Month: June 2003

The truth of the matter is that we’ve blown off Aquatennial for years. Crowds make us nervous, and we certainly don’t need the imprimatur of City Fathers (or Mothers) to enjoy its most bountiful amenity—our lakes and rivers. And yet, Aquatennial has gotten so big that at least one affiliated event is actually drawing national attention these days: We understand this year’s Lifetime Fitness Triathalon (August 2) will be on network TV. Maybe we should take another look at the schedule—and take in the coronation of the Queen of the Lakes (July 25), or maybe the traditional Calhoun regatta (July 26), or the one spectacular event you pretty much have no choice but to enjoy, the mammoth fireworks show in downtown Minneapolis, July 26. www.aquatennial.org

A few months ago, Zadie Smith wrote in the New York Times about being an extra in a PBS screen adaptation of her autobiographical debut novel, White Teeth. It was a touching piece in which the writer acknowledged the shortcomings of her novel, and the bizarre experience of being an extra in the movie of your own life. (Actually, it was, among other things, the raucous story of how her biracial hippie parents met in the paisley heyday of London circa 1975.) Here, she’ll undoubtedly read from The Autograph Man, her likeable second novel, which came out last fall. Ruminator, 1648 Grand Ave., St. Paul, (651) 699-0587, ruminator.com

He may be one of the most prominent Indian writers around today, but Sherman Alexie doesn’t play to the expectations of either white or Native American audiences. Though he almost always writes about characters who are, like himself, Indians from the Seattle/Spokane area, he feels no obligation to the traditions of identity politics and aims for stories that are, if necessarily filtered through his experience, about the wider human condition. He’s a deft ironist, but also knows how to mingle his humor with pain and pathos. His short-story collections include The Toughest Indian in the World and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, which he later adapted into the script for the indie-film sleeper Smoke Signals in 1998. His new collection, Ten Little Indians, adds nine more tales to his catalog, and some of his most mature writing to date. He’s also branched out into directing, with The Business of Fancydancing, featuring Smoke Signals star Evan Adams as a gay Spokane Indian writer shackled by an uneasy relationship with his past. The film is currently making the festival circuit and out on DVD July 8. Black Bear Crossings, 1360 N. Lexington Parkway; call Birchbark Books, (612) 374-4023, for more information

MIT physics professor Lightman is best known for Einstein’s Dreams, a brilliantly elliptical series of spare, magical-realist vignettes which explored what it would be like if the laws of physics worked differently—what-if tales not so much science fiction as brief essays on the limits of human nature. He switched gears for The Diagnosis, a National Book Award finalist, a paranoid J.G. Ballardesque tale about an executive whose body rebels against him with amnesia and paralysis. His latest novel, Reunion, is a downbeat bit of midlife-crisis angst about a 50ish professor who starts seeing hallucinatory reenactments of a disastrous, life-changing love affair from his college days. Lightman’s distanced, even formal prose style, which we enjoyed in his previous books, fits well with the book’s theme of sadness at the road not taken. But even at only 231 pages, Reunion reads like an overextended vignette from Dreams. Lightman reads at Ruminator Books August 1.

You’ve heard the rumors: Deep in the bowels of TPT’s St. Paul studios, former governor, pro wrestler, and Navy SEAL Jesse Ventura is preparing for his debut as an MSNBC television host. Sadly, the launch date of the Ventura show (and the triumphant return of our favorite public servant and bloviator) keeps getting postponed. What on Earth is the problem?

