Absentee Landlord Study Set

This Set is meant to be used by teachers, tour guides, students, and visitors to gain additional knowledge and insight related to Absentee Landlord, John Waters' first foray into curating. The Set contains a number of art works featured in the exhibition, as well as accompanying text, audio, and video components. Feel free to use this Set however you wish- whether it be as preparation for your visit, or post-visit research.

Absentee Landlord, and thus this Set, is predominantly composed of works from the Walker's collection. However, images of works on loan to the Walker were not available and do not appear in the Set. Waters was invited to include loaned art, as all aspects of Waters' personality and interests are not necessarily reflected in the Walker's collection.

Introduction to Absentee Landlord

On view June 11, 2011-March 4, 2012

Okay, look out you current tenant artworks, there’s a new absentee landlord in town, me. And I’m not going for rent control. Sure, the trustees left a security deposit of the permanent collection but I want to clean house, reward troublemakers, and invite crashers. Aren’t all curators landlords who allow fine art to live together in a sublet for a while and be uneasy roommates? Or is it closer to a dictatorship where I can order eviction by deaccession if they talk back, balk at my orders, or fail to entice enough public comment?

Are prints, sculptures, paintings, and photographs relieved to be in museum storage where they don’t have to shine, “art-off,” risk exposure to light? Or are they happy when they have to “work”? Get along with each other in public? Hear sometimes stupid comments from hostile museum-going amateurs? Publicly humiliate themselves by being forced to live up to their auction prices?

Who should room together in the world of contemporary art? Can a Russ Meyer photograph go to sleep in the same gallery as an Yves Klein blue chip masterpiece? Certainly, Sturtevant is secure enough to be hated, but is Anne Truitt? Video art has “street cred” these days but can it ever catch up with a John Currin painting in art-history references, even if they’re embraced and mocked? Who’d copy from Richard Prince? Who’d be sloppier to live with than Mike Kelley? And better yet,
who’d ruin decoration more than Christopher Wool? Suppose an “art-terrorist” like Gregory Green was hiding amongst us? Do we snitch or shiver in welcome artistic fear? Would Fred Sandback approve of the damage his fellow roommates have caused or would he think they were trying too hard?

Can artworks sexually attract each other? Does Minimalism make Pop horny? Does pornography elevated to high art lose its
erotic power? Does size matter or can a tiny joke compete with a maximalist icon? Can art ever be “funny” without losing academic enthusiasm? Would Fischli and Weiss and Roman Signer fight over who’s more droll? More Swiss? And even more importantly, if all these works had to live together, would
Carl Andre ever be able to laugh?

Maybe the entire museum-going experience is in need of intervention. Why is there no art in the parking lot? Wouldn’t a symphony of car crash sound effects remind visitors not to drink too much and drive home after an opening? And shouldn’t the public know how much this show cost? Why not display all the expense receipts (shipping, insurance, construction) in a vitrine like artistic ephemera and let the museum-goers snoop at the endless price of the exhibition? Who says simple sculptural vandalism somewhere in the building makes the whole experience of visiting an art museum sexier? And what if the blueplate special being served in the restaurant is a photograph rather than an actual meal— isn’t that nutrition of a different kind? Can “art talk” that often infuriates the public go even further on the Walker’s Art on Call audio tour and become so ludicrously abstract that the listener suddenly understands? And finally, can I, the new landlord, be tyrannical enough to include a small number of my own works in the show if it makes a few members of the permanent collection blush or feel overprivileged? After all, “getting along” is the enemy of contemporary art, isn’t it?
—John Waters

Intro to John Waters

As the cinema's premier purveyor of trash, John Waters has created a body of work as tasteful as pit beef. In exploring Baltimore's underbelly, he has elevated sleaze to an art form and made films that are the guiltiest of guilty pleasures. Briefly enrolled as a film student at New York University, Waters was expelled and left to his own devices as an aspiring filmmaker. He began his exercises with a Super-8 camera for Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, filming an interracial marriage performed by a Ku Klux Klan member. This was followed by two more shorts, Roman Candles and Eat Your Makeup, before he made his first feature in 1969, Mondo Trasho. With his third feature, Pink Flamingos, Waters became a star of the midnight cult-screening circuit. His newfound infamy continued as he made outrageous films with utterly revolting moments. With Hairspray, he went mainstream with an inadvertently family-friendly movie; he later sought revenge with his viciously sitcomish Serial Mom, starring Kathleen Turner as a lethally overprotective mother. Cecil B. Demented, takes guerrilla filmmaking to heart when an indie director kidnaps a starlet and forces her to act in his underground opus. Although the production values may have improved since he began shooting films, his passions have remained truly depraved. "One must remember that there is such a thing as good bad taste and bad bad taste," the mustachioed one has said. Waters' work has become the standard of good bad taste. —Bio from the Walker Art Center's May 2000's Regis Filmmaker's Evening and Retrospective

Park City Grill

John Currin's strangely disquieting paintings are depictions of contemporary people, rendered in a style characterized by distortion and elongation that is evocative of the painters of northern Renaissance, early Mannerism, and 20th-century modernism, including Grünewald, Parmigianino, and Picasso. However, the artist turns occasionally to advertising, fashion magazine spreads, kitsch portraiture found in thrift stores, and soft-porn magazines for inspiration. He has also used his own facial features and those of his wife, sculptor Rachel Feinstein, in his portraits. Park City Grill is provocative yet ambiguous, ironic yet dangerously inviting. The artist argues that the best art is ultimately beyond psychology and interpretation. Currin has spoken of visual clichés as a form of recurring truth, and considers that aspect of his work to be an end in itself.

Artist: John Currin
Date: 2000
Medium: Paintings
Size: overall 38.0625 x 30 x 1.4375 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2000.107

Park City Grill

Compare the elongation of the features in Parmigianino's Madonna with the Long Neck (1534-40) to those in John Currin's contemporary painting. Why might Currin have chosen to represent his subject in this way?

Low Overhead

Artschwager calls his sculptures "dimensional painting-surrogates," and defines sculpture as "felt space." "Space is an abstraction that grows naturally out of our looking at, looking into, looking through, walking, opening, closing, sitting, thinking about sitting, passing by, etc."

