After reading a previous blog about museum storage, we thought it would be fun to share the fine work of our Packing & Storage Department. John Ross, one of our Storage & Packing Technicians, created a beautifully-crafted housing to store the headdress of an African dancer’s costume. This costume is of the Poro Society – a society mainly found on the Western coast of Africa. The term Wenilegei means “bird man,” so I guess one could say that John contained the “bird man!”

If we had thought of this earlier, we would have taken images of John hard at work in the beginning stages developing the housing. What we do have are great images showing the final outcome! Like much of our collection resting in permanent storage, developing its housing required a number of considerations:

• What is needed to protect it from dust?
• How can we minimize light exposure?
• What type of housing will minimize unnecessary handling?
• Will this housing be understood by the next art handler?
• Overall: What do we need to best protect it?

In addition to those thoughts, our Storage and Packing Technicians also need to accommodate existing storage space, which is rather limited. Some considerations that affect the type of housing are:

• Where are similar objects housed and is there room for this to join them?
• When will it be accessed in the future?

For permanent storage, this headdress and cloak will be stored separately due to limited space in storage and having different storage requirements.

This headdress requires a customized base to accommodate the chin strap, so it is not forced to bend sharply – potentially causing it to break off over time. To do this, a raised circular shape was built for the headdress to “lock onto” while grooves were cut to create a smooth slope for the chin strap. After John took detailed dimension after dimension, he created the below archival base (nice, huh?).

John regularly uses Ethafoam and Volara, archival quality materials, to create tailored storage housings. The open cell Ethafoam functions as a stable base while the smooth, closed cell Volara is added to provide a smooth surface for the headdress to come into contact. The Ethafoam and Volara are somewhat pliable, which allowed him to create a snug fit without unintentionally abrading the surface of the headdress. This type of customized housing also prevents the headdress from shifting or moving while being handled.

Once the base was taken care of, we needed to address the dust and light exposure issue. John created a Foam core box for the Ethafoam base to slide in to. This will prevent dust from gathering on the feathers over time. The easily-opened front flap allows us to see the headdress without unnecessary handling or movement. The label also aids us by providing information without having to open the box at all.

Like many other pieces in storage, the mount for this headdress required a good deal of planning, designing and attention to detail – something our Storage & Packing staff are no strangers to. With the help of Jesse, Rob, and John, we are able to create unique housings for our wide range of collections. Thank you, John, for your hard work! We (and the “bird man”) appreciate it! To see this headdress with its cloak in person, be sure to visit the next Textile Arts exhibition, “Material World” in the Spring of 2011.

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.

If you missed last Thursday’s talk by Modern Art Notes blogger Tyler Green at the Central Library, presented by iMOCA, we’ve got you covered. Overall the talk was insightful–intriguing to those outside the arts world and passion-evoking for those intimately involved in the arts. “We all agree too much. Maybe we’re afraid to say the wrong thing,” said Green at the opening of his talk.

The afternoon before speaking, Green spent some time wandering the galleries of the IMA. The following are Tweets from Green’s visit to the IMA. You can “follow” Green on Twitter by clicking here.

• At Indy Museum of Art. Sweet.
• Digging Emile Bernard. Color, composition, his way of eliminating depth.
• Denis’ The Breton Dance from 1891 shows how important he would be to Bonnard and Vuillard and how they showed foliage/landscape.
• Rembrandt 20something self-portrait is fantastic and weird. Light. Diagonal of cap. Open mouth.
• Early Titian (20ish) portrait is creepy and soothing. Something odd about the eyes. And fur trim on coat is more painterly than hair.
• Fine Prints for Five Dollars at IMA is the most fun I’ve had in a prints gallery in eons. I hope the show is on http://imamuseum.org.
• Emile Bernard’s Yellow Christ: fascinating apostles. Mask-like: recalls later Picasso; simple, direct feature that recall very late Matisse.
• IMA Sandback space is haunting. Untitled diagonal going out window into beyond…
  

Green spoke to a crowd about the 10 (or more) things he hates about contemporary art, along with a brief explanation. Here is a short summary of what he had to say:

1. Mary Cassatt, American impressionist painter, 1844-1926: Green thinks her babies look unhappy and her children resemble horses. Judge for yourself by viewing Cassatt’s work in the IMA’s collection.
2. Sir Peter Paul Ruben’s “Daniel and the Lions Den”, c.1614/1616: To Green, the image just doesn’t make logical sense. How do the lions get in and out of there?
3. Jackson Pollock, American abstract expressionist painter, 1912-1956: Green feels the artist is more important than his art is great.
4. Political art such as work by Richard Serra: “It’s like a pop song you can’t get out of your head,” said Green.
5. We don’t have ambition for art like we did 100-200 years ago: The biggest thing we do is prevent $20 million from being cut from the National Endowment for the Arts budget. Green thinks we need to start thinking about what our nation’s priorities should be and how art can play a part. Increasing art education funding would be a good place to start.
6. The national/international landscape now: Green showed works that capture the ecological damage we are creating through consumption.
7. Art writing: Green played a game with the audience, asking them to differentiate between “real” published art critic and made-up language created from The Instant Art Critique Phrase Generator. He found himself confused, but the crowd seemed to get the difference.
8. Hypocrisy: Green hates hypocrisy but “love(s) how art can reveal it.” He showed examples that hung in Pastor Ted Haggard’s megachurch.
9. “I hate that big parts of America are left out of the art world.”: Green said that New York is not the be-all, end-all. Other places can be just as important. Green cited the IMA’s new “kick ass” Robert Irwin light installation saying, “It might be the best Irwin installed anywhere in America.” In the Q&A portion of his talk, Green went on to explain that in order for arts to flourish in a city, art schools, available studio space, people who buy art as part of the culture, and tremendous museum collections as visual community are all needed.
10. Letting the art market be a compass for what we think of art: Curators and collectors often follow the art market, placing value on artists and works that are most expensive. Green says to resist it.
11. “Artists statements suck.”

Green became a successful blogger by disagreeing with those around him and breaking news. We encourage open discussion on the IMA Blog and hope you will participate by commenting. And most especially, we thank the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art for giving Indy the opportunity to meet Tyler Green.

Tyler Green

You may recall a few mentions of Tyler Green here on our blog.  He is the author of the distinguished art blog Modern Art Notes (MAN).  Waves of giggles and high-fives have radiated through IMA each time we get a mention among the national heavyweights featured on MAN (Except this recent one, which we internalized as an interesting challenge, emboldening our collective spirit).

So you can only imagine the excitement now that he is in Indy.  He will be giving a talk at the Central Library tonight entitled, “Ten Things I Hate About Contemporary Art.” This visit has been organized by the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art.

To borrow a quote from IMCPL’s description of the program, the Wall Street Journal called MAN, “the most influential of all visual arts blogs.”  So I hope you are already checking your calendar, because this is an event not to be missed!  I hope to see many IMA blog readers there! Come say hi and collect a free IMA Blog t-shirt!  (While supplies last, of course!)

The details: Central Library (40 E. St. Clair St.), 7 PM, FREE  For more information visit IMCPL website www.imcpl.org.

Michael Kimmelman– Rocked my world in 2007! Last year I read his book The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa and it changed the way I think about art, my job and my life. I’m also pretty sure he may have one of the coolest gigs in the world, as the chief art critic for the New York Times.

Tyler Green – First of all, he’s all MAN. I’m in awe of Tyler’s authoritative and often humorous blog postings for Artjournal’s Modern Art Notes (MAN). He keeps me in the know and constantly brightens my days with his prolific musings on the art world. I’m also completely in love with him because he just added the IMA to his blog roll.

Philippe de Montebello – Philippe is my original art crush. He’s been director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art since before I was born and I’ve always had a little thing for him. Not “little thing” actually…I’m talking Beatle’s Mania sort of “thing.” Honest to goodness, I might swoon if I ever meet him.

Kathy Halbreich – Not that there’s anything wrong with it, but I LOVE this woman. Actually, I don’t just LOVE Kathy Halbreich, I want to BE Kathy Halbreich. As former Director of the Walker Art Center, she was at the helm of one of the coolest arts organizations in the country. This woman is a visionary, a risk taker, and an enormous inspiration for me professionally.

Will Gompertz – This guy is as hip as they come. As Director of Tate Media at the Tate Museum in England, he has my ideal job. In addition to overseeing Tate’s Communications team and Tate’s magazine (TATE, ETC.), he also is the Director of Tate Online, a leader, if not the leader in Digital Media for museums. Check out those glasses. How could you not fall in love with this man?!