Quodlibetica

The Walker Art Center Performs its Permanent Collection

Written By: Patricia Briggs Constellation 06 2.1.10

by Patricia Briggs

Although we all sometimes complain about the Walker Art Center—its lack of consideration of local artists, the dry tastes of its curators, the cost of admission— we are all nevertheless obviously its beneficiaries. I don’t always like Walker programming but I am always better for having visited. I use the Walker all of the time. I learn about contemporary art there and recommend Walker exhibitions in my reviews. I send students there to face and conquer their conceptual art fears. I meet friends at the Walker and talk my head off about conceptual art as we walk through the galleries. But honestly, Event Horizon—the new installation of the Walker’s permanent collection—is terrible. I am dismayed.

Conceptual art is not meant to be viewed formalistically. Looking at conceptual art this way—reading its abstract shapes and forms for its meaning—shuts it down, mutes it. Outside of its intellectual and historical context, conceptual art is made into a “composition,” an arrangement of form and shape. This is exactly what happens in Event Horizon where visual similarities and formal correspondences govern the logic of display. So over-determined are the formal relationships between and among the works here, it is difficult to see these works beyond the abstract formal characteristics they share: the minimal, monochrome, all-over composition.

Event Horizon is populated by rectangular format works of similar scale. It’s a point I would not usually mention but can’t seem to get past as I attempt to engage with this show. It opens with Andreas Gursky’s Klitchko (1999), a large-scale photograph filled from top to bottom and from left to right with the faceless multitude, the swarming mindless crowd, gathered for a barely visible spectacle (a prize fight) projected on massive screens in an enormous auditorium. Nearby, and about the same size as the Gursky, is Daniel Buren’s Untitled (1966), a canvas covered from top to bottom and from left to right with orange and white stripes in the artist’s signature wallpaper-like pattern. The visual correspondence between this Buren and Andre Caderé’s Round Bar of Wood (1977)—resting against the wall near it—is  particularly painful to observe, as Caderé’s multicolored rods or bars are meant to appear uninvited, disruptive, not to be integrated comfortably into the formal logic of an exhibition. Thomas Hirschhorn’s Abstract Relief (2000), made of foil and packing tape wrapped around the stretcher bar armature, comfortably repeats the visual gestalt of the Gursky and the Buren. Abstract Relief, a boring work by a wonderful artist, strikes one, as does Gursky’s print, as an object produced specifically for the purpose of fitting neatly into an exhibition designed around the paradigm of painting.  It’s a shame to know that the Walker owns Hirschhorn’s amazing Necklace CNN (2002), a huge sculpted necklace with the CNN logo pendant, which explicitly references the life of the street and the reduction of political dialogue to the endless blabbering of ratings-conscious talking heads on cable network.

One could go on and on pointing out Event Horizon’s clever visual juxtapositions: Paul Shambroom’s 2005 photograph of a splash of dark metal against a grey concrete wall (the residue of a homeland security bomb test) shares a superficial resemblance to the abstract pigment explosion in plaster featured in Niki de Saint Phalle Untitled From Edition Mat 64 (1964) hung near it. Next to the de Saint Phalle are Franz West’s 3 Adaptives (1997), which in Event Horizon read as plaster and rebar sculpture, rather than the supremely interesting hand-held objects they were intended to be. It seems silly to go on, but the substance of my reading of Event Horizon is formal analysis, a reading of repetitive patterns and visual correspondences, such as the similarity between Raymond Hains’s Untitled (1959/60-2002), a rusted sheet iron fence with peeling posters, and Mark Bradford’s Analog (2005) of similar size, coloration, and materials (printed billboard and bits of paper used in beauty shops to color hair), and such as the large round mirrors used in Jim Hodges Light I and Olafur Eliasson Convex/Concave (1995-2000) hung in another gallery.  The reference to long-handled cleaning tools seems to govern the handing of Jeff Wall’s Morning Cleaning Mies van der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona (1999) near Jasper Johns’ Fool’s House (1962). The Wall’s worker holds a mop, while the Johns incorporates a broom.  Event Horizon, sadly, places conceptual artworks within a context which stresses formal similarity,  which is at odds with most of these artists’ intentions. It is also at odds with engaged viewers’ predisposition to grapple with the historical and conceptual context from which these works emerged, and it squeezes the life out of most of works on view.

I must write a few more words. The small flat screen monitors hung on walls throughout Event Horizon present documentary footage of modern dance performances that the Walker has commissioned or supported in one way or another ever the years. With no seating provided, the monitors do not constitute viewing stations —a point that is exaggerated by the enormous “viewing” area curtained off for Bruce Connor’s video loop of atomic bomb testing—which looks absolutely “sublime” on its expansive screening area. The small monitors devoted to dance present footage never intended for view in a gallery. More or less impossible to actually watch, these institutional gestures of respect to the medium of dance are a wasted effort. Also counterproductive is the effort and expense that Event Horizon has taken with the gallery devoted to Joseph Cornell—paired here with Peter Hugar due to superficial similarities in their style and imagery—which has the feel of a shrine or chapel. Whereas Cornell’s whimsical boxes filled with unlikely pairings of collage images and found objects invite viewers to enter into a counter-reality and stimulate fantasy, in Event Horizon these delicate and dynamic assemblages are re-boxed or repackaged in elaborate, mirrored, heavily lit glass cases that literally entomb Cornell’s pieces in the walls of the Walker itself.  Cornell’s assemblages become here reliquaries for dead(ened) things rather than launching sites for the imagination.

Benches and Binoculars, a companion exhibition of works from the Walker’s permanent collection, oddly presents paintings intended to be viewed at close range and at eye level, stacked one above the other from floor to ceiling. Adopting the salon style of exhibition designed for academic figurative painting during the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, Benches and Binoculars successfully puts   Expressionist, Surrealist, and Abstract Expressionist paintings at a distance. Luckily the Walker provides benches and binoculars so that visitors can perform an exaggerated act of viewing without directly engaging any works.  Aside from a gimmick geared to appeal to children—seemingly the target audience for this exhibition—the Walker also enacts its own distancing and disdain for the modernist works it warehouses here.

Activated,  responsible viewers of contemporary art expect to read didactic materials, of which there are generally too few at the Walker. They expect to argue with one another, take notes, do research, return again and again to an exhibition. Event Horizon squelches this impulse.

Images:

1.) Andreas Gursky, Klitschko

2.) Benches and Binoculars

3.) Thomas Hirschhorn, Abstract Relief

4.) Niki de Saint Phalle, Untitled From Edition Mat 64

5.) Mark Bradford, Analog

6.) Olafur Eliasson, Convex/Concave

7.) Jeff Wall, Morning Cleaning Mies van der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona

8.) Jasper Johns, Fool’s House