MN Day 6 - Modernism, Mills, and Minnesota Meet-Ups
Due to a scheduling snafu, this was my last day in Minnesota even if it was a day earlier than usual so I was determined to make the most of it. Things started out a bit groggy, because my new cousin-less Air BnB was a little bit outside the Twin Cities proper so I needed an early start to cram in as much sight seeing as I wanted to be able to do. Fortunately, I was able to stop at the perfectly lovely Humble Cup Coffeehouse to get a nice cold brew to shake the sleep off. Sadly, they’ve since had to close, but it was a really calming space with great coffee so I was lucky to visit when I did.
My next major stop for the day was the Walker Art Center, one of the most celebrated contemporary art museums in the MidWest. Technically the Minnesota Sculpture Garden that my cousins, sister, and I went to earlier in the week is also part of the Walker now, but today was my day to see the full museum. This partly because I’d only heard excellent things, and also because it was the first Saturday of the month so they happened to be free which was a nice added bonus.
Right away, I was impressed by how unique and whimsical the exterior of the museum was. The building itself was pleasantly strange because it was initially designed by acclaimed minimalist architect Edward Larrabee Barnes, but then had a new wing added in 2005 design by Swiss architects Jacques Herzog ) and Pierre de Meuron to add some supplemental modernist funkiness to the original sleek and streamlined designs. The grounds also still had plenty of art to show that the Sculpture Garden didn’t have a monopoly on cool outdoor sculptures. One highlight (to the right), was three giant bronze squiggles by Nairy Baghramian called Privileged Points which were carefully placed down the slope of a lovely green hill to give the abstract sculptures a real sense of motion and life.
My favorite exterior feature was an installation by the influential artist James Turrell, who is most celebrated for creating large scale pieces that explore the interactions of light, space, architecture, and the environment in fascinating ways. He also famously helped single-handedly fly Buddhist monks safely out of TIbet during the Vietnam War, and more recently he has been given $10 million by Kanye West to help turn a dormant volcano into a giant art installation and I’m not sure which of those life experiences is more crazy. His piece at the Walker is called Sky Pesher, and at first it may seem like an inconspicuous mound on the hill, but should visitors follow the little stone path way they’re greeted by a cool, calming concrete room designed by Turrell. The ceiling opens up into a skylight that seamlessly blends into the architectures and floods the space with gentle natural light. In a neat bit of design trickery, Turrel has placed artificial lights around the aperture connected to computer programs that fade them in out with the rising and falling of the sun to add to the optical illusion of the sky and the room melding together. It’s a deceptively simple but effective installation, and a great spot for quiet reflection tucked into the middle of the bustling city.
After greatly enjoying the outside of the museum, I decided to finally try the inside which did not disappoint. I ended up really loving the main special exhibition which was a massive 40 year retrospective of the artist Allen Ruppersberg entitled Intellectual Property 1968-2018. I hadn’t heard of Ruppersberg before but he was an influential early member of the LA Conceptual Art scene featuring other artists I’ve really enjoyed like Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari.
Ruppersberg rose to fame for creating large scale conceptual installations that blurred the line between art and reality, but he was a multi-talented artist working in all manor of media including sculptures, painting, photography, and collage to explore “the vocabulary of the ordinary” The breath of the exhibit was so impressive, and the sheer volume and creativity of Ruppersberg’s output would make it hard for anyone to not be impressed even if conceptual art isn’t normally your cup of tea. Before you even entered the exhibit proper, visitors were greeted with a fun little sculpture that looks like a chair with one leg made entirely out of children’s alphabet blocks. It’s at once sort of simplistic, but also kind of plays with your head because your not sure if the blocks are keeping the chair from toppling or if the chair is holding the block tower together with gentle pressure, so right away visitors are tipped off that Ruppersberg’s works are gonna mess with your head and everything might not be what it first seems like.
The first gallery featured works from the first 10 years of Al’s professional career. I really liked seeing his early paintings, prints, and drawings because they show off both his genuine talent and growing fondness for messing with forms. He has a starkly captivating chromogenic print of a man’s legs but chooses to present it upside down, he paints an absolutely beautiful night sky and then paints a bright orange (totally imaginary) book called “Greetings from California: A Novel by A. Ruppersberg” over it for seemingly no reason other than his own amusement, and he makes a lovely pop-art silhouette of an older couple and then just recreates it a little bit smaller in the corner. I’m sure you can find themes in the absurdity about isolation, the futility of trying to impose order and meaning on a random universe, and other such things, but you can also just look at them and laugh that someone so clearly talented has no interest in making things easy for himself or his viewers but is only interested in doing whatever strikes a chord with his sense of humor and imagination. My kinda artist.
Next up was a great collection of some of his early works in photography which playfully deconstructed the with rules of visual story-telling and inventively repurposed household objects. Highlights for me included: a pair of “dynamite legs” a visual pun made by the artist photographic a collage of sticks of fake dynamite taped to a photo of ballerina’s legs as if to literally blow up the idea of traditional art forms; a funny little photographic sequence of two shots of toy cars crashing into each other next to a final shot of an actual person on fire to illustrate that the placement of the photos makes you see them as a narrative even when it’s silly and physically impossible for a grown man to have been in the toy crash; and a beautifully composed photo of people acting like they’re playing scrabble only for the board to clearly show that they’ve just been making short poetry, which clearly upset someone in the next photo who douses the whole game in a bucket of water.
Next up were were some early sculptural assemblages of found objects. These included nonsense dioramas of stray objects grandly presented in repurposed aquariums (these ones I’ll be honest I didn’t totally get though I thought the lighting was neat) and a deceptively MC Escher like self-portrait cut into a cardboard square and hung on a coat-hanger. The cardboard piece really got to me because when you first look at it doesn’t appear particularly impressive until you realize that the artist must have done some trickery because there’s no physically possible way for that cardboard to be threaded through that hanger with both pieces totally intact as the artist fools you into believing they are. I think he must have cut the hanger but by positioning it just so, your eye doesn’t initially question that of course it’s a totally normal everyday hanger, which I thought was a super fun optical illusion to work into such a simple-looking piece.
