This Just In: New to the Walker Collection

Spanning geographies, generations, and media, newly acquired works in the Walker collection help present this institution’s thinking about the changing nature of art as well as its responsibility to continue to support artists through acquisition, preservation, and exhibition. This notable selection from the Walker’s acquisitions over the past year includes first-time commitments to artists—Allora & Calzadilla, Lee Kit, Keith Edmier, and Sean Smuda, among others—as well as works within movements or by artists we already collect in depth. Adrian Piper’s Big Four Oh (1988), for instance, adds to our already deep collections of works by a single artist, while Shusaku Arakawa’s Container of Sands (1958–1959) expands our focus on postwar Japanese art. Other works reflect the Walker’s interest in transdisciplinary art. For example, Tony Conrad’s “instruments” have a singular relationship to the history of film, sculpture, and music, while Allan Sekula’s nine-chapter Fish Story resonates with other recent acquisitions by artists like Hito Steyerl and Yael Bartana, who are asking deep questions of the documentary genre. Together these works present a complex portrait of not only the Walker’s holdings but contemporary art today.

Conceived as a civic intervention, the work Chalk consists of 12 monumental pieces of chalk to be placed in a public space. Eschewing the monumentality of most “public” sculpture, Chalk transforms the site by galvanizing everyday passersby to participate in acts of spontaneous graffiti, ranging from the political to the playful. As sculptures, these “chalks” appear at once to be highly refined minimalist objects and uncanny enlargements of commonly found objects. In public, however, they take on a different function—as collective writing implements. This now-iconic work of the late 1990s asks potent questions about the function of art in the public sphere and the roles of artist and spectator in democratic society. This is the first work by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla to enter the Walker’s collection, although in 2003 they participated in the Walker’s How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age.

Medium: 12 chalks; ed. 3/3 + 1 AP

Shusaku Arakawa (1936–2010) addressed the themes of death, decay, eroticism, and postwar trauma in Japan with his so-called “coffin works.” While some of these issues would continue to fuel the artist’s later practice as a painter and architect, these enigmatic and important early works encapsulate a dramatic vision of destruction and urbanization of the world through fusing organic forms with found and rough-hewn industrial materials. Container of Sands at once affirms the inevitability of death and the impulse to immortalize it in a permanent state. This key early piece is an extremely rare example of this series and is a significant addition to the Walker’s robust collection of postwar Japanese art.

Medium: cement, cotton, paint, corduroy, wood chips, found wooden box

Minneapolis-based artist Frank Big Bear works in a distinctly vivid and unique color palette. Although he is known for his bright Prismacolor pencil works, aspects of those vibrant and fantastical compositions carry over into his collage work Time Zones (Red Owl). This piece comments on political and social issues in art history and culture more generally by featuring famous artists, art works, musicians, and Native American imagery collaged on top of postcards. While referencing early Pop Art and his own artistic influences, Big Bear is also asserting the presence of Native Americans in modern and contemporary American culture and society.

Medium: collage on found paper

American artist Matt Connors, featured in the 2013 exhibition Painter Painter, often executes his paintings with a restricted palette of colors and marks. He freely borrows structures and ideas from design, poetry, writing, music, and the history of painting to open a distributed network of references. Often working in a site-specific manner with painted floors, leaning walls, and other sculptural elements, Connors reminds us that what lies outside the painting’s frame always conditions our perception of the medium. The pieces are scaled to the human body and could almost be mirrors or screens, ultimately open to interpretation and reflection, revealing that our experience of Connors’ work is as contingent as its making.

Medium: acrylic on canvas

Emerging as a major player in the New York avant-garde of the 1960s, American artist Tony Conrad is best-known as an experimental filmmaker and musician who nevertheless had a lasting impact on generations of visual artists. He is a mercurial figure who for decades worked in and between the contexts of film, music, performance, activism, and visual art. Conceived as an ensemble of five “instruments,” this acquisition focuses on works that connect to the artist’s interest in the cinema and speak to the truly multidisciplinary character of his practice. This selection adds to the Walker’s collection, which already houses a work on paper from the artist’s Yellow Movie series.

