Episode 005: Glenn Wharton
Show Notes
On this week's show we chat with art conservator Glenn Wharton, who years ago was MoMA's first-ever time-based media conservator, and the fist museum conservator specializing in time-based media in the US. Today Glenn is the Lore and Gerald Cunard Chair, UCLA/Getty Program in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage and Professor of Art History and Conservation of Material Culture.
Links from the conversation with Glenn
> David Wojnarowicz Knowledge Base
> Joan Jonas Knowledge Base
> The Painted King: Art, Activism, and Authenticity in Hawai‘i
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Transcript
Ben Fino-Radin 0:01
From Small Data Industries, this is Art and Obsolescence. I'm your host, Ben Fino-Radin. Welcome back, everyone, I hope your week is off to a great start. I just wanted to say at the start that it has been so great to see how much you're all enjoying the show. podcast stats are kind of vague, but it seems like so far, there's about 100 or so of us hanging out here each week. If you're new here on this show, I sit down with artists, collectors and professionals, people like curators, conservators, and all kinds of people that are shaping the past, present and future of art and technology. This week's guest is especially important to me, not just because they've had such a hand in shaping the field of conservation, but because well, I'm not sure if my career would have gone the way as if it wasn't for them. Let me tell you a quick story to explain. So I think the year was 2012 and I was in grad school for library science and had landed a temporary research fellowship at Rhizome and I asked my boss at the time, Lauren Cornell, if I could host an event and give a little talk for preservation week, which is kind of like Fashion Week, but for Library and Archives nerds. And to my astonishment, because I was still pretty new to Rhizome, and I think Lauren only kind of trusted me - she said, Yes! So she gave me free rein of the New Museum's theater for an afternoon and I got to do what was my first ever public speaking in the field. I think maybe 12 people showed up and I was probably shaking the whole time, but I remember towards the end, this really tall, stylish guy with bright silver hair quietly sneaking out before the end, and whispering something to Lauren as he left. Afterwards, Lauren came up to me and said, that was Glenn Wharton from MoMA and gave me a little wink. Well, a few months later, I heard from Glenn and before I knew it, he was asking me for advice on a big project MoMA was working on to build their digital infrastructure for preservation and then months later, Glenn pulled me aside at a conference and sat me down and asked me how I would feel about coming to work for MoMA, like, what? So here I am, I think just about to start my second year of grad school, and this person from MoMA thought I knew something? Anyway, I thought they were crazy, but I couldn't say no and oddly enough, as we'll hear from Glenn, this wasn't dissimilar from his experience of being asked not only to be MoMA's, first time based media conservator, but actually the first time based media conservator to work in a museum in the US at all. Glenn had spent decades dedicating his life to archaeological conservation, not time based media conservation. But I'm getting ahead of myself, let's start things off as we usually do at the beginning and hear how Glenn got into the conservation field in the first place. Now, it all started back when Glenn was an undergrad student at UC Santa Barbara, and had been spending some time visiting an Episcopal retreat house in the mountains of Santa Barbara. And it was there of all places that he met someone…
Glenn Wharton 3:19
A monk had learned medieval techniques of creating Russian icons, and he started teaching me how to do it. And so I was learning how to make egg tempera and how to prepare the wood and how to paint icons in a traditional manner and then the church was given a whole collection of Russian icons, and they ended up in his studio for restoration and he asked if I wanted to be his assistant, and I said, sure, so I started going up every weekend to restore these Russian icons, and in retrospect, we had no idea what we were doing. We didn't understand professional ethics, we were repainting missing areas with egg tempera, which is a no no for conservators, because you always want your work to be distinguishable from the other work, the field of conservation has developed a professional code of ethics that guides our practice and people outside of the field are often surprised to learn how detailed it is, we take our work very seriously, and the responsibility of taking care of cultural heritage for the future. we intervene in the lives of these objects that we're caring for and we change them visibly and materially and that's a lot of responsibility because you know, if you're cleaning something that can't be undone, and there's sometimes very good reasons for not cleaning. Or if we're filling in areas of loss or repainting these fills that we make. we're communicating what we think the artworks look like to the viewer. So we've developed all of these ethical stances such as reversibility, anything we do to the object, somebody in the future, could undo it. Or in the case of in painting, such as said, we wouldn't use the same paint medium, because we would want somebody in the future to distinguish our work from the original, and also maybe remove our work. So it should have different solving characteristics that somebody could clean off what we did, while not touching the original. But at any rate, I just fell in love with with the work and started to wonder if there was a profession of doing this. And I looked around and discovered conservation and that started my journey.