Next up were the two installations that really led to Al making a name for himself in the LA art scene, while also helping to give the whole scene some welcome national attention (or notoriety depending on how you felt about the prankish nature of the pieces). The first piece was called Al’s Cafe, and it originally opened in 1969 when Al bought out a closed restaurant in downtown LA called The Seahorse Inn Restaurant. Al worked to refurbish the space, hired other artists as cooks and waiters, and opened what looked outwardly like a classic American diner. In reality the Cafe was a hip blend of sculpture, performance art, and design aimed at both embracing and taking the piss out of the then common trends in contemporary art. While the menus looked authentic, even a passing glance would reveal that they were full of absurdities and puns. Some fun examples include a BLT, naturally standing for Branches, Leaves, and Twigs, and a Patti Melt consisting of a photo of the singer Patti Page covered with melted marshmallows. Each order was then taken to the kitchen, where the staff would plate up lovingly arranged assemblages of found objects. This was at once a nod to the rising popularity of assemblage in the Art World, while also taking some of the pretension out of the whole genre by giving each original artwork directly to patrons for the same price as a deli sandwich. This was an exciting early example that artist’s need not rely on conventional galleries and art-world gatekeepers to get their art into the hands of the public, and in a way it sort of helped people appreciate assemblages more when they were more reasonably priced and silly rather than million dollar collections of “junk” that were meant to be taken deathly serious. Most importantly, the cafe just became a fun place to hang out, and the coffee, beer, and soda was all just normal so even if you wandered in expecting a normal restaurant (as some poor, sweet tourists often did) you might not leave fully disappointed (though as the menu notes, fossils were extra). Truly, it struck a cord with people who got a big kick out of the committed performance of a traditional restaurant blended with the ridiculousness of the actual output, and it became a popular spot among both regular Angelonos and artists and hippie weridos alike until it was eventually shut down by the LAPD who really didn’t know what to make of it so assumed it must have been up to no good.
While the Walker couldn’t actually recreate the Cafe, they had actual menus, staff shirts, and lots of really nicely composed photos of the assemblage piece (which ironically are probably worth a ton now if any customers saved them) to bring the whole lovably goofy saga to life. It’s such a surreal blend of high art, counterculture, and youthful exuberance that I could honestly see something this eccentric and fun succeeding just as much nowadays while also still managing to piss off those in authority. Fans of the incredible Comedy Central series Nathan for You, will no doubt see in Al’s Cafe an early progenitor of the hilarious Dumb Starbucks which did in fact inspire similar amounts of both joy and disdain (click here for a link).
In 1971, Al took the premise of his Cafe to even more ambitious heights with the opening of Al’s Grand Hotel, several art installations disguised as a fully operational hotel. Learning his lesson from his tiffs with LAPD, this time Al worked hard to secure all the licenses and permits to actually open up a hotel had the been his goal, but his mischievous creativity couldn’t be so easily tamed by the idea of actually opening a legitimate business. Inspired by kitschy themed hotel’s popular in the 50s, Al designed this massive project so that each room was built around a theme and filled with carefully curated found objects and original sculptures. These included an Al Room filled with cardboard cut-outs of the artist dressed like figures from classic movies, a Jesus Room filled almost wall-to-wall with a 15-ft tall wooden cross, a Breakfast room filled with diner stalls, and a Bridal Suite filled wedding photos, a multi-tiered wedding cake, and several gifts. The hotel was fully staffed with maids, security, and concierges who may or may not have been in on the joke, but certainly added to the surreal experience. It only operated for a few months, but it became a fun gathering spot where guests could spend a very silly night or two or just hang out and take in concerts and performances by Al’s fellow local artists. Despite all the goofiness, there’s something genuinely sort of touching that Al used the platform provided by these giant in-jokes to actually raise up other artists and provide spaces for artists to congregate, collaborate, and have a good time.
Again, a full hotel might have been beyond the possibilities of the Walker’s exhibit, but I liked how they represented it through a room with multiple projectors hanging from the ceiling casting slideshows of photos from the Hotel’s glory days along the blank white walls to give visitors something like the immersive experience of the actual piece but in miniature.
After the success of his giant installations, Al pulled back in scale somewhat but in effort during the rest of the 70s with several ambitious projects around the concepts of reading and copying intended to question the limits of language and what we’re willing to define as art. These pieces included: the entirety of the novel The Portrait of Dorian Gray meticulously transcribed across 20 canvases thus making it a painting of a novel about a painting and calling into question why we consider a faithful copy less meaningful than an original when we can see how much work it takes as soon as you look at these massive canvases (definitely a more interesting than visually arresting piece, but I got a kick out of it); a series of incredibly photo-realistic graphite portraits of different novels with cheeky captions pairing Al’s stellar draftsmanship with completely mundane musings like “Reading time 175 Hrs 32 Mins 10 Secs” and “Some men have been surrealists and some have not”; and a decades long project called The Novel That Writes Itself which blends print-making, illustrations, and a collaborative creative process pre-dating Kickstarter by some time where anyone who donated money toward the completion of the novel would be written into and the larger the donation the larger their role would be.
Next up was one of my favorite of Al’s collections, in which he faithfully painted dark but unintentionally hilarious newspaper headlines he came across capturing in incredible details the particulars of the fonts, any photos, and even the textures of the newspaper so well you’d swear they had to screen prints and not done by hand. The recreated newspaper clippings would be centered on large, monochromatic backgrounds sort of like Pop-Art-y Rothko paintings, and Al would add his own commentary on the lurid stories in the margins and usually give the painting a big title in Horror movie styled fonts with the caption Translated by Allen Ruppersberg. To put add to the macabre humor of the pieces, there were little plaster cast heads strewn about the floor.
I loved these pieces so much, because these were to me the perfect blend of ridiculous and the profound. Al’s artistic skills are on full display with his insane ability to capture little details in the press clippings, and he does things with fonts that make you really appreciate type-face as a potential medium of “high art” instead of just the “commercial art” we see it used for in every day life. Moreover I think the stories themselves have such a blend of dark humor and tragedy that it almost puts all the absurdist art around it in greater context. These news stories show examples of the ways life itself can be a mixture of the grisly and the goofy even in the same moment, so why shouldn’t art try to capture that? These pieces in particular show that when you try to process horrible events in the humorless matter of factness of news articles sometimes the blunt language is unintentionally much more laughable (“Man troubled before wife slain, friends say”). By acknowledging how hard it is to acknowledge the tonal inconsistencies life throws at you it almost pushes the artwork from being a prankish head game into the realm of a certain kind of honesty about our endlessly strange world that really just kinda blew me away.
Next up was a playful contemporary installation piece called Reading Standing Up, which is maybe one of the only things to combine poetry and obstacle courses. Across the vinyl checkerboard tiles on the floor, Al has written a poem but to read it correctly you have to carefully follow a path across the floor while avoiding little booklets hanging from the ceiling. It’s very whimsical, like something out of Alice in Wonderland, but it’s also wildly inventive and it’s nice to see any art that forces grown adults to experience childlike glee again.
Next up was a series of self-portraits that show off Al’s stylistic versatility while also severely stretching the acceptable bounds of what can be called a “self-portrait”. While we would all assume the words mean that an artist would make a picture of themselves, Al is I suppose technically correct in that as long as the art captures what the artist feels about themselves we cannot actually say that it is not a “self portrait”. It’s a fun reminder that like many linguistic and social constructs, sometimes things we thing of as having an objective meaning are much more subjective than we expect.
