Around 1940, Joseph Cornell made a film titled The Midnight Party. It depicts a child’s dream world that is filled with events and figures both magical and sinister. The work, assembled from scraps of found footage, articulates the artist’s personal obsessions and exemplifies a kind of art whose content is primarily spiritual, visionary, enigmatic, or dreamlike—in a word, subjective.

This exhibition, which is named for Cornell’s film, is itself a highly subjective survey of works by more than 100 artists who have given public form to their private visions. Drawn mostly from the Walker’s collections, the show spans the past 150 years and includes familiar favorites and new acquisitions as well as many pieces not exhibited for decades. Each one is the imaginative expression of a single mind, and each conjures a world in which mystery trumps logic. Midnight Party is an invitation to enter these many surprising worlds.

I like space that never stops...Black is like that. —Lee Bontecou

Lee Bontecou is best known for a group of constructions created with remnants of fabric stretched over welded steel frames, which she began making in the late 1950s. Her reliefs exist somewhere between painting and sculpture and project out from the wall into our space. Untitled is a menacing assembly of scavenged canvas, wire, hardware, and saw blades—far from art's conventional materials. Inside its protruding openings are scraps of velvet that make the work's pitch-black interior appear limitless. The spatial ambiguity of these voids suggests a pervasive form of anxiety, evoking a fear of emptiness and the boundless vacuum of the cosmos.

Artist: Lee Bontecou
Date: 1961
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: 56 x 39.5 x 21.125 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1966.10

"Really, what we get from Surrealism...is how a small group of white, European, apparently heterosexual men thought about sex in the early decades of the 20th century. Which is too bad, because surrealism was the only early 20th century art movement that included large numbers of women. You wouldn't know this from looking at their "official" group photos, which are almost always composed of bourgie-looking guys in suits and ties."–Jerry Saltz

Artist: Kay Sage
Date: 1944
Medium: Paintings
Size: unframed 15 x 18 x 1.125 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1964.45

"Creepy, weird, all about urges and uncanniness, dreams, nightmares, the unconscious, the irrational, unexpected juxtapositions, transgressions, and hallucinations, surrealism is perhaps the most influential art movement of the 20th century–in its effect both on popular culture and on subsequent art...That's because surrealism had sex on the brain. In the words of Andre Breton– its self-appointed "Pope," its despot, and author of its manifesto– surrealism was devoted to "the omnipotence of desire."...Seeking to pull back the curtain on our secret lives, the surrealists weren't interested in the public part of our existence; they wanted to peer into the private part."–Jerry Saltz

Artist: Jimmy Ernst
Date: 1956
Medium: Paintings
Size: unframed 48 x 60.125 x 1.8125 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1960.2

“The works of art of our century are the mirrors of our predicament produced by some of the most sensitive minds of our time.”–Paul Tillich

Artist: Sherrie Levine
Date: 2004
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: overall 20 x 16 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2005.14

Ritual illustrates the strong visual connections between European Surrealism and the beginnings of Abstract Expressionism in the United States. Through the use of a Surrealist technique called psychic automatism–a kind of doodling where the artist lets impulse lead the way–Rothko created a field of freely floating geometric shapes and disconnected identifiable forms. Like Joan Miró, whom the artist acknowledged as a powerful influence in his works, Rothko imitates the presence of the human figure through an imaginative composition of abstract signs: an ear replaces the head, and a series of lines arranged in a bulbous form marks the torso from which sinuous shapes jut like limbs. According to Rothko, these shapes do not have direct association with any particular visual experience and belong to a ritualistic realm associated with a transcendent world.

Artist: Mark Rothko
Date: 1944
Medium: Paintings
Size: unframed 53.4375 x 39 x inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1986.1

“Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.” –Carl Gustav Jung

Artist: Willem de Kooning
Date: 1983
Medium: Paintings
Size: unframed 80 x 70 x inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1993.131

“There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.” –Carl Gustav Jung

Artist: Grace Hartigan
Date: 1963
Medium: Paintings
Size: unframed 81.875 x 63.875 x inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1963.44

"Art no longer represents nature. It has become nature itself." —Jean Arp

Through both his poetry and his visual art, Jean Arp sought to liberate the unconscious mind and trigger its creative energies. His artistic process was rooted in the patient refinement of form, an investigation that might take months or even years. He felt this lengthy process infused his sculptures with the flow of his own life. Only after Arp felt a form was fully realized did he choose a title, often relying on poetic free association. He called this sensuous abstraction Aquatique, which suggests marine animals or sea life; the work’s shape also evokes plants and the human body.

Artist: Jean (Hans) Arp
Date: 1953
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: overall 13.5 x 25.3125 x 9.1875 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1955.4

As both a visual artist and poet, Jean (Hans) Arp was among the initiators of Dada in Zürich in the 1910s. After moving to Paris in 1925, Arp shifted his concentration from relief to the artistic style he would continue for the rest of his life: sculpture "in the round." In this artistic process, Arp extracted specific forms or lines from one work, then created new works in which he could investigate them further. According to Arp, "In one form or another, my sculptures are always torsos."

