The Rake Magazine

Category: Article

  • The All-Seeing Eye

    If you had to pick one person as the ultimate observer of the past, present, and future of design—from cereal boxes to sneakers to web architecture—it’d be hard to go wrong with Steven Heller. His name is on more than two hundred books as author, co-author, editor, or contributor; he produces a continual flow of articles, commentary, and criticism for magazines; now posts online at The Daily Heller; and was until recently the longtime senior art director for the New York Times Book Review. (Those obits for the main newspaper? Just a little sideline.) Throw in his post at Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts, as co-chair for its master’s program in design, and it won’t be surprising to learn that Heller’s workday begins at 4:30 a.m. How does he do it? “I just do it,” he says simply. “We all have obsessions and this one is mine. I wish I could be more profound or witty, but it is what it is.” 

    A lifelong and admittedly provincial New Yorker (he has acknowledged a certain kinship with Woody Allen), Heller is making a trip to St. Paul to deliver the third annual lecture for the “Leaders of Design” series for the College of Visual Arts. That talk takes place in conjunction with 365: AIGA Annual Design Exhibition, an annual survey of current design excellence.

    Given your protean career, what do you make of the groundswell of interest—bordering on mania—about design of all kinds in recent years? The American Craft Museum changed its name to the Museum of Arts & Design. All kinds of magazines, including titles like Newsweek and Fast Company, are producing special design issues and treating designers almost as celebrities. There’s Target’s “Design for All” credo, of course, and locally, Minneapolis is reveling in its new status as a “design capital.” It seems that design is working its way into, or being exploited by, every nook and cranny of the culture. What do you think is driving this?

    I could take the cynical view and say that as America’s industrial and agrarian might recedes, our main output is in the form of entertainment and crafts. Design straddles both realms. Good design can be quite entertaining and it can be perceived as craft. That said, design also frames and positions many of our greatest commodities. The mega-chains worshiped by us lumpen, like Starbucks and Target, have raised the bar of design and are not ashamed to give it credit. Apple is fifty percent design, and we love them for the way they’ve made things look. Yet design has long been part of American life. When I was a kid my mom read all the interior design magazines and bought her furniture and accessories accordingly. Fashion, cars, et cetera, it’s long been about design, as well as utility. We are simply in a period were the word is used more, because people identify with it more. But watch out that design and “lifestyle” do not become synonymous.

    One of your SVA students famously designed the new prescription bottle for Target as her thesis project. Have you come across other student projects that are worthy of that kind of attention?

    We are always looking for that spark in a thesis project. We see lots that have potential. A few years ago one of our stellar students created a project called “Ametrica,” which was a wonderful campaign to turn America metric. She received various grants to produce a book and other advocacy materials, and is still plugging away. These things take time. But more likely our “Designer as Author/Entrepreneur” students produce manageable products that do not require the millions necessary to launch the Target bottle. Quite a few have started small entrepreneurial businesses.

    You are part of an increasingly rare breed in the U.S.: a leader in your field who does not have a college degree. Do you regret not having gotten that diploma, or do you think college is overrated?

    I don’t honestly regret anything that I’ve done, so far, in my life. What I didn’t learn in college—I was an English major at New York University and then studied illustration, very briefly, at the School of Visual Arts—I learned in spades at jobs that offer great stories to tell my grandchildren. I kind of wish I had a broader education. But the fact is, I was not a good student, so I doubt that college would have made much of a difference for me. I needed the stimuli I received away from the classroom—in the streets, as it were.

    Could a young person today achieve what you have without a college degree?

    No, I think kids today—with certain exceptions— should have a college education that includes real-world experiences. As far as the degree goes, it is looked upon in many fields as a measure of accomplishment. In design, however, it’s the work that counts.

    You got your start in the late ’60s at an underground lefty paper, the New York Free Press, and worked for decades at the New York Times, one of the most esteemed newspapers in the world. But with the rise of all things online, is there anything to the continual proclamations about the “death of print”—or the equally common proclamations to the contrary?

    I wrote a bit about the death of print lately. I feel mixed. While I cannot believe it will happen in our lifetime, there is an incredible push for integration of print and web components, and this is to be expected as the shift in media appetites turns toward the web. Behemoth magazines, like Life and Look, folded after TV took all the advertising dollars. These things happen. What about the death of vinyl? Or the death of hot type? Or the death of CDs? For the most part these have become anachronisms. I used to joke that there was no paper on Star Trek, and why should there be?

    We’ve become familiar with the idea of corporate and consumer responsibility—tailoring actions with regard to the environment, to social and economic justice, and so forth. You make the same call for designers in your book Citizen Designer: Perspectives on Design Responsibility. How does that work?

    It’s simple. If you are in a profession that both uses and abuses resources, be aware of what you are doing. I think that’s the first step in design citizenship. From there one has the freedom and responsibility to decide how one’s talents are used. To knowingly hurt others through one’s work or wares is irresponsible, if not criminal. So don’t do it.

    And on that note, what are your thoughts on phenomena like “eco-chic,” Ethos Water, and the RED campaign, which revolves around specially designed goods—heavily promoted
    by celebrities—to be purchased in support of fighting AIDS in Africa?

