Never mind how anyone thinks of this stuff. How do they keep it from falling on your head?
A mostly invisible web of skilled tradespeople, most of them locally based, weld these ideas together, string them up and bolt them down.
Dennis Lehman is one of them. He´s a veteran MSU maintenance mechanic who spends most of his time fixing giant air handlers. Lehman feels at home on dizzying catwalks or inside huge ducts, but the world of contemporary art sucked him into a whole new atmosphere when the Broad Museum opened in fall 2012.
For "Red Factor," the spectacular opening exhibit in the museum´s main gallery, Chicago artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle wanted to suspend a 24-foot-wide geodesic dome about 40 feet in the air, as if it were floating away, anchored by a cable into the floor. A lifesized red canary, the emotional heart of the exhibit, would perch on the cable at about eye level.
The artist specified a 40-degree, canary-correct perching angle that drove the mathematics and engineering of the whole installation.
Lehman, a salt-of-the-earth hardhat charged with making the exhibit feasible and safe, knew he´d be working closely with the artist, but wasn´t sure how to strike up a rapport.
As it happened, Manglano-Ovalle´s son loves one of Lehman´s favorite movies, Jeff Daniels´ Upper Peninsula hunting saga, "Escanaba in Da Moonlight." That broke the ice. To be specific, they shared a laugh about a lengthy scene involving an unsavory bodily function.
"It put him on my level," Lehman said. "I Googled him later and found out what a big artist he was."
Lehman and his team wired cables to the ceiling and hoisted the 24-foot dome to the top of the gallery. The only hitch came at the end, when the team was about to anchor the high-flying hemisphere to the floor. The anchor bolt wasn´t long enough to screw into the concrete subfloor.
The artist, the crew and the big dome hovered quietly while Lehman called Ruben Garza, his materials and logistics man. Garza called around and found a bolt 13 inches long with the right specs. MSU utility driver Bill Burns made his contribution to the international art world with an emergency run to the old Mill Supplies Corp. in downtown Lansing.
When Manglano-Ovalle´s masterpiece was in place, Lehman bent over and took a photo of the bolt in the floor — never mind the dome and the bird — and emailed it to Garza as a token of gratitude. Garza used it as a screen saver for weeks.
Extremely provoked
The daunting job of turning artists´ visions into practical reality at the Broad Museum falls largely to Brian Kirschensteiner, the chief preparator of exhibitions.
Kirschensteiner has two full-time staffers, preparators Amy Brown and Brian MacLean, and six students. On occasion, Kirschensteiner brings in a group of two to four professional art handlers "who are ready for anything." He has about 100 local artisans and tradespeople on call, from carpenters to printers to neon makers.
The antiquated title of "preparator" goes back to the days of salons, when someone like Kirschensteiner would position a sculpture or putting a painting on the wall.
The Broad team does some of that, but the contemporary art world calls for a much broader skill set.
Kirschensteiner´s team combines a fine design sense with a nuts-and-bolts knowledge of how physical things hang, bend, tumble or fall.
Quiet and intense, Kirschensteiner seems torn between pride in his staff´s work and a deep reluctance to steal thunder from the artists.
Artists who have exhibited at the Broad are less shy about giving props to his team.
One of the strangest creations to creep into the Broad Museum in its two-year-plus history is New Delhi artist Mithu Sen´s "Border Unseen," a pink, mouth-like 83-foot-long reef of dental polymer and false teeth that nobody who has seen it will soon forget. The sculpture stood in the museum most of 2013 and 2014.
Sen worked on the sculpture for three years at her studio in India, beginning before the Broad was open. It gradually grew into a monster made of 35 separate sections.
Sen said that working with the Broad team was "a lifetime experience" for her.
She, too, got big ideas from seeing the building. (She worked from drawings of the museum at first.) "I was extremely provoked by the strange architecture of Zaha Hadid," Sen said. "I wanted to poke this loud undeniable sculpture in the flat landscape of East Lansing."
A set of custom designed flexible metal hinges, designed mainly by MacLean, made the sculpture slither, shudder and arch its way to the ceiling in one long, creepy mass. When Sen saw the finished work, she couldn´t find the joints.
