THE QUICK AND THE DEAD

WALKER ARTS CENTER
MINNEAPOLIS, MN
APRIL 25 - SEPTEMBER 27, 2009

Surveying art that tries to reach beyond itself and the limits of our knowledge and experience, The Quick and the Dead seeks, in part, to ask what is alive and dead within the legacy of conceptual art. Though the term “conceptual” has been applied to myriad kinds of art, it originally covered works and practices from the 1960s and ‘70s that emphasized the ideas behind or around a work of art, foregrounding language, action, and context rather than visual form. But this basic definition fails to convey the ambitions of many artists who have been variously described as conceptual: as Sol LeWitt asserted in 1969, conceptual artists are “mystics rather than rationalists.” Although some of their work involves unremarkable materials or even borders on the invisible, these artists explore new ways of thinking about time and space, often aspiring to realms and effects that fall far outside of our perceptual limitations. Organized by Walker curator Peter Eleey, this experimental exhibition grapples with art's relationship to many of the big questions and deep mysteries in life as they were defined and examined during the pivotal decade of the 1960s and carried forth to the present day. The Quick and the Dead addresses how preoccupations with mortality, transience, and the unknown during the early history of conceptual art linked directly to evolving understandings of time and space.