• Scheduling conflicts with Young and the Restless Reunion & Convention Tour
• Guest-hosting Tom Ryther’s swinger parties through July
• Chin-dimple spackle keeps melting under the klieg lights
• Crank-calls Leslie Davis every fifteen minutes
• MSNBC wardrobe staff unable to find peacock-print Zubaz
• Leg-wrestling match with Chris Matthews stretching into its 13th day
• Still separating green glass from brown glass at governor’s mansion
• Too busy writing phony reviews for his books on Amazon.com
• Roasted Chestnut or Old Mahogany?—the mustache-dye quagmire
• Rehearals at TPT studios constantly interrupted by Erik Eskola coughing loudly
• Still trying to find a willing volunteer to take over Predator fans listserv
• Television technicians not sure how to get that big head into the little box
• ESL classes not going as planned
• Hammering out contract riders for “lifetime supply” of Slim Jims and Cheez-Its in green room
• Keeps getting lost driving to St. Paul
• Going “commando” backstage, causing massive staff turn-over
• Finally getting to all those TiVo’ed episodes of Judging Amy
• WWF not giving any deals on “breakaway” folding chairs or suspended cages
• Secretly scared to death of Lester Holt
• Stalling for six to eight weeks before mandatory MSNBC urine test
• Waiting until after man-hunting season is over

Artist Santiago Cucullu has worked himself into a corner. In recent months, the twenty-something former Minneapolitan has struck proverbial gold in the art world—appearing in the Walker Art Center’s multinational blockbuster exhibition “When Latitudes Become Forms,” and also landing a one-year residency at the Core Artists Program at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. So what could be wrong? Well, Cucullu wants to achieve material success commensurate with his venue success. That is, he dreams of making money even though he makes art that, by its very nature, can’t be sold.

“I go back and forth,” Cucullu said recently of his direct-to-wall applications of various tacky (in both senses) wood-grain or red-vinyl contact papers. “It takes money to make money, and given that ‘man makes the money to buy things from the other man,’ I also make drawings. I have not yet made a direct jump from one to the other—from the wall and the experience to something that is portable… I think that the market will come around, and that collectors will see that it is not a big jump.”

Despite its lack of commercial viability, Cucullu’s work is distinctive. He cuts shapes out of the contact paper and arranges them on the wall. The resulting image—of overlapping two-dimensional silhouette figures, landscape elements, indistinct shapes, occasional words—is a pastiche that calls to mind the fragmented collages of Kurt Schwitters, and the graffiti-inspired pastiches of Arturo Herrera and Lily van der Stokker.

Substituting the wall for canvas was an easy way to set his art apart from the mainstream. “I started doing wall pieces because it felt transgressive for me,” Cucullu said. “I had often felt a hesitation about taking away the physical support, although I am actually just replacing it.”

If such direct-to-wall art is truly “transgressive,” then there is a lot of transgressing going on in the local art scene of late. In the past year or so, dozens of local, national, and international artists have taken to tossing out the middle-ground—that is, the conventional canvas, paper, board, or other surface that allows someone to carry away an artwork—and putting their work directly on walls, ceilings, or floors. These trans-temporary murals, as I have taken to calling them, have appeared at Franklin ArtWorks, the Soo Visual Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Midway Contemporary Art, and the Walker with increasingly frequency.

Among the examples, heavily tattooed French artist Jean-Luc Verna applied tattoo-like images of vamping angels and skeletons to the floor and walls of Midway last spring. San Francisco artist Alicia McCarthy painted swaths of Midway’s walls with goopy plaid-like eruptions of color. Last year, Minneapolis artist Colin Gatling lived in the Soo Visual Art Center for three weeks, painting and repainting a black-and-white mural in the gallery through the run of a show. And four other artists besides Cucullu made direct-to-wall work in the Walker’s “Latitudes”; this included a stunning floor drawing by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla that would make Michel-angelo proud. Called “Charcoal Dance Floor,” it was a large charcoal image of dancing figures drawn with precise illusionistic “di sotto in su” perspective that was slowly erased over the show’s run as viewers walked directly on the image.

We can only guess where this temp-muralizing impulse comes from. Some people I spoke to cited the graffiti aesthetic of the mid-1980s as an influence; others mentioned strategies by minimalist artists of the 1960s to activate the architecture through their work. Philippe Vergne, the Walker curator most responsible for “Latitudes,” claimed that contemporary artists are interested in history—citing cave paintings, Renaissance murals, and frescos. I’m not sure I buy it, given the ephemeral nature of what these post-modern artists are doing compared to their forebears. I’m inclined to think it has more to do with simply breaking the rules.