    Whatever works. Hey, philanthropy began in this country with the robber barons. Of course, if we didn’t have a government that encouraged philanthropy by making it worthwhile for the rich, they might never have done it, but still, their contributions have been long-lasting. I think we have a tendency to write off fashion in the service of good works, but I believe if the quid pro quo helps someone other than the fashionistas, then bring it on.

    As a consumer, what are some of your design-related pet peeves, or things you find outrageously stupid, unjust, wasteful, etc.?

    What I truly hate is voice mail hell. The notion that we must talk to machines for basic services is infuriating. I think it wastes time, and reduces employment.

    And on the flip side, are there products or things you find simply irresistible? What about anything you’re drawn to for the “wrong” reasons?

    My guilty pleasures are antique, things from the past. But as far as contemporary objects or gadgets go, I’m as attracted to Apple products as the next person. I have four iMacs of varying years that are sitting unused in a bathroom. I’m also a sucker for sneakers, though I stick with just a few by New Balance. Still, I fantasize about buying them. Other than that I’m pretty ascetic.

    You’ve authored more than a hundred books and written introductions for probably a hundred more. Many of these titles, it seems, revolve around obsessions you have. There’s one on vintage Halloween graphics, and one you produced with your wife, the designer Louise Fili, on miniature countertop mannequins from now-defunct department stores. What are you collecting or obsessing over right now?

    Currently, I’m finishing a long and large project on totalitarian graphics of the twentieth century. I’m obsessing over this material because it contributed to the branding of the world’s harshest regimes. Sometimes the graphics were sensational.

    And what about an earlier title: The Swastika: Symbol Beyond Redemption? Have you found an answer to that question? How do you suggest we deal with swastikas as part of the ornamentation of buildings—many from a certain era?

    In my mind I’ve found the answer. In the U.S. and other Western countries it should not be redeemed for another fifty years. In other nations, and for peoples who have long owned the symbol for good, not evil, they should have their unabridged right to it. Of course, it was used in the U.S. as ornament long before the Nazis stole it, so I have no problem with these historical contexts. What I object to is the abject and idiotic use of Nazi emblems by those who use them flagrantly, like rock groups and skateboard companies.

    Finally, why did you choose this portrait by illustrator Cristoph Niemann to illustrate this interview?

    I hate having pictures taken of me, and worse, I hate seeing them. Vanity? Dunno. As for the image itself, it just makes me smile. I don’t see it as me, but as a little logo for something else.

  • Generating Thermal Energy

    Here’s a fashion idiom indigenous to Minnesota: The piles of hoodies, scarves, polar fleece pullovers, and down-filled jackets that are just now getting unearthed from the closet. It bears mentioning, however, that there are two distinct paths to dressing for the frigid weather. The less inspired might insulate with a giant, balloon-like university sweatshirt and deflect the wind with tear-away nylon track pants. But we’ve spotted (and greatly prefer) a more polished approach as the temperatures drop, one that involves an “aerodynamic” micropolar fleece strategically layered over a thermal jersey, worn with dungarees or cargo pants and vintage sneaks. The best finishing touches are an extra-long, knotted scarf and wool earflap hat. This sporty mixture of fleece, track jackets, down vests, and colorful accessories lends its wearers a certain, covertly sexy je ne sais quoi. We call the look “Patagonia chic,” in honor of Ventura, California’s tasteful outfitter of climbers, skiers, and trekkers. The effect is just as well achieved with “technical gear” by other brands like Marmot and North Face, of course—the latter of which opens a boutique in Uptown this month.

  • Go{pher} Broke

    University of Minnesota Athletics Director Joel Maturi is a triple-A battery of a man. Walk into his office at the Bierman Athletic Building on the East Bank and he leaps out of his chair and shakes your hand as if you’re about to parachute out of an airplane together. Trim and fit at 62, Maturi is glib and empathetic. He’ll spread his hands in a “that’s all there is,” or “what are ya gonna do” fashion, but he searches for eye contact and listens carefully. Even under the best of circumstances, he’s not the kind of guy who relaxes easily.

    Personality aside, Maturi has had plenty of other reasons to be moving through life on the balls of his feet lately. The ramifications from the most turbulent thirty-five-day period in Gopher sports history are still in flux. Over the next three or four years, however, the fallout from the chain of events Maturi helped set in motion last winter will not only define his legacy as the University’s athletic director, but will have a huge bearing on the health and vitality of U of M sports for decades to come.

    Of the twenty-five varsity sports programs at the U, only three–football, men’s basketball, and men’s hockey–operate at a profit. Consequently, these programs are enormously influential, helping absorb the red ink created by other sports. On the last day of November last year, Maturi pushed his men’s basketball coach to resign just seven games into the coach’s eighth season. On the final day of December, Maturi fired a football coach who had compiled the best career winning percentage at the U since 1950 and taken the team to five straight bowl games. “I am probably the only AD in the history of NCAA sports who has dismissed the men’s basketball coach and men’s football coach within thirty days,” Maturi says. “I am not proud of that.”

