I’m looking forward to seeing the show, which airs this Sunday morning at 9:00 am.

Charles Osgood Getting Ready in the Dining Room.

As an art conservator, I was assigned to help the crew film at the recently-opened Miller House and Garden.  This work was a team effort and many from the IMA were involved in helping the CBS folks get what they needed for the show.

For those of you that have worked to care for a historic house, you know that this work is often filled with challenges and compromise, which in general makes it different from working with collections on view in art museums.  Historic houses were, after all, homes used by real humans at one point in their lives, and the Miller House is no exception.  No doubt, the Miller family used it like most of us would: they sat in the conversation pit, ate at the dinner table while sitting in the Saarinen Tulip Chairs, played the piano, watched television while sitting in the Eames Lounge Chair, and so on.

Setting up the Shot in the Dining Room.

Of course, we do not and cannot invite visitors to the house to use it in this way; this is simply out of respect for the materials, and because much of it would not last long if we let everyone use it in this way.

However, we occasionally have to make exceptions when the circumstances require it.  One set of circumstances relate to private events that can be hosted there, on a fee basis.  Go here for more details on hosting an event at the house.

Another such set of circumstances is when Charles Osgood and crew would like to use the house as a vehicle to talk about Design.  To this end, we provided unusual access to CBS; however they had to do all of it under our careful supervision and guidance.  I think the end result will justify the compromises.

Spoiler alert: One of the biggest compromises we made was to allow Mr. Osgood to play the piano—he played Back Home Again in Indiana—rather beautifully, I think.  This will be featured within the show at some point.

Charles Osgood & Richard McCoy at the Piano.

I have to admit to being charmed by “Charlie” through our many conversations during down time and wanted to find a way to commemorate the experience.  So, for a moment, I sat down next to him at the piano and played.  Please note, though, that I’m wearing gloves.

I first became aware of Hanneorla around 2007 when I was looking for Flickr users that were photographing artworks on the grounds of the IMA.  The set made for the IMA has 61 images in it and most of the contemporary outdoor artworks are documented. Although the sheer number of photos is impressive, what also interested me is the way the photos were taken: many of the works are shown from multiple sides, demonstrating that Hanneorla is skilled at looking carefully at art.

It was also around this time when Clay Shirky was getting a lot of attention for talking about how the Internet was ideally suited for us to spend our cognitive surplus doing something productive, rather than just watching television in the evening (Shirky estimates today this cognitive surplus is around a trillion hours a year for the adult population in the developed world).  Trying to harness but a sliver of a thumbnail of this surplus, we created the Wikipedia-and-Flickr-based project Wikiproject Public Art. While this continues to slowly grow, I’m always on the lookout for museum-based projects that tap into the cognitive surplus in a meaningful way.

So, to get to know the most productive art photographer in world better, I invited Hanneorla here for a discussion.

Richard McCoy: Will you tell me about your user name?

Hanneorla: We are a wife/husband team, so Hanneorla = wife (Hanne) + Orla (husband).  Original name, eh?

RM: What is your training as photographers?

HO: Well, we don’t have any. Our work has really been learning by doing all along.

We got our first digital camera in 2002 as a wedding present (a somewhat bulky Canon thingy) and were fascinated by the then-novel prospect that you could just shoot away, transfer, save, and view the images on a PC.  I remember taking our first digital pictures at a Gay Pride Parade in San Diego, standing on a chair in front of a café and trying to focus on the floats and (of course) the spectators.

Gay Pride Parade, Hillcrest, San Diego, California. Image: Hanneorla.

But we really got into photography when planning a trip to Santiago, Chile. Hanne was trying to find good images on the web of Santiago, but could only come up with old grainy ones.  We decided to take matters into our own finger-clicking hands, only to have our camera stolen on the last day in Santiago by a couple of very fast running teenagers. So from our debut as awesome globe-trotting photographers we don’t have a single shot!

RM: Can you talk about your favorite subject or photographic theme?

