The Pharmacy prescribes the following links to combat Monday online anemia.

Blog: Kiss My Spatula

The only thing better than a chef blogger, is a chef blogger who’s good with a camera.  If you’re not convinced you should follow a food blog, maybe this will be the clincher: Giao pairs all her recipes with music selections, because as she says, “music pairings are as important as fresh ingredients & good company.”

ArtBabble Video: Research in progress: Van Gogh and his contemporaries

Vincent van Gogh has a reputation of being a loner as an artist, but is that correct? In his letters he gave his opinion on works of art he had seen and books he’d found worth-while. That is why in the restoration studio of the Van Gogh Museum not only Van Gogh’s own materials and techniques are studied, but also the work of his contemporaries.

IMA Work of Art:

Roses of May by James Merritt Ives

Tweet:

richardmccoy: The @imamuseum’s Hepworth needs a yearly waxing — it looks better now than in this photo: http://bit.ly/8A1HQV

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Zephyr by Steve Wooldridge; Photo by Lauren Tally

What changed my mind about creating content for the Web? This fall, I enrolled in two courses devoted to contemporary museum practice: Collections Care and Management (CC&M), co‐taught by IMA Objects & Variable Art Conservator Richard McCoy and IUPUI faculty member Jennifer Geigel Mikulay, and Museums and Technology, taught by IMA New Media Director Daniel Incandela. My first assignment for both classes was to create user accounts for Wikipedia, Twitter and Flickr, and then start using them.

In CC&M, our major project was to formalize the artworks on and around IUPUI’s campus into a real collection. In the end, we identified 40 pieces that we dubbed the “IUPUI Public Art Collection.”  Didn’t know that much art existed on IUPUI’s campus? Take a walk around sometime to see an incredibly diverse representation of styles, media and condition qualities.   You’ll also find four sculptures on loan from the IMA: East Gate/West Gate, Mega-Gem, Portrait of History, and Spaces with Iron.  You might remember when East Gate/West Gate was moved to IUPUI early this year:

Our methodology for identifying and documenting these artworks was derived from the very successful Save Outdoor Sculpture! (SOS!) project that started in 1989 and was organized by Heritage Preservation: The National Institute of Conservation in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution. A book published in 2005 by Indiana’s SOS! leader, Glory-June Greiff, was also an inspiration.

We set out to share our research and documentation using Wikipedia and Flickr. With that move, our academic project became a movement that we call Wikipedia Saves Public Art (WSPA). The primary goal of this project is to protect and preserve public art.

Conducted largely in the Internet cloud, WSPA has earned the attention of many other museum professionals and some very particular Wikipedians. By contextualizing our academic exercise in the Wikipedia universe and utilizing existing social networks, our project has rippled out through IUPUI and into the larger debate about how public art is cared for and managed. Our scholarly research efforts will become an active part of institutional memory rather than just being papers graded and forgotten. By publicly conducting our research and publishing our articles in Wikipedia, we opened our academic exercise up to intense scrutiny by our peers and Wikipedians committed to protecting its policies and procedures.

With such a large public undertaking, we were grateful to have help. Herron School of Art and Design Dean Valerie Eickmeier,  Art Strategies consultant Mindy Taylor Ross and Smithsonian American Art Museum Head of New Media Nancy Proctor visited our class and helped place our efforts in a larger campus, city, and national context. We also had help from IUPUI University Archivist Brenda Burk, Indiana University Curator of Campus Art Sherry Rouse, and the staff at IUPUI’s Campus Center and Herron Galleries.

So many people were willing to work with us because Wikipedia Saves Public Art isn’t just a one-time class project. It has larger goals. We seek to demonstrate the ways in which Wikipedia can be used as a content management system (CMS) so that anyone in the world can follow the WSPA model to care for and protect public art.

Like every other CMS available commercially, the needs of our project did not exactly match the capacities of current technology. Wikipedia is a complex structure with hard rules banning original research and copyright infringement, and it is also a forum premised on negotiation and debate. Student run‐ins with Wikipedia editors intent on enforcing the laws of the system ran from polite reminders to harsh {{speedydeletion}} of hours of work. Condition reports and images intended to provide a factual record of the current state of the collection were deemed out-of-bounds within Wikipedia. However, we were able to upload and tag images of IUPUI artworks using Flickr, and these images are linked to our Wikipedia articles.

Also, I’m proud to report that three of our articles made it on to the Main Page of Wikipedia, under the “Did you know section …” (Zephyr, Untitled (Jazz Musicians), and Peirce Geodetic Monument.)

Now that I’m on the other side of having to create and manage 40‐plus Wikipedia articles, 375 images on Flickr, 1 Facebook page and countless Twitter micro‐blogs specific to this project, I am invested in the longevity of the WSPA project and will continue to participate and follow the work of my peers.

A memorable moment of the project was when a WSPA article about a contemporary artwork in the form of a bucket of rocks suspended from a tree near the Herron School of Art and Design spurred the classic question “Is it art?”.  My professors and peers engaged in the debate across social network platforms including Wikipedia talk pages and Twitter.