Ben Fino-Radin 5:31
So from a monastery in the mountains of California to being the first media conservator at MoMA, something must have happened in the intervening years. So I'm curious, where did you start in conservation and and what was it that eventually led you to MoMA?
Glenn Wharton 5:51
It's a long story, but I'll try to make it brief. When I learned about the field, I also learned that one needed to get what's called pre program experience by volunteering at a museum and I wrote around and the Antiquities Conservation Department at the Getty Museum accepted me as a volunteer. So I was able to go down there once a week while I was finishing up my undergraduate work and volunteer on ancient materials at the Getty Museum. And that led me to being interested in archaeological conservation and what we call objects conservation. So three dimensional things, sculpture, decorative arts, and then I learned about the graduate programs. They require art history, and studio art and chemistry in order just to get into the program. So I had to take additional courses after graduating, and eventually, I was able to get into a graduate program Cooperstown program in upstate New York. Following that I worked in museums for a few years, worked on archaeological sites during the summer, then I opened a private practice and that was really because I wanted to be back in Santa Barbara, and there was no museum that would hire me in Santa Barbara. So the practice was based in Los Angeles, and I built it up to five people on staff, we were working for museums, mainly in the western United States, but elsewhere as well. And I'm continuing to archaeological sites, mainly in Turkey during the summer, to manage a field laboratory. And I also worked a lot on outdoor sculpture. And I would go to Hawaii, for instance, every summer and work on large outdoor sculptures for the state pretty much. And this one sculpture that came into my life that I was charged to work on. And it had a very interesting situation with the community in a small rural town, painted it on a regular basis. And originally it hadn't been painted, it had been gold leaf. And the state asked me to strip the paint off and goldleaf it. I suspected this would not be a good idea in this community, because they seem to have a close relationship with it. So in my proposal, I wrote that the community should be involved in decision making. And I'd never suggested that before. And the state thought it would be a really bad idea because it would bring up Native Hawaiian issues and community wouldn't be able to decide one way or the other, whether it should be goldleaf or painted. This caused me to really step back and think about our field, because we work collaboratively with art historians and contemporary art with artists. But there was no model for community engagement in research and decision making. So I decided to pursue this I closed my business down entered a Ph. D. program at the Institute of archaeology at University College London, and pursued not only the project, but also the research on what would the components be a community based conservation? And how would a conservator work effectively with community members. It was really a life altering experience for me, because I had been working on sculptures and objects for many years at that point, but never had I engaged with community before. And I didn't know how to do it, as I said, and I didn't feel like our field was really adequately addressing this need. So the first thing I did was start learning from social sciences about participatory research, and community engagement. So I wanted to do this for several reasons. One is to conserve the sculpture, but also to develop a model for practice. One of the things that I learned is you can't just go to a community and start asking people, you need to research the community first. So I spend a lot of time in Honolulu, learning about community practices in Hawaii, and how someone like me as a cultural outsider could go to a small rural community and effectively engage with residents. The sculpture itself is of Kamehameha the first, who was the first king of Hawaii. He was the chief that conquered all the other islands. And then he established a kingdom based on the European model. And this was shortly after Cook had, quote, discovered Hawaii, and the West started to come in. And there were American businessmen at the time that were trying to take over Hawaii. They commissioned the sculpture in order to foster this Hawaiian nationalism. And he's standing in the stance of a Roman Emperor. So it was to say that that Kamehameha was as good as a Roman Emperor, he was, in their terms a Pacific hero. So the sculpture was charged with a lot of meaning. And I wanted to understand that meaning also. So this was the knowledge that I was creating with the research. So a lot of my interviews would start with should the figure be painted or gold leaved. And immediately, people would start talking about mana and talking about Kamehameha and who was he and his importance, because this is the town where he was born. And so he was sort of a local hero, as well. But anyway, in order to do this, people told me that I need to find out what the most important organizations were in town, and discuss with their leaders who should be a part of our decision making team. And so it was sort of through a snowball process, I would talk to people and ask who the most important people were, and then ask them who the most important people were in the community and what the most important organizations were. So in the end, we had representatives from four organizations be part of the decision making team and these were Native Hawaiian organizations, senior organization and a few others. But I was also told that in order to effectively engage the community in Hawaii, you had to get the elders involved. And the elders worked in plantations that were all now defunct, and they had plantation bosses and they were not used to public discourse. They don't go to public meetings. So in order to get the elders interested in a community project, you have to work