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The death of Senator Jesse Helms.

Since this piece you're reading now began as a sort of best-of/top-10/year-in-review kind of a piece - it has since become something more modest in scope - I had initially thought it would be fitting to devote some space to Robert Rauschenberg, who died this year at 82. Good year-end roundups usually incorporate remembrances that one might have neglected to write about during the year (and you can read some excellent, thought-provoking pieces about Rauschenberg from the past year here, here and here). But thinking back on the year, I wonder if the most notable arts-related passing may not have been Rauschenberg, but rather Jesse Helms, the Republican Senator from North Carolina from 1973 to 2003.

Helms is best known for his crusades against the NEA and government funding to individual artists in the late-1980s. In a perverse (ha!) way, it's not unreasonable to think that Helms had a greater impact on the way contemporary art is viewed in this country than any working artist of that era.

Perhaps more than any actual artist ever could have, Helms used his position in public life to make contemporary art into a simple, stupid game of us vs. them, an eternal loop of self-righteous D.W. Griffith film clips, casting the silent majority of good, God-fearing heartlanders against a host of sinister "others," an elite cabal of weirdoes, junkies, faggots and perverts. Their goal: using your tax dollars to undermine two-hundred years of American culture! Reading arts coverage from the late 1980s, it's amazing how often his name comes up, as if he was single-handedly responsible for this assault on the art world. He becomes almost a cartoon character, a villainous one-man stand-in for all the bigotry, backwardness and reactionary fervor in America. There was obviously a lot of truth to that, too, because Helms succeeded wildly in his crusade - funding for the NEA was gutted during this period, and since then, one could argue the default posture for artists in mainstream culture has been a defensive one.

I would love to think that this era has finally passed, and there are more broad-minded, reasonable ways of discussing art, mass culture, federal funding and freedom of expression in America. But even twenty years later, Piss Christ is still invoked by demagogues trying to score cheap political points by decrying the inherent sleaze of contemporary art. Anytime Serrano or Mapplethorpe is invoked by these people, even after all this time, Jesse Helms grins that desiccated, bug-eyed grin of his and takes another shot of bourbon down in Confederate Hell. It's a formidable legacy.

Megan Vossler.

This should have been a landmark year for "political art" - the RNC and its attendant miseries completely dominated the Cities' psychic landscape all summer and a large portion of the fall. Somehow, though, it wasn't the watershed creative year for that we were hoping for. Perhaps passions were running too high for anyone to concentrate on subtlety or nuance. For example, one of the worst pieces of writing I've ever penned was created in August (no, I won't link to it). It was a purported "preview" of a show that coincided with the RNC, and I spent half the piece blathering about the unfocused blunderbuss blast of politically-themed art shows during that time, and not even in a particularly articulate or clever way. That's right; reduced to a sputtering, incoherent loon by the wicked forces of the GOP.

Me and everyone else, apparently. In all the brouhaha, in all of the shows and events and coordinated efforts during that entire cycle, I saw very little art related to the RNC that was particularly memorable. Hell, the seed art at the State Fair that Rich Barlow wrote about in this space was probably about as effective as anything in conveying creative-minded populist discontent. Most of it was just too easy, or too pat, or too didactic to really take hold. Nothing wrong with didactic, of course, but it doesn't always make for a compelling aesthetic experience.

Seeing a lot of this suffocatingly didactic work, I thought back to some drawings I'd seen by Megan Vossler in 2006 and 2007 that dealt with the specifics of warfare directly. These large-scale works depicted brutal, neutrally-toned, carefully-rendered scenes of fighting and destruction against vast, white backdrops of paper. Vossler had a very productive year this year - she showed in three exhibitions I liked quite a lot, the MCAD/McKnight Artists 2007-08 showcase, The Soap Factory's Pay Attention: GM08 and Draw Too: A Drawing Show in Four Acts at SooVAC. Before seeing her new work in these shows, I had expected she'd continue to work in this direction, with these literal depictions of war, particularly given the ever-worsening situation in Afghanistan and Iraq. Surprisingly, though, her new work seemed to touch on many of the same feelings so effectively conveyed in the earlier pieces without making explicit reference to the formal trappings of warfare. In pieces like All of our moments are stolen and When daylight moves, we rely on distance, the figures - when you can make them out against the landscapes - seem part of that violence-saturated world, but the immediacy of violence is replaced by a less urgent, more deeply troubled sense of pervasive dread. The white, unmarked swaths of space are so large and so all-consuming, they seem as if they could close up on the huddled figures that populate them at any moment and swallow them whole, leaving only a blank slate for new horrors to be acted out upon.

Unless it's printed in a broadside or wheat-pasted to a wall, political art can never merely be about purely doctrinaire details. Life isn't comprised of doctrinaire details. That unease in Vossler's work speaks volumes about the unease of our current situation, more than any more literal-minded agit-prop could.

Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg.

I once got into a somewhat fatuous discussion with a girl I was dating about whether or not Minneapolis was the most Canadian of American cities. Maybe, maybe not, but watching Guy Maddin's film My Winnipeg this past year at the Lagoon, I was struck by how easily Maddin's "snowy, sleepwalking" Winnipeg could act as a stand-in for our own frozen metropolis. So many of the thematic concerns and emotions of the film - yearning, escape, chilly perfectionism, confused civic identity, the problems of place - I see played out in much of the art that bears the Minneapolis imprinteur.

