How Do You Care for an Artwork that Has No Physical Form? A Conversation on Media and Time-Based Works in the Walker’s Collections

Walker Publishing Filed to Visual Arts · Part of People Make a Museum

Joe King, 2023. Photo by Kam Herndon. Courtesy Walker Art Center.

Many museums collect and care for paintings, drawings, and sculptures. But what about other forms of art that lack traditional physical forms, like VR, video, and works made of light? In the lead-up to the Walker’s upcoming exhibitions, Motion Capture: Recent Acquisitions in Media and Performance, Joe King, the director of Collections and Exhibition Management at the Walker, discusses the unique and joyful challenges registrars have in the preservation and presentation of digital and durational artworks.

Walker Art Center

How did you come to the Walker?

Joe King

I've worked with the Walker collections in one manner or another for about 27 years. I started by caring for the sculptures in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and moved into a variety of roles since then.

WAC

Did you always want to work in museum collections, or did you stumble across it by accident?

JK

I have a master’s degree in art history. Through my studies, I discovered that I was really interested in the physical art object itself. After graduating, I was drawn to the physical care or the handling of an art object collections. The care of collections was a natural fit for me. Since, I’ve always been a collector of things. I’ve always been fascinated by how the artwork is made. I really enjoy taking care of artworks, making them presentable to the public, and preserving them for the future generations. You’d see this if you visited my home. From rocks to beer cans to hubcaps, to prints, and rugs. Taking care of things, organizing, and making them presentable is just kind of part of my nature.

WAC

What does the Collections and Exhibition Management Department do at the Walker?

JK

Our department has a broad grouping of responsibilities, but they are all unified around the management of objects within the Walker collections or artworks under Walker’s care when they are being presented in our exhibitions or throughout the campus, ranging from visual art pieces to video works as well as works in the Walker archives or libraries while in storage, transit, or being installed for exhibition.

WAC

What are the Walker collections?

JK

Walker's Visual Art Collection contains about 12,000 works and a variety of media. This collection is split into 22 different classifications formed primarily by which medium the artwork was made in. We have 676 paintings in the collection, as well as sculptures, drawings, unique works on paper, video, films, and other time-based media.

WAC

A registrar is a position that isn’t as well known outside of museums and galleries. What do they do?

JK

In my mind, registrars are the glue that holds everything together. We are the people who oversee the care and logistics of artworks. This includes ensuring artworks are safely collected, packed, and shipped to the museum. Before any of that can happen, registrars work to create agreements, contracts, and insurance for the artworks to make sure everyone, as well as the artworks themselves, are protected. Then, once an artwork comes to the Walker, we monitor the condition of the artwork to make sure nothing changes while it is in our care.

Registrars also oversee the shipping of artworks. As you can imagine, that can be a huge undertaking if the artwork is large or complicated. Often our exhibitions and artworks go on tour. This means special crates need to be designed and built for the artwork. People often don’t realize that after an exhibition closes at Walker, it’s not over. For instance, this coming weekend the exhibition Pacita Abad will be opening at SF MoMA [San Francisco Museum of Modern Art]. We had a Walker registrar in San Francisco for about two weeks installing that show and making sure that the artworks were taken care of. The week before that, we were closing our exhibition Jannis Kounellis in Six Acts in Mexico City. The registrars are the ones who are making all of those logistics happen.

WAC

Where do the Walker collections live when they are not on view?

JK

We have art storage in both Walker buildings as well as two offsite storage facilities. All our art storage spaces are specially built to be climate controlled in order to protect the artwork.

The storage spaces are different based on what types of artwork they house. For instance, the storage of works on paper is our most dense because you can fit a lot of sheets of paper in a small location. In contrast, storage for sculpture takes up a lot of space. There’s nothing that’s uniform about any sculpture.

WAC

The upcoming exhibition Motion Capture: Recent Acquisitions in Media and Performance presents time-based works from the collection. Are there unique or challenging aspects of caring for and collecting works that don’t have a traditional physical form?

JK

When we categorize an artwork as time- based, it means it is durational in nature. That can take many different forms, but for collections managers the challenge is to take care of the work and to keep it going. Most of these artworks are reliant on a particular type of technology. For example, an artwork might use incandescent light bulbs. Those are no longer sold, so it becomes a challenge to keep the artwork functioning as the artist intended and available for public view. Thirty-five- millimeter slides are another great example. Slide film is completely gone and out of production. There are only a very few vendors who still make the slide projectors. Some artists only want their works seen as 35mm, while others have allowed us to migrate to JPEGs or to another digital format.

