Art Sled Rally 2011

Yesterday was the fourth annual Art Sled Rally in Minneapolis' Powderhorn Park. Cold feet cut my visit short, but luckily plenty of photographers were on hand to chronicle the races. Check out shots by Sean Smuda and Ren. As Taylor Carik tweeted yesterday, the event is "like a middle finger to winter. A small and polite middle finger, but middle finger nonetheless."

Above, my shot of a cop car sled arriving at the park.

Paired: Sawblades by Mounir Fatmi and Dan Funderburgh

Mounir Fatmi's Between the Lines -- saw blades "with calligraphy inscriptions of texts from the Surah or Hadith, evoking the beauty of God or man's capacity, or desire, to obtain knowledge" -- and wallpaper artist Dan Funderburgh's My Name Is A Killing Word, a work on painted and etched foamcore.

Earlier: Paired: BP graffiti and Huang Yong Ping's Amerigo Vespucci

Video: Minnesota public artist Kinji Akagawa

TPT's MN Original profiles educator, sculptor and public artist Kinji Akagawa. His work Garden Seating, Reading, Thinking has been in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden since its founding in 1988.

Read my essay on Kinji, "How Care Manifests the World," written when he was named 2007 McKnight Foundation Distinguished Artist.

Minneapolis street art: Phil Jones' Random Acts of Design

Guerrilla street signs have been popping up in South Minneapolis recently touting everything from free hugs for hippies (a tree holds the sign in notoriously lefty Powderhorn Park) to lost ninjas ("Have you seen him? Probably not. Because then you would be dead"). These "Random Acts of Design" are the work of freelance graphic designer and recent transplant to Minneapolis Phil Jones.

Check out more of his interventions on his blog or his Flickr page, and this Wednesday look for an interview with Jones at Secrets of the City.

Bits: 01.26.11

• Two years ago last week -- on the day Barack Obama was inaugurated as president -- Minneapolis artist Broc Blegen traveled to Washington to unveil his inflatable sculpture, The George W. Bush Monument. With President's Day coming up, you can get your own; Blegen writes that the work is "available in a limited edition at an affordable price (compared to other monuments) - complete with a customizable inscription so you can honor the President however you wish!"

• Long ago a curatorial intern in the Walker Art Center's Visual Art department -- before working her way to gallery director/curator at REDCAT in LA -- Clara Kim has been hired back by the Walker. She starts in Minneapolis Aug. 1.

• Two interesting posts by John Thackara at Design Observer: One on 73-year old French farmer Pierre Rabhi, founder of the International Movement for Earth and Humanism; another on Milan's new "service ecology" development plan.

• LA Times writer Christopher Knight tweets: "It's worrisome when an art museum's show-title names a movie star but not the artist." The show: LACMA's Elizabeth Taylor in Iran featuring photographs by Firooz Zahedi.

• Trailer: Among others, sculptor Kinji Akagawa will be featured on the next edition of MN Original, which begins airing on TPT stations Thursday night.

• "Superflex's Flooded McDonald's becomes reality in Brisbane."

• From Vandalog, urban robots in Venezuela by Flix.

• Premakes: Trailers for modern movies -- like UP, The Empire Strikes Back and Ghostbusters -- had they been made in the '40s, '50s and '60s.

Video: Swoon at TEDxBrooklyn

Via GammaBlog.

Bits: 01.05.11

Will Steacy, Mold 10, used with permission

• Works from Will Steacy's series "A Human Stain" (found photographs recovered in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina) and "A Silent Affliction" (moldy interiors in the same city) make up many of the images in the title sequence of HBO's Treme.

• Because he's not rich enough: Artist Jeff Koons has sent a cease-and-desist letter to San Francisco's Park Life, a gallery and shop, for selling balloon-dog bookends. The letter, SFist reports, asked the shop to stop selling and advertising the projects, then "return them to some mutually agreed upon address, [and] tell Koons how many have been sold and disclose the maker of said bookends." Koons, of course, didn't invent balloon animals, although he's represented them in large-scale sculptures. (Via Jennifer Yin on Facebook.)

• Artists and a handful of veterans brought projectors to the exterior of the MOCA Geffen Contemporary Monday night to protest LA MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch's whitewashing of a mural commissioned by street artist Blu that depicted coffins draped with money. Hyperallergic has the story.

• Video: Hennesy Youngman helps you "PURSUE YOUR ART WITHOUT TREADING THE GROUND THAT THAT CRACKA BRUCE NAUMAN ALREADY TREAD." NSFW. (Via Kirk McCall via Kara Walker on Facebook.)

• Works by F. Scott Fitzgerald were supposed to enter into the public domain this year --- 70 years after the St. Paul writer's death -- but thanks to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act we've gotta wait. Via Secrets of the City.

• RIP Worldchanging.com.