Artschwager used unconventional materials, such as formica. "It was formica which touched it off. Formica, the great ugly material, the horror of the age... a picture of a piece of wood. If you take that and make something out of it, then you have an object. But it's a picture of something at the same time."—Richard Artschwager

Artist: Richard Artschwager
Date: 1985
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: overall 96 x 93 x 93 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1985.714

Untitled (living rooms)

Richard Prince started his career as a figure painter, but around 1975 he started to make collages using photographs and text. In 1977 he produced a series of four photographs of living rooms lifted from the New York Times. This act of rephotographing cast doubt on basic assumptions about authorship, the authenticity of photographic images, the ownership of public images, and the nature of invention. In the Jokes series, started in 1986, Prince chronicles America's sexual fantasies and frustrated desires through one-liners, stand-up comedy, and burlesque-like jokes. Revealing the darker side of American life and the pathology of Middle America, his work exposes several false distinctions: the presumed dichotomies between the copy and the original, the normal and the uncanny, public and private, fact and fiction. Prince's appropriated photograph Brooke Shields (Spiritual America) (1983) shows the ten-year-old actress standing in the bath, her androgynous child's body contradicted by her sophisticated, womanly attitude. The title of the work alludes to Alfred Stieglitz's photograph of the same name, which depicts the groin of a castrated horse. When this work was first shown in an exhibition organized by Prince himself, the image was at the center of a lawsuit between Shields' mother and the original photographer. Prince's controversial display of the photograph raises issues of voyeurism and commodification of images.

Artist: Richard Prince
Date: 1977
Medium: Photographs
Size: each of 4 20 x 24 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2005.3.1-.4

No. 59

"Ryan was a self-starter. In 1923 she left a marriage in New Jersey for the life of a poet and journalist, traveling alone to Europe and then settling in Greenwich Village... She began painting in 1938 when she was almost 50... After she saw a Kurt Schwitters show in 1948, collage became her passion, and those she produced in her last six years remain a rich and understudied highlight of postwar New York modernism." —Holland Cotter, Art in Review, New York Times, 5/4/07

Artist: Anne Ryan
Date: 1948/1954
Medium: Drawings and Watercolors, Unique Works on Paper, Mixed media
Size: unframed 6.875 x 4.875 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1979.3

The Middle of the Outskirts

"Will you ever look at a Venetian blind the same way again?—John Waters

Artist: Gedi Sibony
Date: 2011
Medium: vertical blinds
Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali Gallery, New York

Video— Anthony Huberman, Chief Curator at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis discusses Gedi Sibony's work.

The Subconscious Sink

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Every apartment needs a bathroom!

Artist: Robert Gober
Date: 1985
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: overall 90 x 83.625 x 25.5 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1985.396

Most of my sculptures have been memories remade, recombined, and filtered through my current experiences. Looking back now at why I built sculptures of sinks, I can remember sinks that I knew as a child, a recurring dream of a roomful of sinks with water flowing through them, the fact that a friend was dying of AIDS. But when I was making them, my considerations were for the most part sculptural and formal ones.--Robert Gober

Robert Gober's fascination with domestic objects dates back to the early 1980s, when he began to create sculptures based on beds, chairs, cribs, and sinks. Subconscious Sink contains the basic elements of a large old-fashioned sink the artist knew as a child. Mounted on the white gallery wall, the sink's gleaming plaster form almost appears to be materializing in front of our eyes, as if it is emerging from our own subconscious. However, it's clear at first glance that this is not an ordinary sink. Most notably, the back splashboard rises to an illogical height, splitting near the top into two identical halves. Furthermore, where there should be faucets and plumbing apparatus, there are gaping holes, rendering the sink useless.

As implied by the title and his own words, Gober is addressing larger psychological issues through this familiar household fixture. For example, our inability to clean ourselves at this sink has been compared to the larger inability of our immune systems to eradicate deadly diseases such as the AIDS virus from our bodies. The split splashboard is also rich with associations, implying a past division stemming from childhood or a discord in one's home environment.

Walker solo exhibition: Robert Gober: Sculpture + Drawing, 1999

Sixteen Jackies

Although Warhol was already impressed with the glamour of Jackie Kennedy by 1962,¹ he was unmoved by the news of John Kennedy's assassination the following year. He later recalled:

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: Andy Warhol
Date: 1964
Medium: Paintings
Size: unframed 80.375 x 64.375 x inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1968.2

<div style="width:140px; height:120px;"><div style="position:relative; width:93.24px; height:79.92px; margin-left:0px; margin-top:0px;"><div class="unzoomed_thumbnail" style="width:93.24px; height:79.92px;"><img class="inline_img fake_0.802083333333" id="zoomer_110492_57398iip_loading" src="http://www.artsconnected.org/media/5b/8f/b9e6bc6204fdd4422cc3a5c31050/93.24/79.92/110492.jpg" class="iip_loading" title="" alt="Sixteen Jackies, Andy Warhol" height_offset="0" /></div></div><div style="position:relative; width:93.24px; height:79.92px; margin-left:46.62px; margin-top:-39.96px;"><div class="gallery_item_text" style="width:135px; height:115px;" >Although Warhol was already impressed with the glamour of Jackie Kennedy by 1962,1 he was unmoved by the news of John Kennedy's assassination the following year. He later recalled: 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. </div></div></div>

Artwork of the Month: Andy Warhol's 16 Jackies

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Yellow Corner Piece

Artist: Fred Sandback
Date: 1970
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: overall 72 x 72 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1986.126.1-.2

"I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent. . . . I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself."--Claes Oldenburg

After settling in New York in 1952, Claes Oldenburg became interested in making art that broke away from traditional forms (such as painting) and venues (such as galleries). During the late 1950s and early 1960s his performances, Happenings, environments, and other works drew on the growing consumerism of American culture, including advertising, comic books, and television, and he became associated with the newly developing Pop Art movement.

The sculpture Shoestring Potatoes Spilling from a Bag and a companion piece entitled Giant Soft Ketchup Bottle (1967) were inspired by an advertisement in a 1965 issue of Life magazine. In typical fashion, Oldenburg transforms the object by greatly enlarging its scale and using unexpected materials. Caught spilling from the bag in a frozen free fall, the fries are transformed into a satirical emblem of the basest level of American culture--greasy fast food to go.

Shoestring Potatoes Spilling from a Bag

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Artist: Claes Oldenburg
Date: 1966
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: variable 108 x 46 x 42 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1966.46

Claes Oldenburg, Shoestring Potatoes Spilling from a Bag (track 1)

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Claes: "Very often I am sitting at dinner and I take out my notebook. I get very inspired when I eat, for some reason."
Coosje: "One of the things that sculptors who work in an urban surrounding think of is scale, the object in comparison to the other things in the surroundings—buildings, the highway, the Cathedral, lantern posts, anything."—Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen

Concetto Spaziale (Spatial Concept)

"We are living in the mechanical age. Painted canvas and standing plaster figures no longer have any reason to exist. What is needed is a change in both essence and form. What is needed is the supercession of painting, sculpture, poetry, and music. It is necessary to have an art that is in greater harmony with the needs of the new spirit."—Lucio Fontana, 1946

Lucio Fontana, an Italian artist who lived and worked in Argentina, was one of the first avant-garde artists to understand art as gesture or performance. His first solo exhibition at an American museum was held at the Walker in 1966, where a critic wrote in the Minneapolis Star that "Fontana gives his works a feeling of space by breaking the surface with perforations, punctures, 'nervous' slits, 'quiet and dramatic' slashes, or 'fluttery' holes." The technique, which Fontana named Spazialismo, was conceived in 1949 when he punctured a thinly painted monochromatic canvas with a knife, exploding the definition—or at least the conventional space—of art. This act challenged the entire history of Western easel painting and led him to the understanding that painting was no longer about illusion contained within the dimensions of a canvas but a complex blend of form, color, architectural space, gesture, and light.