HO: We started out with a deep interest in modern architecture, especially skyscrapers and we still photograph those if they are spectacular enough.  Having been to places like Hong Kong, Singapore, and of course Shanghai, we have seen a few really breathtaking examples. Of course we also have images of a lot of boring bank buildings.

We have often been seen squatting on the pavement in front of a building pointing the camera towards the sky—and enduring people looking at us like we’re cuckoo.

UOB, Singapore. Image: Hanneorla.

RM: Do you remember when and why you first started uploading images to Flickr?

HO: That’s easy; it was in August of 2005. And why Flickr? Well, a friend found the site and thought it might be a good idea, so we checked it out and have been using it ever since.

RM: I really love the fact that you spend so much time creating detailed captions and descriptions for every single photo you upload, which makes your images tremendously useful to folks interested in the arts, and easy to find through search.  Can you talk about your methodology and purpose for this?

HO: That’s the hard and time-consuming part. Before we go anywhere, I (Hanne) spend many (really many!) hours researching the location, especially about sculptures (public and private), art museums, private galleries, and architecture.

I eventually collect the pictures and descriptions of all these objects in our own “guidebook,” so we know what to look for and where.  At this point, Orla usually groans when seeing this phonebook-sized guide book, or “to do list,” but usually ends up appreciating the research when we are on location!  But on many occasions, we have been out driving for hours and getting lost a lot before we find some measly piece of rusty iron that looked like a cutting-edge sculpture in our homemade guidebook!  After having gotten used to GPS technology we now find the artworks a lot faster. We often thank God (or whoever it is) in the sky for leading us in the right directions.

One thing that really irks us though (start of rant!): If you are a city, business, or person that commissions an outdoor sculpture or architectural masterpiece: maintain it and keep it clean!  In other words: TAKE CARE OF IT!  Many South American countries fail at this, as do several Southern European ones. For example, the absolutely magnificent Oscar Niemeyer-designed capital, Brasilia.  It’s a daring beauty in concrete.  A true wonder.  But it is dirty, unkempt, and really a disgrace. I think I’ll write to the new female president Dilma Rousseff and complain. Hey, they have enough money now, and certainly also well-deserved national pride. Asian countries are much better at this and they also have the courage to ask the most progressive artists (yeah, we know about Ai Weiwei and censorship), but modern Chinese art is a unique experience. And we cannot forget: The U.S. also generally has good maintenance of its outdoor artworks.  (Okay, end of our rant on that.)

RM: According to your Flickr stats, you’ve taken and uploaded 41,491 items.  This is beyond impressive.  Can you talk about why you like photographing art and museums?

HO: Allow me to quote from the Flickr profile:  “I am fascinated by contemporary visual art, cutting-edge sculpture, modern architecture, and futuristic designs.  To me the power of art is that it creates concepts and ’becomings’ intellectually and aesthetically. I’m always searching for the shock and delight of the new.”

About our ridiculously high number of photos: Well, it almost looks like a neurotic obsession, doesn’t it?  But it’s driven by pure delight and excitement.  Case in point: after having walked, and in the end crawled, for many miles in Valencia, Spain, we were suddenly dancing, footloose and fancy free, when we saw the contours of Santiago Calatrava’s City of Arts and Sciences.

Here are some more numbers: this week we passed 7,100,000 view counts of our images on Flickr. Boy, that’s more people than live in our own country of Denmark!

Hemisférico, Museo de las Ciencias Príncipe Felipe, Ciudad de las Artes y Ciencias, arquitecto Santiago Calatrava 1998 y 2000, Valencia, Spain. Image: Hanneorla.

RM: Will you talk a little more about the division of labor in your documentation work?  Who takes the photos, who uploads the images and who writes about them?  Do you each do a little of this or does one person?