Next up was a series of virtuosic pencil drawings in which Al would perfectly recreate illustrations from vintage books. Removed from any context, the images take on a dream-like quality which is not alleviated by Al’s non-sequiter captions like “Searching for Passion and Sex (And Other Things)”, statement that are both mildly salacious but then also vague to the point of not actually meaning anything. Whether the absurdism connects or not, the fact that the depth and detail in these drawings is achieved using only pencil and paper is pretty astonishing.
Up next was another large installation from the 90s entitled Lectures and Film Screenings. This piece is initially underwhelming but the level of mundane realism is actually what makes it so impressive. In it, Al has fully recreated a high school hallway from his childhood. The doors do not open, but lectures can be heard going on behind them, and at the end of the hall way is an AV room with TVs playing cheesy instructional videos. It really does feel so much like a school hallway, down to the linoleum and paint choices, that it’s almost jarring to turn out and come out back in the museum. It’s also sort of impressive that you probably didn’t think you had such strong mental associations with “high school hallways” but once you’re in the piece it’s a little crazy tactile memory comes rushing back. Even if this particular hallway isn’t all that similar to your own high school’s in the specifics, something about how it’s presented just captures the vibe so perfectly.
Next up was a sculptural piece from the 90s called Remainders which again showcases Al’s ability to absolutely perfectly capture things you almost never think about. In this case’s it’s incredibly believable recreation of a bookstore’s discount books table, except book on there is a carefully designed fake. Through playing printmaking, typefaces, and careful arrangement it’s sort of remarkable how much he really captures the look and feels of the kind of books you would totally believe would both exist and end up haphazardly stacked on the discount table. It really taps into how we have associations and visual language that we absorb from everyday exposure but never really think consciously about. If you had told me to design a perfectly believable book that also doesn’t really look very good, I’d be really stumped at how to do it, but as soon as you look at any of the books on the table you know right away what kind of books they are and they feel almost familiar which is a very neat trick Al pulls off. It’s good evidence for the idiom that imitation can be the highest form of flattery, because there is something sort of sweet about just how lovingly Al was able mimic and reproduce the visual language of trashy pulp. While guests weren’t supposed to touch the piece, apparently the inside of each fake novel is actually filled with still images from various instructional videos so if you were to flip through the pages real quick each one would give you a little movie, and in an additional bit of playful meta-design, if you lay the text of each book’s inside jacket and back cover side by side, you’ll get the entire text of a 1960s educational film warning about the dangers of hallucinogenic drugs. What a weird genius.
Next up were some vibrant and silly collage pieces combining Al’s printmaking with found photographs and illustrations from all manner of commercially works rearranged in surreal patterns that make you think there’s some sort of them and order when in reality it’s all just aesthetically interesting chaos.
The next piece was a monumental and glaring undertaking called The Singing Posters, in which Al worked in collaboration with LA’s Colby Printing Company to transcribe the entirety of Allen Ginsburg’s epic Beat Poem, Howl, on to a billboard’s worth of their signature Day-Glo posters. The kicker is he actually transcribed the poem phonetically forcing anyone trying to read it to start, consciously or not, sounding out the words to make sense of anything. It’s at once jarring and then oddly powerful as the assaultive nature of the colors and the style makes you work harder to understand the famously misunderstood poem and the shared experience of trying to make heads or tails of the work forges an interactive sense of camaraderie between museum visitors as they laugh and catch each other talking to themselves and straining their necks like lunatics to try to get through a poem they maybe haven’t thought about since high school. Like a lot of Al’s works it cleverly takes a concept that you feel should be very pretentious and annoying and then finds the fun and silliness in it.
I might have been slightly biased towards this piece, because I really love Howl and all it’s stream of consciousness beauty. There was just something about having individual lines on their own posters that really reinforced, to me at least, just how well Ginsburg could turn a phrase in such a unique way. These were some of my favorites:
The next series was entitled The El Segundo Record Club in which Al created a fake record club (cheekily on their website they say the artist would like to remain anonymous”) where subscribers could be mailed records that also double as unique art objects. Every record produced by the El Segundo Record is wholly unique, as the songs are chosen at random from Al’s personal collection of vintage 78s and then transferred onto blank vinyl records (or CDs) and then placed into a record sleeve made from a different vintage and whatever collaged or handwritten elements Al’s imagination saw fit to adorn them with (including at least one gleefully filthy poem) before being mailed off to Record Club Members. It’s maybe less involved than his other large scale fake organizations, but it nonetheless captures his spirit of absurdity, audience participation, and reinventing ways to distribute original art directly to the public.
Next up was piece from 2010 called Big Trouble that shows that Al hasn’t lost any of his inventiveness as he’s gotten older. In the piece he takes random images from 1960s Scrooge McDuck comic book and turns them into life size wooden standees. Then along the walls he’s hung the pages of the comic book but with the images he’s enlarged cut out so it looks almost as if they’ve jumped off the page and into real life. It was so fun seeing cartoons brought to life before your eyes, and it’s cool seeing an artist 40 years into his career still doing something wholly original.
Next was a series of screen prints which toyed with the idea of collection. Each piece featured the same pencil drawing of a study printed in different shades and colors, with a caption that began “Honey I’ve rearranged the collection…”. The last line was then often filled in with tongue in cheek joke (“I tried to separate unhappy artists with problems from the rest, but I couldn’t do it. It’s the whole collection”) that questions the ways we think about art and the very idea of breaking things categories for organizational purposes. Just like you can organize things in an endless number of ways, Al’s pieces show that you can take a basic formula for a piece of art and rearrange the elements in different enough ways to get endlessly new pieces.
Last but not least were more collections of genre bending pieces. These included: Good Dreams, Bad Dreams (What was Sub-Literature?) in which he hired commercial sign painters to cover colorful boards with the names of various vintage pulp novels thus combining two “lower” forms of art into something strange and new that is both visually arresting and semantically meaningless (an irony in that most signs are supposed to clarify not confuse); a piece called Rauschenberg which looks like an abstract painting from a distance but is actually a painstakingly cut and pasted collage of various individual letters arranged into the entirety of Robert Rauschenberg’s obituary, which makes it a surprisingly sincere tribute to a friend and fellow conceptual artist through a shared act of obsessive creation; and a trippy installation called The New Five Foot Book Shelf in which Al has covered the walls of a room with posters made out of high resolution photographs of his own studio thus creating a very strange sensation where you feel like you are looking out into a three dimensional room even though you know they are two dimensional posters.
After the Ruppersberg exhibit, I made my way into the heart of the museum’s permanent collection. While I was visiting, the collection was arranged so as to highlight works focused on place and identity, and things started off on high note with is impressive and bizarre untitled sculpture by Nobuaki Kojima featuring a man either struggling to hang up a large American flag or being totally engulfed by one depending on how you look at. The ambiguity is rife for interpretation and the artist painted the plaster sculpture in a polyethylene resin so it has a shine to it that only adds to its haunting allure.