    Three days after the football coach was canned, a special meeting of the University’s Board of Regents was convened to deal with the rising cost of a new on-campus football stadium scheduled to open in September 2009. In May 2006, the state Legislature had approved a funding package that had taxpayers forking over nearly fifty-five percent of the tab on a $248.7 million stadium. Since then, for a variety of reasons, the price tag had risen to $288.5 million. The revised budget approved by the regents precludes the U from going back to the Legislature or increasing the $25 annual fee levied on University students. Instead, the additional $40 million will have to come from an existing stadium fundraising campaign that was initially charged with soliciting $86.5 million from private donors. If local corporations and well-heeled alumni can’t hit this much more ambitious target, profits generated by the stadium will have to make up the difference. Either way, to sufficiently excite would-be donors or fill the stadium beyond the two- or three-year novelty period, the Gophers must field a quality football team.

    The faith healer
    Maturi is standing at the back of a small room in the bowels of the Metrodome. The Gopher football team has just been pasted, 30-7, by Ohio State, Minnesota’s fourth loss in five games thus far this season. Reporters and University personnel are filing into the room for new coach Tim Brewster’s postgame press conference, and Maturi offers them a curt nod or a tight grin. He is trying to strike an impossible pose, combining the ire a competitor is supposed to feel after his squad gets whupped by more than three touchdowns, and the brazen nonchalance required to quell panic or derision over what has become a spectacularly dreadful football season.

    About the only saving grace for Brewster and Maturi was that nobody seemed to be pining for the return of Glen Mason, an uncharismatic man who had come from the University of Kansas. Mason wielded his comparatively successful Minnesota won-loss record (64-57) like a cudgel, implying at every turn that without his extraordinary skills and savvy the football program would return to its previously dire straits.

    Mason’s critics—including many members of the media and influential alumni—contended that his “success” was merely the result of a devious formula for mediocrity. They noted that Mason padded his record by front-loading the schedule with a succession of nonconference patsies. Those easy victories, combined with an undistinguished record in the rugged Big 10—where Mason’s career record was 32-48 and his teams never finished higher than a tie for fourth—would be enough to secure an invitation to one of the minor, inconsequential bowl games that glut the calendar in December. This pattern played itself out in Mason’s last five seasons, ossifying the positions of both sides. After the Gophers pulled off the largest collapse in the history of NCAA Division I-A bowl games, blowing a 31-point lead in the 2006 Insight Bowl, Maturi saw his chance to pull the plug.

    Less than three weeks later, on January 17, Maturi made the stunning announcement that he was replacing Mason with Brewster, a 46-year old with no head coaching experience above the high school level. But Brewster was a successful recruiter for coach Mack Brown at both North Carolina and Texas, and rose to the rank of assistant head coach with the San Diego Chargers in the NFL. “When I started the search process, I had never heard of Tim Brewster,” Maturi admits, launching into a twenty-minute recitation of all the steps he took before settling on Brewster. What follows is the severely abridged version.

  • The Death and Life of American Imagination

    In February 1953, a violent North Sea storm crashed through the Dutch levee system, killing 1,835 people and leaving a hundred thousand others homeless. In the aftermath, the country responded by building the Delta Works, the world’s most sophisticated system of flood defenses. According to John McQuaid, a reporter for Mother Jones on assignment in the Netherlands, the system is “engineered to a safety standard 100 times more stringent than the current goal (not yet achieved) for New Orleans’ most heavily populated areas. Even Dutch pasturelands have more protection than the Big Easy.” As one government engineer told McQuaid, conceiving and building the Delta Works “was like putting a man on the moon.”

    That was half a century ago. Why the disparity between what the Dutch could accomplish then, and what the U.S. (the country that did put a man on the moon) has conceived to protect New Orleans, one of its most historic and treasured cities, and the surrounding region? You can call it foresight, or innovation, but beyond that, what the Dutch response required—and where we appear to be failing in our response to the aftermath of Katrina—was tremendous imagination.

    Imagination is an intangible, unlimited, and free resource. It is not, at least for the purposes of this discussion, the same as fantasy, where universal laws cease to apply, where elephants might speak Latin or humans travel back in time. Nor is imagination reserved for artistic pursuits, though imagination is the core of creativity. Applying imagination to problem-solving requires the ability to come up with an idea, and to break that idea down into the steps that will bring it to fruition. It also requires an alchemical mix of will, vision, discipline, and action, not to mention stubborn perseverance in the face of frustration or opposition.

    A prime example of this use of imagination would be George Hotz, the seventeen-year-old who spent all summer cracking Apple’s iPhone; he broke the lock that tied the phone to AT&T’s wireless network and freed it for use on other carriers’ networks, even overseas ones. Hotz spent five hundred hours with four online collaborators, and was motivated by the challenge and by “fun.”

    Presently, imagination of this sort is very much in demand. One wake-up call to the erosion of imagination in American culture came in 2004, when “failure of imagination” was cited in the 9/11 commission report as the primary reason U.S. officials misjudged the threat of the 2001 terrorist attacks. Maybe government officials couldn’t imagine terrorists flying planes into the World Trade Center, but plenty of others could and did—and not just those who actually carried out the long-planned and highly complex attack. The ability to prevent terrorist attacks depends on leaders who are as imaginative as those who would carry them out.

