Episode 035 Richard Bloes

Show Notes

This week we’re visiting with someone who quite possibly has the longest running career in installing and maintaining time based media art installations. Richard Bloes has served as an AV technician at the Whitney Museum of American art for over 41 years, and has accrued an incomparable wealth of knowledge. If there is a potential way for an artwork to malfunction, break or be installed incorrectly Richard has seen it and probably knows how to fix it. In addition to the hard earned lessons won over many decades of collaborating directly with incredible roster of artists, Richard is also an artist himself and has maintained practice over the years that has unquestionably enriched and supported his work as a technician who has devoted his entire professional career in the service of other artists intentions and vision. This week’s episode is full of charming anecdotes and terrifying stories of the hard realities of collecting exhibiting and conserving time-based media art.

Links from the conversation with Richard
> V-yramid: https://whitney.org/collection/works/5459
> Magnet TV: https://whitney.org/collection/works/6139
> Fin de Siecle II: https://whitney.org/collection/works/8532
> Earl Reiback: https://whitney.org/artists/1080

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Ben: From Small Data Industries, this is Art and Obsolescence. I'm your host, Ben Fino Radin and on this show, I chat with people that are shaping the past present and future of art and technology. This week, we're visiting with someone who quite possibly has the longest running career in installing and maintaining time-based media art installations. 

[00:00:22] Richard: Hi, my name's Richard Bloes, I've been a AV tech at the Whitney Museum for 41 years now. 

[00:00:29] Ben: Richard has such an incredible wealth of knowledge. If there is a potential way for an artwork to malfunction break or be installed incorrectly. He's seen it and probably knows how to fix it. On a personal note. I just happened to be on the road this week, I edited most of the show on an airplane, and I'm spending the next two weeks in collaboration with the folks at the Aspen Art Museum to install a major exhibition of time-based media art. So I tried to pay particular attention to the hard earned lessons that Richard has won over the many decades of directly collaborating with an incredible roster of artists. Now, in addition to his work as a technician. Richard is also an artist himself and has maintained a practice over the years. And as we'll hear in today's chat, this has enriched and supported his work as a technician who has devoted his entire professional life in the service of other artists and their intentions and their vision. Today's conversation is just chock full of lovely anecdotes and terrifying stories of the hard realities of collecting, exhibiting and conserving time-based media art and I'm just so thrilled to have Richard on the show and share his story with all of you. Before we dive in, if you've been enjoying the show, I hope you'll consider joining us over at patreon.com/artobsolescence to help keep this little show going, you can support the show for as little as $1 a month and if you chip in $5 a month or more, you'll unlock access to all kinds of cool perks, including exclusive and behind the scenes content. Again, that's patreon.com/artobsolescence. Now without further delay, let's dive into this week's chat with Richard Bloes 