Click the "More Info" button to navigate to a screen where you can download this educational resource.

"Various caverns, both of the Old and New world, are tenanted by animals which are usually more or less blind. Among them may be noted the amphibious protens, various blind fish, hundreds of blind insects, many crustaceans, and other forms." —Funk and Wagnalls New Standard Encyclopedia of Universal Knowledge, 1931

Artist: Hans Breder
Date: 1973
Medium: Photographs
Size: sheet 13.875 x 10.875 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2008.16

"To whom but night belong enchantments?" —Thomas Campion, The Description of a Maske [sic], 1607

Artist: Joan Miró
Date: 1967
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: 24.5 x 28.5625 x 11 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1970.35

"I want people to look into the paintings as well as at the paintings–to pause, rewind, and to play them over and over." –Chris Ofili

"For me... it's to the beat in music, because when the dots are made, there's constantly this tapping noise when they are being put on. That comes out of just being in the studio and listening to music...  If you listen to something, it goes into the part of your brain that deals with sight...  I'm trying to make paintings that make you hear them, rather than see them. So actually, you're looking at music [that will] teach your eyes to hear and your ears to see." –Chris Ofili, 2000

Since the 1990s Chris Ofili, a British artist of Nigerian descent, has honed a distinctive and intensely colorful style that unites the worlds of kitsch, hip-hop music, decorative art, blaxploitation film, Pop art, West African textiles, and 1960s psychedelia. These richly layered paintings juxtapose the profane with the sacred, the humorous with the sublime, and the mundane with the mystical. Third Eye Vision is a kaleidoscopic work of color and abstract shapes that rests on two lumps of varnished elephant dung. The “third eye” at its center, from which the composition’s energy radiates, refers to the so-called “brow chakra,” which is said to be a gateway to higher consciousness.

Artist: Chris Ofili
Date: 1999
Medium: Paintings
Size: overall 96 x 72.375 x 6 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2000.11.1-.3

"My eyes make pictures, when they are shut." —Samuel Coleridge, "A Day a Dream," circa 1807

Artist: Lucas Samaras
Date: July 20, 1976
Medium: Photographs
Size: 3 x 3 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1980.32

Cindy Sherman pioneered a significant shift in photographic practice. Not a photographer, but an artist who uses photography in her work, she infused the practice with conceptual heft and sociocultural concerns while mining issues of gender and mass culture. Her influence on the work of artists of the next generation, including Lee Bul and Mariko Mori, has been extraordinary. Sherman emerged from the feminist art movement of the 1970s with her first major body of work, the Untitled Film Stills series (1977-1980). Widely regarded as one of the most original and influential achievements in art of the past two decades, the series comprises an imaginative catalogue of female roles derived from Hollywood movies of the 1940s to the 1960s, all played by Sherman herself. With originality, wit, and intelligence, she used pop culture as a ready-made artistic vocabulary to map a particular constellation of fictional femininity that emerged in postwar America. For each photograph, Sherman created a specific mise-en-scène (props, costume, lighting, pose) evoking a generic type of female role, never a specific actress or film. At once evocative and frustrating, the stills hauntingly remain fragments without a whole, film stills without a film.

Artist: Cindy Sherman
Date: 2002/2004
Medium: Photographs
Size: sheet 39 x 30 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2004.50

Artist: Cindy Sherman
Date: 1987
Medium: Photographs
Size: framed 73.125 x 49.25 x 2.5 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2000.409

In many European museums, works on paper are displayed in a special gallery with minimal lighting that protects fragile objects from overexposure to ultraviolet rays. The small scale of these dimly lit rooms, known as Kabinetts, offer viewers an intimate encounter with the artworks.

The installations in the Kabinett will rotate roughly every three months, and will often be comprised of works borrowed from fellow museums and private collectors.  This photograph depicts the initial installation of late 20th and early 21st century European abstraction.

"dop.pel.gang.er n: a ghostly counterpart and companion of a person; esp. a ghostly double of a live person that haunts him through life and is usu. visible only to himself [<Ger.: doppel~ganger, fr. doppel-, double+ganger, goer>]" —Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, 1961

Artist: Thomas Schütte
Date: 1995
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: installed 73.75 x 10 x 10 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1997.7.1-.3

Robert Gober’s fascination with domestic objects dates back to the early 1980s, when he began to create meticulously handmade sculptures based on beds, chairs, cribs, and sinks. He bases many of these works on childhood memories and dreams, which lends them a dark, psychological potency that is both familiar and strange. In Sigmund Freud’s analysis of dreams, doorways are often invoked as symbols for the body’s own openings. With Untitled Door and Door Frame, Gober has rendered the functional dysfunctional, obliquely suggesting some of the themes that animate his uniquely subjective art: in particular, trauma, abjection, the body, and domestic unease.