Fontana was completely committed to abstraction, publishing in 1946 his famous "White Manifesto," which expanded on ideas from another Italian movement, Futurism, about the role of science and technology in new art forms. In this manifesto he wrote about "the free development of color and form in real space to create an art that would transcend the area of the canvas to become an integral part of architecture."

Artist: Lucio Fontana
Date: 1968
Medium: Paintings
Size: framed 39.375 x 32.875 x 2 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1998.114

Concetto Spaziale - Attesa (Spatial Concept - Expectation)

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Artist: Lucio Fontana
Date: 1964-1965
Medium: Paintings
Size: unframed 57.5 x 45 x inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1998.113

Two-Part Chairs, Obtuse Angle (A Pair)

Artist: Scott Burton
Date: 1983-1984
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: each 33 x 24 x 33 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1984.3

Artwork of the Month: Scott Burton's Two Part Chairs, Obtuse Angle (A Pair)

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Newspaper

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.

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

E.O.W. Looking into the Fire I

"If you pass something every day and it has a little character, it begins to intrigue you. Picasso said that we painters make paintings the way princes make their children—with dairy maids. That is to say that we make them with the ordinary everyday things, whatever greets us when we wake up in the morning, whatever we're hoping for. I am just recording what I see on my daily round."—Frank Auerbach

"He is also an obsessive perfectionist and has been known to buy back and destroy an inferior painting, sometimes years after completion. In his youth, he would compulsively work and rework an image, clawing away unworthy fragments and burying unsatisfactory versions deep in the endless layers of paint."—John O'Mahony, The Guardian, 9/15/01

"Good paintings do attack from an unfamiliar point of view. They're bound to look genuine, and in some way actively repellent, disturbing, itchy, and not right."—Frank Auerbach

"They would've gotten along." —John Waters in reference to placing a Frank Auerbach painting next to a Cindy Sherman photograph

Artist: Frank Auerbach
Date: 1962
Medium: Paintings
Size: actual 12.25 x 10.75 x inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1996.174

Untitled

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.

Artist: Cindy Sherman
Date: 2000
Medium: Photographs
Size: framed 31.125 x 24.1875 x 1 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2001.19

Opening-Day Artist Talk: Sturtevant

Elaine Sturtevant produced the copy of the original Joseph Beuys print Beuys la rivlouzione sima noi (pictured above) that appears in this show.

Click on the "More Info" button to read a summary of this artist talk at the Walker Art Center.

Self-Portrait

A multimedia artist avant la lettre, Andy Warhol was painter, printer, filmmaker, magazine founder, and all-around media star from the early 1960s until his death in 1987. The seminal progenitor of American Pop Art and purveyor of the glamorous celebrity lifestyle uttered the now-clichéd statement, "In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." With this simple utterance, Warhol captured the volatile mix of desire, artifice, glamour, fickleness, and information overload that would define our celebrity-obsessed culture. His celebrated silkscreen paintings were often serialized portraits of rich, famous, and sometimes tragic figures of music, screen, and popular culture--such as Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley, and Jackie Kennedy. In his Factory of the late 1960s and early 1970s, he created "superstars" with that "It" quality that separated them from the ordinary. He made films that starred his creations, including Poor Little Rich Girl with Edie Sedgwick and Sleep with John Giorno. Taking part in all areas of the creative world, mainstream and underground, he was involved in the 1960s underground music scene with his musical protégés the Velvet Underground and was also instrumental in the success of Studio 54, the disco-era New York club that became the archetypal high-profile celebrity hangout. While helping to highlight, define, and foster America's obsession with the rich and famous, in 1969 Warhol also created a vehicle to both critique and celebrate that culture: Interview magazine. He also made a number of forays into television. Apart from appearing, as himself, in popular television series such as Love Boat, he also hosted two cable programs in the 1980s: Andy Warhol's TV and Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes. The episodes included in this exhibition feature segments with artists Eleanor Antin and Yoko Ono, musicians The Ramones and Debbie Harry, and filmmaker John Waters and his star Divine, among many others. Warhol was the pioneer who paved the way for such current celebrity media outlets as E! Entertainment Television and In Style magazine. In addition, he has had an extraordinary influence on many of the artists in this exhibition.

Artist: Andy Warhol
Date: 1978
Medium: Paintings
Size: unframed 16 x 13 x 0.875 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1993.187

<div style="width:140px; height:120px;"><div style="position:relative; width:93.24px; height:79.92px; margin-left:0px; margin-top:0px;"><div class="unzoomed_thumbnail" style="width:93.24px; height:79.92px;"><img class="inline_img fake_0.8203125" id="zoomer_22354_3278iip_loading" src="http://www.artsconnected.org/media/c5/bd/dfd9712273537fb92a45886d764b/93.24/79.92/22354.jpg" class="iip_loading" title="" alt="Self-Portrait, Andy Warhol" height_offset="0" /></div></div><div style="position:relative; width:93.24px; height:79.92px; margin-left:46.62px; margin-top:-39.96px;"><div class="gallery_item_text" style="width:135px; height:115px;" >A multimedia artist avant la lettre, Andy Warhol was painter, printer, filmmaker, magazine founder, and all-around media star from the early 1960s until his death in 1987. The seminal progenitor of American Pop Art and purveyor of the glamorous celebrity lifestyle uttered the now-clichÃ©d statement, "In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." With this simple utterance, Warhol captured the volatile mix of desire, artifice, glamour, fickleness, and information overload that would define our celebrity-obsessed culture. His celebrated silkscreen paintings were often serialized portraits of rich, famous, and sometimes tragic figures of music, screen, and popular culture--such as Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley, and Jackie Kennedy. In his Factory of the late 1960s and early 1970s, he created "superstars" with that "It" quality that separated them from the ordinary. He made films that starred his creations, including Poor Little Rich Girl with Edie Sedgwick and Sleep with John Giorno. Taking part in all areas of the creative world, mainstream and underground, he was involved in the 1960s underground music scene with his musical protÃ©gÃ©s the Velvet Underground and was also instrumental in the success of Studio 54, the disco-era New York club that became the archetypal high-profile celebrity hangout. While helping to highlight, define, and foster America's obsession with the rich and famous, in 1969 Warhol also created a vehicle to both critique and celebrate that culture: Interview magazine. He also made a number of forays into television. Apart from appearing, as himself, in popular television series such as Love Boat, he also hosted two cable programs in the 1980s: Andy Warhol's TV and Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes. The episodes included in this exhibition feature segments with artists Eleanor Antin and Yoko Ono, musicians The Ramones and Debbie Harry, and filmmaker John Waters and his star Divine, among many others. Warhol was the pioneer who paved the way for such current celebrity media outlets as E! Entertainment Television and In Style magazine. In addition, he has had an extraordinary influence on many of the artists in this exhibition.</div></div></div>

High Heel in Ruins

"According to Peter Hujar, New York City is one of the loneliest places in the world. People live there by the million, but those in Hujar's photographs, at least—friends and acquaintances from the 1970s intelligentsia and gay bohemian sub-cultures—look mentally and emotionally alone, alert to the delicate sorrows of the human condition.