[00:02:08] Richard: originally, I was going to be a civil engineer. I always wanted to build bridges when I was a kid I would sit and imagine bridges all the time but then when I got to the civil engineering program, it didn't have anything to do with any kind of creativity, So eventually I changed schools. I went to the university of Iowa and they had a strong art program there. And found my way into the intermedia program at the University of Iowa art department. I was introduced to all kinds of video equipment. It was the early PortaPacks, the half inch stuff. We were just getting three quarter and stuff. I remember when the first color camera showed up on campus and it was really big deal. It was a very progressive art school or at least this program was, it was run by Hans Breder he would invite a lot of artists in to give talks and workshops and among them, were Vitto Acconci and Nam June Paik. Vitto Acconci, especially had a presence there because he took over for Hans for one semester as the teacher he would fly in and out of New York and he felt very comfortable there because he went to the writer's workshop at University of iowa. This is all in 70, 75 to 78, somewhere in there. I was making some sculptures, doing some paintings and doing some videos, and I did some work on this color quantizer they called it and there was no way to record what you did so we filmed it and then that was shown at a film at the film forum at some point, which was a big thing at the time. These artists would come into town and I was the TA at the time and so I was in charge of, you know, getting the equipment together and doing all this other stuff like people would come in and say, I want 10 monitors hooked up and you'd have to figure out a way to do that. I also learned probably the most important skill for my job was how to work with artists. There was a year in Memphis waiting tables, and I finally moved to New York City and I just walked into Global Village Video Resource Center with John Riley, ran this place. They were sort of an independent early video place and they had these classes there. They just happened to need some kind of technician right then so I knew some basics, you know, how like how to clean the heads and all this other stuff. So I was taking care of the equipment for the classes basically. And then I picked up and learned a lot of things there and eventually I think it was Doug Davis's assistant. We had some contact with their studio. I had to run over and do a few repairs for them or something once and she eventually got hired at the Whitney and then she recommended me. There was some great people there, John Hanhardt and Kaley Angel were in the department and, it was this sort of experimental department in this weird way, it didn't quite fit into the museum. John was very good at getting it to fit into the museum, but when it came to doing shows on the floor, where usually you had painting and sculptures, it was much more controversial than when it was shown in the film video gallery. There was a lot more attention paid to making sure this worked, if that makes sense. It was pretty experimental, there was a lot of questions raised about this medium and there were problems because everything was on tape. If you were playing something, a video as a tape piece and not a live camera piece or something and tapes have to rewind. So there would be, a good five minutes of rewind time. That felt very uncomfortable in this situation where everybody wanted things to be perfect. If we go forward to when LaserDisc came around, even though those were of mixed quality in retrospect it was a great thing because things just played constantly. During the Nam June Paik, retrospective when you get off the elevator there was this fish tank and Merce Cunningham's video behind it but during that five minute rewind period, you'd get off the elevator. And it was just a bunch of fish tanks with these kind of black, glowing screens. You know, we don't realize that. So It was always a lot of pressure to make sure that was the only thing that was wrong with it. It was very important to make sure that the pieces actually worked. Certainly the whole Nam June retrospective was ridiculously challenging. There was a lot of good people working on the show too, like Shridhar Bapat, who was one of the early, early video techs and he was working for Nam June at the time. He was quite experienced in all this stuff, but also very mystical about approaching the problem. So he added this different element to things. setting up . Something like V-yramid was very difficult, setting up Fish Flies on Sky was very difficult. There was a big laser piece, which was very difficult to keep going. After that, that's when the Whitney bought the V-yramid in terms of the Whitney's permanent collection it was, like a UFO just fell from the sky and landed in the permanent collection because no one really knew what to do with this thing. There were all these TVs to take care of and all these problems and the piece was shown quite a bit in the early days, too. I think it was