Newest Walker Acquisitions Target Emerging Artists, the Interdisciplinary
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This Just In: New Acquisitions Focus on Emerging Artists, the Interdisciplinary

Continually expanding, the Walker’s world-renowned collections feature diverse artists whose works continually question the possibilities of art. Over the course of the last 15 months, the newest additions to our collection—by artists from Carolee Schneemann, Stan VanDerBeek, and Christian Marclay to Trisha Baga, Tetsuya Yamada, and Martine Syms—were guided by a strong focus on two key areas: interdisciplinary practices and collecting works by emerging artists.

Fueled by our multiyear Interdisciplinary Initiative, made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Walker has put increased emphasis on collecting pieces by artists working at the intersection of the visual and performing arts, including two major works by female pioneers in the field: Joan Jonas’s Funnel (1974/2019) and Carolee Schneemann’s Noise Bodies (1965).

A pioneer of video and performance art, Joan Jonas works in video, installation, sculpture, and drawing, often collaborating with musicians and dancers to realize improvisational works that are equally at home in the museum gallery and on the theatrical stage. Drawing on mythic stories from various cultures, rituals, and folktales, Jonas invests texts from the past with the politics of the present. In 1974, Joan Jonas presented Funnel as a video performance in New York, Amherst, Cologne, Rome, and Houston, in which she performed in a unique space constructed of white paper walls receding towards the back, forming a funnel with its wide end facing the spectators. She later performed the piece on the stage at the Walker in conjunction with Projected Images, a landmark exhibition of film and video. Funnel originated with the artist’s interest in the cone as a sculptural form and a tool to amplify her own voice. During the event, she sang, created drawings on silk, and enacted gestures aided by props including a white rabbit, spinning discs, and a leather belt. Moving within a layered space arranged with paper cones, hanging curtains, and a child’s desk, Jonas was also shown in close-up on a nearby TV monitor. With allusions to different forms of storytelling, her hypnotic performance drew on references as varied as magic shows and the Egyptian deity Horus. Forty-five years since Funnel was first presented at the Walker, it returned on occasion of The Body Electric, for which Jonas specially revisited the work as an installation that incorporates various elements similar to those used in 1974 as well as video material from the original performance.

Carolee Schneemann, Noise Bodies, 1965

Noise Bodies was a movement/sound duet that Schneemann wrote for herself and the composer James Tenney, which premiered on August 28, 1965, at Festival of the Avant Garde ’65, the annual presentation of experimental music and performance organized by Charlotte Moorman. The piece began offstage with Schneemann and Tenney dressing each other in their costumes, which were made of cast-off objects such as tin cans, beads, phone wires, nylons, screens, rubber tubing, rope, teapot lids, and ice tray dividers. During the dance, they “played” each other’s bodies with metal rods taken from an old car engine. Schneemann retired Noise Bodies in 1966 and put the costumes and props in storage until 2015, when she cleaned and restored them for the Block Museum of Art’s exhibition A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant Garde, 1960s-1980s. No moving image of their performances survives, so to give viewers a sense of what the work sounded like, Schneemann conceived and performed a short composition on which she used one of the original metal rods to strike parts of the costumes. The acquisition consists of the costumes, a sculptural prop used in the performance, a sound collage and a digital slide sequence of documentary images; and was accompanied by the generous gift from the Carolee Schneemann Estate of four vintage prints by Peter Moore showing the performance.

This past year, the Walker has also added to its holdings STAGING: solo (2017) by Maria Hassabi, whose commission was presented as part of the Mellon Foundation–supported Interdisciplinary Initiative in 2017. STAGING: solo (2017) is the second non-object-based performance work (aside from Tino Sehgal’s This objective of that object, 2004) to enter the collection and marks the artist’s first work accessioned into a museum collection. Described by the artist as a “live installation,” STAGING: solo unfolds as a progression of austere choreographies, composed of stillness and decelerated movements in space. Oscillating between dance and sculpture, subject and object, live body and still image, the work tests conventional rhythms of viewership in the process. As part of the acquisition, the Walker has agreed to present the live dance only with the active involvement of the artist or her designated representatives. Should at any point in the future the work cease to be performed by the artist or dancers trained by Hassabi, the live work will expire, and instead the accessioned artwork may be presented as a sculptural as well as archival installation, challenging the ways in which the Walker collects and supports interdisciplinary practices that engage liveness. STAGING: solo will be shortly on view as part of the forthcoming Walker exhibition The Paradox of Stillness: Art, Object, and Performance. 

