FLORIDA MAN TORTURES STUDENTS WITH SKETCHUP

February 12 was a typical morning for most college students in the Jacksonville area, except for a small group in a curatorial practices class led by Jim Draper at the University of North Florida. That morning, Jonathan Duck, a local museum preparator, stormed into the room, and began giving a ninety-minute presentation to the unwitting students on what can only be described as the most mind-numbingly boring part of his job: SketchUp modeling.

Image courtesy of Jim Draper

The students' mouths fell agape as Duck began to rattle off numbers and ideas related to creating three-dimensional models of galleries and exhibitions. He even went one step further and snatched a laptop from a student named Charlie so he could explain how to use SketchUp in depth. Those who weren't immediately put to sleep began to ask questions like “who are you?” and “what are you doing here?” and “why is this important?

Image courtesy of Jim Draper

Thankfully, the pain was short-lived, and Duck quickly wrapped up his presentation before the class ended. At least the students still had some time to learn something that day.

CAN I TOUCH THAT?

Yes. Yes, you may touch that, but only if you are an art installer (and you're wearing gloves). Have you ever seen a work of art that looks really heavy, complicated, dangerous, etc.? Have you ever wondered how it got there, or how it even made it inside the building? Who moves this stuff? 

We do.

Art installers have the privilege/curse of physically putting together the exhibitions that you see when you come to MOCA Jacksonville. And we need a wide range of skills.

FOCUS ON THE DETAILS

Often we are asked to report on the incoming or outgoing condition of the works for an exhibition. This requires very detailed notes involving any visible marks, damage, imperfections, etc., that we can see on the piece. We do this to make sure that nothing changed on the artwork during the time that it was on display at the Museum. When I say “detailed,” I mean detailed.

This is a real installer conversation:

“So there is a mark that is noted at 3½ inches from the bottom and 17 inches from the left on the face of the canvas. Is it an abrasion or an accretion?” 

“Definitely an accretion.”

Go ahead, look that word up. You can be the nerd that drops it at the next party and confuses everyone.

DO YOU EVEN LIFT, BRO?

Not all art is created equally, and a lot of times it's EXTRA HEAVY. Some works of art really benefit from being large, like Abstract Expressionist paintings. Some works depend on a heavy weight in the right spot so that they don't fall over at the slightest breath. Some works are made from materials you wouldn't expect, like faux cardboard boxes made of solid bronze (yup, that's real). All of this stuff can be pretty hard to move around, not to mention hang on the wall. We do use certain tools or machines to help us get these pieces to the right spot, but at the end of the day somebody had to pick that sucker up. That was the installers.

ATTACH FLAT PANEL (A) TO POST (B) USING MOUNTING SLEEVE (R) WITH SET SCREWS (J)

“Where the heck are set screws (J)? I don't think they were in this box!”

You might be surprised to learn that a lot of the works that end up in the gallery do not start out as one complete piece but instead come in a lot of small pieces. Sculptures are notorious for this. This is part of the reason that we are called “installers.” We receive installation instructions from artists whose work must be assembled on site. This is a regular practice and is almost always safer for the art in the long run. It's kind of like putting together furniture with all the crazy bolts and piece-except way weirder. For instance, I once received instructions that told me how to mount two turtle heads to a turtle body and where exactly to put the lobster made from traffic cones on his back.

YOU CAN BUILD THAT, RIGHT?

Some exhibitions feature materials that require us to build parts in order to display them properly. So a good knowledge of carpentry and metalworking is crucial to our job. Angela Glajcar's Project Atrium installation Terforation required that we design and manufacture two additional I-beam “outriggers” in order to hang her sculpture at the correct angle. For The New York Times Magazine Photographsexhibition, we designed and built display tables for the presentation of printed magazine articles.

Art installers have a pretty interesting job. We get to do a lot of things that sound crazy-and make for some really good stories. I thoroughly enjoy it. Maybe installing art sounds interesting to you. Just be careful what you wish for: you might not always want to touch the art.

"This one says it's made of broken glass, straight pins, and ninja stars"

HOW TO HANG A GALLERY WITHOUT A HAMMER

We don't need nails or levels or even physical artworks to install an exhibition. We hang every one of our galleries this way, and our guests are none the wiser. How is this possible? Just as technology has crept into every facet of our lives, benefiting us in ways we never knew, it has also transformed the way we plan exhibitions at MOCA Jacksonville.

As the preparator at MOCA Jacksonville, I help design the layouts of all of our upcoming exhibitions. I use a very simple and effective 3-D modeling program called Google SketchUp to digitally recreate the gallery space and every single piece we consider for an exhibition. Google offers a free “hobbyist” version on its website for those who might be interested in trying it.

Although the program is simple to use, the creation of a digital exhibition is a multistep process that begins with the gallery space. This, in a way, becomes our blank canvas on which to present the art, artists, and ideas that we bring to you. After hours of work in the physical space with a sketchpad and tape measure, I am finally ready to flesh out the gallery in the digital space. Every little detail becomes important: outlet locations for power, the width and height of the walls, ceiling heights, stairwell locations, floor space, and the location of that random pipe on the wall of the third floor. The model must be as accurate as possible, or I will end up with some major problems once I bring in the art.

After the blank gallery is modeled, I digitally recreate all of the art we think will end up in the exhibition. I receive a prospective checklist from Assistant Curator of Exhibitions Jaime DeSimone. That document tells me the dimensions of all of the pieces she has pulled together. Jaime shares some basic guidelines for her vision and possible groupings of artworks she has already considered. She also provides an image of each piece, which is displayed in the digital rendering so we know which block represents which piece. I place all of these digital artworks into the gallery following the same rules I use when hanging art in the real world. I give the arrangement my best shot and send that version back to Jaime and MOCA Director and Chief Curator Marcelle Polednik. (These sketches of Southern Exposure: Portraits of a Changing Landscape are pulled from SketchUp via photographic rendering software.) Then we decide what tweaks we can make, such as substituting works of art, cutting some works entirely, or simply rearranging objects. We go through many iterations before we come to the final design.

In this way, each exhibition is hung and rehung many times before the artwork ever arrives at MOCA Jacksonville. Before our guests have even heard about an exhibition, I have the privilege to build what they will see on opening day. And I do it all without any hammers.