HO: Well, Hanne is the slave. She does all the hard work pre and post. I play the Nietzschean part of the mastermentality while really being the slave. When we started out I usually said, “Why are you taking pictures of THAT, I already photographed it.” And she (very sensibly) replied, “Yeah, but sometimes your images are better than mine, and (most often) mine are better than yours”. So we both take pictures of the same pieces of art and then select the best shots to put up on Flickr.

RM: What if there were, say, 25 Hanneorlas out there documenting art and museums?  That would mean right now there would be approximately 1 million images about art and museums.

HO: That’s a great idea. Google Art Project is trying something, and they are to be commended for their efforts, but so far they have only about 12 museums.  It’s a good start. I guess we are trying to create a global, virtual universe of art. Presumptuous? Yes, of course! But we’re doing the best we can. We just need the 24 other Hanneorlas.

(Another rant!) Why, oh, why is it that so many museums around the globe are stuck in the digital Stone Age? Why don’t they allow visitors to take photos of their art? Instead they have these clueless bosses and guards clumsily preventing excited people (the Hanneorlas of the world) from sharing and spreading the pleasure of art!  We will drive MORE PEOPLE to visit your museums and boost your ticket sales and reputation by wetting the appetite of the more than 7 million people who have looked at our pictures from YOUR museum on our Flickr site. (Yes, we’re exaggerating a bit, but a LOT of people will get to know your museum—think about it).  We just don’t get it!

RM: Do you think it possible for there to be a kind of crowd-sourced documentation project in which all of the world’s art is documented by individuals?

HO: Oh, yes. Let’s just corral a couple of dozen Hanneorlas.

RM: Okay, this is a cruel question, but what would happen if Flickr suddenly went away and your account ceased to exist (as rumors have suggested might happen)?

HO: OMG! You mean a virtual Armageddon? Well, we have about 80% of our Flickr pictures on DVDs, so we might survive.

RM: Another tough question: Out of all of your photos can you come up with a top 10?

HO: Any of our many photos of the works of Claes Oldenburg, Fernando Bottero, Santiago Calatrava, Oscar Niemeyer, photorealistic painters, Chinese sculpture, and Tom Otterness. Plus a few more hundreds.

Claes Oldenburg 1976 "Clothespin," Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Image: Hanneorla.

RM: Care to say where you are going next?

HO: We’re already packing. We’re off to Paris, France. And probably thousands more photos.  And the hard part we forgot to mention: The demanding work after we get home. We have to do a lot of organizing, indexing, and captioning of the pictures which takes up an enormous amount of time. We are always two or three trips behind. Let’s see, there are Sao Paulo, Brazil, Dallas, Texas, and Iowa plus a few other states to do.  We need another holiday!

Robert Indiana, "Numbers," 1980-1982, Gift of Melvin Simon and Associates.

When you drive by Robert Indiana’s Numbers, you might think that these more-than-30 year-old sculptures look pretty good.  But if you get up close you’ll notice that the colors aren’t nearly as vibrant as they once were and the surface has lost much of its original glossy appearance.  Also, there are a few spots where the paint has chipped or fallen off.  So, even though our routine maintenance has kept them looking as good as possible, it’s clear they need attention, or since they were made by Indiana, I could say that they, ah, need some LOVE.

Numbers has been on my mind a lot recently because I’ve been researching the most intervening conservation treatment of the work’s life: this spring we’ll be completely stripping and re-painting each number to appear as they were first fabricated.

Before undertaking a conservation treatment of this scale it is important first to have all of the historic information at hand so we can be assured that we are making the right choices along the way, and ultimately that Numbers looks great.  I won’t go into all of the technical information of the treatment here, but I would like to share a bit of its story.  Thanks to the help of pre-program objects conservation intern Jessica Ford, we’ve put together a fairly complete history of Numbers.  Jessica and I have also added a lot of information to the Wikipedia article about Numbers.

Detail of flaking paint.

