Elena Torok, Lance Lander, and Katie Province
Electronic Media Review, Volume Seven: 2021-2022
ABSTRACT
In February 2020, the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) installed Alex Da Corte’s Rubber Pencil Devil (2018), a large-scale three-dimensional work that consists of a painted aluminum house (16 ft x 16 ft x 22 ft), over 200 fragile neon bulbs, a multi-paneled glass floor, a vinyl-covered subfloor, a wall of 15 monitors, and a nearly three- hour-long high-res digital video. As the video plays inside the house, the visitor is able to step inside, or also view from the outside while walking around the house’s perimeter. In this work, Da Corte uses a range of materials and pop culture references to explore the ideas of the home and the screen.
The installation of Rubber Pencil Devil at the DMA lasted five weeks, and required nearly a year of planning, a large dedicated team, multiple external contractors, and thorough involvement of the artist and his studio. The work was a centerpiece in the DMA’s For a Dreamer of Houses exhibition, which borrowed its title from a passage in French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958) and focused on houses, the home, and how the spaces we live in shape the ways we interact with the larger world. The exhibition opened to the public in mid-March 2020 and had to promptly close just a few days later (along with the rest of the Museum) because of the Covid-19 pandemic. By the time the DMA reopened to the public in August 2020, the concept of home had taken on new significance, which allowed for unanticipated new meaning and interpretation of the exhibition and its included works.
This presentation will discuss how the DMA prepared for the installation of Rubber Pencil Devil, highlighting particular challenges associated with installing such a large and complex work at a museum that has a relatively small staff and limited space options for works of this size. It will also examine how the Museum’s Time-Based Media Art Working Group used critical input from the artist and his studio to plan for the work’s long-term storage, care, and preservation. Finally, it will consider the work’s deinstall, scheduled for July 2021, and how multiple new pandemic-related variables and procedures have shaped and altered planning.
AUTHORS
Elena Torok
Assistant Objects Conservator
Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, USA
Lance Lander
Manager of Gallery Technology and Innovation
Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, USA
Katie Province
Assistant Registrar for Collections and Exhibitions
Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, USA