shown at the Whitney about, like a six or seven times in the first 10 years. And each time we showed it in the early days, the Paik studio, people would always come up and help us because it was challenging because all these TVs were just stacked on top of each other, like building blocks. that meant of course that if the bottom TV went out, you would have to take off all the TVs on top of it to change that TV out, which happened the very first show. Eventually we did a work around on that, but that wasn't until my gosh, like the year 2012. It also looked scary because it was just stacked on top of each other. And there was a support structure in the back, which was adequate, but it also scared people because it looks sometimes like it was leaning forward and someone could just run into it and the whole thing would collapse. Because of that perception it wasn't shown for 20 years I would say. We picked up a lot of knowledge over the years, working in setting up difficult pieces at the Whitney but the artists are the ones that really figured all this stuff out first, so they could show it in galleries or museums. So the artists really led the way forward through a lot of the aesthetic questions, what was acceptable? What do we do in this case? How do we find backups? The good thing about those times where if you needed a TV backup, you could just go buy one. Canal street was a big place. Someone like Nam June, he was always buying the cheaper consumer stuff because it was cheaper and then he could do these big pieces. The problem with that is that if you bought that, then some of the times those cheaper TVs didn't hold up too well in the long run. For V-yramid though the bottom 25 inch TVs, I think they bought use at this hotel sale. Hotel was just getting rid of all their old CRTs and putting new CRTs in. Eventually the artists, they move on, they don't support the works technically anymore and so you have to figure it out yourself. I was always in exhibitions and all the conservation at the Whitney, even though there wasn't a conservation department the conservation was just preparing something for a show. Then there was money and a budget to get a piece together. So eventually we started acquiring more and more works, and these works would sit on a shelf for five years. And there were questions about how they worked or if they worked anymore. And then someone would want to borrow this piece and so somebody had to get it together, ready for a show. And that person was just me for some reason, because I always had the most experience in setting these pieces up and basically because nobody else wanted to deal with it. You can't be in this business if you don't have a sense of humor, you have to have some fun doing this stuff. There got to be uh large pieces that were not being shown and when Carol Mancusi-Ungaro came in we had a real conservation department and eventually I walked into her office and said, you know, I've been kind of doing a lot of this stuff over the years is there any time that I could just devote to this because I was really quite busy in AV most of the time and it was hard to focus just on, on trying to get things ready. And I was thinking it would make it easier for myself if I could in some sort of spare time, get pieces ready to show in the future. Then I wouldn't have to scrounge around in this panic mode and try to get a piece ready in under three months for a show. So I was really trying to make it a little easier for myself. It seems like these big projects keep sort of falling into our laps. The Whitney has a history of buying a lot of works from biennials. And a lot of these pieces I've turned out to be really good pieces in the long-term like Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint and Eve Sussman's work. Just recently there was another piece that we bought from a biennial by Craigie Horsfield that had sat in the warehouse for at least 18 years, these two computers, and it was such a clunky program that this guy put together that it brought back great nightmares for the IT department, because it was such a difficult piece for them and it's these huge two huge computers that were sinked with these media lists and programs, and it's a nine hour video was subtitled super-imposed live. We managed to finally crack that thing open and extract the files and extract the subtitles and put it on a server. We have a video server now, as you know, Ben, so we can store all of our videos safely. Recently I'm semiretired, so I'm not setting up the bi-annuals for AV or anything like that anymore. So I work two days a week in conservation and basically we take care of new acquisitions coming in, if they involve a lot of equipment that needs to be tested, we do that in the warehouse. Savannah Campbell checks the videos and puts them on the server, and then we have Brian Block, he takes care of the documentation and then he's taking care of a lot of new stuff with acquisitions that curatorial assistants used to do too. I seem to be the person that just waits until difficult projects fall into my lap. 