Inside the first gallery the walls were covered with powerful contemporary pieces. My favorites included: Robert Longo’s National Trust which features two spooky yet graceful drawings of dying bodies suspended inspace and attached to an ominous aluminum etching of a prison in lower Manhattan; an eerie piece by Sarah Charlesworth called Modern History in which the artist took a series of life sized photographs of various newspaper headlines and then carefully removed everything but the pictures and the mastheads to give you a clear and nagging sense that something is missing; a vibrant painting called Blind Ambition by Kerry James Marshall featuring a Black businessman standing next to a ladder with the word “ambition” at the bottom and “success” at the top in fading letters as if to capture the diminishing rewards returned to people of color trying to succeed in historically racist fields; and a startling triptych of photorgraphs by Alfredo Jaar entitled Life Magazine, April 19, 1968, after the first of the three photos which replicates a photo from that magazine issue of MLK Jr’s funereal, while the next two photos show the disparity between the number of Black people who came to attend the funeral (black dots) and the number of white people who chose to attend (red dots) to make an alarmingly clear statement about how much the majority of the country was actually willing to come out and openly support MLK even after his murder.
Among the two dimensional pieces were also a number of interesting sculptures. These included: a shockingly realistic fiberglass sculpture by Charles Ray of smashed car all painted gray which, while hugely impressive, really gave me the creeps as someone living out of a car; a piece by Italian artist Giovanni Anselmo called Direzione (Direction) which features a giant triangular slab of granite in which the artist has so seamlessly embedded a compass that it looks like part of the rock itself as if it has an innate sense of directions; and a wonderfully satirical piece by Gary Simmons featuring two cotton bath robes with the words “Us” and “Them” embroidered across the backs in gold thread.
Next up were some more conceptual pieces that I found to be really moving. The first was called When Faith Moves Mountains in which the artist Francis Alÿs enlisted 500 volunteers from Lima, Perue with shovels to dig up a massive sand dune and fully moved it a few inches to the side. It was both an incredible testament to the fact that people working together can accomplish the seemingly impossible, while also a sad reminder that sometimes literally moving the earth might not always make a practical difference as the change while monumental was functionally imperceptible to everyone but those who toiled together to achieve it. The other piece was a simple but lovely symbolic rebuking of our current immigration laws by the artist, Carey Young, who drew thick black box onto the walls and floor of the gallery and boldly stated that “by standing in the zone created by this drawing, and for the period you remain there, you declare and agree that you are a citizen of the United States of America”.
Next up was a really great collection of contemporary photography exploring similar themes of identity and place. My favorites included: a hilariously surreal series of self portraits by the artist Tseng Kwong Chi where he dressed like Chairman Mao and stood with a deathly serious expression in front of tourist attractions all over the country; a delightful silver gelatin print by Luis Camnitzer reimagining the face as a pastoral landscape; and a proudly defiant and passionate gay kiss candidly captured in a London club by Wolfgang Tillmans in 2002 which really looks sort of impressively like a classic Romantic-era painting minus the queerness and deeply British tracksuit.
My favorite photographic piece though was from a series I’d seen before, but which I love every time I see it: Lorraine O’Grady’s Art Is… For the piece, O’Grady worked with the New York State Council for the Arts so that she and 15 young Black actors and dancers were able to participate in 1983 African-American Day Parade in Harlem. The dancers carried antique gold frames and went out into the streets and the crowds proclaiming everything they framed to be art, while O’Grady captured amazing photos of the performance and celebratory reactions. It was her attempt as an artist of color to counter the notion that hoighty-toighty conceptual art had no place in the Black community, by conceiving and executing a conceptual work that was so firmly rooted in affirmin Black identity and beauty. It was a sweet idea to begin with, but the paradegoers also seemed to really embrace the spirit of fun and interactivity of the piece providing her with both incredible candid moments and joyfully posed ones as well.
The next gallery featured works which took more abstract attempts at exploring identity. My favorites included: the fascinatingly textured abstract piece Analog by Mark Bradford which looks like a collage but is actually all carefully layered brushes of paint with the canvas either built up with stray paper or sanded down to give the mosaics of paint an almost topographical look that is really strange at first but make the piece more absorbing the longer you stare at it; and a very unusual and unassuming sculpture by Micheal Dean entitled Home which despite just looking like slabs of concrete was actually made through fascinating process where the artist wrote etched the word “home” multiple times until it lost all legibility and then cast a concrete mold out of these etchings so while the slabs initially look the same every little line or rivet is quite literally an imprint of “home” which is as symbolically beautiful as the piece is visually drab.
The next few pieces were housed in a dark hallway because they were all made using light in some way, so just the experience of walking by them after the other galleries was a neat change of pace. The light art itself was quite cool, with highlights for me being: a very simple but elegant piece entitled Light by Jason Rhoades which takes very mundane industrial items, fluorescent lights and plastic buckets, and combines them in way that seems to give off an almost magical aura; and a wonderfully rude use of neon lights by the artist Ralph Lemon to not so subtly take Bruce Nauman (famous for his own neon sculptures) down a peg.
Exiting the darkened Light Art gallery, visitors are greeted with Dada-ist salvation in the form of a book about the works of Marcel Duchamp lovingly bound and printed to look like a Holy Bible by the artist David Hammons, something which I’m sure Duchamp would have found very funny.
The next few galleries explored ideas of art and interior design with three walls of a room were covered in wallpaper by the artists Yto Barrada, Yoko Ono (yes, that Yoko Ono), and Adam Pendleton. The idea was for the wallpaper to serve as art itself and a staging ground for the pieces hanging from the walls. My apologies to Adam Pendelton, as I appear to have left his wall out (likely due to my phone dying) but my highlights that I captured were: Yto Barrada’s minimalist wallpaper inspired by a geometric abstraction of a palm tree (a thick line for the tree, little lines for the leaves, and a small dot for the coconut) that was oddly pleasant even when the art on the wall was telling you to applaud; a heliographic print by Argentinian artist Leon Ferrari called Planta which uses repeated shapes to create a simplified yet hugely complex imaginary city plan; Yoko’s utterly ridiculous to the point where you almost have to love her for it wallpaper featuring just a butt over and over again; and a very eerie set of photographic self-portraits by the artist Ana Mendieta in which she uses wigs and make up to alter her appearance as drastically from photo to photo as she can.
