In this brief interview Mike Kelley talks in more depth about his exploration of his memory of school and why he finds education a rich subject to explore.

Would you ever create art about your experience in school?

Artist: Andreas Gursky
Date: 1999
Medium: Photographs
Size: framed 81.3125 x 103 x 2.25 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2000.25

Event(s) explored: Sports

Conversation starters:

• What kind of event is captured in this photograph? And why do you think the artist chose to capture it on such a large scale?
• Looking closely, what strikes you as unusual or emphasized in this image?
• What sporting events are important to you?

Background information on the artist/artwork:

• In this photograph German artist Andreas Gursky has actually manipulated the image so we're not seeing the event exactly how it occured. The artist is giving us his perception of this boxing match between Wladimir Klitschko and his opponent Axel Schulz. For example, Gursky has taken the enclosed press box (on the right of the photograph) where the sports casters are reporting the fight and transfered it to one of the panels of the Jumbo Tron giving the media special attention.
• Since the 1990s Gursky has frequently represented subjects that at first glance appear everyday in nature such as supermarket shelves, factory workers, sunbathers on the beach, or boxers in a ring. However, when you begin to visually pick apart his compositions and reckon with their sheer scale you begin to see the accentuated nature of each depicted scene. In Klitschko, the combination of bright stadium lights, the chaos in the center ring, the crowds of people, and the energy and goings-on of the event being repeated back to us via the Jumbo Tron brings the event to life and it begins to feel more like theater than sport. We're a part of the action. People have also interpreted his treatment of these subjects as a means to emphasizing their relationship with commerce and consumerism.
• Gursky frequently places his camera far away from and far above his subjects resulting in expansive views. This expansiveness has been compared to history painting from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For exterior subjects such as buildings and lanscapes he's been known to shoot photos from helicoptors. The artist generally takes multiple shots of his subjects and digitally splices them together, creating a highly mediated image

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

Event(s) explored: City activity writ on the walls of buildings and fences, i.e., political protest, advertised "events", etc.

Conversation starters:

• What do you think the artist used to make this work of art?
• Have you seen advertisements and political messages posted around the city? How else do people share their thoughts with a huge population? 
• If you were going to choose a wall to hang in the Walker what would be on your wall?

Background information on the artist/artwork:

• Raymond Hains was a French artist who was interested in the visual landscape of the city and how we use language and memory. In this particular work he focuses on the words of Paris's citizens as spoken through posters plastered on fences and walls. He has literally taken a segment of a metal wall and presented it as he found it.
• Hains and his friend and frequent collaborator Jacques de la Villegle developed a technique called decollage, which translates to art of torn posters. When we look at Untitled we see a collection of colorful, torn and ragged posters. Hains and Villegle saw their use of these posters as a means for collaborating with the people of Paris -- the public's alterations of the posters became a vital part of the piece and demonstrated "real" emotion, political stances, etc. Hains's decollages offer up a history lesson letting us in on the chatter, discomfort, and issues of the day (i.e., Algerian independence from France/Algerian War).
• Hains abandoned decollage after 1961 so this work is a relatively late decollage for the artist.

Trisha Brown, Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, 1970/2008

Event(s) explored: Casual walk/stroll

Conversation starters:

• Walking is something most of us do everyday and gravity allows us to do it. It's a common activity that we may not consider an event. In this instance, when walking is turned on its head, does our perspective of this motion, this way of getting from point A to point B change? Why do you think an artist would create a work of art that requires someone to defy gravity?
• This film documents a 2008 staging of the work at the Walker Art Center. The work was originally enacted in 1970 in New York City. The building used in 1970 had many windows with shutters and a series of fire escapes -- a different and more cluttered "canvas" than the one used at the Walker. How do you think your viewing experience would be different if you saw the first enactment of this work?
• How do you feel about an artist using an everyday activity such as walking as "material" for making art? 

Background information on the artist/artwork:

• Trisha Brown is often discussed as one of the most of the most renowned and influential dancers and choreographers of the 20th and 21st centuries. Her innovative choreographies and experimental approach to dance revolutionized the art form. Key to Brown's practice are improvisation, multi-disciplinary collaboration (she's continuously worked with visual and cinematic artists and musicians), and playing with the notion of "acceptable" spaces for dancing. Brown was the first female choreographer to receive the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
• Brown was a contributing member of the Judson Dance Theater in New York in the 1960s. Judson was understood as the center of dance experimentation in New York and it aimed to bring dance closer to everyday life, thus rejecting the artifice and virtuosity associated with staged (i.e., classical ballet) dance.
• In 2007 the Walker held a retrospective of Trisha Brown's work, which restaged a number of her dances and exhibited  her drawings and documentary footage of her choreography.