with kids. And if you can get kids interested in a project, then they go home and talk about it with their families, and eventually, the elders might get involved. So we got all kinds of grants to create art projects in all of the schools in the region, all the art classes, and we brought in Native Hawaiian artists, and these art projects all had something to do with Kamehameha and the sculpture. For instance, a high school art team made a tile mural of Kamehameha and put it on the hospital on the walls of the hospital. Another art project was to create works of art paintings, or drawings that were sort of copies of famous works of art, but then they would insert the sculpture in the works of art. And we had a big exhibition on Kamehameha day. And in the end, seniors started to get interested and engaged and started coming to our meetings. And so by the time we finished the project, the whole community was engaged with it. There were articles in the newspaper, there was discussion on public radio, there was lots of community meetings. So I deliberately worked with Native Hawaiians to engage community over a period of three years. And in the end, they decided to have a vote, not to invoke some native Hawaiian tradition of decision making, but to have a community vote, and the community voted 71% to continue painting the sculpture. And then that released me to do the technical research of what kind of paint would survive in the harsh sort of semi tropical environment of Hawaii. And then I worked with community members on the scaffolding to strip the paint off that was there and address physical corrosion and there was some cracking in the brass sculpture and then repaint it. And then we had a big rededication ceremony on the following command day, which is a state holiday.
Ben Fino-Radin 14:05
I'm curious, I mean, this in, you know, societal terms is ages ago, and especially in terms of the conservation profession. It's just evolved so much in the last few decades, even how have you seen the anthropological conservation world change over the years? Because as I was saying, before it, it seems like today, there are much more conversations about decolonizing practice, and there are people from these communities that are entering the field, how have you seen it change over the past several decades?
Glenn Wharton 14:37
Well, with contemporary art, I can say that back in the 80s. When I started practicing, I would never think of going to an artist and asking them, if I had a question. I might ask a curator to ask the artist should I do this or should I do that? And that practice has just changed completely. I mean, now, conservators of Contemporary Art just build it into their practice, of course, we need to engage with artists and, you know, realizing that some artists are busy or not available. But we build that in artists engagement as part of our practices, you know, whenever we can if it's appropriate. In parallel world of, let's say ethnographic conservation, where conservators are working with objects from living cultures, again, you know, 30 years ago, they would have never thought of asking an indigenous representatives. But now it's just common practice that, of course, you build that in and with a conservator may understand the object materially and technically and understand technical conservation options. The community representatives understands cultural significance. And for instance, some materials shouldn't be cleaned, other materials should be cleaned. Sometimes there's a residue from ritual practices, that sometimes an object needs to be fed with traditional maintenance methods or even danced, you know, taken to into ritual practice in order to keep the object alive. And we take that on now. Museums now, it's very common to have smudge rooms where Native Americans come and keep the objects alive through ritual practice.
Ben Fino-Radin 16:23
Okay, so in some ways, Glenn's origin story is stunning, not too dissimilar from the first conservator we spoke to on the show in Episode One, Pip Laurenson, who, you know, got her career started as a stone conservator of all things. So similarly, you know, here we have Glenn through his PhD research, helping to transform the world of archaeological and anthropological conservation. So how the heck did he go from that to becoming the first time based media conservator in a US museum?
Glenn Wharton 16:54
I moved to New York in 2000, just as I was completing the PhD research thinking that New York would be a place where I could reinvent myself, if not helped reinvent the field. And I thought I would be working on community murals and sculptures and working with students. I was even in communication with the woman that was in charge of the art program at the public schools in New York, and we were trying to find a project. And I started teaching at NYU in the conservation program and museum studies on a part time basis. And all of a sudden, out of the blue. Jim Coddington, the chief conservator at MoMA, emailed me and asked if we could have lunch. So we had lunch, and he started describing the situation with the media collection at MoMA. And he said that they had received a grant to hire someone for two days a week for two years to help them put a program together for conserving the media collection. I said, Well, that's great, Jim, but why are we having lunch? And he said, Well, would you like to be this person and I knew nothing about media art. And I had no idea why he thought of me. So I asked him, and he said, Well, first of all, there are no media conservators. And I thought, well, there is one but she's got a job at the Tate. And he said that he could go and hire somebody that knew the technology, somebody from the electronics industry, maybe that knew understood video and audio and software technologies, or he could bring in a conservator to put a conservation mind on this problem. And this person would have to learn the technology very quickly. And I just thought, Wow, what a challenge. And so I said yes. So I became actually the country's first time based media conservator in a museum. and that was in 2005.
