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

Blog: My Parents Were Awesome

New inspired crowd-sourcing blog, ‘My Parents Were Awesome‘, collects evidence that, “before the fanny packs and Andrea Bocelli concerts, your parents (and grandparents) were once free-wheeling, fashion-forward, and super awesome.”

(via buzzfeed)

ArtBabble Video: Orly Genger: In The Factory

IMA Work of Art:

Dog Stealing Fish by Ando Hiroshige

Tweet:

iheartSAM: Construction to fix hammering man begins this week. Read @seattletimes coverage on him at http://bit.ly/4lScXc http://bit.ly/2RGYbi

The Design & Installation team taking down Orly Genger: Whole

It seems this exhibition was one of those you either love or hate. I for one loved it. The way it sat and overwhelmed the space and the hefty gargantuan sizes of the pieces made it feel epic every time I rode the escalators up to the galleries. Not only did the finished pieces impress me, but the amount of work put into them was equally as staggering as the size. What I loved is that you get slapped right in the face with a dose of contemporary artwork as soon as you get inside and you are forced you to think.

However, I overheard a lot of people who were irate about the artwork! What’s that, you don’t agree with me?? Visitor comments always show how passionate people are about the art in our galleries, and Whole was certainly no exception. Thanks to @katiezarich and Roz Wells I got access (shhh, don’t tell!) to our comment cards and gathered the best of the worst. In the spirit of transparency I thought I’d share a few…

There’s no place to sit in the Oval. If you’re waiting to be picked up, you can’t see anything. This rope is awful and it’s been here too long!

The “Whole” exhibit disturbs the beauty of the soaring entry space, creating an obstruction with blocks of massive nothingnous with no grace. Take them away, please.

Horrible display in the lobby. Who ever made the decision to display “Whole” needs Prozac!

The stuff in the lobby is offensive and is not perceived by me as “art.”

Orly Genger: This reminds me of the Gordian Knot in the time of Alexander the Great.

I have a comment about the exhibit in the lobby. I really like the black things but why did you put something in the lobby that we can’t touch? We have been wondering for a long time.

I thought the exhibit (Whole) was metal. I really like this and I want to touch it.

The Orly Gener rope exhibit is ugly.

I find the lobby exhibit terribly ugly, depressing, unbelievable & a great waste of money.

I feel like I’m in a fort.

New Exhibit: Takes up too much space in the lobby!

The exhibit in the oval is interesting, but please move it to another area. It does not present a welcoming image of the museum–particularly during the haledays (sic).

While I might not agree, rest assured we are reading your comments and we take them all seriously. If you are still a “Whole hater” I’ll try one more time to convert you with this beautiful video produced by IMA’s Nugget Factory.

Ok, I couldn’t resist so here’s one more beautiful photo set of the artwork on Flickr:

What happens to Whole now?

If you are wondering what happens to the artwork next, I asked Sarah Green that exact question and she said:

One of the sculptures is now part of the IMA’s permanent collection. It’s the one named “Len” that is four square columns that come together to form a larger square. The rest of the pieces are being dismantled and returned to the artist.

Up next in the Efroymson Entrance?

Coming soon to the Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion: Judith Levy’s Memory Cloud. The installation will be comprised of a monumental “cloud” made from white plastic photo viewers that hang on strands of microfilament. That won’t be here until July, so stay tuned for updates.

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.

I’m obsessed with making something that matters. I’m obsessed with working. And I believe that it is only through hard work that good work is made.

One of the most important things to me has always been to keep my hands moving, to keep making things. I worry about what I make and what it means after I make it.  I also used to think that talking about art, especially your own art, ruins it. That’s partly why I dropped out of art school. But I’ve softened on that in recent years, which is maybe a result of having gone to art school. I do talk here and there about my work and hope it won’t ruin anything, but instead reveal a bit about the way I’m thinking, at least in the moment.

Overhead shot of "Whole"

For my show at the IMA I wanted to make sculptures that could stand on their own. I had previously created pieces that were sprawling and boundless and all consuming, the structures of which relied heavily on the spaces they inhabited. But this time I attempted to make sculptures that were contained, pieces that had a beginning and an end. And pieces that could be here, there, or anywhere but are themselves wherever they are and that rely only on themselves to be what they are.

There are nine stacks in the show. I used the most reductive forms of building to create mass-accumulation and repetition. My intention was to simplify my obsessive process into its most basic elements in order to reveal it, to expose the layers of building and to create a texture that is purely based on the movement of my hand making the knots.

