Dan Grahammit!!!

I visited the Walker Art Center for the first time since I've lived in Minneapolis. I was looking forward to it. I love Art, the ideals of it. I tend to get frustrated with it, though, but this stems from me "loving" it. I'm not a patron who hums and awes at a blank canvas with a dot in one corner symbolizing both the style of 60's minimalism and the notion of hope within the culture. I see an artist who felt like that might have been the best message regarding the place and time, but it fails to produce an empathetic taint in my breath. It more leads to a sarcastic comment by me to my cohorts.

My favorite art is art with layers. It can be minimalistic in nature, but it has to be bold. It cannot be four bungee cords tied together in a corner of a room made to look like a blank canvas. Those bungee cords have to be smeared with paint in places, tied to nails, have tiny feathers sticking out, something more than just bungee cords (I mention bungee cords simply because there is this piece of art in the Walker and it struck a . . . discord? . . . with me and my person.). It needs to stick out, have at least three elements.

One of the galleries, Haegue Yang: Integrity of the Insider, brought you inside of the work. You walk into a large room bathed in red light. Venetian blinds hang every which way, reflecting the light in weird mishmash patterns. Looking around the room, my cohort and I found a drumset in a back corner. It was begging to be played, and my companion went to go ask one of the grey suits if it was kosher for the public to play the drumset. Apparently, that was the intent all along. The set is rigged to the lighting system of the room, so that when you bang on the drums, the lights turn, making the shadows around the room dance and intermingle. I played for a good five minutes. A small crowd had gathered to watch after a bit (you can hear those drums on four different floors in the Gallery Tower, it's what brought us into the gallery initially). But I didn't quite grasp the concept of the piece. I had fun with it, but the message was lost. We left with smiles on our faces, mainly concocted from the drum set and the crowd, but also with a sense of sarcastic irony floating beneath our shared gritting teeth.

We failed the artist. I feel most do. Or did the artist fail us? Or is there no failure to be had? That's what pisses me off about art. Most musicians, poets, painters, writers, and the rest of the gamut will say "It's whatever you want it to be" when asked what the piece is about, what it meant, how it should be received, experienced, if it can fail, etc. There is too much liminal space and grey area. It seems lazy to me.

I make up my own meaning to art. But I also like knowing what the artist's intent was initially.

Dan Graham was the main highlight of the Center when we went. He takes up three floors currently in the Gallery Tower. While there were some interesting one way mirror displays (which I found entertaining -- there is a heart shaped mirror system in the middle of a large center room. If you go inside the heart, people on the other side will come up and look at themselves as if it's a funhouse mirror, all the while looking directly at you. Strangers make funny faces at you and they don't realize it.) the whole exhibit seemed stale, old, and irrelevant to me. I got a lot of the art, but I didn't care. And that pissed me off. My partner and I both coined an inside joke for the evening stemming from the shared frustration we both had for the exhibit and the rest of the Center: "DAN GRAHAMMIT!! What does it mean?! Why should I care?!"

Dan Grahammit, indeed. Art: I love you and hate you. If you were personified in a Disney film you would be portrayed as a pretentious, fashionably unfashionable asshole who simply glares at people when asked questions. Yawning, you'd say "I've grown tired of myself," and then not move or do anything. You'd just stand there with half-closed eyes.

My purpose in life is to punch Art in the teeth. "If you're so tired of yourself, then fucking DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!!!!"

Arlo Guthrie -- "The Motorcycle Song"