Bits: 12.21.10

Shopping cart Christmas tree in Emeryville, Calif., by Anthony Schmitt. Photo: danielsjf, Flickr, used with permission

• Artist/experimental geographer Trevor Paglen talks surveillance on Studio 360. Via C-Monster.

• Not all Catholics buy into divisive anti-art (and anti-intellectual) rhetoric like that of Bill Donohue of the Catholic League: When national bishops' conference president Archbishop Timothy Dolan came to Donohue's defense on the archdiocese's blog, both commenters and the group Catholics United decided to have their say. (Good luck commenting: Both of All three of mine were rejected.)

• Jerry Saltz pens a letter to congressional Republicans about where they can take their censorship of David Wojnarowicz's work next: through the full span of global art history on display in the Met's collection.

• Grief as absence and presence: Artist AA Bronson's photo of his partner Felix in bed shortly after his death from AIDS -- the work Bronson unsuccessfully tried to pull from the NPG's Hide/Seek show in protest of the Smithsonian's removal of Wojnarowicz's video -- is a haunting book-end to Felix Gonzeles-Torres' 1991 black-and-white billboard showing an empty bed, his tribute to his lover, Ross, who died from AIDS (as did Gonzales-Torres, five years later).

• NPR's "Best Album Covers of 2010" includes one for S. Carey by Minneapolis photographer Cameron Wittig, whose work is now on view at Black Blue in St. Paul. Here's more of his music photography, which includes cover photos for albums by Andrew Bird, Haley Bonar, and others.

• Apropos of nothing: Go (re)read some Wendell Berry.

• Well, that's not exactly getting into the holiday spirit, is it?

Mpls.TV's year-end list: Best local signage

I'm not a big fan of year-end lists (although I have a winner if I do the year's worst local art tweets list I was thinking about), but Mpls.TV offers my kind of list: "best local signage" (via MNspeak). My two favorites:

For sale: "Slightly used" apocalyptic warning sign

From Minneapolis Craigslist. (Archived here, just in case it disappears.)

Walker sets screening dates for Wojnarowicz's "Fire in my Belly"

The Walker Art Center just tweeted its screening times for David Wojnarowicz's Fire in my Belly: Check it out daily in the Lecture Room from 11:30-noon Dec. 16-31, and every Thursday night from 8:30-9 pm.

Slideshow: St. Paul artists David Rich and Paulette Myers-Rich

Secrets of the City visits with artists David Rich and Paulette Myers-Rich at their St. Paul home/studio. David's an abstract painter and MCAD professor who's got a new monograph out, while Paulette is a bookmaker, photographer, printer and winner of the 2009 Minnesota Book Awards Book Artist Award. Their home, a live-work space just a few blocks from the High Bridge in St. Paul, is a converted mechanic's shop that's now filled with printing equipment, David's large-scale paintings, books, bongos and plants. Kelsey Johnston interviews and takes the pictures.

Warhol Foundation threatens to pull funds over NPG pulling Wojnarowicz work

Missed this from yesterday: The Warhol Foundation, which kicked in $100,000 for the National Portrait Gallery exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, says it'll yank funding if the gallery's parent organization, the Smithsonian Institution, doesn't put David Wojnarowicz's video work Fire In My Belly back on display. NPG pulled the work after some Republicans in Congress and the rightwing Catholic League claimed it was "anti-Christian."

Walker Art Center to screen censored Wojnarowicz work

The Walker Art Center will screen Fire in my Belly, the late David Wojnarowicz's video work that's at the center of controversy after the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery removed it from an exhibition at the urging of conservative Christian groups and legislators, according to a blog post by its director, Olga Viso. Pending the OK from the artist's estate, the piece -- which drew the ire of the Catholic League for an 11-second clip showing a crucifix with ants crawling on it -- will screen daily later this week.

Viso, director of the Smithson's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden before coming to Minneapolis, also puts the Walker squarely in support of artistic freedom and in opposition to NPG's actions in removing the work, which she writes "captures [Wojnarowicz's] anger and struggle with the death of a lover and his own H.I.V. diagnosis."

After traveling to Washington to see Hide/Seek : Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, the exhibition that included Fire in my Belly, she applauded the National Portrait Gallery for a "groundbreaking, scholarly exhibition and supporting the curators’ well argued thesis that a powerful artistic and cultural legacy has been 'hidden in plain sight for more than a century'" -- that is, work dealing with America's changing attitudes toward sexuality.

But she goes on: "Yet the NPG’s and Smithsonian’s surprising decision to remove a key work from the exhibition a month after its opening undermines this thesis as well as the premise and curatorial integrity of the exhibition in alarming ways. Indeed this action serves to sublimate or 'hide' the very thing the exhibition attempts to make visible."

