This Saturday, you can experience the sounds Nick Hennies as he performs music from his forthcoming album, Psalms, as well as Objects, a new work dedicated to the exhibition Tara Donovan: Untitled and composed especially for this installation.

Drawing connections to Donovan’s work, Hennies’ piece makes seemingly familiar sounds become strange and new.

Check out one of Nick’s performances below:

New Sound Facilities #1 – Nick Hennies & Sandy Ewen from You and Yours on Vimeo.

For the past 16 weeks I’ve been volunteering my Monday mornings in the Variable Art Conservation Lab to clean and maintain the 6 room-size installations in the Tara Donovan exhibition, Untitled, which closes in less than 2 weeks on August 1st. Back in March I volunteered to help construct these complex installations under the guidance of Tara, her assistants, and alongside 15 other volunteers. The initial installation took this team more than 60 hours over the course of 8 intense days.

On the night of the opening party I remember walking through the exhibition with a friend and proudly pointing to certain areas of installations in which I worked the most. I talked about the specific areas in Untitled (Plastic Cups) where I sat and stacked cups in order to execute Tara’s plan. And then, after Tara and her assistants returned to New York, I became Richard’s go-to guy for cleaning and maintaining the installations.

Untitled (Plastic Cups) 2006, Courtesy of Artie and Millie Glimcher

Looking back I think I had a false sense of agency on opening night, a false sense that my aesthetic had entered the installations in some way. Now, after spending all this time with Tara’s artworks, I’ve thought a lot about her process, and along the way regained perspective on the minor role I played in Tara’s work. Tara’s art is the unique process she discovered for each instance. Tara’s ideas have the artistic merit; I was simply a means to help realize them here in Indianapolis.

I no longer care about my specific contributions. When I’m working in the exhibition I focus on each installation’s overall aesthetic and its complete impression—and I can’t deny the intense feeling that builds when I’m realizing that each installation is more than the sum of its parts. The totality of her exhibition shows us a transformative beauty inherently present within the millions of everyday objects that surround, occupy, and consume us. Focusing directly on a certain section of one of Tara’s installations reduces the objects to everyday things. In the same way when I gaze on a field in nature I do not consider each blade of grass individually with equal importance—it is the whole field that engages me.

There are no hidden tricks in these artworks. For example, look at this image of the 2008 installation of Untitled (Plastic Cups) at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

Like at the IMA, San Diego, or Cincinnati, the installation is simply millions of plastic cups, stacked. At each instance the installation crew consisted of people who generally had little experience with the materials, much less the installation, yet the show looks aesthetically similar to Tara’s prior installations. Tara’s idea dominates, not the installer’s.

From a museological perspective, I feel well-qualified to work on this show and advocate for the correct representation of each installation on Monday mornings.

Volunteering in the conservation department for almost a year now has led me to understand that while I may be comfortable maintaining Tara’s work and other contemporary ideas, I know that I would not be comfortable physically intervening with ancient Roman artifacts like this or on precise still life paintings like this. The importance of these artworks resides in their physicality and finality, not necessarily their concepts or process. Understanding these works from a technological perspective requires an expertise I do not have.

Tara’s works change slightly from site to site and they weather the audience organically. Dust may accumulate or visitors may accidently move a section of pencils or shift a glob of glue, but I know these fields can be repaired with the kind of understanding and appreciation for process that I developed after working closely with Tara and her crew during installation back in March.

To hear from Tara directly, check out this interview that Richard completed on Art 21’s blog.

click here to read it

While you’re at it, don’t miss the latest from IMA Director Maxwell Anderson on environmental control in art museums:

click here to read it

]]> http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2010/04/08/links-we-liketara-donovan-interview-and-climate-control/feed/ 0 tdscreen maxarticle http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2010/04/06/the-care-feeding-of-contemporary-art/ http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2010/04/06/the-care-feeding-of-contemporary-art/#comments Tue, 06 Apr 2010 16:09:39 +0000 Richard McCoy http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/?p=11839 This Thursday at The Toby I’ll be participating in a panel discussion about the new exhibition, Tara Donovan: Untitled. Here’s a taste of what we’ll be discussing, from this exhibition’s TAP tour.

The event is free, open to the public, and offered in conjunction with the IMA’s Educator Sneak Peek Program. To accommodate multiple audiences, the program will be divided into two sections (feel free to come to one or both parts):

Part 1 — 5:00 pm
We’ll discuss the roles of staff members in selecting, displaying and caring for contemporary art.

Part 2 — 6:00 pm
We’ll discuss in greater detail the process of commissioning new artworks, complexities of working with installation art, and the long-term care of contemporary artworks.

Joining me on the panel will be a friend and special guest, Jill Sterrett, Director of Conservation and Collections at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA); and

Lisa Freiman, IMA Chair of the Department of Contemporary Art;

Greg Smith, IMA Senior Conservation Scientist.

Here’s a link for more information about the program. I think we’ve got just about all the angles covered in this panel, but if you have any questions that you’d like us to address, please leave a comment and we’ll see if we can add it into the conversation.