In 1980 Indiana was commissioned to make Numbers as part of the 20^th-anniversary celebration of Indianapolis-based Simon Property Group (then called Melvin Simon & Associates). However, Indiana’s interest in numbers began long before 1980, as he states in the 2009 documentary A Visit to the Star of Hope: Conversations with Robert Indiana:

“My involvement with numbers started with my mother, and her insistence on moving from house to house in Indiana. Before I was 17 years old I had lived in 21different houses. For my mother and father, their only amusement was really the automobile, and so we’d jump in the car and go driving around and check out all of those houses that we had lived in; and, of course, there was a number one, and there was a number two, and there was a number three.”

For his important 1980 commission Indiana produced the following print called The Ten Stages: Number Sculptures Reflected.

Robert Indiana, "The Ten Stages Number Sculptures Reflected," 1980. © Morgan Art Foundation Ltd./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The artist has stated that his inspiration for this drawing came in the early 1970s when he was an artist-in-residence at Dartmouth College and was given a copy of the 19^th-century print of The Life and Age of Man: Stages of Man’s Life, from the Cradle to the Grave.  In a recent telephone interview, Indiana told me that the print still hangs in his studio, and that it looked like this black and white one by James Baille:

James Baille, "The Life and Age of Man: Stages of Man's Life from the Cradle to the Grave," 1848.

From 1980 to 1983, Indiana fabricated each of the eight-foot-tall aluminum sculptures at Lippincott, Inc. in North Haven, CT.  In addition to fabricating Indiana’s first LOVE sculpture, which is so prominently displayed at the IMA, Lippincott fabricated important works for Ellsworth Kelly, Louise Nevelson, Barnett Newman, and Claes Oldenburg. (A well-illustrated monograph, Large Scale, was published in 2010 about the early years at Lippincott—I recently interviewed the author over on the Art21 Blog.)

In 2002, when a version of Numbers was on display on Park Avenue, Carol Vogel interviewed Indiana about the sculptures for an article in the New York Times.  In this article, Indiana identified the significance of the colors of each number in parallel to the original print:

1, Red and green, represents birth
2, Blue and green, infancy
3, Orange and blue, youth
4, Red and yellow, adolescence
5, Blue and white, pre-prime of life
6, Red and green, prime of life
7, Blue and orange, early autumn
8, Orange and purple, autumn
9, Yellow and black, warning
0, Shades of gray, death

”I didn’t use 10 because I don’t like double digits,” he said.

By 1983 Indiana had finished Numbers and it was in the possession of Simon Property Group.  While we’ve not been able to find a clear record of where each number was displayed, or really even good evidence that each part of Numbers was actually on display here in the city, it is known that 1 was first on view outside the Simon headquarters and that some of them were around the city of Indianapolis in the early 1980s at various locations.

Here’s a 1981 photo of well-known Children’s Museum of Indianapolis director Mildred Compton celebrating her 21st year of service in the central court of the museum on Meridian Street.

And here’s an account of 1, 2, and 3 being used as the medal podium backdrop for the 1982 National Sports Festival held here in Indianapolis.

If you have pictures or evidence of any others being on display in Indy, please leave me a note in the comments section. I’d love to see where else they  were located.

As part of the commission, Simon Property made arrangements for Numbers to be donated to IMA once their anniversary celebration was finished. True to their word, they were given to the IMA in 1988, but not installed until 1992—around the time the IMA was headlong into constructing the Edward Larrabee Barnes wing of the museum. Here’s a slide I scanned of the 1992 installation with three young ladies in the foreground.

Once installed, they remained on the IMA’s Alliance Sculpture Court until 2002.   After the museum underwent another expansion and renovation, in 2005 they were installed in their current location on the east side of the mall.  During this time, Indiana worked with the museum to give Numbers a new arrangement by grouping pairs of them together.  Here’s how he defined all of the pairings:

41 Pearl Harbor took place while I lived in Indianapolis
29 The crash which I experienced as a child on the East Side
50 Suggesting in part my hometown’s most famous institution: the last zero lost on a fast curve
76 The United States birthday every hundred years
38 My father worked for many years on this street

Indiana has created multiple versions of Numbers in a variety of sizes and materials and displayed them all over the world, however the IMA has the original set and the only one that hasn’t left the state of Indiana since it was fabricated.

