Träumendes Kind (Dreaming Baby), 2004, stood at the center of Isa Genzken’s first show with David Zwirner in New York, in the spring of 2005. Topped with a twig broom, a mighty bundle of sticks, some precariously shoved-together vases, a spraypainted baby, and a giant Halloween spider, it was the shaggiest of the nine messy, totemic sculptures that dominated the show. It’s probably where Hirshhorn curator Anne Ellegood saw it, but it’s not clear when she decided to include it and five other similar Genzkens in her 2006 survey exhibition of contemporary sculpture, The Uncertainty of Objects and Ideas.
Traumendes Kind [minus the umlaut] was discussed at length in the show’s catalogue, where Ellegood celebrated “artists’ willingness to allow their work to suggest both a coming together and a falling apart.” And works whose “visible awkwardness or indeterminateness may take on structural manifestations in terms of delicacy, precariousness, and the periodic use of inherently unstable materials.” Yes, about that, actually,
In mid-October, a couple of weeks before the show, the Hirshhorn folks opened a large crate shipped from New York, and they found half the Genzken was missing. It turns out the mirror- and cherub-wrapped pedestal was in its own crate that didn’t make the trip. More importantly for this post, the half that did arrive was in pieces, rolling around on the bottom of the crate.
While looking for something else in the Hirshhorn archives I stumbled across the documentation of the resolution of Träumendes Kind‘s trauma: a thick folder of unredacted back & forth with the lender—gallerist Tim Nye, actually almost all of it was with his assistant—and Hirshhorn conservators, registrars, and curators, with occasional reply all’d interjections from the David Zwirner team and the Christian Scheidemann, contemporary art’s go-to conservator. It’s the kind of thing that happens all the time, but even for a show about sculptural uncertainty, it almost never gets mentioned or discussed in public. In this case, though, it’s all preserved for the nation by the Smithsonian.
tl;dr the sculpture’s fine ($35,000) and Nye’s fine ($30,000), but here’s what happened:
Nye is almost invisible here, except for some mentions of early conversations with Ellegood. He had his assistant doing everything. [Principals are public, but I’m not going to invade peoples’ google mentions by namechecking them in their 18yo emails.] The assistant told the Hirshhorn the work was already packed in one crate and in storage. Neither the museum nor their shipper, Artex, asked to open the crate first.
Instead, they opened it in DC, and found half the work, a loose strap, and the double vase element—a red plastic vase attached over some figurines and a painted glass vase—had detached from the plinth. And some of the sticks had detached from the plinth. The museum’s conservator studied it for a couple of days, wrote it up, and decided it was too precarious to be in the precarity show. It had been already been repaired before, too, with the same kind of epoxy that hadn’t held once before. And rather than do that again, what it really needed was some structural intervention, more than a borrowing institution should do for a temporary exhibition.
“It seems as though the conservation report was not terribly widely read,” wrote the conservator; all they heard was “broken vase,” and started talking about total losses. Four months later he had to chime in again to say, people, it’s fine, you know it’s fine because you fixed it before; you also know you can’t use epoxy on painted surfaces. “This object deserves to be retrieved.”
When Zwirner’s senior exec came in hot with a bulleted list of instructions and “I don’t know what insurance value Tim put on the loan form but it should be $150,000.” Nye’s assistant, falling on every sword presented to her, said she had “foolishly” put the wrong value for the sculpture on the lender form: $75,000 [Which, OK. Nye did not just make up his number. Was $75k the actual 2005 price? Did he get it wholesale? Did it seriously double in value in 16 months? Or was this to set the level from which to start calculating the loss of value Nye would suffer from having a now-non-original, repaired-and-replaced Genzken?]
There was a flurry of email when Genzken was coming to NYC next week, and Nye wants her to see the sculpture, have you shipped it back to NY yet, and if not, why not? Which felt like Nye’s assistant was typing under duress while no one in NYC would discuss the cheap-ass crate the work was in, or where it had come from.
Genzken ultimately did not get involved, and I think the museum recrated it to send to Scheidemann. Who apparently charged $35,000 to install the invisible rods and pins on which to mount the teetering vases and sticks. Coupled with the $30,000 of pain and suffering Nye got for having a tainted Genzken, the total cost to the Smithsonian’s insurers almost equaled the entire amount Nye paid [or didn’t?] for the work. The work which Zwirner and he both almost certainly knew had broken before and could have been at risk again.
On the bright side, the show was still great, and Dreaming Baby has had 19 quiet years without a peep on the internet, so let’s assume it’s all great, too, and safe and well cared for.