En route to Fargo, North Dakota, I stopped at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis on June 20, 2025. I didn't know what was on display and didn't have any expectations as to what I would see. As it happened, there were a number of things that interested me and the little expedition was an unanticipated success, an example, I think, of a pleasing serendipity, an unexpected gift.
There are three large shows on exhibit: Ways of Knowing, Kandis Williams: A Surface, and a large installation called "Sudden Places" by Pan Daijing. Ways of Knowing consists of several large groupings of art divided into more or less arbitrary categories -- the curation of the art doesn't make much sense and there really is no connection between the different experiences on offer here. The initial gallery is arid and doesn't promise much -- it's some highly conceptual work that covers the walls with small placard-like images. Rose Salane's "Confessions" consists of images of handwritten notes in English sent to the proprietors of Pompeii returning objects filched from the archaeological site -- the actual objects returned in this way are displayed next to facsimiles of the notes. It's mildly interesting as an example of the "avenging conscience" -- the correspondents seem desperate to disabuse themselves of their souvenirs which are mostly nondescript pebbles and bits of ceramic and a nail; the installation vaguely suggests that the tourists may have suffered from the malevolence of the objects themselves, although this is a matter of imagination imposing some kind of order on the collection which is, in fact, more or less, random. In nearby vitrines, there are fragments of coral plucked out of a dying reef and anatomized by mechanical drawings of the artifacts. On another wall, there are forty feet of picture postcards of temples and statues in southeast Asia and India. I have no idea what these installations were supposed to be about -- and they were devoid of any interest. Things improve, however, in the next galleries. A couple of darkened rooms display large HD video of industrial processes or abandoned buildings on an Alaskan island -- it's St. Paul Island in the Aleutians. These things have considerable authority although they are fairly predictable, the sort of large-screen languorous tracking and zoom-effect images that are common in video displays in contemporary art museums. The images on the Aleutian islands, at least, feature walruses and seals glimpsed as if through an aperture of a toilet paper role and, on the soundtrack, there are some vague remarks about the Aleut language by a soft-spoken elder. In one niche, a group of pretty Congolese boys in a choir sing seraphically while on the neighboring wall videos show copper wire spun and processed by huge menacing machines. The juxtaposition, I suppose, means something but I don't know what. Nonetheless, it's striking particularly since the choirboys wear big, crude copper crosses on their chests. A large room is full of colorful drawings, brilliantly executed, I thought, depicting gory scenes in Egyptian and European history. This work is called "Time of Change" by the Armenian- Egyptian artist Anna Borghiguian and I thought it was extremely interesting. The cartoons vary from horrible scenes of mayhem and torture and lyric images of people conversing in coffee shops and walking in parks. Monstrous figures bare their teeth at us -- one of the villainous critters, a Nazi concentration camp doctor named Aribut Heim seems to have three or four separate rows of teeth; he's drawn extracting people's organs, surgery without the benefit of anesthesia -- as far as I could ascertain, Dr. Heim fled Germany for Egypt where he seems to have prospered for a number of years before being discovered. There are scenes of various revolutions, images of the French guillotine, and riots in the street. The drawing is very expressive and, in many instances, impressively colored and the diagrammatic images (they seem to be made on butcher paper about 30 x 18 inches) are covered with scribbled handwriting annotating the pictures. Obviously, this is a show that would require several hours to properly appreciate and admire. However, I am convinced that this artist, born in 1946, is important, a talent of major proportions. "Cloud Museum" by Eduardo Navarro is a collection of diaphanous-looking garments on silver hangers, white robes with metallic scarves drooping down from three similarly silver rings. The garments look like a flock of angels dropped to earth and roosting in a gallery with kitschy pink walls. The next gallery, a big darkened room, features a retrato (portrait) of someone named Antonio do Erouso, also known as "Catalina, the lieutenant nun". Erouso, shown in painting from around 1640 (she was born in 1585) was a woman who was a cross-dresser, a transvestite in the service of the Spanish or Portuguese military. Another HD triptych of screens features modern homosexuals and trans people commenting on the woman whom they imagine to be a spiritual forebear, a sort of elder or ancestor figure. The three interlocutors are eloquent but annoying. They interrogate the picture and seek to imagine the story of this odd figure. This exhibit isn't art as far as I can see, but more some kind of history with modern-day interlocutors (more or less "talking heads") in big glossy images seeking to connect the baroque painting to their own experience -- the installation's interest isn't esthetic but primarily socio-historic. Petrit Halilay was a boy in Kosovo during the troubles in that place. His work "Very Volcanic over the Green Feather" consists of truck-sized cut-outs vibrantly painted in a child's palette hanging from the ceiling like gaudy clouds. If you walk among the colorful and cheerful mobiles, they stir a little, wafted here and there and, on their back sides, you can see more somber images, a crying child and a column of military vehicles -- the inverse of the bright fowl and rainbow-colored landscapes are, in some cases (but not all) disturbing memories of the violence that the artist endured a child.
