Art/Museums

When All Else Fails, Books Can Lead the Way

Filed under: Art/Museums

According to this New York Times article, it wasn’t technology or business that rejuvenated the Minneapolis Warehouse District. It was books.

Times writer Lisa Chamberlain details the decline of the "thriving flour mill district along the Mississippi River," that "later became seedy bars and flophouses," in her April 30 piece.

When a plan for a technology corridor went defunct, a collaboration between three nonprofit organizations paved the way to the area's new found development with the Open Book Literary Arts Center, the largest literary and books art hub in the U.S., Chamberlain writes.

It is not uncommon for the arts to revitalize a neighborhood, but it is certainly unusual for old-fashioned literature and books to lead the way.

Open Book Literary Art’s Center debut in May, 2000, led the way for a several other artisan groups now in the area, including the Guthrie Theater, the Mill City Museum, the Mac Phail Center for Music, Minneapolis Central library and other theaters and galleries.

More than 1,000 new residential units have been built as well as new and redeveloped commercial property, increasing the value of neighborhood property to $334 million in 2006, from an estimated $25 million in 1994, according to the Metropolitan Council, a Twin Cities regional development organization. Where a sea of parking lots once existed, there is now a parking problem.

But, if books were to lead development anywhere, it’s no surprise that it’s here in Minneapolis, the nation’s most literate city. With the Loft Literary Center providing writing classes and space for readings; the Minnesota Center for Book Arts offering equipment and space for work in letterpress printing, hand bookbinding and papermaking; and Milkweed Editions offering an opportunity to publish, the non-profit collaborative has made the world of reading, writing and publishing accessible to everyone, Chamberlain writes.

The piece is filled with other interesting tidbits about the architecture and interior design of Open Book's space along Washington Avenue between the University and downtown, and the determined work of architect Garth Rockcastle, of Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle.

"I had to convince them that the whole area was worthwhile....The neighborhood was precisely the exact center of three things: downtown Minneapolis, the University of Minnesota, and the three main highway arteries,” which was important, since few people lived in the area then.

Posted by Beth Walton at May 8, 2008 11:28 AM | Comments (0)

 

Hot Hot Heat: Students melt metal for art

Filed under: Art/Museums

Things heated up at the U of M's Regis Center for Art on Friday -- all the way up to 2,443 degrees Fahrenheit, to be exact.

A U of M metal casting class teamed up with students from other local universities in the 39th annual Iron Pour to liquidize iron and fill their homemade ceramic bowls with the scalding substance. Video and photos after the jump.

Watch this video of the process, and see a dozen or so images in the slideshow.

People padded around in heavy, fireproof wear and protective masks, waiting on a cupola, a massive cauldron, to melt the iron to the proper degree. Around every 20 minutes, when the cupola looked like it was about to erupt and spew lava all over the warehouse, a horn sounded and students gathered to empty some of its contents (around 300 lbs worth) into a contraption one student referred simply to as a "ladle." From there, students transported 100 lbs of the steaming, red-hot liquid into
a smaller ladle, and then used that to gently pour the iron over nondescript bowls the students made in the class.

"It's just like making a sandcastle," U of M senior Krista Cuellar said.

Yeah, exactly. A very scary one.

Posted by Amy Lieberman at April 18, 2008 3:24 PM | Comments (0)

 

Living the dream: Marc Bamuthi Joseph's world premiere at the Walker

Filed under: Art/Museums

In 1999, it all came together for Marc Bamuthi Joseph. It sounds cliché to say his art started with a dream, but it's nevertheless true.

In this case, the dream is literal rather than figurative. That night the sleeping Joseph – a national poetry slam champion – found his dream-self trying to relate something to his father. “He wouldn't listen to me unless I was dancing,” Joseph remembers.

So he woke up and wrote a piece – and started moving along with it. The piece was called “For Pop.” Ever since, the artist has been experimenting with interdisciplinary work, art that combines theater, dance, spoken word, poetry, music and film.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph in a photo by Umi Vaughan. See more photos by Vaughan and by Ward Rubrecht in the slideshow.

Tonight, his residency at the Walker Art Center culminates with a world premiere of Joseph's latest work, the break/s. A fusion of hip-hop poetry with other artistic elements, the break/s finds Joseph combining his gifts with turntablist DJ Excess and beatboxer Tommy Shepherd a.k.a. Soulati.

Inspired by the globalization of hip-hop culture and Jeff Chang's American Book Award winner Can't Stop Won't Stop, the break/s aims to mix various elements into a unified whole. The performance is intentional about both form and content, bringing hip-hop to the stage in an innovative way. Joseph calls it “a mixtape for the stage.”

The work is as high-concept as it is engaging. Joseph hopes to take the audience on a journey across geography, across time, and through waking space and dreamspace – a metaphorical journey similar to the one he took himself almost 10 years ago. And like hip-hop, which blends disparate elements into distinct new works, Joseph hopes to catch the audience up in the journey.

“This is not Guys and Dolls; it's not meant for people to just sit down and be entertained,” Joseph says. “There is, hopefully, high entertainment value – but it's art meant to engage.”

Marc Bamuthi Joseph's show the break/s premieres tonight, Thursday April 10, at 8 p.m. in the William and Nadine McGuire Theater at the Walker. The work also plays April 11 and 12 at 8 p.m.

Posted by Jeff Shaw at April 10, 2008 8:28 AM | Comments (0)

 

Art attacks the suburbs, making it cooler

One needs to look no further than the Norling Photos at the Minnesota Historical Society or the Worlds Away exhibit at the Walker to see that the suburbs can serve as a prolific creative muse. Those that venture out to the fair town of Roseville this Saturday night will be treated to a hip evening of culture when Grumpy’s (2801 Snelling Ave. N.) hosts “Art Attack on the Suburbs.”

A lot will be happening at this shindig, including a mural unveiling of two massive 18-foot tall stencil murals by John Grider, whose previous work includes a wide variety of rock show posters, as well as the Nomad World Pub mural pictured above. The subject of these dual pieces are described as the beer history of St. Paul and Minneapolis (Grain Belt will most likely be making an appearance in the Minneapolis mural). You can check out John Grider’s work here. Also on hand will be the super-popular artist, and Ox-Op Gallery regular, Shag. His playful and boldly-colored designs will be on display and on sale (in limited quantities). Check out his work here. Rounding out the night will be DJ host Lori Barbero of Babes in Toyland, and a screening of the HAZE-XXL and Dalek collaboration, Purge of Dissidents. Click here for more info on Purge. The event is free, and happens between the hours of 10 p.m. and 2 a.m.

Posted by Jessica Armbruster at March 29, 2008 6:06 AM | Comments (0)

 

Come for the painter's wife, stay for the bricklayer

Filed under: Art/Museums

In the offices of the Weinstein Gallery on West 46th Street, there toils a man who should be paid by the governor--or at least the mayor--as an essential public servant. On the walls of the gallery hang a collection of photographs by the legendary German photographer August Sander's People of the 20th Century project, which Martin Weinstein worked three years to obtain. He'll sell them, sure (the prints are going for $7-15 thousand). But mostly, he wants you to see them.