Ben Fino-Radin 18:48
That must have been an on some level terrifying.
Glenn Wharton 18:52
It was absolutely.
Ben Fino-Radin 18:55
At this point, you've spent, you know, how many decades in archaeological conservation, which I would imagine must have used technology? Yeah. But here you are being faced with a massive art collection, not archaeology. And not only is it art, but it's art that uses technology.
Glenn Wharton 19:13
Yes, and it was profoundly different and profoundly the same as traditional cultural heritage and sculpture and archaeological materials. So I was able to bring that same set of ethics to the question of preserving media art, yet, the materials and the technology were very different. I had been working a fair amount of with contemporary art just through my practice, and had started working with artists to understand their point of view, how they would want the works to be exhibited in the future, and also in the PhD research that I had undertaken I'd learned social science methods, performing interview working to understand people's relationships with things. So I was able to bring those skills that I've learned about interviews and working and collaborating in order to produce knowledge to the situation where the artists were still alive. The works themselves were sometimes conceptual in that the idea was more important than the physical manifestation. So in some cases, the artists would tell me, I don't care. Go ahead. And if the technology becomes obsolescence migrated to new technologies, or sometimes they would say, no, it's actually very important to retain the same technology that the work was originally conceived on, for instance, a cathode ray tube monitor. So I realized that in this case, the building of that knowledge about the artists concerns was as important as learning about the technology and doing the technical interventions that were necessary.
Ben Fino-Radin 21:00
I don't think that all of our listeners will necessarily know exactly, I mean, what the heck does a time based media conservator even do? So could you could you describe that for us? What is the job of a time based media conservator?
Glenn Wharton 21:14
The conservators job is to preserve art and cultural heritage objects for the future. We do this by performing analysis, what is the object? What is it made out of? What's its current condition? What are the artistic and cultural concerns, and what are the aesthetics, and then pulling all this together, we make a decision about how to intervene whether to intervene, and that's usually collaborative, we work with curators art historians, or might be community representatives in order to make these decisions. But then we perform interventions in the name of preservation, and we build in a museum the institutional capacity to care for it in the future. So if that's all applied to media art, then it's understanding the technologies, the artists concerns the current condition. And then we may perform interventions such as digitizing analog audio, and video migrating from one technology to another, for instance, going from a cathode ray tube to a flat screen monitor, if that's required, because you can't buy cathode ray tube monitors anymore, and then documenting all of that in order for people in the future to know what we did, but also what we learned. And in the case of time based media, it won't be apparent to people in the future, what these technologies were, much of my work shifted from just documenting what I did, and what I learned to building institutional capacity to show these works in the future, through artist interviews through creating diagrams and floor plans and maintenance videos. And in the case of performance art, which is time based. We might interview the artists video, the artists performing the work video, the artist training someone else to perform the work, and then video the other person performing the work. So we're building your institutional knowledge so that in 20 years, a new curator and a new performer could come along and re-perform the work based on our documentation.
Ben Fino-Radin 23:21
How much had MoMA been collecting up to that point of you being the first person on the conservation team dedicated to that
Glenn Wharton 23:30
MoMA had the largest collection in the world, it had 2000 plus or minus works that were audio video software based, and hundreds of 1000s of films. But fortunately, somebody else took care of the films. And it's really because of Barbara London, and a few other curators that early on, recognized the importance of media art, or what we now call time based media art, and started collecting in the 1970s, which was really early and collected widely and massively. So there was a large collection, but it was, you know, I don't want to say a state of disarray, but there was a lot of problems in managing the collection. And it's not MoMA's fault. No museum was managing it appropriately, because they weren't really conceiving of it as art in the same way that art objects were.
Ben Fino-Radin 24:22
So I mean, where did you even start, you arrive on the scene, and MoMA has been collecting art that uses technology, whether it's video art, or software based art or film for decades now. And you're the first person who's going to figure out how to make it last a long time. Yeah, how did you decide to prioritize tasks or decide where to begin? Yeah, what was most important to do initially?