"Brian [MacLean] helped me to create something closest to the dream I had for this installation," she said. "I think it was a total emotional and creative challenge for him."
Holland-based artist Lisa Walcott gave the Broad crew a different challenge with "Swarm," a hovering, 16-foot-by-7-foot constellation of fishing sinkers encased in black wax.
"With all those weights and lines, it wanted to tangle like crazy," Walcott said. "They built this whole cantilever contraption of poles and hooks just to get it moved into place."
Once the sculpture was in place, a disco ball motor and ceiling-mounted U-bolt turned it slowly, enabling it to catch the changing light of the museum´s east atrium. Another Walcott creation, "Vice Versa," filled the museum´s education wing with a dozen racquetballs that quietly bounced up and down all day, driven by a battery of windshield wiper motors.
Walcott said the Broad Museum brought her to work to a whole new scale, moving parts and all.
"Everything kind of expanded for me there," she said. "I wanted ["Swarm"] to extend fully into the architecture, which is tall and crooked. They were patient and they actually liked problem solving with me."
´The landfill exhibit´
Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi called his 2013-2014 Broad Museum exhibit "The God of Small Things." Lehman lovingly calls it "the landfill exhibit."
The biggest piece in Qureshi´s exhibit, his first in an American museum, proved to be the capstone of a creative phase that vaulted him to international renown in the art world: a mountain of more than 20,000 crumpled prints of his own work.
Now, that sounds uncomplicated. Just crumple ´em up and pile ´em on, right?
Ho, ho, no. When Qureshi saw the gravity-defying slope of the gallery´s west end, he got one of those sugarplum visions only the Broad can provoke. He asked if his mountain of paper could be sliced at the same precise 130 degree angle of the gallery wall, as if by a giant blade.
If the slice was right, visitors would slip into a neat diagonal incision in space where they could lose themselves in a play of contrasts: a massive mountain made of thin paper, a garbage-y mess with a clean edge, and, as the museum catalog put it, "duality between grand and intimate scale."
But crushing the wall of paper flat was a problem. The Broad team went so far as to drive a semi truck over a huge wad of paper, among other trials, but no pile was flat enough.
Then Lehman remembered a 200-ton press he set years ago for Laurent Matuana, an MSU professor researching polymer packaging. Matuana gave the Broad staffers lab space and free rein on his megapress for a few days.
That´s another thing that makes Lehman indispensable to Kirschensteiner and his staff.
"Dennis represents a hub, an institutional knowledge, because he´s been here so long and worked with so many researchers and trades," Kirschensteiner said.
To hold the flattened mass in the air, Lehman and his team built an aluminum frame and stretched stainless steel aircraft cables back into the room, anchoring the 30-foot wall as it leaned into the museum´s towering windows like a dog trying to jump out of a car.
The paper wall seemed pressed into place off by a force field, with no visible means of support.
"It was quite an effect as you walked underneath there," Lehman said. "How is that all holding up?"
That job made Lehman feel like a magician.
"Of all the exhibits, I got — I don´t want to say emotional — about the landfill exhibit," he said. Let´s pretend he didn´t.
The cube and the boat
It´s not surprising to hear Kirschensteiner say that every project is new and different at the Broad Museum. Contemporary art is not big on repeating itself. What´s surprising is the wide variation of input from each artist, and how much is often left to the support staff.
"Sometimes it´s not much more than a couple of sketches [from the artist]," Kirschensteiner said. "In other instances, it´s a thorough idea of what the artist envisioned in the space."
Chinese artist Sui Jianguo´s "One Cubic Meter of Darkness," part of the current "Future Returns" exhibit at the Broad, was fabricated entirely at the MSU Physical Plant´s metal shop on south campus, to the artist´s precise specifications.
A team of four welders wrangled four 600-pound pieces as they were set into place by cranes and carefully welded together. Half-finished ladders, custom built for working on the MSU steam tunnels, lined the walls of the shop.
Workers stopped to heckle Lehman´s welders as they fussed over a seemingly useless cube.
"There were a lot of jokes made out of it, but a lot of pride, too," Lehman said. "They had fun with it. It was different from welding pipes and things like that."
"The cube" was slowly moved from the shop and parked on the Broad´s second level mezzanine gallery last October.
