Category: Article

Standing on the wide brick steps of the State Department Store, I
scanned the crowd for Khaidavyn Chilaajav, director of the Union of
Mongolian Writers, who I was to meet for dinner. Its plaza crowded with
taxis and pedestrians, the store is still the hub of downtown, though
no longer Ulaanbaatar’s only retail center as it was during Mongolia’s
seventy years of Communism. Small children spun in circles on a
miniature fair ride, while bigger ones bounced on a four-leaf clover of
trampolines. Men and women in tattered jeans or silk deels, the
traditional ankle-length robe, sat docilely near white phones, where a
call could be made for one hundred togrog (about ten cents). Along a
boulevard lined with teenagers whispering intimately on benches, the
cerulean dome of the State Circus shone brightly against the dry, brown
Southern mountains.  

Kaidavyn arrived, suited and brusque, and we joined the throngs of
cars headed into the city’s sprawling neighborhoods of crumbling
Soviet-era apartments. Inside his flat, he disappeared momentarily
while I removed my shoes and settled on the couch. He reemerged in
pajama pants and a polo shirt, his demeanor softened, and flipped on
the TV. He teased his young daughters and was eminently patient with my
imperfect Mongolian. Despite his prestigious post organizing and
promoting Mongolia’s writers, Kaidavyn is a relatively young man of
around forty, short and portly, who trained as a veterinarian in
Russia. Enthusiastic about poetry, he showed me his extensive library
and gave me two books of his poems, a rich gift in a country where
authors pay for their own publishing and fifteen years ago the stores
didn’t have food to sell.

Chilaajav’s wife, Oyunchimeg, brought in tea and a plate of cucumbers
and khyam (a cross between pâté and Spam). When I stopped her to
introduce myself, she smiled widely, her brown eyes bright and warm;
she spoke quickly and then hurried back to the kitchen. She was busy
during the whole meal, refilling teacups, handing out napkins, and
serving khushuur (fried meat dumplings) and then buuz (steamed meat
dumplings). We drank sweet wine made from a regional berry and shots of
Chinggis vodka. We looked at family photos and paged through a
coffee-table book of landscapes called Under the Everlasting Mongolian
Sky. I told them that it was Mongolia’s marvelously huge sky and open
grasslands that brought me to this country. And, after a brief
exchange, we found ourselves putting on our shoes and heading off to
search for just these marvels.

In five minutes the family was ready: Kaidavyn handed out sweaters, the
two girls grabbed toys, and Oyunchimeg packed a backpack with food and
filled a thermos with tea. Not long after piling into their small SUV,
there we were, surrounded by dry, treeless hills and a few ramshackle
houses and yurts. Loose pink clouds dissipated as the sun set behind a
line of dark, distant mountains. Kaidavyn said to me, laughing, “That’s
the sky.”

We followed a dirt track to a hilltop. The ground was faintly green
with young grass and dotted with rotting bones and piles of horse
manure. Oyunchimeg arranged the blankets and food. Kaidavyn and his
eldest daughter played badminton, their birdie barely a speck against
the great dusky sky and sweeping plains. We heard a quiet lowing and
Oyunchimeg said it was the sound of a cow before I pointed out it was
coming from her bag. A round of giggling ensued as she answered her
vibrating cell phone. To talk to his older daughter, who had walked
over the rise, Kaidavyn used his phone to call hers, which, it turned
out, had been left in the car. In place of a ring, a pop song played
into Kaidavyn’s ear, loud and tinny in the empty night. The younger
girl snatched her father’s phone and began dancing to the music,
spinning in circles and shaking her hips, her grinning face lit by the
screen’s blue glow. Her sister eventually returned, perhaps following
the sound of Kaidavyn’s boisterous singing. We drank more vodka and
tea, and ate fruit. We watched the first star rise as Oyunchimeg told
us about naming her daughters after stars. The air grew cold and so we
moved toward the car, talking of coming back later with tents and a
grill.