[00:13:15] Ben: I know that for the exhibition programmed, there was the massive Nam June Paik piece that was, you know, there right when the elevators opened. And I know that you and your colleague Reinhard Bek worked on the conservation of that piece for I believe quite a few years. So I was hoping you could maybe share with our listeners a bit about what that process entailed and what that was.

[00:13:40] Richard: That's quite a tale. I'll try to summarize it a little bit here. The piece was showing in Image World. Nam June put this piece together. It was like 207 monitors composed of twenty-five inch TVs, 20 inch TVs and a lot of 10 inch TVs and some five inch TVs at the top. It had a video wall processor, which was one of the first ones at that time. And that changed the images on all 64, the 20 inch TVs in the middle. So that was roughly the piece. A collector from Hawaii bought the piece. Nam June and his crew went out to Hawaii to set it up. The collector, wanted it in this sort of outdoor gazebo covered on three sides next to a swimming pool next to the ocean. Okay. So you can imagine, I mean, it sounds like a great party thing, but it's a terrible way to take care of a major piece. Eventually the piece didn't work anymore things started to rust out, et cetera, and they donated it to the Whitney. And nobody looked at it. It's the old look a gift horse in the mouth and then of course it sat there for a good eight or nine years. Nobody had time to deal with this and we could see that it was rusted and then the boxes were quickly closed up again. So at some point we did a test of all the equipment we tested everything out. We were testing it in the Whitney warehouse, where they store all this other artwork, all of a sudden these TVs started to smoke or give off this weird plastic smell. So we immediately like had to shut that down. The other TVs, like the 20 inch ones are really well-built they're metal chassies to be able to stack on top of each other, but they were rusted and in the inside we found leaves in addition to bird hairs and feathers, so the original plan with the Paik estate was to just completely buy all new equipment and not use anything. The problem was that by the time we got seriously thinking about showing it, and there was a budget we couldn't find any more 10 inch TVs. There were no ten inch CRTs around anywhere. We needed something like 110 of them. And we really wanted them to match because there was a visual element to this whole piece and it would have looked weird to have all these different brands up there. And also I wanted something reliable too, because this piece is up like something like 15 feet high. And it's all held up by this rickety scaffolding. In the 89 show I had to get up there and reconnect TVs and cause they would lose their tuning and it was really scary to be up there that high on the shaky thing. There's a number of challenges here. So we had to um, find 110 reliable TVs. Through CT Lui we could find 70, 20 inch CRTs. So that wasn't a problem. The version in Hawaii was a little different in that they didn't have any of the bottom wooden cabinet TV 25 inch television sets in it. So we had to look on eBay and we had to get seven of those and of those seven two worked and then the others, we got it and put Dotronix in them. In addition all the laser discs where the only media we had and they were stored outside in the salty air for so long they were almost useless. Some of them, we could get a complete recording off of, and that eventually proved to be kind of a good thing, but we had to go back to the Paik estate and get all new files. And it was a little confusing because Nam June constantly was shifting the media. He would record something, make a video channel for one piece and then record over that same tape for another piece, two days later or something. At least that's what the myth was. The reality might be a little more under control. We don't know for sure, but it's a little hard to get the definitive same original version. So that was a challenge. So eventually for the 10 inch we settled on getting LCDs because the Paik estate said that Nam June used these LCDs, these 10 inch marshal TVs quite a bit in other pieces and he wasn't that picky about the CRT versus LCD question. We Looked at these, we bought some marshals and we didn't like the quality, but then we found this other brand True View, they were like twice, three times as bright and the color was decent. The problem was though there was no viewing angle below and these TVs were all up high. So we had to get the factory to flip the screens so that you got a decent viewing angle down below, and then they flipped the software so that the image was right in the same position. They're flat screens, but we asked them if they could make a three-dimensional cabinets, the same size as the original. CRTs cause we still didn't have the original original ones, but there's this picture of Nam June holding one of these original TVs that was in the original version of Fin de Siècle II at the Whitney. And we bought one on eBay, measured it. And then they made all these 110 plus 30 backups, with metal cabinets from the same dimensions so that they could stack because the stacking was a big part of Nam June's work that sort of gravity that's involved in that stacking. And that proved to be successful enough. There's always this thing where, maybe there's going to be better TVs, flat-screen TVs in another 15 years, but you make these decisions based on the best things you can get at the time. And I think it was quite successful. So everything ended up being CRTs, we ended up using a lot of the 27 inch Sony TVs that were original, the ones that were so rusty, we decided at the last minute, like it's just wasteful to throw out these 64 TVs that are still working. So we made a decision to use the older TVs until they burned out. And none of them burned out during the show. So it was really amazing. So now we still have a lot of extra CRTs. These, this piece could be shown again. it's a bear to set it up, it's all ready to go. That was one of the more challenging things that we ever did. And the fact that it was up for nine months and we kind of worried about it every day for nine months. 

[00:20:04] Ben: Are there any shifts you've witnessed over the course of your career in how artists work with technology that you've picked up on?

