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:
Download audio file (interview_with_orly_genger_and_lisa_freiman_and_richard_mccoy_11_21_08_32k.mp3)

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.

Here’s the link to Lunder’s Twitter Site.  I’ve been following them since I first saw that blog post; I also follow a few other people: one of my brothers, a friend, an artist, and so on.  I’ve never posted anything to my Twitter account, but I do update my “status” on my Facebook account somewhat frequently, which is a lot like using Twitter.  Who knows why it so compelling to let my “friends” know what I’m up to, but I do it.

I hope by this point you’re asking yourself why the Lunder Center (or anyone) is tweeting or updating their facebook status.  Because that’s what I’ve been asking myself recently.  Why are we interested in doing this?  Are we deepening the way we communicate; or is the way we are communicating, searching, reading, and surfing on the internet changing us?  In the end I think this is the more interesting question: how is technology changing the way we think?

With Linda’s post last week and then Damon Darlin’s article, Technology Doesn’t Dumb Us Down. It Frees Our Minds in the NYT, which was a response to Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic Monthly article Is Google Making Us Stupid?, I’ve been kicking these thoughts around recently.

Of course, I don’t really have any answers, and I trust you weren’t expecting them from me.  To pair all of this down to a sentence or two: I don’t think technology is making us stupid, and, well, I really don’t think it’s making us any smarter.  But I am thrilled to be at this moment when technology is opening doors that were previously closed, showing us into parts of the museum (and every other part of society) that were previously off limits, and allowing us to collaborative work together on projects that are greater than each individual.

Listen to Clay Shirky at the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo talk about “waking up from the collective bender” we’ve been having on our free time and you’ll know what I mean.  I for one agree with him about the idea of “carving out a bit of the cognitive surplus” and putting it to good use.  And of course agree that it’s better to do something rather than to do nothing with “free time” (one of his arguments I find a bit tough: that playing World of Warcraft is more productive than watching a sitcom like The Office).

So, maybe this is why I’m so interested in following museum projects with Twitter, or why I’m willing blog for the IMA, read other conservation blogs, work on Wikipedia projects, or fool with Facebook (mind you I really don’t mess with any of these things while I’m here at the IMA, I’m just too busy with the “work” work I do. Honestly, that’s the truth.  I do all that stuff at home, on my free time.). I’m willing to do it because it’s doing something not nothing.  (Another side note here, the other weekend I made an application in Facebook that allows you to send art conservation tools to your friends – because they may need them.  I’ll let you be judge if this is doing something or doing nothing.)

I remember sometime ago when Tyler Green over at Modern Art Notes announced  that he was on Facebook, but then said “Not sure what I’ll do with it, but I’m open to suggestions.”  (Yes, he’s on also Twitter .)   Yeah, “open to suggestions.”  Me too.  I think that’s a big difference: it seems everyone and everything is now open for suggestions or discussion, or is just plain open. This is a change in thinking.  I think this proves that technology has the potential to free our minds, not make us more stupid.

I feel a need to bring this back to art conservation because, in the end, that’s what I do and what I’m nominally supposed to be writing about.  Using technology to talk about conservation or work on conservation projects has plenty of positives.  And doing it in an open way has the potential to get more people involved and make the work that we are doing in the museum more accessible.  Do I think using Twitter to let you have up-to-the-minute updates on what the conservators are doing on projects is a good idea?  I don’t know, and I don’t think I’ll be up for answering that anytime soon (unless, of course, the Nugget Factory decides to pony up the money to cover my cell phone data plan to let me experiment with it).

Finally, then, I’d like to take this post in a slightly different but related direction and end with another question: how does all of this technology and accessibility change our understanding of and interest in art?  I’m fairly certain that all of the art in the IMA’s collection has nothing to do with you sitting at home looking at a computer screen; you have to come here to see it.  Because I work in conservation, I’m reminded on a daily basis that art is a physical thing: it has dimension, occupies space, and in some ways is living a life here at the IMA.  A flat, glowing screen can’t relay this kind of information; art must be viewed and experienced in person.

Here’s my attempt to reduce this to a tweet: “Richard McCoy is unsure how technology influences viewing art.”