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(Robin Schwartzman) We always think of mini golf as sort of this experience
where the mini golf ball goes on a journey
and you as the player gets to sort of live vicariously
through that mini golf ball, so as the player, you can't fit
into all these little nooks and crannies, but your mind
sort of goes on a journey with the mini golf balls.
(Scott Stulen) So the Artist-Designed Mini Golf Course
is a mini golf course obviously designed by artists,
and it's all local Minnesota artists
that have designed the course.
Basically it's a spin on traditional mini golf.
So it has a total of 27 artists
and it's over the course of 15 holes.
The Walker's always been interested in pop art
and popular culture and ways we can kind of bring that
into the things that we do, and we're also interested
in different ways of audience engagement.
Well, the first one came back in 2003
and with the success of that course
became a lot of clamoring for doing it again,
and the second course actually was in 2008.
And this summer, with the 25th anniversary
of the Sculpture Garden, it seemed like
an appropriate time to bring it back.
We did a call for artists to come in
and produce the designs, and they go before senior curators,
including myself, to be selected for this course.
Two of our artists, Tom Loftus and Robin Schwartzman
are mini golf experts; they're local here,
they produced the watering can hole for the course.
They also write for a blog called A Couple of Putts,
which they developed, which reviews mini golf courses,
both regionally and nationally.
(Tom) Okay. (Robin) Don't mess this one up.
(Tom) Yeah, yeah, yeah.
clattering of the golf ball
Our first date was at a mini golf course together
and we both really enjoyed the sport
before we met each other,
and then we decided that we liked doing it together.
So we were just playing on dates,
then it kind of turned into, well, we're doing this enough,
why don't we start blogging about it?
There you go.
(Tom) Our hole is called Can You Handle This?
and the reason is twofold.
One is that it talks about the element of skill that's involved,
and the other is that if you can't handle this,
we gave an option for people
to shoot to a hole to the side of it.
So a lot went into the actual construction of the hole.
Building something that has to be outside for 3 months
is a challenge within itself, but then also considering
that 50,000 people are going to be playing it and touching it
and you've got an audience of all ages holding a golf club,
is kind of tricky to work around,
so you have to really think about durability and material.
It's holding up good considering.
concertina plays in waltz time
(Scott) We asked the University of Minnesota
to produce two of the holes; one was Mega Golf,
so it's basically this really giant golf ball
that has a small-scale version of the Walker campus
that you putt around on the inside of it.
Then the second one they did is this Ames Room,
which is kind of an optical illusion
where you putt into this space
that seems like a small room but with a slanted floor.
And depending on where you stand in there, you'll appear
either really large or really small in perspective.
This year I will say the artists did an exceptional job of making
not only aesthetically pleasing holes,
but holes that played very well
and function really well as an overall course.
(Robin) Well, I think this course is special for us
as mini golf lovers and bloggers
because it's a really unique local course.
The idea of having a temporary one that's designed
by many different people within one course makes it
special in a way that-- one of the commercially run ones--
you know, it's sort of either made by a company
or all made by the same voice or vision,
so this has a lot of variety.
The fact that it's temporary makes it special
because you can only play it within a certain period of time
and then it's gone forever.