And you really have to see them. August Sander is hardly an obscure figure in 20th Century photography. But I assure you, if you've seen these photographs before, you've never seen them like this. And if you've never seen them like this, you may never have the chance again. The prints are from the original negatives, some of them nearly 90 years old. They survived three years in an underground storage facility in Nazi Gemany during World War II. They emerged a bit scarred, and primitive touch-up techniques are not difficult to spot. It's the forensic evidence of the kind of lives these and countless other early 20th Century negatives have lived--and a reminder of how lucky we are to have them at all.

Photo: Die Photographische Sammlung/SK-Stiftung Kultur –
August Sander Archive, Cologne; ARS New York, 2008.

The new prints were hand selected by Weinstein and printed by Sander's grandson Gerd, who apprenticed in his grandfather's darkroom and made these prints using the precise specifications adhered to by Sander in the 20's and 30's.

The prints are large and the subjects are impossibly vivid--all those incredibly strange and almost mythical people: the bricklayer, the gypsy, the painter, and the painter's wife (go just for this photo, seriously). If you stare at them long enough, I swear you can see them drawing breath and even blinking.

Photo: Die Photographische Sammlung/SK-Stiftung Kultur –
August Sander Archive, Cologne; ARS New York, 2008.

Almost as remarkable as the photos themselves is the fact that this is the first ever solo exhibit by August Sander in the United States (the revered German photographer died in 1964). And for this, my fellow Minnesotans, we must thank Mr. Weinstein--because, at least for a few weeks, you don't have to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see a Sander print. You merely need to make your way to Weinstein Gallery on West 46th Street (there is always parking right in front) and push open the door. Most likely, you'll be alone in the space and surrounded by the paper-people who Sander, so many years ago, labored to see "as they are and not as they should or could be." You've got until April 12th friends. It's always free. Don't miss this one.

Posted by Jeff Severns Guntzel at March 12, 2008 11:46 AM | Comments (0)

 

Art, public dissent, and technology with Graffiti Research Lab founder James Powderly

Graffiti Research Lab is a revolutionary group founded by James Powderly and Evan Roth. Through special events, workshops, a public blog, and field research with graffiti artists they have created new and innovative technologies, all of which they make available to the public. Two of these innovations include the LED throwy, a magnetic device that can be used to attach lights to metal surfaces, and the laser trolley, a machine that can be pulled behind a bike and used to project art and political statements on any surface. In town this week to chat on electronic art and technology, James Powderly took a moment to discuss GRL with City Pages.

City Pages: When I think of art and political activism, I don’t necessarily think of technological advances. How did you and Evan come up with the idea to integrate all three of these things?

James Powderly: Well, we were technologists in various industries. I worked in an aerospace robotics guild and Evan was an architect. We didn’t necessary take straight paths, but eventually we found our way into these sort of techy mainstream jobs, and then for various reasons we became disillusioned. Mine reasons were related to the machine of war that turned my NASA job into a military gig, and with Evan, he was frustrated with communities overrun with a style of architecture that didn’t seem to humanize that community; really quite the opposite. When we quit those jobs, I literally felt I had a grudge to bear against dominant culture.

CP: Has your mission statement changed over the years?

JP: Yeah, absolutely. Evan had a specific interest in graffiti because he had moved to NYC, and was a photographer of it. I had a similar experience. A lot of it for me was this idea that my colleagues believed that technology was neutral; that we were just coming up with generalist solutions to these tech problems that could be implemented for good or bad later down the road, but we had very little say in it. Graffiti technology is not neutral. People are either for or against it. Eventually, I could finally convince my friends that technology isn’t neutral. Finding a way to record painting a wall with a fire extinguisher, that’s not neutral: To the City of New York that’s bad, and for graffiti artists that’s good. I was really into that; that moment when my colleagues realized it’s not neutral, technology has a lot to do with the client it’s being made for. Over time I have grown to love graffiti art more, and I see graffiti artists and writers as hackers of the city. They’re so clever and self-practitioners. We’ve been able to help out with the graffiti community, and technology does have a place in the community. There are pros to laser graffiti: you’re in a legal grey area, you could make a more publicly outrageous statement, you didn’t have to hide behind a bandanna.

CP: Have you had problems creating art legally in public spaces? I know in the past taggers like Mike Baca have faced serious jail time for tagging. Is it risky when much of your work is documented and blogged?

JP: We’re in a fortunate position in an unfortunate reality of society: we’re graffiti artists of a certain age that are white. We really don’t even call ourselves graffiti artists, we think of ourselves as graffiti engineers or research scientists. Around the world, were they do get busted fined, but here in NYC the lines are very racially divided. We have the opportunity, to do this as an art practice and walk away from it in most cases. As we’ve gotten larger, we do get fined for various things, politicians speak out against us, saying the city should boycott the universities we teach at. Our graffiti artist friends will come out for a New York Times photo shoot, and they’re artists, even minor celebrities. But then the next day they’re arrested by the NYPD. We spend a lot of time in courts for our friends trying to figure out how the system works. A lot of our efforts have gone towards fundraising for them. Some are facing serious jail sentences. Our friend Mike got out after three months. He had to stand trial for 42 counts indictment. It could have been 7 years in jail. Now he gets to clean things up at a reduced cost to his life, and the tax payer. So, we’re not taking the same risk-level as our peers, but they respect us for our devotion and fandom of what they do.

CP: Tell me a little bit about the LED throwies.

JP: We had all these parts on a table, and we started conjecturing on what would be a good way to get things up quickly in the city, like an electrograph. With magnets, we could do something. It really was about the magnet as an attachment element. It could have been silly, like: Finally, art that makes the city look better. Instead, we used LED and threw them up. The obvious next step was to make a lot of them and put them up on a building. The end result was socially interesting. It’s not permanent, so people weren’t afraid to get involved because it’s not creating permanent damage. It’s the idea that if you give people a tool that removes some of the stigma of modifying their own environment, they participate and are involved. It’s just the stigma of graffiti that prevents people from wanting to reclaim their local environment in that way.

CP: How about the laser trolley? That contraption just seems made for something like Critical Mass.

JP: We were lucky enough to live in NY and watch what happened around the RNC, and both Evan and I are bike riders. The bike is sometimes interpreted as a tool of mischief and mayhem, Critical Mass being an example. It is an empowering tool. Technology is also empowering. Bikes organize mobility through the city. We thought that if we set the laser tag up on a bike, we could provide it to people in general. It’s sort of like how libraries provide books: You come in, you get tutored on how to use the system, go out with the interns, then use it for your own reason, be it political or artistic. We have loaned it out to 20-25 different organizations from pro-Palestine protest activists (Electronic Palestine), fringe group 9-11 Truth, and student artists that don’t usually have access to technology that use it for things like whimsical games in public spaces, to protest related activities, like projecting the line to which the sea level will rise by 2010 in NYC. These people have had relatively peaceful experiences with the technology.

CP: Obviously, you put your technology out there for the general public, but do you ever worry about certain aspects of your work being co-opted by marketing and advertising companies?

