Today at the Walker Art Center

The Fish Fall in Love (Mahiha Ashegh Mishavand) : Directed by Ali Raffi : Film

Sun, 11 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Loosely based on the Persian tale of Shahrazad mixed with A Thousand and One Nights, first time director Ali Raffis film is a rich banquet of food and love set on the southern coast of Iran. Locals flock to Atiehs thriving restaurant for her extravagant dishes. When a former lover appears after a 20-year absence with the intention of closing the restaurant, Atieh prepares his favorite dishes, one after the other, in a desperate effort to convince him otherwise. 2006, Iran, in Farsi with English subtitles, 96 minutes.

Opera Jawa : Directed by Garin Nugroho : Film

Sun, 11 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Startling in his originality and ambition, director Garin Nugroho interprets The Abduction of Sita from the Hindu epic The Ramayana as a musical requiem for the victims of violence and natural disaster. The opulent cinematography of the lush forests and beaches of Java is topped only by the impracticable, acrobatic choreography in this tale of a vengeful potter who takes action against the suitor of his unfaithful wife. 2006, Indonesia, in Bahasa Indonesian with English subtitles, 120 minutes.

Trisha Brown: So That the Audience Does Not Know Whether I Have Stopped Dancing : Exhibition

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 05:00:00 GMT

While Trisha Brown (b. 1936) is best known for her innovative choreographies that revolutionized modern dance, she has for many years made drawings and other works beyond the stage that integrate the performing and visual arts. Trisha Brown presents a particular occasion to consider the lesser-known visual arts practice of one of the most acclaimed contemporary choreographers at a moment of increasing interest in the broad sweep of her work and its influence. Drawing has long featured prominently in Browns maverick practice, shifting from a tool for schematic composition into a fully-realized component of her broader investigation into the limits of her own body.

Among the most active artists to have emerged from the multidisciplinary avant-garde of 1960s New York, Brown pioneered within dance the idea of the body as a field with varying centers, encouraging her performers to conceive of dances in which movement could begin in a variety of locations throughout their bodies, by turns embracing and defying gravity. Early in her career, Brown created works in which performers walked on the walls of a gallery or down the exterior façade of a buildingrather than on the floor. The exhibition takes inspiration in its structure from Browns interest in reorienting the performer and audience, with a performance installation that places live dancers on the wall of the gallery, and a participatory audio work that invites visitors to lie on the gallery floor and contemplate the ceiling. The former work, Planes (1968), is a major early performance that includes a film by Jud Yalkut and soundtrack by Simone Forti; the latter, Skymap (1969), was Browns one attempt to engage the ceiling as a performative surface.

The exhibition centers on a broad survey of Browns drawings going back more than three decades, concluding with a large drawing to be performed by the artist at the opening for inclusion in the show. To a significant degree, the arc of Browns work in drawing parallels her developments in dance, and footage of seminal performances is present throughout the exhibition. Whether she is working within the frame of a sheet of paper, on the wall, or on the stage, Brown delights in the play between structure and improvisation, between repetition and invention, and between choice and chance. I get involved in the mystery of space, she says. I have the same adrenaline and heartbeat going as I enter the paper as I do going on stage.

As an extension of the exhibition, the Walker is organizing a number of Browns early performance works around the museum during the show, including a rare presentation of Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970), and a number of performances by the full company as part of the Walkers performing arts program.

Trisha Browns work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions, most recently Documenta 12, and she has directed numerous operas. She is the first woman choreographer to receive the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and has been awarded many other honors including the National Medal of Arts in 2003. She was named Chevalier dans lOrdre des Arts et des Lettres by the government of France in 1988; was elevated to Officier in 2000; and then to the level of Commandeur in 2004. Browns Set & Reset is included in the baccalaureate curriculum for French students pursuing dance studies. At the invitation of President Bill Clinton, Brown served on the National Council on the Arts from 1994 to 1997.

Richard Prince: Spiritual America : Exhibition

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 05:00:00 GMT

Nobody cannibalizes an image like Richard Prince, who has carved his place in contemporary art by recycling, reflecting, and reframing photographs, cartoons, advertisements, and other images already existing in the public sphere. Its a practice cut from 1970s and 80s SoHoCindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, and Sherrie Levine are among his contemporaries. But more than his peers, Prince sees himself as a funnel rather than a filter: he pilfers freely from the vast image bank of pop culture and recasts these appropriated images in a new light, embracing and at the same time critiquing a distinct American sensibility.

