“Our emotional environment is poor and dangerous. Artistic work can’t change it, but it can transcribe it. It can also give an opinion, which we are never asked for.” After my recent visit to the 12th installment of the Istanbul Biennial, which closes November 13, I was struck by the overwhelming sense of nostalgia and lament that pervades this major survey of international contemporary art. Curated by…

Walker members have more fun taking advantage of  A Think & A Drink: Member Events.  Last Friday, after most of the museum shut down, we toured the exhibition Absentee Landlord, curated by John Waters.  Almost 60 of our favorite members were in attendance to celebrate the arbiter of trash! We started off the evening with a tour of the exhibition.  Below you’ll find one of our fabulous tour guides Tanya! …

Franz West’s Sitzwuste (2000) — three sausage-shaped aluminum sculptures designed as sitting spaces — are back, but with a big change. The 13-foot pieces were reinstalled on Friday on the Walker hillside near the entrance to James Turrell’s Sky Pesher. Although they don’t have the garish neon enamel they did when they were first installed in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden 11 years ago, they still…

Earlier this week, Walker assistant curator Bartholomew Ryan wrote a thoughtful piece for MPR’s State of the Arts blog about how 9/11 has influenced art making. Responding to a question posed there – “What art resonates most with you when thinking about the events of 9/11?” – Walker colleagues Dean Otto (film/video curator) and Siri Engberg and Betsy Carpenter (visual arts curators) and I selected works…

I have seen your dystopian films like Bladerunner and the one with that rich American, Christopher Lloyd, and so I argue for you to consider a contrary possibility: the future is smashing! If you have a chance to go there, seize it! Carpe diem posterum! Seize the behind of tomorrow! I can understand it might not be for everybody, but if you have a keen curiosity about — well, mostly about yourself — I think…

In order to pack in some primary research, last week I visited the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and the Cunningham Dance Foundation.  The building that houses the Rauschenberg space used to be an orphanage (St. Joseph Mission of the Immaculate Virgin), and it retains traces of this almshouse in its broad wooden stair cases, the behemoth cast iron…

These are the first two scenes from the latest stage of Pedro Reyes’ Baby Marx. The founders of communism and capitalism, Karl Marx and Adam Smith, have been brought to the future by way of a glitch-prone Smart-O-Wave magic microwave oven. Here, they explore the Walker Art Center galleries and café while the exhibition in which they feature is being installed. Expect more scenes in the upcoming weeks!

As a part of the forthcoming exhibition , which opens on Thursday, August 11, the Walker is collaborating with the University of Minnesota Political Science department to host a Town Hall-style debate that explores some of the issues embedded within the project, loosely inspired by Gil Scott-Heron’s “Comment #1″ . Moderator and event co-organizer Ben Ansell of the University of Minnesota’s Political…

As the Cunningham Collection continues to be catalogued, here are more close-ups of the aquisition items.   This week’s images focus on Antic Meet (1958), a piece that the Merce Cunningham Dance Company will present as part of their Farewell Legacy Tour at the Walker’s McGuire Theater this November 4/5/6.  Robert Rauschenberg costumed the piece with both his own designs and loot gathered from the New…