Through the Looking Glass

At the Walker Art Center, the new exhibition Lifelike is imbued with emotion and a quiet fragility, probing a quieter, more personal side of the quotidian.

"You reading this, be ready." Poet William Stafford's words seem appropriate companions for a tour of Lifelike, the latest exhibition to open this weekend at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. "Starting here, what do you want to remember? How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?" That floor could be the linoleum tiles of Sylvia Mangold's In Memory of My Father surprising us with their humble beauty, or the pristine ethereality of Utopia 1 by Paul Winstanley, whom art critic Peter Schjeldahl pronounced "the Vermeer of corporate interiors." Lifelike examines a trajectory in art between Pop and Photorealism that began in the 1960s and continues to inform the work of many artists at the forefront today. In contrast to the flash of Pop and the steely edge of Photorealism, the artists in Lifelike probe a quieter, more personal side of the quotidian. The result is a show imbued with emotion and a quiet fragility. If, like me, you normally find yourself left cold by the detached nature of both of these aforementioned art movements, you may find Lifelike surprisingly likable.

It is precisely the humanity present in the exhibition works—which range in media from drawing, painting and photography, to sculpture, video and three-dimensional environments—that imbues them with their subtle magnetism. This is only enhanced by the masterful curation of Siri Engberg, who has incorporated 90 works by over 50 artists into beautifully conceived rooms that effectively frame the work into five conceptual sections: Common Objects, The Uncanny, Realism into Abstraction, Handmade Sleight of Hand and Special Effects: The Real as Spectacle. With Common Objects as the departure point, a historical framework is laid in the 1960s and 1970s by the likes of Vija Celmins, Robert Bechtle, Duane Hanson and Chuck Close. These artists—while interested in the process of production and in the planar qualities of the world around them—stand out for their celebration of the plainer qualities; the in-between moments, the unremarkable, the everyday object that, through attention, is rendered at once beguiling and beautiful.

Top: Maurizio Cattelan, <em>Untitled</em>, 2001, Installation View. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. Above: Jud Nelson, <em>Hefty 2-Ply</em>, 1979-1981. Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis — Top: Maurizio Cattelan, *Untitled*, 2001, Installation View. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. Above: Jud Nelson, *Hefty 2-Ply*, 1979-1981. Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Distinctly absent from the vast majority of the exhibition work is a reliance on technological intervention. Indeed, running countercurrent to the increasing speed and ease of contemporary material production, Lifelike reveals that many artists are intentionally slowing and complicating their own working methods. Through the deliberate and painstaking reproduction of generic items these subjects become objects of curiosity, folly and even fetish. Catherine Murphy's detail of the fabric on the seat in Moiré Chair , Jud Nelson's Carrara marble Hefty 2-Ply garbage bag, and Susan Collis' construction debris, reconstructed with precious materials and highly skilled labor in Forever Young, sharpen eyes and focus minds on the life that is so often overlooked. Those with attuned senses are rewarded: Thomas Demand's Rain/Regen is not what it seems, in either sight or sound. James Casebere's Landscape with Houses (Dutchess County, NY) #8 is at first disturbingly real, while Esteban Pastorino Diaz' aerial photograph Cuatro Vientos appears disconcertingly artificial.

Ron Mueck, <em>Crouching Boy in Mirror</em>, 1999-2000. The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica. Courtesy of the artist and Anthony d'Offay Ltd — Ron Mueck, *Crouching Boy in Mirror*, 1999-2000. The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica. Courtesy of the artist and Anthony d'Offay Ltd

Lifelike is about the encounter and the way in which it alerts us to how we—consciously and unconsciously—design and define the world around us. An appreciation of much of this work requires a different type of attention span than the one that 2012 has armed us with. Sam Taylor-Wood's Still Life video of fruit progressing from ripe to rot makes clear the centrality of time, and the importance of noticing what gets lost between the fast-paced moments of 21st century living. And yet, it is this very knowledge of the speed and transitory nature of things that invigorates life and renders it all the more precious in its banality. Lifelike appropriately raises more questions than it answers. These works, at first so familiar, ask us to see things with new eyes: to examine life without and within, and to see the ordinary and the extraordinary interchangeably. Take them as so many looking glasses for life.
"What can anyone give you greater than now," ponders William Stafford, "starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?" Kimberlie Birks (@kimbirks)

Running countercurrent to the increasing speed and ease of contemporary material production, the show reveals that many artists are intentionally slowing and complicating their own working methods

Sylvia Plimack Mangold, <em>Half Window</em>, 1972. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow Fund. Photo © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston — Sylvia Plimack Mangold, *Half Window*, 1972. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow Fund. Photo © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Lifelike
Walker Art Center
Minneapolis
Through 27 May 2012

Yoshihiro Suda, <em>Weeds</em>, 2008. Photo
© Yoshihiro Suda / Courtesy of Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo — Yoshihiro Suda, *Weeds*, 2008. Photo © Yoshihiro Suda / Courtesy of Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo

Through the Looking Glass

At the Walker Art Center, the new exhibition Lifelike is imbued with emotion and a quiet fragility, probing a quieter, more personal side of the quotidian.

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