Minneapolis, like Winnipeg, is not a cultural hub; it's an outpost. A very fine, livable and progressive outpost, but an outpost nonetheless. When you are an artist that has chosen to stay in an outpost, it's because you're either somehow trapped by circumstances, or (more likely) you've made a conscious decision to do so. It's not because you want to get rich or successful or famous, but because you have something here, some profound understanding of the place, or some attachment or obligation to it. Maddin's film deals with a fictionalized version of himself, a native of Winnipeg, drifting in a liminal space between sleep and waking life, conspiring to leave the city for good. This journey is really just a pretext, though, for Maddin to move between elaborate, semi-autobiographical set pieces about his mother and his family, his personal history in the city, the history of the city itself, and the hold that it continues to have on his imagination. So much of it is so bizarrely imaginative -- Secret societies! Séances! Rival cab companies operating on a secret grid of back alleys! -- that one begins to understand just how deeply rooted Maddin's own personal vision is rooted in the strangeness and idiosyncrasies of the city he comes from, and how difficult it is to see where one begins and the other ends. It's a funny, beautiful, moving piece of art that anyone who has chosen to create away from the cultural centers will recognize themselves in.

(Parenthetically, in keeping with the Canada/Minneapolis thing, there's also a serious subplot about, yep, hockey. My friend Harry once said this about the North Stars: their leaving Minnesota was "was a betrayal on the level of the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn. If it seems like Minnesotans don't talk about it the way old Dodger fans talked about their loss, it's because Minnesotans are morose and the bitterness is kept inside where it can fester." The lyrical segment on the sale of the Winnipeg Jets to Arizona in 1996 and the pointless demolition of the historic Winnipeg Arena feels so perfectly Minnesotan in so many ways that I had to remind myself I was watching a film about another city.)

Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley's Street with a View.

Some of the year-end roundups I've been reading have made special note of the ongoing collapse of capitalism, and the role it will play in how art is made, sold and experienced. I find that street art, in particular, is singled out as a sort of new working model, free from the supposed stuffiness and elitism of the gallery system, existing as a perfect meritocracy where innovation and dynamism eventually floats to the top. I'm only partially sold on the idea myself; I find a lot of work by the likes of Banksy skews a shade too obvious to really satisfy me. However, I am certainly interested in thinking about new working models for art, and I think some of what we most have to look forward to in contemporary art is seeing these new models develop outside traditional galleries and museums. This won't just be "street art," as such, but broader. These new models with include any other sort of guerilla approach to art-making that is cheap, self-sustaining, flexible and accessible.

A wonderful example of this sensibility is Hewlett and Kinsley's Street with a View, an intervention that utilizes technology, performance, high concept and a bravura sense of corporate-piggybacking to create a piece of "street art" in the most literal sense. Working in Pittsburgh (again, away from those cultural centers!), Hewlett and Kinsley wrangled a whole team of performers, artists and neighborhood folks to stage a series of whimsical tableaus along a back-alley in the city's working class northside - swashbucklers, firemen, a garage band, a giant chicken, a full parade. This was all staged for the benefit of the Google Street View film crew that was passing through that day to document the area for its comprehensive Street View project. These scenes are now lodged forever in within that widely-used service, available for viewing by whoever stumbles across them.

Google has become the sole arbiter for so much of what we experience online. Street View itself has been criticized in certain quarters as proto-Orwellian, a fact that actually led one St. Paul suburb to demand the removal of its streets from the service this year. It's a monolithic force, and the fact that Hewlett and Kinsley were able to unilaterally intervene with such a joyous, ramshackle IRL scene, even with Google's tacit permission, makes it something special. The piece does an odd little dance around co-opting Google's "don't be evil" easy-goin' just-folks good-time corporate reputation, and outright flouting it by reminding Google that, though the Street View images may be their intellectual property, the streets they depict really do belong to the community and all the synthesizer-playing, sword-fighting weirdoes that live there. What we do with these streets, and how we interact with them, is an increasingly important question that artists will be asking in the coming years.

Hardland/Heartland's Millions of Innocent Accidents at the MAEP, Minneapolis Institute of Art.

My favorite critical dust-up of the year, if that's the right word for it. This show, of course, was covered in these pages by my colleague Michael Fallon, who pronounced it, in no uncertain terms, a failure ("poorly conceived, dolefully hopeless," he writes, and there are plenty more equally troubled adjectives throughout). I actually enjoyed the show myself, finding a lot to admire in the doleful hopelessness, but I didn't write about it, as anything I might have produced would have been significantly less questioning, irritated and (it has to be said) amusing than Fallon's piece. It was a searching piece of criticism that didn't play particularly nice, but raised points that were absolutely fair game.

Which is why I was delighted to see local gallerist David Petersen chime in for the defense a few weeks later on his own blog, in a piece that was equally full-throated, irritated and questioning in tone (despite the, uh, gratuitous bird-flipping imagery). The basic points that Fallon laid out and Petersen addressed are important ones, the critical questions that make for a good dialogue between artist and viewer - basically, the big questions regarding the former's intent and the latter's response. Fallon went into the HL/HL show, and saw a mostly irredeemable mess of well-meaning incompetence. Petersen went into it and saw the exact opposite, the work of a high-functioning group of artists that didn't in fact mean well at all and weren't shy about showing it. So if indeed the show was a failure, is it due to the good intentions of the artists and their inability to match the quality of the product with the concepts? Or does the show succeed in spite of that, because it manages to generate its own individual set of criteria, with no intention - good or otherwise - of meeting the viewer halfway?

Regardless, it was by no means an easy show, and I'm still half-surprised there was a place for it in the MAEP. Half-surprised, but very happy. In this year where the future of the program as we know it was thrown suddenly into doubt following Stewart Turnquist's resignation, it's good to see work and accompanying criticism that inspires such thoughtful, provocative and (yeah) viciously funny commentary.

Header photo of Unconvention yard signs courtesy zbartrout.