JP: Any artist practicing something—especially with street culture—they just have to deal with the fact that it is going to be stolen. They have to decide how they are going to spend their time. We’re lucky that we never really had to make that decision. We started Graffiti Research Lab at a place called the EyeBeam OpenLab (the group is currently housed at FATLAB), which is a non-profit that required all our work be public domain. So, when we got this fellowship we signed contracts that said we wouldn’t use proprietary license on any technology, and it would be available to the public. We wanted to work in the public domain, it’s an unrestricted way of distributing your information. Anyone can use our technology, even for commercial purposes. We took that stance because don’t want to spend out time in courts battling for or against our work, we don’t want to restrict access because we want to create. It wouldn’t make sense to create these things and not have it available for free, because then we’d just be a business. We also wanted to introduce graffiti to the public in a way they could get involved. So, we offer it to people, and corporations get access to it as well.

CP: What new and exciting things are GRL up to nowadays?

JP: We’ve been doing a lot of events recently. We had an opening at the MoMA, and used to laser tag inside. We realized during our friend Mike’s trial that to be able to say you had esthetic intent when you made something is a difference between a misdemeanor and a felony in NY. Basically, a judge gets to decide that. So, we figured if we had as many people from the graffiti community as possible come and use the system in the MoMA, they would be able to show that they in fact are considered artists by a mainstream art establishment. Now our crew and friends have documented photography if they should ever get in trouble.

CP: Tell me a little bit about the bike ride and any plans you have here for the Twin Cities.

JP: Ali Momeni has procured through the university a grant big enough to make three mobile broadcast units. He’s interested in having these platforms that are basically a mobile cinema, just point it at a wall and use it. With the RNC coming, he saw an opportunity to use it not only for students, but it has practical potential during the RNC. So he’s building these bikes that we’ll use for laser tag during our time here.

Come hang with Jim Powderly and others from Graffiti Research Lab at the Spark Festival. He’s giving a free lecture 12:30 p.m. Wednesday, February 27 at the Regis Center for the Art (405 21st Ave. S., Minneapolis), followed by a bike tour at 5 p.m. later that day. For a complete schedule of Spark Festival events, click http://spark.cla.umn.edu. Graffiti Research Lab’s blog is located here.

Posted by Jessica Armbruster at February 26, 2008 3:50 PM | Comments (1)

 

YouTube video tackles 35W collapse

Filed under: Art/Museums

Come on, children, all together now:

"I-35 is falling down/ falling down/ falling down/I-35 is falling down/My dear Pawlenty."

So the song goes when uttered from the lips of Carter Malouf, a Minneapolis native and sophomore at Washington University in St. Louis.

Malouf composed the lyrics, designed the more than decent illustrations and worked the camera for her 2-minute video, now posted on YouTube. It documents the story of the I-35W bridge and its collapse in August through a very unlikely manner -- Malouf's voice is sugary sweet, in a strung out/mildly disturbed kind of way, but her blunt lyrics ("We need to fix this bridge/but there's no money") are only more depressing when contrasted with the classic children's rhyme.

There are some phrases that don't translate fluidly into sing-a-long format -- consider harmonizing on the words "structurally deficient" -- but Malouf's video is definitely worth a peek. And as some of the comments viewers posted include "Rad!" and "Great vid!" other people seem to think the same.

Posted by Amy Lieberman at February 25, 2008 4:01 PM | Comments (1)

 

Phil Hansen's Valentine's Day Goodbye Art

Filed under: Art/Museums

Phil Hansen, the artist we profiled earlier this month, has a charming new piece up. It's a song and video, "the ABC's of Love."

After you watch it, check out Hansen's blog, where he describes getting the idea, soliciting submissions for the original ABC poem, and creating the workspace where he'd film the moving Sweetarts.

Posted by Jeff Shaw at February 14, 2008 10:45 AM | Comments (0)

 

Print Art for $5 (but no bag of chips)

Filed under: Art/Museums

Is that Pulp Fiction poster you bought at a college art fair and taped up now crumpled and barely clinging to the wall? Are you too lazy to paint over the smudge left in the dining room where your kid threw lime Jell-o at you from a high chair? Perhaps you sit at your computer, staring at a blank wall while desperately waiting for creative inspiration to come. I daresay it sounds like you need some art, art that will cover the unsightly, replace the lameness, or really tie together a room. Low on funds? No problem!

This Saturday from 6:00 p.m. to 11:30 p.m., Grumpy’s Bar (1111 Washington Ave S., Minneapolis) will be hosting Aesthetic Apparatus’ Kindling & Litter-Box-Liner Sale. Sort of like a warehouse clothing sale (but in a bar), posters with slight misprints (mostly undetectable to human eyes) will be available for $5—the price of your average pint. Some of the items up for sale include gig show posters that had previously sold out, as well as other items. So, not only will you be supporting local print artists, but you can also add a little culture to your fine living establishment. Check out what Aesthetic Apparatus has been up to here.

Posted by Jessica Armbruster at February 8, 2008 6:06 PM | Comments (0)

 

Dictators, Disasters, and Cheez Logs: The Art of Phil Hansen

Filed under: Art/Museums

On the morning I drive out to Eden Prairie to meet Phil Hansen, there is a virtual white-out. Powdery snow snakes across a windy Highway 5. Large, remarkably similar houses line the cul-de-sacs and residential streets that seem to be forever doubling back on themselves, leading only to more houses -- or are those the same houses I just passed by?

After my editor viewed some of Hansen’s darker works on-line, he only half-jokingly suggested phoning in the interview or, at the very least, taking a friend with me. The large portrait of Kim Jong Il that Hansen did in his own blood and another of the Gary Ridgway, the Green River serial killer, are the two pieces that piqued his concern. Today I have opted to go it alone, and as I watch the houses scroll past the window, the only fear I have is that I will become permanently lost in suburban malaise.

Little do I know how lucky I am today. In his temporary basement studio, Hansen has carved out an anti-malaise space. Each piece is more complex than it first appears. It is impossible to resist the pull of his work. The surface images are adept and often attractive, but you also have to look beneath the surface. What at first glance is about dictators and death turns out to be a touching remembrance of the victims.

The “canvas” of the Kim Jong Il portrait, for example, is comprised of hundreds of bandages folded so that only the gauzy part is exposed. They look like small tiles. The “frame” of the portrait is made of band-aids, face down overlapping each other, lending them a flesh-like appearance. Yes, the portrait is made with Hansen’s own blood, which he had his MD sister-in-law draw for him, but as he pointed out on a recent Yahoo interview, “Five hundred cc's of blood seems like a lot, but it's just nothing. I don't even have scars on my arms from it.” The subtext is that what he did for the piece is nothing compared to the amount that North Koreans have suffered under the dictator’s reign.

***

Hansen greets me at the door of his brother’s large corner house where he currently lives. Fair-skinned and lightly freckled, he looks younger than his 28 years and not nearly the type one would expect to be the creator behind such seemingly dark works. He wears his hair in a slick, spikey faux-hawk. Together with his wide, bright blue eyes this calls to mind Tintin, the plucky hero of the French comic books by Hergé. The living area behind him is remarkably clean and white, in a very unartist-like way. Must be his brother’s doing, I think, but it turns out his brother has been out of the country for four months. Hansen moved from his home state of Washington into his brother’s house in 2006 with for a two year hiatus to work on his art and see where it would go.

