Episode No. 63 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Wolfgang Laib and conservator Richard McCoy.

Laib is installing two major works in the U.S. Laib will debut Pollen from Hazelnut in the atrium at the Museum of Modern Art on January 23. At 18 by 21 feet, it will be the largest pollen field he has made. Then the Phillips Collection will open the Laib Wax Room, a new permanent installation, on March 2. It will be the first permanent installation at the Phillips since the museum opened its Rothko Room in 1960.

Laib’s installations typically make use of natural materials such as different kinds of pollen, rice, wax, milk and marble. He has been the subject of numerous retrospectives, including an American retrospective organized by the American Federation of Arts that opened at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 2000.

On the second segment, Richard McCoy, the conservator of objects and variable art at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, tells us about the International Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art-North America’s Tony Smith Artist Research Project. INCCA-NA has created a project by which anyone may contribute to the documentation of Smith’s 83 outdoor sculptures on Wikipedia. Among the web pages we discuss are the Wikipedia list of Smith’s outdoor works, the page the project’s volunteers created for Smith’s Gracehoper (1962/88, right) and this art21 blog post, in which INCCA-NA offers a very cool t-shirt to anyone who contributes an entry to the project.

Air date: Jan. 17, 2013.

 

Many images of Laib’s 2009 installation at the Fondazione Merz, Turin.