Curious about the 1970 enactment of Man Walking Down the Side of a Building? Check out a photograph that documented the piece on the Trisha Brown Dance Company's Web site: http://www.trishabrowncompany.org/index.php?section=20#main

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

Event(s) explored: A meal with friends/dinner party

Conversation starters:

• Name the objects that comprise this work. Would you call this collection of objects a sculpture or a painting? Why?
• Why do you think the artist was interested in the remnants of someone's meal?
• Would you consider a meal with friends a work of art? How would you choose to artistically represent a dinner party?

Background information the artist/artwork:

• One of Spoerri's best-known bodies of work are his Snare Pictures -- sculptural pieces that aim to fix a moment or situation in space and time such as this meal eaten by fellow artist Bruce Conner in 1964. Spoerri, like many artists coming of age in the 1960s, was interested in exploring the area where everday life and artistic expression meet. 
• Conner's meal is one of thirty-one that Spoerri captured from a series of dinner parties he gave in 1964. Although Spoerri initiated the piece by hosting the party it was the guest who assisted in the piece's completion -- the arrangement of the silverware, glasses and "crumbs" are all courtesy of the person dining. The composition was left to chance.
• Here's a quote from Spoerri asking viewers to be careful how they view his Snare Pictures:

"Don't take my Snare Pictures as works of art. They are information, provocations, indications for the eye to see things it normally doesn't notice. Nothing more ... And anyway, what is art? Maybe a way and a possibility of living."

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

Event(s) explored: Cleaning house

Conversation starters:

• Why do you think an artist would choose to represent labor, such as washing windows, on such a grand scale?
• What story does this picture tell?
• Where else have you seen backlit images like this?

Background information the artist/artwork:

• This work is an example of Wall's primary way of working: mounting large-scale color transparencies in light boxes. The artist believes light enhances his images, creating depth and texture and introducing element of the spectacular. Would you agree? In the mid 1990s Wall also began producing black and white photographs that are not back-lit.

• One of Wall's sources is Western European painting from the 18th and 19th centuries depicting landscapes, allegories, and historical figures and events. Other sources of interest for Wall are theater, film, and documentary-style street photography. Wall has said of his work, “I understood how to crank up the movement of the street by featuring the human body on the scale in which it appears in history painting.” A work such as Morning Cleaning ... depicts an actor in an event staged by Wall that he either witnessed at some point in time or simply imagined.

• Wall never offers a complete story. He gives us the elements of a narrative such as place, people, action, setting; however, a viewer is never quite sure of how all these elements come together to form a whole. And each person's perception of the work is unique.
  

Artist: Udomsak Krisanamis
Date: 1998
Medium: Paintings
Size: unframed 72.0625 x 48 x 1.5 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1998.115

Event(s) explored: Immigration; language learning; music

Conversation starters:

• Zoom in on the image and begin describing what you see on the surface of this painting?
• Does this painting remind you of anything else you might see in the world?
• Why do you think the artist named his work How Deep is the Ocean?

Background information the artist/artwork:

• The artist immigrated from Thailand to the United States in 1991and his method for learning the English language is directly reflected in this work of art. While a graduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Krisanamis read the newspaper to enhance his acquisition of English. When he learned a word he'd read he would cross it out until eventually he'd blacked our entire articles. In How Deep is the Ocean? the artist has taken a piece of fabric, affixed thousands of strips of newspaer to it, and inked out all of the letters except the insides of certain one's such as the letter "O." In a sense the artist's canvas shares a relationship to his assimilation as an immigrant to the United States.
• The title for the work actually comes from an Irving Berlin song written in 1932. Berlin was an American composer (born in Russia, 1888). To hear the song sung by actor/singer/dancer Bing Crosby advance to the next slide and click on the link. After listening to the song think about whether your impression of Krisanamis's work changes in anyway.
• The art critic Roberta Smith has said that Krisanamis's paintings evoke "star-clogged night skies, twinkling cityscapes and blinking digital universes.

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

Event(s) explored: Wedding; reading the paper

Conversation starters:

• Describe what you see on the front page of this newspaper.
• What does the caption next to the image of the bride say?
• What message might the artist be trying to convey by placing this caption by the bride?

Background information on the artist/artwork:

• In this work of art both the everyday and the monumental are on display. Newspapers are commonplace -- we see them everyday on our front stoop, at newspaper stands around the city, at school, etc. Weddings are special events -- they may happen everyday, but they're momentous occasions for the individuals involved.
• The stack of newspapers was handmade in the artist's studio. He took stories from past newspapers and added some of his own information. Gober is known for taking mass-produced objects and hand-crafting them as one-off unique objects.
• The bride depicted is actually the artist. How does your perception of the work change (or does it) knowing that you're looking at an image of the artist dressed in costume?