In 1977, Princes simple yet controversial act of rephotographing advertising images and presenting them as his own ushered in a new, critical approach to art-makingone that questioned notions of originality. This plays out through his reframings of the Marlboro man, topless women atop Harley-Davidsons (culled from pictures in biker magazines such as Easyriders), comedians, cars, cartoons (hand-copied from The New Yorker and Playboy, among others), neglected landscapes, pulp fiction, side-by-side pinups of Hollywood starlets, nurses in surgical masks and, most recently, homages to the paintings of Willem de Kooning.

There are well-known piecesthe appropriated image of a naked Brooke Shields at age 10, which gives this exhibition its name, had a controversial history even before the artist cast a new light on it. The 1983 photo, Spiritual America, is quintessential Prince, playing to conflicting impulsesthe seeking of attention while maintaining a high moral groundthat are at the heart of contemporary American culture. Prince also turned his fascination with celebrity culture inward with a series of paintings layered with his own canceled novelty checks.

While the Walker began collecting and showing the artists work in 1984, Richard Prince: Spiritual America, organized by the Guggenheim Museum, New York, is the artists first comprehensive retrospective since 1992. Philippe Vergne, the Walkers chief curator and deputy director, sees a cruel elegance threading Princes work and considers the exhibition essential both to the Walker and to anyone interested in the visualand visceraldissection of Americana. We have the cowboys, hoods, girlfriends, early photographs, the core of his career in our collection, he says. What people will see now is a depth of practice.

While Pop Art has largely appropriated pop culture, Prince makes this process circular by creating art that appropriates and later becomes part of popular culture itself. Previous examinations of his art have emphasized its role in postmodern criticism. This exhibition and its accompanying catalogue not only focus on the artists fascination with rebellion, obsession with fame, and preoccupation with the tawdry and the illicit, but also connect them to the fabric of our social landscape. Nancy Spector, chief curator at the Guggenheim, writes in the exhibition catalogue that Prince entered a metaphoric life of crime in 1977 and went underground, adopting aliases to evade identification and escape definition. His specialty is a carefully constructed hybrid that is also some kind of joke, charged by conflicting notions of high, low and lower, New York Times critic Roberta Smith wrote of Prince in a September 2007 review of this show. His work disturbs, amuses and then splinters in the mind. It unsettles assumptions about art, originality and value, class and sexual difference and creativity.

Controversial and seductive, edgy and classical, ultimately beautiful, Richard Prince: Spiritual America shows him as a chameleon in style and form. Through all his work, Prince compels his audience to notice the ordinary and see commonalities with the extraordinary. He relinquished the role of artist as high priest, which he had originally aspired to in his reverence for Kline and Pollock, and took on that of the fugitive, Spector writes. He even created an artistic alter ego known as John Dogg, who had his own exhibitions and fleeting 15 minutes of fame. . . . In the end, the question Who is Richard Prince? is a rhetorical one.

Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes : Exhibition

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Because suburbia occupies a dominant presence in so many livesa place of not only residence but also of work, commerce, worship, education, and leisureit has become a focal point for competing interests and viewpoints. The suburbs have always been a fertile space for imagining both the best and the worst of modern social life. On the one hand, the suburbs are portrayed as a middle-class domestic utopia and on the other as a dystopic world of homogeneity and conformity. Both of these stereotypes belie a more realistic understanding of contemporary suburbia and its dynamic transformations, and how these representations and realities shape our society, influence our culture, and impact our lives.

The intention of Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes is to demonstrate how the American suburb has played a catalytic role in the creation of new art. Challenging preconceived ideas and expectations about suburbia (either pro or con), the exhibition hopes to impart a better understanding of how those ideas were formed and how they are challenged by contemporary realities. The exhibition features artwork by Gregory Crewdson, Dan Graham, Catherine Opie, and Edward Ruscha, among others, and architectural projects by firms such as Fashion.Architecture.Taste, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, MVRDV, and Estudio Teddy Cruz.

Worlds Away will be accompanied by a 320-page, fully illustrated catalogue featuring essays and interviews which provide a revisionist and even contrarian take on the conventional wisdom surrounding American suburban life.