Once I got my phone charged up a bit, I went to the next gallery explored which how artists utilize and allude to common household items to turn them into something strange and new. This would definitely not be the gallery to start with if you don’t already like contemporary art, because if you’re not on the winking conceptual wavelength of some of these pieces they might definitely just look like piles of junk. Naturally that playful willingness to be outrageously unaesthetic only made me like a number of these ridiculous pieces more. My favorites included: a piece called Rug by Robert Breer that might at first look a prime offender of arty pretentiousness because it is ostensibly a sheet of aluminum thrown on the floor, but the artist has actually skillfully and sneakily attached motors all along the underside of the piece so just when you’re about to scoff at it you realize it’s starting to move and you get really freaked out and you have to hand it him he got you (maybe that was just me); a giant bulbous pleather sculpture of an electrical outlet by Swedish Pop-Artist Claes Oldenburg which is really in the uncanny valley of being instantly recognizable while also entirely all wrong; an absolutely hilarious piece of assemblage art called the Huffy Howler by Rachel Harrison that creates a noble jousting apparatus out of common objects like a child’s bike, cement blocks, hand bags, a sheepskin, and naturally a photograph of Mel Gibson; and a darkly ironic piece called The Future is Filled With Opportunities featuring a mechanical bull made out of a mobility scooter, buckets, and PVC pipes (which you can’t help but feel sort of look like a catheter) to imply that all cowboys might not age quite so gracefully as riding into the sunset.
The centerpiece of this gallery was an incredible and influential piece of Video Art entitled The Way Things Go by Peter Fischli and David Weiss which chronicles a domino effect of utterly mundane industrial objects bounding into one another for 30 mins to create a magnificently spellbinding Rube Goldberg machine of carefully orchestrated chaos that is nearly impossible to take your eyes off despite being wholly unaesthetic in terms of materials and their warehouse setting. Once you start watching, something inside you just yearns to see how every little contrivance is set up to keep the motion going and every improbable bit of forward momentum is immensely satisfying. It’s really a bit of a magic trick on the behalf of the filmmakers that materials that are otherwise so commonplace and ugly can, for 30 minutes, utterly enchant a room full of adults and children alike. I think in all the video installations I’ve seen this is one of the only ones that utterly transfixed museum goers for its entire runtime. Sadly, I can’t share the whole piece, but if you want to see a bit of it in motion you can click here or here.
Next up was a special exhibition highlighting works by the jazz pianist, composer, and multi-disciplinary artist Jason Moran. Every piece was in some way related to music but were impressively diverse in style and mediums, including sculptural pieces, original music, paintings, and video art. Everything had a really old school jazzy vibe which gave the whole exhibit a super cool ambience. Highlights for me included: a beautifully rendered sculptural recreation of Slug’s Saloon, a famous NYC jazz club that operated from 1964-1972 which is both lovingly detailed and sadly lonely; some pieces that initially seem abstract but actually represent the artist’s attempt at taking music from the auditory to the visual realm by putting on the hammers in his piano so they would leave create patterns of markings on strategically placed papers as he played essentially turning the percussive element into brushstrokes; psychedelic videos capturing specially commissioned performances by the artist and his band; and a sculpture that uses light and space really well to create the sense of being inside a giant pipe organ.
After the exhibit, I started heading towards the museum’s rooftop patio to soak up some art and sun. In the main hallway though there was a really interesting display about major controversies that the museum has weathered, chiefly during the 1980s and 1990s when the AIDs crisis really brought long simmering homophobia to the forefront and skirmishes between queer artists and religious groups and conservative politicians started becoming a common occurrence. The artists felt that at a time when government apathy was literally killing them, public displays of queer art and increasing the visibility of and knowledge about queer life was more valuable than ever. The conservatives felt that that they were trying to destroy religious and family values, and they didn’t think any tax money or government funds should be given to museums that chose to showcase this “dangerous” art. I’m obviously a little bit biased, but the idea of thinking that being grossed out by something at an art museum (and to be fair some of the controversial art really was kind of gross in a pure visual sense) is a problem that needs to be fixed more urgently than the systematic oppression, violence, and an actual deadly epidemic that inspired the art is the height of arrogance and entitlement. Plus if you really hate the art that much you’re probably working against your own interests stirring controversy, because I think the average American would not really think twice about high-falutin’ contemporary art if no one made a fuss about it.
Things came to a head at the Walker in particular during a performance by extreme performance artist Ron Athey when a bunch of sheltered rich midwesterners mistakenly thought that they had been exposed to the HIV virus and started panicking. This led to a brief national outrage against the museum and Athey until it eventually became clear that there was absolutely no physical danger from the performance. While Athey’s piece, in which he did cut himself on stage and make art with the blood in a piece that drew parallels between both BDSM subculture and religious rituals, was surely shocking, (and I actually don’t think I would care to watch it myself if I’m being honest) the shock value was very intentional drawing a contrast between how the artist’s religious upbringing emphasized the violence of the Passion and everyone really “feeling” Christ’s suffering but the same religious institutions he grew up in were now shying away from appreciating the suffering of the gay community. He felt this was more than a bit hypocritical so he created an artwork where that queer suffering was impossible to not feel. Again, maybe too intense for some people (myself included) but hardly mindless shock tactics, and, while I have nothing but sympathy for anyone who hears about such an extreme performance and says “Not for me thanks”, to then say that absolutely nobody should be able to see a piece of art is just a bridge too far for me. Like I would say that Larry the Cable Guy has no artistic merit to me personally, but if he brings joy or emotional resonance to anybody else, I would feel like a jerk saying that they’re not allowed to have that. Removed from the more emotionally charged contexts of religion and queer identity, I feel like the same censorship becomes more opaquely ridiculous.
Additionally, a key misunderstanding, other than the crowd being in any danger, was the idea that museum would be exposing impressionable youths to this “disturbing art”. In fact, it was a special one time performance and all the posters from the time featured a shirtless man with pierced skin, tattoos, and bloody face paint as part of a larger performance series called Cultural Infidels: Film and Performance for Consenting Adults, so anyone who took all that in and bought a ticket must have had at least pretty decent hint at what they were getting into and it was hardly something the museum was forcing upon an unsuspecting public. You can not like the performance for sure, but you can’t say it was done with anything less than pretty full transparency from the museum because they correctly thought it would have merit and meaning to some of its patrons who they trusted to make the decision for themselves whether they wanted to go. The panic and attempts to censor the art were just another classic example of the Culture Wars pretending that blatant homophobia was a way to protect people from things that in truth posed them no danger. Sadly, in the wake of the Athey performance, congress led by the (I would say) much more offensive and dangerous Newt Gingrich was able to vote in the largest cut to the National Endowment for the Arts budget in history. Fortunately on a positive note, the Endowment would survive Gingrich, and the Walker did not let the controversy stop them from continuing to showcase queer artists, a decision which 25 years later in this little hallway really makes the museum come out looking like an Arts institution that was willing to go out of its way to back up artists when they needed it. It was an oddly heartwarming exhibit about some pretty wild events.
On a (literally) brighter note, the rooftop patio of the museum was incredible, and there really wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Beyond stunning views out over the Twin Cities, the patio also offered up some geometric art by Sol LeWitt, the master of monster-sized minimalism, as well as super cute activities like mini-golf courses inspired by famous pieces of art, which I would have gone nuts for as a kid (and if we’re being honest I still went a little bit nuts about).
They even had a mini- curling sheet (I had to look up the term) which I’d never seen before in my life and was utterly delighted by.
