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It’s been a while since I wrote about the Walker Art Center—so, over Thanksgiving weekend, while recovering from an overdose of tryptophan, I paid…

It’s been a while since I wrote about the Walker Art
Center—so, over Thanksgiving weekend, while recovering from an overdose of
tryptophan, I paid a visit . . . and discovered, quite happily, that everything
about the place has changed, most of it for the better. Which is good, because
the permanent exhibits were getting stale, winter is approaching, and there
hasn’t been much to chew on at our favorite contemporary art museum since the The
Quick and the Dead stopped melting minds
back in September. 

Floor to ceiling, end to end, the Walker is a completely
different museum than it was just a couple of months ago. Haegue Yang’s
entertaining Artist-in-Residence Project resides in the Medtronic gallery
upstairs, Dan Graham: Beyond consumes
galleries 4-6,  and Event
Horizon—the beginning of the Walker’s
three-year project to present the entirety of its permanent collection—occupies
galleries 1-3. This includes Benches & Binoculars, a brilliant salon-style presentation of 96
paintings that, were they given the Walker’s usual ratio of white space to art,
would have required about 40 acres of drywall to hang. 

I began my visit with Dan Graham: Beyond, a recent import from the Whitney that has earned
high praise in the art press for being the first retrospective of Graham’s work
on U.S. soil. Graham is an artist’s artist, but his sensibility is easy to
like. According to Artforum, he
got the idea for the exhibit’s name from a Beyoncé poster—which is like saying
you decided to go deer hunting because you like the way Sarah Palin holds a
rifle. From this one can deduce that either Graham doesn’t care about looking
cool, or he’s so cool it doesn’t matter.

Either way, one of the great things about Dan Graham is that
he’s such a prolific prankster. Practically all of his art is a visual pun of
one sort or another, and most of it on display at the Walker has to do with
perceptions and reflections, or the tension between the observer and the
observed. Walking into one of his many transparent glass pavilions is like
walking into a three-dimensional representation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty
Principle, in which the observer (you) changes the nature of observed (the
curvy glass) by supplying the reflection in what amounts to a high-brow
funhouse mirror. Four-year-olds are likely to “get it” faster than adults,
because the point seems to be that it’s funny to watch people watch other
people watching themselves—especially in reflective surfaces that make people
look fat. One of these glass enclosures features a table with three tubes of
lipstick under a useless, teensy fish-eye mirror. Go ahead, the exhibit seems
to be taunting: just try to make yourself look beautiful in this ridiculous
room. 

I’m sure people have written all sorts of erudite treatises
on the artistic import of Graham’s elaborately phenomenological
constructions—the yin/yang, to/fro, I’m-rubber-you’re-glue, push-me-pull-you
nature of it all— but the man can have just as much fun with a simple piece of
paper. One innocuous but ingenious example is a piece of 8×11 typing paper that
simply catalogues, in list form, the number of letters, numbers, and
punctuation marks on that piece of paper, creating a document with its own
circular logic. It strikes me as the kind of thing Graham does when he’s bored
waiting in line at the ATM—a one-off, for fun, just for the hell of it. 

Dan Graham: Beyond includes
lots of other conceptual experiments, including rooms with projectors facing
opposite directions showing photographers photographing each other; rooms with
mirrored walls that stretch into infinity; and several amateur-looking
black-and-white films of the sort that have become cliché in contemporary art
exhibits. To wit: films that poorly made and boring must be art.

Next I checked out Event Horizon, which is the boldest, most refreshing thing the
Walker has done with its permanent collection in a long time. The grand idea
behind Event Horizon is to
present the Walker’s entire permanent collection, including film, dance, music,
and performance, in a rotating exhibit over the course of three years. Seeing
the whole thing will be almost impossible, but that’s okay. What’s important is
to recognize that Event Horizon
the sort of daring, lively experiment director Olga Viso was expected to bring
to town when she was hired two years ago, and which is now being realized
through the ambition and talent of the Walker’s new chief curator, Darsie
Alexander.

Event Horizon is the
kind of exhibit that demands repeated viewings, not only because it will be
changing over time, but because there is so much to see that it’s difficult to
digest it all in a single visit. There are the pieces you expect: Andy Warhol’s
Sixteen Jackies, Kara Walker
cutouts, etcetera—but whole new levels of weird are also being explored, from
Ron Vawter’s (The Wooster Group) colorfully decadent stage set for his play, Roy
Cohn/Jack Smith, to Tetsumi Kudo’s Olympic
Winner’s Platform, which features the
severed head of Eugene Ionesco dangling from the gold-medal spot, and, at the
bottom, Ionesco’s decomposing torso. I’m not sure what absurd sport Ionesco is
supposed to have died from (curling, maybe?) but kudos to Kudo for kicking up
the sicko factor in contemporary art; it makes all those dribble and smudgers
look like hopeless wussies. 

I would tell you more about Event Horizon, but I got side-tracked by a devastatingly addictive
36-minute film by Bruce Conner called Crossroads. Shown on a giant screen in its own curtained room, Crossroads consists mainly of slow-motion film of the first
atomic bomb test in Bikini Atoll in 1946. Evidently, hundreds of government
cameras recorded the explosion. 
Conner collected film from 27 different angles and set the images to
dreamy synthesizer music, creating a haunting visual essay of sorts. As you sit
and watch each explosion unfold in agonizingly slow-motion, you become hyper-aware of the
destructive force unleashed by these weapons—but you also can’t deny that the
resulting mushroom cloud is quite beautiful to watch, especially the central
column of water, which spirals upward like the stem of a giant flower.

Watching Crossroads
is disconcerting, to say the least: On one hand it’s aesthetically pleasing and
secretly thrilling to watch the most explosive force mankind has ever
unleashed; on the other hand, it’s repugnant to watch it and know that shortly
thereafter, that same destructive force was used to kill thousands of people in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If you see nothing else at Event Horizon, see Crossroads—it will blow your mind—in the best of all possible
ways.

Finally, the Walker has outdone itself with the exhibit it’s
calling Benches and Binoculars. When you
walk in, sure enough, there are benches with tiny binoculars on them—for
viewing the paintings near the ceiling of a room packed floor to ceiling with
masterworks from the Walker’s permanent collection.

It would be easy to spend a couple of hours in Benches
and Binoculars alone. There are 96
paintings in all, including works by Jasper Johns, Stuart Davis, Marsden
Hartley, David Hockney, Georgia O’Keeffe, Andy Warhol, Edward Hopper, Willem
DeKooning, Mark Rothko, and dozens of others. It’s just a fabulously
overwhelming extravaganza of art, made all the more tantalizing because the
Walker never does this kind of thing. By which I mean, the Walker is rarely
this much fun. The place has a long history of taking itself and its art too
seriously, but now that the gallery spaces have been entirely transformed, Olga
Viso’s reign as director is clearly hitting its stride. The Walker has never
been more enjoyable, entertaining, and thought-provoking than it is now, in its
current incarnation. Heck, you can even hang out in Haugue Yang’s Melancholy
Red and bang on a set of drums all day if
you want to—that’s what it’s there for. (You can’t see the drums in the photo below, but they’re behind that pillar on the left.)

 If it’s been a while since you visited the Walker, it’s time
to set aside an afternoon and go find out what Olga and company are up to
behind those brushed aluminum walls. You may be surprised, dismayed, horrified,
perplexed, enthralled, amused, or saddened—but one thing is for sure, you won’t
be disappointed.

Dan Graham: Beyond runs through Jan. 24, 2010. Event Horizon
runs through Aug. 26, 2012. Benches and Binoculars runs through Aug. 15, 2010.

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