Hujar, who died in 1987, was an important American photographer of the 1970s and early 1980s, whose work describes New York at a time when the city was financially impoverished but artistically rich...Hujar was important as a portrait photographer because he provided a bridge between the New York art scene of the 1960s, characterized by the denizens of Warhol's Factory, and those who were to come up in the later 1970s, people such as the sculptor Paul Thek, and the painter David Wojnarowicz.

Hujar also had a little-known talent for the kind of night photography of cities that we associate with Brassai or Weegee. His urban landscapes reflect the condition of the city in the mid 1970s, when New York was suffering in the wake of the oil crisis and when downtown was notorious as a playground of criminals and gay hustlers."—Joanna Pitman, Peter Hujar's Love for the Lonely, The Times, 12/5/2007

When you are in the galleries, notice the placement of Hujar's photograph across from Warhol's self-portrait. Warhol and members of his Factory were Hujar's subjects in the 1960s.

Artist: Peter Hujar
Date: 1985
Medium: Photographs
Size: sheet 19.8125 x 15.8125 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2008.61

The Caveman from Wurst Series

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

Peter Fischli and David Weiss are Swiss artists who are obsessed by everyday things so ordinary that they tend to be overlooked and, in their minds, undervalued. Their ongoing preoccupation with the banal and their ingenious explorations of the commonplace have taken a wide variety of forms, including sculptures, photographs, films, and videos. In each case, the artists try to recapture an almost childlike wonder with our surrounding environment.

Artist: Peter Fischli, David Weiss
Date: 1979
Medium: Photographs
Size: 9.5 x 13.75 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1993.188.1

The Carpet Shop from Wurst Series

"But sometimes you have to lighten up. Fischli/Weiss sneak into my home all the time and make me laugh. They never have the rent, but what do I care? Not only are they the most droll, elegantly witty, and quietly hilarious artists working today, their deadpan, goofily poetic work asks the question, "Can kidding be art?" And, of course, it can. Especially when it is subtle and cool enough not to depend on dreaded cynicism. Unlike other contemporary artists trying to move onto anybody's walls, they don't shout for attention at art fairs or translate well to overproduced auction catalogues. This duo of Swiss artists aren't even angry! They're the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis of the art world and their work has the charm of desperately wiping your nose on a fine Swiss handkerchief while riding the train to Gstaad in a snowstorm for the Christmas holidays." —John Waters, Role Models.

Artist: Peter Fischli, David Weiss
Date: 1979
Medium: Photographs
Size: 9.5 x 13.75 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1993.188.2

At the North Pole from Wurst Series

Artist: Peter Fischli, David Weiss
Date: 1979
Medium: Photographs
Size: 9.5 x 13.75 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1993.188.3

In the Mountains from Wurst Series

"Graduating to their ridiculously sublime photos of "carpet shops" made out of lunch meats or their "Swiss Alps" imagined as an unmade bed with pillows propped up, I started to feel more sophisticated, more Swiss." —John Waters, Role Models

Artist: Peter Fischli, David Weiss
Date: 1979
Medium: Photographs
Size: 9.5 x 13.75 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1993.188.4

The Accident from Wurst Series

Artist: Peter Fischli, David Weiss
Date: 1979
Medium: Photographs
Size: 9.5 x 13.75 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1993.188.5

The Snobs (the fashion show) from Wurst Series

"They're an expensive cheap thrill that mocks photography as fine art at every level but at the same time winks at me to let me know I'm in on the art. Sometimes right before I fall asleep in my second floor bedroom overhead, I think I hear them downstairs on the wall giggling together. And then I sleep very, very peacefully." —John Waters, on Fischli/Weiss's Fotografias, Role Models

Artist: Peter Fischli, David Weiss
Date: 1979
Medium: Photographs
Size: 9.5 x 13.75 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1993.188.6

Titanic from Wurst Series

Artist: Peter Fischli, David Weiss
Date: 1979
Medium: Photographs
Size: 13.75 x 9.5 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1993.188.7

Pavesi from Wurst Series

Artist: Peter Fischli, David Weiss
Date: 1979
Medium: Photographs
Size: 9.5 x 13.75 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1993.188.8

Moonraker from Wurst Series

Artist: Peter Fischli, David Weiss
Date: 1979
Medium: Photographs
Size: 9.5 x 13.75 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1993.188.9

The Fire of Uster from Wurst Series

Artist: Peter Fischli, David Weiss
Date: 1979
Medium: Photographs
Size: 9.5 x 13.75 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1993.188.10

Apartment wrestling photograph by Theo Ehret from Studies for the film "BB"

"[Cameron Jamie's] sharp critical gaze often focuses on ritualistic practices in popular culture, and his intricate work has its background in the artist's own folklore and mythologies. Using American suburban culture as a case study, he analyzes how the structures of mythology are shaped and shared, and the extent to which they participate in the creation of individuals' fictional worlds and fictional selves."—Whitney Biennial 2006 website

Theo Ehret interviewed by Cameron Jamie:
C.J: "Tell me how apartment wrestling came about. Who approached you with this concept?"
T.E.: "It was started by Sam Weston, who was the owner of those Detective magazines. One day he called and said, 'What do you think about getting a couple of gals in bikinis, and then having them pretend to wrestle in an apartment?' He wanted to start having this 'apartment wrestling' thing in pro wrestling magazines...He instructed me to shoot it in an interior, a living room, or an apartment. And after that, it was called 'apartment wrestling.' At that time, pro wrestling had slackened off, and it was made to spice up the magazines. That's when it started."

Artist: Cameron Jamie
Date: circa 1970s
Medium: Photographs
Size: framed 12.375 x 10.625 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2007.61.7.1-.2

Eve in blue sweater

"Mr. Meyer is often credited with inventing the "skin flick" as a commercial proposition, but he also drew praise for the artistic vision and raw energy he brought to two dozen films, four of which are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. He became one of the first movie makers in his licentious genre to move to mainline cinema without altering his style. "Of all the sexploitation filmmakers, he is the one guy who crossed over," said his biographer, Jimmy McDonough...

John Waters, who himself crossed over from underground films to Hollywood respectability with "Hairspray," has been widely quoted as saying "Pussycat" may have been the best movie ever made. His praise only began there. "It is possibly better than any film that will be made in the future," he said...