Kirschensteiner was confident the oneton mass wouldn´t sink through the floor because he´d already commissioned a structural analysis of the gallery for "the salt boat."
And that´s another story.
"Boat," by rising young artist Nguyen Phuong Linh, was one of the Broad´s opening exhibits in fall 2012, a boatshaped sculpture made of three tons of Vietnamese salt bound with water, like a sand castle. Despite its weight, the sculpture sat safely on the second floor until February 2013, but the run-up was not all smooth sailing.
Nothing like the "Boat" project had been tried outside the artist´s home country of Vietnam. Kirschensteiner started by collecting samples of salt from the Great Salt Lake, the Dead Sea, South America and other places. Only Vietnamese or Korean salt held its shape. The supplier, an Asian food market wholesaler, seemed eager to help, but pulled out of the deal at the last minute.
There was only a month to get the salt before the museum´s opening day.
Kirschensteiner contacted a Vietnamese student group at MSU.
"I need people in Vietnam who can get me salt — fast," he told them.
He found himself huddled at a Ph.D. student´s apartment in Spartan Village, in the middle of the night (daytime in Vietnam), calling potential salt connections. They found a warehouse in Washington, D.C., with several pallets of Korean salt.
Lansing woodworker Rich Rollins, Kirschensteiner´s go-to man for unusual jobs involving wood, made laminated ribs to the exact shape needed. To fight the corrosive effects of salt and water, the mold was treated and sealed and a "sacrificial floor" was added under the sculpture to protect the underlying "real" floor.
The salt came just in time, a little more than a week before the opening.
"We had teams of people in there pounding this salt into the forms, adding just the right amount of water," Kirschensteiner said.
Two days before the opening, the Broad team cracked open the mold and set up fans to dry it out.
The sculpture held for months.
Sloth guy and twig girl
Last summer, MSU civil engineer John LeFevre was sitting at his desk at Infrastructure Planning and Facilities (the fancy name for the old Physical Plant), looking at schematic drawings of steam tunnels, when a call came from Kirschensteiner. LeFevre knew by then that there was no such thing as an ordinary call from "Brian K."
"We got the sloth coming in," Kirschensteiner told LeFevre. "We need to find a home for it."
The Broad´s unique demands stretch outside the museum to the surrounding grounds, making LeFevre´s life even more interesting.
"The Sloth," immortalized in a photo near LeFevre´s office, is a heavy, tempered-glass X-ray of a mother sloth and her baby, dubbed "Sloth Pieta" by its creator, Long Island artist Steve Miller. The sculpture now stands in the sculpture garden to the east of the Broad Museum.
Miller´s stark image refers to the many "Pietas" of art history, with the dead Christ in the arms of the Virgin Mary, while calling attention to the worldwide loss of wildlife habitat and species extinction.
But the sloth is not native to these parts. It needed a foundation and base that would withstand the stresses of Michigan´s 42-inch frost depth.
LeFevre suggested a conventional base to "give the weed whacker some concrete to hit instead of the sculpture." He should have known better. The artist wanted the sloth to rise straight up out of the earth. And there were other demands.
"We don´t want it to rust and the thing´s supposed to be there forever," LeFevre said.
A system of underground poles, plates and bolts, most of them stainless steel, welded at low temperatures to protect the bronze portion of the sculpture, should keep the sloth standing well after the Zombie Apocalypse.
"All you see is this mysteriously thin piece come up out of the ground that´s supported somehow," LeFevre said, flipping his pen on the desk. "And that´s the sloth guy."
Landscape architect Deb Kinney, who is charged with fitting each new sculpture in the small sculpture garden, stopped by to chat with LeFevre. On the way to work that day, Kinney had noticed snow piled around the "twig girl," as she calls another sculpture, Klara Kristalova´s "Deer." She recounted her subsequent talk with the MSU grounds staff.
"I told them, ´We went over this. You agreed that this site was OK. Get rid of the frickin´ snow.´" She laughed.
"We take it all pretty seriously. There´s a lot of pride. Most of us went to school here."
Kinney grinned after a few seconds´ pause. Sloth Guy and Twig Girl are about to have some company. "There´s another one coming," Kinney said. "You´ll see."
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