Artist: Robert Gober
Date: 1987-1988
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: door 84 x 34 x 1.5 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2004.68.1-.6

Thomas Demand’s images straddle the line between photography and sculpture, instilling their subjects with a sense of unease. He painstakingly constructs full-size
sculptural tableaux that replicate culturally resonant yet visually ordinary spaces, such as the interior of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment building, or the room where L. Ron Hubbard wrote Dianetics, the founding manifesto of Scientology. Carefully lighting and then documenting these cardboard and paper models, the artist shows us architectural facades that are devoid of life but haunting in their artificial doubling of the real world. For this work, Demand photographed his model of Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock’s studio. These pictures demonstrated the performative turn in art, as the event of making began to compete with the primacy of the object itself. Demand's approach can be described as a translation of sorts–and like all translations, something of the original source is lost. But in this case, something unexpected, even uncanny, is gained.

Artist: Thomas Demand
Date: 1997
Medium: Photographs
Size: 72.25 x 99.75 x 1.5 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1998.80

An installation artist for more than a decade, Ward uses everyday objects to create evocative architectural environments in which these common materials are transformed into enigmatic artworks suggesting themes of memory, history, and collective experience. 

In hopes of giving Ward an opportunity to further his artistic practice and collaborate with residents of the Twin Cities, the Walker invited him to be a part of its Artists and Communities at the Crossroads artist-in-residence program. From January through October 2000, he regularly traveled from his home in Harlem to work in various Twin Cities communities.

Artist: Nari Ward
Date: 1999
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: overall 24.5 x 44.5 x 93.5 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2002.30.1-.2

Artist: Marvin Cone
Date: 1953
Medium: oil on canvas
Size: 28.25x15.25x1.75 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1954.2

"His drawings generate videos, which generate photographs and sculptures, which generate more drawings... His most overlooked works are his scrawled, notational pencil drawings. Framed in "self-lubricating plastic," these knarled sketches are often no bigger than index cards. Yet they contain massive amounts of visual information and psychic energy." –Jerry Saltz

Artist: Matthew Barney
Date: 1993
Medium: Drawings and Watercolors, Drawings
Size: 16.5 x 16.5 x 3.5 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1993.136

"The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science." —Albert Einstein, The World as I See It, 1956

Artist: Ranjani Shettar
Date: 2000
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: variable
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2005.86.1-.19

"Well, if there is anything at all that manifests everything artists are supposed to be or have—the delight in innovation, creativity, spontaneity, productivity, creativity entirely out of oneself, and so on—then it is the potato." —Sigmar Polke

Initially associated with the Capitalist Realist movement, the German critical reaction to American Pop Art of the 1960s, Polke creates paintings, photographs, prints, and sculptures that draw inspiration from mass media, banal objects, and low-culture icons. Physically retooling his work to invoke metaphorical transcendence, Polke comments on the real and imaginary as seen through the lens of postwar Germany.

Artist: Sigmar Polke
Date: 1969
Medium: Mixed Media, Multiples, Other
Size: overall 31.5 x 16.25 x 16.25 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1994.131

Die Waschung der Lineale (The Washing of the Rulers) 1972/1999
black-and-white photographs by Polke, text by Mitzka; ed. of 310
Published by Griffelkunst-Vereinigung, Hamburg-Langenhorn e. V.
T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund and McKnight Acquisition Fund, 2007

The Wrong Door

On a cold winter evening in 197* S. and M. were sitting in Alfred Niewöhner’s bar in Hamburg-W. To chase away the chill, they indulged in lots of punch and tried to impress two women by using various pranks and wisecracks. However, the cool blonds were not impressed, even though S. set his jacket sleeve on fire and then quickly doused it with punch. Disappointed, S. and M. left Niewöhner’s around midnight to get some sleep in M.’s nearby apartment. Stumbling up the narrow staircase, they faced two similar doors, and decided to choose the one on the left. To their surprise, they found themselves in the home of H., M.’s neighbor.
Roused from sleep, H., in brown and white striped pajamas, came out to find the cause of this disturbance in the middle of the night. He was pleasantly surprised when S. was introduced to him as the well-known artist P. from D. At that, Frau V., now also awake, uncorked a good bottle of wine. M. explained that H. was also an artist, creating mostly precise etchings. H. showed them a few of his etchings, which he kept in a print cabinet next to a coal-burning stove. Without much thought S. asked whether H. made a lot of money with that. With some hesitation, H. said yes. Probably inspired by the wordplay [in German, Kohle means “coal” but is also slang for money], S. grabbed the metal bucket filled with coal that was kept next to the stove, and dumped the coal into the cabinet and onto H.’s etchings. Horrified, H. stared at his work, all now ruined. S. and M. withdrew to M.’s apartment to enjoy some well-deserved sleep. In the morning, next to a cold oil burning stove, M. woke up before S. and was immediately overcome by a guilty conscience over the barbaric act of the previous night. He woke S. and they went to see H. to apologize for their exuberance and offer their help to remedy the damage as best they could. The coal was carefully gathered up, the etchings lovingly dusted off, and even several of H.’s rulers were carefully washed in soapy water. By the way, H.’s etchings had not suffered all that much; instead they had acquired an aura as a result of the “free” treatment they had received earlier. Thus, an unpleasant affair came to a happy ending.
— Mitzka’s text translated by Helga Dale.

