How is a museum like a bird house? The magic of the Digesting Duck performing a sleight of hand; even museum buildings themselves are built specifically to disappear. Anyway, he would do this every day—wake up, get stoned, and walk to the museum to remember the original phrase. An inside and an outside. This thing isn’t any different than that thing, other than the fact that this thing is the embodiment of skepticism and an architecture of care, and the importance of labor organizing sits just below the surface. Ideally, the bird never knows that it is in a birdhouse. When Renzo Piano began thinking about the building he would design for the Art Institute of Chicago, he thought primarily about how to connect it to the 110-year-old man who could resurrect decapitated beings and tame wild animals. In this sense, restoration denies the full history of an object. Seeing it there—encased, entombed—I wanted to cry: even magic has a price.
“How is a museum like a bird house?” asks Thomas Huston, who walks us through the philosophy and magic of the ways museums install art work—the usually unseen process by which the skilled labor of art handlers transforms intentions into aesthetic experience. His stories cover the wonders of legerdemain, the Digesting Duck, Renzo Piano, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Elvis, shims, vitrines, hygrothermographs, autopsies and condition reports, Amazonian parrots, mechanical watches, the polyurethane foam sculptures of John Chamberlain, pretty much everything from the white cube to the Atlantic Ocean. It’s all there. No art historian could have written this book, or even imagined it. But every art historian should read it. And artists too. And art handlers. And Magicians, who could probably learn a thing or two from art handlers.
— Joseph Grigely
Available for purchase at:
Inga Books (Chicago)
Buddy (Chicago)
Bungee Space (New York)
Good Press (Glasgow UK)
Casa Bosques (Mexico City)
Purchased by the Ryerson and Burnham Library at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection at SAIC .
A playlist of related videos can be found here.
Inga Books (Chicago)
Buddy (Chicago)
Bungee Space (New York)
Good Press (Glasgow UK)
Casa Bosques (Mexico City)
Purchased by the Ryerson and Burnham Library at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection at SAIC .
A playlist of related videos can be found here.
MUSEUM STUDIES
or
WANT TO LEARN A SECRET? WATCH THIS.
or
OBJECTS WITHOUT SHADOWS
or
SHIMS MAY BE NECESSARY TO REDUCE THE WOBBLE
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HOW DOES THIS ALL ADD UP? THAT’S FOR YOU TO FIGURE OUT... SEEK AND THOU SHALT FIND.
IT IS WHAT THE FAITHFUL ALWAYS DO.
or
(HOW TO) UNWEAVE A RAINBOW