Medium: mixed media

William Cordova has lived in and traveled through many places during his life. Born in Lima, Peru, he has resided in Miami, New York, and New Haven, with temporary stops and artist residencies along the way in cities throughout the US and Europe. His ongoing experience as a traveler, engaging and translating different cultural situations, has shaped his work as an artist. This is seen in the portable, impromptu materials—pen, paper, found objects, and notebooks—he uses to communicate transitory, poetic, desperate, and playful aspects of cultures in flux. Cordova draws inspiration from another lineage of drawing as an art form in its own right and an ideal vehicle to express the fleeting conditions of our time. desire: optic verses is the first major work by Cordova to enter the Walker collection.

Medium: Watercolor, graphite, paint, collage, plastic, corrugated cardboard, paper napkins, hair, paper

One of the key artists to come out of Mexico City’s dynamic art scene in recent years, Abraham Cruzvillegas has developed a riveting body of work that explores sculpture as a process of change, renewal, and action, where matter coexists in definitively unfinished states. Cruzvillegas’ sculptures are hybrid marriages of materials and techniques that recall art-historical precedents such as the Duchampian transformation of everyday objects. His improvisatory practice also engages alternate economic systems that privilege craft over art, the handmade over the manufactured, and celebrates a learned communal behavior that arises from a necessity for “making do.” The first work by Cruzvillegas to enter the collection, La moderna was featured in the Walker-organized 2013 exhibition Abraham Cruzvillegas: The Autoconstrucción Suites.

Medium: sickles, wooden oar, paper

In Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg’s hands, childlike animations become transgressive and nightmarish allegories of desire and malcontent. Since 2001, she has honed a distinctive style of filmmaking, using the pliability of clay to dramatize our most primal urges—jealousy, revenge, greed, submission, gluttony, and so on. Set to music and sound effects by her collaborator, Hans Berg, Djurberg’s videos plumb the dark recesses of the mind, drawing sometimes disturbing connections between human psychology and animal behavior. These three video works by the artist join two editioned, commissioned sculptures already in the collection.

Medium: clay animation, digital video (color, sound), Edition 1/4; running time 6:19 minutes

A major figure in contemporary art, Jimmie Durham has been working for nearly five decades as an artist, essayist, poet and a leading activist of the American Indian Movement. Durham has garnered recognition for a singular body of work that cleverly critiques Western ideology and upends deeply embedded belief structures. For his installation Sound Work (2011), Durham utilizes an unusual combination of materials such as PVC pipes, discarded pieces of wood, salvaged scrap metal, and clothing crudely assembled together. Made up of eight individual sculptures with accompanying sound elements, the work is an extension of Durham’s interest in anthropomorphic or totemic forms. Here, they read as figures of power or authority (the locker, the guard standing prostrate, the Russian army overcoat with one arm up) being undermined with a wicked sense of humor. Each object consists of some manner of soundtrack, such as the artist singing or screaming “fuck you!” or “get away from here!,” the mechanical noise of the Lawrence Livermore radiation facility, or the sounds of sticks hitting the inside of the locker. Operating as anti-monuments of sorts, the feeble physical properties of the work belies its almost menacing note.

Medium: mixed media

American artist Keith Edmier is known for work that references American pop culture through the lens of his own biography. Early experience working as a Hollywood special effects artist, and later as a studio assistant to artist Matthew Barney, have influenced his art. Often drawing upon techniques of casting from life or the language of hyper-realism, Edmier’s work probes at deeply psychological issues around cultural memory, personal history, and the uncanny. An interactive environment akin to a period room, Bremen Towne is an installation that can be entered by visitors who are free to explore its several rooms. The artist’s overall aim was to evoke the effect of the “brand new home,” one that would resemble the look and feel of the house that he and his family first moved into in 1971. This work was featured in the Walker’s 2012 exhibition Lifelike.