When I started working at the Walker, the golden standard format for the preservation of moving-image works such as video was the laser disc. That lasted for a short time before being replaced by DVDs. Back then, it was said that the gold DVD technology was going to last forever, but then suddenly those faded. Now most moving-image works that come to us are in a digital format.

Along the way, we have to make sure the artworks are in a format for which we have the technology to present to the public. What was on laser disc had to be transferred to gold DVD because of obsolescence. Now we must migrate DVDs and physical videotapes, like 3⁄4-inch Beta Cam tapes to digital formats. The players for these mediums are being phased out of production. This is why it is important for us to stay on top of technology, even though the earlier formats are always kept in our archive. We just never know if we’re going to need that format someday; it becomes about redundant copies. We even go so as far as to store copies on servers that are located far away from the Walker, such as the Amazon Glacial server. Essentially, we’re preserving at least three formats of every moving- image title that’s within our collection.

WAC

Have you encountered any artworks that still push the boundaries of the collections?

JK

Most of the works that are in Motion Capture are relatively new pieces. Many of them use existing technology like digital video, but there are others, such as the work by Jacolby Satterwhite, that utilize a newer technology—Virtual Reality. This could potentially prove to be a challenge to preserve in 10 years as technology continues to evolve and change. This is an example of the challenge in collecting contemporary art that utilizes technology. We have to be flexible, knowing that we will likely be challenged to preserve such pieces in the future. That is really one of the tenets of our roles in managing collections— to preserve art for future generations to experience and learn from.

Another example is our digital media study collection that was formed in the late 1990s by the-then Director of New Media, Steve Dietz. He commissioned a number of artists to make web-based artworks, which formed the basis o Walker Digital Media collection. Because these were all built on web formats that don’t exist anymore, and newer computers can’t even run, it’s been a unique challenge to restore the works so they can be experienced once again. We have 56 of these pieces, and 28 of them have now been restored. In order to do this, we partnered with the Rhizome, the NYC-based arts organization that supports and provides a platform for new media art. They created what is called a Way-Back machine.

The Way-Back machine is an emulated environment of a  circa 1997 Mac. Rhizome has scoured the internet to find versions of plug-ins and web-based technology from that time, like Shockwave or Flash Player, to ensure the viability of the collection. It has been a really cool project restoring 25 year old works that are antiques in the technology world. At first we were completely stumped, but after working together the Walker and Rhizome found inventive ways to restore these artworks.

For instance, there was one artwork that was problematic as no one could identify the required version of Netscape that is needed to run the piece. The team ended up watching YouTube documentation of someone looking at this piece. They then were able to hyper-zoom into the YouTube video, see the icon that was on the desktop of this computer that was running the program, and identify which version of Netscape was needed to optimize the piece.

There are also other artworks that are not always obviously time-based. For instance, we just restored James Turrell’s Sky Pesher, 2005 that is permanently installed in the Wurtele Upper Garden next to the Walker building.

That work includes a lighting program that relates to sunrise and sunset. The lighting tubes in the sculpture change color based on the color of the sky throughout the progression of the sun setting or rising. These tubes were manufactured in 2005 using the 1920s technology of cold cathode tubes and a DMX dimming device.

Within the last two years, we’ve found it impossible to find cold cathode tubes, especially in the color temperatures that the artist specified. We can’t even get the raw glass with the phosphorus sprayed on it that the tubes are made from. This became an opportunity to work with the artist to find a solution. We worked with Turrell and his studio to convert the work to LED lights, e. LED technology allows for more control of the lights and for a wider range of colors; where before it was shades of tinted white, it is now multicolored and fantastic. In my opinion the best program starts about 30 minutes before sunrise. The seats in the piece are heated, so it is more comfortable to view even during cold months. Otherwise, if you’re a late riser, the program that takes place beginning at sunset is also pretty spectacular.

Collaborating with contemporary artists on their works is one of the rewarding aspects of working at the Walker. We get to discuss their preferences, like what kind of projectors should we use? Where should the subwoofer be? How many lumens in the projectors? Should this be looped or should it run on a schedule? What should this room look like? Should it be carpeted? Should there be something on the ceiling? Working with artists and with the art means we never have a dull day at the Walker.▪︎

Experience Motion Capture: Recent Acquisitions in Media and Performance for yourself at the Walker from February 29 through August 25, 2024.

You can also take in James Turrell’s Sky Pesher that is permanently installed in the Wurtele Upper Garden next to the Walker building from sun up to sent set any day of the year. Insider tip, James Turrell’s Sky Pesher is free!