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Through the generosity of Beth Rudin DeWoody, the Museum recently acquired a multiple component installation piece made by the artist Vadis Turner, which will be included as part of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. The installation titled Reception addresses women’s worth as represented in dowries provided at the time of marriage. The sculpture consists of a twin bed piled high with objects in this woman’s dowry, including dishes, candelabra, jewelry, textiles, and stacks of bibles. All of this is surrounded by fabric wedding cakes, chocolate coins, ribbons, fabric flowers, garter belts, paper rose petals made from tampon boxes and plastic brides and grooms mounted on top of fabric cupcakes.

Due to the numerous components—61 fabric flowers alone—and complexity of how the components interrelate, the artist came in to assist with the initial installation of this object. The object is on view in a specially selected room within 21: Selections of Contemporary Art from the Brooklyn Museum on the 4th floor.

The install took a day and a half, but the cataloging and accession numbering of all the components took several weeks. When objects are acquired by the Museum for the permanent collection, a baseline condition report and cataloging of the parts are made. This follows the current standard of best practices, establishing a record which will aid the museum in preservation and proper interpretation of the art work in years to come. Besides the bed, the viewer will note two other major elements in the room; a sex swing and a working chandelier made from tampons. The effect is one of a riotous explosion which seems a little off kilter. In speaking with the artist as she set up the installation, she wants the whole feeling of the piece to be decadent but a little tired; kind of like a melting wedding cake.

The 1stfans Twitter Art Feed artist for August is Lauren McCarthy, a young artist who has already worn many hats. A self-described “artist/programmer/designer/person,” Lauren’s work explores the intersection of physical and virtual space. She has invented a tent that can re-create the physical and environmental conditions anywhere in the world, installed an interactive exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, and designed a pair of running shoes that are appropriate for any occasion. Her proposal for the feed isn’t even her first foray into using twitter as art: in June she oversaw an installation in the Gershwin Hotel whereby visitors listened to tweets that were embedded into everyday objects. I could go on, but you’re better served by just taking a look at all of her projects.

Here’s Lauren’s proposal, which will play out on the Twitter Art Feed this month:

For me, the shower is a place for private, intimate reflection and ritual - a time all for myself to focus on my body and my thoughts without interruption. It is a preparation for the day, physically and psychologically. It is a set of routine motions that I can do with little attention to them, leaving my mind free to wander.

I will create a waterproof casing for my phone [more photos of this process may be found in the 1stfans flickr group], and send one tweet via text message per day from inside the shower. The subject of the tweets will be whatever thoughts come to mind as I wash myself. They will mix observations of the physical sensations of cleaning my body with thoughts that arise through the process.

The practice will explore the way twitter/technology is incorporated into daily ritual, and provide a moment for me to focus on the significance and experience of cleaning myself, while engaging simultaneously with my physical body and my mental processes. Others will be able to share in this, as my normally private shower reflection is made public through the twitter broadcast.

Each person has their own personal shower ritual and it is rarely given much thought or discussed. Through this project I would hope to inspire others to take a minute while showering to consciously consider their routines, their bodies, and their ideas.

I also want to explore the effect technology has on the boundary between private and public life. What happens if the most intimate experiences are shared online? How is this sharing different than if it were to occur in physical space? What place do our physical bodies have in our increasingly technologically mediated world?

If you’ve already downloaded the Brooklyn Museum iPhone app (link opens iTunes), you may have noticed an update (or two) for it in the app store.  We are psyched to mention that version 1.3 was just released and has fixes for many of the issues you mentioned via the blog and twitter, as well as some new slickness.  At this point, we hope you will download the new version and help test it out.  We’d adore it if everyone would do it all at once, so we can test our server load : ) The last time we went through this, it was popular enough to crash our server and while we think that’s pretty cool, we’ve made some changes to help fix those issues and would like to test our improvements. Here’s what’s new:

• Images that are displayed small due to copyright protection are no longer pixelated—the app now respects the size of the images distributed via the API, so they will still be small, but fuzzy no more!
• In the randomize feature, objects that do not have images are suppressed, so you’ll always be able to browse at random now without “image cannot be found” interruption.
• The app is now respecting the object’s primary image via the API, so no more strange side or rear views popping up when there’s a better one to display.
• Some of the navigation buttons have been renamed to be more clear.
• Many of the reported crashes have been fixed.  A good deal of the crashing was due to some server-side stability issues on the Brooklyn Museum side, but other crashes were due to coding in the app itself.  It took us a while to narrow everything down and figure out who was responsible for what aspects, but we think we’ve made a lot of progress and now we need to launch for extensive testing.
• Adam is doing a lot of caching, so the app is a bit zippier.

