Abstract
Behind the floor-to-ceiling glass wall that separates his book-filled office from the administrative spaces, Rudolf Frieling, Curator of Media Arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), still entertains a little viewing station with a DVD and VHS player, connected to a 1990s CRT monitor. The colorfully cabled setup is a remnant of a time when artists and galleries sent VHS viewing copies directly to curators to promote their works. For curators, such a setup provided a practical and necessary portal to accessing their collection. Single-channel video works could easily be viewed or previewed in this way. However, more complex video installations are not as accessible. For instance, to stage Christian Marclay’s immersive four-channel installation Video Quartet (2002) for Frieling in 2012, media technicians at SFMOMA had to set up four synchronized DVD players and four monitors—the installation art’s cumbersome equivalent of pulling out the wire mesh art screen that houses a painting in storage. The four-channel video projection consists of a myriad of found footage segments and is, in and of itself, a musical composition, with the four channels of the work coming together like four different instruments playing in unison.
Highlights
Behind the floor-to-ceiling glass wall that separates his book-filled office from the administrative spaces, Rudolf Frieling, Curator of Media Arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), still entertains a little viewing station with a DVD and VHS player, connected to a 1990s CRT monitor
We have found that complex works often “defy traditional categories”[11] used by museums in collections management system (CMS) designed to systematically represent more traditional art forms, such as paintings, drawings, and photographs
In our experience in the intervening years, the MediaWiki has proven to be an invaluable and satisfying workspace for individuals to collaborate on creating active digital records for artworks
Summary
Behind the floor-to-ceiling glass wall that separates his book-filled office from the administrative spaces, Rudolf Frieling, Curator of Media Arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), still entertains a little viewing station with a DVD and VHS player, connected to a 1990s CRT monitor. The colorfully cabled setup is a remnant of a time when artists and galleries sent VHS viewing copies directly to curators to promote their works. Such a setup provided a practical and necessary portal to accessing their collection. Like looking at only one panel or sheet comprising a quadriptych, watching each video channel separately will not reveal the work This somewhat on-the-nose example illustrates the inherent challenge that contemporary art installations—and media installations in particular—pose for institutions at every step of the way: the works only come into existence when installed, and the states of existence can be variable. This paper is an experience-based case study of SFMOMA’s adoption of the MediaWiki platform as a documentation tool to help represent the aboutness of contemporary art through reimagined, open-ended object records that can accommodate differing degrees of variability in art, and for which collaboration among individuals and teams is key
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