From the Ledge

No visit to Minneapolis is complete for me without a trip to the Walker Art Center, one of the most esteemed and most risk-taking and original of all contemporary art museums in the US.  My arts education as a graduate student in Minnesota way back when was heavily influenced by the Walker; it was here that I first encountered Chuck Close and Robert Rauschenberg, and I remembered sitting through a screening here of Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book delirious with wonder at the craziness that Greenaway brazenly put on film (including unabashedly admiring shots of Ewan MacGregor’s, shall we say, ah, uhmmm, prodigious, non-acting, assets).  As soon as I got off the plane in Minneapolis last Wednesday, friends and random strangers were telling me to run and see the Frida Kahlo exhibition at the Walker.  So off I went, and then found out, disappointingly, that there was an hour and fifteen minute wait to get into the Kahlo galleries.  As I gazed with dismay at the sea of Minnesotans in their wool sweaters embroidered with various forms of flaura and fauna, patiently waiting, I decided, unless Salma Hayek was inside in her Frida costume and unibrow, that no way in hell would I be waiting an hour in line for anything.  So I wandered through the other Walker galleries and literally stumbled into their phenomenal, meticulously curated survey of international contemporary art called “Brave New Worlds”.  No amount of Frida, or Salma for that matter, could have been as dazzling and intellectually satisfying to me as this exhibit was.

“Brave New Worlds” takes its title from Aldous Huxley’s novel “Brave New World”, which paints a utopian world that is harmonious, prosperous, and singular, achieved at the expense of giving up individualistic thought, family, loyalty, loving relationships, art and culture.  In the Walker exhibit, 24 artists from 17 countries, working in a variety of media (painting, sculpture, drawing, video, photography, and multi-media installations) show our world today as fragmented, discordant, conflict-scarred, and as far from any concept of utopia as possible, an inversion of Huxley’s concept, but also reflective and philosophical.  As to be expected from an ambitious international contemporary art exhibit, the artists represented explore themes primarily around war and globalization, particularly focusing on the belligerent, co-dependent, and tenuous political and commercial relationships between the developed and developing worlds.  These themes are tackled both explicitly, such as in Peruvian artist Fernando Bryce’s series of ink drawings which replicates pages from international food agencies’ and lending institutions’ annual reports (which, put side by side, powerfully indicts both Third World countries’ mendicancy and the aid organizations’ distance from real-world solutions that would end hunger and poverty); and implicitly, such as in Chinese artist Zheng Guogu’s (a rising star in the international art world) iron casts of ordinary supermarket items like shampoos, baby formula, even rose medicine essence, mounted on pedestals (which I thought was an interesting take on the rapid, heady commercialization of Chinese everyday life). 

The works that particularly touched me, though, were the ones that focused on the personal impact of these large, macro, global themes.  I sat transfixed in a viewing room where three 15-minute short films by the Polish artist Artur Zmijewski were running simultaneously on three walls of the room.  The short films, named after their subjects, “Danuta”, “Dorota”, and “Halina”, followed a day in the life of these three female Polish workers, a factory worker, a supermarket check out clerk, and a laundress, from the time they woke up to the crack of dawn, through their busy day at labor-intensive jobs, through coming back home late at night and their attempts to live a well-adjusted home life in spite of financial problems.  These films movingly, but unequivocally, showed how pitifully small life for the ordinary person in Poland had improved, despite the end of Communism and membership in the European Union.  Another powerful work was the stunning multi-room, multi-media installation from Chinese artist Cao Fei entitled “Whose Utopia?”.  She filmed workers in a Siemens light-bulb factory in the Pearl River Delta (PDR), the wealthiest economic zone in China (which accounts for one third of the country’s trade value) and the model for China’s successful economic advancement.  In one room, there was a video projection of the workers completing their tasks in the factory, punctuated by a surreal acting out of a worker’s daydream (such as ballet dancing amongst rows of stacked fluorescent lights).  In the other room,there was a running video of her interviews with the workers; heartbreaking frank, and at times highly emotional, they talked about what they had to give up in order to work at mundane jobs for the sake of financial prosperity (which still continued to elude them):  family, education, dreams of relocation and emigration.  The video projections were surrounded by things that evoked the worker’s constricting dorm rooms:  bunk beds, Chinese pop star posters, cotton shirts hung on a washline.  The installation asked the obvious question of what was the personal price of economic development?  But also more critically it asked, was any kind of development or advancement worth the destruction of individual aspirations, despite how modest they were? 

Some of the pieces also baffled.  One of the more perplexing was “Talking Mirror” by the Romanian artist Mircea Cantor. A huge cowboy hat filled to the brim with used motor oil and mounted on a wooden pedestal, it was supposed to say something significant about the global politics of oil and its relationship to an individual’s inherent narcissism, or some pretentious blah blah like that.  The afternoon I was there, unfortunately, one woman was so perplexed, I guess, that she leaned in too close to the sculpture, and dipped, her, ah, long tresses into the motor oil and splattered it all over the Walker floor. As she was squeezing that junk out of her hair, she probably was kicking herself for not waiting that hour and fifteen to see Frida Kahlo instead.

“Brave New Worlds” is on exhibit at the Walker Art Center, 1750 Hennepin Avenue, Minneapolis, Minnesota, until February 17, 2008.  Here is an all-too brief conversation between NY Arts magazine and the exhibition curators, which gives a nice overview of the show.

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