Curator: Andrew Blauvelt, Design Director and Curator, with Tracy Myers, Curator, Heinz Architectural Center

Elemental : Exhibition

Sun, 17 Apr 2005 05:00:00 GMT

By the mid-1960s, critics and artists heralded the arrival of Minimalism, an idea-based sensibility that seemed more in keeping with America's embrace of its burgeoning space program and new technologies than the metaphysical and transcendental aims of the Abstract Expressionists and the subjective impulses of the Action painters of the late 1940s and 1950s. From very early antecedents, to the purest examples of Minimalism, this exhibition will provide a genealogy of the movement while showcasing one of the strongest areas of the Walker's collection.

Major works by Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Richard Serra, and Robert Smithson provide a foundation for the exhibition. Although the works of these artists share many of the same formal devices, each came to a minimalist aesthetic through a different point of view. What may appear to be a clearly defined aesthetic is revealed in this exhibition to be an open discourse about influences, form, and content.

Mythologies : Exhibition

Sun, 17 Apr 2005 05:00:00 GMT

Including works by Joseph Beuys, Mary Esch, Katharina Fritsch, Anselm Kiefer, Paul McCarthy, Julie Mehretu, Sigmar Polke, Charles Ray, and Paul Thek, this exhibition assembles a variety of media around the idea of historical or contemporary mythologies. For instance, Beuys, Kiefer, and Polke reflect on troubled history and the notion of national identity, and Charles Ray shapes a conflicted monument to the late 20th century in his wrecked car entitled Unpainted Sculpture.

The Shape of Time : Exhibition

Sun, 17 Apr 2005 05:00:00 GMT

Unfolding a chronological path through 50 years of art history, this exhibition begins with postwar abstraction, moves on to the historical and visual thrill of "alternative modernisms," and ends in the swarming and seductive experiments of the 1980s and 1990s.

Mid-Century Radical
The Shape of Time begins with postwar American and European abstraction. Chronological but never canonical, this installation of High Modernist painting and sculpture presents moments of classicism and radicality in the work of a selection of artists, including Lucio Fontana, Alberto Giacometti, Hans Hofmann, Ellsworth Kelly, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, Isamu Noguchi, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still.

Alternative Modernisms
Exploring in depth the turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s and the concurrent spirit of liberation and experimentation, this section offers a survey of aesthetic practices aimed at subverting the conventions of artmaking: Japanese Gutai, Viennese Actionism, Italian Arte Povera, the international Fluxus movement. Artists include Alighiero Boetti, Bruce Conner, David Hammons, Yves Klein, Marisa Merz, Hermann Nitsch, Nam June Paik, Giulio Paolini, Dieter Roth, Shiraga Kazuo, Tanaka Atsuko, and Hannah Wilke.

American Standard
The pervasive presence of American mass media, advertising, and consumer goods in the 1950s has proven to be a fertile subject for artists, most notably spawning Pop Art during the early 1960s. Drawing on the proliferation of brandname products, logos, billboards, popular press, television, and Hollywood films (not to mention the advertising industry charged with creating consumer desire for those goods), Pop artists such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg made work that rejected the otherworldly aspirations of the Abstract Expressionists. They embraced the banality of their environments and produced art that was resolutely of its time.

Two artists on view in this gallery, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, form a bridge between Abstract Expressionism and Pop, combining painterly abstraction with found objects, collage, and recognizable images. The stuff of modern lifeclassic Pop subject matterpopulates the other works in this space. Oldenburg parodied fast food while Warhol appropriated grocery-store packaging and newspaper photos. Today, the work of these artists reads as both a celebration and critique of postwar American capitalism in all its ingenuity and blatant hucksterism.

Variations on Convention
For centuries the practices of both painting and sculpture have gone through numerous disruptions and transformations: painters have upended such traditional categories as figuration, abstraction, portraiture, and landscape; and sculptors have questioned the age-old uses of mass, light, and space. In the 1980s, a plurality of approaches emerged alongside and at times in opposition to one another, and though there was much talk of the oncoming death of painting, the 80s and 90s proved to be fertile ground for its rebirth. Artists such as Chuck Close and On Kawara continued to innovate in the realms of figuration and conceptualism, while artists Richard Prince and Christopher Wool reinvented the rules by using a car hood as a support or bringing language into the picture plane. The same wildly divergent approaches were apparent in the realm of sculpture in Robert Gobers strange, handmade reinterpretation of a sink, or in Sherrie Levines rethinking of Marcel Duchamps iconoclastic fountain. In both mediums, these variations on convention turned the accepted and the familiar on their heads in a way that would open up a new field of inquiry for the coming generation.