Art Friend: Our arts critic takes a teacher to see a subversive piece at the Walker

Everyone needs an art friend. Art spaces can feel exclusive and art can be confusing, obtuse, even boring. But, especially with the right context, everyone can be a critic.

So let the MPR News arts team be your guide, your Art Friend.

Rob Morton: It’s a little, it’s a bit disturbing, it evokes — the obvious is death. But then there’s this mystery behind it because of the fact that — you can’t see if there is indeed a person in there, first off.

Alex V. Cipolle (voice-over): That’s my friend Rob Morton. He’s looking at a piece of art I brought to show him at the Walker Art Center. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s meet Rob first.

Rob: I am a musician. I’m a teacher. I’m a father, new father to Zippy. Six months old.

Alex (voice-over): I’ve known Rob for about 20 years. He’s very pro-democracy, very punk rock.

Alex: This exhibition is called “Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s.”

Rob: Oh, exciting. Okay.

Alex: What do you think of when you hear that?

Rob: When I hear Eastern Bloc countries, especially when I hear Eastern Germany I think of drab, brutalist, very cold kind of architecture, which is probably unfair.

Alex: That’s probably my assumption. I mean, you think of like, Soviet era, you think of communism and like, yeah, brutalist architecture. Lots of like concrete.

Alex (voice-over): The exhibition features hundreds of works by one hundred artists, most who are unknown to U.S. audiences. Our assumptions were wrong. The world presented — that of East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia in the 1960s-1980s — here is far from drab.

It’s wide-ranging and vibrant, playful and subversive, sensual and chilling. But there’s one spectacularly strange piece I wanted to show Rob.

Alex: Tell me what you see.

Rob: All right, so what we’re standing in front of is kind of like a gurney with what appears to be a body inside, wrapped up in gauze. There’s red around the edges, appears to be blood-like.

Alex (voice-over): This is “Bleeding Monument” by Gyula Konkoly. The Hungarian artist first made this human-sized work in 1969. It’s the first time it’s been on view outside Europe. It’s become a sort of celebrity in its own right since its debut in Minneapolis in November, where it’s been shocking and moving visitors.

Rob: It almost like looks wrapped up in a special sort of way as the burial right of some kind? Burial rite?

Alex: So what does it make you feel like?

Rob: It’s a little, it’s a bit disturbing, it evokes — the obvious is death. But then there’s this mystery behind it because of the fact that — you can’t see if there is indeed a person in there.

Alex (voice-over): Konkoly created the piece in response to the violent suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, started by students who opposed the ongoing Soviet dominance of their country. Soviet troops killed thousands of Hungarians. Konkoly also made it a year after the Prague Spring, another movement crushed by the Soviets.

Alex: It’s also like a more fleshy or more human version of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Rob: Yeah. Right.

Alex: It’s like this anonymous victim.

Rob: It’s much more visceral version of it, you know, very in your face.

Alex: It doesn’t sterilize the horrors of war. So I need to tell you what this is made of.

Rob: So what’s this made of?

Alex: So “Bleeding Monument” is a massive block of ice, a human-sized block of ice that is wrapped in gauze bandages that have been soaked in different chemicals. And as the ice melts, the chemicals in the bandages turn red. So when I came here …

Rob: Oh Wow!

Alex: Right. So when I came here two weeks ago, this was all white, and almost more of a rectangle.

Rob: Huh

Alex: By the time this exhibition closes, it’s going to be a dried pile of brown and red bandages.

Rob: That’s amazing! I love that. That’s amazing. Wow. That is cool. That’s some of my favorite stuff. Whenever an artist, you know, pours all this time and effort into something that is transient, that will only be there for, you know, however long it either takes the elements to destroy it, or whatever the process is to break it down.

Alex: Okay, so this is a re-creation. Did he come here and do this?

Rob: Yeah, that’s a question I was gonna ask, do you know?

Alex (voice-over): I didn’t know. So I reached out to Pavel Pyś, the Walker curator who’s been organizing this show for years.

Pavel Pyś: It’s a show that is full of color, vibrancy, joy, pleasure, solidarity, friendship, it’s a story that is full of surprises.

Alex (voice-over): I shared our reaction and questions about “Bleeding Monument.”

Pavel: It’s perhaps one of the few works in the show that has very direct political meaning that’s very legible.

So I think at that time it had of course a meaning that was very tied to those events when the memory of carrying wooden wounded citizens through city streets was quite fresh, I think in people’s minds today. When you see the work, it brings into mind, certainly some contemporary events.

Alex: So did Konkoly come to the Walker to re-create this?

Pavel: He sent detailed instructions on how to make the piece and our crew made the work after many different tests of mini — what were described as “ice burritos” in the basement — just to get the right amount of potassium on the ice.

(Dial tone)

Rob: Alex!

Alex: Rob!

Alex (voice-over): I call Rob with some answers.

Rob: So, okay, so that’s crazy, baby-sized, baby-size burrito versions of the art. That’s nuts.

Alex (voice-over): I wanted to know if this changed Rob’s opinion on the piece.

Rob: My initial reaction to that is kind of, Oh, that’s too bad, that it was, you know, it’s very much a re-creation of it. And to hear that the artist themselves did not have, as, you know, as personal of a role in creating what we saw.

But my view on how artists create is kind of evolved, to the point where I kind of view art not as something that is, like, created by a person, like one person — there’s a genius and they are to be lauded, and it was 100 percent their creation — and I don’t really think that way anymore. I think more like, everything is a culmination of human experience.

So in a way, you know, we all make every piece of art in every book, and every, you know, song,

And so in that regard, like, the fact that the artist just sent some instructions to the people at the Walker and said, you know, here’s how you do it, here’s the specification, here’s the chemicals to use. That’s kind of awesome.

Alex: It must be so liberating for the art artists to be like, here’s this idea. I’m setting it free.

There’s something kind of democratic about that too, which is really cool in a show that, you know, deals so much with non-democratic places and times.

Alex (voice-over): A few weeks had passed since we saw the show so I wanted to know if anything else had come up for Rob, about “Bleeding Monument” or the show in general.

Rob: These pieces that we saw, are they relics of a past that is to be pitied? And we shake our heads, thinking about just how far we’ve come? Or do we look at that and think, my God, we have not come very far at all.

Alex: I feel that a little bit the same way. What can you do with that, you know, like, if at that have a lot of this art was made, you know, 50-60 years ago?

Rob: Yeah, but then, it’s sort of inspiring to think that people will make what moves them, regardless of what repressive governments tell them they can and can’t do. Ultimately the human spirit is inconquerable.

Alex: Rob, thank you so much.

Rob: I mean, I’m honored to be the first person to go on this art friend journey with you.

“Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s” is on view at the Walker Art Center through March 10.

“Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc” gallery

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