Even though many of our articles went through dramatic revisions, the great majority of the critical information that we collected in our research (who made the art, where it is located, what it is made of and who is responsible for its care) did make it onto the most recognized encyclopedia in the online universe. At last check, even our previously deleted article came back to life (just try Googling “IUPUI Bucket of Rocks”). Now that makes me chuckle, and then I send links to my followers and friends to make them chuckle.
Finally, we’d like to make a call for help.  After much research, one of the artworks on campus still lacks fundamental information and verifiable sources.  Do you or does someone you know anything about Carey Chapmen’s artwork  on IUPUI’s campus?  Please let me know here on this blog, or go and fix it yourself within Wikipedia.  For now, it’s titled “Unknown (Tall Metal)“.

Unknown (Tall Metal) by Carey Chapman Photo by Chrissy Gregg

Professor Charles Falco

OK, yesterday Richard gave you his version of events.  Today, it’s my turn.

Part I: Making the Connections

My Background

The year: 1960
The place: Ft. Dodge, Iowa
Richard started his story ten years ago in Madrid.  I’ll start mine fifty years ago in Ft. Dodge.

I’ve been keenly interested in images since early childhood, starting with an old Kodak box camera, and advancing to my first “serious” camera when I was twelve. This involvement with creating and manipulating images using various processes — photography, cyanotypes, silk screening, etc. — steadily expanded as I got older, to the point that by age 30 I owned at least 20 lenses ranging up to a 800 mm super-telephoto, as well as had designed and fabricated various pieces of specialized photographic equipment for my imaging experiments.

The infrared camera described in this blog is the most recent piece of fabricated/altered imaging equipment dating back to an enlarger I made in high school by modifying an old bellows camera.Although I got my Ph.D. in physics, and have worked in experimental physics my entire career (first at Argonne National Laboratory, and since 1982 as a professor of optical sciences and of physics at the University of Arizona), I also have had an interest in art that dates back to childhood.  By age 30 I had visited over 25 art museums in eight countries, always using any free time during travels to physics conferences to visit art museums.  And motorcycle museums.

Like my interest in photography, I have been a participant in art as well as an observer.  In the May 14, 2007 issue of The New Yorker Magazine, Peter Schjelhahl wrote “An efficient test on where you stand on contemporary art is whether you are persuaded, or persuadable, that Chris Burden is a good artist. I think he’s pretty great.”  Burden is perhaps best known for his November 1971 conceptual art piece ‘Shoot’, in which he had himself shot in the arm.  A month earlier, for his piece ‘220′, he and three others spent the night on wooden ladders in a gallery filled with 12″ of water into which he had dropped a 220-Volt electrical line.  I was one of those three participants.

Jumping ahead a few decades, in 1997 I was asked to co-curate the Solomon R. Guggenheim’s The Art of the Motorcycle exhibition that opened in 1998, and which set an all-time attendance record for that museum.  I shared an award for this work from the U.S. Chapter of the Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art with the architect Frank Gehry, the then-director of the museum Thomas Krens, and my co-curator Ultan Guilfoyle.

Making a long story short, thanks to Ultan Guilfoyle, in 2000 I was introduced to David Hockney by Lawrence Weschler, who had written a story about him in the January 30 issue of The New Yorker Magazine.  This resulted in the most intense period of collaboration of my entire scientific career.  One consequence of our collaboration was that I was invited to the National Science Foundation in 2006 to give the Distinguished Lecture in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences.  Zina Deretsky attended that talk, resulting in her arranging for me to speak at the annual meeting of the Association of Medical Illustrators, resulting in me meeting Richard McCoy, resulting in this blog.

Artwork in the Infrared

In the spring of 2008 I realized that since modern digital cameras use silicon CMOS or CCD sensors, and since silicon is sensitive reasonably far into the infrared (to ~1100 nm, whereas the visible ends at ~750 nm), a suitably-modified camera might allow the capture of high resolution infrared photographs — “IR reflectograms” — of works of art.  The reason IR reflectograms are of interest for art is that many pigments are semi-transparent to infrared light, allowing such light to penetrate through these pigments to reveal features that are not apparent in the visible.  Such features can include defects in the canvas or board (Figure 1),

Figure 1

areas that have been repaired by overpainting (Figure 2),

Figure 2

or underdrawings made on the white gesso (Figure 3).

Figure 3

In addition to paintings, the camera provides useful information on 3-dimensional objects (Figure 4).

Figure 4

However, the IR sensitivity of the silicon sensor is only one factor in the operation of an imaging device, so the only way to know if such camera would actually provide useful information for works of art would be to modify one and characterize all of its relevant features.

I rationalized spending the money for this by telling myself that, even if it proved useless for extracting useful information from art, I still could use it for general infrared photography.  However, my understanding of the technologies involved gave me a great deal of confidence my money would be well spent. As a result, a technical description of this high resolution infrared imaging instrument just appeared as an invited paper in the July 2009 issue of the ‘Review of Scientific Instruments’.  You can download a copy of it from the link at the bottom of my art-optics web page.

Figure 5

I conducted the first tests of this modified camera in my own university’s art museum, and immediately discovered interesting new information in some of the IR reflectograms.  As an example, the lines in the underdrawing in Figure 5 that are revealed in the IR converge to a well-defined vanishing point, showing that this particular artist understood the laws of geometrical perspective that had only recently been articulated.  This is information that no one ever could have known before.