Hansen’s basement domain is almost as organized as the rest of the house. On a large table in his bedroom, posters and postcards of Hansen’s work are arranged in tidy piles next to a black plastic shelving unit full of the shipping supplies Hansen uses to fill his internet orders. He explains, laughing, “This used to be my bedroom. It’s kind of changed.”

The room next door is where Hansen works most of the time. There’s a computer on a desk in the corner, where he surfs the net, keeps his website updated, and edits and uploads files onto YouTube, the site that has become Hansen’s cyber-gallery—apropos for an aught generation artist. One wall is covered in scribbled portraits that Hansen has penciled for his latest project. A box light squats on the floor in the corner with a large negative of Hansen himself. In another corner, a web cam is pointed at a large piece of brightly-lit white paper on the wall, which is white with small bruises of black paint, evidence of a portrait of Bruce Lee that Hansen karate chopped using the paint-covered edge of his hand against a large paper canvas. A large table with scraps of paper sits next to a bookshelf next to the door. Amongst other flotsam and jetsam on the shelves is a small round brick of partially burnt matches which I initially mistake for a moldy cupcake. It’s a remnant from a piece that he set on fire. The white room is well lit, ready for Hansen to film for YouTube, even late at night when he gets much of his work done. The Beastie Boys rap eloquent through computer speakers.

The main room of the basement is full of Hansen’s work. Some pieces fill entire walls. There is no way to comprehend the scale of his work from just looking at it on YouTube. The low ceiling, stark lighting, and white walls and carpet lend an eerie feel to his already eerie subjects: the aforementioned North Korean dictator, the serial killer, a group of Ku Klux Klansmen, and George W. Bush. A box full of crumpled portraits, some with their eyes x-ed out – detritus from yet another project -- completes the scene.

Like the Kim Jong Il piece, the work acknowledges those who have suffered at the hands of the subject. The Bush portrait is made of the names of each of the American soldiers that died in Iraq as of April 30th, 2005. The Green River killer portrait is similarly made of the individual portraits of the women that Gary Ridgeway killed. But rather than paying homage to a killer, the piece is much more about remembering his victims and what brought them all together. As his father, Jerry Hansen, recalls, “I was with him one time when he displayed that in Seattle and he had a social worker come up to it and basically say she was real glad somebody remembered the people who were his victims. He had another person come up who had known a couple of the victims and was real glad they were remembered too.”

The KKK piece is made of pages of the bible shrunk and magnified to create shades of grey from black to white. The companion piece is a huge sheet of paper covered in bible verses that, when backlit, reveal a portrait of Rosa Parks created by layering the verses to make black or white space.

“When I started these pieces the idea was at that time everything that you read in American media [about] Islam was just negative. And like any religion, there has to be positive. There has to be. So for me, these two pieces are about society, hopefully, being able to reflect and say, ‘in our past, yes, there was a time where our Christian ideal did have these two major opposing sides to it.’ And hopefully being able to look at it, recognize it and apply that to other cultures, other people that we don’t necessarily understand.” Hansen is, himself, a self-described agnostic.

Not all of Hansen’s projects attempt to encompass such hefty ideas. He is perhaps best known on YouTube for his “Goodbye Art” series -– art that is impermanent and created, mostly, for on-line viewing. The idea was to “make a new piece each weekend, with a different theme each month, without concern for the extreme detail and absolute perfection.” He’s made pieces out of leaves, pinecones, snow, Oreos, candles, individually painted matches, chalk and other media that won’t necessarily last or that he intentionally destroys. He isn’t shy about sharing his process with his viewers. In fact, many of the YouTube videos focus on the process.

Some of the pieces are decidedly gimmicky, especially for such a high concept artist, and Hansen doesn't count all among his best work. But “Goodbye Art” has garnered a lot of hits on YouTube. A lot. The picture of a Buddhist monk in Vietnam self immolating made out of Oreo cookies got over 73,000 hits. The portrait of a soldier which he made by x-raying a box filled with sand attracted over 109,000 hits. In keeping with the idea of impermanence behind “Goodbye” art, he shredded the final image and destroyed the box.

The piece inspired one marriage proposal and a discussion (yes, an actual discussion) on YouTube about art and the importance of the process; why an artist might destroy their work rather than try to make money off of it, for example.

Another hit-generating piece of impermanent art was the portrait of Jimi Hendrix that Hansen made out of matchsticks. He painstakingly painted each one in red, black, and white before setting the whole thing on fire. This earned well over a million video views and over four thousand comments (and likely over four thousand uses of the word “awesome” or “awesomeness”).

The Hendrix piece illustrates another facet of Hansen, and shows that YouTube has proved to be an ideal training ground for an artist who wants “to make art that Joe Shmoe -- who would walk past a gallery and think absolutely nothing about walking past and maybe wouldn’t even look at the window -- that that person can look at my work and actually sort of be surprised that they liked it, they get it, they don’t know why, but they connect with it in some way.” In addition to the accessibility of the YouTube videos, Hansen’s boy-next-store approachability in his videos is also one of the reasons for his success. Fewer people would want to watch a video featuring a moody, seemingly unapproachable creator. As Hansen explains, “people ask, ‘Oh, so you’re an artist?’ I usually say, ‘no.’ I mean, I do art. Do I call myself an artist? I don’t know. I had this idea of people who call themselves an artists – it’s a construed idea, of course, but… I don’t fit my own idea of an artist.”

And yet there’s tension inherent in Hansen’s aspirations because, on the other hand, he also wants “to make art that’s technically detailed, that’s intricate, that has multiple layers that you can tell there’s a process behind everything. So people that are really into art can appreciate it as well.” He is trying to find the balance between those. It was a hard balance to strike, working full-time as an x-ray technician. He was getting lots of hits on his videos and advertising agencies were starting to notice him.

Hansen began putting more pressure on himself to create more challenging and adept work. He was spending three and four days a week on small pieces of “Goodbye Art” that were, initially, meant to just get his creative juices flowing. He had little time left for big projects and rushing his smaller pieces meant that he was posting increasingly, in his opinion, sup-par work. “It just kind of got to the point where I didn’t want to put something out that the end product was crap.”

After three months of “Goodbye Art,” he stopped it. “I had some fun ideas, but nothing that I would ever say represents my art. It was fun.”

Jia Liu, a fellow photographer and graduate student at Carlson, watched Hansen through the “Goodbye Art” project. “I told him that small projects are fine but you shouldn’t force yourself to do that every week.” Liu was concerned that Hansen would end up just producing “trash.” The “Goodbye Art” was limiting Hansen. “I think as an artist,” Liu explains, “you should become quiet with your art and what comes up to your mind, you should work on it no matter if it’s a big project or a small project; you shouldn’t limit yourself.”

His final “Goodbye Art” piece in 2007 was a 7-foot-by-12-foot portrait that he made by rubbing the grease from a large order of MacDonald’s French fries on a piece of white paper, making it nearly translucent and revealing the black paper behind. “I loved the picture in a way,” he explains, “but it was kind of out of my norm. It wasn’t photorealistic. It was very simple but it kind of had this grotesque feel to it. I was just so unsatisfied and unhappy with the whole thing. I just said screw it. I put it up and then that was the end of it.”

***

“Goodbye Art” as a means to stimulate creativity hardly seems to be necessity for Hansen; the man remains a fount of ideas.

