WAC during Covid (Michaela Eichwald) and a Warning

 I've been to Minneapolis and St. Paul only twice in the last year.  Since new infections have been decreasing during the past few days, I availed myself of this lull in the tempest to visit the Walker Art Center.  (Apparently, Covid infections are predicted to spike again in about three or four weeks, during mid-March 2021 -- this is apparently due to the onslaught of a much more infectious and lethal strain of the disease, the mutation known as B.1.1.7. from the United Kingdom.)  I also was celebrating my prospective injection of vaccine at Albert Lea's Walmart on Friday, February 19, 2021.  This celebration turned out to be premature -- winter weather delays in supply caused cancellation of my vaccination.  I learned this by email as I was driving to Minneapolis.  

The Walker Art Center, like many contemporary art museums, straddles the fine line between gimmicky hoax and genuine art with respect to many of the objects that it displays.  (I suppose some theorists of contemporary art would deny that there is a distinction -- a lot of what passes for leading edge art is firmly rooted in the old avant-garde of Dadaism, now over a hundred years in the past:  that is, art works that appalled or amused our great-great-grandparents ceaselessly recycled in increasingly arid variants in our modern art museums.)  There's always been a lot of fraud on show at the WAC.  And, as art migrates into progressively more limited and Balkanized ethnic, racial, and sexual identity politics, the razor-thin line between art that has merit and mere propaganda also blurs.  Therefore, any visit to the WAC is likely to involve some degree of outrage.  Whether it is good to be outraged by art is an open question -- on balance, I think the answer to this question should be "no", since outrage distracts from the other qualities intrinsic to an artwork.  

By WAC standards. the small show of paintings and prose-poems by Berlin-based Michaela Eichwald is tame.  Eichwald is a neo-expressionist, pretty clearly in the lineage of Joerg Immendorf and, even, more directly, George Baselitz.  She paints with intentional crudity, smearing surfaces with slimy-looking orangish browns and yellows.  Although Eichwald's titles obscure this fact, she is fundamentally a figurative artist -- of the 15 or so paintings on display in the show, almost all of them can be interpreted as images of something, most with anthropomorphic forms visible in the slither of acrylic.  On first viewing, Eichwalds's pictures (here made between 2013 and 2019), seem chaotic and she appears to design her large frieze shaped panels to refute efforts at interpretation.  For instance, one painting that looks like an intestinal tract uncoiled for display shows a brownish-yellow tube winding around within the picture. (Die unsrigen sind fortgezogen -- "The Ours have moved away")  However, Eichwald makes the tube-like smear worming in loops in the picture, discontinuous -- this confounds the eye's ability to make sense of the image as a kind of ropy maze.  Many of her paintings are about three-feet wide and six or eight feet long (or wide).  This images have a mural aspect.  In the West, we read pictures of this sort from left to right -- the direction that we read words on a page.  Eichwald often sets up her pictures to suggest a process that progresses in the opposite direction -- that is, someone is doing something at the right side of the picture with the apparent effects of that action shown to the left.  This is the reverse of what we expect and also confounds any easy reading of the painting's surface.  

Eichwald's intentionally ugly colors and her haphazard way of structuring the pictures make the images somewhat rebarbative.   As it was said of Wagner's music, the picture, however, are considerably better than they look.  (This isn't true of Eichwald's prose poems, nine of which are displayed between pictures -- these printed panels are mostly pretentious gibberish and essentially unreadable.  Here is a sample:  in this way you can believe me.  I'm imagining the sentence "what german foresters can do only german foresters can" once wrapped in worn loden, once flocculated onto a dark green crumpled sack... "loden"is a dark green woolen cloth; "floccculated" is a term mostly used in chemistry that means "to form into a loosely aggregated mass of clumps or particles." )   I ambled around the museum for awhile after spending some time closely looking at Eichwald's work, returning to the gallery after surveying some other things exhibited in the Museum.  On a second viewing, the paintings seemed more coherent to me.  Each looks best when viewed from across the room.  Up close, the images are obscure and the pictures just seem chaotic.  But when viewed at a distance, and making the assumption that pictures are mostly figurative in inspiration, they look better, more interesting, and less abstract.  Eichwald doesn't use canvas -- the pictures in this show were either acrylic on fabric or daubed on "pleather" (this is polyurethane designed to resemble leather -- the sort of thing that many car seats are made from.)  The largest work in the group, Beziehungswahn ("Connection-mania") a thirty-foot long collage is by far the worst -- it's hideous and unimaginatively made with no apparent structure at all; Eichwald has just glued pictures on the polyurethane and smeared whorls and orbs of paint around them.  Much better is Gebet, so wird Euch genommen ("Ask and it shall be taken from you") -- the word "Gebet" in German primarily means "prayer" and the picture appears to show a human-shaped cloud at the left gesturing toward several irregularly-shaped badges or shields of yellow against the kind of institutional green that you might find on the tiles at a bakery; the "praying" or gesturing figure with one hand in the air is a crusty impasto of deep blue.  Steinzeit ("Stone Age") may even be witty -- near the center of the narrow painting, a troglodyte with a big nose broods in  profile over some smears of shit-colored paint.  Amidst these daubs, there is a crisply painted form, a bit like the outline of a flat-headed screw, suggesting that the cave-man has, perhaps, invented (or, at least, imagined) some kind of fastener.  In Die Auer Dult, die leidende Mangle ("The Auer Dult, the washing machine wringer suffers"), Eichwald has painted some vaguely anthropomorphic forms on a long runner of linen; the Auer Dult is a Munich folk festival and the picture suggests some Dervish-like figures dancing amidst flares of yellow and orange.  As all reasonable people know, there is really nothing that is truly abstract.  The mind and eye always conspire to imagine a form even in seemingly random spots of color -- I suppose other people might see other things in these pictures, but I have no doubt that in these paintings Eichwald is representing something.  In fact, several of the pictures have humanoid forms that would not be out of place in one of Paul Klee's paintings -- this is particularly true of Die Neue Bestimmungen sind da ("The New Regulations are there") another painting that seems to scan from left to right, a whimsical yellow profile peering out across a space where what seem to be red dancers are whirling like tops.    

