The Walker Art Center (Summer 2022) hosts a show of artworks by Liz Larner, an American artists (born 1960). WAC calls the show: "Don't Put it Back like it Was" -- this idiotic and impossible to remember slogan is characteristic of the WAC's self-defeating method of announcing its exhibitions. The motto is so stupid and prosaic that, of course, many people will be deterred from attending the show, In fact, Larner's works are pretty interesting and one can only wish that the art center would reconsider labeling its exhibits with dull and annoying platitudes like this one.
Larner makes objects probably best characterized as sculptures although categories of that kind really aren't relevant to her work. The objects on display can be divided into three broad types. First, Larner makes skateboard-shaped ceramics, rather thick and often with embedded rocks or split down the middle. The skateboard ceramics are decorative with nicely colored glazes and conventionally "pretty." There are 36 objects in the show and one-third of them are these ceramic plaques, each generally about three feet long and two feet wide. The things are abstract, easy to display and don't require much conservation, and, I suspect, that they are probably easy to sell. Interest in them palls readily -- they all look more or less alike and seem lazy and uninteresting. Better are objects that seem to simulate the human form -- some of these things are quite beautiful or alarming. In the latter category, there is a handsome heap of three leather-surfaced punching bags (at least this is what they look like), lusciously colored in deep burgundy and sprawling on the floor all interlocked like the exhausted participants in some orgy. Other airy skeins of white thread or wire represent human figures or a "bird in flight" -- these things are delicate, like vaguely anthropomorphic spider webs. The last category of objects made by Larner are artifacts that I would characterize as somehow abject -- these include sculptural plinths supporting petri dishes furry with nasty-looking mold, heaps of chain dangling over the edges of shelves, and corner sculptures in which wire webs support what seem to be sanitary napkins or panty-liners. The best of these artifacts is a web of chain pulled tautly around a protruding corner. The chain links washers and the light casts shadows of this hardware against the wall, creating a vibrating pattern, a bit like some of Agnes Martin's canvases. These "abject" things look like some of the similarly humble and vulnerable art made by Eva Hesse, an artist who seems to have been an influence are Larner. The first two galleries of the show are very noisy. An uncharacteristic artwork made in 1988 features a tall mechanized spindle to which two chains with heavy metal balls are attached. When the viewer presses a button, the spindle fires up and bashes the metal balls against the corner walls, knocking out piles of plaster and wood lathe that heap up on the floor. It's a pretty aggressive object and, when activated, makes lots and lots of noise. As is often the custom, Larner footnotes her show by providing a couple shelves of her favorite books, mostly feminist screeds although also including essays by Joan Didion and provocative stuff by Georges Bataille. One of the books has an interesting title, something about our era as the Chthuluscene (a word that uses the name for the ancient sea monsters in Lovecraft, the Old Ones of Chthulu world). The book apparently posits that the monsters from Lovecraft's Chthulu mythos have inaugurated a new world order, one that involves sexual interaction with tentacles and a general "squishiness." (This notion is the brainchild of Donna Harraway in a 2015 book and she rejects the idea that her tentacle-monsters are noxious or hostile to humanity -- for some reason, Harraway argues that the Chthuluscene will be a new age in which "tentacles of connection" will link human beings with the natural world. If this is her intent, I don't know why she references Lovecraft's cosmic horror monsters.)
Poa Hou Her's installation on display nearby is called "Flowers of the Sky". "Flowers of the Sky" means marijuana or cannabis and refers to the so-called "Green Rush" in northern California. As cannabis has become increasingly legalized for recreational use, Hmong farmers have staked out growing plantations in the high desert beneath Mount Shasta. The installation involves 7 light boxes each displaying a large poster-sized picture (in black and white) of the desert with damaged-looking trees and heaps of rubble under the looming white tower of Mount Shasta. Each picture looks primeval, a bit like a pot-head Ansel Adams, but if you look closely you can see signs of human activity: weird boxes, cyclones fence netting, and faraway telephone poles -- in one picture, a small plastic bag is caught in the thorns in front of several contorted Chthulu-style trees. The pictures are reasonably compelling but nothing special. A big video covering one wall in the gallery features Hmong people, a man and a woman, in split screen chanting or half-singing against an empty landscape of nondescript corn fields or dense green shrubs. This is ancient cliche as old as I am and should be retired. It's totally devoid of interest although it does provide an (irritating) sound track to the uncommunicative photos of the desert plateau.
I commend to you a work of art on the upper slope above the WAC, that is, on the hillside between the art museum and the mansions on the rise overlooking the place. People always tour the sculpture garden to the north of the WAC, but I haven't ventured onto the hill to the south and west of the building. There are a couple of snake-like tubes on the hill, large python structures on which you sometimes see people perched. Half-hidden in the side of the hill is a sort of silo or bunker entered through a sidewalk that leads into a subterranean (actually split-level) chamber. This is James Turrell's "Sky Pesher". The chamber has dark, metallic-looking walls that angle away from benches around the perimeter of the bunker. Overhead, the space is open to the sky and the frame of the oculus provides a vantage on the heavens that seems to draw them down and close to earth. I was alone in "Sky Pesher" when I viewed the turbulent-looking clouds and blue shafts of sky over Minneapolis -- the effect is, indeed, uncanny and the frame seems to isolate the fragment of sky displayed overhead and gives it a commanding presence. What's more, and you should try this, the view is completely different, even frighteningly different from the other side (or sides) of the chamber. The bench is accommodating and you can lean back against the walls to look upward without craning your neck uncomfortably. This is a fine work of art, apparently installed in 2005 and something that I believe most visitors will miss.
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