Medium: building materials, reproduction and vintage fabrics, furnishings, fixtures, finishes

In FACES: Set #8, Daryl Nelson, LA-based artist Charles Gaines combines photographic images with grid drawings created through a complex, predetermined set of rules. Each set in Gaines’ “Faces” series (from which this work is derived) features a photograph of a different subject, and this work’s third panel combines the outlines of all the subjects in the series to date. Gaines’ work investigates how we judge the world and the cognitive processes that determine knowledge and understanding. Deeply skeptical of content produced purely by artistic imagination or inspiration, Gaines’ drawings are made by arbitrary systems that involve methodical processes of plotting and sequencing numbers on a graph. Gaines was interested in the role systems played in the construction of forms and objects and how logical systems become illogical because of their subjective nature. FACES: Set #8, Daryl Nelson is the first by the artist to enter the Walker’s collection.

Medium: black and white photograph, ink on paper

British artist Roger Hiorns has become known for an alchemical relationship to materials in his sculptures and installations. Untitled (2012) is part of a series of works wherein the artist utilizes car engines, typically from BMW vehicles. He transforms these utilitarian, inanimate mechanical objects into brilliantly-hued, organic artworks: a process that betrays the artist’s fascination with the autonomy of the object. For Hiorns, the making of art is a process of collaboration with his materials.

Medium: engines, copper sulphate, and steel

Lee Kit is an artist based in Hong Kong who has recently found recognition for his subtle installations, dry humor, and gently political approach to sculpture. Lee began his career as a painter and explored the quotidian through his use of mundane materials as canvases, making abstract paintings on household linens. He would later incorporate towels, sheets, and other objects into his daily life as part of an ongoing performance. I can’t help falling in love features eleven televisions arranged on the floor and on a steel structure. As a loud, synthesized karaoke instrumental of Elvis’ “I Can’t Help Falling in Love” plays on a loop, the television screens flicker with low-resolution video stills of common toiletries and household objects. Lee has articulated his own tendency to humanize products, both through associating them with real people and through allowing the objects to develop their own personae. Here, the repetitive use of foreign products and English words makes reference to the presence of market capitalism and to Hong Kong’s sociopolitical history, while perhaps also pointing to the rising power of the fetishized commodity, in an ostensibly Communist mainland China. I can’t help falling in love is the Walker’s first acquisition of work by the artist.

Medium: 11 karaoke videos (color, sound), readymade objects

A recent video by well-known Minnesota artist Chris Larson, Heavy Rotation begins with a view of the artist in his studio as he draws circles onto vellum. As the piece continues, a portal opens in the ground and Larson climbs down into a a new studio almost identical to restart the rotation. Setting up a dizzying meditation on studio practice, process, and the mise en abyme of artistic creativity: the work becomes a playful and disorientating project that refers back to the studio experiments of artists such as Bruce Nauman while introducing a new sense of subterfuge and trickery within the very framing and construction of the piece. As with all of his work, Larson built the multi-tiered structures that he navigates throughout the video. Featured in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Heavy Rotation references the massive architectural and sculptural machines and structures Larson first became known for, while here placing them at the margins of his practice. This project occurred in the year after the artist completely cleared out his studio and began anew with graphite, records, and vellum as working materials.

Medium: Video (color, sound)

UK-based artist Steve McQueen is acclaimed for his contributions to the fields of both art and cinema over the last two decades. Originally a painter influenced by artists such as de Kooning and Basquiat, he rose to prominence for his meaningful and challenging video and film works that were made for exhibition in a contemporary art context. In recent years he has also become widely known for his feature films, Hunger, Shame and 12 Years a Slave. In McQueen’s 2002 work Once Upon A Time, a sequence of slides presents a seemingly incongruous group of images: the birth of a child, people working, outdoor nature scenes, scientific formulas, cityscapes, etc. McQueen drew inspiration for this work from astronomer Carl Sagan’s legendary 1977 project for NASA, the Golden Record. Launched into space on the Voyager I and II spacecrafts, the Golden Record was a 12-inch, gold plated copper disc that functioned as a time capsule of life on earth and was intended to communicate the story of humanity and nature to extraterrestrial life. The 116 images don’t seem to share a cohesive narrative although they are linked temporally to the 1970s. The viewer must confront McQueen’s work and be challenged by a language that speaks with an impassioned opacity.