Glenn Wharton 24:49
Well, it was a difficult task to figure out where to start, especially since I didn't know anything about the technologies. So I started massively learning about the technologies Working with other people at the Museum, the registrar's, the curators, the AV team, and others to learn about the collection. I went and sort of experience the collection by watching some of the videos and did a lot of reading and speaking with others, not other media conservators, because there really weren't any. Although I did go to the Tate and spent a week with Pip Laurenson, she generously described all of their processes and collections care, and she gave me a lot of documents and forms that they had developed so that that week was really my training period. In the end, we focused on four main areas. One was performing condition assessments, so actually watching the videos or playing the software programs or listening to the audio works, building that documentation. So setting up an artist's interview program, and creating manuals, diagrams for planned maintenance procedures, and all the other types of documentation that would allow someone in the future to maintain these works. The third project was digitization. So most of these 2000 works were single channel videos on tape. And at the time, all the literature said and this was for video archives, you need to copy the tapes onto new tapes. This was already around 2008 2009. And I realized that it was more more difficult to buy tape. And I just saw, you know the future being digital. But that was hugely frightening to me to decide to digitize a whole analog collection when no other museums were doing this. But after consulting with a lot of people in various industries, and people at MoMA, we decided that that's what we would do. So digitization of all these analog works was the third project. And the fourth one was creating digital storage. And that was both for the artworks, but also for all the different forms of documentation that we were creating. So we created a digital repository, and we created a digital asset management system for the documentation. Fortunately, after a few years of being there, we did come up with some funding to bring new people on one by one and at first, just provisionally and then we were able to actually create positions for them. So the first person that we hired was Peter Oleksik. And I found him by going to the Media Information and Archive Program at New York University and asking one of the professors if she could recommend one of their graduates, and she highly recommended Peter. So I contacted him. And he had deep knowledge on audio and video technology. And he was an archivist, not a conservator, but an archivist. So I spoke with him hired him. And he really brought in much more technical understanding than I had. And so he and I work together on this digitization process and other projects on individual works. And then we were able to create a position for him and hire him. Then the next hire was you, Ben.
Ben Fino-Radin 28:10
Spoiler alert.
Glenn Wharton 28:12
I had heard you lecture at the New Museum and learned about your work at Rhizome and was very impressed. So I took you out to lunch, you may remember, and we spoke about the program at MoMA. I don't think I asked you if you'd want to work at MoMA during that lunch. But I did go back and spoke with Jim Coddington and others about your area of expertise and the expertise that we needed specifically for building the digital storage. And we all agreed that you would be a good person. So we hired you and you came in. As you might remember, your mission was to create the digital repository for us.
Ben Fino-Radin 28:52
Well, that history of the kind of initial building of the team at MoMA is so fascinating to me, because the former chief conservator Jim Coddington's initial impulse to get the program off the ground was to bring in a very seasoned and experienced conservator. But then your next moves were to bring in people who weren't conservators at all, but people who had kind of like niche technical expertise. And I think that's really fascinating. And I just know, you know, speaking personally, obviously, is one of those people. It was, frankly, to me utterly insane. That the Museum of Modern Art wanted to hire somebody to work on the conservation team who, you know, was a library science nerd, not a trained art conservator. But it does make sense in hindsight, because at the time, you know, there really were no programs for this kind of stuff at the time. And I was basically surrounded by the best art conservators in the world. So it was a way to learn very, very quickly. So anyway, as the years went on, you know, what was the most rewarding aspect of your time at MoMA?
Glenn Wharton 29:58
What I loved the most was working with artists. for the privilege of being able to sit down with some of the most engaging creative artists in the world, being at MoMA, and ask them about how they made their work kind of technology platforms that they use, what did they want the public to experience? How should the work be cared for in the future, and inevitably, would lead to all kinds of fascinating stories, discussing with someone about something they did in the past, that stirs their memory, and I developed friendships, relationships with some of these artists that that I still have today, which was really just wonderful. And also, as I continued teaching at NYU, in the museum studies program whole time I was at MoMA, and I would teach students how to do a lot of the work that I was doing, including artists interviews, so I would always bring students in to actually lead interview so they would research the artist and the technology and develop an understanding of the conservation problems, and they would leave the interview and then we would keep the interview record in our files, just as if I or the other conservators had interviewed the artists. And I just love that.