While the Walker has continued to deepen fruitful relationships with established artists, it is also committed to acquiring and supporting lesser-known practitioners. Recently, several new voices have been brought into the permanent collection, each representing artists who are shaping discourse and debate, invariably responding to the mood and spirit of our times. Highlights include paintings by Christina Quarles and Jonathan Lyndon Chase, whose works hover between abstraction and figuration, while alluding to the fluidity of race, gender, and sexuality. Three Logos (2013) is a large-scale installation by Rayyane Tabet (whose Walker exhibition will open in December 2020) that evokes the numerous mergers and rebrandings of the American corporations involved in the construction of the Trans-Arabian Pipe Line (also known as the TAPline). Made specifically for our collection and inspired by the geometry of the Walker’s 2005 Herzog & de Meuron expansion, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s Walker Curtain (2018) takes the form of aluminum curtains that have the ability to be traversable and to close quickly after the viewer’s passage, creating a delicate noise.

Recent acquisitions by emerging artists have focused extensively on the moving image and its various manifestations as single channel works, immersive installations and stand-alone sculptures combining video and objects. Recently on view, Carissa Rodriguez’s The Maid (2018) follows a selection of Newborn sculptures created by the artist Sherrie Levine that have made their way into private and public collections around the US, including the Walker’s. Spanning the course of a day, Rodriguez’s film shows Levine’s sculptures in their present settings—domestic interiors, auction houses, and museum storage. Martine Syms’s Audain Gallery – Borrowed Lady Installation (2016) presents an expanded installation of the artist’s video Notes on Gesture (2015), in which the artist Diamond Stingily repeats a number of authentic and dramatic gestures that each relate to African-American women: “famous women, infamous women, and unknown women,” as Syms has said. Inspired by English philosopher John Bulwer’s Chirologia: Or the Natural Language of the Hand, a 1644 thesis on the communicative meaning of hand movements, Syms’s video offers an inventory of gestures, questioning the assumptions we make about a person’s appearance, behavior and nonverbal communication. Co-acquired with the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Banu Cennetoğlu’s 1 January 1970 – 21 March 2018 · H O W B E I T · Guilty feet have got no rhythm · Keçiboynuzu · AS IS · MurMur · I measure every grief I meet · Taq u Raq · A piercing Comfort it affords · Stitch · Made in Fall · Yes. But. We had a golden heart. · One day soon I’m gonna tell the moon about the crying game (2018), is a moving image work that presents the totality of the artist’s visual archive from June 10, 2006 to March 21, 2018 sourced from various devices—including Cennetoğlu’s mobile phones, computers, cameras, and external hard drives—in an unedited stream of content. Cennetoğlu refers to the work as an “intro-spective” that brings together scattered, fleeting moments of a life lived, from the birth of her daughter to moments of political upheaval and protest; documentation of her artistic practice; images sent to her by colleagues, friends, and family for various reasons and with different intentions; to banal footage of everyday life. Trisha Baga’s Mollusca and the Pelvic Floor (2018) takes the form of an expanded environment with 2D and 3D projections and various objects. The work loosely narrates the artist’s increasingly intimate relationship with Mollusca—the name and prompt she has given to Alexa, the Amazon virtual assistant. Baga’s entanglement with Mollusca eventually becomes embodiment, narrated by descriptions of metamorphosis and inter-species contact appropriated from books such as Octavia Butler’s Imago (1989), Dan Brown’s Origin (2017), Michael Crichton’s Sphere (1987), and films such as Robert Zemeckis’s Contact (1997). In addition, recent moving image acquisitions include Laure Prouvost’s DIT LEARN (2017), Helen Marten’s Dust and Piranhas (2011), and Sondra Perry’s Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation (2016).

Several recent acquisitions build upon relationships with artists whose works have been exhibited in our galleries, though not yet represented in our collection. Recently, we added first works to the collection by Marc Camille Chaimowicz and Stan VanDerBeek. Most recently on view as part of the 2016 Walker exhibition Question the Wall Itself, the work of French/British artist Chaimowicz spans painting, sculpture and photography with prototypes for everyday objects, furnishings, and wallpapers. Comprised of 17 leaning panels, Paris Triptych (1985) finds its starting point in a group of photographs taken and printed by Chaimowicz that depict a number of seemingly quotidian, or domestic scenes—vases with flowers, a phone, furniture in a room. Part of a larger group of photographs taken in the artist’s home and during his travel, the images evoke atmospheric and emotive readings, positioned as remembrances of the past that in turn generate new configurations and meanings.