After the war [Meyer] shot industrial pictures, and photographed his wife, Eve, for some of Playboy's early nude pictorials."—Douglas Martin, Russ Meyer, 82, a Filmmaker of Classics in a Lusty Genre Dies, New York Times, 9/23/2004

Artist: Russ Meyer
Date: circa 1960/2002
Medium: Photographs
Size: sheet 20 x 16 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2006.79.1-.2

Slope 2004

"I was consciously writing poetry before I was consciously making sculpture. . . A typewriter has even spacing on the lines . . . [and] is essentially a grid... Rather than trying to achieve a certain look, I was using the same underlying abstractions, the same underlying forms, in both [poetry and sculpture]—working out of the grid system of the typewriter to the actual grid system of paper in poetry and also using the same kind of system to plan sculptures to try and find elements that would work within a system."—Carl Andre, 1972

Artist: Carl Andre
Date: 1968
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: overall 0.5 x 204 x 38 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1969.12.1-.7

My works are in a constant state of change. I'm not interested in reaching an ideal state with my works. As people walk on them, as the steel rusts, as the brick crumbles, as the materials weather, the work becomes its own record of everything that's happened to it.--Carl Andre, 1968

Carl Andre's floor pieces feature symmetrical, or near symmetrical, arrangements of raw industrial materials: bricks and slate or metal tiles. His placement of the tiles on the floor emphasizes the geography of a room. As in the work of other sculptors who are described as Minimalist, such as Donald Judd, Andre uses symmetry, repetition, and simple geometric elements. The placement of the sculpture remains paramount, yet even this is de-emphasized to the point where the work becomes as conventional as a tile floor.

This particular piece is unusual in that it is not completely symmetrical. One of the large metal tiles is cut at an angle, which sits up against the architecture of the gallery so that the line of tiles is at an angle to the wall. This method of composition relates the work to painting: the architecture of the room functions in much the same way as does the edge of a canvas.

Suaire de Mondo Cane (Mondo Cane Shroud)

"Today anyone who paints space must actually go into space to paint, but he must go there without any faking, and neither in an aeroplane, a parachute, or a rocket: he must go there by his own means, by an autonomous, individual force."—Yves Klein, 1961

Yves Klein—associated with the postwar group of artists who called themselves the Nouveaux Réalistes, along with Piero Manzoni and Niki de Saint Phalle—is best known for creating a series of monochromatic, or "unicolor" blue paintings the color of the sky, which were identical except in size, hue, and texture. He wrote that "pure, existential space was regularly winking at me, each time in a more impressive manner, and this sensation of total freedom attracted me so powerfully that I painted some monochrome surfaces just to 'see,' to 'see' with my own eyes what existential sensibility granted me: absolute freedom!" His paintings and later performances using women as "living paint brushes" were seminal in the European art movements of the late 1950s.

Artist: Yves Klein
Date: 1961
Medium: Paintings
Size: overall 108 x 118.5 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2004.63.1-.3

Lot 091195.03

Artist: Donald Moffett
Date: 1995/2003
Medium: Paintings
Size: overall 20.125 x 16.125 x 2.25 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2003.55

Silver Jackie with Pink Spot

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Since his first solo exhibition in 1990, Jack Pierson has worked in a wide array of media, including photography, drawing, painting, installation, and sculpture. Taking his material from popular culture and urban subcultures, Pierson demonstrates a fascination with cliché. He uses various media to enact melancholic and romantic meditations on the pathos of daily life as experienced through memory. His work is about the yearning for glamour and celebrity and is perhaps allied with that of Andy Warhol and the Factory. Much of Pierson's work refers to the desire for fame that so often ends in broken dreams and failed hopes. As the artist himself puts it: "I see the work document the disaster inherent in the search for glamour—glamour being that which is not real."

John Waters recorded his own audio guides in pig latin. What might he be attempting to express about interpretive materials in museums?

Artist: Jack Pierson
Date: 1991
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: platform 4 x 48.25 x 48 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1997.130.1-.6

Woman

"Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure."—Willem deKooning

When walking though Absentee Landlord, notice Waters' placement of this de Kooning close to the ground, below a painting by a Contemporary female artist. What message might Waters be attempting to communicate?

Artist: Willem de Kooning
Date: circa 1952
Medium: Drawings and Watercolors, Drawings
Size: unframed 13.5 x 10.3125 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1995.67

Filzanzug (Felt Suit)

Jorg Schellmann and Bernd Kluser: Why doesn't the Felt Suit have buttons?

Joseph Beuys: Well, that was dictated by the character of felt. That occurred quite naturally. It was tailored after my own suit and I think the whole thing has to retain the character of felt, in the sense that felt doesn't strive to be smart, so to speak. One has to conserve the character, omit mere trifles, such as complicated buttons, buttonholes, and so on. And if somebody wants to wear the suit, he can fasten it with safety pins.

S, K: Does the association with convicts' uniforms, on which the buttons and braces have been cut off as a sign of disgrace, apply?

B: Of course I thought of that, but there's no direct relation. It isn't meant to be a suit which people wear. The suit is meant to be an object which one is precisely not supposed to wear. One can wear it, but in a relatively short time it'll lose its shape because felt is not a material which holds a form. Felt isn't woven. It's pressed together usually from hare or rabbit hair. It's precisely that, and it isn't suited for buttonholes and the like.

S, K: How should one take care of the Felt Suit?

B: I don't care. You can nail the suit to the wall. You can also hang it on a hanger, ad libitum! But you can also wear it or throw it into a chest.

S, K: Does the suit's felt material play the role of insulating the physical warmth of a person?

B: The character of warming--yes, that's obvious. The Felt Suit is not just a gag. It's an extension of the felt sculptures I made during my performances. There, felt also appeared as an element of warmth or as an insulator. Felt was used in all the categories of warmth sculpture, usually in connection with fat, and it's a derivative of that. So it does have a bearing on the character of warmth. Ultimately the concept of warmth goes even further. Not even physical warmth; I could just as well have used an infrared light in my performances. Actually, I mean a completely different kind of warmth, namely spiritual warmth or the beginning of an evolution.