Then again, the absence of money in the arts may be a more direct cause of this trend. While there has always been a sense that it’s difficult to make money as an artist—with the possible exception of Reagan’s tax break-fueled art market of the 1980s—we’ve entered a period of financial realism in the arts. Artists may have once imagined it was possible to make money by selling art to collectors, and they tended to avoid making ad hoc art. “I never think of it as highly salable,” said Thomas Barry, owner of the for-profit Thomas Barry Gallery in Minneapolis, of direct-to-wall art. “Moveable objects are always much easier to realize for people who are selling or are buying them.” With the arts taking an inordinate hit in the current economy, however, all bets are off.

Temporary art works thrive in an atmosphere where artists’ main goals are to get grants and university teaching positions. A line on the resume for a temporary work slapped on a wall is just as good as one for a well-crafted artwork that someone may or may not buy. In fact, the incentive not to have to cart around such work is strong. According to Suzy Greenberg, director of the Soo Visual Art Center, one artist chose to make her trans-temporary mural at Soo in order to save space in her studio. Temporary art is easily portable across time-zones and through strip searches. There are no shipping fees, no canvas or frames to buy, no insurance to purchase—what could be easier?

It’s unfortunate that the resulting art, made under deadline pressures by artists on the spot, often has a rather unappealing tossed-off quality and lacks the craft and grace of a more fully realized art work. For instance, Jean-Luc Verna’s photographic self-portraits of his sculpturesque body are more interesting by far than his gallery tattoos. And pretty as Alicia McCarthy’s goopy wall abstractions are, they’d be prettier still if it were possible to take one of them home.

In the end, we may have to live with this new aesthetic. In the post-consumerist art world of today, art is not precious, and it is made less for purchasing than for encountering. Or as Vergne put it, “There is a very sustained practice by artists who want to move away from painting as an object—that is, color on canvas—to embrace art that is more experiential.” One can only hope that this trend doesn’t go much further, or artists bent on sharing their experiences may skip making art altogether.

Regardless of how much you admire Madonna’s ability to reinvent herself over the last 20 years, there’s a point at which you see her on your TV screen for the millionth time and snore. No matter how many expensively-produced albums and impeccably orchestrated world tours Madonna churns out, no matter how many new styles and images and ideas she borrows from bohemian or gay or alternative culture, no matter how many times she makes headlines by giving birth or learning to enjoy a frothy pint of Guinness in an English pub or buying a new mansion or changing her hair color, at some point, she just doesn’t seem that interesting or relevant anymore.

But, like a relationship that ends suddenly, you don’t realize the feeling’s gone until it’s way too late. For me, it happened right before the release of Madonna’s latest album, American Life. She appeared on an MTV special called Madonna On Stage & On The Record, and despite the fraudience of hard-core fans assembled to gasp and swoon and hang on her every word, she looked sort of awkward and unspectacular. Even as she hit every mark like a career politician, providing just the right answers to each difficult question from the crowd, she averted her eyes and seemed uncomfortable with the role she chose for herself way back when she was a teenager.

Still, it’s strange to even contemplate a downward slide in popularity for Madonna when, just a few months ago, it seemed certain that her new album would be a hit. Her video for the title track, a montage of military images paired with an unapologetic attack on the crass commercialism of American culture, seemed both unnervingly in step with the times and remarkably bold, considering that so few artists saw fit to express their contempt for the hawkish shift in the public’s consciousness since September 11. In an uncharacteristically self-conscious move, she pulled the video, lest it be mistaken as a crassly commercial move to profit from the war in Iraq. While many have proclaimed her wise to do so, it signaled a more sensitive, caring Madonna. The question is, Do we really want a more sensitive, caring Madonna?