Kandis Williams': A Surface consists of huge collages and other objects -- it's a vast retrospective occupying four large galleries. The collages are lurid and densely populated with horror movie imagery and mobs of black and brown figures. This stuff is marginally interesting, mostly due to the extreme and violent pictorial content. I don't know what the artist intends by these collages -- is she arguing that African-Americans in this country have been monstrously abused by White people? This is my surmise although the point is certainly not made with any clarity. The labels are full of paranoid and hysterical allegations phrased in academic jargon of the worst kind: for instance, "ontology is a conjuration from gods and monsters that white people make up to kill us all." ("Gods and monsters" is a campy citation from James Whale's very queer The Bride of Frankenstein -- in the film, a mad doctor proposes a toast to "a new world of gods and monsters.') More interesting are some assemblages made from artificial plants, intertwined green leaves and stems and potted orchids that have all been spray-painted with a greenish-white pigment. These things have a vaguely malevolent aspect; the simulated vegetal growth seems sinister, somehow toxic, and menacing in its abundance and density. The most technically impressive images in the show are two large lenticular prints -- these are images made with raised particles and fins of colored plastic that have the effect of changing from one picture to another when viewed from different angles. Seen from one vantage, the viewer sees an audience in a darkened theater; from another angle, only a few feet distant, the image of the auditorium transforms into a picture of a Black diva who seems anguished and tearful; from another angle, also only a couple feet farther along the axis of the picture, the image shows the artist self-assured and singing into her microphone -- it's fascinating to see how the image changes and morphs into different pictures as you walk by it. The name of the picture is "From the joy of seeing them to the pain of being them" -- a literal representation of how the proud, competent performer turns into a weeping figure mediated by the indifferent audience. A second lenticular image is even more complex -- I counted six or seven separate images somehow stacked on top of one another and visible seriatim as the gallerygoer walks by the 4 foot by five foot picture. These images are spectacular technical achievements and it is interesting to speculate as to how they are made. A large series of images of the young Michael Jackson, painted on silk-screen is accompanied by label gibberish that I cite exactly as written: "But more fundamentally a deepening of the compromise already integral to any exogamy that is able to remain patrilineal..." Exactly what we were all thinking as we encounter these images of the late lamented "king of pop." (Almost every one of Willaim's images is accompanied by a daunting tablet of printed text, hundreds of words that are completely incoherent and opaque displayed next to the pictures.)
Pan Daijing's Sudden Places is another immense installation, occupying two large and very dark galleries, spaces that are about the size of a bowling alley. It's unsettling -- the sound system creates an ambient rumbling and buzzing, a bit like the soundtrack of a David Lynch movie. The floor is draped in some sort of rubbery fabric that smells strongly of chemicals and that rustles in a disconcerting way underfoot. As you traverse the space, you feel unsteady, dizzy, as if about to topple over in the darkness. In one corner of the big space, some five-foot long strips of tinsel, the sort of thing you might see on a Brobdingnian Christmas tree dangles from the ceiling. Along one wall, there are blackboards entirely covered in illegible script, lit starkly from the side so that the chalk marks glow. In the other room, there are huge video monitors playing something -- it must have been nondescript because I don't recall any of the images, just their grainy texture and the wan light cast from them. In one corner, there's a slit in the wall through which you can look to see some construction debris, a sawhorse, concrete floors and a panel also marked with illegible chalk marks simulating some kind of writing. This is an ambitious installation. I have no idea what it is supposed to signify -- it's a kind of haunted house and I was happy to get away from it.
These exhibits were so interesting and demanding that I spent almost two hours looking at them and didn't have time to really visit with the old friends in the permanent collection higher in the building. I stood in front of Marc's Blue Horses and looked at the Edward Hopper painting of the secretary and businessman at night in an office that suggests a state of siege. The blue horses snuffle at the landscape like overly excited dogs, blue harnessed to vivid blue. Then, I was back on the highway, driving to Fargo.
(Lenticular prints are, sometimes, called "Winkies" or "transforming prints". They are made by printing different images on thin, raised strips that are interlaced so that several pictures are simultaneously present on the grooved surface. The images as interlaced are installed beneath a lenticular lens which provides access to different aspects of the surface as the eye change position. Lenticular prints fall into "transforming print", animated print, and stereoscopic 3D print categories. They are similar to the so-called tabula scalata popular in the renaissance and baroque periods that also interlace disparate images on this surfaces. The effect was discovered by paleolithic cave artists who cut grooves into images that they made so that, when viewed from different angles, horses seem to move their heads and tails and mammoths wiggle their trunks.
Pan Daijing is a Berlin artist born in China. She is best-known for her musical compositions which are "noise" art and industrial techno in character. She is queer and BDSM practitioner, often posing in leather with red highlights.
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