Walk This Way
We recently called out Minnesota's black artists for claiming they were out of the loop on black visual culture. Now we've got more evidence that they are right where the rubber meets the road with new ideas coming from black artists. To wit: LA artist and SMH Frequency alumnus Rodney McMillian, is one of three artists to examine the everyday made extraordinary in the Walker Art Center's Ordinary Culture, which opened recently at the Minneapolis venue.
The show was curated by Korean-born curator Doryun Chong and attempts to examine the all-encompassing concept of culture by dissecting and manipulating mundane and ordinary things, almost in the manner of field anthropologists more than gallery artists. We think this makes sense given McMillian's contribution to Frequency: a dilapidated chair, seemingly reclaimed from the garbage and displayed in the museum as a readymade.
McMillian's Ordinary Culture contribution similarly includes a salvaged-looking piece of patterned linoleum hung on the wall as though it were a painting. A short distance from the wall, a collection of about 50 slate gray, cloth-wrapped columns stand at attention near a video of McMillan delivering Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” speech from 1964.
We see a trio of ideas that have been much in evidence in recent contemporary art in the US: the return of the readymade, the use of a collection, and the evocation of 60s-era political tactics. Other artists in the show are Minnesota's Jay Heikes and New York's Adam Helms.
28 August 2006