Artist: Sigmar Polke, Ernst Mitzka
Date: 1972/1999
Medium: Photographs
Size: each of 7 11.9375 x 15.875 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2007.52.1-.9

He called editions of the same work of art "multiples." This challenged the idea of art as a unique product to be purchased by a limited number of people who could afford it. 

The artist viewed multiples as "vehicles of information" that were vitally important to spreading his ideas. He believed that people who owned multiples were staying in touch with him and thus could extend the life of his own concepts. He also envisioned his multiples serving as stand-ins for himself and as objects that would always spark debate, regardless of where they traveled.

Beuys had strong opinions about the role of money in society. In an interview for the publication Art Papier in 1979, he said, "Money and state are the only oppressive powers in the present time . . . There is no other power and as long as people go to vote and go to the polling booths and say yes, yes, yes, to this system, this system will survive. And so we go radically another way and push against this. Radically." While Beuys needed money to live and to support his ideas, the capitalist system of profit troubled him. In his view, money should serve to allow creative living, not as an objective in and of itself. He spoke of his art as production, and emphasized that money from the multiples he created helped support causes such as the Free International University, which he founded.

Artist: Joseph Beuys
Date: 1973
Medium: Mixed Media, Multiples, Other
Size: .1-.5 attached reels 7.5 x 15 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1992.221.1-.7

“Spirit painter supreme.” –Joan Rothfuss

Artist: Louis Eilshemius
Date: 1919
Medium: Paintings
Size: unframed 6.75 x 5.75 x inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1966.30

"Hair should be cut with the waxing or waning moon, according to whether it is desired that it should grow again quickly or be kept short. When the cutting is complete, the clippings must be destroyed by fire, and never on any account left about where an evilly disposed person or a bird can find them." —E. and M. A. Radford, The Encyclopedia of Superstitions, 1948

Artist: Louis Eilshemius
Date: not dated
Medium: Paintings
Size: unframed 7.125 x 8.125 x 1 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1966.31

“bright flames of spirit laughter / around all my seething frame.” —Poetry of Hartley as told in John Updike’s A Lone Left Thing

Artist: Marsden Hartley
Date: 1943
Medium: Paintings
Size: unframed 40.125 x 30.125 x inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1971.47

The abstract expressionist group, which was working in the U.S. and working, again, in the wake of World War II trying to redefine what painting had been. Again, coming out of a very strongly figurative tradition of surrealism, they were trying—the abstract expressionists—to empty out the figurative content and simply and distill. They saw abstraction as not a lack of subject matter but more a fullness of subject matter that was collectively-based so that the specifics of, let's say, a Leonardo would tie it directly to its time. They wanted to get rid of that and still retain some of the collective aspects of the subject matter that they felt were shared by everybody who was a human being. That, of course, came out of their interest in Jungian psychology and the collective unconscious and things that everybody understands sort of instinctively that they felt they were trying to reach in their painting.

—Commentary by Joan Rothfuss

Artist: Morris Louis
Date: 1958
Medium: Paintings
Size: overall 92 x 133.75 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2009.31

"The less an artist thinks in non-artistic terms and the less he exploits the easy, common skills, the more of an artist he is...The less an artist obtrudes himself in his painting, the purer and clearer his aims... Less is more." –Ad Reinhardt, 1953

Although Ad Reinhardt is often grouped with the New York ­based Abstract Expressionist painters, his work is not concerned with gestural expression but rather with the optical and emotional sensations produced by the application of pure color onto a two-dimensional surface. Like Barnett Newman, he aspired to rid his art of all narrative or symbolic content; painting could refer only to itself and not to anything outside its flat, colored surface. His reductivism led him to work in monochrome. From 1954 until his death in 1967 he painted only black-on-black canvases, including this one. With its barely perceptible vertical and horizontal bands of shades of black on a black ground, this canvas embodies Reinhardt's belief that "there is something wrong, irresponsible, and mindless about color, something impossible to control. Control and rationality are part of any morality."