The Infrared of Indiana

Having determined that the modified camera was indeed capable of extracting useful new information from paintings, I took it with me to Indianapolis where I was to speak at the Association of Medical Illustrators.  Basically, the reason I brought it was to gain experience with it when “on the road,” vs. in the relatively controlled environment of a museum located only a few hundred yards from my office.  However, I didn’t know I would have the opportunity to test it at the Indianapolis Museum of Art against paintings recently studied with a special-purpose IR camera, so the introduction to Richard McCoy and David Miller made by Zina Deretsky was pure serendipity.

The results initially were disappointing to all of us when looking at the freshly-captured images on the camera’s LCD screen, but we were very pleasantly surprised when we pulled them into Photoshop(R) on one of the museum’s computers.  The reason for the difference in appearance is that the resolution of the LCD screen is ~10x lower than the resolution of the actual images.  As a result, even features that are quite apparent in the images captured by the camera usually are barely, if at all, visible on the LCD screen.

Since that first “in situ” test in Indianapolis in July 2008, I have captured IR reflectograms with this camera in eleven art museums on three continents so far.  One of my favorite incidents involving it was an evening talk I gave at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, in which I discussed some of features revealed in one of their paintings (a Pissarro) by an IR reflectogram.  I captured that image at 11:31 a.m. and talked about it at 7:20 p.m., which must be some new record for the fastest time between extracting new scientific data from an artwork and “publishing” the results.  You can see this talk on Youtube, and my 2 minute discussion of the IR starts at 50′ 40″ into the video.

I should note that nothing revealed by that IR reflectogram was particularly spectacular.  But, I already had data on another Pissarro painting in my talk, so this was a great opportunity to work in something previously unknown about a painting in that museum’s own collection.  I also gave the audience the homework assignment of remembering what I had just showed them, and after my talk going back to the actual painting to look for the features themselves.  So, in addition to extracting useful new data from paintings, this camera also can be used to engage an audience in art history in new ways.

Group IR Shot. David Miller, Charles Falco, Richard McCoy, Zina Deretsky, Aimee Allen, Christina Milton-O'Connell, and Linda Witkowski

Part I: Making the Connections

The year: 1998
The place: Madrid, Spain.

In Madrid I was learning encuadernación and life drawing when I met Zina Deretsky who at the time was illustrating many different species of Iberian lacewings at the same Universidad Complutense.  We became good friends and began trading stories on our walks to la Universidad.  My stories revolved around my upbringing in the agra-centric world of Indiana – topics included sports, people I knew in Future Farmers of America (FFA), unnecessarily large trucks owned by adolescent boys, and a now-defunct yearly event at my high school called “Farm Day.”  Farm Day was amazing, but I’m not going into that here.  Zina’s stories revolved around sunny California, Yale, and her quasi-scientific vodka sampling.  She went on to grad school at Johns Hopkins and later became an illustrator who works for the National Science Foundation.  And after grad school in New York, I went on to come back to Indiana as an art conservator for the IMA.

Antlion by Zina Deretsky

So, last summer I was more than happy to help Zina organize a workshop at the IMA for the American Medical Illustrators Annual Meeting.  And how did Zina get to Indy from her D.C. area home?  By motorcycle, of course

I quickly found out that one of the big highlights of the AMI Annual Meeting is the “Salon” where medical illustrators exhibit and celebrate their recent illustrations and projects.  After checking out some of gruesomely fascinating work (that one of the car accident for the court trial still troubles me) we bumped into University of Arizona PhD student, Aimee Allen, who had just finished teaching a workshop with Zina on drawing with camera obscuras. The cameras that they used for the workshop happened to be owned by Charles Falco  (who from here on, for sake of continuity and accuracy, will be referred to simply as “Falco”).

Falco was at the AMI Annual Meeting giving a couple of lectures including one on the “Use of Mirrors and Optics in Early Renaissance Painting.” Knowing a little about the Falco from his work on the Hockney-Falco thesis, and as the co-curator of “The Art of the Motorcycle” at the Guggenheim Museum, I really wanted to catch one of his lectures.  But I never could get away from the IMA to go hear him.

To make a long story short, Falco, Aimee, and Zina came by the conservation lab to have a look on the work currently being done on the renaissance-era painting by Sebestian Mainardi.   You may have seen this work in the Star Studio as part of the conservation exhibition.  If not, here’s an introductory video:

Note: as of last month you can now come and visit the painting installed in the Clowes Courtyard. (Yeah, it’s worth a special trip!)

I was surprised when Falco brought a modified digital SLR camera with him that allowed him to photograph the Infrared Region (IR) of the electromagnetic spectrum.  Conservators have been using IR cameras as an examination and documentation technique for decades, but usually the process requires a more complicated set up than the SLR camera Falco was carrying around.

You now might have realized that the first image in this post looks a little different.  It’s not that it’s black and white: it’s an IR image taken by Falco’s camera in front of the Mainardi.

For example, the IMA has owned an IR video camera in its lab for close to 30 years. Being able to see into the IR is particularly helpful when looking at paintings that have underdrawings – literally I mean drawings underneath the paint layers that artists would have used as guides while making paintings (if you want to see how a renaissance artist would have used an under drawing in a panel painting go here).   Simply stated, using an IR camera to look at a painting allows us to “see” behind certain paint layers.  This is quite helpful for conservators doing research into an artist’s techniques and materials and it can also guide conservators in their approach in the event an intervention is required.