    While imagination is one key to national security, it’s also crucial to economic security. In 2004, executives at leading technology companies like Dell, Cypress Semiconductor, and IBM spoke to Lee Todd, president of the University of Kentucky, about creating sustainable jobs for the U.S. in the years to come. All said the same thing, according to Todd: Imagination and creativity represent the future of the U.S. economy. On a broader level, the World Economic Forum chose “The Creative Imperative” as the theme for its 2006 conference in Davos, Switzerland. Writers like Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind, point to the new “imagination economy” as a trend that’s just taking off. He sees it in quite simple terms: “People have to be able to do something that can’t be outsourced,” Pink told me. “Something that’s hard to automate and that delivers on the growing demand for nonmaterial things like stories and design. Typically these are things we associate with the right side of the brain, with artistic and empathetic and playful sorts of abilities.”

    Government leaders in education are joining the chorus, too. “American education’s single-minded focus on science, technology, engineering, and math (‘STEM’ subjects) is admirable but misguided,” wrote two former assistant U.S. secretaries of education in the August 12 issue of The Wall Street Journal Online. What makes America competitive in a shrinking global economy, they claimed, is “our people’s creativity, versatility, imagination, restlessness, energy, ambition, and problem-solving prowess.” As they summed it up, true success—economic, civic, cultural, domestic, military—depends on a broadly educated populace with “flowers and leaves as well as stems.”

  • Zoom In: Dona Schwartz

    Spend a few minutes with photographer Dona Schwartz and you’ll start to see a bit of grandeur hiding beneath humble day-to-day routines. “I want to see what’s amazing that’s right under my nose,” she explains. “To me, that’s really compelling. But to photograph daily life, you have to first really see it. You have to be really quick and really observant.”

    And so began In the Kitchen and Soccer Mom, two series that document, respectively, the comings and goings of family and friends in Schwartz’s own home, and parents at their kids’ soccer matches. Seen through Schwartz’s lens, these snatches of family life are surreal and evoke the changeable nature of parent-child relationships. Occasionally they’re funny; sometimes, they’re uncomfortably frank.

    “I think about how I can incorporate my photography into the life I lead,” Schwartz explains. “I can’t entertain the idea of leaving—photographing across the country or around the world for long stretches of time. I have these children, and I love these children. I can’t just go off and leave them. But I don’t think it’s trivial to look at things closer to home. To me, part of the challenge is to say, ‘Look at just how amazing and complex these things you take for granted are.’”

    For Schwartz, photography is about finding a good story and telling it as best you can. “Meaningful work doesn’t have to have exotic subject matter, ” she argues. “I can tell you this,” she says, leaning in. “It’s a ridiculously euphoric experience when you lock a truly decisive moment within the frame. It’s like recognizing your own thoughts crystallized in an image.”

     

    This article originally appeared in issue 15.1 of access+ENGAGE.
    Subscribe to this free arts e-magazine at mnartists.org/accessengage.

  • In Review: In the Realm of the Senses

    Fieldwork…

    What is it we want from fieldwork or a field of view? Beth Dow prunes the romantic notion of the artist-above-nature with the punctum of an enlightened gardener. Despite straightforward appearances, her work teems with history and philosophy in a comforting, meditative way, like gardens of the sublime domesticated and available for personal consultation.

    Nineteen or so sixteen-inch-square plots of palladium prints, with their large tonal range, show patterns not fully visible to our colored, roving eyes. Dow guides us through spaces that are not black and white, but suffused with gray hovering mists, and positions our field of view within them. Perhaps here we can find our simple wish: to wonder at the presence of infinity and singularity.

    Speaking of presence, Dow has said that Led Zeppelin IV was an early influence—“something ominous.” And it seems that mood is part of the existential drama at the roots of her work. The cover art for that album shows a country man hunched over by a large bundle of sticks on his back, propping himself up with another stick: a gesture of self-assertion. It’s an image that shows interdependency between humanity and nature, like many of the gestures recorded in Dow’s landscapes.

    — Sean Smuda, from “Complicated Grey Eyes,” a review of Fieldwork by Beth Dow at Franklin Art Works


    From the Environment of Invention exhibition at MMAA:
    Detail of Errant Ecosystem by Liz Miller; mixed media; 2007.

    Environments of Invention

    Paper icebergs; tree stumps made of cardboard; little cartoon woodland scenes in ceramic and felt; a biomorphic scatter of machine-made forms; a landscape of fully interchangeable smooth white parts; another landscape of giant bedclothes, limned delicately along a plaster wall.

    Nature still lends its forms to these artworks, but it’s experienced as mediation, as a made thing.

    This used to be news. Twenty years ago it was Baudrillard’s news, Lyotard’s news. These French thinkers wrote that we now live in a fully mediated world, that of the simulation, the world where there’s always a scrim of human culture between us and the big world that was here before humans existed. In fact, the scrim is so thick we can’t really even tell whether there’s anything else out there. The things that we take for granted as our environment—what you might call the ground of existence, the given—are all apparently human, now.

    From left, clockwise: Disengenuous Growth by Erika Olson, felt and mixed media, 2005; Stump 2 by David Lefkowitz, cardboard and Formica, 1998;
    Lady Luck Lotus by Holly Anderson Jorde, stoneware, glaze, paint, wood, 2004.

     

    At a panel discussion of the show, when one of the artists spoke of driving up the North Shore and seeing the environment of trees and scrub as being not very appealing and, well, “messy,” it became even more apparent that the art world is fully encased in a solipsistic universe, eating and creating culture.

