Note: No images are available for this exhibit due to the image rights concerns of living artists.
It's a trick in casinos to remove clocks and calendars from the walls so that their patrons lose sense of all time and eventually lose all their money into slot machines and overinvolvement. The Walker takes a different approach: slightly disordered dates on a wall. Variable lighting, based on how much light Minneapolis received the week before. Moments of isolation, followed by machine overload. The end result is such a complete disorientation from chronology as you know it that not even a watch or a calendar feature on your cell phone will help you.
The Quick and the Dead exhibition is a sampling of contemporary art fare, best scene in person in part because of a strict policy disallowing photography within any of the galleries. This series of installations are not mere hangings on a wall - they are active, observant, and demand your attention lest you step on the model hired to try to curl his back into a wall as an exploration of space and how human beings try to fit themselves to the shapes that surround them. In the center of the room is a sort of chandelier-string of lit, stacked, multi-colored plastic. The lights are run off of a solar generator, lighting the room based on how much light the city got from the sun a week before. Along the walls scattered throughout the gallery are random and near-random instructions from an orchestral piece, each by themselves an odd meditation: "Keep pinpointing the center until further accuracy is impossible." The result, likely, is the space between a note of even the center of a beat.
A particularly jarring installation requires one person at a time to walk down a short hallway while ominous music plays. The sound is contingent on movement; stop moving and the sound stops. Walk more slowly, the music slows. Upon exiting the viewer sees a taxidermied dog fit into a corner. A woman watching other people exit the room was delighted when one person jumped back at seeing the dog. "Now that's the reaction I was looking for!" she said.
Music is disconnected from its organized construction, sound is recorded for a demonstration of laws of probability, light is at least one week out of sync and what year it is ceases to matter in the face of machine loops, shadows, strings and process. It's a disorienting, fascinating exhibit, and great for techie-types who may think they don't care much for art but who are fascinated by machinery and new applications of technology. To visit the Quick and the Dead is to step out of time - and step into full involvement.
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