Laurence Robinson of Opus Instruments Ltd demonstrating the Osiris IR camera at the IMA

Having Falco visit when he did was convenient because a few weeks prior we were visited by Laurence Robinson of Opus Instruments Ltd. who came to the IMA from the UK to demonstrate a new digital IRR camera system.  This “Osiris” camera is fabulous. It produces high-quality and high-resolution digital images using an array of sensors.  This camera has the capacity to see into a greater range of the IR spectrum than the camera that Falco brought with him.  Though this camera is rather portable, it’s not nearly as portable as Falco’s modified hand-held SLR camera.  Also it’s considerably more expensive and requires some expertise to use properly.

Obviously, we were all thrilled to escort Falco and the rest of the gang around the lab as they looked at and photographed some other paintings that we had recently examined using the Osiris camera.  Falco snapped away in the lab and up in the galleries.  We were impressed with the immediate results of his easy-to-use camera.

And it’s at this point in the story that I will stop.  You’ll have to come back tomorrow to read Falco’s side of the story.  I’ll give you a hint, though, he shows some great examples of what he’s been seeing with his camera for the past year, and also talks about an upcoming publication in the July 2009 issue of the ‘Review of Scientific Instruments’.

The IMA rarely has the luxury of reframing the paintings in its collection, since funds to pay for new frames are not readily available. A frame is an important part of a painting that serves not only to enhance the image but also to protect it.  Several paintings at the IMA have unsuitable frames that do nothing to enhance the beauty of the work and may actually detract from it.  One of those paintings is Abbott Thayer’s 1886 Still Life, a simple but lush depiction of a peony in a pewter-lined copper bowl.  This spare but dramatic still life was in a deteriorating reproduction frame that had a negative affect on the painting.

Last year the work appeared in the exhibition American Art and the East at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.  It was seen by Eli Wilner, a leading frame dealer and restorer, who noticed that the frame did not show the painting to its best advantage.  Mr. Wilner contacted the IMA and made a proposal to reframe the painting for a minimal payment from the museum.  The IMA was being given the opportunity to obtain a museum quality frame that we would not have been able to purchase if Mr. Wilner had not offered to donate most of its cost.

A comparison of Thayer’s still life before and after reframing shows a stunning transformation in the presentation of the painting.  It is now surrounded by a frame that resembles those of the period in which it was created and one that brings out the beauty of the image.  Mr. Wilner has offered to help the IMA reframe additional paintings with his support, so we are hoping that we will be able to take advantage of this very generous offer in the future.

The next time you are visiting the IMA come to the American galleries and see the Abbott Thayer still life in its new frame and experience what the appropriate frame can do for a painting.

Now, Dear Reader, you can by a mere flick of the clicking finger discover what we’ve discovered at the IMA, which, I think, is pretty rad in the stealthy world of museum administration.  Most recently, what we’ve unearthed is not from Jaipur or Nimrud, but from an apparently long-forgotten box on a shelf.  But sometimes it happens that real life discoveries are just as romantic as those of Dr. Jones’s folklore.

The “what” is actually a “who”- a Roman terracotta portrait bust of a young woman, probably from the first century C.E.  For now, she remains mysterious.  I discovered her by chance (luck, fate?) while foraging the museum’s endless object storage cabinets, recognizing first the elaborate hairstyle worn by the women of ancient Rome.  There she was, gleaming out from an old box, still perfectly coiffed after two thousand years.  And there too I was, smudgy and not so well-coiffed.

She was a gift of Hoosier author Booth Tarkington, notorious loather of modern art.  To unearth such a piece is thrilling, but at the same time a little saddening, because there is very little chance of learning its origins prior to its donation in 1951.  So far we have a few promising leads, which point to some prominent New York auction houses.

Of course every museum has a cavernous storeroom full of more than 90% of its objects, many as yet unseen by the public eye, or at least unremembered.  Rarely, though, do we discover something of significance, something as skillfully-wrought and captivating as this portrait, and terracotta statues are fragile, so they do not often survive in good condition.  The reemergence of works like this one elucidates two separate histories: one which tells a story about the object’s own cultural past, but also another about the history of the museum itself.  If you ask me, the romance is in the union of those two stories, in how a private Roman woman, who was not famous in her lifetime, came to be art in Indianapolis, Indiana.

So, you ask, what’s on the agenda for this bi-millennial beauty?  We’re interested in dating her as accurately as possible, for which she will visit the conservation department of the museum.  Roman portraits are interesting because they can help us understand how the Romans thought of themselves and what values or “trends,” if you will, existed at the time.  I am looking forward to sharing our research, and, hopefully, to setting her up for others to admire.

And so as we delve into the mystery of our bella donna Romana, I invite you to stay tuned for more details.

CoOL logo

I remember the first time I saw the CoOL web page (Conservation Online).  It was about 1995 and I was a student working in the Lilly Library’s Book Conservation department when Jim Canary told me to check it out.

I really can’t think of a topic that isn’t covered at CoOL.  I can remember spending hours digging around all of the pages when I first saw it.  It seemed to answer all of my questions about my interest in the profession and point to ones that I hadn’t thought of.  Have a look at all of the “Conservation Topics,” or look at the number of national and international organizations who have their home pages associated with CoOL.  Dig around there.  It’s amazing.

