and Shakers
The brutal and exacting art of moving massive art
The New York Times / Museums section
May 2, 2001
(This version is slightly longer than the one that appeared in The Times.)
With only days before the opening of a group show, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center had a 12-ton problem. The 25-foot swimming pool from Tuscany had arrived on schedule, but the outhouse from Rotterdam and the life-size ceramic elephant from Rome were held up at Port Elizabeth because of a snowstorm. Finally the delayed cargo arrived, and a team of art handlers, riggers, registrars, and curators hurried to unpack the containers and install the show.
For four frantic days, the museum, in a converted school in Long island City, Queens, resembled a construction site. Inside, cut-glass experts pieced together a handblown chandelier, while a ceramist diagrammed how to correctly uncrate Luigi Ontanišs elephant. Outside, two barefoot Italians dug a trench in half-frozen mud for Massimo Bartolini's swimming pool. Nearby, a crane hoisted Joep van Lieshout's outhouse onto its second-story platform as if it were a rooftop air-conditioner.
"This is the fourth outhouse I've moved," said Peter Lundberg, who was operating the crane, "But as art it's the first one."
Despite the chaos, everything was in place by the opening. The muddy courtyard was carpeted with combed gravel. The galleries were well lit, the floors swept, the museum staff shaved and spiffy.
"It's theater," says Graham Stewart of Art Crating, his company that moves and installs oversized and complicated artworks. "We do whatever's needed to pull the show off. And there's no margin of error. It's like run this across the street but don't drop it and don't tell any one. We're like elves. We don't come back until the show is over."
Art has always moved the masses, but it takes a cadre of specialists to move massive art. The process is at once brutal and exacting, requiring riggers and art handlers to be part forklift operator, part mechanic, part engineer, part diplomat, and part conservator. With all of the variables, it is not surprising that museums rely on experts, usually outside contractors, to do the work. "We get paid to take risks and for some know-how," says Eddie MacAveney of More Transport, another art-moving outfit.
Big art draws big crowds, yet it presents prodigious challenges to the workers who install it. No two pieces are alike and installers must be improvising and resourceful when faced with unexpected obstacles. Dennis Oppenheim's Device to Root Out Evil, a colossal upside-down church clad in glass shingles, balances on the tip of its pointed bell tower. The 35-foot-tall behemoth is a nightmare to erect in solid ground, but when workers arrived at the 1997 Venice Biennial to install it, they discovered the soil was too soft to support the structure. The solution: plant the inverted steeple in a foundation of poured concrete.
Thomas Ritter's Maximog, a futuristic all-terrain vehicle, can virtually traverse any place on earth. Except for the Museum of Modern Art. Transporting the vehicle from Germany and into the Modern for arecent show, required removing its wheels, bumper, and gasoline (flammable liquids are not allowed in the museum). "I thought it would have been easy to just drive straight through the elevator, down the 14-inch step, around the corner and into its final position," suggested Ritter. Not so. After riggers maneuvered it sideways into the freight elevator, the impotent monster truck was rolled into position on dollies.
To minimize the challenges, highly skilled art handlers, like Stewart, research a piece's history before tackling the job. Still, certain works are astoundingly complex. Even with its 50-page instruction manual, Chris Burden's Medusa Head, which just came down at the Modern, is one of the most burdensome sculptures to install. The gigantic orb weighs 5-tons; every inch of its fragile surface is obsessively crisscrossed with toy locomotive tracks that wind through intricate rock-encrusted tunnels. "It's an oversized Faberge egg," said Burden in a telephone interview.
The sculpture travels with a complement of tools and Mr. Burden's assistant, Spencer Strait, who has the piece memorized. "There are times when the work of contemporary artists tries the imagination of those of us who have to install it," said Jerome Neuner, director of exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art. Before hanging it from a single chain, technicians had to X-ray the reinforced concrete ceiling to see if it could hold the load.
The more outlandish the art, the more extraordinary the demands of installation. When installing Damien Hirst's dioramas-cum-aquariums filled with freshwater fish at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea last year, art handlers in scuba masks and snorkels had to dive into the tanks to arrange props that the fish had knocked down.
Some works are so imposing the museum itself is altered to accommodate them. Facades are torn down, ceilings removed, garage doors concealed behind temporary walls. To install Peter Paul Rubens's 19' x 14' foot masterwork The Assumption of the Virgin, for a 1985 exhibit, the Metropolitan had to uncrate the Rubens outside by the fountain on Fifth Avenue. After dismantling a steel door, door frame, and lintel, and cut a 10-inch-deep, 50-foot-long groove across the ceilings of two galleries. Only then could twelve art handlers ease the canvas through the slot, up the Grand Stairway, and into position. By the opening, the groove was gone -- only to reappear three months later, when the show came down and the entire process was reversed.
What goes up must carefully come down before the next show arrives. Like most monumental sculptures, Mr. Burden's Medusa Head breaks down into four manageable parts -- eventually. But first the seams must be painstakingly unearthed, a process that took a team of seven skilled art handlers an entire week. Before the sculpture is lowered, each quadrant is bolted to a custom-built support brace and then transferred onto a giant dolly. All told, the sculpture takes three weeks to install and three weeks to disassemble. The entire process, including transportation, costs upwards of $80,000.