It seems that, while we weren’t looking, Madonna has become a little too evolved to be interesting. Her relentless flow of so-called exclusive interviews reveals a woman whose bluster and delusions of grandeur have dissolved into circumspection and philosophical musings, whose focus on the Kabballah has turned out to be more than the passing interest most initially assumed it would be. We’re all happy for her, of course, for finding religion and for having a seemingly satisfying family life. But the sad truth is that a mature, measured Madonna will never be nearly as exciting as the slutty bride who rolled on the floor singing “Like a Virgin.” As much as we learn about the perils of materialism and the joys of enlightenment and the evils of American arrogance, all delivered in that eerie British accent that makes you want to shake her until she snaps out of it, Madonna was a lot more fun when she wasn’t quite so intent on appearing healthy and well adjusted. While there’s still something unnerving about watching her calmly outline her newfound openness and spiritual rebirth on MTV, all the while barely masking her disdain for the fawning teenagers around her, such undercurrents of emotional dissonance hardly compare to the woman who, in her 1991 biopic Truth or Dare, interrupted a visit with her very Catholic father by dashing into the next room and flashing her boobs for the camera.

Setting aside her obvious skill for co-opting the underground, dysfunction has always been a big part of Madonna’s appeal. From “Papa Don’t Preach” to “Live to Tell,” her image and her music are an elaborate acting-out against her parents, society, overbearing men, and a parade of other demons. Her blatant hunger for fame and power at the start of her career, her vanity and self-involvement and shallow concerns in Truth or Dare, her isolation and paranoia and disdain for her fans during the filming of Evita, the masochism of her relentless, punishing exercise schedules—the contrast between her invincible image and such hints of mental and emotional weakness were tragicomic and mysterious and unfathomable. We felt privileged to understand Madonna better than she understood herself. And, like Princess Diana, despite her omnipresence in the media, Madonna’s weaknesses gave us the feeling that she needed our support.

Granted, there is some satisfaction that comes from seeing Madonna deriding her own bad taste and shallow interests, as she now does regularly, flinching at her big hair and shameless attention-seeking. But as much as her honesty might reflect a newer, healthier Material Girl, her evolution as a person may not coincide with an ability to maintain her dominance as an artist, considering we loved and embraced the sleazy, whiny, obsessive, out-of-control Madonna more, not just because she was more entertaining, but because she truly required our love more than this toned, centered, pitch-perfect specimen we now see before us.

Madonna, for one, doesn’t seem concerned about the price she might pay for evolving. When MTV’s John Norris asked her if she felt a responsibility to her audience to give them what they expect from her, she answered, “I think that my fans tend to be pretty expansive-thinking people who are always themselves looking for something new and something different, who are adventurous. So, I think we’re on the same wavelength. I think we’re feeling each other, so I don’t have to keep them happy; I think they’re on my journey with me.”

As expansive-thinking as such an answer may be, Madonna can’t ignore the fact that she designed herself as a multi-media pop artist, formed around images and gossip and grandiose visions and hints of emotional turmoil far more than around talent. While it’s perfectly fine for Beyonce not to boast and flounder and flaunt herself publicly because her appeal lies in her talent, for Madonna, talent has always been entirely beside the point. Her voice is remarkably trained and polished but never that rich or interesting, her dancing, when it’s not painstakingly choreographed, leaves much to be desired. That said, her knack for hiring talent is legendary. With the help of a revolving door of quality musicians, producers, choreographers, stylists, and designers, she manages to create the kind of spectacle—both in her videos and her stage shows—that’s absolutely irresistible to the public. Add to that an uncanny ability to stay in the headlines, paired with a skill for crafting tunes so catchy you can absolutely hate them on first listen and still find yourself humming them seconds later, and it’s clear that Madonna will always find a way to stay in the public eye.

Even so, every star has to fade eventually. Like Michael Jordan retiring for the third time or Celine Dion staging another fake-out farewell tour, Madonna’s turn as mild-mannered, spiritually fulfilled, middle-aged mother may be the one reincarnation that doesn’t spark the public’s interest. Her latest role may bring her happiness, but it does seem less likely to bring her fans.

Does that mean Madonna should give up what she believes just to maintain her popularity? Of course not. In fact, losing her power of celebrity may be the final stage of Madonna’s personal journey toward happiness. And I’m happy to see Madonna happy—as long as I don’t have to see her quite so often.