Olafur Eliasson: ‘Konvex / Konkav’, 1995-2000
Collection of Walker Art Center
Courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Andy Warhol: ‘Sixteen Jackies’, 1964
Collection of Walker Art Center
© The Andy Warhol Foundation for the visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Bruce Conner: ‘Crossroads’, 1976
Collection of Walker Art Center
The Conner Family Trust
Dynamic Collections Exhibition, ‘Event Horizon’, at Walker Art Center
A cross-disciplinary blend of film, video, performance, painting, sculpture, and photography drawn from the Walker Art Center’s rich, multidisciplinary holdings is presented in Event Horizon
November 21, 2009 – August 5, 2012
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Source: Walker Art Center
Unfolding over a nearly three-year period, the exhibition features a range of subplots and visual contrasts by both established and lesser-known artists represented in the Walker’s collections. In galleries animated with installations that change over time, Event Horizon offers a new context in which to view and experience connections to real-life events as well as artistic moments. Organized by a team of curators and realized in its final form by chief curator Darsie Alexander and curator Elizabeth Carpenter, the exhibition features some 90 pieces ranging from avant-garde film of the 1960s to live performances to newly created environmental works. Active zones of rotating works and dialogues serve as sites for screenings, performances, and public conversations. Event Horizon runs through August 5, 2012.
“The theme of ‘event’ operates on many levels at once, tapping into the deep strata of collections and programs here at the Walker. From film and video to visual and performing arts, this concept enables us to consider the major events of art and life that have shaped culture since the 1960s,” Alexander says.
Inspired by the idea of the event horizon, a term used in astronomy to describe the edge of observable space as well as the outer limits of darkness and light, the exhibition presents works that reflect the many voices, perspectives, and programs advanced by the Walker—expanding its boundaries as an art center and its role as a collecting as well as presenting institution. Reversing the traditional precedence of the object over the event of its creation, artists such as Raymond Hains, Kara Walker, and Andy Warhol have used the very images of culture as material for exploration and critique. Appropriating mass media images, French artist Hains transformed the mundane into art with his collages created from torn posters found on the streets of Paris. Warhol’s melancholy black, blue, and white Sixteen Jackies (1964) quotes from the incessant television coverage of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, after which footage of the event was repeated for weeks. Kara Walker depicts her own version of the past using the antebellum South, one of America’s darker historical locations, as backdrop. In her screenprint Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated) (2005), her signature silhouettes are paired with rephotographed Civil War lithographs of battle and strife.
While some galleries will be quiet and contemplative, others will be animated with performances, screenings, and conversation, demonstrating the Walker’s unique multidisciplinary platform. Changing selections of moving images from the Ruben/Bentson Film and Video Study Collection will be screened in a designated space, beginning with Bruce Conner’s poetic and mesmerizing film CROSSROADS (1976), which combines multiple camera shots of the first underwater atomic bomb test into a 36-minute meditation on the image of the resulting mushroom-shaped cloud. Films by Hollis Frampton, Derek Jarman, and Chris Marker—others whose work has captured events that have shaped our history—also will be featured during the exhibition’s run. Video monitors in each gallery will showcase the Walker’s 40-year performing arts history with landmark performances that have defined the program by such artists as Mikhail Baryshnikov, Trisha Brown, Romeo Castellucci, Merce Cunningham, Bill T. Jones, Ralph Lemon, and Elizabeth Streb. Also on view will be Cao Fei’s video installation i.Mirror by China Tracy (AKA Cao Fei) (2007), depicting a simulated romance between avatars in the artist’s 3D virtual world Second Life, which blends documentary and magical realism.
In addition to performances captured on video, renowned Japanese American dance creators Eiko & Koma will be in residence throughout the month of November 2010 to perform Naked, a new “living installation,” six hours a day, six days a week. Commissioned by the Walker to celebrate its 30-year relationship with the artists, the piece features the duo’s characteristic glacially paced movement amidst sound, light, video, and organic set elements of their own design.
Frequent participatory moments—from handling the sculptural Three Adaptives (1997) of Franz West to seeing one’s reflection in the mirror of Olafur Eliasson’s Convex/Concave (1995–2000)—enable a variety of experiential encounters to occur in Event Horizon, which will take shape and change during the run of the exhibition. According to Carpenter, “gallery-to-gallery opportunities to reflect as well as act will unfold as the visitor moves through space.”
Event Horizon reflects the Walker’s collecting practice, which in recent years has tended to focus around the edges of the obvious, resulting in collections distinguished by the embrace of hybrid or otherwise unclassifiable works that might fall between the cracks in more traditional institutions
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