Last but not least, there was a special site-specific installation that Allen Ruppersberg made for the Walker as a capstone to their retrospective. For the piece he went through tons and tons of museum records, promotional materials, and ephemera and made floor to ceiling collages to fully cover two walls in the exhibit space. Meanwhile in the main gallery space, he played with the basic concept of furniture and interactivity by creating giant lego-like furniture that guests were fully allowed to sit on and interact with. While he created furniture that looked like building blocks, he then playfully also used real furniture like building blocks to create an impressively free-standing sculptural assemblage. High resolution photographs of different parts of this assemblage were then hung on the walls to highlight different intentionally conceived elements that show that there was real method to the madness and hidden beauty in the “junk art”. Naturally my favorite elements were the very amusing “Poems Wanted” Tongue Cleaner that Al fashioned to add just a little bit of whimsy to morning hygiene routines, and a “Hardcore 24 Hours A Day” totebag that is just lovably more intense than a tote bag has any right to be.
As I Was leaving the museum, I noticed in one of the stairwells that the odd geometry of the building actually made for some mildly spectacular window-viewing experiences, and it was lovely not to say goodbye to the museum on.
After all that arting about, I was in need of a caffeine transfusion. So I made my way to Spyhouse Coffee, a sleek aesthetically stunning local coffee chain (seriously all of their locations are so pretty). I’d already had a taste of their coffee added to the excellent milkshake I got at the Bad Waitress earlier in the week, but I’m happy to say that it still tasted very good on its own without the helping hand of ice cream.
Rejuvenated, I made my way to my next big stop for the day, the Mill City Museum, a museum dedicated to the flour industry that essentially built the modern Twin Cities. I was skeptical of how interesting a museum about flour could be, but basically every Minnesotan I talked to recommended it highly. Right away, my doubts started to disappear as soon as I arrived and was greeted by the impressive and imposing architecture of the Historic Washburn A. Mill, which has also been designated a National Historic Landmark in addition to the celebrated museum. At the top of the towering building is a giant Art Deco influenced sign for Gold Medal Flour that was erected in 1910 and certainly adds a bit of character to the Twin Cities skyline.
Upon walking in, I was immediately blown away by a massive piece of contemporary artwork (already not what I was expecting to be greeted with in a historic flour mill) by the artist JoAnn Verburg called Between Now and Then, Minnesota. The piece mixes glass, steel, and photography to create a gorgeous collage of historic photographs of fields of grain, trees, and St. Anthony Falls, the only waterfall in the Mississippi River which was at one time a big generator of power for the mill. Because the photos are printed on glass, when the light hits them you can start to see through them out onto the riverfront today, so the past and present start to literally blend together. It was really a sort of jaw-dropping effect (that my dumb photo can’t totally capture), and one hell of a way to open a museum.
Continuing the theme of the past and present happily bleeding into one another, I passed a less artistic window which looked out over the Ruin Courtyard, the site of a former mill building that had been totally destroyed by a 1991 fire (before the museum was established so luckily only architecture was hurt, no people). Rather than attempt to rebuild a simulacrum of the former mill, the city embraced the almost Coliseum-esque look of the ruined brick walls and turned it into a unique open-air performance venue for live shows. Seeing the very contemporary looking stage and lighting set up amidst the rubble is very surreal, but I do feel like it would create a pretty cool ambience to see a show there.
The first real historic gallery I passed by gives you a sense of the size of the mill, as it houses a full historic St. Paul and Pacific Boxcar in the site where railroad tracks used to actually run through the mill so that barrels and bags of flour could be loaded right there which is a pretty brilliant labor saving design if you have the space for it and somehow also the full cooperation of the railway company. This gives you an early sense right away of how much the history of the mill ties directly into the history of the Twin Cities themselves as so much of the cities’ infrastructure was built with supporting the massively profitable flour industry in mind. It was genuinely much more fascinating than you would expect something that seems so commonplace as flour would be.
On the same floor as the railway car was a gallery space that houses rotating exhibits of local contemporary art, which shows how the mill is in someways still supporting the growth of different communities in the Twin Cities. While I was there, the art on display was an amazing collection of historic photographs of streets and waterways in the Twin Cities curated by historian Larry Millet combined with contemporary photographs of the same locations now by the artist Jerry Mathiason. The project was started as part of a book called Twin Cities: Now and Then, with each diptych accompanied by essays by Millet explaining the significance of each location to Twin Cities History. The photographs old and new were consistently gorgeous, and the historical deep dives in the notes just added such a wonderful layer of connectivity between the past and the present.
From there I moved downstairs to the main gallery spaces. Here I started with a an exhibit tracing the timeline of the mill with key moments in Minnesota history. This timeline also featured the first of several dapper wooden sculptures of key figures in the Mill’s development by husband and wife artist team Paul Wrench and Becky Schurmann. In this case, the sculpture was of the Mill’s founder, C.C. Washburn (you’d probably go by your initials too if your first name was Cadwallader. The 19th century was crazy.), and I was lucky enough to overhear an older woman walk up to it and say “Hello, handsome” much to my delight and amusement.
Some fun facts from the Mill’s history included: at the time it was fully finished in the 1880s it was the largest and most technologically advanced mill in the world; it was eventually the home of General Mills, while rival Pillsbury operated just on the other side of the Mississippi River; the technological advances of the mill actually made white flour mass produceable and accessible to people across the country starting in the 1870s which feels shockingly recent for something that is essentially a kitchen staple; in its heyday, the mill produced over 2 million pounds of flour each day (!); and perhaps most out of the blue, the spacious hallways of the mills were also used during WWII by the famous behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner to train pigeons to operate guided missiles (seriously).
My favorite bit of general Minnesota trivia, not necessarily about the mill, was the story of Eliza Winston, a former slave, who successfully sued for her freedom arguing that she had been sold to her current master even though she had previously already bought her own freedom making any further trading of her null and void. This was a pretty rock solid argument by Winston which sadly hardly guaranteed her success in court, but Minnesota was a free state and her judge saw it as a good opportunity to really take a stand on the matter and declared her a free woman. Despite this, mobs of pro-slavery shitheads (the technical term) tried to storm where she was staying and force her back to her illegal owners, but before they even got there she and her husband, with the help of the Underground Railroad, were already on their way to Canada. She waited for the heat to die down, but then rather than live a cushy free life in Canada, she actually returned to the states to help host anti-slavery rallies and help others win their freedom even if it put her at risk after the controversial Dred Scott Case. That kind of selflessness and bravery in the face of so-much danger never ceases to blow me away, and while it has absolutely nothing to do with flour, I’m glad the museum chose to highlight it.
Next up was a display about the process of turning a grain of wheat into flour which still feels slightly like a magic trick. While I still don’t fully understand all the technical witch craft that goes into both how flour is made and used, I did like seeing a historic mill stone, a giant wooden sculpture of a magnified grain of wheat, and a helpful breakdown of the surprisingly complex anatomy of the grain.