    Artists, of course, haven’t created this situation, but they do report on it. The show is an affecting and effective report from the changing boundary between nature and human culture. It’s witty and amusing, and also, from the standpoint of this somewhat misanthropic treehugging critic, terribly sad.

    The world in which icebergs come from National Geographic photos and forest landscapes come from Disney cartoons, and where our closest contact with trees is through our use of their macerated flesh in cardboard cartons and printer paper, is very much the real one. We might wish it wasn’t, but the first step toward fulfilling that wish to realize that it is.

    — Ann Klefstad, from “Our Invented World(s)”: a review of Environments of Invention at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, featuring work from Holly Anderson Jorde, David Lefkowitz, Cherith Lundin, Liz Miller, Erika Olson, and Margaret Pezalla-Granlund

     

    Body by Anne E. Harris; graphite, colored pencil, pastel.

    Beyond Likeness

    I am particularly taken with Anne Harris’s drawings, a literal body of work. Harris has drawn her own body in studies “of gravity and inner space.” These are fleshy images, often in large formats, and succeed at showing the viewer the nature of the physicality of being a woman, compounded by a kind of transparency—that of never really being able to objectively evaluate oneself. Harris says, “I don’t know what I look like anyway,” and her grid of dozens of small portraits featuring only her face and head are testament to this impossibility.

    Women have consistently struggled with representation and in today’s world of digital manipulation, it is common for even Oprah, that paragon of “woman-ness,” to have her images digitally slimmed. Art in itself has become about fashion, and how the female artist looks sometimes competes with the content of her art. Harris’s heavy and sagging studies challenge this societal expectation of perfection. It is relieving to find her bodies more about a state of mind—how do I feel inside my body—than a statement of contemporary beauty.

    There is an obsessive quality to all the work in this show—whether writing endless lines with henna, paring the human form into basic shapes, creating meticulous reproductions or drawing lines of shifting human form—that gives the viewer an enormous amount to consider, with the eyes, heart, and mind. Laurel Reuter has put together a provocative exhibition that deserves to be seen by a wider audience. Which means, readers, we need to get out of our little worlds and get ourselves to the other side of the state. The best art no longer happens in the big cities—thanks to tenacious curators like Reuter.

    —Suz Szucs, from “Light Shed on the Body,” a review of Beyond Likeness, a show by Ann E. Harris, Elizabeth King, Jennifer Onofrio, and Lalla Essaydi at the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks

     

    Tangle #18 (Glare) by David Lefkowitz; oil on panel, 14" x 13".

    Unnatural Nature

    David Lefkowitz has long explored the topic of human intervention in nature. Tangle builds on his earlier series Flora: Introduced Species, which also took a microscope to the oil-and-water relationship between technology and nature. In Tangle Lefkowitz takes the expanding conflict one step further: Not content with his repurposed type of genre painting or the ongoing human-versus-nature wrestling match, Lefkowitz gives yet another twist of his critical knife. Unlike the Flora works, the backgrounds of the paintings in the Tangle series are no longer simply neutral fields for the conflict. Here, some have been painted to suggest an endless sea or a timeless, eternal space glowing with light and atmosphere (Heaven?). Others depict a grainy, out-of-focus background, as if the works were not paintings at all, but common photographic snapshots, legitimizing the conflict as real. And by painting weeds, plants known for their rampant growth, instead of more exotic flora, Lefkowitz constructs a parallel narrative to the out-of-control growth of technology.

    If initially these paintings seduce through their veneer of beauty and an offhand sense of humor, their dark side quickly subverts this appeal. “We may be beautiful and full of artifice,” they seem to suggest, “but this conflict is real.” It is no longer so easy to see where nature stops and human engineering begins.

    — Mason Riddle, from “Unnatural Nature,” a review of Tangle by David Lefkowitz at Thomas Barry Fine Arts

  • The Unexpected Pleasures of Art Shopping at the Farmers' Market

    Beyond the plethora of plants, produce, and flowers, one of the pleasures of an expedition to the Minneapolis Farmers Market is the prospect of more abiding goods: The vendors who populate the south end of this market are selling everything from cell phones and bumper stickers to fire pits and fine crafts—and yes, even art. I’m pretty sure I’ll never renew my phone plan here, but there’s a great time to be had browsing the booths of the artists and craftspeople in the sheds tucked in the shadow of the I-94 overpass.

    Several stalls offer ceramics, but only Phil “Pottery Dude” Echert stacks his pots atop one another and calls them “garden art.” These sculptures are deceptive—the pots look precariously balanced but are threaded on iron poles, so the whole structure is really quite sturdy. Aside from the topsy-turvy trickery, it’s the glazes on Phil’s pots that will lure you. These saturated primaries capture the cheery feeling of a garden in full summer bloom. The best part: You can pick the pots to be included in a custom sculpture that Phil creates on the spot.

    A few stalls down you’ll find Cheryl Fitzgerald’s Iron Gallery. Like many of the market’s artists, Fitzgerald shows a lot of outdoor sculpture. Her pergolas and arbors have the appeal of lovely old iron gates and will lend any garden an aura of mystery, as if promising entry to an otherworldly realm just beyond the vines intertwined on them. On a recent trip, I was also entranced by an oversized flower sculpture and a stand of giant iron cattails. For those focused on practical outdoor accessories, Fitzgerald offers stylish tall tables and chairs to create a backyard patio bistro.