Artist: Ad Reinhardt
Date: 1960
Medium: Paintings
Size: unframed 25.25 x 22 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1999.54

As a sculptor, printmaker, and installation artist, Kiki Smith’s perennial concerns have been the body as a site of knowledge and the mind’s ability to create stories and symbols. She has called herself a “housewife artist,” referencing both her use of modest materials and her choice to make art at home rather than in a studio. Indeed, the stuff of domestic life permeates her work. Quite literally carved into the gallery, Kitchen presents a constellation of familiar objects that charge the space with an openended sense of narrative and memory. The little girl cocooned in this room at the heart of an imagined colonial household clearly longs for the outside world, which—as the daily newspaper on the kitchen table indicates—is disquietingly different from the one she knows.

Artist: Kiki Smith
Date: 2005
Medium: Mixed media, Media Arts, Multimedia
Size: variable
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2006.2.1-.178

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.

Artist: Tetsumi Kudo
Date: 1979
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: overall installed 12.8125 x 11.9375 x 8.6875 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2008.51

"Dismantling and accumulating, proliferating and separating, the sense of obliterating and the sounds from the invisible cosmos. What are all these things?"—Yayoi Kusama

At age 27, Yayoi Kusama left her native Japan for New York and quickly established a reputation for herself in avant-garde art circles. Though her work has elements of Pop, Fluxus, Minimalism, and Surrealism, it is distinct in its obsessive, often sexually charged sensibility.

Oven-Pan is part of a continuing body of works, begun in 1962, which Kusama calls "aggregation sculptures," "accumulation sculptures," or "compulsion furniture." Often, they combine an object associated with women's work—in this case, a metal "oven pan"—with a covering of stuffed, phallic protrusions. At times, Kusama has expanded these works to room-sized installations in which the environment becomes a field of obliterating, menacing proliferations.

Artist: Yayoi Kusama
Date: 1963
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: overall 9.75 x 18.5 x 24 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1996.165

"Hannah Wilke was a celebrated and controversial artist who came to prominence during the feminist art movements of the 1960s and 70s. The photographs, sculptures, videos and performances she produced examined and critiqued the depiction of women and female sexuality within art history and popular culture. " —Peter Eleey

Artist: Hannah Wilke
Date: 1967
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: overall installed 4 x 12 x 12 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2002.69.1-.2

"William Copley, one of [Man Ray's] patrons, termed him "the Dada of us all." He brought together an astonishing number of the characteristics that have been labeled "postmodern" in the art made in the years since his death. He created objects only to photograph them; he dissolved the line between unique and reproducible objects; he pioneered manipulated and cameraless photography; he veered from medium to medium; he incorporated machine-made and artist-crafted objects into hybrids; he rejected craft and technique for concept and idea; he combined words and images in startling and humorous juxtapositions; he was a cheerful surrealist, a nonideological dadaist, a tinker and inventor, an American and a European, a conjurer of dreams but usually not of nightmares. He sought to "amuse, bewilder, annoy, and inspire" rather than to shock—or to confront the full terrors of the twentieth-century world." —Biography Resource Center, 2001 Gale Group

Artist: Man Ray
Date: 1921/1963
Medium: Mixed Media, Multiples, Other
Size: overall 6.25 x 3.625 x 4.5 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2004.55

"Constantin Brancusi held a modernist belief that primal innocence and formal simplicity were linked. From 1909 until 1933 he employed the oval form again and again, captivated by its cosmological flavor—simultaneously suggesting the fragility of an egg and an infant' s head. My favorite of these sculptures is "Newborn," the image of a bawling child, its mouth wide open, suggesting the shock of the birth."—Sherrie Levine

Since the early 1980s, Levine has appropriated—co-opted or reused—famous works of art that she has manipulated and tailored for her artistic purposes. Throughout her career, Levine has created art based on works by prominent 20th-century male artists in order to underscore the relative absence of women in the history of art, particularly the modernist tradition.

Newborn is a rebirth of the Constantin Brancusi sculpture from 1915 with which it shares its title. The smooth egg-shaped form is interrupted only by a stylized ridge and sliced oval plane suggesting the nose and open mouth of a crying infant. Originally displayed on a grand piano, Newborn invokes Marcel Duchamp's "readymades"—prefabricated objects that became works of art because he declared them to be. Levine's cast glass head questions the notion of authenticity and authorship—issues that are constantly raised and challenged throughout the 20th century.

Artist: Sherrie Levine
Date: 1994
Medium: Mixed Media, Multiples, Other
Size: overall 5.25 x 8 x 5.5 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2002.233

"It is my main concern to go beyond what I know and what I can know. The formal principles are understandable and understood. It is the unknown quantity from which and where I want to go. As a thing, an object, it accedes to its non-logical self. It is something, it is nothing."—Eva Hesse

Hesse experiments with and manipulates unusual artistic materials such as latex, rubber, fiberglass, rope, and cloth. Steeped in the labor-intensive process of making sculpture and the physical transformation of its materials, Hesse's abstract and organic forms often play upon the tension between opposites: freedom and confinement, suppression and release, soft and hard, anthropomorphic and geometric, permanence and impermanence.