And now a new chapter begins for our Numbers.  While it may seem fairly straightforward to restore these sculptures (they are after all, just painted aluminum), they were originally painted with a specialized coating system which is more than 30 years old itself, making them a bit tricky to re-paint correctly. Also, with a total of 20 different colors used (two on each), matching the colors can have its difficulties.  But we’ve assembled a solid team for the project and we all look forward to having them back at the IMA looking better than ever.

Finally, I leave you with picture of Robert Indiana talking with IMA Registrar Sherry Peglow in 2000 when the artist was last here to help install the exhibition Crossroads of American Sculpture, which included other Indiana-born artists John Chamberlain, Bruce Nauman, George Rickey, David Smith, and William Wiley.

While some important uses for Twitter have developed globally—especially around politics and sports—and many cultural institutions and art folks use it in interesting ways, Twitter still seems like an insider’s club.  Said another way, if you’re not using Twitter, you probably don’t have a use for it; in fact I think those that don’t use it generally get tired of hearing about it, and all the jargon that goes along with it.  After all, who could actually like the word “tweet” or want to work out a suitable past tense for that word.

But after more than two years, I think I’ve finally found a reason for folks interested in art conservation to use Twitter without, well, actually using Twitter.  Using the web-based application Paper.li, I’ve created Art Conservation Daily to summarize all the tweets about art conservation from the past 24 hours.  This online newspaper is auto-generated from my list of about 150 people that regularly tweet about art conservation.

So you can have a fresh copy of Art Conservation Daily delivered to your virtual doorstep every morning (e-mail inbox) by simply clicking on the “subscribe” button in the upper right.  Best of all you never have to so much as sniff a “tweet”.  While I don’t understand how the paper chooses the headlines or sections, overall it seems to do a good job of creating a timely and relevant newspaper. Take for example this weekend, when the Egyptian political system began crumbling, and museums became endangered; the best way to get the most current information about this situation was through Twitter.  Not surprisingly, the front page of Art Conservation Daily had a story about the situation.
As far as I can tell, there is no other place that you can get a daily summary of art conservation news on this scale. I really only have one market competitor: e-conservation daily, which is similar but its Twitter list is less than ½ the size and the content appears to be geared more generally to the cultural heritage field.  There are a few professional associations that operate general news blogs about art conservation (AIC and IIC, for example), and a few other conservators that write about conservation issues on their blogs, but none that give such a clear and timely snapshot of art conservation current events.

Although it seems unlikely that it will be putting the likes of The Art Newspaper or Art Daily out of business any time soon, Art Conservation Daily seems to be growing in popularity.  According to the counter at the top of the paper, it has had just under 2,500 viewers and a modest list of subscribers.

Also, there are some interesting features of this application: you can embed it in your own web page using the code at the top of the paper, you can see a streaming list of folks tweeting about art conservation inside the paper, and there’s a built-in archive so you can catch up on past editions.  Of course it’s paperless. The drawbacks? There aren’t many; it’s free, easy to use and maintain, but there are ads.  But what paper doesn’t have ads?  My only complaint is that I don’t get any of the ad revenue.

I’m always looking for interesting folks to add to my list to make the paper better, so if you know of any users that consistently talk about conservation or collections care, please let me know and I’ll add them. Who knows, they might make it in the paper.

Over the years, a number of interns in the Objects & Variable Art Lab have written blog posts for the IMA.  But this week, Jessica Ford and Katherine Langdon (who, you might remember, wrote “Caring for Bronze in the Community” this summer) have moved on to the proverbial “big time” to pen a two-part post on the American Institute for Conservation’s News Blog about their recent East Coast road trip to research art conservation graduate schools: Buffalo State College, New York University (my alma mater), and the University of Delaware.