Perhaps most importantly, though, look at the ConsDistList, an e-mail distribution list that at last count had just under 10,000 subscribers.  This dist list has been going strong since 1988 and has been one of the most important ways for conservators to share and find information on a truly international level.  It has been the central hub for information sharing within the conservation community.

Yesterday that changed when Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources announced that Stanford is no longer going to support CoOL and that the ConsDistList had produced its last instance.  Bang.  It’s over.

Stanford University Libraries also announced that they were laying off 32 employees.  Clearly, these decisions were difficult for Stanford.  As an employee of an institution that has recently experienced lay offs, I know that these are not easy times for anyone.

Also yesterday, the American Institute for Conservation (AIC) and the International Institute for Conservation (IIC) sent out e-mails pledging their determination to help support CoOL and to find a way to support the information contained within the web page.  Clearly, this will take a lot of work and effort.

Walter Henry, who had been for the past 22 years the principal organizer and manager of CoOL and the ConsDistList, suggested that CoOL “contains, at a very rough guess, 120,000 documents, possibly quite a few more. I hope they have been useful to you all, and I hope to be of service to you as we move into the future.”  That’s a truck load of documents that are now hanging perilously on the edge of invisibility.

The imminent demise of CoOL and the ConsDistList marks the biggest shift in information sharing for conservators since the profession started printing journals.

I don’t think for a minute that AIC and IIC and conservators in general are willing to let this resource and the contained documents fade away.

But I would like to raise some questions around the best ways for this information and data to be shared and stored.  I would like to suggest that AIC and IIC work to make themselves platforms for the creation and sharing of this information rather than just static distribution sources.  Instead of relying on one person to manage the information (Walter, how did you do it?), I suggest that they rely on **everyone** to manage, create, and update the information.

For the past few years my friend Daniel Cull and I have been involved in creating and editing the Wikipedia article for Art Conservation-Restoration.  While clearly, this article currently contains a fraction of the information that is in CoOL, Wikipedia’s potential is limited only be our efforts and imagination.  It should contain the sum of conservation knowledge.

Could Wikipedia become a replacement for CoOL?  Maybe, just maybe.

But that’s just part of the problem.  What about the ConsDistList, and all of the other e-mail dist lists associated within CoOL?  I can only throw out suggestions or ideas.   But maybe we could build discussion networks within current social media applications such as Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc?  What role could a blog or multiple blogs play in sharing this information?  Wouldn’t it be more cost effective to use these new and existing technologies?

I don’t really have the answers to these questions, but I think this is an opportunity for conservators to open their collaborative networks and try and use social media applications to handle our information sharing.  This is an opportunity for conservators and associated museum professionals to discuss the best ways to share and distribute electronic information.

Ellen Carrlee is an objects conservator who lives in Alaska.  We’ve never met in person and only know each other through these internets.  Along with our other friend and objects conservator, Daniel Cull, we’ve decided to take turns this week writing aboutour ideas for “New Directions” for the American Institute for Conservation (AIC).  I was a guest blogger for Ellen on Monday. My post up there in Alaska is filled with lots of crazy ideas.  On Friday, Daniel Cull will make a post on his blog… who knows what he’s cooking up.  Here’s Ellen’s offering:

Straight from Wikipedia:

Elitism is the belief or attitude that those individuals who are considered members of the elite—a select group of people with outstanding personal abilities, intellect, wealth, specialized training or experience, or other distinctive attributes—are those whose views on a matter are to be taken the most seriously or carry the most weight; whose views and/or actions are most likely to be constructive to society as a whole; or whose extraordinary skills, abilities or wisdom render them especially fit to govern.

First things first: we need AIC and I respect the vital role it plays in our professionalism.  You could say I was suckled at the AIC teat.  Back in 1993, I was trying to find someone who would tell me what the heck “conservation” was.  I made a long distance phone call to Jay Krueger, who my uncle told me was a friend of a friend, and one of this mysterious breed called “conservators.”  It was quite a short conversation, and the upshot was “ask AIC.”  I sent away for their brochures (by mail!) and poured over the requirements of the programs.  It was the first of many times I turned to AIC to tell me what I needed to do.

In graduate school at NYU, the conservation professors referred frequently to the standards and ethics outlined by AIC and required us to follow them in our coursework.  I became a member in 1997.  As an emerging professional, I found myself moving to Alaska, the home of exactly three conservators: one was a contemporary from the Winterthur/Delaware program (Monica Shah) and the other was the man I had just married (Scott Carroll from the Buffalo program.)

I also accepted a job as a curator of collections and exhibits, and began a part-time business doing private conservation work.  Suddenly I had a ton of questions about ethics, and the standards of practice I would have to live up to in starting a business.  Again, I turned to AIC and studied its core documents carefully.  I became more interested in listserves in order to stay informed about the conservation world, and frequently thumbed through the AIC directory to see if someone who had posted was affiliated with AIC and therefore steeped in the same professional standards I was familiar with.

Occasionally, someone with an excellent reputation and interesting postings was not listed in AIC at all, and I would wonder why.  In 2006, I jumped through the hoops to become an AIC Professional Associate, which seemed like the closest thing to being vetted by a national professional conservation organization.  I have used AIC and its core documents as a touchstone every step of my career.