The first time we meet in early December, he has an idea for a series of photographs about the California wildfires. He’s about to take a trip to San Diego where Jeremiah, a friend of his who had to be evacuated during the fires, lives. He wants to find a spot that was hit by the fires and take two pictures of his friend. In one, Jeremiah will be painted entirely in black and shot from behind. In the next, he will turn around to reveal his front, which will be painted entirely in red.

The project is rooted in Hansen’s fascination with how the media can cover an event or tragedy or some sort of devastation to a saturation point, but as soon as the event seems over will move on to the next tragedy -- forgetting that any sort of devastation has an aftermath. The original California project has led to other ideas for more pairs of photographs of subjects camouflaged into and then set in stark contrast to their “natural” settings.

He also has a larger piece in the works. “In my personal opinion, [it’s] my biggest project to date in terms of technical [matters] as well as the involvement with it. I think the reaction to it – depending on where it’s shown, depending on how it’s viewed, I think the reaction to it might be a bit harsh, but I think that’ll be from people who don’t really sit and think about it.”

But Hansen resists actually articulating what the project entails. When I ask him about it, he grows quiet, pensive. It’s not that he is unable to talk about his work; it’s that he doesn’t really like to talk about his work until after it’s complete. “I’m very critical of myself and if I tell somebody what I’m working on and they don’t react well, I spend way too much time dealing on why they might have reacted that way. I spend too much time thinking about other people’s reactions.”

A week or so later, I witness this phenomenon in person.

I meet Hansen again for a cup of coffee in a dimly-lit Uptown coffeeshop. He’s wearing a grey and black tessellation zip-up hoodie, his winter-time trademark gear. His first announcement is that he’s brought back “Goodbye Art.” (“Hello Goodbye?” the YouTube consumers comment.) The decision was in part born out of basic need. Hansen makes no money from his YouTube videos, but they do drive a lot of traffic to his website where he sells posters and fine art prints of his work. “Now I kind of realize the power of ten to twenty thousand people a week looking at my videos.” In fact, he was selling so many posters before he stopped “Goodbye Art” that he was able to scale down his x-ray job to part time -- which, in turn, has given him more time to do these smaller projects.

The hiatus was a learning experience for him. First, he was surprised that no one seemed to notice that he had stopped the project. “People didn’t say anything -- [and] I was absolutely shocked. I’m putting a piece out every week roughly, and then all of the sudden, I totally cut out. I don’t say anything about it and I get no e-mails from anyone asking what’s going on, where’s it going. It’s like a TV show – it’s gone and you forget about it.”

Taking a break also gave him perspective on the potential for “Goodbye Art.” “For me, it’s good and bad. It’s bad because if I’m not feeling it, I’m going to force something that shouldn’t be forced. But the idea of creating something every week, it expanded my thinking in ways. It pushed me to develop new ideas – to push boundaries and different things that were personal boundaries.” Not art boundaries, he qualifies. “Just personal things I didn’t feel comfortable with. I’m like, you know what, if I’m not comfortable with it? Screw it. I’m going to do it.”

He came back to it reinvigorated. In the first piece, he took a hike in the woods with a hundred dollars worth of Cheez Whiz, found a log with an interesting shape to it and covered the log in the bright orange substance. The project, the video, and the picture of the end product that he took was about more than just a clever Christmas-time pun (although there was that too).

“Cheese is natural,” Hansen explains. “Cheez – that kind of thing out of a can -- is not exactly natural, but it’s still considered cheese. And so when I look at the photograph, I see something that’s supposed to be natural, supposed to be wholesome in a natural setting and, I tell you, it looks so unnatural. It stands out obnoxiously.” Hansen was pleased with the photograph of his Cheez log and surprised to find that when he walked to the opposite side of the lake, nearly a half mile away, he was still able to see the glowing orange processed product against the snowy backdrop. He posted the video on YouTube. “Goodbye Art” was back.

Hansen received comments that he was not expecting.

“The Web is what the Web is and people were flat out giving their harsh opinions. ‘This is the worst thing [you]’ve ever done.’ ‘It’s not art, it’s just covering up a log with cheese.’ If I went out in the woods and made a picture of a face with Cheez, the same people would be like, ‘That’s great.’ But no, they wouldn’t have any of it.”

Hansen is admittedly sensitive to criticism, but I am flabbergasted when I go to check out the comments on YouTube and find that 95% of the comments are laudatory at least and neutral at worst. The piece has stimulated conversations about art. Viewers find humor in the piece. The Web is what the Web is -- and it definitely gets much worse. Hansen has extremely high expectations of himself and his art. His perception of the on-line reaction to the piece has led him to take a temporary break from responding to the comments, something that he did with all of his other work.

Those few who did have negative comments about the Cheez log were, perhaps, offended because the piece seemingly showcased less of Hansen’s astounding technical talent, which he has in spades. In fact, one of the things that drove Hansen away from Northwest College of Art in Washington after just two quarters was the lack of technical instruction. “For the first two quarters, all they taught us was the stuff I learned in introduction art in high school. So it was depressing.” His only real regret is that he missed out on learning how to negotiate the art world, how to approach galleries, and get his work off of the Web and out into the rest of the world.

His technical skills extend beyond making photorealistic portraits out of unusual substances. In order to do what he does, he must also be skilled in photography, lighting, filming, and editing. His YouTube videos are short narratives in which the climax is the creation of a compelling piece of art.

A few weeks after we first meet, Hansen e-mails me the rough copies of his California wildfires project. The results are striking. In the first piece, his friend Jeremiah stands naked with his back to the camera and his body painted entirely black. The setting is a rocky landscape with sparse, dead, blackened trees set against an almost white sky. The shine of the black paint on Jeremiah’s skin is mirrored in the ashy black shine of the nearby boulders. He is at once a piece of the scenery and apart from it. In the second picture, Jeremiah is facing toward the camera and painted bright red. Something about the paint around his eyes makes him look like a satyr or some other mythical creature in a post-apocalyptic world.

Hansen clearly soaks up the world visually. He is able to give it back to viewers ten-fold. It makes sense that he spends his working hours holed up in the x-ray room, serving, in a sense, as the eyes of the surgeons repairing broken limbs in the operating room.

Technical skill aside, what is evident in Hansen’s work is that his has an ability to focus that borders on obsession. He spent days and days painting matchstick heads for the Jimi Hendrix piece. (Only to light and burn them up.) His larger pieces often require such precision and planning that it is clear that none of Hansen’s art happens by accident. In 1400 Celsius, Hansen constructed a series of two by fours to look like the frame of a house. He then charred the wood to create the picture of a fireman that is only visible from a single point of view.

His father remembers that Hansen’s focus has been with him since childhood. “He would be focused on what he wanted to do and he could be very emphatic about what he wanted to do. He was always pretty intense, pretty focused kind of kid.”

Hansen's photography friend, Liu, echoes the observation. “He wants to put a lot, a lot into art – I can’t sacrifice as much as he can. I really appreciate that. He can spend tons of money or he can [be] in his workroom without a break for like twenty hours in a row. He’s a kind of crazy person.”