VanDerBeek was a pioneering American filmmaker and installation artist, who in the early 1960s began to include his films in installations conceived as immersive experiences composed of multiple projections. The best known of these is Movie Drome (1965), which was built inside the top of a grain silo VanDerBeek installed on his farm in Stony Point, New York. Viewers lay on the ground and watched an endless stream of found images that were projected on the inner surface of the dome. VanDerBeek hoped to expand the concept into a worldwide communication system composed of multiple Movie Dromes installed around the world that shared imagery via satellite. Today, we can understand Movie Drome as an early, embodied version of the World Wide Web. In 1968, VanDerBeek reconfigured Movie Drome as Movie Mural, taking the form of an installation for a single interior wall with multiple films, slides, and audio. Reconstructed posthumously, Movie Mural includes composite film programs representing 25 of VanDerBeek’s films from 1957 to 1972 as well as two films VanDerBeek made during his collaboration with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 1965.

Christian Marclay, 48 War Movies, 2019

We have also been deepening our holdings of artists with whom the Walker has sustained relationships with over the years. Over the last 35 years, the Walker has presented Christian Marclay’s work across Visual Arts, Performing Arts, and Moving Image programs, as well as featured writing on Marclay on our online publishing platforms. In 2004, Marclay was an artist-in-residence at the Walker, during which he developed a fascination for our collection of Fluxus objects, which resulted with the commissioned sound installation Shake Rattle and Roll (2004), held in the Collection. In recent months, the Walker acquired Marclay’s 48 War Movies (2019), a single-channel moving image work that reflects on the endless onward march of global warfare and its mediation in popular culture. The work digitally layers 48 feature-length war films, each slightly larger than the one that almost conceals it, so that only the four outer edges of each film’s frame are visible. The collaged imagery eschews narrative or direct depiction: only at times are recognizable images seen, such as a glimpse of a Confederate uniform or a Vietnam-era helicopter. Marclay has said that the work “deals with fear and anxiety and loss of liberties … It’s not a piece that you have to spend a lot of time with; it’s not a pleasurable piece. But it can be quite hypnotic.” Abstracted and accompanied by an immersive and cacophonous soundtrack, 48 War Movies is an affecting work that besieges the viewer, an urgent reflection on the never-ending issue of war and violence.

Throughout our exhibitions and acquisitions history, the Walker has been committed to championing the practices of artists from the Twin Cities and greater Minnesota. In June 2019, we unveiled the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden commission Shadows at the Crossroads (2019) by Twin Cities–based artists Ta-coumba Aiken and Seitu Jones with poetry by Soyini Vinelle Guyton and the late Kirk Washington, Jr. The seven-part work continues the series Shadows of Spirit (1992), originally commissioned by the City of Minneapolis for the pedestrian walkways of Nicollet Mall. In the Garden, the artists’ new project takes the form of bronze and etched human silhouettes embedded in the sidewalks, each honoring significant figure from the region’s cultural history. We have continued to add more works by Minnesota artists to the collection, including Frank Big Bear’s The Walker Collage, Multiverse #10 (2016), the inaugural commission for the Target Project Space, as well as Everyday City (2006) and 9435E3628094 (2016) by Twin Cities-based artist Tetsuya Yamada. This past year, we have also been gifted important early works by Siah Armajani: Follow This Line (1959), gifted by Christopher and Cynthia Bake, and Chair (1966), gifted by Irena and Stephen Kahne.

Gift giving has continued to play a major role in facilitating acquisitions. Thanks to the generosity of Walker supporters, gifts of artworks by important artists have continued to be made, most notably this past year by Erwin and Miriam Kelen, whose collection of drawings has been recently on view. The Kelens’ generous gift includes a group of 79 works on paper assembled over the course of nearly 60 years, focusing on figurative drawing and spanning more than a century of artistic experimentation in the US and Europe, with works by 55 different artists ranging from Edgar Degas to Chuck Close. The Kelens’ gift strengthens the Walker’s collection, while also adding further context and bringing new artists to our holdings, with works by William Kentridge and Marlene Dumas, and many others.

Recently, the Walker has also received two sculptures by Martin Puryear—Untitled (2005) and Phrygian Spirit (2012–14)—gifted by John, Martha, Laura, and Anne Gabbert. These gifts bring our holdings of Puryear’s works to five, including his outdoor commission, Gog & Magog (Ampersand) (1987–88), which marks the entrance to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. Other important gifts including the installation After Kerouac (2006) by Mike Nelson, gifted by Patricia Moraes and Pedro Barbosa, as well as Voile/Toile – Toile/Voile (1975/2018), a major interdisciplinary work by Daniel Buren, gifted by the Ronning Family Foundation and VIA Art Foundation.

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