WHY DOES AIC TICK PEOPLE OFF?
After I’d been in the field awhile, I began to hear more about why some people didn’t like AIC.  It was elitist, some claimed.  Critical and harsh to outsiders.  It was behind the times.  It didn’t do enough advocacy in the wider public arena to benefit its members.  It had a history of excluding natural history, archaeology, and ethnographic conservation.  It had a history of setting up confrontational or adversarial relationships with various groups of people: people who were not program-trained, restorers, foreigners, archaeologists, maritime conservators, etc.  And there were a fair number of people who had been involved with AIC their entire careers but declared they were fed up, and membership in AIC had no benefits for them.

At first, I assumed they had just had run-ins with some of the more abrasive and powerful personalities that often dominate organizations like AIC.  I daresay conservators can be a cantankerous and self-righteous lot.  I still think that’s part of the issue.  But I also think there is much to be learned (and perhaps a better path for the future) by studying the history of the organization.  There could be a thesis written on that, no doubt.

Reading the “Murray Pease Report” and other early documents however, makes it clear that in the beginning, AIC was largely an organization of conservators specializing in paintings and sculpture.  Individual artifacts of high monetary value that justified money being spent on their conservation.  Those who identified as “conservators” were interested in developing standards to differentiate themselves from “restorers.”  Conservators were scientifically and morally saving art from those who were using dubious recipe books and old wives’ tales to turn a fast buck at the peril of our heritage.  Was this the beginning of an “us versus them” mentality?  Throughout AIC’s history, the institutional culture has time and again organized itself around fighting “them.”  Loosely defined, AIC’s critics have come to see themselves in “them” … anyone who disagrees with the AIC.

CHARISMATIC MEGAFAUNA / BIG SEXY ART

Following the recent debate/defeat of certification, it seems that the organization has now entered a period of introspection and re-evaluation.   AIC is unlikely to break free of its aura of elitism.  It is also doomed to be a venue for those who insist on shooting off their mouths in an undiplomatic fashion.  But it does serve a very important role in conservation in the United States: it is our national professional organization.  Let’s not underestimate that.  But perhaps elitism has been at the root of conservation remaining separate from the museum world: separate programs, training curriculums, and conferences.

Chenhall’s Nomenclature anyone? Marie Malaro?  AAM’s General Facilities Report?

Conservation students are not taught much about the museum profession.  Often, the conservator on staff is seen as the obstructionist. The one who says “no.”  The one who goes by the book and makes everything difficult.  The one who does not get invited to the table.  Elitism is perhaps the cause of AIC’s biggest failure: people don’t know what conservation is.  When I give a lab tour, I always have to define conservation.  My good friends still mistake me for a curator. After more than 50 years as a profession (NYU’s Conservation Center was founded in 1960 and AIC in 1972) we still are scarcely known to the public. Plenty of people think we protect trees.

There is a term in the world of environmentalism: charismatic megafauna.  It refers to the use of large popular animals like pandas and whales to leverage support and protection for whole ecosystems and less flashy critters. Conservators have traditionally focused on Big Sexy Art, and while some aspects of preventive conservation serve to improve the condition of all collections, a lot of our cultural heritage is still neglected.  The Heritage Health Index indicates that 190 million artifacts are in peril, and many of them are in smaller museums with no conservator on staff and little funding to afford one.

These folks often post on listserves:
“How can I reshape this brittle basket in my collection?”
“There’s white fuzzy stuff on this saddle… is it mold?”
“How can I make this samovar shiny again?”

Often the answers come from their colleagues who are well-meaning but misguided.  Hardware store commercial products and Martha Stewart-inspired recommendations are common.  Occasionally someone might jump and scold, “Stop! You have to consult a conservator!”  Pragmatically and financially, many of these objects are not going to get a proper conservation treatment.  But they can be saved from poor treatment choices with just a little in-depth expertise and gentle words of caution in plain English.

Dave Harvey is the champion of this kind of service.  Marc Williams is also thoughtful and generous with his knowledge.  This is the kind of public relations that the conservation world needs more of.  Here’s some of the love!  Jump right in.  Individuals are sometimes working like this, but the profession is not.  What if providing this kind of public voice were a factor in assessing PAs and Fellows?

ELECTRONIC ELISTISM
Elitism is not solely the realm of conservators.  There is brand of elitism found among folks who have passion for computers.  People who are conversant in Blogs, Wikis, Twitter, Ning, Delicious, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace…those people are the future. They are connected.  They have the answers.  Or do they?  While the potential of many of these platforms is appealing, the actual content is often rather meager.  Visually stimulating and easy to digest, they remind me of the recent trend toward museums as entertainment.  The blockbuster!  The wall of graphics!  The touch-me interactive!  I say, show me the REAL STUFF.  Give me content.  What is it made of?  Who made it?  Why?

Web 2.0 definitely has its place.  It can function in ways that AIC can’t or won’t.  AIC has a hard time responding in a timely manner on current events and 2.0 folks can take advantage of front line opportunities for PR in our profession.  Viral marketing!  Professional organizations are a bit like museums: slow, careful, and deliberative.  Not designed to jump headlong into new things but rather hang back, observe, and help history sort itself out.  AIC would have a hard time keeping up with Daniel Cull in terms of relevance anyway. Maneuverability is an unfair expectation of AIC.  That should be up to us.  And perhaps our smaller and more nimble regional organizations like WAAC and MRCG.

