The controversy has cast a shadow over the garden’s reopening. But Viso remains guardedly hopeful. When contemporary art lands in the news cycle, it’s often for what its devotees may consider the “wrong” reasons, whether because of sky-high auction prices (like last month’s sale of a canvas by Jean-Michel Basquiat for $110.5 million at Sotheby’s) or because of calls for censorship from the political right or left. In 1999, when then–New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani threatened to withhold city funding from the Brooklyn Museum for showing Chris Ofili’s mixed-media canvas The Holy Virgin—an image of a Black Madonna adorned with elephant dung—it was front-page news, and easy for art world insiders to cry, “Philistines!” The storm last spring surrounding Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmet Till in the Whitney Biennial was more complicated to navigate and filled my Facebook feed for weeks, with one art critic after another weighing in on either side of the controversy. So when news erupted over Memorial Day weekend that the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and its director, Olga Viso, were being attacked for installing a sculpture by Los Angeles–based artist Sam Durant in the Walker’s newly redesigned Sculpture Garden—an almost 30-year-old jewel of the city’s Parks system, curated by the Walker but sited on public land, and reopening today—it gave me pause. I had toured the garden in April, when bulldozers were still moving dirt around, and had spoken briefly with Viso about her reasons for undertaking this massive, $33 million renovation, which included making the garden more environmentally and user-friendly, and moving its contemporary sculpture program into the 21st century, with 18 new acquisitions and commissions, many by women and people of color. German sculptor Katharina Fritsch’s Hahn/Cock—a 13-foot-tall rooster, cast in ultramarine blue resin and set atop a 10-foot-high pedestal—was meant to be a focal point, a reflection, at once feminist and Pop, on monumentality and absurdism. Only a few works were installed when I visited, including beautiful figurative bronzes by Dutch artist Mark Manders and Los Angeles–based sculptor Matthew Monahan. The Durant piece, Scaffold—a large, stark, and somewhat forbidding timber and steel structure resembling a Piranesian jungle gym or an unfinished house—hadn’t impressed me visually, though its backstory seemed compelling. Durant had based its design on seven different scaffoldings that had served in executions between 1859 and 2006; he had first exhibited it in Kassel, Germany, in 2012, where it was understood as a critique of capital punishment. But in Minneapolis, local members of the Dakota Sioux nation understood it differently. For them, the sculpture recalled just one of Durant’s sources: the gallows that served in the 1862 public hanging of 38 Dakota Sioux men, which took place in nearby Mankato. The largest mass execution in U.S. history, it remains an open wound for their people. In late May, after protests by Native American groups and others, Viso and Durant began a process of mediation with Dakota Sioux elders. “When we understood that Sam’s piece was being seen by the Dakota community in literal terms, it was very painful,” Viso explained by phone recently. “The sculpture sits on public land—on former Dakota land, in fact. So that’s a very specific context. For them, Scaffold was not about raising awareness of this suppressed history: It was the killing machine itself.” Durant, she said, was “very clear that if he had understood the trauma this work would have induced, he would not have made it in the same way. It was he who volunteered the idea of giving the gallows to the Dakota community.” One week ago, workers began dismantling the sculpture; the fate of its timber, which now belongs to the Dakota Sioux nation, remains uncertain. The controversy has cast a shadow over the garden’s reopening. But Viso remains guardedly hopeful. As a museum professional, she noted, “Every fiber of my being is focused on the preservation of art. But I think, with Sam’s participation, we remade the work in a new way. It’s still very much alive. It may not exist in physical form. But it exists in archive, in oral history, and in the lives of all who were transformed by this process.”
POST: 2023-09-23