Thomas Ritter, on the other hand, hopes to drive the Maximog out of the Modern during construction of its new building, when the museum is filled with rubble and the freight elevator is gone.
After a show, the exhibitions are prepared for transport. Climate-controlled crates are custom-built and expertly packed. The Met, for instance, has four employees who build crates and five workers who pack them. When lending a piece to another institution, museums color-code or brand the crates for easy tracking. Mr. van Lieshout's sculptures are actually made from shipping containers and can go directly onto a container ship or flatbed tractor-trailor without modification. Routinely, an installer, a courier, or both, will escort a piece to ensure its safe delivery.
Despite the vigilance, accidents can happen. Friezes chip. Vases are knocked over. Paintings are vandalized. Occasionally the toll is human. The most notorious incidents involve Richard Serra sculptures. In 1988, a rigger taking down a 16-ton sculpture by Richard Serra at the Castelli Gallery in SoHo lost his leg when it toppled onto him. In 1971, a worker installing a Serra at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis was killed when a two-ton steel plate fell on him. Mr. Serra was devastated and could not work for a year. "If an accident like that happens the artist is always blamed," said Mr. Burden whose 42-ton Flying Steamroller once broke out of its crate while on a freighter. No one was hurt. "These are heavy equipment movers. This is their level of expertise. It could have been a pipeline for the Middle East. That it is an artwork is irrelevant."
How a piece is moved is determined by its size, shape, materials, condition, and value. The most difficult pieces to move are oddly shaped solid masses with fragile surfaces. For Mr. MacAveney of More Transport, a 400-pound plaster seashell coated in wax was far more difficult to move than the five huge Calder stabiles he transported at once. The Calders were disassembled and moved; the seashell was impossible to isolate in its crate without marring its surface.
When oversized art leaves the museum it becomes heavy cargo. And that is exactly how it is treated when it passes from cargo plane to boom crane to flatbed truck. A cargo ship is the least reliable method of transport because turbulent seas can slow travel and moisture can cause damage. The Met hasn't sent anything by ship since the late 1970s. Still certain works are too huge for even the largest cargo jet, the Russian-made Antonov, which the Solomon R. Guggenheim occasionally uses to transport art to its museums in Venice, Berlin, and Bilbao.
Each state has its own regulations regarding extra-wide loads, so hauling massive sculptures from state to state requires tremendous paperwork and planning. Last year, Mr. Hirst's supersize anatomical torso, Hymn, arrived in New Jersey on a cargo ship the size of a small city. The seven-ton bronze was too wide to fit in the Lincoln Tunnel. Before it could be legally driven to Manhattan, the Department of Transportation flagged the load, provided flashing escort cars, designated a route, and reserved a time that it could cross the George Washington Bridge. "It's usually 4 a.m.," said Mr. Stewart who handled the move.
Some sculptures require even more precautions. At 60-tons each, Mr. Serra's six Forged Cubes had to be trucked over the George Washington Bridge one at a time.
Of course, navigating roads is fairly straightforward compared to following the numerous legal restrictions designating what can or can not travel. Before Mr. Hirst's sculptural vitrines containing cross sections of cows and pigs can travel they must be drained of formaldehyde, a hazardous substance restricted by the Department of Environomental Protection; the embalmed carcasses are vacuumed-packed and flown in custom-built crates.
When paintings aren't painted with paint but are instead 200-pound mosaics of illicit drugs, like the work artist Fred Tomaselli is about to fly from New York to London, the challenge is clearing customs. Border crossing itself is an art, a subspecialty relegated to customs brokers and couriers. In 1994, Tomaselli's work wasn't released from customs in Paris until two weeks after his show opened. People arrived at the empty gallery thinking the show was about the futility of art in the late-20th century. "They seemed disappointed that I had intended to show paintings," said Mr. Tomaselli.
Strange things happen when art and life intersect and often the best solution is to pass it off as something else. An art handler for Dennis Oppenheim once persuaded customs officials that the taxidermy deer manikin circling on the airport baggage carousel was a prop for a play, when in fact it was en route to the Venice Biennial.
Some works are so valuable that moving them defies practicality. Expense means nothing when safeguarding, say, the 15 Vermeers that now hang at the Met. "You would never take the risk of putting the work of a single painter all on one plane," said the Metropolitan's chief registrar, Herb Moskowitz. Needless to say, the Vermeers never travel as a group.
When Richard Serra's Torqued Ellipses, colossal steel plates that weigh hundreds of tons, were sent on a world tour the entire art community gasped. When the menacing convoy arrived at Los Angeles M.O.C.A. it was if a battleship had just pulled into port after crossing the country on dry land.
That museums are willing to undertake the enormous effort and expense for a temporary exhibition is remarkable. After all, as Franz Schmidt, the Met's manager for special projects, put it: "You're dealing with objects that cannot be replaced if they are damaged, broken, or lost. You have insurance, but money cannot replace a chalice from the 10th century that was made for a Czar or an emperor."
Through it all, the integrity of the artwork remains paramount. "The number one rule is not to change the object," Mr. MacAveney said. "It's like that Hippocratic oath: 'Do no harm.'"
Š 2001 Melissa Milgrom
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