WHERE IS THE LOVE?
This month, I’m joining the AIA and the SAA.  As a conservator of ethnographic and archaeological materials, I was not even aware until last week that the SAA has a group about perishables.  While I enjoy the AIC annual conference, I think I’ll be aiming to go less frequently in order to direct resources at attending conferences in allied professions.  This has been a talking point in AIC for some time, but there seem to be only a handful who walk the walk.  And I am posting information liberally on the internet…info that might have been considered taboo in the past.

When I was in graduate school, treatment reports done as part of the core courses were saved in a file cabinet in the library.  But it was locked.  Students had to request the key, and it was discouraged.  I never found out why, and I was too timid to ask.  In some ways, I feel the conservation profession is locked in that way, particularly when it comes to availability of treatment information, lest it “fall into the wrong hands.”  After more than a decade in the profession, I have come to believe that in many cases, lack of treatment information does not generally force those objects into the competent hands of conservators.  Nor does it mean that the object won’t be treated.  People will just give it their best shot.  Inside the tent pissing out or outside the tent pissing in?

I have had several stimulating telephone conversations with Jim Jobling at the Conservation Research Lab at Texas A&M.  Certainly there are many ways that his lab is not “AIC compliant.”  And you know what?  He doesn’t care.  He does his work the best he can according to the parallel universe of standards that have developed in maritime conservation world.  Google the names of people who treat shipwreck material or wetsite archaeology and most of those names are not coming from the AIC world.  In fact, many of those names have been affiliated with the Texas A&M program.  Or the program at East Carolina University.  If AIC cannot or will not be more inclusive then it is up to us.

I have long suspected that People Who Know Things tend to share generously, while people who are not sure of their knowledge tend to be defensive and secretive.  How about being the change we want to see? I’m trying to put content on my blog that looks like info I’d like to find.  What if Richard Wolbers had his notes on cleaning techniques that worked and ones that didn’t right there on the web?  What if Tony Sigel had a series of brilliant YouTube clips showing tips for treating ceramics?  Rogue exhibit critiques with Toby Raphael?

Only a small percentage of what I am doing is unique or mature enough to bother jumping through the hoops of journal publication.

But plenty of my files are interesting…

…To folks on lab tours: here is more detail on what happens behind-the-scenes
…To the scientist at NOAA: can we collaborate on this project?
…To the grant committee: here is this prototype of what I would do with the money
…To the prospective intern: this is what working with me would be like, are we a good fit?

Plenty of files in the AIC office are interesting too.  Documents on the history of the organization.  Discussions and reports about difficult issues like certification.  Letters to AIC.  Writings from the Kecks.  Do you have to go to Delaware to read the AIC oral history project?  I would love to see pdf postings of all the past conference brochures!

My own blog doesn’t even need to generate new material…I just need to clean up and post the useful stuff that’s already on my hard drive.  I think AIC could do the same.  And so could you.  If you look at my blog it is probably obvious that what I want is a real webpage, but I can’t be bothered with learning how to set it up.  In fact, I’m pretty bad with technology in general.  If you see a hyperlink (is that the right word?) in this posting, it is because the folks at the IMA know how to make it work, not me.  But a weblog is an easy place to dump my content for everyone to use, and best of all, it has a comment section to allow collaboration.

So, what do you think?

I’m kind of surprised that Mr. Cull didn’t beat me up about the 10 or 20 typos in the article.  After thinking about this for a while I’ve come to realize that the typos don’t bother me.  Really they don’t.  I’m more interested in the ideas, the Content written with a big “C,” and feedback.

CeROArt

But, listen, I know typos really can irritate people.  A typo = unprofessional, unpolished, not quite perfect.   Typos are mistakes that could have been corrected if more time had been spent proofreading and copy editing.  Usually, though, we don’t like talking about mistakes, especially when it comes to art conservators – those of us that are given the responsibility of preserving and even occasional physically intervening with cultural property.  I feel pretty comfortable when I say, in general, museums also don’t like talking about mistakes; they don’t like talking about when art gets stolen, broken, damaged, or lost.  In every museum I’ve worked for, visited, or interned at I’ve witnessed people working diligently to reduce the potential for mistakes to happen.  Most that work in museums believe in the importance of art in a profound way. But mistakes still happen.  Muriel Verbeeck-Boutin, CeROArt’s editor in chief, discusses what it means for art conservators to make mistakes, and how we can change our minds by learning from them.  I don’t think she’s calling for an international movement to start talking about all the mistakes we make in museums, but a little more dialogue around this topic seems in order.  To that end, I’m glad that CeROArt decided to devote an entire issue to L’erreur, la faute, le faux.  And I’m glad they invited me to write an article in English, and not in French.

While my typos are one kind of problem, I have serious doubts that everyone is in agreement that this article even counts as a “real publication.” After all it’s in an online journal, it’s not a “real journal,” right?  CeROArt is one of only a few free, online journals (the other one that I think of is e-conservation ).