    Beyond the monumental yard art, plenty of vendors appeal to the connoisseur of smaller wares. Jewelry and textiles abound, if you don’t mind strolling by tables of knock-off sunglasses and watches to find these homegrown crafts. Be sure to check out Kendra Gebbia’s handmade purses printed with charming, stylized botanical images, and her beaded necklaces, along with her intricate, nature-inspired wood-block prints. Across from Gebbia are two vendors—J&K Glass Expressions and Erika Royer of Glamorous Glass—that should be sought out by any chick with a glamorous event on her schedule. Erika’s fused-glass jewelry and hair clips are colorful and unique, and J&K’s knockout coasters and platters can serve as distinctive accessories for gifts or entertaining.

    Deeper within the market, near the guitarist belting out ’70s and ’80s soft-rock hits, you’ll run across the Art Andes stall. Owner Melanie Ebertz imports gorgeous flat-weave rugs and textiles from Peru, and on at least one trip to the market, a visiting artisan from South America was demonstrating weaving technique. Though the process is ancient, these vibrant rugs, with warm colors and geometric designs, would look equally at home in a cutting-edge loft space or a cozy Arts and Crafts hearth room.

    Evla Pottery entices the market-goer with “Berry Bowls,” decorative colanders that come with saucers to catch water from freshly rinsed berries. You can wash, drain, serve, and store your harvest in the same vessel. These rustic earthenware pots are an ingenious necessity for any well-equipped kitchen.

    After fortifying yourself with a couple of fish tacos from one of the market’s fantastic seafood stalls, turn your attention to Francis Metal Works, where Chuck Adams uses large fieldstones and iron tube stock to fashion all manner of birds native to Minnesota. These sculptures are not your grandmother’s kitschy yard art. I love a good pink flamingo as much as the next girl, but these birds are subtle, sophisticated, and lovely.

    In short, you can rely on the farmer’s market for one-stop shopping. Where else can you pick up Minnesota-grown spinach for your Sunday brunch along with trendy beaded earrings for the Saturday night before? Who knows—you may even drive away with a giant daisy sculpture in the trunk.


    From left: handbags by Kendra Gennia, birds from Chuck Adams, and Phil Echert’s stackable pottery.

     

    This article originally appeared in issue 19.1 of access+ENGAGE. Subscribe to this free arts e-magazine at mnartists.org/accessengage.

  • Zoom In: Lori Greene

    Mosaic on a Stick hums with chatter from neighbors coming in to browse for supplies, gossip, sign up for classes, and admire new pieces on display. In the three years since mosaicist Lori Greene and her business partner Maria Ricke opened “The Stick” in Saint Paul’s Midway area, they’ve put down solid roots through neighborhood art collaborations—like the project that resulted in ten community-created, mosaic-embellished planters along Snelling Avenue. Greene’s personal work, which she creates in a studio behind The Stick, is steeped in imagery from her African and American Indian ancestry; her totems to femininity and motherhood, while beautiful, often betray an ambivalence and even fear of motherhood, too.

    In her most peculiar, powerful work, babies and dolls appear as regal and even somewhat frightening figures.

    Greene’s public work is no less intimate, focusing on the power of heritage and generational ties. Divination Systems, the series of large statues commissioned by the Midtown Global Market in Minneapolis, is particularly stunning. “They gave me a lot of freedom,” she said, “and I’d been dreaming of those pieces for years.” For Greene, art is no solitary affair, but rooted instead in personal relationships, neighborhoods, and family. “I’m not really even sure what all these pieces mean, to tell you the truth,” she shrugs. “But I can’t imagine not doing this work. It’s who I am.” —Susannah Schouweiler

    Detail from Sangoma by Lori Greene, photo by Usry Alleyne

     

    This article originally appeared in issue 13.1 of access+ENGAGE.
    Subscribe to this free arts e-journal at mnartists.org/accessengage.

  • Another Green World: New Landscape Art in Minnesota

    Landscape has always been one of the strongest currents in the Minnesota art world. Now, new ways of perceiving and portraying landscape tie artists here to a global groundswell of art about the complex relationship of nature and culture. Recently, I sat down with a group of artists from around the state to discuss their work: photographer Chris Faust, painter Theresa Handy, sculptor Karl Unnasch, multimedia artist Margaret Pezalla-Granlund, and painter/sculptor Gregory Euclide (our cover artist); plus curator Theresa Downing, whose fascinating show, Environments of Invention at the Minnesota Museum of American Art this spring (see “In Review,” p. 18), was the opening topic. As Downing said, “The theme of the show was looking at the difference between raw experience of the natural world and our perception of it through the screen of our eyes, our minds, our emotions.”

    Each artist had a different tale of the origins of their insight into the natural world. Euclide’s involved saturating himself in it. “Being a kid wandering through fields was important … experiences like falling in the snow and staying there for three hours and letting snow fall on you and just looking at the sky … Here I am thirteen years old and laying down in a river and letting the water flow over me for hours—if anyone saw me they’d think, you know … ” and he casts his eyes up.

