Walker Art Center (late August)

In late August 2017, most of the Walker Art Center galleries were closed -- some sort of monumental exhibit is in the "offing" or, perhaps, the permanent collection is being reorganized and objects rehung or relocated.  Three shows are on display:  Katherine Fritsch's "multiples", sculpture by Jimmie Durham, and a kooky and beautiful interactive environment by TeamLab, a Japanese animation enterprise. 

Fritsch's "multiples" are small sleek objects displayed in plexi-glass vitrines -- they are hats, a fly, various tools, some religious icons, and, most famously, a set of twenty fat black rats all tied together by their tails (a so-called Rattenkoenig, referring to the folk belief that groups of rats would entwine their tails to make a kind of living throne for the King of the Rats -- Fritsch is German and this macabre conceit seems like something out of the Brothers Grimm.)  All of these objects are crafted from some kind of super-smooth, bland-looking and rubbery plastic -- the idea is that these objects can be readily produced, perhaps, by injection molding, en masse.  The objects, accordingly, posit themselves as infinitely replicable, a perverse variant on consumer goods -- if you want three dozen turquoise-colored ten-inch tall Madonnas, Fritsch can produce these for you.  The small-scale sculptures look like children's toys and they are brightly colored.  Their surface-texture, however, is like that of an ultra-smooth Gummi bear and there is something more than a little sinister about the super-bland, perfectly colored and, apparently, infinitely reproducible objects -- none of them seem to have been touched by human hands.  It's not much of a show and the conceit wears thin before you reach the end of the display cases.

Jimmy Durham is a peculiar case, an artist who is without any real signature style.  His forte is chest-tall "combines" that look a bit like the work of Rauschenberg.  Durham has tamed, I think, Rauschenberg's wild and unpredictable surrealist assemblies, mostly collages of objects that were non-figurative, into something more easily enjoyed -- Durham's combines are made from bits of broom-handle, odd appliance levers and springs, and the skulls of dead felines; the cat skulls are sometimes decorated with gold or inlaid turquoise or extravagantly painted.  Almost all of these objects are figurative -- menacing or humorous little monsters.  Many of the sculptures have scowling Indian faces -- Durham claims to be Cherokee although no Cherokee tribe in the United States recognizes him as an enrolled member.  (Durham has worked most of his life abroad -- in Paris, Berlin, and now Italy -- and I think his work enjoys a certain cachet in Europe because of its American Indian themes.)  Durham has a number of works that rely on puns -- he calls white people "pail-faces" -- and some of his objects are basically signs bearing messages about the perfidious White man and his wretched civilization.  As opposed to Katherine Fritsch, Durham's works have a variety of funky textures; they are clearly and lovingly hand-made -- glass is embedded in some of them and they have hook-like claws extruding and, even, human teeth.  (One of his grotesque little personages puts forth a tiny hand gripping a couple of human teeth and exhibits in his other metal clip-fist a sign that says "Mr. Durham's actual teeth.")  There are some paintings, some water colors, and, most amusingly, a big case of containing various "petrified" foodstuffs -- petrified cheese and biscuits and bread and chocolate, all of these foods wonderfully and very persuasively impersonated by different-colored chunks of rock.  It's an interesting show, not profound, but playful, and, even, a bit witty.  However, there is something insincere about this exhibit (perhaps this is a residue of knowing that Durham is not a real, but rather a fake, Indian).  It's hard to characterize the importance of sincerity in art.  As great an artist as Andy Warhol didn't have a sincere bone in his body and this doesn't undercut his work.  But Durham's highly personal "combines" somehow require a modicum of sincerity that the artist doesn't seem to possess -- he's simply too facile, too much of a chameleon.

On the seventh floor of the WAC, the Japanese computer animators teamLab have designed an environment consisting a dark chamber forty feet long and wide in which brightly colored crocodiles pursue equally colorful frogs while butterflies flutter across the floor.  Sometimes, a great whale appears and slowly swims through the meadow of leaping frogs and hunting crocodiles where schematic flowers blossom and wave in the wind.  The great whales are a mosaic of bright colors and they slowly roll across the floor surrounded by the leaping frogs and the crocodiles clambering here and there.  You can make your own images, scan them into a computer, and, I guess, these picture will also appear among the moving animals and flowers.  It's interactive -- the animation is something that you can enter and, then, experience on all sides of you and underfoot.  Some big pillows on the ground can be shoved around to alter the surfaces onto which these whimsical creatures are projected.  You can walk among them and when you step on a frog or a crocodile, the creature splats under your heel, flattening and spraying out a cloud of pastel colors in all directions.  It's wholly charming and hypnotic.