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Terence Koh’s Untitled, a stack of thirty-three glass cases, is a striking presence in the Contemporary galleries.  Almost every case contains an artifact that’s been painted white. Some of these date back to the artist’s childhood while others are from friends and lovers, or flea markets. The sculpture is like a shrine that preserves meaningful relics from various chapters of Koh’s life. Unlike many artists, he embraces the effects of entropy and decay on his work, such as mold, or glass shattered in transit.

Terence Koh (born China, 1977). Untitled (Vitrines), 2006. Mixed media, variable. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Peres Projects, Inc., 2008.34.

The piece is part of a larger body of monochrome work in which Koh explores the meanings of white in different cultures, ranging from purity to mourning. With its investigation of temporality and allusions to eventual death, the Brooklyn Museum’s glass stack provides an introspective counterpoint to Koh’s flamboyant public persona. (See his website) Sex and death are themes that run obsessively throughout all aspects of his work.

As part of Performa 09, Koh will be at the Brooklyn Museum on November 7^th for Target First Saturday to perform Saaqiou. At 9:30 p.m., he will be performing and DJing in the Rubin Pavillion, incorporating the Rodin sculptures.

With the exhibition Who Shot Rock & Roll:  A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present, opening tomorrow at the museum, I thought now would be a great time to acquaint our readers with the museum’s vintage collection of psychedelic posters.  I started documenting these posters a few years ago after I noticed a wooden box high up on a shelf in the museum’s Works on Paper storage area.  In this box I found close to three hundred stunning posters.

Norman Orr (American). [Untitled] (Poco - Siegal - Schwall), 1970. Offset lithograph, Sheet: 21 7/8 x 28 in. (55.6 x 71.1 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Designated Purchase Fund, 73.39.266. ©Bill Graham Archives, LLC, www.Wolfgangsvault.com.

I thought it was interesting that these were part of our collection so I did some research.  I found that they had been brought into the museum by the museum’s then print curator, Jo Miller.  At the time they were purchased, in 1972, these posters were relatively unknown outside of San Francisco, although there had been an exhibition of Fillmore posters at the Museum of Modern Art around this same time. Since their purchase, almost forty years ago, these posters have never been shown at the Brooklyn Museum.  You can view a few here and a larger selection on the Museum’s contemporary collections pages.

Left: Bonnie MacLean (American). [Untitled] (The Who / Loading Zone), 1967. Offset lithograph, Sheet: 22 x 14 1/16 in. (55.9 x 35.7 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Designated Purchase Fund, 73.39.70.  ©Bill Graham Archives, LLC, www.Wolfgangsvault.com. Right: D. Bread (American). [Untitled] (Janis Joplin…), 1969. Offset lithograph, Sheet: 21 x 14 1/8 in. (53.3 x 35.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Designated Purchase Fund, 73.39.164. ©Bill Graham Archives, LLC, www.Wolfgangsvault.com.

Between 1966 and 1971 posters were being produced as publicity for dance concerts, or dance parties, at venues such as the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore West in San Francisco. These concerts featured loud, live bands, colorful light shows, often poetry readings or performance art, and were mostly fueled by LSD or acid.  These unique events were part of what became known as the psychedelic experience.

Left: Lee Conklin (American). [Untitled] (Buffalo Springfield / Richie Havens / Chambers Brothers), 1968. Offset lithograph, Sheet: 21 1/8 x 14 in. (53.7 x 35.6 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Designated Purchase Fund, 73.39.121.  ©Bill Graham Archives, LLC, www.Wolfgangsvault.com. Right: Bonnie MacLean (American). [Untitled] (Blue Cheer / Vanilla Fudge / Sunshine Co.), 1967. Offset lithograph, Sheet: 21 1/4 x 14 3/16 in. (54 x 36 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Designated Purchase Fund, 73.39.84. ©Bill Graham Archives, LLC, www.Wolfgangsvault.com.

Organized respectively by Chet Helms and Bill Graham, major promoters on the West Coast art and music scene in the 1960’s and early 1970’s, these concerts helped introduce performers that would go on to become legendary Rock Stars, such as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Doors, Pink Floyd, Santana, Jefferson Airplane, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath, to name a few.  Amazingly, on these same concert bills were Rhythm and Blues greats such as Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding, and veteran Jazz and Blues musicians including Miles Davis and Albert King!  Please stop by next week for more on these posters and the artists that created them.

Here at the Brooklyn Museum, we’re never one to shy away from inter-museum competition of all sorts. I’ve blogged before about how art museums and sports have more in common than one might think, and we’ve already seen just how heated the softball games between us and the Metropolitan Museum of Art can get. Now we’re pleased to engage in a competition where we can represent our borough in a museum battle that spans four of five boroughs.

This Thursday, the Brooklyn Museum is taking part in a naval battle hosted by the Queens Museum of Art and Artist Duke Riley, whose work is in our collection. The battle, which Duke has titled “Those About to Die Salute You,” will pit the Queens Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum of Art, and El Museo del Barrio against each other in ships that Riley and his team have designed and created. As this Wall Street Journal article points out, this event follows the grand Roman tradition of staging naval battles as a way of entertaining the public and the emperors.  It’s a great chance for public art on a grand scale on a beautiful summer night.

The team we’ve assembled to represent the Museum spans many departments (Technology, Membership, Visitor Services, Education, Conservation, and the Director’s Office, to be exact), and we’ve been preparing in many different ways. I’ve spent the last few evenings brushing up on my von Clausewitz , Shelley has been training at the Red Hook Pool, and the folks from conservation are looking into building a corvus similar to those used during the First Punic War. Needless to say, the excitement is building, as is the trash-talking on twitter.

So if you’re interested in seeing four NYC Museums duke (pun intended) it out on Thursday night, head over to the World’s Fair reflecting pool in Flushing Meadows Corona Park right outside the Queens Museum of Art. The proceedings will start (loosely, we hear) at 6pm, and feel free to wear a toga!

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.

Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play is a work that was made specifically for our period rooms. Last spring when Yinka Shonibare was in New York, he visited the Brooklyn Museum to meet with the relevant staff and also to take a look at the Blum and 4th floor Schapiro galleries, where his survey Yinka Shonibare MBE would be installed. While he was here, we gave him a tour of our period rooms, and he was immediately enchanted by them. Before the day was over, it was decided that he would create a site-specific work for a number of those rooms. Once he was back in London, we emailed him the floor plans for the period rooms along with documents about the history of each of the rooms. Yinka seemed taken not only with the way the rooms look—the furnishings, the maze-like layout of the houses, etc—but also with the historical context of the rooms.

Months later, we started to receive “work in progress” shots of the children-size mannequins. First the preliminary sketches, then the sculpted clay bodies of the mannequins, and finally a picture of the girl with jump rope. Then the mannequins were packed and crated in Yinka’s studio and sent by ship to arrive here in time for the installation. Even though they were produced in London and there were no opportunities to try them out in the respective rooms before their arrival, they all fit perfectly in their new temporary homes.

As Yinka has said about the placement of the children, “It’s like the children’s game, ‘Where’s Waldo?’” There are no individual labels pointing out the specific locations of the children; the idea is for our visitors to wander through the rooms and stumble upon them. Hopefully those who usually come to the Brooklyn Museum to see contemporary works will discover our wonderful period rooms through Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play. And, those who are already familiar with the period rooms will rediscover these rooms and see them in a different way.

Photos: Yinka Shonibare MBE installation Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play in the Brooklyn Museum period rooms.  From top to bottom installations in the Cane Acres Plantation House, John D. Rockefeller House Moorish Smoking Room, and Trippe House.