The IMA’s conservation staff included graduates from each of these training programs, and former faculty from Buffalo State and University of Delaware.  Needless to say, we take training the next generation of conservators seriously around here.  So, please go over to AIC’s News Blog and check out Jessica and Katherine’s work:

• On the Road to Conservation: Pre-Program Road Trip – Part 1
  Jessica talks about making a trip out to University of Delaware and New York University to see their graduate programs.

• On the Road to Conservation: Pre-Program Road Trip – Part 2
  Katherine talks about visiting the Buffalo State College graduate program and nearby cities.

Both Jessica and Katherine are applying to conservation graduate school this year and we wish them well!

It’s impossible to attend every conservation-related conference or symposium. This summer, I missed what was perhaps one of the best conferences about the conservation of contemporary art in the past 10 years: Contemporary Art: Who Cares? Research and Practices in Contemporary Art Conservation. It was organized by the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage (ICN), Foundation for the Conservation of Contemporary Art in the Netherlands (SBMK), and the University of Amsterdam (UvA).  The symposium was an activity of the International Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art (INCCA).  It was held in Amsterdam June 9-11, 2010.

Shortly after the conference concluded, I interviewed Karen te Brake-Baldock on Art:21’s blog about the initial outcomes. When I was working on that interview and considering what I had missed, it occurred to me that, though there were many great talks, I really would have liked to hear those by Charles Esche, the Director of van Abbemuseum and Peter van Mensch, professor of cultural history at the Reinwardt Academie (Amsterdam). Well, now we can all hear these talks, and the rest of that were presented.

Charles Esche:

Charles Esche – Van Abbemuseum from incca on Vimeo.

Peter van Mensche:

Peter van Mensch – Reinwardt Academie from incca on Vimeo.

Both talks challenge us to re-think some of the purposes of museums and the display of artwork within them.  I’ll not go into a summary or any kind of critique of any of the talks, but instead simply encourage you to go check the complete list out.  Here’s a complete list of the talks.  Thanks, INCCA, for making the conference available online and letting me “attend” from my own home.

The truly dedicated IMA blog reader will know that Richard has been interested in putting information about art in Wikipedia for some time, and will also remember that the IMA has been interested in doing the same: from participating in the project Wikipedia Loves Art, to Max having lunch with local Wikipedians, to a number of folks from the IMA participating in the Wikimedia-sponsored event at Museums and the Web this year.

So, as a way to maximize collaborations, and kick off the final project for Richard’s Collections Care and Management course, we’ve arranged to have two rock stars of the Wikipedia world come lecture at the IMA next Tuesday night at 6pm.  The lectures will be free and open to the public.

Liam Wyatt, of Sydney, Australia, and Adrianne Wadewitz, of Bloomington, Indiana will discuss the importance of collaboration between Wikipedia and museums, libraries, and universities.

Here’s a little background on our IUPUI project: Last year Richard co-taught my Collections Care and Management course with Jenny Mikulay as we pioneered an effort to document the public art on the campus of IUPUI.  From that class we developed Wikipedia Saves Public Art (WSPA); you can read Richard and Jenny’s blog for more information.  The project has received a lot of positive attention, from within the Wikimedia Foundation and in academia. We’re most proud of this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education: Scholars Use Wikipedia to Save Public Art From the Dustbins of History.

This year our Collections Care and Management course is working with the resources developed though WSPA to document, research, and publish information about the public artworks in and around the Indiana Statehouse.

While this lecture will serve as the kick off for our project, it is also being developed in collaboration with Andrea Copeland, a professor in the IU School of Library and Information Science.  Andrea’s Public Library Management course has been writing two articles in Wikipedia as part of their class:
•    Public Library Advocacy
•    History of Public Library Advocacy

We are excited to bring together two speakers who have made a name for themselves by advocating for a stronger relationship between Wikipedia and the cultural sector:

Liam has worked closely with the Wikimedia Foundation to promote Wikipedia collaborations with Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums (GLAMs). Recently, he’s been traveling the globe to help museums and libraries collaborate effectively with Wikipedia, most notably as the first ever Wikipedian-in-Residence at the British Museum, a project that was highlighted by a recent article in the New York Times.

