I think the most beautiful thing about modern art is that it has built into its own potential the capacity for destroying itself.
—Robert Barry (1969)

The Quick and the Dead is an exhibition that starts with a spur of a title. Branded beneath it in gold, a pair of triangles are carefully stacked tip-to-tip, one up, one down, in the shape of an hourglass, similar perhaps to a Möbius strip. It eventually becomes clear that this icon is something of a curatorial signature, for it not only conjures the categories of time and space that govern the show, it also maps out the path viewers are about to take. Ultimately, though, The Quick and the Dead is a bit misleading as a title, even if it’s catchy. It’s American. It summons associations with cowboys and gamblers and gangsters, and horses that stomp in the mud.

Exhibition curator Peter Eleey’s catalogue essay, “Thursday,” named after a George Brecht event score, reveals that the exhibition title’s original reference predates the American frontier (which he does not mention). “The quick and the dead” derives from the Bible, “referring to all souls, the living and the dead, who would come to be judged by Christ after the end of time.”

So, with some afflatus and even perhaps subtlety, the quick is living and the dead is dead, and time, or the end of time, is in the air. According to the press release, part of the aim of this “experimental exhibition” is to take a pulse on the legacy of conceptual art from the standpoint of the present moment, particularly in relation to “the big questions and deep mysteries in life,” such as “mortality, transience, and the unknown.”

Yet with its dim lighting and doleful atmosphere, along with some of its devastating juxtapositions, this is a show that dramatizes the melancholy of its mise-en-scène. Death trumps. By staging the exhibition in this way, Eleey—who joined the Walker in 2007 from Creative Time in New York—makes it self-reflexively clear that he’s concerned with the museum’s relationship to the vitality of the artworks that are guarded within it, an inquiry emboldened by two excellent essays included in the catalogue: the dialectical “Valéry, Proust, Museum,” by Theodor Adorno, and “What Is a Museum?”—a knockout conversation between Robert Smithson and Allan Kaprow (both published in English in 1967).

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Having just arrived, here we are, walking down the first corridor of the show, heading toward the On Kawara painting that makes us wonder if he’s still alive, if he’s painting today’s date, if he’s painting right now. Turning the corner to the right, we see a pedestal lit softly, on top of which sits a metal box with a switch, just a little thing in a vitrine: a piece of junk.

Hmm. I have to read the text on the wall to understand this one. We’re looking at “an electromagnetic energy transmitter with a nine-volt battery,” a project by Robert Barry. The artwork, in other words, is the unseen energy that Barry’s box is producing (or my apprehension of it, or my apprehension of my apprehension as a result of his discursive performance). Using gases, telepathy, ultrasonic sounds, radioactive substances, and energy fields, Barry’s art practice expanded conceptual space by drawing attention to such invisible materials.

If there were any doubt about the stakes of Barry’s project, which includes a postwar inquiry into energy, Eleey grounds the viewer by placing a large photograph on the wall, to the right: an abstraction. It’s The Blob, a tie-dye moon, a big circle of spheres, a big circle of stains in black and white. Close up, we can see what looks like a horizon, a thin strip along the bottom of the frame where the silhouettes of trees are just barely discernible. This is a photograph by Harold Edgerton: Atomic Bomb ca. 1952 (Joshua Trees).

This juxtaposition stuns, making Barry’s little box swell with a delayed force. Returning to his switch with a conceptual shudder, we’re encouraged to think of the unfathomable, of the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of those decades of Dr. Strangelove with the drills kids had to do at school when they were trained to curl up beneath their desks, duck and cover, ready for the bomb.

But there’s more. Eleey situates a third project around the next corner, where viewers suddenly see a human body on the ground, curled up. It’s a man, I think, with his back to us, knees pulled to his chest, hands behind his head, facing the wall. From the abstract energy of Conceptual art to the terrifying abstraction of the bomb, we turn the corner to encounter the flesh of a human body so still that it could be dead, only it’s not. It’s just a sculpture by Bruce Nauman, an untitled performance from 1969 (local performers rotate). This is curating at its best.