Are “professional publications” something that you have to hold in your hand and then stick on a shelf, or stick someplace different all together?  Is there a difference in legitimacy in the things that are actually printed and physical and the things that you read on your screen?  Is there a difference between the content you see in a catalogue, the Internet , and a gallery label?

Of course, I think my article is a legitimate publication, and that the topic is timely and important.  I’m not going to make a substantial effort to quantify the difference between print and screen publications.  That’s somebody else’s work.  Clearly, there is a difference between the two.  Not everything is better on the screen; I only read literature in books with real pages.  But I don’t really want to read data and information from a book anymore; I want that on a screen.  I need to acquire information quickly and efficiently, and I need to be able to compare it for my own purposes.

It’s fair to say that there are all sorts of new, legitimate “professional publications.” For example, conservators can list blog publications on a C.V., or list Flickr sets they’ve made around a conservation project.  The IMA conservation department has made some excellent Flickr projects that are as informative and timely as many print publications that I’ve read recently.  I even think doing work on a Wikipedia article can be a professional publication.  I certainly think it would be an important professional activity if a conservator played a major role in writing about the degradation of plastic on the Wikipedia article for Plastic?

But, if you’re reading this blog, I probably didn’t need to tell you any of this.  I’m guessing that it’s those that don’t look to the screen for information that disagree with me.  I guess the only way to get to them is to print this post out, give it to them and ask them to send me a letter in the mail about the topic.  (By the way, that would be totally amazing if it actually happened.)

So what about my typos?  Oh, yeah, those.  Actually, my typos point to one of the benefits of not publishing an article in print.  If I really, really wanted to I could find all the mistakes I made and then send them to CeROArt and they could fix them. I think I’d rather just move forward and let them be.

Finally, the real benefit of online publications is that they have the potential to be seen by everyone in the world, at any time of day they want.  That’s awfully cool.  If only CeROArt had a comment section, then there’d be potential for some feedback on their site.  But then wouldn’t it just be a blog?  Maybe we should collectively rename online journals and blogs to something more professional.  That way when they are printed out folks will know they are extra real.

In addition to Tyler’s post, Ms. Genger’s installation was also discussed in Interior Design and Ana Finel Honigman interviewed Ms. Genger over at Saatchi Online. Don’t forget Ms. Genger herself wrote a post for this blog back in December.

Almost the whole installation

Anyway, you might be surprised to hear that we actually considered the possibility of someone trying to climb one of the pieces, and more specifically the possibility of someone bumping into one and toppling it. Be warned, though, Ms. Genger is awfully clever and with the help of Larry Smallwood (a freelance project manager), an internal support system was engineered to prohibit this from happening. Without going into the details I can say it’s highly unlikely that one of these pieces will topple. But, please trust me on this one: don’t come over and “test them out” for yourself.

I bring this up as an example of how we spend a lot of time around here considering things that our visitor may not be aware of. We take seriously the representation and care of our artworks. In fact, to focus on complex installations like Ms. Genger’s this institution developed an interdisciplinary team dedicated to the care and representation of artworks that we consider “variable.” In short, we say that variable art is a term that defines art that possesses changing observable state.

While Ms. Genger’s artwork likely will not vary considerably while on view as part of the “Whole” installation, we’ve been thinking about what it will mean to separate our newest acquisition, “Len,” from this installation, and then represent it in a new location. Remember, we didn’t acquire the entire installation, just our new friend Len. You can see him in the picture above in the bottom right corner.

Anticipating the possibility of the IMA acquiring one of Ms. Genger’s pieces, Lisa Freiman and I sat down with Ms. Genger the day after her excellent Artist Talk. We excerpted a segment of what conservators call an “artist interview” to hear Lisa talk about one of the reasons she was drawn to Ms. Genger’s work; you can here that excerpt on the “Whole” web page. The excerpt picks up in the middle of the conversation in which Lisa is talking about why she let out a loud laugh during Ms. Genger’s Artist Talk.

In case you’re really interested in the artist interview, here it is in entirety:
Artist Interview with Orly Genger, Lisa Freiman, and Richard McCoy

In the interview I try to cover as many technical aspects of her work as possible. Art conservators are constantly researching from what and how art is made, and what better time to figure all of this out than just after art is made? Just think if there were recorded conversations with some of your favorite artists from the past. Those sure would help conservators out a lot.

But doing an artist interview is just one of the things we do to gather information about contemporary projects. While the project is being planned we’re constantly collecting information and images that describe and define it the process and final product. The hope is that this information will be useful the next time an artwork is installed, be that next year or 100 years from now.

Here’s something from the Genger project I find particularly interesting and helpful.

Artwork Installation Plan

It’s a plan drawing that illustrates the final placement of all of the pieces in the “Whole” installation. I won’t describe all of the details but it is important to point out that we worked hand and hand with Ms. Genger to make sure that the pieces were installed just how she wanted them, while at the same time insuring that we were providing proper access in the space for movement and egress. This is just a fraction of the information that the “Variable Art Team” collected during this project. In case you’d like to know more about this, I’d like to point you to a couple of great resources:

The Tate’s Media Matters project
The European Union project, Inside Installations
International Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Artworks (INCCA)

So, finally, I’d like to say, please be nice to Ms. Genger’s installation while it’s here at the IMA. And, I’d like to suggest one way for Tyler to get his hands on his own and very portable Orly Genger. He can go here and get one of her necklaces.