Artist: Eva Hesse
Date: 1969
Medium: Mixed Media, Multiples, Other
Size: 10 x 3 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1988.390.2

Artist Ray Johnson started the New York Correspondence School as an international network for poets and artists. These artists used the medium of the postal system to freely exchange artwork, objects, and anything else deemed worthy by the school participants. Johnson's love of collaboration and habit of recycling old works into multilayered new ones resulted in a flurry of mail art circling the globe with instructions to "add and return to Ray Johnson."

Artist: Ray Johnson
Date: 1974
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: overall 3 x 9.5 x 4 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2001.134

Complete with marionette puppets and a miniature theater, and first shown at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in 1991, The Philosopher's Suite is a meditation on the Marquis de Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom (1793). Each of the mutilated puppets represents the six characters from Sade's controversial book. The puppet represented here is the main character, Eugenie, who is recast by the artist as the late French photographer Pierre Molinier. By bringing together the fictional character and the real individual, Blake not only reverses gender roles but erases the distinction between what is real and fictional. By giving life to the characters in the book, Blake explores the act of reading and the act of thinking as performance.

Artist: Nayland Blake
Date: 1997
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: overall installed 73.75 x 14 x 12 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1997.111.1-.3

Inspired by the neighborhood nickelodeon theaters of the early 1900s, which showed short films of all genres, this space features selections from the Walker’s Ruben/Bentson Film and Video Study Collection. The program will change every six months for the duration of the exhibition.

Now showing through August 28, 2011:

Georges Méliès French, 1861–1938
Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) 1902
16mm film (black and white, silent with piano accompaniment) transferred to video; 9 minutes

Guy Maddin Canadian, b. 1956
Odilon Redon or The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity 1995
16mm film (black and white, sound) transferred to video; 5 minutes

As is the case with all of Robert Gober's sculptures, this work was meticulously created by hand down to the last details, including the latticework of the plastic milk crate and the individual placement of real human hairs on the wax torso. Untitled began with the reconstruction of a found object: a broken milk crate. The artist cast this common, mass-produced object by hand, and later inserted the half-male, half-female torso into the receptacle. Similar torsos have appeared independently in Gober's work, and he has also made another version of this piece with a male torso.

In his working process, the artist creates a number of similar yet unique works based on common objects such as sinks, newspapers, doorways, or culvert pipes. The human body has been a site of ongoing investigation for Gober and often appears in his work in various formal mutations.

Artist: Robert Gober
Date: 1999
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: overall 12.5 x 18.75 x 13 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1999.38

This specimen was found by Marion Faller in an established escape well within the dripline perimeter of a crack willow in the Town of Eaton, New York, in July 1977. Good fortune emanates from ownership of the consequence of a chromosomal ambiguity in this leguminous herb. As the number of leaves is incremented, luck increases exponentially. For related but inferior species, that increase is merely arithmetic. Even numbers greater than three govern cards, odd numbers, love. The nectar is edible, but disappointingly weak considering the exercise required to extract it.

Artist: Hollis Frampton
Date: 1982
Medium: Photographs
Size: 20 x 16 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1993.190.4

This remnant of a specimen was purchased by the author in February 1982 from J & S Oriental Grocery on Erie Boulevard in Syracuse, New York. The stinging coelenterate, not a true jellyfish, is perfectly congruent with the virulent Portuguese Man O’War of the Atlantic and is fished for food in the Sea of Japan. Only the flotation bladder is available at market, since the jellyfishermen reserve for their own households the finest portion, the mouth parts, which they call the head. Once desalinated and rehydrated, the bladder is sliced into strips and eaten raw, alone, or perhaps with cold chicken, juliennes of cucumber, and a light purée of sesame. In appearance and first texture, this food resembles classic india rubber bands, but it retrieves for the palate something of the childish adventure of jumping on beached bell jellies after a hard sea storm: ever so momentarily, they resist, and then, suddenly,
pressed, liquefy and vanish, leaving behind an everlasting sensation.

Artist: Hollis Frampton
Date: 1982
Medium: Photographs
Size: 16 x 20 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1993.190.7

This specimen, one of a pair costing $1.39, was purchased by the author at King Chong Company, Bayard Street, Manhattan, in November 1981. Its chalky or calcærous braincap, called ossa sepia, has been excised for sale to the canary trade, as well as the little sac in which it carried with it a calamitous portable tint of night. The flesh of the genus is more savory, more pensive, less yielding to the teeth than that of other cephalopods, who invite being eaten carelessly, with quick, flashing bites.

Artist: Hollis Frampton
Date: 1982
Medium: Photographs
Size: 16 x 20 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1993.190.12

This specimen was purchased by the author at a marine curio shop on Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco, in April 1980, for five dollars. Its stated provenance was Hong Kong, and we may conjecture that the genus appears as an adulterant among edible catches dragnetted in easterly effluents from the Indian Ocean. The present
apparition is an artificial fetish, made by incising the fish along its dorsal edge. It is then opened like a pamphlet, drawn, dried, varnished, and the result prepared for
hanging as a wall decoration by twisting a noose thin copper wire about what passes for a neck. That wire has been removed: its presence implied a false narrative, since fish are never garotted or executed by hanging.