Adrianne is a Wikipedia Campus Ambassador at Indiana University, Bloomington who is currently writing her dissertation on 18th-century children’s literature. She holds the distinction of contributing to over 30 Featured Articles, making her an authority on creating high quality Wikipedia articles. For years, Adrianne has used Wikipedia in her teaching and is an advocate for its use in academia.

Please note that following Liam and Adrianne’s talks there will be a workshop for using Wikipedia. Space is very limited! If you’re currently working in Wikipedia or interested in participating in the workshop, please email Lori Phillips at lorphill@iupui.edu.

Wikipedia & the Cultural Sector
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
6:00–8:45 pm
DeBoest Lecture Hall

6–7:30 pm Lectures
7:45–8:45 pm Workshop

In the summer of 2010, I was fortunate to intern in the Variable Art Conservation Department with Richard McCoy. In 12 short weeks I examined ten years of planning and implementation documents for 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art and Nature Park. When I wasn’t wading through concepts and plans, I got to stomp around in a very unusual, very soggy, construction site filled with a fantastic tunnel and a basketball court that was transforming into seemingly unending arcs of red and blue.

In our project, we aimed to establish conservation dossiers—a kind of hybrid condition report and research document of the artwork identifying key characteristics of the 100 Acres artwork. The European Union-funded project Inside Installations: Preservation and Presentation of Installation Art provided an excellent road map for us to consider how to document the structures, sounds, and images found in 100 Acres.

As a result, I observed the birth of 100 Acres from a unique perspective. As the earthmovers and horticulturalists were busy shaping the watery landscape between canal and river, I reviewed internal and external communications, USGS reports, drawings and plans spanning the life of the project. It was a bit like looking into the collective brain of what has become a very real, internationally significant, park.

Richard tasked me with researching the Park’s genesis and development, and then the final realization of the installations. From this we began to organize the conservation dossiers into a series of records and summaries that future conservators and others IMA staff and researchers can use to understand questions of artists’ intentions, duration, and material concerns.

The experience proved to be both challenging and immensely rewarding. Working out of the conservation lab, I interviewed many of the 100 Acres team members, attended planning meetings, drafted a conservation security document, and compiled technical documents detailing conservation concerns related to materials and constructions.

Serving as the project thesis, questions of from what and how each artwork was made were addressed. We aimed to establish distilled summaries that future conservators could look to when trying to understand what is happening to the commissioned installations as they live and change within the environs of 100 Acres.

The maturing plants and settling gabion baskets of Alfredo Jaar’s Park of the Laments require an understanding of not only the materials used but also the collaboration that happened between artist, curator, and horticulturist.

Tea Mäkipää’s Eden II ship was constructed in Indianapolis at the Herron School of Art and Design sculpture studio and assembled on-site at IMA in the 100 Acres meadow. The accompanying guard house positioned on the lakeshore, allowing park visitors to peer into the ships bowels via mysterious audio and video feed, is a platform designed to support the artist’s vision as much as it is a part of the current installation of this work. The final artwork was realized after an intense period of collaboration between museum and artist in the summer and fall of 2009 – and several trips to local salvage yards for weathered materials to meet the artist’s concept of a lost vessel of refugees drifting onto the shores of 100 Acres from a distant, wasted land.

The very nature of the 100 Acres site-responsive artwork, situated within a floodplain, and in some cases encouraged to change over time, called for a contemporary model to frame our research. These dossiers will serve as a kind of missive to future conservators of these complex installations detailing what we know to be true now, what is most important to the realization of the artist’s concepts, and how each component of the park is expected to live within the place that is 100 Acres.