[00:20:12] Richard: There's always been almost the same groups. If we go way back, there's somebody like Gary Hill who's been like technically savvy from the very beginning and he knew how to work with someone like Dave Jones to make these complex works. So then on the other hand, you had someone like Pepón Osorio who made this piece called Angel the Shoe Shiner and it was in a biennial and we purchased it and I ran into him midway through the biennial and I said, Hey, Pepón where's the master tape we need to take this master tape and keep it very safe. We bought this piece now and he goes, oh, well, it's, it's playing in the machine right now. That still is our master because that's what he edited on. So there's artists who the technology is just something they don't put a lot of thought into. It's part of the sculptural process for them and then there's people like if you have someone like Dennis Oppenheim, we have a piece of his called Echo and for him, technology is whatever works at the time. So originally I think echo was shown on the super eight cartridges at The Kitchen and he did not care what format or how we showed it again, but as long as it was projected that was fine by him. So we didn't have to be careful about for instance, always using a certain kind of projector or making sure it was super eight loops. We could put it on a DVD and project it and that was just fine. So I don't think a lot of these divergences among artists have changed that much. Because I think there's some that are always like totally in the works and other people who it's just something they do on the side as part of their practice. I think generally speaking though, the people that really are technically competent these days, the artists using a lot of computers and stuff are very, very sophisticated. 

[00:22:05] Ben: So you have seen the Whitney go through so much change. I mean, in every fathomable way, both physically in terms of the building, but also institutionally it's changed and morphed so much. And you've seen the field of time-based media conservation evolve and emerge, I guess, you know, thinking about museums broadly speaking, what's the most significant way you've seen things change over the years? 

[00:22:32] Richard: Certainly one of the biggest things is it's got to be a lot more accepted and popular, not just, film, video curators, but among painting and sculpture curators also. I mean, I think that's just a huge change and I think that they have a slightly different approach to it too. Which is always interesting. And then I think that there's been so much work done now that it has a history to it. That's a big change because in the early days it didn't have much history. The fact that people go online and look up these older pieces and see what the history is of this medium I think is pretty amazing. What I've been thinking lately is it's surprising to me how many of the basics have been there from the beginning of the whole field now? You had V-yramid come in. And all of a sudden you have to take care of these TVs. Should it be a CRT should it always be shown on this same equipment? And then you have something like Magnet TV, where Nam June put that black and white TV inside of a Magnavox wooden cabinet. The magnet TV case the chassis is so much a part of the sculpture. You can replace the CRT as long as it's the same size and black and conrach and the same model of Conrack which is difficult, but there still is some replaceability there. And then you have someone like Earl Reiback, which was one of my favorite pieces. He was in on the early days, TV As a Creative Medium. He was in that show. He was some sort of an engineer and somehow he got into, or got to know people at RCA who were mass producing these 25 inch televisions in the late sixties. And he convinced them to take two of the TV sets unassembled so that the CRT didn't have the front glass attached to it yet. And he went in there with fluorescent paint, he painted this design and made these little sculptures inside the CRT scraped away the phosphorus from the screen. And then we guess they put it back on the assembly line and the front safety glass was attached to the CRT tube and he has the sculptures inside the CRTs. It's a very beautiful piece because you're used to looking at the surface differently and here it is, you look in there and it's just this little theater area, psychedelic and the way it's painted and everything. And those works are very much like when they die, they die because we've wrestled with this piece, quite a bit and we can't quite find a solution. We've tried and it's not completely impossible, but that's a piece that might be just destined to have a short lifetime. While with Magnet TV I'm always optimistic and think that we can get that piece to work for say 400 years, if there's electricity. 

[00:25:26] Ben: Is there any advice or, or lessons that you'd like to pass on to younger contemporary artists who are maybe just getting started today, things that you have learned over the years that you think would be useful for them to keep in mind. 