***

The Internet serves as a way for Hansen to get exposure -- he’s been featured on Yahoo and CNN – and without it he would probably be toiling away in obscurity. But Hansen uses the Web to not only share his art, but as a way to create art. A way of building connections between people, too.

Some of his work has been interactive and global in a way that would be impossible without the web. To take one small, playful example, he invited visitors to his website to fill in a maze. The completed maze revealed a picture of Hansen. He then asked those who completed the maze to take a picture of themselves with the portrait and send it back to him. He received pictures from all over the world including Australia, Netherlands, Denmark, Holland, the Philippines, and Korea.

In projects like these, Hansen has used the Web for heightened social interaction, sometimes intense and sometimes whimsical. He’s taken every sociologist, psychologist, and anthropologist whose greatest fear is that the Internet will only serve to further alienate and isolate people and proven them wrong.

A much larger scale work is Hansen’s “A Moment.” For this piece, Hansen took a week off of work and camped out in his brother’s garage, ordering in food and only left the “studio” for bathroom breaks. He put a video on-line asking that people call his cell phone with memories of the moment that changed their lives.

Hansen spent the week fielding phone calls, taking notes, condensing the stories into single sentences and then adding them to a 120 inch wide rotation circular canvas. The words and letters formed single spots that, when completed, formed a picture of Hansen’s face surrounded by hands. He spoke with 600 people from as far away as Botswana, Russia, and Germany. It would be enough to sit in a garage for a week transcribing stories, but even before Hansen could begin fielding phone calls he was working on the project. He had to assemble a rotating canvas that could then be taken down so that it could be safely transported and shown in places other than his brother’s garage. His father recalls phone conversations about setting up the wheel. “He was doing a lot of exploration and learning about pillow blocks for axles and related kinds of things. And it was stuff that I knew he knew nothing about, but he got into and really got into learning about it because it was necessary to be able to make that big rotating picture.”

Hansen won’t share the memory that he would have contributed, but it is evident that the project was profound for him. Hansen realized that, details aside, our moments are not entirely our own.

Each person’s submitted moment was hardly unique. “We look at everyone and see ourselves as so different and judge people and racial divides, social divides --- those don’t really exist – we force them, we make them in our lives, but they’re not really there.” It calls to mind the story of the woman whose child dies and who goes to the Buddha to ask him to bring her child back. He says he can and he will if she brings him a mustard seed from a house that does has never known her kind of suffering. She asks at every household in the village, but to no avail. Suffering is one universal.

Hansen vividly remembers talking to a 22 year old woman who, at 14, was homeless, living in a car with her mother. It was her life-defining moment and today, not being homeless, she tries to help those who are. “But occasionally,” explains Hansen, “she judges people. And it shocks her. 'Did I really just think that about this person that was in the same situation I was at some point'?

His hope is that “A Moment” will have a similar effect on viewers. “I want someone to look at this project, walk up to it, read something and say, I’ve experienced the same thing. I’ve been there.” He taps the table with his finger for emphasis. “To not know the details, but to know that somebody went through the exact same thing. That was kind of an eye-opener. That means everything in my life that I go through is unique in my own life in same way – but someone else has gone through the exact same thing – it’s been worse in different situation and I need to look at it and recognize it. It brought out so much more how similar we all are.”

As diverse and varied as Hansen’s work is, one of the themes that runs through all of it is the ways in which individual stories and lives are interconnected. His piece “Influences” was one of his early YouTube videos that got a lot of attention. He coated his chest and stomach with layer upon layer of paint. Each new layer was a picture of someone or something that influenced him. After huffing paint fumes for the two days it took to complete all thirty images, he peeled off the paint in a single sheet and cut a silhouette of his head, replete with distinctive faux-hawk.

Georges Seurat had his layer as did an ex-girlfriend who encouraged him to get back into art. His high school art teacher was symbolized with a sunflower and the band Korn had their moment on Hansen’s chest. The picture of a dog represents a co-workers pooch who spent his days in a doggie day-care equipped with webcams. Owners could log in from any computer and check up on their best friend. Seeing his co-worker do this inspired Hansen to buy a webcam, which he used to record the piece.

Experience, like art, has layers, and Hansen is conscious of how he represents each of the experiences that brought his project to this point.

“That project wouldn’t have existed without that dog, without that experience and so I had to include the dog in the thing – ‘cause it wouldn’t be there,” Hansen explains. “Kevin Snipes from Yahoo, that was the first piece he ever saw and that was what got him to do the story, which is what got CNN to do their story, which – all of that adds together to this conversation.”

Posted by Rhena Tantisunthorn at February 6, 2008 11:41 PM | Comments (1)

 

Twist and Create: Intermedia Arts' record-setting lovefest

Filed under: Art/Museums

How often do you get the chance to play Twister, set a world record, and do world-class wooing all at once? Intermedia Arts made it happen Saturday night.

The multidisciplinary arts organization on Lyndale's "Love Rox" event, an early paean to Valentine's Day, brought all these elements together and more in a showcase of what local artists can accomplish in the service of beauty, truth, and having a good time.

Heart-clad women flitted about, drawing participants to the Twister arena. More photos by Ward Rubrecht in the slideshow.

The constant of the evening was the marathon Twister event, where for six hours volunteers stretched their limbs in an attempt to set a world record. While no such longest-Twister-game record currently occupies the Guinness Book, you have to think the record people will be impressed that the attempt involved Minnesota Roller Girls including Marilyn Monrogue, Soylent Mean and Betty Bruiser.

Later, Bruiser and Mean served as judges, while Monrogue joined Dottie Hazzard on emcee duties. Among others spotted twisting on the main stage were Jacob Roske and Bianca Pettis of Beatrix*JAR, local circuit benders extraordinaire.

While Twister is all about love, Love Rox wasn't all about Twister. Splayed throughout the space were opportunities to view and participate in creative expression of one kind or another for the 200-some attendees, many of whom could be found grooving to various musical performances during the course of the evening.

Visitors also brought their lips to a kissing booth for the Smooch Project. Photographer Bonnie Fournier is attempting to document 10,000 exhibition-quality images of the simple, powerful expression of affection. While you waited, craft supplies were available to make Valentines for the one you brought -- or the one you met.

People search for meaning in art. But what's there to say about an evening that's simultaneously the best date night ever, but also a great time for the unattached but artistically inclined? Love Rox reminded me of what Archibald McLeish said about poems: poems should not necessarily mean things -- just the fact that they exist is enough.

Posted by Jeff Shaw at February 4, 2008 6:00 AM | Comments (0)

 

Rock Atlas: Notes From the Artist

Filed under: Art/Museums

Did you pick up a hard copy of our Rock Atlas from last month? The guide to local music venues was available in print as a two-page spread, and we published a JPEG online, too, for your convenience.

Artist Kevin Cannon also has a detailed post at his blog explaining his thought and creative processes, taking you through the production of the Rock Atlas. It's fascinating to see how an intricate project like this is completed.

Posted by Jeff Shaw at January 5, 2008 7:12 AM | Comments (0)

 

Friends of the Block E Haters

Filed under: Art/Museums

The art & design blog Cool Hunting recently posted a nice little documentary on architecture in Minneapolis. It's funny, anytime anybody talks about all the good architectural calls this city has made in recent years, all I can think about is Block E. How the hell did that happen? I moved away from the city when Block E was still a parking lot and an empty theater - so don't blame me.