Corner detail

People ask me if making my work is relaxing or meditative. It’s not. Working with these ropes is physically challenging. They are big and heavy and clumsy. I sweat, I curse, and I feel like I’m wrestling with an octopus.  There is a sense of accomplishment in overcoming a physical challenge. It is through endurance, and an intense level of psychological commitment and invariance that we push through the toughest of times. There is always a struggle and there are always challenges. I am fueled by the desire to overcome them.

Orly and Joe

We all have a need to flex. Whether it’s showing off our biceps and inflating our chest or wearing high heels and feathers in our caps, we want to be bigger. We want to be better.  My work attempts to deal with the hyperbolic nature of this survival tendency. Each stack is named after a different Mr. Universe champion from the ‘60s and ‘70s. They are not my heroes, but they are big men.

There are also moments of lightness, of fragility and gentleness. I like to pretend I am a boxer dishing out a bloody beating followed by a ballerina dancing with my toes barely skimming the ground.  And then I like to imagine that my work is the product of these two people falling in love. There is precision and there is rawness. And there is the combination of the two that creates the tension that I am attracted to.

But nothing I say matters all that much. It’s what I do. I believe in action. In what I choose to leave behind. In what I take the time to devote myself to. In the end it’s the work that matters.

The first in-house video I worked on at the IMA was re-editing an African Pottery Techniques documentary shot in Burkina Faso.  At the time, it was a pretty big step for the museum – to actually do this in-house, quickly, easily and for free.  When I compare that to our latest  video release on Orly Genger’s installation “Whole”, I kind of laugh.  We shot this video in HD, incorporated Time Lapse, used a lift for certain shots and then published to YouTube.  Check it out below.

My colleague Dan Dark recently recorded the Christmas at Lilly House tour with the LH Director, Bradley Brooks in an afternoon.  Dan then finalized and edited in the space of a few hours, then uploaded it to our Guide by Cell account.  Visitors to Lilly House can access this content by using their cell phone. Our first Christmas at Lilly House involved a lot more time editing and recording, and incorporated the Dell DJ Ditty mp3 players.  I am actually laughing….but it worked at the time.  We plan on increasing our audio content across all of IMA’s collections in 2009, and I am incredibly excited about some of the concepts we are planning.  But I can’t discuss those yet…

imamuseum.org/blog is almost a year old.  It’s been a really exciting year for the blog with some superb posts from all over the museum.  I’m proud when I think that internally, the IMA supports a variety of areas blogging.  Where else can you go and hear directly from conservation, security, horticulture or an artist duo?  We’ve come a long way from the Felix Gonzalez-Torres blog (did anyone ever see that?) we setup a few years ago, and our imamuseum.org drupal based blog just a year ago.  Sometime we get it wrong.  Sometimes we get it right.

I’m also reflecting on past projects because I can’t quite share some of the upcoming projects in 2009, yet.  I’m dying to, and the second I can I will post.  The main change in the digital content we produce is an increased focus on the contemporary world.  The Toby, Contemporary department as well as the opening of 100 Acres in 2009, presents access to cutting edge artists, performers and academics.  That means content opportunities that will become audio guides, videos, and web projects.  It’s gonna be a big year, and we plan on making ‘09 the best for the museum visitor and technology-focused experiences.  It’s all about keeping the momentum.

And in closing, this is Despi’s last day at the museum.  She’s been an integral part of the IMA and New Media, a dedicated professional, supportive colleague, and more importantly, a friend.  Best of luck Darnell!

Tentacles of the Beast, 2008

I just returned from a trip to New York in the height of the August heat with all of the lovely smells and suffocating humidity that comes with it. The goal of this trip? To spend as much time with artists and their work as possible, to slip into the city’s unique rhythms and magic anonymously and deeply. To see again.

My first experience with art on this trip happened unexpectedly and almost immediately. When I got to my Midtown hotel to drop off my bags before rushing down to a Chelsea studio on 26th Street, I pulled back my curtains and opened the windows, letting in the outside air to equalize the freezing air in my room. Set before me was a Hitchcockian scene, a 21st century Rear Window. I looked outside of my room on the eighth floor and saw various people engaged in quiet, disparate activities: in one window a woman busy at her desk, in another two people kissing, and an old man walking out onto the fire escape to grab a secret smoke. There were silent intimate recognitions, an awareness that we were all seeing each other, despite our resistance to acknowledging it, a fierce refusal to allow our eyes to meet directly. Extreme privacy and exposure both at once. I was reminded of the Impressionist era opera paintings where the subject of the work is spectatorship, the reciprocal experience of looking and being looked at. What happens in the space between.