Ben Fino-Radin 31:08
Yeah, I gather that artists interviews has played a pretty central role in your practice. And in some ways, I have to imagine that kind of is a byproduct of having your your beginnings in archaeological conservation, where you you couldn't talk to the the artists as it happened 1000s of years ago, or hundreds of years ago, I'm curious, you know, when you talk to an artist, and you try and understand from them how they would prefer for their artwork to be cared for over time? I mean, does that just become the kind of gold standard? What the artist says that's just what the museum has to do? Or how does that work? Like, what kind of factor does the artists wishes actually play in terms of the long term care of an artwork?
Glenn Wharton 31:50
A lot of my knowledge about interviewing came from the research that I did for my PhD, when I was doing ethnography and participant observation. I'd learned about semi structured interviews in the social sciences. And I learned things like people that you're interviewing are staging themselves. So just as I'm staging myself in this interview that we're having right now, I'm staging myself as a conservator with experience at MoMA, and I'm trying to communicate certain things. And I'm trying to communicate things I think you want me to say, whereas if I was in another situation, I would be saying very different things or answering in very different ways. So one day, I might be a professor. And then the next day, I might be a conservator working physically on an object. And then I go home, and I'm a family member. And I act different ways I say different things. And in different environments, I say different things. One, artists that I interviewed said, I would like for you to interview me twice on different days, because I'll probably say different things. And I was just floored. I said, if you've been reading anthropology, and he said, yes. So interviewing is a very complicated thing. And I think to perform a good interview, one needs to first of all develop skills, but have an understanding of complexity of producing knowledge of coproducing knowledge. So it's not like you turn on a tap and get the artists to express their intent, you move them into a situation and you might need to remind them you might need to bring photographs and think about the physical environment to make them comfortable, in order to produce the kind of knowledge that you want. So I just got so involved in this that I thought we need to train other people in the field, how to interview artists. And in the end, I founded a nonprofit called Voices in Contemporary Art. And I've stepped away from it now I was on the board for years with now I'm emeritus on the board, but what they do is hold public interviews with artists, and they train conservators and other art professionals in interview techniques. The emphasis is to create dialogue about contemporary art. So I spent a lot of time creating that organization and helping train people to interview artists.
Ben Fino-Radin 34:12
I have to say this is probably the most meta interview that we'll be doing on this podcast, talking about interviews in an interview. I personally actually took a VOCA workshop for the first time, I think about a year and a half ago and it was mind blowing to me. I mean, I personally had done somewhere under 10 artists interviews over the course of my career so far, but the workshop was just mind blowing, because I believe the the co-instructors were a curator and then somebody from more of like a sociology or an anthropology background, you know, very practiced and trained in the art of oral histories. And I definitely learned so much so that's just astonishing to know that you created you created that VOCA and It's still around today and alive and well and doing great things in the world. So you spent several years at MoMA, but eventually you made the decision to to leave. So what did you do after MoMA? And what what are you doing now?
Glenn Wharton 35:15
I just decided that I really wanted to research and write and teach and that spells University. And at the time, I was teaching one course per semester at in the museum studies program at NYU, and I spoke with the director, and he said that he would be able to create a full time position for me. So that's where I went, I became a full time professor at NYU for a number of years. And that allowed me to do a lot more research and writing. So I turned out a number of articles and just loved teaching, but I did want to continue doing the kind of work I was doing at MoMA. So I created a research initiative at NYU that's called the artists archive initiative. And I joined forces with Deena Engle who's a computer scientist at NYU, in order to build the same kind of information that we're building about artworks within the institution, build information resources about artists, and make them available to the public online. We started with David Wojnarowicz, who was an important artists back in the 80s and 90s. He was an AIDS activist and a performance artist, painter, multimedia artist. And his archive was at NYU at the Fales, downtown artists archives. So we got some grant money, hired some students, and researched those archives and conducted a number of interviews with people that had known him and worked with him and put all this information into what we're calling a knowledge base, or an information resource about him. And Deena's part was to develop the technology. So we used media wiki as a platform, and it is now available online. And people can go and research it and learn about David Wojnarowicz. And the materials you use to create the artwork, concerns about conservation. So we launched that in 2017. Now we're working on a second knowledge base for Joan Jonas. And we linked with Barbara Clausen, who is a Jonas expert, curator and art historian. So the three of us got grants, hired a lot of students, and we're just about to launch it probably within the next couple of months. And in this case, we're using WordPress, but we're building it out with linked open data to facilitate future research. But this has just been really fun because the artist is alive. And Joan is someone who I'd worked with back at MoMA. So I knew her and approached her. And she said, Sure, let's do it. So we've interviewed her a number of times about her concerns about showing her work. We've interviewed lots and lots of curators and performers and people that she's worked with, and dug through multiple archives to feature important early works, and several comprehensive exhibitions of her. We are trying to produce knowledge that will inform curators conservators and others who are researching the work, but definitely from a conservation and curatorial point of view. So we want to assist people in making conservation or exhibition decisions. So our interviews with john, for instance, were often just about what kind of a person should perform this work in the future, or what kind of an environment should be performed on or let's talk like levels or audio levels. So very, very practical information. But definitely, you know, sort of leaning towards activation of the works in the future.
