Our venture to Minneapolis last week was equally enjoyable and informative. I was impressed with the works displayed at the Walker this month. Modern art is being pushed as far as possible, in so many intriguing directions now, it seems. Of course the main goal remains, and that is to generate a particular feeling within the viewer. For example, Haegue Yang's "Yearning Melancholy Red" was captivating and overwhelming. This is achieved by combining all sorts of stimuli and interaction for the viewer to meander through and form their own conclusions. I was impressed on many levels by this installation.
However, I choose to speak about another piece that created a stronger reaction of a different sort for me. I discovered "Empty Room" while looking at a piece close to it, and noticing a faint light underneath the second set of stairs in the first two galleries. Getting down on hand and knee to peer underneath, I thought at first I was looking at a mess left about by museum workers, or left over artist supplies. This ordinary curiosity that I felt right away turned into a humorous realization that it was all fabricated specifically to generate that 'ordinary' feeling. It was incredibly intriguing that I felt a feeling that the artists completely intended me to feel!
Peter Fischli and David Weiss are the two collaborative installation artists that created "Empty Room". They had a production at the Walker in 1996 that created this particular mess in the basement. It was this random assortment of supplies scattered about that gave them the idea for this piece. They intended to celebrate the ordinary, overlooked, or undervalued in our lives by using the concept of trompe l'oeil to create the illusion that the viewer is simply seeing a scattered, left over mess. In fact, each of these objects is fabricated from polyurethane, every box, book, board, bucket, paintbrush, hammer, nail, lighter, cup, q-tip, and piece of garbage! They have fabricated a perfect mess.
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