The old man turned out to be a performance artist of sorts. Standing on the balcony he pulled open a new pack of cigarettes, removing the small bit of rectangular foil and carefully and intentionally released it in midair. My first reaction to his gesture was anger, but this soon yielded to embarrassment at witnessing his private transgression, an acknowledgment that we all have these moments but never want to admit to them. And then something happened: the small piece of foil wafted through the air, catching the glints of sunlight like some precious, weightless gem released from outer space. Watching it descend and flutter eight floors to the ground, I found myself smiling completely, awed by the simple beauty that such a common object could bring to this very particular context and moment. And then I realized that the old man had dropped the foil just for me, enacting a private performance pointing to the Beautiful, an experience of the Sublime.

Type A and Lisa

Then on to Chelsea to meet up with collective Type A (Adam Ames and Andrew Bordwin), two artists with whom I’m working on a major Team Building project for the much anticipated Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park which will open in September 2009. The streets of Chelsea were mostly abandoned, the dealers secreted away in the Hamptons for the last gasp of summer before the frenzy of season openers in September. Adam and Andrew and I were about to head to South Street Seaport to take the Circle Line around the Harbor to see Olafur Eliasson’s Waterfalls project.  When I got to their studio, they were excited to show me a new body of work, a series of photogravures that they had been developing over the past year.

Untitled, Type A, 2008. Courtesy of the artists and Goff & Rosenthal, New York.

They laid them out before me and talked about their menacing quality and I disagreed with them immediately, saying that the series was emphatically intimate, beautiful, vulnerable, romantic, mysterious, nostalgic, and poetic. The velvety, luscious images depict the artists’ bodies posed in extreme shadow to reveal only a fragment of the whole. Each picture presents one body separate and alone, but inevitably in dialogical relation to the other. The best ones verge on abstraction, where the forms become almost unrecognizable, but forcefully organic and referential. Because Adam and Andrew each took the complementary picture of the other, there is a fascinating duality to the works that encapsulates Adam and Andrew’s unorthodox artistic relationship, a kind of unified portrait of the maker and the sitter, a self and other, a presence and a lack. In most photographic situations the photographer and the sitter usually are unrelated, but these images take on more significance because of Adam and Andrew’s collaborative practices over the past ten years. There is an interesting in-betweenness in these photos, a tension between the two of them that is an unspoken but visual and physical form of intimacy.

Adam, Andrew and I had a lively, rambunctious cab ride downtown to experience Olafur Eliasson’s Waterfalls from a boat. Approaching the Pier on a hot New York summer night, I was blanketed by the smell of saltwater and sea air along with the accompanying odor of diesel fumes. It reminded me of my youth at the New Jersey shore (and of another incredible project that Adam and Andrew are developing. . . more to come on that in a future post, perhaps). Now the art was coming to me in the form of a smell, showing me the way an odor can evoke memories and physical sensations, creating an elusive mental picture that fades immediately upon experiencing it, leaving a satisfying sense of longing and desire for a past that can never be completely reconstructed. Standing in line, Andrew had me turn around to see an old ship and the skyline of downtown New York through its masts. More magic in everyday things.

South Street Seaport near the Circle Line

The waterfalls are remarkable and ordinary at the same time. Our favorite one sat beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, itself a work of art. The majestic bridge juxtaposed with the immense scaffolding of Eliasson’s waterfall’s armature was strikingly beautiful and perfectly sited; the scale of hundreds of feet of rushing water against the backdrop of the bridge and cityscape utterly breathtaking and pleasurable. The irrationality of a manmade waterfall made from hundreds of feet of steel and pumps, sitting in an absurd location, pointed to the unlikely relationship between art, nature, urban infrastructure, and the postindustrial present.

So much more happened on the trip, including a wonderful studio visit with sculptor Petah Coyne who is finishing up a new body of work that will premiere at Galerie Lelong on October 24, 2008. I’ve been watching the work develop over the last few years and have been lucky enough to engage with Petah in an intense dialogue about its relationship to art history, literature (particularly Dante’s renowned epic poem The Divine Comedy), film, and personal memory. I think it is some of the best work that she has produced to date. There are two objects that stand out the most for me, one based on the medieval poet Dante’s idealized, beloved Beatrice and the other on the Roman poet Virgil. I would welcome either of these objects into the IMA’s permanent collection with gusto, just in case there’s anyone out there reading with the will and means to help us grow the collection with a single gesture.

