sculpture – CustomCat1

INSTRUCTIONS: How to Handle Ruth Asawa’s Hanging Metal Works

Matt Isble — Thu, 01 Aug 2019 15:33:20 +0000

Ruth Asawa’s works are popular for a reason, they are ethereal and beautiful. They are also fragile due to the nature of being woven metal. She has provided and excellent HOW TO guide for her most difficult works, the hanging basket forms. I care to preserve all cultural significant objects, they could be in-hand OR in your hands. Either way, I want to preserve Ruth’s works. Perhaps you have an Asawa in your collection and no instructions to work from. You could “go for it” and be as careful as can be or read on and preserve Ruth’s works to the best possible degree. In the interest of having every and all art handling instruction manuals in one place (museumtrade.org) it is provided here.

Art handlers, art preparators, and museum technicians please follow up with manuals you may have lying around your shop or desktop. Any and all artists are welcome. How cool will it be when we have “all” of them here. The library of care and handling instructions, new works and ancient in one place.

And now, onto Ruth’s words (or at least the estate’s words):

Sculpture Handling

Ruth Asawa’s iconic, large looped wire sculptures require special handling. Only qualified art handlers should do this work.

Sculpture Facts

They are fragile even though they are made of flexible wire.
They are not collapsible. Once the wire loops bend, they stay bent until they are conserved to their original form (and rebending wire can affect patina).
They are not heavy. Small sculptures can weigh only a few pounds. Longer, bulkier pieces can weigh between 20-35 lbs. The largest pieces may be only 50 lbs.
The safest position is vertical, suspended by a hanging wire and swivel at the top of the sculpture.
The Best Art Handlers We’ve Observed

Have good flexibility and physical agility. These two traits are more important than strength since the sculptures are reasonably lightweight.
Work as a team and are willing to take the time to read these instructions.
Rehearse how they will move the sculpture in advance, with ladders (or lifts) in position to reduce the amount of time a sculpture must be carried.

WARNING to ART HANDLERS

Never rest a sculpture on the floor. This may cause the larger, round lobes to become deformed.
Never pick up a sculpture without knowing exactly where it will hang and exactly how it will get to the hanging hook.
Always wrap the narrow necks with tissue paper and bubble wrap before attempting to move the sculpture.
Do not squeeze the necks, cradle them securely, but gently.
Never move an Asawa sculpture by holding the larger, round lobes.
Take particular care to protect lobes with interior forms, as these are so much more difficult, if not impossible, to conserve.
When moving the sculpture either vertically or horizontally, never allow the lobes to collapse into each other (or jam up). The suspension should be maintained so that the lobes do not collapse up or down into one another.
This is a partial list.

Then onto Ruth Asawa’s lengthier document, which is also attached if you want to print it, or you can simply open up this webpage on a tablet or phone. The point being that you’ll probably want this with you during installation time.

Link to PDF here

Featured image credit: CC BY-SA 4.0

File:Ruth Asawa’s Untitled (S.563, Hanging SIx Lobed Form with Two Interior Spheres), 1956.jpg
Created: 2017-09-26 12:13:38

Rigging and Installing Richard Serra’s Delineator at MOMA

Matt Isble — Sun, 31 Jan 2016 05:52:53 +0000

This story was covered by MOMA’s website, but I think Museum Trade is a great place to land all the stories from around the net, we’d like to be a one stop shop, so please let us know if you come across an applicable story so we can link it here. Originally posted August 27, 2012 by Cara Manes who’s the Collection Specialist in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MOMA, this short article gives a wonderful insight into the tough work we do. If you don’t know Serra’s work, it’s generally a large steel sculpture, that really heavy! Look at the number of guys on this crew, the equipment, the work itself. Amazing. I wish there were more pictures between the piece laying down and being semi-vertical on the giant A-frame, yikes. Personally I’m not experienced enough to lead a project like this, but oh man is it beautiful to watch. Does anyone know if this is still up in the gallery? Please click on Cara’s name to link to her other spot on articles and enjoy the unedited article below:

Richard Serra. Delineator. 1974-75. Installation view on fourth floor of MoMA’s Painting and Sculpture Galleries

Richard Serra’s Delineator (1974-75), in the Museum’s fourth-floor collection galleries, is the newest addition to MoMA’s collection of Painting and Sculpture. The work consists of two rectangular steel plates, each measuring 10’ x 26’ and weighing in at two and a half tons apiece.

One plate lies flat on the floor and the other lies flat against the ceiling, together creating a cruciform that spans the full height of the room and delineates its volume. Serra has cited a longstanding interest in making objects that “reveal the structure and content and character of a space.” Viewers are invited to enter the work and walk, at once, on top of and beneath it; with each step, the relationship between the body, the sculpture and the surrounding environment shifts. In this state of heightened perceptual awareness “you’re forced to acknowledge the space above, below, right, left, north, east, south, west, up, down,” Serra has observed. “All your psychophysical coordinates, your sense of orientation, are called into question immediately.”

