Eastern Bloc Art at the Walker Art Center

 I drove one-hundred miles (two-hundred miles round trip) to see Multiple Realities:  Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc (1960's to 1980's at the Walker Art Center.  I would gladly cross the street to see this show so long as the street was not too wide and nor the sun too hot.  In other words, this exhibit is mildly interesting but, more or less, unimpressive -- the work on display doesn't conform to any standard canons for beauty, nor is it memorably ugly.  It's just grey and morose, more or less in keeping with the way things were behind the Iron Curtain in Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia (and similar places).  The former Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia (and Poland as well) hosted a vibrant "new wave" or film renaissance during the twenty years covered by the show -- I am thinking of some of Andrzej Wajda's movies, Dusan Makavejev's Sweet Movie and W.R. the Mysteries of the Organism, as well Jan Svankmayer's scary and beautiful animated films.  But the show focuses on the conceptual art, by and large, as well as various sorts of avant-garde performance art and so the efflorescence of cinema in some of these Eastern Bloc nations is mostly ignored.  An exception is made for Vera Chytilova's Daisies, a remarkable surrealist film in the anarcho-feminist vein -- Daisies is funny and genuinely disturbing and a loop showing part of movie's climax, a food fight that evolves into a full-fledged orgy of gastronomical destruction, represents some of the more radical impulses in Eastern European feminism.  About a half of the art works on display have feminist implications.  These are largely drab installations involving sloganeering and lots of naked women inserted into political tableaux.  (There was a genre of feminism that operated by just showing lots of pubic hair -- I  don't think these interventions are particularly profound; a naked body isn't necessarily subversive or politically cogent; if this were the case, Rubens would be the most subversive painter who ever lived.)  A third of the stuff on display is Gay-oriented, also almost entirely dull pictures of people in bars, men wearing garter belts, and various cross-dressers.  The remaining objects have vaguely political implications -- for instance, there were a couple of exhibits showing Polaroids taken by STASI (State Security or secret police) operatives in East Germany. (The pictures were made so that the STASI agents, acting with commendable Germanic efficiency, could ransack people's apartments and, then, put everything back exactly as it was before the raid.)  An East German artist with the unprepossessing name of Cornelia Schleime produced some witty variants on images and reports in her own STASI file, including a memo that she doesn't seem to have many friends and favors "western style" clothing.  (Schleime also made a striking "Picture Diary" with thick paint, interesting drawings and collage images that seemed to me quite beautiful and an exception to the grim monochromatic Fluxus-influenced art on display.)

East Germany sponsored vibrant, if grisly, experimentation in performance and theater.  The chief exponent of this State-sanctioned avant-garde work was Heiner Mueller, the playwright most well-known for his work Hamletmaschine.  An artist named Lutz Daumbeil collaborated with Mueller (and several others) to create a large installation piece -- it's bombastic and ugly after the manner of Mueller's nasty theatrical practice (lots of vomiting and simulated copulation in his plays):  a film shows a mostly naked man wearing a Greek warrior's helmet (and other peculiar headpieces) pacing around stiff-legged under a shattered curtain flanked by distressed classical statuary and two big transparencies labeled Eigensinn ("Stubbornness") and Strafen ("Punishment") in brutal neo-expressionistic lettering.  The work is called "Revising of Herakles", referring to Heiner Mueller's theater work named Heracles that is largely concerned with excrement -- that is, Herakles cleaning out the Augean stables.  There's a final room featuring experimental music scores and works of optical art; that stuff is more colorful but it's not very interesting.  An exception to this generally bland and dull work in the show are four linocuts made by someone named Juergen Widdorf commissioned by the Leipzig Academy of Sports in the early 1960's.  The big images are laugh-out-loud funny.  Widdorf, apparently, persuaded the authorities that he was making neo-classical prints of athletes; in fact, Widdorf had great Communist credentials -- he taught drawing classes to East German border guards.  But the pictures are hilariously homo-erotic -- in one image, a group of East German workers look exactly like the Village People (minus the Indian Chief) in tight jeans bulging at the crotch, each hunky lad brandishing some kind of tool. some butch women are gathered around a swimming pool and, in another picture, a bunch of half-naked men pose while one of them points his camera at the groin of another man -- apparently, this is supposed to depict a Leipzig photography club.  The most explicit of the four big lino-cuts on display shows a bunch of naked men taking showers in a locker-room -- it looks like something by Tom of Finland, but, seemingly, the authorities thought it was an impressive depiction of the highly muscular physiques of East German youth.  These pictures were very funny and, on reflection, it might be worth looking at these things if you are in Minneapolis and have a spare half-hour to kill.  But the rest of the show is instantly forgettable.  

A collection of porcelain works (coffee mugs and vases) and plywood assemblies by Tesuya Yamada on exhibit are similarly uninteresting.  This is a large show and it's handsome in a way, but the objects on display look like the sort of thing you could buy at Walmart or a Dollar General Store.  There's an interesting low plywood bench with brown cow-patty-shaped ceramics on which to rest your butt if you want to sit.  

Part of the fun in going to the Walker Art Center is to observe the other visitors and security in the galleries.  There are several angry-looking Transsexuals wearing mini-skirts and combat boots who are as interesting as works of art as most of the stuff on display.