The next display was more up my alley focusing on vintage advertisements used by both General Mills and their competitors. I love retro advertising because it’s always a weird mix of very impressive and very shocking art and ideas about human psychology that range from shockingly insightful to wildly misguided. In this instance I was impressed by how much the flour industry really embraced a multi-media approach to make themselves integral to the American household with ad campaigns that transcended posters and commercials to include competitions, collectible homegoods, and even vinyl records of jingles. Highlights for me included: a 15 foot Pop Art sculpture of a vintage Bisquick Box by the artist Kim Lawler that actually features more galleries inside of it(!); a whole book of sheer music put out by Pillsbury along with the records of their jingles so that you too could learn to play your favorite baking songs (absolutely insane that this was a thing anyone wanted); a vintage TV-playing different ads from the 50s to the 90s including a few pre-Doughboy Pillsbury ads that are weirdly less engaging (who could have guessed that Lord Baltimore’s FlavorMoist didn’t catch on with the American public); great promotional photos of the sweet mom’s to be inducted into the Pillsbury Test Kitchen to ensure that their high standards of quality were maintained; some stylish promotional baking tins and cookie jars from Bisquick; and a beautiful souvenir plate featuring the Mills overlooking the Mississippi River in all their grandeur (I believe this used to be sold at gas stations which is not where I think to go for great art usually).
Next up I started looking around at the mill machinery featuring some very somber-looking wooden mill workers grinding away at their backbreaking flour labor.
Next up was one of my favorite parts of the museum, The Baking Lab, where you actually get to taste some fresh baked bread, which after all the reading about baking is very welcome. Besides the bread being delicious, there’s also the benefit of all the bakers having great Mid-Western Mom energy so they all just fawned over me which really stroked my little boy ego. In addition, they also had a little display about the different kinds of flour there are and the different grains that yield them, which was pretty interesting to see.
Next up was a display about famous Flour mascots, where you got to watch the evolution of Poppin’ Fresh (the true name of the Pillsbury Doughboy), Betty Crocker, and slightly more regional Miss Minneapolis. It was genuinely shocking to see just how much Doughboy merchandise had been made when he is essentially a mascot celebrating the devouring of his own people.
After the mascots was a great collection of more painterly vintage ads blown up to poster size to really highlight the artistic intricacy. My favorites included: a very fantastical Pillsbury ad featuring an ethereal woman, some weird child bakers, and a drum interestingly labeled “XXXX”; a Wheaties ad where former Red Sox first baseman, Jimmy Foxx, looks like he’s just moments away from smacking his son; an unnecessarily beautiful Cream of Wheat advertisement made by the great N.C. Wyeth where you can tell he basically already made a great illustration and just threw the words Cream of Wheat on it at the last minute; and a wonderfully baffling ad featuring an old-timey police officer I guess arresting a bag of flour (truly no clue what’s going on here).
Other ads took a different route and featured wonderfully goofy photos of children. The pictures are great on their own but the wild slogan, “Vitamins for you, sir!” really pushes the one on the left over the top in my humble opinion.
To get the advertising juices flowing as early as possible, there was also a cute interactive display for kids where they can draw and design new advertising mascots while sitting in a giant sculpture of pancakes because why the heck not?
After the giant pancake station, I went to look around more at all the complicated Mill machinery which were both really complex and interesting and hugely terrifying to a weak weak person like myself who surely would have been ground up like so much flour.
Accompanying the machinery, there was a display about the Mill Girls, the first major surge in women getting to enter the Twin Cities workforce which was also a big leap forward for women being able to start accruing independent wealth and more freedom to make their own choices in life. It’s shocking that this wasn’t commonplace in this country until the 20th century, but it was exciting to see this progress (and its unexpected connection to flour on both the production and consumption end, as housewives also led the push for more mass-produced flour) documented in the museum. Another highlight from this small display was learning that Mill Girls “worked hard and played hard” (actual museum text) and turned the woman’s restroom into a secret clubhouse, sneaking in a player piano for singing and dancing during the lunch break. They also organized company sports teams, which sounds fun, but always looks goofy in historic photos because reasonable women’s athletic-wear was still decades away from being invented.
Next up came more wooden sculptures by Paul Wrench and Becky Schurmann which started having some more stylistic flourishes like two men being literally linked by a vintage news story and a housewife becoming one with her furnitures.
At this point it, it was time for a scheduled tour of the museum’s 8 story historic elevator ride up one of the flour towers. This began with a fun presentation by one of the museum docents which featured a surprising and thrilling pyrotechnic display as he explained just how tiny particles of flour dust in the air led to one of the most devastating mill explosions that started a fire that ravaged the Twin Cities in 1878.
Unfortunately after such an exciting talk, we received some disappoint news about the elevator ride. You see, the problem with historic elevators is that they’re a little more fickle than modern ones and today it just decided it wasn’t going to work. To make up for a lack of ability to go up the flower tower, we were granted a rare opportunity to explore some of the machinery up near newly built observation deck (which you get to take a more reliable elevator to). Normally this isn’t part of the tour but we got to see some of the systems of chutes and storage vessels the flour would travel up and down in the mill’s busy heyday. We even got to see some nice vintage graffiti from the period in between the mill shutting down and the museum taking over when it was surely a very cool place for rebellious teenagers and resourceful squatters to sneak into.
While the machinery was cool, the most spectacular part was easily the panoramic views out of the cities, the Ol’ Miss, and St. Anthony Falls. Really breathtaking.
The rooftop deck also gave you a fantastic up close and personal view of the grand Gold Medal Flour sign:
Back down on the ground level, the next display was sweet nod to the farmers who harvested the grain that would become the flour. This featured an old steam-powered tractor and a really lovely painted backdrop of big skies and fields of grain by the artist Tom Maakestad.
Next up was a fantastically detailed, and surely painstakingly crafted, miniature model of the entire Mill system as the artists imagined it must have looked like when everything was firing on all cylinders. This was really an impressive piece of handiwork and gives a great sense of how much hustle and bustle must have been required to run such a massive operation.
Next up was a display about the day to day lives of the mill workers designed in the fashion of a fully loaded dinner table to symbolize the final form the mill’s flour would eventually take and the sense of family unity brought on by gathering to break bread. Around the dinner table, the plates were printed with quotes from mill workers and retro photographs, and next to the table was display of some particularly beautifully painted dishware that would have been the centerpiece on any family’s table.
Last but not least, there was one more Pillsbury ad that might have been the absolute craziest one yet. I loved it.
Next to the museum, there was one of the most strikingly bizarre buildings I’ve ever seen, a performing arts venue called the Guthrie Theatre. The building was designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel and features a wild protuberance called the Endless Bridge which extends out over the Mississippi river to give theater-goers some incredible views while they wait for their plays to begin.