Artist: Hollis Frampton
Date: 1982
Medium: Photographs
Size: 20 x 16 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1993.190.11

These specimens were purchased by the author in June 1980 from J & S Oriental Grocery on Erie Boulevard in Syracuse, New York, as part of a packet of fourteen
costing seventy-nine cents. The species is prized only for the edibility of the immature tuber represented here; unlike the sort from Gondwanaland, it never harbors jewels. The ancient euphoric psychotropic of the Nile valley derived from the fruit of a tree, Zizyphus lotus, of the buckthorn family.

Artist: Hollis Frampton
Date: 1982
Medium: Photographs
Size: 16 x 20 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1993.190.6

This specimen, one of a pair costing $1.49, was purchased by the author at William’s Market in Mattydale, New York, in October 1979. Its tail is bowdlerized, having been surreptitiously gnawed some months later by Maxwell, a cat. The species, a notorious
whistler and a schooler of subtropical shallows, is customarily seined, by hand or from rowboats, in Thai waters, where it is often chopped or shredded and pickled in a sour, peppery escabeche. From anatomical evidence, it is clear that this fish subsists on a diet of smaller fish and possesses only moderate vertical mobility. It was mislabeled, though, as pollack (Pollachius virens), a commercially important codlike fish of the North Atlantic, shaped less like a cudgel, which appears at table even more seldom than hake.

Artist: Hollis Frampton
Date: 1982
Medium: Photographs
Size: 16 x 20 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1993.190.13

These specimens were gathered, among a vast recurrent troop, by the author, in the company of Gerald Church, Postmaster in the village of Eaton, New York, on a raw morning at the beginning of November 1981. Fresh or dried and reconstituted, the abundant meat of this fungus is of unusual tensility. At least three races may be distinguished by the tone of the slightly viscid cap, which may vary from opalescent white through pale gray to a strong yellowish beige. Invariably, the gills of mature bodies are foraged by a small beetle whose presence is positively diagnostic of a choice species well distributed throughout the North temperate zone. It is one of two fully domesticated edible fungi, the other being a strain of Agaricus campestris propagated on beds of clay and composted horse dung in abandoned anthracite mines of Pennsylvania. In Japan, this Pleurotus is domesticated on rotting elm logs. The author has obtained it wild, as well, from senescent maples and from standing beech
(Fagus americana) in seeming health; but the establishment of its mycelium is always a sign of pathology in the host.

Artist: Hollis Frampton
Date: 1982
Medium: Photographs
Size: 20 x 16 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1993.190.10

Vacated winter skins, found in the summer of 1980, in a vegetable garden in the Town of Eaton, New York, are proposed as standards for a new system of measurement. These benign reptiles, insectivore and constrictor respectively, are alleged to hear through their tongues. They are enjoyed by diurnal predatory birds and universally deprecated by fools.

Artist: Hollis Frampton
Date: 1982
Medium: Photographs
Size: 16 x 20 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1993.190.2

This specimen was donated by Mary Emmaline Bryant, then of Poolville, New York, in August 1979. The author suspects that her gift was prompted by the creature’s imaginary tactile symmetry with certain grotesque or exotic fungi, of indeterminate identity, which he had gathered on that pleasant day, whereafter he stopped in Poolville to show them to her family and drink a bottle of beer. Constantin Brancusi maintained that toads were more handsome than Michelangelo’s statues, but he referred to the modest French park toad. The drug bufagin, a cardiac stimulant and vas-odilator, brewed from Chinese toads during the Chou and Former Han, and rediscovered in the West in the early 1950s, has never been synthesized and may have fallen into medical desuetude or disrepute. Its scarcity in purified form is pendant to the deserved unpopularity of toad catching as an adult vocation: toads defend themselves in a perennially surprising way.

Artist: Hollis Frampton
Date: 1982
Medium: Photographs
Size: 16 x 20 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1993.190.9

These specimens, dried at various ages, were grown by Marion Faller in her vegetable garden in the Town of Eaton, New York, during the summer of 1981. This preservative method steals something of the peppers’ piquancy, but it enhances their essence and imparts to them a lucency of unexcelled saturation. Because it is a triumph to raise jalapeños on the Allegheny Plateau, where the growing season is barely a hundred days
long, we determined to celebrate the first big harvest with a feast. For an afternoon, I parched and flayed, she stuffed with three farces, we sauced and baked. Ah!