She continues:

Three years after my departure, I am saddened to find a very different Washington, one informed by fear, intolerance, and silence, and a different Smithsonian, one that has perhaps lost touch with some of the core principles and spirit of its establishment. Founded in 1846 to increase and diffuse knowledge, the Smithsonian was created by the U.S. Congress as a trust instrumentality of the nation to be administered by an independent governing body and leader. This structure was created in part to prevent an institution envisioned as a beacon for research, debate, and the advancement of knowledge from being subject to the winds of political change, partisanship, and special interest. So important was this value that the Congress debated for nearly a decade prior to the Smithsonian’s establishment how to best ensure scholarly objectivity.

I am, of course, deeply disheartened by the Smithsonian’s recent actions and join my colleagues at the Association of Art Museum Directors and the Warhol Foundation, on whose boards I also serve, in their statements of disapproval and condemnation. Since time immemorial, artists have questioned the predominant modes of thought in our society and pushed the bounds of conventional thinking to inspire reflection, debate, and ultimately advance culture. As stewards and supporters of our cultural legacy, it is essential for institutions like the Walker and, indeed all citizens, to support the independent voices of artists and the value of creative and artistic freedom. It has never been more important to speak out and openly for the freedom of expression.

The Walker joins a slew of other museums that are showing the banned work -- SFMOMA, the New Museum, the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Hammer, the Wadsworth Atheneum, among many others -- giving the piece far more exposure than had the Catholic League and legislators like John Boehner not called for censorship. While Modern Arts Notes states that's it the smaller and the more progressive institutions that led the way on bringing this exposure (Transformer Gallery in Washington was the first to screen the piece, with bigger institutions following later), I'm proud that the Walker has taken a stand.

Details on this week's Fire in the Belly screenings will appear on the museum's website soon. Wojnarowicz's 1990 lithograph Four Elements, from the Walker's collection, will be on view in the exhibition 50/50: Audience and Experts Curate the Paper Collection, which opens Thursday.

Update: The Walker will screen the video daily, starting this Thursday and continuing through the end of the month. Times here.

Image: David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (face in dirt), c. 1990

Bits: 12.09.10

Sze Tsung Leong, Zhongshan Lu I, Xinjiekou, Xuanwu District, Nanjing, 2004

• Counterpunch's Jimmy Johnson, writing that "we should consider Wikileaks to be a literacy organization": "Something secret has to develop more forms of secrecy in order to keep itself secret, thus the classified universe, in the words of geographer Trevor Paglen, 'tends to sculpt the world around it in its own image.' How, after all, can a secret be transparently discussed?"

• Must-read: Hip-hop historian Jeff (Can't Stop Won't Stop) Chang co-writes an American Prospect piece with the Center for American Progress' Brian Komar about how culture needs to lead in the push for progressive change. (Via Davey D.)

• Related: Exiled Iranian artist Shirin Neshat tells attendees at the TEDWomen conference that in the West, culture runs the risk of becoming mere entertainment. An Xiao, who was there, tells Hyperallergic that Neshat "explained that art and culture are a form of resistance, and that she envied Western artists for not having to think about resistance in their work."

• Essay: Diane Mullin, associate curator at the University of Minnesota's Weisman Art Museum and former Minneapolis College of Art and Design/Jerome Fellowship director, on how "the persistent consternation such fellowship shows provoke may be the fault, not of the artists, jurors, or program directors, but of the mode of and perhaps even the inclusion of the exhibition itself."

• Tyler Green breaks news that the National Portrait Gallery commissioner James T. Bartlett has resigned in protest of the Smithsonian’s removal of David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly from the Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture exhibition. As a leaked Smithsonian memo suggests, it's not the only sign of internal tension over the institution's handling of the work, which rightwing groups have claimed is "anti-Christian."

• Jabari Jordan Walker interviews Eyeteeth pal Matt Olson of Minneapolis design firm ROLU for 01 Magazine on all that he and partner Mike Brady do: landscape design, blogging, furniture design, art commissioning...

• On the occasion of the arrival of my Danzig-style Werner Herzog t-shirt, Taylor sends a link to an exhaustive gallery of Hüsker Dü gig posters (here's 1984). Which filmmaker fits the font? (He suggests Uwe Boll.)

• Speaking of metal and visual culture: The Minneapolis Egotist points out the Map of Metal, which lets you navigate through kinds of metal I've never heard of (mathcore?) Earlier: Diagram of heavy metal band names, and an interview with Christophe Szpajdel, the "Paul Rand of metal."