As with every technology project that we talk about on the blog, we try and present a well-rounded account of the process, so with the good there are always challenges and here are some of those issues:

Letting Go: When we released the API, we talked a lot about letting go of data.  Truth is, that was a lot more difficult than I personally ever thought possible.  There’s so much we do internally with our collection online to make things very clear for viewers.  Simple stuff with big impact… like highlighting search terms so visitors can see why their search results returned the way they did … or making it ultra clear when works are on view and when they are not.  All these issues were carefully thought out on our side and while that data is often available via the API, we can’t control how another developer work with those options.  With all instances of the API use, we are seeing a lot of these issues surface.

Mission:  Everything the Technology department spends time on relates to our mission and the goals of the institution.  In the case of an iPhone app, we have to question the idea of an app that can only be used on one platform (iPhone) and that, perhaps, this is not as on-mission as we’d like due to accessibility issues.  This can be a good thing—something that we’d never set aside time for internally can be accomplished via the API by an outside developer (yay!), but we have to consider that in a high-profile project such as this one, the institution is represented and, going back to those letting go issues, that is something that we have been grappling with. We are going to talk a bit more on this soon.

Limitations and Purpose:  With the iPhone app specifically, we’ve run up against the limitations of the API.  The entire application uses the API and nothing else and there’s only so far it can go with features at this point without branching from the API.   As constructed (especially with the new update), this is great app for browsing the collection, but we have to consider…does it work in the gallery?  Personally, I love the tool when I’m not in the gallery, but when I’m in the gallery I want something else entirely and that’s something else we are going to be talking about soon.

Priorities: Much like our own situation here with a small staff and many competing projects, there are priorities.  In this instance, we’ve got an awesome volunteer developer who’s dedicated an amazing amount of time to create this app, but we have to acknowledge that his time is limited.  This came up with the latest round of fixes and feature requests. It was difficult to make fix lists recognizing how much time they would take and knowing that the person doing them doesn’t actually work here, but also knowing that the app does represent the institution even indirectly—our app has a 2 1/2 star rating in the iTunes store based on 38 ratings.  I have to thank Adam for being such a trooper at this point—for trudging through the fixes and being open to all the issues that we’ve been grappling with.

All that said, we are going one more step today and Adam is open-sourcing the project.  Due to the nature of how the app store and its process works, we will be working out logistics as we go along.  While there are some open source iPhone apps out there, it’s not the norm and we expect this will have to be a coordinated effort so we don’t have different versions of the app running around.  We are looking forward to this next step in the lifecycle of our app and will report back on what we learn.

As you install the latest version, we’d love your feedback and your input—if you are a developer who’d like to help us with the project, we’d love to hear from you.

Last week we received a query via Twitter asking how we did the lighting in the Luce Visible Storage ▪ Study Center. This was a long-term design project that lasted from 2001 until the Center opened in 2005. At the beginning of the project, I visited other Luce Centers to explore what had been done, what worked, what could be improved. One aspect that needed to be addressed was how to light artworks displayed on shelving units—much of the artwork tended to fall in shadows since they were mostly lit from the ceiling. Some tried using glass shelving to alleviate the problem.

And so, I went on a search to find a kind of light that would evenly light each shelf, that generated minimal heat, didn’t produce UV, and could be dim enough to meet conservation standards for light sensitive artworks. It was challenging! The winner was E-lite, which is an electro-luminescent film that is attached to aluminum and powered by high-voltage electricity. You might more familiarly know it from your Timex Night-Glo watch . . . same technology. In the late ’90s, Timex no longer owned the exclusive rights to the light, so E-lite was looking for ways to re-purpose their flatlite.  Once I knew I was using E-lite, my next task was to design thin shelves! Here’s how it looked before the art was installed:

What is the Brooklyn Museum’s important Arshile Gorky lithograph doing outdoors?  And why is it immersed in water?  I received these questions many times from museum visitors and employees who strolled by my light-bleaching set-up outside the building’s staff entrance on Monday of this week.