Detail of Tara Donovan's Untitled (© Tara Donovan, courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York)

This is the second TAP tour we’ve done for an exhibition, and another major accomplishment for the Nugget Factory. NF FTW! As with any project, the second go-around always seems a little smoother. We certainly couldn’t have done it without the collaborative spirit of the contemporary department. Also, big ups to our applications team for some slick interface modifications to the TAP software. Did I mention the entire software development, content production and implementation was done entirely in-house?

Another difference you’ll notice if you took the Sacred Spain tour last winter is that this tour focuses more on the visitor’s interpretation and experience and offers many different perspectives.

You’ll hear voices from curatorial, design, education, and conservation at the IMA. One of those voices is IMA’s Phil Lynam, Manager of Art and Design Education. We hope this sample stop will entice you to TAP into Tara Donovan:Untitled at the IMA. Listen below:

Stay tuned for more exciting news about TAP!

Auto-rotate proved more confusing than anything else

Yes, the image above is supposed to be confusing. It’s one of the lessons learned from collecting feedback and tracking events on the TAP iPod tour for Sacred Spain. Patrons didn’t quite realize that as they interacted with the tour, we were secretly shooting off messages to a server.  We tracked everything from incorrect codes to device rotations.  All in all we collected over a quarter million events.  Almost half of those events were rotations of the application layout.  We heard back from people that they were “catching up with the rotations”.  Based on this we have decided to flat remove any rotation from the next tour. Everything will be in portrait mode with the exception of video playback.

Here’s a few more simple stats I pulled.

2,788 times TAP was launched during the Sacred Spain exhibition.

90,984 tour stops visited.

3,051 incorrect codes entered.

Interested in more?  Here’s a dump of the log file.

I invite you to experience the next TAP tour of our upcoming exhibition, Tara Donovan: Untitled.

Explore Tara Donovan: Untitled using the next TAP tour from the IMA

]]> http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2010/03/25/tap-analytics/feed/ 0 Auto-rotate overload Splash screen for TAP Tara Donovan: Untitled http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2009/12/30/getting-over-the-nurdle-hurdle/ http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2009/12/30/getting-over-the-nurdle-hurdle/#comments Wed, 30 Dec 2009 13:00:17 +0000 Anne Laker http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/?p=10231 Plastic makes life possible in America. I come to this conclusion after trying to live one day without it. As you can guess, I didn’t make it far. From Barbies and Legos to laptops, food containers and cars, plastic is the modern clay.

Tara Donovan, Untitled (Plastic Cups), 2008 (Photo by: Dennis Cowley/ Courtesy Pace- Wildenstein, New York)

We’re looking forward to a big IMA exhibition this April by contemporary artist Tara Donovan, who works in the medium of plastic. I’ve had plastic on the brain since watching the recent documentary Addicted to Plastic, directed by Ian Connacher:

The ironic fact is that plastic was invented as a substitute for natural materials like rubber and cork, in an attempt to conserve them. But now there is ten times more plastic than plankton in the oceans. One hope, according to scientist Freeman Dyson, is biotechnology — engineering fish or birds that can digest our byproducts.

All things plastic are born in the form of a pre-production pellet called a nurdle, about 5 mm in diameter. There is no death for plastic. That plastic spork or toy may break down into smaller pieces, but it never disintegrates. Meaning that the planet has to absorb it all.

What about the cultural impact of plastic? It had a starring role as the smart guy’s investment in 1967’s The Graduate. Some might say it liberated women, creating convenient food storage and reducing drudgery by making vacuums and irons weigh less. You could say that plastic does the opposite by taking power out of our hands—none of us make our own plastic at home.

So what are we to do, knowing that phthalates (the chemical that turns plastic into squishy, pliable vinyl) disrupt hormones? And that our addiction to petroleum-based plastic fuels our addiction to oil?

We innovate, that’s what. Some entrepreneurs consider landfills (brimming as they are with plastic) the “oil wells” of the future. Plastic can be creatively repurposed. Some companies are experimenting with bioplastics. And NEC makes a biodegradable cell phone.

Bring on the ingenuity. Time to dream up some alternatives to the plastic status quo…

• Throngs of museum security guards donate hair to Locks of Love
• IMA race car art
• Indianapolis Zoo’s Naturally Inspired Paint Out: My favorite elephant
• Banana Republic’s 2008 ad campaign “The Art of Style: Captured Through Photography”
• Blogger Swap 2010 call out
• My senior thesis and why I believed new media was ruining the culture of Bhutan
• Current state of the art market with an insider’s look from Sotheby’s Institute of Art professors
• Corporate art in Indianapolis- What’s really hanging on the walls at Eli Lilly headquarters?
• The Plaster Belly Trend: 3 Dimensional replicas of pregnancy (only $24.99)
• How to get on the roof of the IMA, an in-depth investigation of the IMA Nuggets