[00:25:40] Richard: I think the best answer to that is just to be yourself. It doesn't matter how competent you are in terms of technology or how you use it. We've dealt with such a wide variety of people and different artists and different media and different problems that, eventually everything gets solved, but sometimes greater patience is required. We grill these people these days. We don't let them off the hook so easily. I have mixed feelings about that in some ways, because I think the artists, sometimes they don't like to fill out all these forms that all seem too intimidating and they do this minimalist job perhaps. It's like as fun as doing your taxes in a way. We did keep this in mind when we made all these forms, but it's also very difficult because institutionally it gets to be this group thing, and everybody wants this in this in and this in and at the end, you end up with a slightly intimidating form. But, I mean, if you go back there was always this little questionnaire in the early days that the artists were supposed to answer, but there was never any really in-depth questions. A lot of these questions are really handy for people to know. I mean, the idea is that say 50 years from now somebody can look at this in depth questionnaire that the artists are maybe forced to answer and they'll figure out how to show their work better. So there is something really positive about it as well. I think that's the ultimate goal is to show the work the best in the future. 

[00:27:15] Ben: Similarly, if there's anybody who's listening to this show who, might be interested in occupying this kind of space within a museum of a supportive technical role helping to make the art look as good as possible. Do you have any advice for somebody who's interested in getting into that?

[00:27:33] Richard: I think I said earlier that you need a good sense of humor and I think that that still holds true. it's gotten a lot more standardized these days. In the early days, it felt like we were making up everything. How do we show this? Do we show the cable? What do we do here? And there's a little bit more of a standardized presentation right now, which I have mixed feelings about, but it exists, you know, and that is keep it clean as possible. Hide the cables. You're not inventing as much in some ways right now. But on the other hand, the artists are the ones that are pushing this stuff forward into different territories all the time, which is what it should be. And so my advice is to always listen to the artist. Even though it's an art museum after a while it's easy for people to stop listening to the artists the curators always do, but the rest of the staff should always continue to listen to the artist not all the time, of course.

[00:28:35] Ben: Have you maintained an artistic practice at all over the years?

[00:28:38] Richard: I have, I still make work. I used to make these wooden constructions and I'm doing less of that now just because it's a lot of physical work. So, lately I've been trying to do just some paintings or some photo works. I'm still inching my way through that. was always interested in painting and I didn't take it that seriously, but it always led to like, oh, this is what I should do my next video piece with. So it was always the way I found myself again. I don't know, honestly, if I'm just doing paintings now, or if I'm leading into the next video, piece I don't have a way to find out, but just to do it. To me, it's important that more artists should be conservators because you're not intimidated by the materials. You're not afraid to do things and I find a lot of people maybe are a little too hesitant around materials. I think being an artist is actually a good thing for doing this kind of work. And I feel the same way about people with AV backgrounds too, because you get a lot of hands-on experience. I think what I'm trying to say is you handle materials more intuitively. I think having an intuitive approach to things is very good in understanding an artist's work and what to do. 

[00:30:00] Ben: So what is coming next for you?

[00:30:03] Richard: I think we're going to be working on Nan Goldin's slideshow a little bit again. It's kind of amazing that all the big projects, including like this huge projection piece by Michael Heizer, which was also a real bear to set up, the pieces that were in the collection that were weighing on all of us collectively they've shrunk quite a bit. So I'm sure there's going to be something though. 

[00:30:29] Ben: Richard, thank you so much for taking the time to chat today. It was just so great to hear your story

[00:30:34] Richard: All right. Well, thank you, Ben.

[00:30:35] Ben: And thank you, dear listener for joining us for this week's conversation. If you have been enjoying the show and you want to support our work and our mission of equitably compensating artists that come on the show, like I mentioned, at the top, you can join us over at patreon.com/artobsolescence, or if you are interested in making a one-time tax deductible gift through our fiscal sponsor, the New York Foundation for The Arts you can do so at artandobsolescence.com/donate and there, you can also find the show notes, full transcripts, as well as highlights on Twitter and Instagram @artobsolescence. Have a great week. My friends, my name is Ben Fino-Radin, and this has been Art and Obsolescence.