It may look like fun-in-the-sun, or an excuse just to work outside, but light-bleaching is in fact, a treatment technique that is employed often by paper conservators and has been a standardized procedure used in the profession of conservation for at least 30 years.

The technique utilizes exposure to light from the sun or from an artificial light source such as fluorescent lamps to reduce discoloration in paper while it is submerged in a bath of purified and buffered water.

Conservators find light-bleaching to be useful because the process is relatively easy to control, the color of the paper appears quite natural after treatment, the paper feels stronger afterward, and the procedure avoids the introduction of another extraneous chemical into an already degraded paper.

Light from the sun is much stronger than that emitted from an artificial source.  For this reason the exposure time necessary for good results when sun-bleaching is much less than when light-bleaching indoors.  It should be noted however, that while light-bleaching improves the appearance of an object, it does not prolong the life span.

Arshile Gorky (American, born Armenia, 1904-1948). Painter and Model, 1931. Lithograph, Sheet: 11 1/4 x 9 7/8 in. (28.6 x 25.1 cm). Prints, Drawings and Photographs. Dick S. Ramsay Fund, 63.116.5.

Gorky’s Artist and Model is a 1931 crayon lithograph printed with black ink on medium weight, machine made, wove paper.  It is scheduled to go out on loan to the Philadelphia Museum of Art this October and so it came to the Paper Conservation Lab for examination.

The print was mostly in good condition except that at some point in its history, animal glue was applied to the front of the sheet just above the image.  Over time the glue had become dry and brittle, shrinking and pulling on the paper and resulting in distortion.  I carefully removed the adhesive using moisture, revealing a dark brown adhesive stain underneath.

The paper was also discolored in the image area where it was not covered by a mat.  This discoloration is the result of overexposure to light over time.  Ironically, exposure to light (using controlled aqueous baths) is what can help to reduce this discoloration.  In consultation with Eugenie Tsai, the museum’s John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art, who agreed that the stains and discoloration were distracting while viewing the image, it was decided that the print would benefit from a light-bleaching treatment.

Many precautions must be taken when light-bleaching.  Light-bleaching is an oxidizing reaction catalyzed by the light’s energy in the presence of oxygen.  This means that water is an essential component in the light-bleaching process.  During its exposure to light, the object is fully immersed in a tray of deionized water.

Also due to the oxidizing reaction that takes place, it is very important to keep the water bath alkaline (at a pH higher than 7) by the addition of calcium hydroxide both during light exposure, and afterwards by rinsing in a second alkaline bath.

Cellulose in paper generally begins to absorb UV radiation at levels below 400 nanometers, which can cause the cellulosic structure of the paper to weaken.  For this reason, a sheet of UV filtering Plexiglas is used to eliminate low level radiation by placing it over the tray of water.

This past Monday was a perfectly clear and sunny day.  I decided to take advantage of the weather and so I prepared a cart with all of the necessary supplies and rolled it outside.  I had pre-rinsed the print in an alkaline bath and carefully transported it on the cart as well.  After two hours of carefully monitored exposure during peak sunshine, from 12-2pm, the appearance of the brown adhesive stain at the top of the sheet and the overall discoloration was greatly reduced.

After rinsing the print, I allowed it to flatten while it dried by placing it between blotters under gentle, even pressure.  This process eliminated the cockling of the paper caused by the adhesive residue.

Arshile Gorky (American, born Armenia, 1904-1948). Painter and Model, 1931. Lithograph, Sheet: 11 1/4 x 9 7/8 in. (28.6 x 25.1 cm). Prints, Drawings and Photographs. Dick S. Ramsay Fund, 63.116.5.

A few more steps are necessary to complete the full treatment of this piece before it will go out on loan, including mending tears and reinforcing creases, but the light-bleaching portion of the treatment was a success.