The Shape of Time

Contrasting the new Walker with New York’s almost-as-new Museum of Modern Art gives us yet another reason to love living in the Twin Cities. MOMA still tells the authoritative history of modern art, and does so more efficiently by funneling larger hordes through its expansive galleries. The Walker couldn’t be more different. Lingering, wandering, and backtracking are encouraged in the galleries, and the new permanent collection exhibitions emphasize twentieth-century art history as an ever-mutating assembly of stories. In The Shape of Time, for instance, Claes Oldenburg’s giant, upended bag of French fries links to Reinhard Mucha’s wooden chairs sandwiching a typical white, rectangular museum pedestal in the next gallery, and beyond that (actually, in another exhibit), is Katharina FrischÕs Poison Bottle, which looks like it could be fabricated from antimatter. Three interpretations of everyday objects, with different scales, different versions of simplicity, different objectives. Throughout this exhibit, itÕs abundantly clear that the Walker is less concerned with authority than with undercurrents, provocations, discoveries, and alternatives to art-historical paradigms. The result is such a potent sense of freshness and possibility that we’re excited to see what goes up next. But we still need a couple more afternoons with this show–MOMA’s great to visit, but the Walker is a museum you want to live with. 612-375-7622, www.walkerart.org