"Now I AM the Art!"

On Tuesday I decided to take advantage of my long break from classes to re-explore my favorite place in Minneapolis: The Walker Art Center. The best part about meandering along the galleries of the Walker Art Center on a Tuesday is that it is not a Saturday. So there is no dealing with strollers, shovers, gum-chompers, whiners, stand-in-front-of-the-art-too-longers, art student posers, and "what do you think the artist is saying?" askers.

While I have always been drawn to more tradition visual art, and especially painting, I have discovered a new passion for "participatory art." I am not sure if that is the technical term for it, but I love art that is designed to be experienced by the viewer in a physical-spatial sense, really making them more than a viewer. The Walker sculpture garden has a large steel piece that has a suspended platform and when I stand on it (well, when anyone stands on it, really) my shifts in weight and balance cause most of the sculpture to also shift in reaction. Since the sculpture was clearly designed to move, but needs a person to provide the fuel for movement, when I am on the platform (hovering only about twelve inches above terra firma) I am the art. That is spectacular. And how silly I must look out there in the middle of the city swinging to and fro like a child on an artist's steel megalith, but I am rarely concerned with how I appear to passersby. To add to my fascination with being art, the Walker is currently hosting an exhibit called Garden of Metamorphosis by artist Tetsumi Kudo. Two of his most distinct pieces were small rooms where sculptural installations were illuminated by black light. It was definitely some interesting art (and I will warn: there were some extremely adult themes), but it is fun to be invited into an artist's creation instead of just observe it from behind a velvet barrier rope.

Of course, a trip to the Walker would be incomplete if I didn't tromp around the Spoon and Cherry Bridge that is so iconic of Minneapolis. The Sculpture Garden holds a different energy in the winter months-- the pond around the Spoon is frozen, the fountain is turned off, and there are very few brave people who don their mega-mittens to embrace the snow-capped stone, steel, and brick gentle giants of art.


My time photographing the Spoon and Cherry Bridge always reminds me of a great quote a friend sent me that I try to live by: "I take what life offers, which is why I carry a spoon (in hopes that it offers something delicious and spoon-sized)." Life is definitely offering some big things for me right now, so I am glad to have this spoon close by!