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

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

Charles Esche:

Charles Esche – Van Abbemuseum from incca on Vimeo.

Peter van Mensche:

Peter van Mensch – Reinwardt Academie from incca on Vimeo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.