Artist: Joseph Beuys
Date: 1970
Medium: Mixed Media, Multiples, Other
Size: overall installed 69 x 49.5 x 7 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1987.121.1-.3

<div style="width:140px; height:120px;"><div style="position:relative; width:93.24px; height:79.92px; margin-left:0px; margin-top:0px;"><div class="unzoomed_thumbnail" style="width:93.24px; height:79.92px;"><img class="inline_img fake_0.55859375" id="zoomer_22416_35381iip_loading" src="http://www.artsconnected.org/media/66/96/4717d771c9700a716682774f4d2e/93.24/79.92/22416.jpg" class="iip_loading" title="" alt="Filzanzug (Felt Suit), Joseph Beuys" height_offset="0" /></div></div><div style="position:relative; width:93.24px; height:79.92px; margin-left:46.62px; margin-top:-39.96px;"><div class="gallery_item_text" style="width:135px; height:115px;" >Jorg Schellmann and Bernd Kluser: Why doesn't the Felt Suit have buttons? Joseph Beuys: Well, that was dictated by the character of felt. That occurred quite naturally. It was tailored after my own suit and I think the whole thing has to retain the character of felt, in the sense that felt doesn't strive to be smart, so to speak. One has to conserve the character, omit mere trifles, such as complicated buttons, buttonholes, and so on. And if somebody wants to wear the suit, he can fasten it with safety pins. S, K: Does the association with convicts' uniforms, on which the buttons and braces have been cut off as a sign of disgrace, apply? B: Of course I thought of that, but there's no direct relation. It isn't meant to be a suit which people wear. The suit is meant to be an object which one is precisely not supposed to wear. One can wear it, but in a relatively short time it'll lose its shape because felt is not a material which holds a form. Felt isn't woven. It's pressed together usually from hare or rabbit hair. It's precisely that, and it isn't suited for buttonholes and the like. S, K: How should one take care of the Felt Suit? B: I don't care. You can nail the suit to the wall. You can also hang it on a hanger, ad libitum! But you can also wear it or throw it into a chest. S, K: Does the suit's felt material play the role of insulating the physical warmth of a person? B: The character of warming--yes, that's obvious. The Felt Suit is not just a gag. It's an extension of the felt sculptures I made during my performances. There, felt also appeared as an element of warmth or as an insulator. Felt was used in all the categories of warmth sculpture, usually in connection with fat, and it's a derivative of that. So it does have a bearing on the character of warmth. Ultimately the concept of warmth goes even further. Not even physical warmth; I could just as well have used an infrared light in my performances. Actually, I mean a completely different kind of warmth, namely spiritual warmth or the beginning of an evolution. </div></div></div>

Joseph Beuys produced Filzanzug (Felt Suit) not just once but a hundred times. 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. By producing more than one version of Felt Suit, Beuys made his work available to the many people who couldn't afford a unique painting or sculpture.

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.

Joseph Beuys was born in 1921 in Krefeld, a city in northwestern Germany near the Dutch border. He grew up in the nearby towns of Kleve and Rindern, the only child in a middle class, strongly Catholic family. During his youth he pursued dual interests in the natural sciences and art, and he chose a career in medicine. In 1940 he joined the military, volunteering in order to avoid the draft. He was trained as an aircraft radio operator and combat pilot, and during his years of active duty he was seriously wounded numerous times. At the end of the war he was held in a British prisoner-of-war camp for several months, and returned to Kleve in 1945.

Coming to terms with his involvement in the war was a long process and figures, at least obliquely, in much of his artwork. Beuys often said that his interest in fat and felt as sculptural materials grew out of a wartime experience--a plane crash in the Crimea, after which he was rescued by nomadic Tartars who rubbed him with fat and wrapped him in felt to heal and warm his body. While the story appears to have little grounding in real events (Beuys himself downplayed its importance in a 1980 interview), its poetics are strong enough to have made the story one of the most enduring aspects of his mythic biography.

On his return from the war Beuys abandoned his plans for a career in medicine and enrolled in the Düsseldorf Academy of Art to study sculpture. He graduated in 1952, and during the next years focused on drawing--he produced thousands during the 1950s alone--and reading, ranging freely through philosophy, science, poetry, literature, and the occult. He married in 1959 and two years later, at the age of 40, was appointed to a professorship at his alma mater.

During the early 1960s, Düsseldorf developed into an important center for contemporary art and Beuys became acquainted with the experimental work of artists such as Nam June Paik and the Fluxus group, whose public "concerts" brought a new fluidity to the boundaries between literature, music, visual art, performance, and everyday life. Their ideas were a catalyst for Beuys' own performances, which he called "actions," and his evolving ideas about how art could play a wider role in society. He began to publicly exhibit his large-scale sculptures, small objects, drawings, and room installations. He also created numerous actions and began making editioned objects and prints called multiples.

As the decades advanced, his commitment to political reform increased and he was involved in the founding of several activist groups: in 1967, the German Student Party, whose platform included worldwide disarmament and educational reform; in 1970, the Organization for Direct Democracy by Referendum, which proposed increased political power for individuals; and in 1972, the Free International University, which emphasized the creative potential in all human beings and advocated cross-pollination of ideas across disciplines. In 1979 he was one of 500 founding members of the Green Party.

His charismatic presence, his urgent and public calls for reform of all kinds, and his unconventional artistic style (incorporating ritualized movement and sound, and materials such as fat, felt, earth, honey, blood, and even dead animals) gained him international notoriety during these decades, but it also cost him his job. Beuys was dismissed in 1972 from his teaching position over his insistence that admission to the art school be open to anyone who wished to study there.

While he counted debate, discussion, and teaching as part of his expanded definition of art, Beuys also continued to make objects, installations, multiples, and performances. His reputation in the international art world solidified after a 1979 retrospective at New York's Guggenheim Museum, and he lived the last years of his life at a hectic pace, participating in dozens of exhibitions and traveling widely on behalf of his organizations. Beuys died in 1986 in Düsseldorf. In the subsequent decade his students have carried on his campaign for change, and his ideas and artwork have continued to spark lively debate.

Beuys/Logos

http://www.walkerart.org/archive/2/994375F1C7DC1EF86179.htm

Green Rocker

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Artist: Ellsworth Kelly
Date: 1968
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: overall 20.25 x 97.75 x 112 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1969.4

Ellsworth Kelly, Green Rocker (track 2)

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"The form of my painting is the content. My work is made of single or multiple panels: rectangle, curved or square. I am less interested in marks on the panels than the "presence" of the panels themselves... It was made to exist forever in the present, it is an idea and can be repeated anytime in the future."—Ellsworth Kelly, 1969

Work Table #9 (Minneapolis), he of Righteousness

"Since the mid-1980's Gregory Green has created performances and artworks exploring the evolution of empowerment, which consider the use of violence, alternatives to violence and the accessibility to information and technology as vehicles for social or political change.

Many of Green's artistic investigations have focused on terrorism and the possibilities for sabotage of the physical infrastructure, and the ease in which individuals, armed with readily available information, can endanger the status quo. Green thoroughly researched and produced a series of pipe, book, suitcase and nuclear bomb sculptures. He also created several guided missiles that could be armed with conventional, bio-chemical or nuclear devices. These artworks, although containing no explosives, are otherwise carefully designed to be mechanically complete and potentially functional-including a 10-Kiloton nuclear device, minus only the needed plutonium.

One work suggesting how to manufacture large quantities of LSD as a form of civil disruption was seized by the police in 1995 after raiding a gallery, briefly jailing its director, and issuing a warrant for Green's arrest.

Green's ongoing body of work emphasizes the power of non-violent means for effecting change in existing political and economic structures."—Kinz+ Tillou Fine Art's website

Gregory Green is one of John Waters' favorite artists. He has a Gregory Green piece installed in a room in his house.

