When Anne Walsh was a girl growing up in Manhattan, going to work with her father meant spending the day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he worked as curator of 17-century Dutch landscape painting. Walsh roamed the vaulted halls among the suits of armor and Egyptian obelisks. Art became her playground.
"For me going to the Met with my dad was way more fun than going to the park," says Walsh, an assistant professor of electronic media arts and a 2005-2006 Townsend Fellow. "I still feel reverential toward beautiful objects."
Anne Walsh, with parrot, from "The Parrot Suite #1," 2002
Copyright Anne Walsh
Yet Walsh's own work does not lend itself well to gilded frames or hushed galleries. While her father's Dutch Masters meticulously explore light and space, Walsh concerns herself with language and time. And where the Met enshrines the traditional media of canonical art history -- painting, sculpture, and physical artifact -- Walsh makes innovative use of video, sound, and software to create art that, inherently ephemeral, resists the pull of the pedestal.
Throughout her extensive body of work, Walsh's funny, sad, unsettling narratives spark strange flickers of recognition. By breaking down language and sensory experience into microscopic parts, divorced from any immediate physical or social context, her pieces at first seem wholly weird. But over time, unlikely intimations of familiarity emerge -- a song we didn't realize we knew, but whose words have been with us all along.
In "Full Metal Jackets" (2005), a piece installed this fall at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, 28 speakers connected by a tangled web of wire hang scattered across a multi-story expanse of blank white wall. An oddly soothing rain of sound echoes through the room: metallic pings, rattles, and clatters, some sharp, some soft. At the base of the wall, white text scrolls up the screen of a small computer monitor, revealing the names of the audio files producing the sounds -- among them "44 Magnum Bullet Casing Concrete Drop"; "Bullet Cartridge, Ball M9, drop to wood"; and "multishell barrage for liquid bullet effect" -- some 200 sounds in all.
"Full Metal Jackets," 2005
Copyright Anne Walsh
Walsh created the piece with her husband, artist and sound designer Chris Kubick. Along with 100 sounds already in the couple's vast sound effect library, they recorded 100 new sounds using an enormous bag of bullet casings collected at a local gun club, dropping them against different surfaces around their Oakland home. Walsh views the piece as a taxonomy of sorts, "reading the world as an archive of sound."
"The world then becomes revealed in terms of the sounds that you've recorded of it. And you have to produce a set of names for them," she says. "The sound is also very beautiful. It's very troubling how beautiful it is."
Walsh's solo video work explores similar themes, though with a more intimate edge. In a 2004 piece titled "Monster Lip Sync," Walsh's mother and her mother's oldest friend appear in separate videos projected side by side. Both are seen in a head-and-shoulders shot, dressed in everyday clothes, standing in a garden. With no sound, both contort their faces in bizarre expressions, sometimes raising their fingers like claws, stalking across the screen. The scenes are funny, and not a little disturbing, creating a disorienting parody of communication that seems both otherworldly and immediately recognizable. In her viewing notes, Walsh offers this explanation: "In actuality [the women] were played a three-minute soundtrack of vocalizations of monsters of various kinds, compiled from horror films. The women are very earnestly lip-syncing the sounds they were hearing."
"Mom and Me Watching Zoolander," 2002
Copyright Anne Walsh
Walsh's mother also appears in another piece, "Mom and Me Watching Zoolander," created in 2002. As the title suggests, both women are watching the 2000 Ben Stiller comedy "Zoolander." Twin monitors show them laughing, grimacing, and smiling at the movie, though the movie itself is not audible, highlighting the profound layers of connection embedded in a certain shared experience -- watching a movie -- that are hardly ever noticed.
Walsh first left home as a teenager never intending to become an artist. Tall and wiry, she studied classical ballet and choreography, and spent a year as a professional dancer in Boston before starting college at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. There, as a sophomore, studying in an interdisciplinary humanities program, a professor introduced her to the work of Marcel Duchamp. The encounter opened up a new realm of possibilities.
"In my young mind it hadn't really occurred to me that you couldn't separate visual art from what was happening politically and philosophically in a culture," she says. She delved deeper into 20th-century conceptual art and discovered a tradition where words and ideas mattered as much as color and composition.
"Monster Lip Sync," 2004
Copyright Anne Walsh
After earning her Masters in Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, she taught at UC Irvine for 10 years. She joined the Art Practice faculty at Berkeley in 2002, where she teaches classes in video art, new media, and art theory.
Her work has appeared, among other places, at the Whitney Biennial, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City, the AIM II exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and in a solo exhibition in Utrecht, Holland. She has served as curator for shows in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Vancouver. She has also worked as an editor for X-Tra, a Los Angeles-based journal of contemporary art.
In a series of recent pieces collected under the project title "Art after Death," Walsh and her husband have constructed spirit biographies of deceased artists using the recorded words of psychic mediums enlisted by the pair to channel the souls of Joseph Cornell, Countess Castiglione, and Yves Klein. For Walsh, the question of the authenticity of the mediums is not as important as the encounters with the artists they facilitate.
To build her narratives, Walsh made a point of immersing herself deeply in the lives and work of each artist, reading biographies, letters, and anything else she could get her hands on. Each time, she was reminded of how gutsy it is to be an artist -- and how hard.
She says: "It's really helped me respect what I do."
– Marcus Wohlsen