Medium: Sequence of 116 35mm slides, digitally transferred, sound, 70 minutes, Projected onto a screen, Edition 4 of 4 + 1AP

As a part of Karen Mirza and Brad Butler’s overarching project The Museum of Non Participation, Hold Your Ground and Act 00136 explore the contested zones of participation and collaboration of artist and audience in art institutions. After finding themselves enveloped by a protest that resulted in violence from Pakistani authorities in 2007, this London-based art duo sought to examine the challenges arising for artists and museums to merge contemporary political issues and artistic practice. Inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings, the video Hold Your Ground explores the performative act of speech in protest, while the neon text work Act 00136, in English and Urdu, acts as a testimony to the project’s itinerant travels through the art world and social space.

Medium: video, neon glass, tubing

For British painter Katy Moran, hard and fast categories such as representation and abstraction have very little use in the studio. Her practice is rooted in a desire to capture a sensation of seeing in the world, and while her paintings are ostensibly abstract—bits of found paper, deft brushwork, wet paints mixing here and there—it’s their emergent figurative aspects that hold her imagination. Joe’s in Town (2012), a work that was featured in the Walker exhibition Painter Painter, reflects this distinctive sense of pictorial invention unique to the artist while also marking an important recent shift in her practice toward collage. Despite their depth and complexity, these works nevertheless retain the immediacy of a snapshot or something glimpsed out of the corner of one’s eye.

Medium: acrylic, paper, leather, and collage on board

Art Is… (1983/2009) is a series of 40 photographs that document Lorraine O’Grady’s intervention at the 1983 African American Day Parade in Harlem. Addressing representations of identity in public space, the work is composed of images taken by the artist, her assistants, and parade-goers which were carefully edited by the artist some years after the event. Artistic discourse is situated in the public realm, amongst a community that was underrepresented and under-served by the mainstream art world. By inviting the public to frame themselves within individual gilded frames, O’Grady asserts that art is relevant for those who take ownership of it, irrespective of race and social class. This acquisition is the first by the artist to enter the Walker’s collection.

Medium: chromogenic prints

Grazing, swiping, scraping, carving, imprinting—every mark in American artist Alex Olson’s work signals a unique condition of surface. With Proposal 9, featured in the Walker exhibition Painter Painter, Olson offers new propositions for the painted surface. The canvas features an overall iteration of woven “curls” created with a large round brush—a magnification of her smaller “commas” used in earlier pieces. Then, through a sequence of moves, such as scraping, dragging, and in painting, the artist executes an irregular grid of “ribbons.” As a result, certain aspects of the painting begin to read as a photocopied image, highlighting the work’s relationship to printed information, which is an ongoing concern for the artist. As such, Olson advances a philosophical inquiry into the nature of surface and meaning.

Medium: oil on linen

The Big Four Oh is an installation made by conceptual artist Adrian Piper to commemorate her 40th birthday in 1988. It features a video monitor on a table, a suit of armor in fragments, baseballs scattered across the floor, and jars that contain, among other substances, the artist’s tears, blood, and urine. The video features Piper in blue jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers, dancing for 46 minutes to a series of funk and disco songs. The work also includes a stream of consciousness diary entry the artist wrote for her birthday. Part accounting of her past, statement on her present, and manifesto to the future, the text is influenced by her readings of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. Many of the installation’s elements appear to be sourced from the text: “I had to get hit in the stomach with a hardball many times before I learned to play the game”; “I sweated blood to become myself and not someone else I didn’t like.”

