Smart Art at Midway
While some art enthusiasts appear bundles of energy, gushing forth ideas and artists and concepts without rest, the art enthusiasts at Midway Contemporary Art appear a different breed: Reflective, deliberate, contemplative.
In contrast to some of the Twin Cities other “alternative” art scenes—the word “alternative” seems inappropriate and pejorative, but somehow apt—Midway Contemporary Art, now in Minneapolis but founded in 2000 in St. Paul, is a site that tries to use its space thoughtfully and reflectively. The meticulous attention to spatial relations is reflected in the approach of John Rasmussen, Executive Director, and Aaron Van Dyke, Education Coordinator.
As Rasmussen and Van Dyke both noted in conversation, Midway works on building relationships with artists, often long-term ones. It may help that Rasmussen, a former artist, and Van Dyke, who still has an active studio practice, know art, as it were, from the perspective of the artist as well as the arts administrator; Midway’s focus on developing relationships with artists reveals a testament to their own, personal stakes in the arts community. Their own relationship to art making no doubt influences their passion for reflective collaboration. Rasmussen as well as colleagues such as Van Dyke work directly with Midway’s local, national, and international artists throughout the creative process. Key in the relationship between art center and artist at Midway, Rasmussen suggests, is the extensive communication he and his staff have with their invited guests as these individuals conceive, create, and install their works. The focus on developing relationships with artists at Midway is a cornerstone of the creative process, a foundation that leads to some impressive—and notably long-term—engagements. Indeed, we might call what happens at Midway the epitome of “smart art.”
An extension of the Midway’s passion for nurturing artists is its increasing emphasis on nurturing dialogue about art and activity in the arts community as well. While Ben Heywood of the Soap Factory describes his venue as one that sees extensive foot traffic from individuals new to the arts community, Midway presents itself as a different kind of space with a different kind of audience. The film screenings this past June, curated by former (two-time) Whitney Independent Study Program Fellow Jonathan Thomas, for example, provided a highly conceptual and intellectualized history of time-based media. Even the stacked title of the series demonstrates the conceptually provocative nature of the screenings, where typographical juxtaposition implies both historical connections as well as the tenuousness of these connections, like unstable building blocks ready to fall:
2010
2009
2008
2007
2006
2005
2004
2003
The audience for the two screenings we authors attended included a core group of Twin Cities artists and art students. This is not to say that the Midway is not an accessible venue for a first-time, local art experience. Rather, the focus of Midway’s exhibition calendar suggests that those familiar with or curious about art and art history would benefit most greatly from its offerings. For Midway, art is best experienced when one is prepared to encounter it.
Rasmussen’s efforts to oversee and, with Van Dyke and other Midway staff members, help develop an even greater collection of artists’ books speaks to this approach to the art experience as well. Midway’s impressive, and fairly new, research space and library hold an ever-expanding collection of artists’ monographs and catalogs. The collection, as Rasmussen notes, is something of a treasure trove not only for art aficionados and history students, but also for other local museums and galleries. The staff from other art institutions, he suggests, visit Midway’s collection to find those materials about and by artists unavailable in most other venues. This unique and growing collection represents several of Midway’s notable features: Its focus on artists and developing relationships with them, its investment in generating a knowledgeable arts community in the Twin Cities, and a passion for a non-commercial venue for arts engagement that recognizes, simultaneously, the quotidian material needs of artists.
Normally measured and reflective in their comments, when our conversation about Midway turns to its role in the Twin Cities community, Rasmussen and Van Dyke speak passionately on the need to educate the public about art and the need to build a culture dedicated to appreciating the visual arts. To this end, Midway drives and encourages a certain way of thinking, of being critical and experimental, both in the work they show and in the artists with whom they partner. Melancholy, if not outright dejection, marks Rasmussen’s face as he points to the historic lack of passion for visual culture in the U.S. He laments specifically the pressure on museums to be entertainment spectacles, an idea he finds both misdirected and inappropriate. The idea of a museum as a kind of “Time’s Square,” he notes, never worked—and never will.