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On this journey—but where is Virgil?—through The Quick and the Dead, viewers travel through a trio of galleries out into the parking ramp, into the wind of the sculpture garden, and even over a bridge to the big basilica where an excerpt from John Cage’s 1987 composition Organ2/ASLSP will be played as slowly as possible at selected times on the church’s organ (the full piece is now being performed in Halberstadt, Germany; it will take 639 years to complete). On this journey we encounter works about memory, decay, energy, entropy, feedback, renewal, cartography, notation, interaction, obsolescence, the bomb, the apocalypse, the infinite, the future, all produced in a variety of media. There’s photography, film, ice, fat, video, sound, charcoal, fingernails, fax machines, lemons, linguistic propositions (but too many event scores), a dog that pretends to sleep in the corner (like the Nauman sculpture, but this one’s really dead), a FOUR CARAT BLACK TOURMALINE AND HALF CARAT RUBY INSIDE AN OWL (a dead owl), a video corridor, an audio corridor, a skeleton that was given to Kiki Smith by David Wojnarowicz and is now permanently buried at an unmarked location on the museum’s property, identified only by its GPS coordinates.

*

To begin again, imagine the following: we enter The Quick and the Dead straight on. To the left and right, on the white walls, viewers see projects that complete the foyer (otherwise painted black), and hear music. On the left is a color photograph by Louise Lawler that depicts a dinner table now abandoned, cluttered with a few water glasses, a couple of wine glasses, a snuffed candle, and a pile of cigarettes on a plate: all butts, some pinched, all spent, Camels. In the background, above the table, is an On Kawara painting. What we see is a still life, a memento mori.

The project on the right, by Barry, is a framed document. It contains a single sentence, typed on a cheap piece of paper: “Something that is taking shape in my mind and will sometime come to consciousness.” We listen. The sound, we read, is a piece by the musician Arthur Russell. It’s one part of a variation of two.

When we leave the exhibition after traversing the time and space between the beginning and the end (one imagines Valéry huffing and puffing), we reach the last foyer where we again find works by the three artists with whom we started. The music is different, as we anticipated (the text at the start alerted us to this), but the photograph is now smaller, isn’t it? And her camera, Lawler must have moved her camera, for the composition is different. It has to be. A glass is missing. Something has been lost.

On the other wall, another framed sentence by Barry, but unfamiliar: “Something I was once conscious of, but have now forgotten.”

After touring this show there’s something that we, too, have forgotten. But we keep searching; when we can’t go on, we keep going on. We realize at the end of our time at the Walker that we are also part of the The Quick and the Dead, a show that works on a loop like a Möbius strip—like the icon emblazoned on the wall, now stuck in our head. We start where we end, we begin again, we live, and we die.

This is an exhibition that takes a serious and perhaps heady position; it is also a show that shows that it feels: with its curatorial écriture, it seems determined to reward the visitor who engages it in this fashion. The Quick and the Dead solicits our sympathy in its undercurrent, and to say this is to affiliate it with something like an eighteenth-century cult of sensibility, or sentimentality, with strands of the Romantic, the Gothic, the residues of which are in the air (recently referred to as Romantic Conceptualism). Not that this is a bad thing. Feelings can be powerful.

We leave the Walker with a fresh reminder that our bodies, our bones, are impermanent and dumb, and probably recyclable. These thoughts are not platitudes, they’re equal opportunity employers. The Quick and the Dead provides a carefully structured chance to think about this, to consider that we, like all that stuff, are just a part of the earth from which we came, the earth to which we’ll return, like a chair, or a peach, or a pile of leaves. Reminded of the icon, the curatorial signature, we might recall Zarathustra and think of Nietzsche:

This slow spider dragging itself towards the light of the moon and that same moonlight, and you and I whispering at the gateway, whispering of eternal things, haven’t we already coincided in the past? And won’t we happen again on the long road, on this long tremulous road, won’t we recur eternally?