The second program of
The Artist’s Bookshelf
, a new book club presented by the Walker Art Center and the Friends of the Minneapolis Public Library, takes place at 6:30 pm Wednesday, July 7, at Walker Community Library, 2880 Hennepin Avenue South, Minneapolis. The featured book, selected by Walker Artist-In-Residence Christian Marclay, is Haruki Murakami’s After the Quake, a collection of stories set in Japan in 1995 between the twin disasters of the Kobe earthquake and the poison-gas attacks in Tokyo’s subways. Walker Art Center Teen Programs Coordintor Witt Siasoco will lead the discussion. Copies of After the Quake may be reserved at www.mplib.org for pickup at any library branch. Admission to The Artist’s Bookshelf is free.
Murakami’s After the Quake (2002, Knopf Publishing Group) collects stories about compassion, courage, and the nature of human suffering. In 1995, the physical and social landscape of Japan was transformed by two events: the Kobe earthquake, in January, which destroyed thousands of lives, and the poison-gas attacks in the Tokyo subways in March, during the morning rush hour. Following these twin disasters, Murakami abandoned his life abroad and returned home to confront his country’s grief. Out of the quake come these six stories, set at a time when Japan became brutally aware of the fragility of its daily existence. His characters find their resolutely normal everyday lives undone by events even more surreal (yet somehow believable) than we have come to expect in his fiction.
Artist/experimental musician Christian Marclay’s work will be featured in the exhibition Shake Rattle and Roll: Christian Marclay opening at Franklin Art Works on June 26. As part of his artist residency, he will also be performing with Andrew Broder and George Cartwright at Triple Rock Social Club on Saturday, August 21, at 9 pm, and again as part of djTRIO (with DJ Olive and Toshio Kajiwara) on Monday, August 23, as part of the Walker’s Summer Music and Movies in Loring Park. Marclay’s work has been shown at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C; the Venice Biennial; the Musée d’Art et d’histoire, Geneva; the Kunsthaus in Zurich; and the Whitney Museum of American Art at Phillip Morris in New York. His retrospective exhibition organized by the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, is currently on an international tour.
Find discussion questions for After the Quake at www.walkerart.org. For more information, visit www.walkerart.org or www.friendsofmpl.org, or call 612.375.7622.