Finding art at Walker Art Center

I went to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis the other day. I went because it was free and I went because I happened to be on a date with a rather strapping young guy.

I also have never been to the Walker (as locals like to call it) and I realize that having grown up in Minnesota and never having been to the Walker seems ridiculous but I now understand why my mother never took me to such a place. 

Not that my mother or I don’t have an appreciation for art. We do. However I think art has gone above and beyond reason to the point where it only means something to the artist. Now I understand that art is only for the artist but then if it’s only for the artist why is it on exhibit at the Walker?

Oh that’s right, you had to pay your bill last month and you do nothing else but think of the most ridiculous things.

I often wonder if artists purposefully try to find the most obscure thing in the world, slop some paint on it (or just something else sticky) and call it art.  My thoughts in this article might be scattered but so are the random things at the Walker and my brain has still not recovered from such a place yet.

I mean you first walk in and you are invited to the gift shop, which by the way has a lot of cool pointless stuff. And trust me, I love cool pointless stuff... I bought some rainbow colored tape and I don’t know what I could possibly use it for, but I am ecstatic that at the moment I need such a ridiculous product that I will in fact have it.

As you walk down the long hallway that reminds me of the Willy Wonka (the original… no Johnny Depp in this article… sad day!) hallway where everyone gets bigger and the hallway get’s smaller you start to lose your sense of equilibrium. The problem with this hallway is that it’s not level at all with the walls and it feels like the contractors 4 year old kid created it.

And then the random white (or is it egg shell?) rooms with literally NOTHING in it are on… display! This bogs my mind. How is it that I can walk into a room, find 5 blue cubes evenly spaced apart in the middle of the room with 3 shelves on different walls at different heights considered art?!

And how much is this artist being paid to come up with something so simplistic? I continued my journey, trying my hardest not to laugh because I have no idea how my date is feeling about the lack of art we stumble upon another room that has a weird high-pitched noise that freaks me out. I go up to one of the glass boxes and inside it are random artifacts that aren’t related what-so-ever to each other.

Tell me, how is an old, moldy, blood sausage related to boxing gloves? I tried connecting the two as far as saying the blood sausage represents how America feels about boxers, just a piece of meat used for its blood. I don’t think that’s it at all but there had to be a reason, it’s the Walker, I mean people from around the country come to this place to see some of the finest art and I’m suppose to believe that a blood sausage is art let alone fine art?!

As if it couldn’t get worst we didn’t even see one of the traveling exhibits which was entitled “The dead and (I forget the second part because I’m trying to block the entire thing out of my mind)” yet and to get to it we took the elevator which… MEOWED at us the WHOLE way. My headache began to ensue and wouldn’t get any better as white noise and screeching serial killer sounds played in the background.

I definitely saw some interesting stuff, a giant CNN gold chain, a life size model of a car totaled, T.V.’s from the 1980’s playing the most ridiculous things, a stuffed dog (yes…an actual stuffed dog, it was at this point my brain completely shut down and I just didn’t care anymore), more random white rooms, a person spending an hour at a time trying to make herself into a ball in the corner of the room (the freakiest thing is, you don’t know she’s alive (because after all you just saw a stuffed dog and you’re at the Walker…anything’s possible) until you get real close and notice she’s breathing) and the ones that really get me are paintings with random splattering that remind me of kindergarten, a movie of a revolving restaurant (watching people eating without actually hearing what they are saying), a recorder on a continuous loop recording constantly over itself and then the grand hoopla of it all a tire attached to a motor spinning against the wall burning the rubber off of it into little particles collecting on the ground and I’m suppose to believe that that…that…THAT’S ART?!

Correct me if I’m wrong and I’m sure every art major out there will jump at the chance once they are done dipping an entire engine in sugar water to crystallize it will do so, but isn’t art suppose to be something that evokes some kind of emotion?

Isn’t art supposed to say something about anything that is happening or was happening in the world? Isn’t art supposed to resonate deep inside of us even if we don’t understand it? The Walker wasn’t a complete bust; I had one moment, one out of all the crazy and “crazies” I saw there that made me feel something even though I didn’t understand it.

I stood before a 20-foot painting that resembled a stormy ocean with a textured paint tear in the middle coming from dark clouds that seemed to drop something (I thought them to be lost souls (maybe I was feeling “emo” at the moment) dropping from heaven after judgment) and I couldn’t explain it but my spin sent a shiver through my body and I felt tingly and I just stood in awe and amazement at what I believed to be actual art. Here was a genius who felt something when he painted. Here was a master piece worthy to be on display it was just sad that right next to it was the giant CNN gold chain necklace. (To represent the lack of closure from the Walker…I’ve decided to just randomly end…).