History and performance are twin threads that connect artworks recently brought into the Walker collection. This notable selection from the Walker’s acquisitions includes several first works by artists being introduced into our holdings and inclusions by artists with long relationships with the Walker. Some pieces—such as a painting by Jay Heikes that collapses the artist’s biography with prehistoric cave painting and Andrea Bowers’ drawings that reanimate the voices of abortion rights activists from the '60s and '70s—address different kinds of history, from the personal to the political. Others works are more performative in nature—like Dave McKenzie’s text painting that proposes an in-gallery social exchange, a massive video installation by artist-choreographer Ralph Lemon, and a moving-image work by Hassan Khan that fills the gallery with Sha’abi dance music. This is the first installment in a regular feature on new works entering the collection.

Favoring the designation “picture object” over “photograph,” Los Angeles-based artist Elad Lassy says, “My whole practice raises the question of whether the work’s existence is image-based or object-based, or whether it can be both.” Squirrel, one of four works by Lassy acquired recently by the Walker, is scaled to the size of a magazine page. The image itself feels entirely generic, yet all of Lassry’s pictures are meticulously staged. Concerned with everyday visual tropes culled from various histories of the still and moving image, Lassry’s work redirects our attention away from the image as such to engage issues of display and circulation.

—Eric Crosby, assistant curator

Red Alert emerged from German artist and theorist Hito Steyerl’s facination with the idea that it is increasingly the images with the least information—the highly pixelated cell-phone shot of a terrorist on an airplane, or the low-resolution, barely decipherable video feeds from embedded reporters during Operation Iraqi Freedom—that convey the greatest sense of on-the-ground authenticity. The work also takes a cue from the constructivist artist Aleksander Rodchenko, who believed in 1919 that he had reached the “logical conclusion” of easel painting by applying paint monochromatically to three canvases in red, yellow, and blue. Featuring a triptych of computer monitors hung vertically side by side, each playing a loop of the same monochromatic deep red, Red Alert imagines a “logical end” to the documentary medium. But instead of replicating Rodchenko’s colors, Steyerl chose the color of highest level within the US terror alert system. The documentary form ends then not in pure abstraction so much as pure affect: reality summarized as raw political manipulation.

—Bartholomew Ryan, Assistant Curator

“This painting is a proposal. I propose we meet once every year until one of us can’t or won’t.” The ninth in an ongoing series, Jamaica-born, Brooklyn-based artist Dave McKenzie’s painting Proposal changes the function of art from an object on display to a personal interaction—a quiet, yet poignant transformation that demonstrates the latent potential of mutual desire or commitment. Bridging the distance between the artist and the viewer, the piece, like much of McKenzie’s work, operates as a modest proposal that examines our dependence on prescribed social roles and conventions while contemplating the place of the individual.

—Clara Kim, senior curator

Two working-class male archetypes of Egyptian life flail their limbs in a quintessential “dance-off” in the film Jewel by British-born, Cairo-based artist/musician Hassan Khan. Locked in an unidentified space, the two men revolve around a square disco ball moving to a soundtrack composed by Khan. This captivating work comments on the various spaces and popular cultures within the city that simultaneously unite and divide people across rigid social classes. As the two men move between moments of synchronicity and disjunction, the work begins to articulate larger questions around power struggles between classes, the cult of the male ego, and weight of a patriarchal society, as well as the bittersweet promise of overcoming difference in the search for nationhood.

—Yesomi Umolu, curatorial fellow

The primary questions that guide the works of LA-based artist Andrea Bowers are: how do we reconcile aesthetics and politics, and subsequently how can they begin to meaningfully serve each other? In her series Letters to an Army of Three (2005), Bowers created photorealist drawings replicating letters written in the 1960s and '70s to the Army of Three, a group of Bay Area abortion rights activists. “The physical act of copying each word of each letter is a phenomenological process,” says the artist. “It is a way of learning and understanding that goes beyond just reading or listening.” As such, the drawings become sites for both contemplation and activism, where binary positions of “for” or “against’ or moral dichotomies of “right” and “wrong” become detrimentally reductive and where time and labor expended have a direct personal, and political, investment.

—Yesomi Umolu, curatorial fellow

Rirkrit Tiravanija’s most ambitious print project to date, this 84-foot scroll offers a visual chronicle—rendered through collage and printmaking techniques—of the past 20 years of the artist’s life, replete with city maps, reproductions from his passport, diagrams of archaeological sites, and a variety of other references to his travels and work. He merges images of iconic artworks by Marcel Duchamp and Marcel Broodthaers, self-consciously linking his own artistic practice to the conceptualism of his predecessors. This is the most recent addition to the Walker’s near-complete archive of Tiravanija’s editioned work.

—Eric Crosby, assistant curator

A monumental two-channel video installation, Meditation uses the last six minutes of Jean Luc Godard’s 1965 science fiction film Alphaville, in which protagonist Lemmy Caution travels to a city ruled by a tyrannical computer that denies its citizens the right to basic emotional expression. Caution rescues a woman who declares her love for him in the closing line, thereby liberating human relationships from technocratic oppression. Slowed down to 18 percent of its original speed, and projected on the floor and back wall in a long sliver of light, Lemon and Findlay’s work also introduces two short sequences from Andrei Tarkovsy’s 1972 film Solaris. The immersive and sensorial piece is part of an exploration by Lemon—an artist, writer, and choreographer who has a long relationship with the Walker—of love and loss and stands as a testament to the redemptive power of life.

—Bartholomew Ryan, assistant curator

“From Val Kilmer’s portrayal of Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s The Doors to Sonic Youth’s use of a Gerhard Richter painting for cover art, I can’t help but see everything as a manipulated collective memory created by reference-heavy semiotic gaps,” writes Minneapolis-based artist Jay Heikes. It is from these gaps that his inscrutable, darkly comedic forms emerge.

In a series of so-called “cave paintings,” Heikes ironically conflates his own conceptual gestures with primeval forms of painterly expression. Created through a sedimentary layering of paper and dry pigment, each piece bears as its title the name of a known cave. Ear of Dionysius refers to an artificial limestone cave in Sicily where, according to legend, the 4th century BC Greek despot Dionysius used it to torture prisoners because its shape would amplify their screams.

—Eric Crosby, assistant curator