• The girl behind the Upland Brewing Co. Twitterfeed and the cool green key chains she gave away at Bloggers Anonymous
• Micro-donations on the Blog. NPR does it well.
• My life changing experience with Tara Donovan at the Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati
• Following up with Indianapolis City Ballet: What’s next?
• “Synchronous Object for One Flat Thing, reproduced” Web site: Visualizing choreographic information in new ways
• Why people don’t buy art: A recap of OnTheCusp.org’s summer 2009 survey results
• Wilber takes on the Indianapolis Cultural Trail
• The life of a content migrator and why I love/hate wiki
• The making of an IMA Magazine cover (link coming soon)
• IDADA: The Year Ahead
• Sacred Spain: TAP tour survey trends, How did you rate the TAP experience?
• moosh in indy. -The coolest mommy blogger I know

Thank you for reading!

YooouuuTuuube – The creative exuberance of the web has touched my brain this beautiful Monday morning. I like this video mosaic creation thing/tool/hack a lot. Try it out for yourself by picking a YouTube video URL you want to mess around with and have this site create your psychedelic amateurpiece. Muppet fans should definitely check this one out of Beaker performing “Ode to Joy.”

BKLYN Designs – About a week ago I went to see the Tara Donovan exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. Since then, I’ve had my eye out for neat designs made of funky materials. The BKLYN show caught my eye. Speaking of design, we’ve got a design show going on and it’s kind of a big deal.

Storker Project – Mark Jenkins is an artist that is also doing cool stuff with an interesting material. Check out Mark’s often funny and adorable images of little guys made out of packing tape hanging out on stuff.

Monday Music – “New In Town” by Little Boots (Fred Falke Remix).\”New in Town\” (Fred Falke Remix) by Little Boots

First up was the Armory Show, which brought quite a few folks to New York last week. Like many, I have a conflicted relationship with art fairs. I continue to go to them, although the experience is a manic exercise in ambivalence: one is alternately perturbed by crowds of art socialites, happy to run into people one knows (which causes one to worry whether one is posing as an art socialite), worried the art might be decent but that the context is spoiling it, and elated and relieved when encountering a few strong artworks that stand out from the huddled thousands on display. I came away with the impression that much of the art presented at the Armory was decorative and generally uninspiring, although there were a few notable exceptions. I’m a fan of David Shrigley’s work, and there were a few good pieces on display at Anton Kern’s booth, including a most clever projected animation entitled Lightswitch (2007). Ronald Feldman Fine Arts played host to a witty boutique-within-a-boutique with Christine Hill’s The Volksboutique Armory Apothecary, for which the artist worked from behind a counter to dispense personalized remedies to the sundry ailments of visitors. I also had the pleasure of seeing my friend and accomplished video artist Lida Abdul, whose work was on view at the booth of Giorgio Persano Gallery.

Of the handful of satellite fairs also going on, I made it to Pulse and Volta (whose names sound rather ridiculous next to one another) and enjoyed poking around the booths with my most esteemed colleagues Lisa Freiman and Allison Unruh.

Much less fussy than the Armory, these fairs can be a great way to see good art by emerging and mid-career artists in a setting much less likely to induce the mixed emotions described above. At Pulse, the Parsons MFA Fine Arts program put curator Eva Diaz to the task of organizing the smartest of mini-exhibitions, in which she elected to show all program artists instead of a juried few. Small-scale artworks were displayed thoughtfully in an artist-built structure alongside the books the students were reading at the moment.

A most entertaining curiosity cabinet-cum-reading room. What I value most about going to fairs and seeing such a high volume of art at once is how helpful it can be in expanding nascent exhibition ideas. Say I’m interested in doing a comprehensive group show about pencil drawing since the 1980s, then I can learn of Paul Chiappe‘s minute recreations of photographs through Madder 139 at Pulse and see excellent works on paper in The Drawing Center’s current exhibition Apparently Invisible by Michaela Frühwirth and Anne Lindberg.

On Thursday I met up with Danish artist Tue Greenfort, who lives in Berlin but is currently in residence in New York to work on a project for Creative Time. His work is currently on view at Peter Blum Gallery, and he and I are beginning to speak about the potential for a project in Indianapolis. Stay tuned for news of his visit to the IMA this Spring, which I am anticipating greatly. Lisa and I also had the pleasure of visiting Tara Donovan in her studio/home in Brooklyn (sorry no pictures! I got distracted and forgot), where we saw several stunning works on paper that are in development for an upcoming gallery show. We discussed with Tara an exhibition of her work here in Indianapolis in 2010 (hooray!) and spoke about all of the possibilities surrounding such a project.

Last, but not least, I visited the place that has been mentioned to me every time I talk to someone in New York about 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park: SoHo’s restaurant Hundred Acres.

I mean, it’s delicious and all, but it’s just not as pretty—or as full of innovative art installations—as our developing project. And we come by our name fairly, legitimately covering 100 acres of woodlands, wetlands, meadows and a 35-acre lake, which I must admit I was happy to return to at the end of my trip.