Artist: Hollis Frampton
Date: 1982
Medium: Photographs
Size: each sheet 20 x 16 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1993.190.1

This specimen was discovered by Will Faller, Jr., in May 1981, on the shoulder of a macadam road in Randallsville, Town of Lebanon, New York. The timid soprano amphibian becomes highly vocal under collective sexual arousal, improvising stochastic nocturnal choruses of considerable elegance. It is nominally edible but meager.

Artist: Hollis Frampton
Date: 1982
Medium: Photographs
Size: 20 x 16 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1993.190.14

This immature specimen was found by Bill Brand during the demolition of a wall in the Town of Eaton, New York, in July 1975. The genus is never iridescent, but it is
soothing in appearance as in voice and graceful in its habits. The squabs are reputedly delicious but are rarely to be gathered in quantity.

Artist: Hollis Frampton
Date: 1982
Medium: Photographs
Size: 16 x 20 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1993.190.5

This young adult specimen, enhanced by two spray applications of a cellulose acetate fixative, was discovered by Adam Mierzwa in May 1973 in the course of partially dismantling a house in the Town of Eaton, New York. The cause of its virtually total depilation is unknown. A rural pest, graminivorous by preference, the species constitutes the permanent North American reservoir of bubonic plague, and must not be confused with Rattus norvegicus, its urban counterpart. Inedible by custom, the genus Rattus is prized as a delicacy in Easter Island, whither it was brought by European explorers. The author wishes that its site of delectation might have been displaced to Yap, in proximity to superior megaliths.

Artist: Hollis Frampton
Date: 1982
Medium: Photographs
Size: 20 x 16 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1993.190.8

This specimen was taken by the author as a keepsake from a funeral wreath at Millersburg, Ohio, on March 5, 1980. The mature fruit, a hip, anatomically cognate with apples and pears but unusual among most cultivars of this species, is edible and contains appreciable quantities of ascorbic acid. Formerly, petals were smoked by the Queen of Siam and offered for that use to guests during royal audiences; when strewn in the paths of the brilliant, or of heads of state, they are a sign of acclaim.

Artist: Hollis Frampton
Date: 1982
Medium: Photographs
Size: 20 x 16 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1993.190.3

"It has never been my object to record my dreams, just the determination to realize them." —Man Ray

Man Ray, an avant-garde artist known for his innovative work in photography, has made in this film a series of visual and kinetic experiments in the cinematic form. Weaving abstract and concrete images, positive and negative exposures, static and moving objects, Ray creates a catalog of techniques—including his own "rayographs," cameraless contact prints of objects on paper and film—that later filmmakers working in the experimental genre would explore and define. —MoMa's website

David Smith was the first major American artist who challenged the supremacy of the solid figure or object. He replaced the massed form with a more open, physically hollow one by employing principles of direct welding based on joinery and construction, rather than traditional sculptural modes of carving and modeling.

The Royal Bird represents a continuation of Smith's interests in linear, insect like creatures that began in the mid-1930s. It is based on the skeleton of a prehistoric bird of the Cretaceous period, the Hesperornis regalis (royal evening bird), in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The artist created imaginative additions to the skeleton's form in sketchbook drawings in the 1940s, augmenting the bulbous tail and streamlining the figure to more closely resemble the taut body of a diving bird.

Artist: David Smith
Date: 1947-1948
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: 22.125 x 59.8125 x 8.5 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1952.4

Robert Watts is an artist best known for his association with Fluxus, a loose international affiliation of visual and performing artists active in the 1960s and 1970s. Early in the 1960s, through his friendships with George Segal and Roy Lichtenstein at Rutgers University, he had also been associated with Pop Art. He shared Pop artists' interests in iconography and the vernacular culture, including food. He shared with Fluxus artists an approach to making "intermedia" art—in this case combining the media of sculpture with photography.

While Pop artists were interested in how consumer objects are represented, advertised, and commodified, Watts more directly appropriated the life-size everyday objects. Beginning in 1965 he made a series of "found objects"—chrome-plated ceramic plates, chocolates in candy boxes, fruits, vegetables, and other foods. Each had a humorous detail that reminded the viewer they were not "real"—such as the green, plaster peas and the photograph affixed to TV Dinner.

Artist: Robert Watts
Date: 1965-1985
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: overall installed 17 x 16.875 x 7.625 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1993.127.1-.21

The work also addresses issues concerning women, fashion, consumption, and the body. The equation of women with meat and the notion that "you are what you wear" are common ideas in Western society. In the United States, statistics have pointed to a growing number of young women with eating disorders such as bulimia and anorexia nervosa (referred to in the title), because their body types do not match the prevailing fashion or "look" sported by the tall, thin models populating the media.

The dress was stitched together from 60 pounds of raw flank steak and must be constructed anew each time it is shown. Following a centuries-old method of food preservation, the meat is heavily salted and allowed to air-dry. Over the span of the exhibition, the aging process drastically changes the appearance of the work.

Artist: Jana Sterbak
Date: 1987
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: mannequin 62.25 x 16.5 x 11.875 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1993.54.1-.3