    When Faust was young, “the outdoors was where your real life was,” he said. He loved maps, and was fascinated by the split between their flat symbols and the look and feel of the places they represented.

    Unnasch spoke of how and why he came to use landscape in his sculptures: “I’m interested in, for lack of a better term, I’ll say ‘innocence’—the thirteen-year-old’s stigmata. For myself, growing up in the country, being out in nature was the basis of that transition; it wasn’t smoking my first cigarette, it was catching my first trout.”

    It became clear that the losses, memories, and entropy associated with the natural world all played a major role in most of these artists’ work. As Euclide described his childhood experiments, he spoke of a longing for an experience that would not fade, a desire for presence: “The growth and decay that I saw in the landscape was mirrored in my mind as experience and memory.”

    Faust remarked, “Nature is continually trying to increase entropy, and humans are trying to decrease it. That’s why we paint the house, right? Nature is trying to erode the house, we’re trying to scrape and prime … Nature will always win.”

    Starling, The Long and the Short of It, and Whudda Croc by Karl Unnasch

    New Landscape for Old?

    How do these artists view their relation to the traditions of landscape painting and photography? Is this relation ironic, transformed? Euclide noted, “I don’t consider myself a ‘landscape painter,’ even though that’s what I do.” For him, work becomes experience. “I’ll pile up sheets of paper, do a painting on one, then spray water on it. I think of it as a natural process, a temporal image, the landscape washed away by water; I’ll start painting on the next piece, these planes of paper mimic planes of experience in time, they get painted on the front and on the back to mimic the experience of walking through landscape. For myself, it’s a kind of longing, because I’m not in nature anymore, I’m in the city.”

    Most of these artists are urbanites, though they may have memories of idyllic days in nature. Though Handy didn’t grow up in the country, “maybe my work talks about that sort of longing [for it],” she said. “And my work is a metaphor as well. Lately I’ve been making small works fastened together. They’re photographs that I paint on, editing out a lot of things in the photo. They feel like flashes of a memory of a place, a happening, a time … that editing mimics our inability to remember all the details.”

    Of course, it is possible to see the urban environment as simply another sort of landscape. This became clear to Pezalla-Granlund when she was living in Los Angeles, which “was very different from the landscape I grew up in, but it was also similar, quite flat. I guess when I got addicted to landscape was in parking ramps, and also on L.A. freeways, because you’re up above.”

    As the discussion stretched over a range of themes and topics, an undercurrent emerged: landscape as something we want to see but which is difficult to grasp. Faust talked about a rural ecology project he’s part of, which is trying to devise ways of easing the relationship between farmland and wild land. “We’re looking at this point where farmland and nature meet, looking at what farmers would call ‘chaos.’ The natural landscape looks messy to them. The Conservation District is trying to convince farmers to do different landscape practices. They’ll be asked to put in a buffer zone to filter field chemicals, but we have to order it somehow. You can’t just plant a bunch of stuff, there has to be some rhyme or reason to it—otherwise the farmers won’t do it.” Even for him, shooting pictures of these junctures isn’t easy: “It’s very odd-looking, I really have to sit down and look at it for a while. Jill Nassau, the project landscape architect, talks about this messiness, and how it’s innate in every human to try to order landscape. I find that when I’m out in natural landscape, I need to find some sort of thing that compositionally ties it all together.”


    Missing Part (Iceberg Models) by Margaret Pezalla-Granlund

     

    Unnasch agreed with this compulsion to order the world, noting, “I bet it’s hard to find a piece of ground that’s unaffected, that’s not somehow urbanized.” Euclide dreamily added, “You know what the most beautiful spaces I find are? Freeway ramps. I think that those are so beautiful, because they’re left alone.”

    In response, Faust reported a comment he heard while driving along a highway, that “MNDoT oughta come in here and clear some of this stuff out!” Faust disagreed—it was nature working. Unnasch laughed. “People feel safer when all those trees are doing exactly what’s expected”—ensuring, in other words, that there’s no room for weeds. He added, “Now there’s another conceptual word—what’s a weed and what’s not? There are no weeds in nature, just like there’s no ‘natural disaster,’ only human disasters.” Faust answered himself, “Nature doesn’t care.”


    Safetyland by Chris Faust

     

    But is there always a distinction between the human and the natural?

    Handy points out the possibility that human alteration of the world is as natural as any other part of it. Her work is becoming more urban; she’s looking more at her immediate surroundings—skies, birds, telephone wires. Euclide told this story: “About six months ago I buried some paper. Later I used that paper covered with dirt, sprayed it with water, made shelves on the torn paper that caught the dirt and water, which became a three-dimensional construction that came out over the floor. I was interested in making the process mimic what the work represented, so the process and content were the same. There was decay on the paper, and where it came out from the wall I planted seeds that grew. The aesthetic parts were not my doing but created by growth and decay.”

    The need to understand the disorderly order of nature, to gain a viewpoint beyond the human, is familiar to these artists. Downing described Google Earth, the online database of satellite images of the whole globe, as tremendously influential:

    “I often sit and think about how I look to someone outside our atmosphere. For me it was hypnotic to go on Google Earth the first time and think about how we see ourselves and how others see us. It’s changing so rapidly.”