Medium: video (color, sound), bloody band-aid in jar, sweaty towel in jar, tear drenched tissue in jar, urine in jar, bottle of vinegar, 40 (hard) baseballs, 1 binder-style notebook with blank pages and handwritten text, 14 pieces of plastic knight’s armor, Sony PVM-20L1 monitor

In 2010, the Walker presented the first US exhibition of Baby Marx, an ongoing project by Mexican artist Pedro Reyes that looks at the potential for mass entertainment to operate as a radical educational tool. An architect by training, Reyes works across platforms and disciplines—including design, installation, and video—to explore sites and scenarios of collective interaction. This acquisition features the two principal puppets from the Baby Marx project, Karl Marx and Adam Smith. Designed by the artist in collaboration with famed Japanese puppet-maker Takumi Ota, the handmade rod puppets each feature individualized characteristics that seek to highlight some aspect of the theories espoused by the characters. The acquisition also contains a selection of four videos shot on-site during the course of the exhibition, and a fifth shot at New York’s Zuccotti Park during the height of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.

Medium: puppets (wood, paper, fabric, mechanical components), videos (color, sound); ed. 1/3 + 2 AP

The renowned American artist, theorist, and photography historian Allan Sekula (1951–2013) displayed an unrelenting engagement with documentation—as pictorial form, method of recording, narrative device, and medium of social engagement. His photography has actively engaged ideas around labor, capitalism, and Marxist theory, providing complex and poignant critiques of social reality. The monumental project Fish Story is the result of seven years of documenting harbors and port cities around the world. The powerful work challenges and expands upon the traditions of documentary photography and romanticist notions of the sea (Herman Melville, Caspar David Friedrich). The Walker’s acquisition of all nine chapters of Fish Story is a major step in preserving the work and output of this crucial artist.

Medium: cibachrome prints, gelatin silver text panels, 35mm slides; ed. 4/5

Minnesota photographer and multimedia artist Sean Smuda examines natural elements versus human-made objects in his portfolio series Blueprints. Printed on aluminum, the works feature collaged photographs of transportation elements, ranging from trains to shopping carts, and juxtaposed against the natural landscape. The contrasting and barren feel of the images suggest a world that exists after humans, our footprints being the mechanical devices we leave behind. Poems and texts translated into and from multiple languages are embedded within the prints to portray the differences of language and imagery across the globe while also tying our existence together through geography, identity, and our relationship with nature. As such, the work represents a keen meditation on the networked world today, with shadows of a foreboding and/or optimistic future, from an artist embedded in the heart of the Upper Midwest.

Medium: Archival pigment prints on aluminum

Over the past 50 years New York–based artist Jack Whitten has experimented with numerous amalgamations of technology and painting, often referring to photographic processes. He has referred to his 1970s process-based works as “Energy Fields,” alluding to the relationship between light and space that became a key visual aspect of the pieces. The paintings often refer to science and can be read as atmospheres of charged particles, made visible by the artist’s process. In the early 1970s, in an effort to bypass his own familiar painterly gestures, he developed an unconventional array of tools to create the work, including rakes, squeegees, and Afro combs. Sigma Group IV is from Whitten’s important “Greek Alphabet” series initiated in the mid-1970s after a residency at the Xerox Corporation. It is notable for its reintroduction of color into his work of the time. This is the first work by the artist to enter the Walker collection.

Medium: acrylic on canvas

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung’s paintings seize their energy from her determination to work through the challenges of a medium that comes with so much history and baggage. On one hand, there’s something optimistic about Zuckerman-Hartung’s work, a belief that painting might still have something to say, and on the other a feeling of desperation: the sense that the medium is not up to the artist’s challenge to be vital and alive in the present. The various elements of The Failure of Contingency (2012), the floor-bound installation she created for Painter Painter, have their own history in the studio and together form a narrative about the act of painting today and the anxieties of failure and impossibility that often surround it.

Medium: mixed media

 

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