Design for Different Futures occupies several large galleries -- it's not really an art show but rather an exhibit of architectural and industrial designs for future worlds.  The objects have the cool and lucid appearance of scientific instruments -- some of the enigmatic objects reminded me of the awful gynecological instruments in David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, speculum made for "mutant women."  There are items of apparel, one of the Handmaiden's gowns from the TV show based on the Margaret Atwood novel, and various sorts of boots and helmets.  Some designs for a lunar colony are offered and a very peculiar arch-shaped armature of hard white plastic with gallon-sized modules arranged along its spine is labeled as a "Cricket Shelter:  modular edible insect farm" -- the idea being that crickets in the tens of thousands could be raised in the jugs, aerated and provided nectar though pipe-like tubes and, then, harvested to be roasted or ground into meal for flour.  The design is sleek and appealing and the object has tall wispy antennae at its top that are for air exchange and that also allow the cricket-farmer to enjoy the sound of his insect crop singing in the big white arch.  The highlight of the Designs show is a large darkened gallery in which a house-sized plastic orb encloses several other huge, translucent globular spheres -- the thing is called "Another Generosity" and it is attached to a mass of conduits and sensors.  The object apparently detects the carbon dioxide generated by visitors to the gallery (it has a number of vents on its exterior) and changes color and shape on the basis of data collected in that way.  This object sat alone in a room with a single guard.  I approached it closely and breathed into one of the ports, dropping my mask for that purpose -- nothing happened so far as I could observe.  

Parts of the permanent collection have been re-hung.  This show is identified as Five Ways In -- Themes from the Collection.  This exhibition is heavy on identity-politics and conceptual art.  The Walker's signature canvas, Franz Marc's "Blue Horses" is nowhere on display and Edward Hopper's enigmatic "Night Office," another picture that is a viewer favorite is crammed into a nondescript corner near the beginning of the exhibit.  Two highlights from the show at David Hammer's Phat Free, a large video screen showing a man kicking a bucket down a desolate street in New York City -- the installation is very loud and grating, but the imagery is surprisingly beautiful, slightly blurred and mostly monochrome video of the man kicking the bucket against a ravishing nocturnal background of vacant storefronts lit by brilliant flaring yellow lights.  It's gorgeous to behold in a strangely Old Masters (Rembrandt) sort of way.  At the end of the galleries, in the "Abstraction" part of the show, there's a ravishing painting by Agnes Martin -- an abstract painting that is as close to true abstraction as can be imagined.  The picture shows a sort of blue-grey mist over which Martin has used a pencil to trace parallel lines.  The lines make a grid that is comprised of alternating patterns of closely spaced vertical lines and more broadly spaced lines, crossed by horizontals that are evenly spaced.  As I've earlier argued, everything looks like something and, so, I suppose this abstraction (it's called "Untitled #7") might approximate a very faintly lavender mist somehow seen through a grid like an ultra-precise and delicate wire fence.  The curious thing about this painting is that viewed from certain angles, the top of the picture seems markedly darker than its bottom -- and it's a big painting, probably about eight feet tall.  I can't tell if this effect is a result of darker gesso at the top of the painting or some kind of optical illusion.  I spend quite a bit of time looking at the Martin picture and admiring the canvas for its strange, disembodied beauty.  

Here's a warning:  In the design show, there's a vitrine in which three internal organs designed for upgraded human beings (they seem to be improvements on bile ducts) are displayed.  The organs are patterns of rubies and quite pretty in their own way.  The base of the display case, there's a  video screen showing an operation that involves a retractor device parting ribs and, then, much grubbing around in the gory interior of a human body.  When the retractor parts the ribs, the interior of the body gushes blood that overflows the basin of flesh and pours over the edge of the body.  I found this image upsetting and wished I hadn't attended so closely to it.  Reeling from my reaction to this footage, I felt faint and looked around for some place to sit.  With the darkness closing it, I raced through several galleries but found no benches anywhere.  I didn't faint but vomited a little in a corner.  When the guards approached, I told them to put a label on the wall and they could display the emesis as art.