The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

 

Tough times ahead. They're already here.

A question it might be a good idea for artists to ask themselves is, "What do I set before the eyes of other people? What would make it worth their while to crawl out from under their miseries to see?"

The Heartland/Hardland collective, in its sloppy show at the Minnesota Artist Exhibition space at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, squandered the opportunity to exhibit--amid great works of art from all over the world just a few feet away from their own throughout the museum--the best they might as individuals have been capable of. Overlooked in Michael Fallon's recent disheartened review of the show, however--and overlooked as well in the special pleading for the show by commentators in response to the review-are a handful of strong works by Ruthann Godollei exhibited concurrently, also just a few feet away, in the other of the two Minnesota Artists galleries.

Godollei's works are about the bloodshed in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of them in particular leads me to think that history is nothing more than the shape spilled blood takes as it dries. The piece is called SURGE--a favorite word in the Bush discourse on Iraq, used here by the artist with ruthless irony. Painted with a verve born of despair, and as though with blood itself, the work is a powerful outcry against the carnage and it is joined on the walls of the gallery by others nearly as affecting. Each of Godollei's prints turns one of the military's robotic euphemisms back upon itself so that, juxtaposed with a banal image, the very words themselves are flayed, their meaning peeled back: a puddled bathtub drain and plug is called EXIT STRATEGY; a spade in the dirt of a grave reads REDEPLOYED; a grave with a cross and a helmet is labeled DETAINEE; gravestones in a military cemetery are captioned TROOP REDUCTION. Refracted through the images, deadened words are restored to the possibility of using them to speak the truth.

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People speak in code. In the art world, they talk about "movements," confident you'll know what they mean. It gives us a way to sound like we know what we're talking about but I wouldn't confuse talking about art in the shorthand of categories with actually understanding anything. The word "movement" suggests peristalsis; it brings to mind the passage of a lump of mouse through the length of a snake--an event in the bowels. In cultural/historical terms, maybe that's what art movements are-piled-up excreta viewed retrospectively. Singular works of art, though, which are what interest me most, aren't created by movements but by distinct individuals, married to a discipline. They reflect their times, of course, and sometimes, it's true, artists work in teams, but the reason they can is that each person is individually evolved. "Movements" tend to arise from demagogues-a Joseph Beuys, for example, as evidenced in photos of him currently on exhibit at the Walker, dispensing cryptic parables and shepherding his adoring followers in Germany. Before you know it, you have a cult, its believers vetting you for ideological and spiritual purity. Except for the hundreds of oaks that Beuys planted with his acolytes, his objects don't repay long contemplation. They are self-importantly obscure: it's fat and it's felt. . . with Matthew Barney, it's Vaseline and tapioca. What is it with these guys and their hokey alchemy? Their art makes you work to get it; it isn't art that works to get to you.

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The work of Kara Walker works to get to you and there is no escaping it when it does, no avenue of evasion, no exit strategy that works. Walker commandeers the dated, sentimental medium of the silhouette with subversive and cutting intent. I think it is no accident that her figures are knifed-out, perhaps with an X-acto, and in a manner so deft it's as if she were skinning game. Subtleties of posture, relationship, gesture are expressed and implied with an almost vicious precision, degradation avenged with light twists of the scissors or the knife. The body language of these shadows was never seen in those old parlors where silhouettes were part of the décor.

 

Not by Kara Walker, but by another artist of the silhouette is this image by the German type designer, calligrapher, and artist, Rudolf Koch (1876-1934). It's one of a folio called "The Typefoundry in Silhouette" that Koch did for his employer the Klingspor Typefoundry, in Offenbach, Germany, the employer as well of the guy pushing the wheelbarrow up the ramp. This was created in the waning days of the Epoch of the Book, before the onset of the Plague of Blogs. The suite was exhibited in a recent show at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts on developments in German, Czech, and British typeface design between the wars, when the forces of nationalism bore down on the very shapes of the letters used to put together words.

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In the flood-prone old St. Paul neighborhood once known as the Levee or Little Italy, on Mississippi River bottomland along Shepard Road, there is a new string of condos called the Upper Landing. The architecture is uninspired; it doesn't evince much interest in its relationship to the river but the waste of the beautiful setting is redeemed in part by a feature in Chestnut Plaza, the site's crowning touch, at the foot of Chestnut Street. The new plaza is part of the broader development of the riverside called Upper Landing Park, and what makes it a fine place to be on a sunny day is a noble pair of fountains that feed a shallow pool that drains to a series of waterfalls that carry down to the river.

The fountains are now turned off for the winter, but this doesn't detract from their strength as sculpture; even without water moving through them they are powerful forms. In the winter, ice and snow will cloak them in the hoary dignity of statues of old soldiers enduring the weather. The materials aren't marble or granite or bronze but proletarian concrete and off-the-shelf steel, unembellished and raw. The offset, stacked-box strata of the board-formed concrete impart a sense of something developed geologically, accretions built up over time, like the river's limestone bluffs. The columns are articulated and given interest up close by light and shadow falling on the variegated wood-imprinted forms. The humanness of gesture in their cantilevered steel channels, extended like arms making an offering, is extremely moving. It becomes even more so when you see that the pair, facing each other across space, are engaged in a dialogue (you might want to call it a pissing contest, but that's just a different form of dialogue)--two beings, reaching for each other, their hearts pouring through their sluices to the river below.