Too Much Joy

Lost in the funhouse with the Walker Art Center's Let's Entertain

A A A Comments By Peter Ritter Wednesday, Mar 22 2000

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But the questions remain: Can art effectively illuminate the nature of the beast from within its belly, speak to us about our hedonism from a position so deeply informed by the same? And what about the visceral thrill--better than any conceptualist exercise or lurid diversion--we get from a great work of art, a pleasure derived from knowing that what we're seeing is unlike anything else in either appearance or suggestion?

Rather than resolving these paradoxes, Let's Entertain revels in them. Here, in the looped video installations of Peter Land and Rodney Graham, the Sisyphus myth repeats ad infinitum. There, the Japanese performance-art collective Kyupi Kyupi appropriates the quick-cut style of MTV and kitschy sexuality of het porn for a short film of gyrating geishas. Andreas Gursky's apocalyptic image of massed humanity at an outdoor rave speaks of anxiety and conformity, while video artist Gillian Wearing plays with notions of spectator and spectacle by filming a Wild West shootout in the pristine halls of a museum, filming an audience watching the shootout, and pushing us in between the two. This art--both sensational and silly--assaults at a feverish pace. But what, if anything, does it all signify? At best, Let's Entertain suggests only that we are entering a new Babylon, where the competing languages of fashion and advertising, technology, and personality blur into cacophony. The overall tone is one of violent discord.

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And yet, as we wind through the final gallery, the Walker ends its eclectic symphony on a hopeful note, with "Advanced Nation: A Late Bloomer," a sculpture by Korean artist Choi Jeong-hwa constructed of tiny white light bulbs strung around a copper wire frame. Though the piece is reportedly a homage to the chandeliers that have become status symbols in middle-class Seoul, in the mind of the viewer it can become almost anything: a gloved hand, a city in flames, a winged chariot. In its effortless evocation of possibility, the piece plays with notions of prosperity and promise: It is bright and weightless, yet also fragile. So, too, in its exquisite balance--the piece, mostly air and light, appears to float a few feet above the floor--this sculpture reconciles the ambition and anxiety of modern Asia. After passing through the lower reaches of the avant-garde, Jeong-hwa's breathless optimism makes us feel as though we've graduated into a well-lighted limbo. This, finally, is a peace that lingers.

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