Artist: Gregory Green
Date: 2011
Medium: mixed media
Size: 192x192x84 inches.
Courtesy of the artist, Kinz Tillou Fine Arts, New York, Aeroplastics Contemporary, Brussels, Mindy Solomon Gallery, Saint Petersburg

Aeid

"Tomma Abts’s paintings are the result of a rigorous working method that pitches the rational against the intuitive. She works consistently to a format of 48 x 38 centimetres in acrylic and oil paint. She uses no source material and begins with no preconceived idea of the final result. Instead, her paintings take shape through a gradual process of layering and accrual. As the internal logic of each composition unfolds forms are defined, buried and rediscovered until the painting becomes ‘congruent with itself’.

Abts describes the finished works as ‘a concentrate of the many paintings underneath’, each functioning as an autonomous object revealing the visible traces of its construction.

Abts creates a complex interplay between the painting’s physical surface and the form that it describes. Planes that appear to be located in the foreground also remain embedded within the structure of the painting itself; shapes are both overlapping and integrated. Abstract elements might hover on the edge of representation but are then undermined by an incongruous perspective or colour scheme...Her titles are derived from a dictionary of first names and the process of naming marks the work’s completion."—The Tate's website

Artist: Tomma Abts
Date: 2006
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: overall 18.875 x 14.9375 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2008.31

Eighth Paper Octagonal

"But I'm attracted to serious roommates, too. Ones that are so smart I usually have no idea what they are talking about when they first move into my house. I don't want someone living with me whose work I can understand. I want an artist who can make me see something amazing from almost nothing—the exact opposite of moviemaking. Richard Tuttle is the perfect choice.

I knew about Richard Tuttle's minimalist troublemaking and respected his early hostile establishment reviews, such as "Less has never been less than this." His...bare plywood slat pieces nailed flat to the wall with just one thin side of the depth of the wood painted white were so beautiful, so simple, so plain, that I felt exhausted just imagining how complete the artist must have felt when he decided the work was finished... Was Tuttle Tinker Bell's brother? Here, at last, was art made by someone obviously outside the human condition...

Did Richard know he was bringing in a calming effect to counterattack the anxiety of the movie business inside my house?" —John Waters, Role Models

Artist: Richard Tuttle
Date: 1970
Medium: Drawings and Watercolors, Unique Works on Paper, Mixed media
Size: on paper roll 46 x 60 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2002.61

"Untitled" (Last Light)

Felix Gonzalez-Torres habitually conferred an aura of art on the most mundane objects—hard candies, wall clocks, lightbulbs, jigsaw puzzles—and often invited the viewer to activate his art through interaction. Versed in the language of Minimalism and Conceptualism, the artist infused these well-worn ideas with social commentary born of the urgency of living in a time of AIDS. His work—ambiguous, subtle, and highly metaphoric—often broke down the boundaries between "us" and "them." His seemingly banal readymades were democratic in accessibility, leading viewers "through a maze of images that describe a society in crisis" while simultaneously evoking "bittersweet epiphanies of temporary communion and ultimate solitude."

Artist: Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Date: 1993
Medium: Mixed Media, Multiples, Other
Size: dimensions variable
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2003.53.1-.2

The Third

Barnett Newman's monumental painting is made up of just two colors, yellow and orange. In his work Newman sought to eliminate any reference to objects, figures, and symbols. He found himself left with only one remaining subject: pure empty space.

Since no one can actually see the space that exists between two people or two objects, Newman chose to interpret space as color. To make his idea of space more apparent, he created huge paintings that envelop you when you stand in front of them.

In this painting, a large field of orange stretches from the far right almost to the left edge of the canvas, representing Newman's expansive idea of space. He included two vertical lines—which he called "zips"—that interrupt this orange expanse, almost appearing to float over it rather than divide it. Now look at the far left side of the painting where Newman's orange space breaks apart. Do you think this is where this space begins or ends?

Newman's pared-down compositions and his use of bold, flat color greatly influenced the Minimal artist of the 1960s and 1970s and led the way to one of the ultimate expressions of modernist art—monochromatic painting.

Barnett Newman explains his use of color:
"It is interesting to me to notice how difficult it is for people to take the intense heat and blaze of my color. If my paintings were empty they could take them with ease. I have always worked with color without regard for existing rules concerning intensity, value, or non-value. Also, I have never manipulated colors—I have tried to create color."

Artist: Barnett Newman
Date: 1962
Medium: Paintings
Size: unframed 101.5 x 120.25 x 2 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1978.3

Larry Johnson; Untitled (I Had Never Seen Anything Like It)

"Perhaps the best thing would be for people to examine their own reasons for liking the same stories I do. Maybe that's enough."--Larry Johnson

In his work, Los Angeles-based artist Larry Johnson references various media and autobiographical experiences such as advertisements, conversations, and magazine texts. In much the same way as a movie clip, the "scene" authored by the artist in Untitled (I Had Never Seen Anything Like It) is dependent on creating a context of time and space that suggests a larger fiction. Through his use of photography, text, and a modernist color palette, Johnson at once affirms and complicates the nonlinear dynamics of language, his own love of images, and the pervasive influence of Hollywood on the imagination.

Klitschko

German artist Andreas Gursky is best known for his large-scale photographs that inhabit a space between painting and photography, landscape and human concern, animate and inanimate subjects. He often places his large-format camera at a high-angled distance from his subject, creating images that suggest mapping stills from outer space or cyber-technology. Sometimes computer-manipulated, his images of corporate architecture, geological features, and crowds of people frozen in motion often reference the geometric forms of Minimalist Art and the "all-over" quality of a Jackson Pollock painting.

Klitschko presents a scene at a sporting event: the athletes and their handlers, the hungry crowd, and the sportscasters encased in a glass booth above the fray. Here, Gursky blends relationships between spectacle, culture, and technology as he captures motion and creates a moment of stillness in the space. This dense, slightly abstracted image evokes film stills, apocalyptic imaginings, mass demonstrations, and other associations from our collective consciousness. This moment at a sporting event and its particular culture presents a decidedly contemporary view of mass culture and its frenzied activity. Through highly dramatic means, Gursky at once documents and remaps this scene of struggle, confusion, promise, and elation.

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

All-over Technique

Compare the composition of Jackson Pollock's painting to the composition of Gursky's photograph.

Repressed Spatial Relationships Rendered as Fluid, No. 4: Stevenson Junior High and Satellites

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.

Artist: Mike Kelley
Date: 2002
Medium: mixed media on paper
Size: 35x69x69 inches
T.B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2003

John Waters on Mikey Kelley

"Mike Kelley is one of my roommates... Some of my friends make fun of my roommate Mike. "How much was that?" a usually liberal-minded friend shrieked when she saw Child Substitute (1995)... "It cost enough," I answered vaguely to her snorts of contempt... I love how mad Mike's work can make some people. Isn't that the job of contemporary art? To infuriate?...

