studio. On the visible top page, he has paired an advertisement with an article about a pedestrian being hit by a car and a report about shellfish in Chile. In the ad, Gober assumes the persona of a bride; positioned in a traditional wedding portrait, he substitutes himself for a model advertising bridal gowns in The New York Times. Smiling coyly next to the caption "Having It All," the artist subverts what has been upheld as the ultimate moment of female realization. He has also commented on what he sees as the ironic nature of the wedding dress--a symbol of purity that is designed to drag along the floor in the dirt.
Walker solo exhibition: Robert Gober: Sculpture + Drawing, 1999
The Whitney Biennial's Artist Directory (2006) provides a brief profile on Robert Gober.
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Artist: Kara Walker
Date: 2005
Medium: Prints, Edition Prints/Proofs
Size: each of 11 39 x 53 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2005.69.1-.15
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Artist: Kara Walker
Date: 2005
Medium: Prints, Edition Prints/Proofs
Size: each of 11 39 x 53 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2005.69.1-.15
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Artist: Kara Walker
Date: 2005
Medium: Prints, Edition Prints/Proofs
Size: each of 11 39 x 53 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2005.69.1-.15
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Artist: Kara Walker
Date: 2005
Medium: Prints, Edition Prints/Proofs
Size: each of 11 39 x 53 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2005.69.1-.15
4 of prints from this series of work are on display in Event Horizon's Gallery 3. To see the entire portfolio of 15 images, visit: http://collections.walkerart.org/item/object/12021.
Learn more about the artist on this Web resource designed as a companion to the exhibition Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love.
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Artist: Ann Hamilton
Date: 1993
Medium: Mixed media, Media Arts, Multimedia
Size: screen size 3.5 x 4.5 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1995.25.1-.3
Ann Hamilton created this video as one component of her 1993 installation, aleph, presented at the List Visual Arts Center. "Aleph" is the first character of the Hebrew alphabet and references written language as well as the origins of language.
In this video, the artist's mouth is filled with stones that impede her speech while producing non-specific, perhaps "pre-linguistic" sounds of their own. Untitled (mouth/stones) also alludes to the ancient Greek orator Demosthenes, who overcame a speech impediment by practicing with pebbles in his mouth.
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Artist: Olafur Eliasson
Date: 1995-2000
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: mirror 63.375 x 63.375 x 1.125 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2002.67.1-.7
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Artist: Todd Norsten
Date: 2008
Medium: Paintings
Size: overall 78 x 66 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2008.7
The Whitney Biennial's Artist Directory (2006) provides a brief profile on Todd Norsten.
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Artist: Paul Chan
Date: 2007
Medium: Media Arts, Videotapes/Videodiscs, Audio-Video
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2008.1
This work by artist, writer, and filmmaker Paul Chan is part of a series of seven pieces that suggests the seven days of God’s creation from dawn to dusk, and explores themes of the sacred and the profane as well as temptation and renunciation through the use of the iconography of our contemporary world. The first six works are composed of a single digital animation projected variously onto a floor, wall, or corner. The final piece is a drawing with an abstract musical score for an as-yet-unmade projection. Structured as 14-minute cycles of day and night, each contains a “four-sided wedge of light,” a window through which we can glimpse shadows of the world beyond. At the beginning of the series, the shadows are mostly of tangible things such as lampposts, cell phones, people, and animals. In later works, they become more abstract and pass by with less frequency, implying a process of fragmentation and dissolution. 6th Light is part apocalyptic, seeming to reference both 9/11 and the Last Judgment, but it also offers the potential for new beginnings as forms fall and rise in space.
The Whitney Biennial's Artist Directory (2006) provides a brief profile of Paul Chan.
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Artist: Cao Fei
Date: 2007
Medium: Media Arts, Videotapes/Videodiscs, Audio-Video
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2009.14.1-.2
See 10 minutes of i.Mirror, a Second Life documentary film by China Tracy on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vcR7OkzHkI
Read a brief bio of the artist Cao Fei on the Art:21 site.
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Artist: Cindy Sherman
Date: 1981
Medium: Photographs
Size: 24 x 48 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1982.40
To see more of Sherman's film stills and hear a brief profile of the artist, go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6MyCErU2Y0 (3:38 minutes)
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Artist: Katharina Fritsch
Date: 2007
Medium: Mixed Media, Multiples, Other
Size: overall 3.5 x 6.625 x 4.5 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2007.58
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Left: In this detail of Armajani's Prayer, Farsi calligraphy inscribes the words of 13th and 14th century poets.
Right: In this image, traditional Farsi script ornaments the walls of an Iranian mosque.
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Artist: Tomma Abts
Date: 2006
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: overall 18.875 x 14.9375 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2008.31
Abts is known for her small-scale paintings, but Aeid is unusual in that it is a sculpture cast from one of her paintings.
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We'd love for you to contribute additional resources, insights, and ideas that relate to this set or the exhibition Event Horizon. You can do so by adding comments.
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The ArtsConnectEd Collector Set you have just finished viewing provides a partial preview of Event Horizon. As you visit this dynamic exhibition over time, look for works of art not included in this set to come on view. Additionally, the Event Horizon galleries will serve as sites for performances, public dialogues, and screenings. For a complete list of programs related to Event Horizon, visit: http://calendar.walkerart.org/canopy.wac?id=5269.
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