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

Event(s) explored: The American Civil War

Conversation starters:

• What appears to be taking place in the scenes behind the silhouettes?
• Can you describe the silhoutted figures? What are they wearing and doing? What do their clothes and actions tell us about them?
• Would you react differently to these works if they were done in color?

Background information the artist/artwork:

• In this series of prints the artist Kara Walker has appropriated illustrations from the publication Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War and added her own silhoeutte figures as a means to altering the story being told. Walker is known for her silhouette figures which depict stereotypical images of African-Americans and people implicated in slavery in the United States. Her cast of characters is most often located in the antebellum south and engaged in gruesome and imagined vignettes.
• In addition to creating large-scale wall installations of silhouetted figures, Walker also paints, writes, and experiments with film and other media. Her pieces always engage with black identity and question accepted/written history, asking us to think about how and where we learn about the past. The artist also plays with societal taboos by offering up uncomfortable, violent, and ambiguous images that we the viewer must digest and work through.
• The artist had a retrospective at the Walker Art Center in 2007 entitled, Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love. An online companion  was created to assist viewers of all ages in understanding  Walker's work. To browse the companion click here: http://learn.walkerart.org/karawalker. 

To see additional images in this series, please click on the "More Info" button below.

Artist: Siah Armajani
Date: 1962
Medium: Paintings
Size: framed 70.75 x 50.75 x 1.375 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1962.53

Event(s) explored: Communication/language; cultural hybridity

Conversation starters:

• What's the first thing you notice about this work of art?
• The language we see is Persian Farsi. Why might the artist have chosen Farsi?
• If we forget that we're looking at text/language what can we say about the overall composition or look of this painting? Does it remind you of anything?

Background information on the artist/artwork:

• Siah Armajani was raised in a Christian household in Tehran, Iran, the third of four children. He attended a Presbyterian missionary school and was encouraged by his father and uncle to attend college in the United States. His uncle taught history at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN where Armajani found himself studying Philosophy and mathematics in 1960. Armajani became a citizen around 1970 and has remained in the Twin Cities since arriving here nearly fifty years ago.
• Armajani recalls wanting to be an artist since childhood. This desire continued throughout college and Prayer was completed while he was still a student at Macalester. The work was featured in the Walker's 1962 Biennial of Painting and Sculpture and subsequently purchased for its collection. Although Armajani began as a painter his primary focus as an artist has been on developing new forms of public art such as the Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge that connects the Sculpture Garden with Loring Park. Armajani is interested in creating art that supports human interaction in everyday spaces. Consider this quote by the artist:

"I am interested in usefulness ... My intention is to build open, available, useful, common, public, gathering places." (Calvin Tomkins, "Open, Available, Useful," The New Yorker, March 19, 1990)

• Prayer is comprised of fragments from thirteenth and fourteenth century Sufi poems. The poems are virtually unreadable because they're presented incompletely -- phrases run into and over each other creating a kind of visual poetry. The artists connects the past with the present in this image -- integrating his cultural roots into his newly developing identity as an artist living in America.

Artist: Cao Fei
Date: 2007
Medium: Media Arts, Videotapes/Videodiscs, Audio-Video
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2009.14.1-.2

Event(s) explored: Playing make believe

Conversation starters:

• The Life We Live becomes the lives we can live in this particular artwork. China Tracy is Fei's avatar or on-line personality. How many people use Second Life or have an avatar?
• What's appealing about creating a second life or pretending that you're someone else?
• What do you notice about China Tracy's second life?

Background information on the artist/artwork:

• For i.Mirror by China Tracy (AKA: Cao Fei) Fei worked with a team of people to develop the city we see (RMB City) and the music we hear, so although China Tracy is the artist's avatar the entire scope of the work reflects a collaboration between several people.
• Fei likes to create art that rests somewhere in-between reality and fantasy or dream. For example, the artist has a series of photographs called, COSPLAYERS in which she captures the culture of Cosplay. Cosplayers dress as characters from popular Japanese games, Manga (Japanese graphic novels), and anime. In her series Fei shows anonymous COSPLAYERS sitting, in full costume, in their parents's living room, or posing in locations around a city. For a description of the photos in this series, visit Cao Fei's Web site: http://www.caofei.com/works/photography/.
• Fei works in photography, film, performance, and installation.

A sample of Cao Fei's/China Tracy's Second Life documentary.