Petah Coyne, Untitled #1180 (Beatrice), 2003-08. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong, New York.

I have fallen in love with Coyne’s Beatrice, once described by Dante as “La gloriosa donna della mia mente” (the glorious lady of my mind). Long the subject of Pre-Raphaelite artists and poets, Beatrice has been transformed anew into a peculiar abstract vision comprised of roughly 20,000 silk flowers, wax cast statuary, taxidermy animals and birds, thread, silk/rayon velvet, felt, tree branches, tree bark, driftwood, specially formulated wax, pearl-headed hat pins, black spray paint, pigment, plywood, wood, metal hardware, chicken wire fencing, wire, cable and cable bolts. With all of these components, one would be hard pressed to believe that the final object could be specific, cohesive, and staggering. But it is.

Petah Coyne, Detail, Untitled #1180 (Beatrice), 2003-08. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong, New York.

Petah’s irresistible blue and purple Beatrice, which contrasts with previous depictions of her in red and white, towers over the spectator at just over eleven feet tall; she is the whirling embodiment of Divine Love, virtue, and grace, a force of good, a personification of Beauty. This condensed representation of essential love simultaneously encapsulates the geography of paradise and its most famous guide.

Petah Coyne makes the viewer want to believe in Heaven, even if s/he has her doubts.

And then an amazing dinner conversation with Orly Genger who is in the midst of developing a powerful commissioned project for our Efroymson Entry Pavilion which will open on November 21, 2008. Orly once told me that she sees her work perched at the intersection of Anni Albers and Richard Serra. This colossal hand-knotted, organic installation is going to be amazing. Be prepared to be moved in lots of ways!

Then back to Indianapolis to escort a Chicago-based blogger around the Art & Nature Park. Walking out of the rear loading dock, heading over towards the Park, I ran into two IMA employees, Brad Dilger, our masterful installation tech who handles all of our intermedia art projects with great innovation and commitment, and Brose Partington, a fabulous artist in his own right who helps build mounts and other things for our exhibitions. Walking over to me with impish grins, they asked me to take a look at two shiny, ribbed aluminum venting pipes that were spilling out of a dark mechanical doorway on the side of our limestone building. Tied together and suspended on the side of the building, the functional pipes looked like part of a Tim Hawkinson installation (perhaps I was thinking this because on Monday I just installed a new addition to our collection, Hawkinson’s Mobius Ship, up on the third floor in the contemporary galleries). Upon closer inspection, I saw an object label (perfectly scaled and formatted) haphazardly affixed to one of the exhaust pipes.  On it someone had typed the following words:

Tentacles of the Beast, 2008
Aluminum on Limestone
Building Services
2008.1

I marveled at this installation of shiny pipes and the gesture invoked by our Building Services employees through naming it. Although I knew it was meant as a spoof, the effort that they made to name this everyday functional form moved me; the fact that they named it was a way of seeing in it its artistry and humor. It brought the Beautiful back to me again in another guise. It is always a good sign for a creative institution when things like this start popping up around the building where people work. And I thought how great it was that so many people sitting at the smoking shack – custodians, electricians, curators, preparators – were talking about the question of what made something art. Could a set of aluminum exhaust pipes transform into a sculpture in situ? The very real act of seeing was happening in the IMA’s back yard, people were talking about art and the everyday. It was exceptionally cool.

Tentacles of the Beast, 2008

So I asked Bert Reader, our facilities engineer, a.k.a., the artist, to share a little bit more about the work. Here’s what he said:

“This whole contraption came about in an effort to eliminate the need for the temporary emergency generator which cost the IMA about $1000 per day just to sit there.  Part of the reason for the recent generator failure was that the room air temperature became too hot when the generator ran. Adapters where purchased from Caterpillar and mounted on the combustion air intake manifolds.  12″ aluminum flexible pipes were connected and they were run outside allowing combustion air to be drawn in at ambient conditions. We are currently working with BDMD and Circle Design group to find a permanent solution.  Hester DeLoach [our typesetter] remarked that the pipes look like tentacles, David Lingeman [from Buildings] noted that it was aluminum on limestone, and the generator has been a beast, a problem child, since it was placed there, hence the title.  Someone mentioned that it looked like it was trying to get out, and interestingly enough had we placed the generator outside to begin with, we wouldn’t have had any issues.”

Art is found in the places in between. It is the responsibility of each of us to open ourselves up to seeing it.