Kazimir Malevich. Black Cross. 1915. Oil on canvas. Centre Georges Pompidou. Musée national d’art moderne, Paris

Serra acknowledges a key inspiration for the work in that of the Russian abstract painter Kazimir Malevich, whose aesthetic theory, known as Suprematism, tested the limits of the possibility of abstraction. In 1915, Malevich claimed “the supremacy of painting,” rejecting the medium’s traditional loyalty to natural appearances and praising its potential for creating a new world through a language of geometric forms floating against a white background. At the core of his new abstract vocabulary was a set of recurring simple shapes, including the square, the circle, and the cross. Serra notes that he conceived of the sculpture while recovering from a back injury that left him bedridden for an extended period, where he spent a lot of time staring up at the ceiling. He began thinking about his own prone body in relation to the beams in his ceiling, and how this situation could render in three dimensions Malevich’s ambition to create purely abstract forms in abstract space.

Delineator’s journey to its new home on the Museum’s fourth floor was an incredible one. An enormous amount of logistical planning by a large team of people was required to ensure that the work could be safely shepherded from the back of a giant flatbed truck, up four stories, and into its new residence. Earlier this year, a group of our curators, exhibition designers, operations staff, registrars, and others met with the artist and members of his longtime trusted rigging company to identify a location where the work could be installed and to design a plan of execution. A wide variety of factors had to be considered—from the walls that had to be built to create the properly proportioned gallery space to the sprinkler heads that had to be relocated in the ceiling to accommodate the hardware installed there to hold the upper panel. One issue revealed itself immediately: too large to fit inside the regular freight elevator car, the steel plates had to be carefully hoisted up together through the empty elevator shaft using a pulley system.

Delineator Coming Off the Truck and into Elevator Shaft

A lot of Trust in the Rigging and Cables

Once the plates were raised to the building’s fourth floor, they were offloaded onto rolling wheels, and separated from one another using a gantry.

Each plate was hoisted up onto its own A-frame cart, custom designed to allow the plates to tilt just enough so that they cleared both the height and width of the gallery doorways.

The riggers then carefully guided the plates halfway across the floor to the gallery, which had previously been outfitted with a hole in the ceiling and a complex system of pulleys.

Once they lowered the first plate into its position on the floor, the crew attached the hanging chains to corresponding points on the top of the upper plate, and began to hoist it up.

In a choreographed expression of sheer strength, the riggers pulled on the chains together in perfect unison for several minutes, as the massive plate slowly made its way upward.

Eventually, when the plate neared the ceiling, a few riggers had to pull themselves right up inside.

Two escape holes had been cut for them on the spot, and soon the men came out, one by one. A little bit of cosmetic work to patch the holes in the ceiling and sweep up the debris, and our work was done!

It is an incredible experience to stand within the work, one that is simultaneously awe-inspiring and anxiety-inducing. But I do feel comforted, in a way, to have had the opportunity to understand the meticulously calibrated mechanism designed and employed to suspend those tons of steel 14 feet in the air. Don’t worry, one of the riggers assured us, the chain system is strong enough to hold three times the weight of the one plate!

Please come and experience Richard Serra’s Delineator for yourself, now on view in MoMA’s fourth-floor collection galleries.

Installation photos by Eric Meier and Cara Manes

Founding of Industrial Scale Fabrication of Art, Donald Lippincott was a True Pioneer

Matt Isble — Sun, 08 Nov 2015 05:27:01 +0000

Large Scale: Lippincott Inc.

by Jonathan Lippincott

Before Lippincott, Inc. was founded in 1966, artists had no natural industrial partner and no capacity to produce sculpture on an industrial scale. They had to fabricate their own pieces, working alone or perhaps with assistants or students, or turn to manufacturers with no experience producing artworks. Sculpture was typically modest in scale, designed for intimate viewing, and often still produced in the artisanal manner—by the incremental labor of single artists.

After Lippincott, Inc. was founded by my father, Donald Lippincott, and his business partner, Roxanne Everett, sculpture changed. It got bigger, it moved outdoors, it asserted itself as a modern form of public monument. The Lippincott shop introduced industrial production to sculpture and vice versa, and it helped create a new kind of work in which scale was not just a formal matter but a crucial part of the sculptural endeavor. Lippincott’s four decades in business correspond quite neatly with perhaps the most active period of public sculpture in art history; for more than a decade and a half, Lippincott was the only fabricator dedicated exclusively to fine art.