Van Dyke, too, shares Rasmussen’s longing for the kind of civic engagement truly smart, contemporary art can engender. Reflecting on the possibility that art has—or could ever—create a kind of space for public discussion and reflection, Van Dyke suggests, albeit skeptically so, that early in the Enlightenment, perhaps as late as the 18th century, there was a sense that art could serve as a key vehicle for a civic, if not completely democratic, forum for debate. He notes, however, that the kind of pragmatism that became increasingly common in the U.S. in the 19th and 20th centuries—really, a kind of consumerism indebted to capitalism and disguised as self-betterment—meant that such political and pedagogical aspirations for art were never fully realized. Purchasing, rather than pondering, became the credo of the capitalist-influenced and highly misdirected “American Enlightenment.”
As their work at Midway suggests though, neither Rasmussen nor Van Dyke are defeated by the lackluster, passive approach to “art-as-spectacle” still so common in urban centers like the Twin Cities. The slouching passivity and fetishistic focus on the spectacular lives on in spite of such urban centers’ apparently vibrant art communities. While other parts of the world may provide examples of the role art can play in creating a truly civic and democratic dialogue, the strange mix of pragmatist materialism and capitalist consumerism make such opportunities, in Van Dyke’s words, “difficult to realize” here.
Both Rasmussen and Van Dyke acknowledge, noting the irony, that consumerist, capitalist influences provide in the U.S. opportunities for the arts community: Through philanthropy, through donations, through galleries, through grants. But something still seems amiss. The ties still seem too instrumentalized. A contemporary art that engages and engenders truly free civic debate and discussion is possible in the Twin Cities. We just aren’t quite there yet.
Looking abroad at the kinds of venues available in other contexts, Rasmussen and Van Dyke have tried to offer up—to some degree consciously, and to some degree unconsciously—models of civic arts engagement to Twin Cities’ audiences from elsewhere. A case in point is Midway’s upcoming events involving castillo/corrales, a collectively and cooperatively organized exhibition space in Paris, France. Founded in 2007, castillo/corrales serves as a site for artists, curators, and writers to work collaboratively to organize exhibits and events. In their upcoming Midway visit and in related Twin Cities events at venues such as the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in November, members of castillo/corrales Thomas Boutoux, Benjamin Thorel, and Oscar Tuazon will discuss their work and the ways in which the Paris space they help to create—literally and figuratively—enables a democratic exchange of ideas in and through art. The Twin Cities’ events should prove too compelling to miss, which is (almost) half the battle.
Perhaps in a less literal way than the Paris space of castillo/corrales, Jonathan Thomas’s June film series and the current Pennacchio and Argentato exhibit (on view through August 28th) at Midway provide other kinds of art spaces for public reflection. While Thomas’s film screenings—often conceptual, some of which involved live musical or artistic performances—contrast interestingly to the purposefully misdirected title of Pennacchio and Argentato’s exhibit, their The New Boring promises to be anything but. Indeed, it would be difficult to describe the work, or a conversation with Rasmussen or Van Dyke, as anything near boring. Thomas’s series and Pennacchio and Argentato’s exhibit reveal, much like castillo/corrales or Rasmussen and Van Dyke themselves, that “smart art” is about reflecting on the conditions of engagement, of possibility.
Midway’s thoughtful and insightful ideas about the role of contemporary art in civic life are indeed smart. Yet Rasmussen’s and Van Dyke’s work at the Midway is hardly inaccessible to the unfamiliar viewer. No other event speaks to the kind of general public accessibility that the Midway encourages than does their once-a-year, annual fundraiser, the Monster Drawing Rally.
Comparing the event to other fundraisers in the Twin Cities, it becomes clear that the Monster Drawing Rally at Midway is a great deal more about a kind of performance than simply about the art object. And the performance itself is key to the fundraiser, and to Midway’s mission. What the attendee “gets” from the event is more than a relatively inexpensive piece of art. Rather, the visitor has a chance to engage with the artists as they create art works. With each volunteer artist taking one of three hour-long shifts, attendees are given more than a $35 picture for their dining-room wall. Through the Monster Drawing Rally, Midway Contemporary Art provides individuals the chance to meet artists, to interact with them, and to realize art as a crucial part of democratic, civic dialogue.
But, then again, maybe this is what Rasmussen, Van Dyke, their colleagues, and the invited artists at Midway Contemporary Art do all year around. Smart art, indeed.
Images:
1) Isa Gagarin, Beru, 2009. Installation view.
2) Carey Young, Declared Void, 2005, vinyl drawing and text.
3) Midway Contemporary Art Library.
4) Gedi Sibony, The Science of Imagination, 2007. Installation view.
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