We drove through the clouds of smoke that blanketed the lightless road.
We swerved around pedestrians and a man conveying a boy on the
handlebars of a bicycle. Cars coming from the city flashed their
brights as they approached and dimmed them after they passed. The first
factories appeared, followed by churches and shopping centers, and then
the endless blocks of apartments. To me, weary and smiling and lulled
by Kaidavyn’s singing, the city seemed tentative and insignificant, an
itinerant camp in that vast landscape, enveloped by everlasting sky.

Graduates from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design
have been changing the world you see since 1886. Names from its lengthy roster
of notable alums include Wanda Gag, the brilliant children’s book illustrator
who graduated in 1917, when the institution was known as the Minneapolis School
of Fine Arts; the New York School painter George Morrison (class of 1943); Rob
Roy Kelly (1952), who designed the Guthrie logo; Rob Fischer (1993), currently
showing at prestigious New York venues like PS 1 and the Whitney
Museum of American Art; and Ben Conrad and Alexei Tylevich (1994 and 1996,
respectively), whose studio, Logan, designs ads for the iPod Shuffle. And, of
course, the school is currently incubating talent you haven’t heard of-yet.

But you can buy work from tomorrow’s stars at the MCAD
Annual Art Sale. With many pieces under $100 and nothing more than a thousand,
the price is certainly right. And if you trust your good eye, you might acquire
something whose maker is on a fast track to fame. November 30 and December 1 at
MCAD, 2501 Stevens Avenue South, Minneapolis; (612) 874-3700. For more images and info, see here.

Richard Johnson’s photos of weathered storefronts,
thrift-store castoffs, and tattered religious iconography in northern Minnesota
serve as an astute chronicle of the erosion of small Midwestern towns. He grew up in Cloquet, which he
describes as “an OK place,” one with “a slightly higher-than-average number of
churches as well as per-capita consumption of distilled spirits, and the distinction
of lending its name to a big forest fire.” After developing a severe allergy to
chemicals used in processing film, for years Johnson turned to collage instead.
(Happily, digital photography eventually allowed him a chemical-free way to
return to the craft.) “I was an inveterate collector of ephemera anyway,” he
explains. “I haunted flea markets and rummage sales for old books, magazines,
marbled papers, objets de junk, and assorted crap.”

Not one to merely dabble, he dove into the medium, producing
a large collection of gorgeous, offbeat assemblages. “I used so bloody much
rubber cement that I began experiencing peripheral nerve damage. I kid you not,
the tips of my fingers developed a constant tingle. God only knows what it did
to my brain.”

The stuff certainly didn’t detract from Johnson’s eye for
imagery. His work, whether in collage or photography, packs a visceral punch,
one that reflects the artist’s wry humor and keen insight.

Originally appeared in issue 20.1 of access+ENGAGE.

Brave New Worlds, up through February 17 at the Walker Art
Center, considers "the present state of political consciousness, expressed
through the questions of how to live, experience, and dream." The seventy works
by twenty-four artists from seventeen countries were organized by Walker
curators Doryun Chong and Yasmil Raymond; 10,000 arts spoke to Chong about the
exhibition:

How did the idea for this show come about?

Almost all of us in the field are feeling a certain kind of
urgency. Exhibitions dealing with the topic of wars, the topic of America, are
turning up in Europe. We wanted to blow it up into something more encompassing
… this work seems different in how it strives to be responsible to the world.

With such a broad topic, relatively speaking, how did you
narrow the field to just two dozen artists?

We didn’t "discover" these artists. We’re looking at a range
of practices to see what’s out there. We went to places like Poland or Romania,
where there isn’t really an arts infrastructure, but many of the artists were
very savvy anyway. The most interesting ideas are from these kinds of places,
because you have to know the "First World" but also deal with your own world.

For instance, Artur Zmijewski, a Polish artist, followed
three working-class women around for twenty-four hours to show a portrait of
life, of labor in Warsaw at this moment. Cao Fei, a Chinese artist, did a
project with workers in a German-owned lightbulb factory in southern China,
about their dreams and aspirations. They go from this assembly-line documentary
to full-blown fantasy sequences with music and costumes.

What was important to us was that all these artists are
anchored in specific locations and specific locales.

There’s also a lot of sculpture in the show that has specific
concrete relations to place, is made of substances specific to place. So the
show is a map of current art practices but not a totalizing map; it shows
important threads of what artists in the world are doing.