Not Dead Yet

Walker Art Center visual arts curator Peter Eleey wants to rescue conceptual art—or at least redraw the boundaries a bit. In the Walker Art Center’s The Quick and the Dead, a new exhibition featuring work from 50 conceptual artists—some associated with the conceptual art movement of the 1960s and 1970s, some not—Eleey says he’s trying to encourage people to think of conceptual art not as a movement that has precipitated an “existential crisis” in art, but as a form that tells us something important about the nature of reality and the human condition.

According to Eleey, many conceptual artists were heavily influenced by philosophy and science, and that’s a theme that runs through The Quick and the Dead. There’s even an interview in the exhibition catalog with neuroscientist Olaf Blanke, whose efforts to induce an out-of-body experience unwittingly mirror some of Bruce Nauman’s art. (Nauman is the U.S. representative to the 2009 Venice Biennale.)

“Science, philosophy, and religion have come to model these experiences that go beyond what’s right in front of us,” says Eleey—and conceptual art does too, he insists. “Conceptual art is in many ways meant to evoke and give us access to this larger type of experience,” he explains.

In the case of The Quick and the Dead, the art also goes well beyond the gallery walls, extending into public spaces, including the parking ramp, the sculpture garden, and the Basilica of Saint Mary, where a notorious musical piece by John Cage called “Organ2/ASLSP As Slow As Possible” will be performed. One east German town has determined that taking Cage’s title seriously means the piece should take 639 years to complete, but don’t worry, the Walker’s version will take only a few months to play.

April 24–September 27. Walker Art Center, 1750 Hennepin Ave., Mpls., 612-375-7600