In his sharp new survey of Twin Cities architecture, Lost Twin Cities author Larry Millett provides this nugget review of Block E:

"A cartoon of a development that presents architecture as a kind of entertainment for the same masses who crowd into Disney World or roam the Las Vegas strip. It's easy to dislike everything about this complex...but it's much harder to dismiss the reality of what it represents. Commercial architecture of all kinds is growing ever lighter, showier, and more disposable, and Block E in its own crummy but calculated way perfectly expresses these trends."

I digress...here's the Cool Hunting video:

Posted by Jeff Severns Guntzel at November 15, 2007 3:44 PM | Comments (0)

 

An open apology to the drunken vegan at Art-A-Whirl

Filed under: Art/Museums

who happened upon that rotting tray of chicken livers I placed by the river's edge outside the Spot Art gallery this weekend. I left those livers festering in the sun because I wanted to go catfishing with my fellow art lovers and nothing appeals to channel cats quite like chicken liver--especially when ripened for three full days.

But never in my wildest imagination did I think anyone could mistake that mess of putrified organ meat for a snack tray of dried fruits.

I guess underestimated the power of Jim Beam.

While I can't do anything about the damage to your vegan karma, if you floss thoroughly, I bet you can get the rest of that liver out of your teeth.

Posted by Mike Mosedale at May 22, 2007 9:58 AM | Comments (1)

 

"Guy from Minnesota new king of New York street art?"

Filed under: Art/Museums

Give us the late pass for this, but check out last week's Village Voice cover story, in which a Minnesota train-hopper takes New York graffiti by storm: "Gothamist's Jake Dobkin, who also runs an online street-art collection called Streetsy, declared, 'New King in Town: Deuce Seven.' But there was one strange hitch. Turns out that New York's New King lives in Minneapolis." More here and here.

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at March 22, 2007 10:31 AM | Comments (3)

 

From Snoopy to Dino: the evolution of public art in St. Paul

Filed under: Art/Museums

Last month the Science Museum of Minnesota announced that as part of their 100-year anniversary, they would be participating in the creation of 100 dinosaurs to be unleashed on the streets of the Twin Cities. Though there probably won't be any dark alley knife fights with the Charlie Brown statue people (both series were produced by Capital City Partners), the dinosaurs probably have a slight edge since it looks like they will be slightly larger at 4.5 feet tall and 8 feet long. "A paleontologist ok'd all of the statue designs to make sure that it's scientifically accurate," states Sponsorship Coordinator AJ Kiefer. "They don't want to have anything out there that's cartoony, so all the proportions are accurate to what a dinosaur would look like. Though obviously a real dinosaur wouldn't look like Joe Mauer, probably... We don't know for sure though." We couldn't help but wonder after so many Twin Cities homages through the years with the Peanut character series, what they would come up with this year—would we see a Sex World-themed dinosaur? A Prince-themed dinosaur? Perhaps a First Avenue dino? Although a Joe Mauer dinosaur has been confirmed (complete with sideburns), we'll have to wait to see what else is pitched for this series. Artists can still submit designs until March 15th, followed by a massive spray paint high May 20th, when artists arrive at the Science Museum for a giant paint-off open to the public. All the dinosaurs will be created in the following four days, and will hit the streets May 28th. In early September, some of the dinosaurs will be auctioned off to benefit the museum.

Posted by Jessica Armbruster at March 14, 2007 7:20 AM | Comments (0)

 

David Rathman at Weinstein Gallery

Filed under: Art/Museums

Just in time to relieve your pre-Super Bowl football withdrawal, local artist David Rathman's new show at the Weinstein Gallery carries on his usual work of sending up the mythology of American masculinity. Having already trained his reverant but blackly humorous sights on cowboys and boxers, he now (ahem) tackles football players, specifically the high school team of his small-town Montana alma mater. Images from the show, "Home and Away," after the jump; the artist's reception is tonight at 6:30 p.m. Weinstein Gallery, 908 W. 46th St, Mpls.

Home and Away, ink and watercolor on canvas, 30 x 38 inches, 2006

Untitled 12, ink and watercolor on canvas, 26 x 29 inches, 2006

Untitled 13, ink and watercolor on canvas, 26 x 29 inches, 2006

Untitled 14, ink and watercolor on canvas, 22 x 26 inches, 2007

Posted by Chuck Terhark at January 26, 2007 4:26 PM | Comments (0)

 

City Planner: Wednesday 12/13

Filed under: Art/Museums

3Qs with "Level_13" curator Jamie Schumacher

Exhibition curator Jamie Schumacher offers City Pages a few pithy pixels about how the painting, sculpture, sound, and digital art in Altered Esthetics' "Level_13" reflects, refracts, and builds on a body of video game culture that's growing faster than the national debt.

City Pages: There's an abundance of compelling art based on—or in—modern video games. So why does "Level_13" focus on the classics?

Jamie Schumacher: My generation grew up with a type of art that was different than the forms that preceded it. Unlike cartoons and paintings, video games were art you could play with. "Level_13" recognizes the tremendous role video games of the '80s had on an entire generation of artists, designers, writers, and gamers.

CP: Two pieces in the show are actually playable, but neither is for sale. Does that reflect video games' non-commodity-based essence, in the sense that their merit is grounded mostly in experience?

JS: I believe that has more to do with the artists' connections to the creations rather than a perceived notion about commodity value.

CP: Do you think video games can be great art?

JS: Video games have tremendous power to generate art that is not only beautiful, aesthetically balanced, and expressive, but also appealing to an impressive--and at times addictive--degree. Video games, especially role-playing games, are like incredibly enhanced installation art. With a little less latex and wood.

--Rod Smith

"Level_13," a 30-artist exhibition inspired by classic video games, runs through December 21 at Altered Esthetics. Free. 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday, and Tuesday; also 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. Thursday.

Posted by Chuck Terhark at December 13, 2006 6:44 AM | Comments (0)

 

Gordon Parks, 1912-2006

Filed under: Film , Film , Film , Film , Film , Film , Film , Film

Gordon Parks "once took a ride tailed by the cops with some young L.A. [Black] Panthers with guns in their laps," writes Greg Tate in today's Village Voice obituary. "One asked him if he would still choose the camera over the gun, as he'd declared in his 1967 memoir, A Choice of Weapons. Parks reiterated his belief. Two weeks later the Panther was dead." Parks, who was the first black staff photographer at Life in the '50s and the first ever to direct a studio film (The Learning Tree, in 1969), lived life alongside his subjects, from blacks in the Twin Cities to Malcolm X. Born in Kansas in 1912, the future writer, jazz musician, poet, painter, choreographer, and composer moved to St. Paul as a stunned teenager after the death of his mother, according to his autobiography Voices in the Mirror, and was promptly thrown out into the subzero weather by his brother-in-law. He spent a week homeless, "bouncing between Jim Williams's pool hall during the day and the trolley cars at night," writes Michael Tortorello in a 1998 City Pages appreciation. "One morning, hungry and broke, Parks drew a knife on one of the conductors, and then, in shame, offered to sell it to him in exchange for breakfast"...