Simply put, what I like most about my job is that I get to look at works of art. I probably spend more time looking in one week than most people do in a whole year. When I’m looking, I always start with trying to figure out from what and how a work is made. For me, these are the most interesting questions to investigate. If you can’t put together at least some rough answers, then you really can’t make any further assumptions (art historical or otherwise), and you’re certainly not going to be in a good position to make good conservation decisions.

I rarely ever get to the question of whether or not I like an artwork; in conservation, answering that question doesn’t really get me anywhere.

This week I’ve had the exceptional opportunity to look at a rare corner cabinet with carvings by Emile Bernard. This cabinet is one of only four known examples produced by the Pont-Aven School (one is at the Norton Simon, one is at the AIC, and the other in Paris). It made quite a big splash when we acquired it this year.

In an effort to better understand the construction of the cabinet, I’m working alongside the IMA’s Pont-Aven specialist, Ellen Lee, The Wood-Pulliam Senior Curator, and Jérôme Séré, ebéniste restaurateur de mobilier (cabinetmaker and furniture restoration specialist) who specializes in this type of cabinetry.

We’ve started our technical examination of the piece by measuring and inspecting each element, and then making radiographs of certain joins, and finally producing IRR images to look for under drawings. The IMA’s New Media folks were down in the lab yesterday to make a video about the work, so stay tuned for that. Also, the cabinet will be featured in the forthcoming IMA Magazine.

But today, I want to share a few sneak peaks of our work.  Here are some digital radiographic images I produced yesterday that show the refined joinery of the cabinet and the hardware used to make the cabinet doors swing open.

Bernard Corner Cabinet, Lowest Section, Top Proper Left

Bernard Corner Cabinet, Lowest Section, Bottom Proper Left

Richard getting ready to crush it to left

This year, with Jim Walker’s help from the Big Car Gallery, we resurrected the Indy Cultural Softball League.  We’re fortunate to play on a handsome stretch of grass just behind the Garfield Park Arts Center, and have the park’s historic 1903 pagoda as a backdrop.

League Logo designed by Joel Dale

The teams in the league are:
The Indianapolis Museum of Art
Keep Indianapolis Beautiful
Herron School of Art & Design
Big Car Gallery
And this other team, from this other museum here in Indianapolis. What’s their name? I always forget… oh, yeah, the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art. Our softball nemesis!  The Newman to our Seinfeld.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the Eiteljorg; it’s a great museum and one of highlights to our city.  They put on excellent exhibitions and the staff are top-notch museum professionals, but a softball team?  Come on, now.  Please.
Sure, they barely beat us the last time we played, but that was a fluke, an aberration, an odd and distasteful hiccup in the storied legend of the IMA’s softball dominance.  And, sure, John Vanausdall, the Director and CEO of their museum pitches for the team, holds down the short stop position, and swings a good bat (I’m just saying, Max.  I’m just saying.), but are they a serious softball squad?  No way.

Eiteljorg Director & CEO John Vanausdall pitching for the team

The IMA plays the EM in the final game of the year next Tuesday the 31st of August at 7:30 pm.  This is where we’ll find out which museum really owns this town.  According to the standings, the IMA and EM are deadlocked at 5-2, so this game will decide it all.  Please come out and cheer on the IMA!
And for me, the crime of it all is that I just started back teaching my Collections Care & Management class for the IUPUI Museum Studies program, which of course the class meets on Tuesday nights.  So I’m going to miss the game.
I’ve tried and tried to figure out a way to make the softball game part of this year’s curriculum, but still haven’t found an angle.  Somehow it just doesn’t seem right to require my students to come out and cheer for the IMA as part of their class.  Well, honestly, it probably would feel right, but I’m not sure of the educative component.  If anybody has any ideas, I’m all ears. Oh, and if you have any ideas for clever nicknames for the Eiteljorg, please list them below.

IMA congratulates KIB on a great game

]]> http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2010/08/27/boom-goes-the-dynamite/feed/ 7 Richard getting ready to crush it to left League Logo designed by Joel Dale Eiteljorg Director & CEO John Vanausdall pitching for the team IMA congratulates KIB on a great game