My roommates need to be illusionists and Mike Kelley certainly is. He's a companion who can make you see something supposedly shameful in a beautiful, hilarious, radical, subversive way. Isn't he really a miracle worker?Art and Auction magazine called Mike an "apocalyptical vulgarian" but who cares about a roommate's reviews? I call him a terrorist and a healer and he never has to pay rent in any of my abodes. Matter of fact, I'll pay him!" —John Waters, Role Models

Glenn Ligon

"I was interested in the idea of invention and self-invention in autobiography as it speaks to couteracting essential notions of black identity. The 'one' that I am is composed of narratives that overlap, run parallel to and often contradict one another."—Glenn Ligon

Painter, photographer and printmaker, Glenn Ligon's provocative artwork mines the history of African-American culture, from slave narratives to the "Million Man March" on Washington, D.C.

Artist: Glenn Ligon
Date: 2000
Medium: screenprint, oil crayon on primed canvas
Size: 96x72 inches
T.B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2000

Drunk II

Artist: Christopher Wool
Date: 1990
Medium: Paintings
Size: overall 96 x 64 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2003.75

Australian Spring

"In 1961, Truitt made the first of the totem-like painted wood sculptures that would occupy her for the rest of her life. Truitt believed that life experiences were 'the ground out of which art grows.' Sculptures could be triggered by colors she associated with friends or nature or memories of her childhood. She infused her art with these experiences through a labor intensive process—applying many layers of paint by hand to each piece and sanding the surfaces to a fine finish—and the bands of rich color that cover her sculptures, liberated from the traditional two-dimensional plane of painting, prompt viewers to make their own associations with her work. Although critics have attempted to group Truitt with the Minimalist sculptors or the Color Field painters, her marriage of painting and sculpture resulted in an oeuvre that eludes simple categorization."—Matthew Marks Gallery's website

Like John Waters, Anne Truitt was born in Baltimore, Maryland.

Artist: Anne Truitt
Date: 1972
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: overall 72 x 24 x 24 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1973.16

Peinture acrylique blanche sur tissu rayé blanc et orange (White acrylic painting on white and orange striped fabric)

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.

Artist: Daniel Buren
Date: 1966
Medium: Paintings
Size: framed 90.875 x 79.375 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2007.60

Empty Room

This installation follows in the long artistic tradition of trompe l'oeil—a French expression that literally means to "deceive the eye"—in which objects are depicted in highly realistic detail. While it appears that the installation crew has not yet finished its work, this is in fact an illusion. The space is the work of art: each object was carefully hand-carved by the artists from polyurethane (a material similar to Styrofoam) and then painted. These objects are modeled on materials found in the Walker's basement during the production of its Fischli and Weiss retrospective as well as on items used by the artists in their studio in Zürich.

Artist: Peter Fischli, David Weiss
Date: 1995-1996
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: see element sizes
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1996.132.1-.156

John Waters on Fischli/Weiss

"I remember entering Sonnabend Gallery in 1994, seeing that the new Fischli/Weiss show was still being installed, and, like many other gallery-goers, almost leaving. But suddenly I realized the lumber on the floor, the paint cans, the cleaning supplies, the hammers and other tools, were all Fischli/Weiss sculpture. The leftover nails still hanging on the walls from the last show and the vaguely unfresh paint on the gallery walls were all part of the installation. The fast food trash on the floor, seemingly left by the installers, was also actually hand-carved by these great tricksters. It was only when you tried to focus on the lettering of any of the commercial products scattered around that you realized they were quickly done, not focused. Being "not ready" for your show, the ultimate nightmare of both gallery owner and artist, was suddenly art.

I love art on the floor. Dennis Dermody hates it, though, and always... trips over [my] thirteen aluminum Carl Andre tiles. "Watch it, ox," I yell, but I'm not mad because you can't really hurt a Carl Andre sculpture. But look out for my Fischli/Weiss! Those eight little pieces of faux scrap wood are so delicate, so quiet, that just looking at them could break your heart and theirs if you're not careful." —John Waters, Role Models

M

"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: 1955
Medium: Paintings
Size: unframed 48 x 12 x inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1987.111

In Conclusion

"I live alone but I have a ton of roommates. Luckily, they're not human beings. I couldn't stand the idea of having someone else's belongings around. I don't have the mental space. Worse yet, suppose they suddenly hung on the wall something I didn't like? I can't listen to someone else's music or borrow their books either. No siree, no real-life people sharing my bathroom or reading my newspapers before me! Instead, I live with artists." —John Waters, Role Models

Absentee Landlord Study Set

Introduction to Absentee Landlord

Intro to John Waters

Park City Grill

Park City Grill

Low Overhead

Untitled (living rooms)

No. 59

The Middle of the Outskirts

The Subconscious Sink

Robert Gober, Subconscious Sink (1985)

Sixteen Jackies

Artwork of the Month: Andy Warhol's 16 Jackies

Yellow Corner Piece

Claes Oldenburg, Shoestring Potatoes Spilling from a Bag (1966)

Shoestring Potatoes Spilling from a Bag

Claes Oldenburg, Shoestring Potatoes Spilling from a Bag (track 1)

Concetto Spaziale (Spatial Concept)

Concetto Spaziale - Attesa (Spatial Concept - Expectation)

Two-Part Chairs, Obtuse Angle (A Pair)

Artwork of the Month: Scott Burton's Two Part Chairs, Obtuse Angle (A Pair)

Newspaper

E.O.W. Looking into the Fire I

Untitled

Opening-Day Artist Talk: Sturtevant

Self-Portrait

High Heel in Ruins

The Caveman from Wurst Series

The Carpet Shop from Wurst Series

At the North Pole from Wurst Series

In the Mountains from Wurst Series

The Accident from Wurst Series

The Snobs (the fashion show) from Wurst Series

Titanic from Wurst Series

Pavesi from Wurst Series

Moonraker from Wurst Series

The Fire of Uster from Wurst Series

Apartment wrestling photograph by Theo Ehret from Studies for the film "BB"

Eve in blue sweater

Slope 2004

Carl Andre, Slope 2004 (1968)

Suaire de Mondo Cane (Mondo Cane Shroud)

Lot 091195.03

Silver Jackie with Pink Spot

Woman

Filzanzug (Felt Suit)

Economy: Multiples

Joseph Beuys: A Brief Biography

Beuys/Logos

Green Rocker

Ellsworth Kelly, Green Rocker (track 2)

Work Table #9 (Minneapolis), he of Righteousness

Aeid

Eighth Paper Octagonal

"Untitled" (Last Light)

The Third

Larry Johnson; Untitled (I Had Never Seen Anything Like It)

Klitschko

All-over Technique

Repressed Spatial Relationships Rendered as Fluid, No. 4: Stevenson Junior High and Satellites

John Waters on Mikey Kelley

Glenn Ligon

Drunk II

Australian Spring

Peinture acrylique blanche sur tissu rayé blanc et orange (White acrylic painting on white and orange striped fabric)

Empty Room

John Waters on Fischli/Weiss

M

In Conclusion