Par-Tee On

On a sunny June afternoon, Mark Vogt and Azure Marlowe have been given the enviable job of replacing bowling pins on hole number three of the mini-golf course-cum-art exhibit installed for the summer at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. Hole three, titled Bolfing for Gowlers, is designed to look like a tiny bowling lane, and after two weeks of play and several saturating rainstorms, its wood is warped and several of its pins have been plucked like rotten teeth. And so, released from their usual gigs in Walker Art Center’s comparatively dim indoor galleries, the construction supervisor and lead tech for the mini-course have jacked up the hole and then balanced it on saw horses; Vogt is drilling screws in from underneath to replace the bowling pins that create one of the mini golf world’s most impossible approach shots. (The bowling pin placed directly in front of the hole seems to preclude any chance of scoring a hole in one, and the gutters on each side take most balls hopelessly, irretrievably out of play.) When asked if the pins have regularly been swiped as fond souvenirs, or ripped mightily off their screws by frustrated players, Vogt says, “I think it’s called ‘picking up a spare.’”

The Walker seems to have bowled a strike with “Walker in the Rough,” located at the Sculpture Garden’s north end, between the Calders and the jutting arms of Mark di Suvero’s Molecule. Shortly after opening the ten-hole mini-golf course, the hours were extended to accommodate crowds that have sometimes waited up to three and a half hours to play. “I don’t think they had any idea it would be this popular,” says Marlowe.

Indeed, on a Wednesday, when the course is officially closed, at least two dozen hopeful golfers have come to keep their elbows straight and swing through the ball, only to be disappointed by the locked-up shack that houses score cards and clubs.

“Is there anywhere else to golf around here?” asked one woman, a tourist whose group finally went to their cars, retrieved their own clubs, and played a couple of holes anyway.

And perhaps this is one reason for the exhibit’s runaway success. Until this summer, there really hasn’t been anywhere to play mini-golf right in the city. Now, though, St. Paul has also joined the game with the nine-hole “EarthScapes” course at the Science Museum. Even before that, the suburban course at Centennial Lakes in Edina had become quite the hotspot. Clearly, the draw of the Lilliputian links is not to be underestimated.

In the 1920s, mini-golf was the United States’ fifth-biggest industry, as popular as baseball and the movies. With courses designed in homage to Scotland’s rolling greens, the game was a sophisticated pastime whose popularity spread from New York rooftops across the country with an almost feverish intensity. Opening a mini-golf course became one of the era’s most foolproof get-rich-quick schemes; soon, local ordinances were being passed to keep enthusiasts from playing late into the night, and widespread worry emerged about the pastime’s corruptive and corrosive influence on America’s youth. (Think Footloose: Those kids and their crazy dancing!)

Alternatively called dwarf golf, pygmy golf, midget golf, and a variety of other things unpalatable to the modern sensibility, mini-golf as we mostly know it emerged during the Depression, when course owners had to get a little more creative, trading in pre-fab groomed holes for homemade links, which is when the windmills, tiny bridges, clown mouths, pendulums, and the like came into play. While eventually its popularity began to decline—clearly Hollywood is currently faring better than the mini-golf industry—mini-golf’s manageable challenges still have a draw.

But that can’t be the only reason so many people have come here this June afternoon. Of the disheartened golfers who showed up on an off day, most settle happily for wandering from hole to hole as they might in the Walker’s indoor galleries, reading the didactic labels and clucking appreciation, disapproval, or just plain confusion:

“An ice-fishing house. Ice fishing in the summer. Fantastic!” “This one looks like you could skateboard up it.” “Gosh, what is this? I thought this was going to be a real golf course.”

Good point. So is it a real golf course? A mini one, that is? Is it golf? Or is it art? Or some strange hybrid created by the seemingly unlikely bedfellows of sport and art? And with ten holes instead of the usual nine or eighteen, you have to wonder if the Walker had any idea what it was doing—should artists really design golf courses? Even tiny ones?—or if, as usual, this avant-garde institution is asking us to think outside the box, bending the boundaries of our understanding. What does it mean that there are ten holes? Is it a comment on our blind acceptance of the status quo, of a kind of lockstep reverence for obscure numerological Kaballa?