Ben Fino-Radin 38:44
So I gather now you're not at NYU anymore. You're at UCLA. So what are you doing at UCLA these days? And what are your other research projects?
Glenn Wharton 38:56
Well, several years ago, position opened up at UCLA that I just couldn't resist. So I applied and they hired me. I am the Chair of the UCLA Getty graduate program in the conservation of archaeological and ethnographic materials. And I'm also a professor of art history. So I'm 50% in the art history department, and 50% chairing this graduate program, and it's really exciting. We just launched a Ph. D program. So now we're the second conservation Ph. D. program in the country after the University of Delaware. Now, I came in with a lot of ideas for the program. For one thing I first thing I did was ask about the name and everyone thought it was problematic. The word ethnographic in the title is a very Western way of framing indigenous materials. So we're going to change the name it'll be the UCLA Getty program in the conservation of cultural heritage, and I came in with two major areas that I wanted to work in. One was to integrate sustainability And issues related to climate change into conservation, education, research and practice, we just got a big NEH grant to start us doing that. And the other is to diversify the field. This is a pipeline issue, because people aren't applying from African American communities and to some extent, Latinx communities and indigenous communities. So it's because they don't know about the field, and they haven't taken all the chemistry in our history and all the courses you need to enter the graduate program. So we have a Mellon funded workshop every summer for people from underrepresented populations, to sort of like a boot camp of conservation. So they're exposed to all phases of conservation, they meet conservators. And then we follow up with my colleague who runs the program. Ellen Pearlstein follows up with the graduates from these workshops and helps them take the right courses and internships kind of fosters their path. And now, after doing this for a few years there, they are starting to apply to conservation graduate programs. So we're doing work like that. And we just got another NEH grant, actually to help us develop partnerships with collections related to African American History and Native American history in order to work on objects related to these various cultures and groups, but also partner with them. So we can share knowledge. That's what I was talking about before this kind of community based conservation. So we'll be able to implement that with this grant.
Ben Fino-Radin 41:29
It must be so rewarding to kind of go full circle in a way you're back where in a lot of ways, it all began for you with many, many more years of experience, and all kinds of expertise under your belt, and you're now shaping a program that's going to shape the future of the field that must feel like a phenomenal next stage of your career.
Glenn Wharton 41:50
Unlike when I went to MoMA and I was so frightened about the task at hand, this felt like coming home, and I came home in so many ways, not only back to California, I'm actually in Santa Barbara, again, where this all started. And living this life, I used to live between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. But I also came home to archeology, cultural heritage conservation, and it just feels really good at this point in my life, to be able to have come home. And also think about what I've learned about contemporary art and time based media and how now going the other way, what I learned at MoMA, how that can inform my teaching and my practice. For instance, the course that I'm designing right now for next quarter is going to be looking at conservation theory in contemporary art sort of emerging theory for practice, and conservation theory for traditional cultural heritage and just see how they, how they interact, or how conservation decisions are informed by new emerging theory. And so what we'll do is we'll look at a case study in contemporary art and a case study in traditional cultural heritage and assess how the conservators made their decisions, for instance, with working with an artists for contemporary art and working with a community member for more traditional objects, cleaning decisions, when would you think of cleaning contemporary art? And when would you think of cleaning maybe a particular case with maybe related to indigenous practices? Like I was saying before.
Ben Fino-Radin 41:51
That's so fascinating to me and it makes total sense to consider the approaches of cultural heritage conservation and contemporary art conservation side by side because our idea our notion of contemporary art, as we know today is a contemporary invention. Does there come a day where a Duchamp will be cultural heritage and not contemporary art? Like how old does an artwork have to be before its cultural heritage? Does it does that happen? Can something change? Or is it always going to be contemporary art?