    For her, landscape art is this kind of mediation, and both meaning and chance—which can include random techniques like tearing, seized compositions, as well as accident and decay—inform the work of the artists present.

    Unnasch’s tableaus often include road-killed animals and found artifacts; the bases of his landscapes are “actual animals, not taxidermied … because I’m not interested in taxidermy, the craft of it. I want to know just enough to bring it off, to keep innocence, openness.” His work is formed half by himself and half by the ravages of time and decay on the animal corpses and the reclaimed objects that make up his sculptures.

    That willingness to both see and to un-see—that is, to erase assumptions—is part of this new genre as well. “I’m interested in a continuum of landscape,” Faust said. “I want to draw a line on a map and shoot photos along that line, to unlearn assumptions about the land, to find out what it really is.”

    But there’s an equal desire not to represent landscape but to become it, to have art be the processes that create the natural world. “I couldn’t just depict the experience of being in nature,” said Euclide. “I had to redo the process of growth and decay. The process of viewing it, then, becomes the equal of making the piece.” Two-dimensional painting that only depicts the world comes up short for him.

    For all their innovative ideas, these landscape artists still owe much to the past, of course: a yearning for communion with the natural world, respect for perception, commitment to the wisdom of the senses. But there’s much that’s new here too. The landscape in these artworks is cut across by human markings, literally broken into pieces, or torn, or part of a body that was once living. Their works convey difficult beauties and tough-minded pleasure; romantic and scientific, earthy and philosophical, these artists are giving us the world that we need as well as the one we deserve.


    The participants: Margaret Pezalla-Granlund, Karl Unnasch, Gregory Euclide, Theresa Downing, Theresa Handy, Chris Faust.

     

  • Harvest Boon

    I love this time of year. I love having both the sun and the chill in the air, the musky scent of dead leaves and blessed, blessed school. I like having the kids out of the house for a prescribed amount of time each day. I like being alone in my house listening to loud music that the kids wouldn’t imagine I listen to. I like having the kids back at the end of the day, and though I am saddened by the fact that their homework no longer consists of coloring and word finds, I am glad that they realize they have a better chance at decent grades if they do the work themselves.

    It’s the routine I am thankful for—an orderliness to the days that helps me actually get more done. I like that it gets darker earlier, and I like cooking autumn dinners. I love baking giant dead animals in my oven. It makes me feel feminine, and also somewhat accomplished. I love it when the windows of the house fog up from cooking. I am thankful when all of the side dishes time out perfectly with the main course, and everything arrives hot to the table. It makes me feel like Houdini.

    I love mashing potatoes by hand, imagining that I am crushing the bones of my earthly enemies.

    I am thankful for my coffeepot all year long, but particularly when the mornings are dark. I love its robotic timer function. The smell of the beans beginning to brew invades my sleep. The next thing I hear is the clunking, sucking sound of the water drawing up through the reservoir. By the time the cycle is complete, I am shuffling through the dark kitchen with my big mug outstretched, softly walk-kicking the cat out of my way.

    She tries to kill me every morning by darting into my path, hoping I will stumble while trying to avoid stepping on her, and maybe fall and crack my skull on the corner of the concrete countertops. If I am ever found dead in my kitchen, this is what has happened.

    I love wearing clothes that cover my stomach. I love that the threat of being invited to something that might require a bathing suit is past. I like incorporating more cheese and less salad into my diet. I love watching television while eating cheese while wearing something that covers my stomach.

    At this time of year I love soup. It is hot, salty, soothing liquid love. That sounds dirty but it’s not, so get your damn mind out of the gutter; I’m talking chunky chicken noodle here.

    I love turtleneck sweaters, the smell of Vicks VapoRub, and having a sore throat so I don’t have to talk. I love catching cold, because I love soup and I love it when people feel sorry for me and I love complaining about my lot in life while people I love make me soup.

    I love church at the holidays. I love the swishing of fat old-lady thighs encased in thick nylon stockings. You get a hundred of them in the chapel, and it’s like crickets. I love ladies who wear sequins to morning services. Jesus would approve, because Jesus loves color, and he is happy when you wear your favorite things to his house. He wants you to feel at home.

    This time of year I love that my husband doesn’t give a rat’s ass about football. Neither do I, and I love that I don’t have to pretend to care. This leaves us free to use our prodigious powers of pretending for other, more satisfying areas of our lives. We can pretend we care about the subprime mortgage crisis instead, because that makes us seem like responsible, compassionate people, and being mistaken for responsible, compassionate people makes us feel good about ourselves. Win-win.

    I like bedtime, and heavy blankets that pin me to the mattress. I like throwing my leg up on that man of mine and pinning him down, too. I don’t even mind stuffing my ears with earplugs to tone down his snoring. I lay my head on his chest and I can still hear him sawing away, revving his engine, poppin’ wheelies to dreamland.

    This time of year I like the increasing frequency of house parties, because I like snooping in people’s medicine cabinets. I like knowing what sorts of drugs they are on, and what funguses they are currently battling, and their laxative regimens. It explains a lot of things, and helps me to feel greater empathy for them as fellow human beings. When I have parties at my house, I like to fill my medicine cabinet with ping-pong balls before guests arrive. If you think I am kidding, go ahead and try me, Snoopy.