“We put out a request for proposals and we picked eight that we liked,” says Christi Atkinson, the Walker’s associate director of education. “And then we got to design one. And Target [the course’s corporate sponsor] got one. Oh. So how does a mini-golf exhibit fit with the Walker’s usual challenging fare? “It’s true that we’re often challenging art, opening up people’s ideas about what art is. But the purpose of this isn’t to deconstruct mini-golf,” Atkinson patiently responds.

But how many golf holes are, well, curated? And, in such close proximity to the gnomic declarations that Jenny Holzer carved into her marble benches, one can’t help but read things like “Keep club head below knees and do not loft ball” as some kind of metaphorical directive. After strolling the course long enough, even the adjacent Coke machine’s “Thirsty?” came to read as a metaphysical question.

Take hole number four, Mini Golf Smackdown!, whose creators have devised a point system rewarding schadenfreude and raw aggression, and “questioning the passive competition of traditional golf.” (Passive? Have they ever played golf with my sister?) Assuming that most people are essentially playing against themselves and to better their abilities, Takuma Handa and Daniel Vercruysse here instruct players to whack their way around a grid of raised and inverted pyramids, encouraging you to knock other balls off the course, chip your own ball back onto it using most any means, and to “laugh at others’ misfortune.” On a hole where it’s essentially impossible to line up a shot, the first person to actually sink the ball in the hole is rewarded with one point (three under par), the second gets two points, and so on—that is, your score for the hole has nothing to do with how many shots you actually took.

For mini-golf, this is sort of complicated, and one steamy Thursday night, the line backs up quickly. “It’s a good thing there’s a ten-stroke limit,” comments one player when asked about her success on the Smackdown, “or we would have been there all night.”(Actually, the stroke limit for the course is six.) When I asked a member of another group what she thought of the idea behind the Smackdown, she said, “The one with the pyramids? Yeah. We didn’t read the instructions.”

The creators of Pachinko Generation, hole number two, have constructed a combination skateboard half-chute and Plexiglas-encased wall of spinning blocks that have screws in them, and which looks something like a medieval torture device. The didactic label states, “A surprising discovery about pachinko machines is that the more evenly its metal pins are spaced, the more unpredictable the ball’s bounce becomes.” More surprising still is the raw aggression (extra Smackdown points here?) that players use to get their balls unstuck from the pachinko machine, something like trying to get a jammed Snickers out of a vending machine when your blood sugar has dropped. Most players resort to shoving their clubs behind the Plexiglas to sp
in the blocks, which does have the desired effect of “remix[ing] the machine’s images,” though not as organically as the designers might have hoped.

Other holes are more straightforward. Winter in Summer; Ice Fishing House pays homage to a Minnesota pastime, and Frank’s Frolic is a nod to a Frank Stella painting in the Walker’s permanent collection. (Its maddening diagonals prompted my partner, after several bad shots, to bellow, “Stella!”) Point of fact: If you’re actually competitive about mini golf, you’re out of luck here.

“One of my friends is a high school math teacher,” noted Charles Weed, who was golfing the course with his wife, Jennifer Prestholdt, and their two young children. “He kept saying ‘This is clearly designed by artists! The angles are all wrong!’” Jo Schultz, an MCAD student in a black T-shirt that said “Kill ’Em All. Let God Sort ’Em Out,” was playing a second round with her boyfriend Parker. “I’m competitive about it,” she said. “It’s a little frustrating to not be able to kick his ass so bad.”

Most golfers seemed to quit keeping score after a while and simply surrender to the heat and the giddiness of the game. (“Get over here now or I’ll club you like a baby seal,” one golfer entreated her son, and then broke into gales of laughter.)

The question remains: Is it sport or is it sculpture? “They are sculptures,” Christi Atkinson asserts. Are they? “I think they are,” said Rose Park, golfing with her co-workers from the Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights office. “But it’s artists creating art for a certain purpose. They’re practical sculptures.”

The most practical of which turns out to be Bullseye’s Bunker, the hole created by Target. Perhaps it’s just that adherence to the bottom line so necessary to the corporate world, but as one player laughed, “That’s the only hole I got it in.”


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