Many of the artists who came to Lippincott had not created sculpture in metal before, though they had worked extensively in other media (and often as painters as well). Lippincott fostered close collaboration between the artists and the crew, which allowed the company to act as an extension of the artists’ studios, and of their own hands. Usually, several different artists’ projects would be happening simultaneously, and in a way the shop served as a group studio space, far more elaborate than any one artist could possess. Lippincott worked with artists from the conception of a project to the completed sculpture, displayed these pieces in the field adjoining the shop, and installed the sculptures all over the country and the world. Work on a new sculpture began with discussions of the construction process, the final size of the piece, the engineering issues, and the building materials. Part of the discussion in planning each sculpture considered how the work would travel; most sculptures were made in elements that could be assembled and taken apart relatively easily, so that they could be moved from place to place.

Usually an artist would arrive with a model of some kind, either drawings or some small three-dimensional object. From this model, the artist and the crew would create templates for a piece to be executed at a large scale. The artist would usually need to make adjustments to allow for the change in scale, and artists were always encouraged to be directly involved in the process at every stage. Typically, an artist would review the progress of the sculpture several times during fabrication. The company’s proximity to New York City allowed them to make day trips as often as they liked, and some would come for several days at a time while their sculptures were being fabricated.

The photographs below document three major postwar artists—Barnett Newman, Louise Nevelson, and Claes Oldenburg—making work at Lippincott.

Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk, 1963–67, during installation for the show “Sculpture Downtown in Detroit,” 1969. The photo shows how the two elements of the sculpture fit together and how the junction bar, made of high-strength steel like that used in aircraft landing gear, projects up from the pyramid base.

Watching the final assembly of Broken Obelisk. Don stands next to the base, while Newman and his wife, Annalee, look on from the right side of the photo. The ropes attached to the top help guide the piece onto the junction bar.

Don Lippincott, Barnett Newman, and Robert Murray (left to right) stand in front of Broken Obelisk. Newman and Murray were good friends, having met in Canada in the late 1950s, and it was Murray who first encouraged Newman to visit the Lippincott shop to consider working there.

Louise Nevelson’s Sky Covenant, 1973, during fabrication at the shop. The interiors of the boxes were made individually, and the boxes were bolted together to assemble the completed sculpture. The worker at the lower left is grinding the edges of one of the interior components, so they fit together properly.

Sky Covenant during installation at the Temple Israel in Boston, which had commissioned the work.

Sky Covenant installed at Temple Israel. The sculpture is set out slightly from the facade, which creates an interesting play of light.

Claes Oldenburg’s Standing Mitt with Ball, 1973, during fabrication. The photo shows one step in the process of forming the quarter-inch weathering-steel shell of Mitt. This machine produces smooth, continuous curves by running the sheet of metal through rollers. Two initial rollers hold the sheet, and the third roller on the other side can be moved up and down to increase or decrease the diameter of the curve. Mitt is suspended from a crane, visible at the top of the photograph, which bears of the weight of the piece while the crew guides the shaping.

Laying out the ³/16″ lead sheet which will be the lining of Mitt. The lead sheet is resting on a bed of sand, which will support it during the forming process. The wooden ball of Mitt will be placed on the lead, and pressed into it to create the desired shape.

Placing the lead lining in the formed steel shell, which will act as a cradle during the move back into the shop for finishing.

Mitt with the lead interior and the wooden ball in place. The ragged edges of the lead are visible at the right side of the piece; these will be trimmed away as it is completed. Oldenburg is standing with Agnes Gund, who commissioned this sculpture.

Jonathan Lippincott is the design manager at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He has worked as a book designer for seventeen years and lives in New York. Large Scale: Fabricating Sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s was published earlier this fall by Princeton Architectural Press.

Posted originally by the Paris Review, December 7, 2010

Andy Goldsworth’s BURNT PATCH time-lapse installation at the San Jose Museum of Art

Richard Karson — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 21:15:07 +0000

If you’re a fan of Andy Goldsworthy you will love this video. Notice how the install crew has to work their way out of the space and at the very last second has to drop the final sticks from the ledge. Enjoy[vimeo id=”143917234″ align=”center” mode=”lazyload-lightbox” autoplay=”no” parameters=”https://vimeo.com/user36073429/andrew goldsworth’s burnt patch time-lapse” grow=”yes”]

Simple Security Mount for 3D Art Object

Matt Isble — Fri, 01 May 2015 00:17:05 +0000

Nothing groundbreaking to see here, but sometimes simplicity can be revelatory. We wanted to make this rolling table by the artist Barbara Spring a little *less* rolling. Some monofilament and pan head screws and we were there. (Keen observers might catch sight of the visible screw heads- perfect candidates for a coat of wall color paint!)