Parks played piano in a local brothel, bused tables at the Minneapolis Club, and reluctantly dropped out of St. Paul Central High School before moving to Chicago, New York, and back again. He was working as a porter on the North Coast Limited in the '30s when he became inspired by the great Depression-era documentary photographers, whose pictures he found in train magazines. Parks invested in a used camera, what he would call "his weapon against poverty and racism," and began taking photographs for the Minneapolis Spokesman/St. Paul Recorder. 50 years of work in a half-dozen mediums followed, though he's still best known for directing Shaft--he once told City Pages it was "nowhere near blaxploitation." (Parks's film biographer, Craig Rice, says he applied to film school the day after seeing the movie.)

"I don't make my poetry or my music just for people in Harlem or Kansas or any one place in between," Parks told Rob Nelson in a 1996 City Pages interview. "I think it's about reaching as many kinds of people as you can." He stayed prolific to the end, publishing two books on Atria in 2005: A Hungry Heart : A Memoir and Eyes with Winged Thoughts: Poems and Photographs. He died last Tuesday at age 93 in New York. (Read the New York Times obituary and the one in the Kansas City Star.)

In an interview with the Spokesman-Recorder last year, Parks said: "I let my heart persuade me toward whatever I needed at the moment; that's where I went. That's why I was successful, or why I failed."

(View a video at MNStories.com, a discussion at MNSpeak.com, and more Parks photography here, here, and here.)

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at March 13, 2006 5:35 PM | Comments (1)

 

Love hurts

Filed under: Art/Museums

Slate has posted a fascinating essay/slideshow by local photographer Alec Soth. It's excerpted from his most recent major project, "NIAGARA," which debuted at the Gagosian Gallery in NYC last month. Soth's intimate photos, shot around the Niagara Falls area, capture hand-written love letters, shabby motels, and flaccid, naked couples. As the pictures flash by the artist ruminates on love and its (often ugly) aftermath. The collection will be published as a book next month and goes on display at the Weinstein Gallery in Minneapolis starting April 7th.

Posted by Paul Demko at February 28, 2006 1:43 PM | Comments (0)

 

Googling pain

Filed under: Art/Museums

Local artist Jaron Childs paints pain. He uses found photos of people crying, sobbing, or bent with loss, and re-creates them as photo-realistic images of ghostly and mysterious cousins twice removed of the original painful moment.

The titles of his paintings, currently on display at Soo Vac, are the same as his source material: Google image searches resulted in "628.jpg" and "crying(2).jpg," among 15 other found photos, that Childs has painted in careful brush strokes. But there are no links to stories or other searchable clues provided in the enlarged images; all that remains are interpretations of human loss and anguish via Childs' painstakingly realistic reconstructions.

As a comment on media saturation and a culture with a growing tragedy addiction, some of the best images of the exhibit are "crying1.jpg" and "anguish.28.jpg." By painting the photos exactly as they are, with "AP Photo" in one corner of "anguish" and the CBS logo creeping up on "crying1," Childs has made the images less about innate empathy and human connection and more about a culture of gawkerism.

In the end, though, any cynicism is abated by Childs' careful attention to each image, to each agonizing instant. The cracks in the anguish-twisted faces are deeper and more defined than any photograph could reveal, as if by reproducing the reproductions Childs made the images more real, and made the people in them more human.

Posted by at February 27, 2006 12:18 AM | Comments (0)

 

New Orleans Museum of Art to reopen

Filed under: Art/Museums

E. John Bullard, director of the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA), has announced the museum will open its doors again on March 3, following repair and clean-up in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden next to the museum reopened Saturday, December 10. Thanks to members, donors, and grant organizations, NOMA will now be free to residents of Louisiana. Donations are still being accepted at NOMA, Katrina Fund, P.O. Box 19123, New Orleans, LA 70179.

Posted by Corey Anderson at February 15, 2006 12:14 PM | Comments (0)

 

I don't know art, but I know what rocks

Filed under: Art/Museums

Gig posters have a long, colorful past but MCAD's Graphic Noise: Rock Posters at 1,000 dBs will get you caught up on the last ten years. After perusing more than 550 rock posters from all over the world, you might feel like a bit of an expert. Artists' signature aesthetics are quickly recognized, whether they be Ben Wilson's big-eyed, sallow-skinned characters, or Tara McPherson's uncluttered, melancholy cartoons. Elsewhere, you'll be able to identify artists whose work you've seen around town or on a best friend's living room wall: An entire hallway is devoted to local artists like Squad 19, Aesthetic Apparatus, and Burlesque of North America. It takes a lot to get noticed in such flashy company but sometimes it's as simple as the material the poster was printed on. Standouts include a cowboy painted on burlap, a gun composed of skeletal remains on faux-velvet, and maybe most impressive of all, a screenprint that looks astonishingly like magic marker scribbled on cardboard. Now that's old school. The exhibit's opening party takes place Friday night, and features music by STNNNG, the Deaths, and DJ Lori Barbero.

Posted by Lindsey Thomas at January 17, 2006 1:38 PM | Comments (0)

 

Cat power

Filed under: Art/Museums , Art/Museums

Never before has artwork faced so much competition for attention from the gallery it was displayed in. The first night of Jim Grafsgaard's new exhibit, which runs through Valentine's Day, coincided with the grand reopening of the Smitten Kitten at Lake and Lyndale. (The feminist-owned sex shop was originally located in south Minneapolis.) Patrons munched on appetizers catered by a self-proclaimed "chef/pervert," while perusing Grafsgaard's comical black and white ink drawings and Technicolor paintings. They also browsed over dildos shaped like Jesus, Mary, and, for those looking for a little more girth, Buddha. Despite the store's distractions, Grafsgaard's work couldn't have picked a better showroom. Like the Smitten Kitten, his doodles reveal a playful openness when it comes to sex. Plus, he offers something for all erotic tastes. I personally find the drawing of a teenage girl squatting over a mirror and exclaiming, "Oh boy! Boobies!" a bit ostentatious. I'd opt for something a little more understated--"Dong Bouquet" perhaps.

Posted by Lindsey Thomas at January 9, 2006 4:10 PM | Comments (0)

 

Little prefab houses

Filed under: Art/Museums

Abraham Maslow's five-tiered hierarchy of needs lists safety--shelter and protection from elements--as the second step necessary to achieve the ever-elusive concept of self-actualization. Without need number two, he says, even love is meaningless. Like everything else in Maslow's hierarchy (status, achievement, etc.), our concept of living spaces has continued to shift in the last decade: prefab homes, which once were as unpopular for the architecturally-minded as post-war tract homes, certainly aren't the shack-in-a-box they used to be. Starting December 8, the Walker Art Center's "Some Assembly Required" exhibit will house some of these new prefab houses in the form of diagrams, photos, and 3D models, including a 480-sqaure-foot replica of a FlatPak home created by Minneapolis-based architectural firm Lazor Office. (The original FlatPak home is like a giant glass-encased minimalist art piece plopped in the middle of the Kenwood neighborhood.) Incorporating unique materials, concepts of nature, a fluidity with the outside world, a modern-art ideology, and inspirations from patterns the world creates, these do-it-yourself kits are modern-day tools for creating works of art you can live in.

Posted by at December 2, 2005 10:49 AM | Comments (1)

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