Glenn Wharton 43:59
Oh, absolutely. And you know, a conservators eye is on the past in the future as much as it is on the present. And I think we're the first to understand that what we're doing is we're preparing these very freshly made works to enter art history and to survive physically, but also aesthetically, and meaning wise into the future. So we're the workers that are doing that.
Ben Fino-Radin 44:28
I'm curious, what advice would you give to somebody, you know, kind of starting out in the field of conservation today, somebody who's either you know, entering program or or you know, somebody who's maybe listening to this, and just really kind of having that moment of epiphany that Oh, conservation is a things What advice would you give to somebody?
Glenn Wharton 44:47
Well, first of all to learn about the field, it's not for everybody. It's not well paid. It takes a lot of effort to get into the field just to get into a graduate program and get some experience. We try to avoid non paid internships in the field, but museums often take on interns unpaid. So it's a very, you know, awkward moment that we're in right now and within the field, sort of discussing unpaid internships. But anyway, for someone interested in getting into the field, I do recommend getting some experience to see if it's for you, do you like working in a laboratory on objects? And then thinking about the different sort of subfields within the field, do you gravitate more towards paintings or photographs or time based media, or archaeological materials or physical structures, and then investigate the graduate programs because they all have different areas of specialization, join the American Institute for Conservation and go to their website, explore it, start reading articles, maybe even go to some meetings, professional meetings, so you hear lectures by professionals in the field and start building a network, get to know people in the field, because these are the people that are going going to be writing your letters of reference to get into graduate school. But also pay real close attention to the courses you're taking, if you're an undergraduate to make sure that they are the courses that are required for these graduate programs, the art history that studio art chemistry, in the case of time based media, engineering, electronics, and to build the the transcript from the right kinds of courses, and then apply to graduate school.
Ben Fino-Radin 46:29
Glenn, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I really enjoyed chatting, and obviously we go back from our time working together at MoMA, but it was really great to you know, dig into your story and learn about a lot of things that I just didn't know about. So thank you so much for taking the time.
Glenn Wharton 46:47
Thank you, Ben. It was really fun, really fun chatting with you and I'd love to interview you sometime. You too have had an interesting life.
Ben Fino-Radin 46:55
It sounds like you have a lot on your plate. How do you…that's the last question. How does Glenn Wharton do so much? What's your secret?
Glenn Wharton 47:05
I work all the time. No that's not true. I do have fun as well. I have a family life a husband we have four kids, four grandkids a great grand daughter now so yeah, work life balance, but I do work a lot.
Ben Fino-Radin 47:20
Yes, work life balance. Speaking of which, I'm gonna get out of here and go get ready for my next bike tour. By the time you're all listening to this I'm going to be traveling through the forest with my co producer, aka my dog. Thank you so much for joining me for this conversation with Glenn this week. And if you enjoyed hearing about Glenn's PhD research, you are in luck because he turned that work into a book you can find The Painted King: Art, Activism and Authenticity in Hawaii, wherever books are sold. And before we go, I wanted to ask you all a favor. Have you noticed anything different about this podcast, aside from the charming host? Just kidding. You might have noticed that there are no ads I'm not going to try and get you to buy a mattress you don't need or sign up for some subscription service you don't need this podcast is a non profit operation. So at the end of the podcast every week when I say that Art and Obsolescence is a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts. All that means is that if you go to artandobsolescence.com and click on Donate, your donations are fully managed by the New York Foundation for the Arts and operating costs for the show are incredibly low because this is a one person operation in case that wasn't obvious, but I want to ensure that I'm able to support and equitably pay artists that come on the show. So if equity and supporting artists is important to you, help me make sure that I can continue to do that work by going to artandobsolescence.com and if you are in a position to help I greatly appreciate it you can make your tax deductible donation there. But there are other ways you can help you know you can subscribe if you haven't already wherever you get your podcasts Spotify, Apple podcast, overcast Stitcher, etc. and give us a follow on social media @ArtObsolescence on Twitter and Instagram and there you can share clips that we're posting with your friends and tell a friend about the show all that really actually helps immensely. In any case, thanks for anything you can do to support the show. But most of all, thank you for listening. I really appreciate it. It's been great having you here. Have a great week. Stay safe. My name is Ben Fino-Radin. And this has been Art and Obsolescence.