At this point, I had quite a rumbling in my tum, and I decided to go get some authentic food from the city’s prominent Hmong community. I went to an excellent restaurant called My Huong Kitchen, which just markets itself as a Vietnamese restaurant presumably because they didn’t expect the average American to really know about different Southeast Asian ethnic groups that didn’t already have cuisines that were pre-established. I ordered Com Tam Bi, Suon Nuong which featured shredded pork, lemongrass pork chop, veggies, and egg over stir-fried rice, and it some of the best pork and rice I’ve had anywhere. It was so tender and bursting with flavor, and the two styles of pork really complimented each other and the rice beautifully. Craziest of all the whole feast was only $9 which is simply a steal. Because it was such a good deal, I also splurged for a Vietnamese iced coffee which was both delicious and a welcome burst of a caffeine before the evening’s comedy.
For dessert, I wanted to follow up on my friend Mike’s recommendation for some of the best ice cream in the state and check out Grand Ole Creamery. This wonderful shop did not disappoint and I went with one of their signature creations, Black Hills Gold, which features rich caramel ice cream with chunks of Oreos and praline pecans all nestled in a crispy homemade waffle cone. It was heaven on a warm summer’s day, and the addition of praline pecans to ice cream was a masterstroke I’d never encountered before and it was simply extraordinary. It definitely lived up to Mike’s hype.
Before tonight’s open mic, which was also at the Corner Bar where last night’s mic was, I was planning on meeting my friend from college, Perry, a proud Minnesotan who’d also interned with me for a summer in England where he was invaluable friendly face in a foreign country. While I waited for him to get to the venue, I had a great bold Black H2O Oatmeal Stout from the nearby Town Hall Brewery which was a fun discovery.
Perry ended up bringing two of his friends with him, so I had a nice little cheering section with me at the night’s open mic. This was really lucky as Saturday night open mics aren’t super common because that’s a day where generally people are out with friends and more likely to go to a professional show rather than an open mic so there was a much smaller crowd than the night before. I’ve since been told by other Midwestern comics I’ve hung out with that, with the exception of Perry and his friends, the crowd was indicative of uniquely Midwestern phenomenon where sometimes if a crowd is small enough they’ll get the idea that laughing is disruptive so they’ll just smile and nod when they like a joke, so they might all be actually having a good time but it’ll really sound like everyone’s bombing. It was off-putting to me as a performer to not hear people laughing for the majority of the comics, but then it was even stranger when nobody left and they were all super complimentary after the show so they were actually apparently having a very nice time not that you’d know by listening.
Despite the unusual crowd-energy, the Minneapolis comics still did the best to soldier on and deliver some very solid performances. My personal favorite joke of the night was from a woman named Lisa Evanson who said “My coworker's spirit animal must be a Daddy Long Legs because he's lanky and everyone wishes he was dead”
Other highlights:
Drew Hehir - If I can pretend to have a lisp, can't they pretend to not?
Hillary Wells- I saw a girl I know post a picture of her baby wearing a feminist onesie, which is crazy after all the non-consensual things he’d done to her body.
Henry Fuguitt- People hate the gluten intolerant. They walk down grocery store aisles like they're gentrified neighborhoods
Dena Denny - I told my mom I was bisexual and she said she already knew because Jesus told her which was interesting.
Marty Quist- I heard one person clap which is still an applause break
Steven Kraeger - Americans are the only people who try to say the moon landing was fake
I’ll be honest my own set didn’t go as well as I would have liked. I tried to work in a new joke which I just thought of that day and hadn’t practiced before so that unsurprisingly landed with a thud, and then I spent the rest of my short 3 minute set trying to build back the energy with more tried and true jokes. It wasn’t a total failure, but I was definitely a little embarrassed that the performance my friend had come to see and had even been nice enough to bring friends to was definitely the worst I’d done in weeks. Per good Midwestern boys, they were really supportive and nice about it afterwards, but I feel like if that’s what they thought my comedy was always like they were definitely in the back of their heads thinking “people gave him money to do that?!” and I wouldn’t blame them.
We weren’t ready to stop hanging out after the mic so the four of us all went to another nearby bar (this was a very bar dense sector of Minneapolis apparently) called Republic, and we got to end the night and my week in MN on a high note just drinking, sharing jokes and stories, and reminiscing about some of the misadventures Perry and I had across Europe. Perry was a year younger than me in school, so I haven’t gotten to see him much in person since this MN meet-up, but now he’s working at a Human Rights Law Firm in D.C. so I have every confidence that wherever he is, he’s actively working to make the world a better place.
Favorite Random Sightings: a marketing agency called Fast Horse (odd but memorable); a almond spread by a company called Nutty by Nature (not the worst pun I’ve heard); a poster advertising a local band with the excellent name, Haters Club.
Regional Observations: My friends warned me but if you’re traveling through Minnesota and trying to stick to a schedule you have to factor in time where ever you go for pleasant conversations with servers, cashiers, and other customers wherever you go because they will break out, they will be nice, but they will take a while.
Albums Listened To: I was still listening to my Phillip K. Dick book today, but I was really enjoying it.
Joke of the Day: As the doctor completed an examination of the patient, he said, ''I can't find a cause for your complaint. Frankly, I think it's due to drinking.''
''In that case,'' said the patient, ''I'll come back when you're sober''
Minnesota Superlatives (I had a great week, but I’m obliged to say that because it was shorter than average I also missed out on an absolute ton of the state and so these are really all for the Twin Cities):
Favorite Coffee: Dogwood Coffee in Minneapolis
Favorite Restaurant: I’m gonna go with the My Huong Kitchen in Minneapolis but the Happy Gnome in St. Paul and Minneapolis’ Fat Lorenzo’s are very close.
Favorite Bar: The Freehouse in Minneapolis
Favorite Beer: The Darkness Imperial Stout from Surly Brewing in Minneapolis
Favorite Attraction: Because they have the Sculpture Garden and the Museum, I’m gonna give the edge to the Walker Art Center, but the Twin Cities are shockingly dense with great museums. And Mall of America is probably something that needs to be seen to be believed even if it’s not near the same quality.
Favorite Natural Attraction: Minnehaha Falls in Minneapolis
General Impression of the Comedy Scene: I didn’t see as much of it as I would have like because of the 4th of July and hanging out with my cousins, but I think is a testament to how strong the three mics I went to were that I really wished I’d seen more. It seemed like the Twin Cities had a pretty strong, supportive scene with lots of opportunities to perform nearly everyday, and a variety of venues from cool bars to real comedy clubs that would take a chance on up and comers. The joke writing was strong across the board, and they had a good variety of more story telling styles, more traditional set up-punchline stuff, and even a few weirder more performance based acts so that kind of variety is always really nice to see.
Songs of the Day: (since I didn’t listen to any music, I’d figure I’d end the week with some of my favorite songs by probably the most famous Minnesotan)
just an insane collection of rock and roll legends on one stage
i like that she captures how crazy some of Bob’s line deliveries are