Army Men: Kristine Potter's 'The Gray Line'

Kristine Potter, Untitled, 2009

Of all the photos in Kristine Potter's "The Gray Line" series, this is the one I keep coming back to. From this untrained photographer's perspective, it at first seems imperfect: improperly exposed or inadequately accounting for the sun's glare. But this lighting is everything. As war can do, it fades out the individual identities of the men who are engaged in fighting. It underscores the soldiers' skill at camouflage and represents a core aspect of the soldiers' jobs: Violence. And it blurs the line between earth (under which these men may be buried if killed in the line of duty, a very real risk) and sky (where the soul ascends after death, as some religious traditions posit).

Potter, whose work is on view at Daniel Cooney Fine Art in New York through Dec. 23, comes from a family that has seen many of its men, although none in the current generation, serve in the military, so she grew up in a culture of orderliness, hierarchy and patriotism, writes Women In Photography. Yet in adulthood, her feelings about the military have become more complex, dealing with broader issues of power and violence, as well as the personal and complicated psychologies of soldiers, who hold toughness, anxiety and vulnerability at the same time. This shot, moreso than Potter's others, seems to embody that complexity.

@MuseumNerd does Minneapolis

Experiencing the Twin Cities art scene with out-of-towners, as I did with the anonymous (and remarkably prolific) art tweeter @MuseumNerd a few weekends back, reminds me how good we've got it here. Today @MuseumNerd shares some of his/her best local museum moments with Secrets of the City, including a visit to see the Walker's profound and surprising live-performance installation by Eiko and Koma with me ("it was probably a religious experience for the non-religious visitors") and trips to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Pavek Museum of Broadcasting, SOOVAC (now showing the work of 17-year-old artist Sarah Nakano), and elsewhere.

Check it out at Secrets of the City, which is doing some nice arts coverage under new owner Taylor Carik (disclosure: Taylor and I, who I met years ago when he emailed asking me to weigh in on this art-related topic, frequently drink beer together).

Thanks to Barry Hoggard of Culture Pundits for the intro to @MuseumNerd.

Chiang Mai street stencil: Fish with gas mask

This shot, by Flickr user eb78, looks an awful lot like the one I posted awhile back, but has slight differences. I'm told the piece is painted over the kind of wall paintings identifying schools in Thailand (although it could also be a marking from a telephone company). Here's another such school ID.

Bits: 12.06.10

Barilla Jacket, made from recycled packaging by Katell Gélébart of Art D'Eco Design

• The Association of Art Museum Directors' rebuke of the Smithsonian for censoring a David Wojnarowicz video work at the National Portrait Gallery -- the group blamed "unwarranted and uninformed censorship from politicians and other public figures, many of whom, by their own admission, have seen neither the exhibition as a whole or this specific work" for the removal of the work -- is at odds with a statement by Ford W. Bell, president of the American Association of Museum, who believes yanking the work was the right thing to do.

• Washington City Paper: "Two activists were detained by police on Saturday at the National Portrait Gallery after showing David Wojnarowicz's A Fire in My Belly on an iPad inside the museum. Both activists were ejected and subsequently banned for life from any Smithsonian Institution facility."

• Weak: The Smithsonian explains, "We removed [A Fire in My Belly] from the exhibition Nov. 30 because the attention it was receiving distracted from the overall exhibition, which includes works by American artists John Singer Sargent, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Annie Leibovitz and Georgia O’Keeffe."

• NYT critic Holland Cotter dubs filmmaker Peter Greenaway's multimedia Leonardo's Last Supper installation, on view at the Armory, a "big, expensive, technological-bells-and-whistles-to-the-max dud." You have until Jan. 6 to see how much it sucks. (I'm kidding, Mr. Greenaway, sir.)

• "T-shirts are the new galleries": Support Hyperallergic by buying one of these reader-designed shirts (congrats to designer Duncan Alexander).

• While not a new idea, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts' Art ReMix program really works. My favorites from yesterday's visit: Thomas Struth's large-scale photo of the Köln Cathedral, featuring Gerhard Richter's pixelated stain-glass windows, atop the museum's grand staircase, and a Kehinde Wiley painting in the baroque room.

• Unfortunate stock photography of the day: CNN, in a story about same-sex marriage, included a Getty Images stock photo of anti-Prop 8 buttons, not noticing -- as one Redditor did -- an explicit image (NSFW) on one of the buttons. Now the story shows a recropped version of the shot.

• Bill "Calvin & Hobbes" Watterson's college drawings.

Slideshow: St. Paul artists Allen Brewer and Pamela Valfer

Secrets of the City's ongoing Sunday series focusing on Twin Cities artists continues with a look at the work of husband-and-wife couple Allen Brewer and Pamela Valfer. Brewer's an illustrator, who recently had a solo show at the Burnet Gallery at the Chambers Hotel in downtown Minneapolis, while Valfer is a mixed-media artist working, most recently, with recycled mink stoles, drawing and taxidermy. (Here are some of my shots of a visit to her studio earlier this year; look for video of our conversation soon.) As always, Kelsey Johnston offers an engaging interview.