3; Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Work.

My supervisors are funny, my workstation's neat, and I get to hold original prints of famous photographs. The First day of work wasn't so bad...except for the fact that everything that could possibly go wrong with the computer did.

I woke up extra early today to carpool with a couple other people, which was pretty fun I guess, but not waking up early. We got to park at TOH...top of the hill...which is normally reserved for the BigWigs at the Getty...and carpoolers. We felt like real high rollahzzz.

So I arrived at my desk about 20 minutes early after being harangued a couple times from guards at the GRI (Getty Research Institute). Then I realized I didn't have my stupid ITS folder with ALL MY TEMP PASSWORDS. This was definitely bad, and I couldn't help but think it was some sort of payback from yesterday's extensive badmouthing of the ITS experience.

Keeping my cool, I decided to call the help desk and found a lot of complicated things I had to keep in mind--not to mention my unease at talking on the phone so loudly in such a quiet space. Turns out the damn tech's outsourced to Texas and the guy couldn't hear me so I had to talk in my usual Loud American Voice to communicate my problems...basically everybody heard the new worker in the department confessing that he lost his password sheets on the first day and couldn't log on to the network.

This issue remained unresolved until after lunch, because frankly, I didn't want to play phone-tag and pass up the opportunity to start working for realzies with my supervisors.

So I'll spare you the details of my work, because that's not really important, and this part's just supposed to be personal commentary as opposed to a long recitation of events. Blah blah work blah blah computers blah blah acquisition number blah.

While lamenting my inability to log in under my own username, I recieved my first piece of mail which seemed to have gone through at least 10 different people before landing on my lap. It seemed to be a PIN sheet from security services, which I suspect is an authorization to get access to the actual collection without supervisors...I'll have to test to find out.

The whole time I was working I was pondering the different times I could go in and just have a field trip in the chilly little crypt of Art Past. Then Uncle Ben (not the rice dude) walked into my head with those famous words of no-fun heroism: "With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility," heretofore referred to as WGPCGR...not that I'll ever use that again.

Lunch Came and Lunch Went...the 2nd half of the day.

I failed to locate the previously mentioned stalagmites at the Getty, so pictures of those will have to wait. Actually, I don't have a new camera yet, so there.

Walter Benjamin wrote a piece on the status of photography as art that perfectly frames my experiences in the afternoon. He said that art photography makes people want to wash their hands in the restroom reserved for the opposite sex.

Actually, he theorized on the Aura of the art object--the unique art object, such as a painting or sculpture, is an entity unto itself, unique througout all space and time. A singular object.

Since this was also the attribute of early photography such as daguerreotypes, it helped increase the artistic judgment of photography in its early days, but Talbot's very early method of photography already had a reproducible negative.

So the conundrum Benjamin pointed out, in words more eloquent than mine, was that most photography construed as "art" is intrinsically reproducible from the negative the photographer owns or owned. The "original" print doesn't really exist in a sense. The first print, definitely...but 50 prints from the same negative could be made identical to the first, so what would make the first so special really?

I think he pointed out that...wait, I think it was someone else...pointed out that with NY Museum of Modern Art's giant exhibit on Atget helped push the idea of photography as art in an object-sense. Art photography has always (or for a long time at least) occupied the same formal and conceptual space as other mediums but when it came to being an actual art object...unique in every way...it failed, but museums and galleries IMBUED their photography with the Artistic Aura. Now your probably-ununique image of Edward Weston's "Two Shells" can be jacked up in price because they can be marketed like a unique painting!

It's a strange thing, this imbuing of the artistic aura on a medium that's intrinsically clonable.

This long-winded, inaccurately-expressed tour of Bejamin's art theory was a roundabout way of saying that I felt funny in a good way when I got to hold ORIGINAL photographic prints this afternoon. There's something strangely mystifying about the "original" photograph...physically there but different from being physically "there" in a magazine reproduction. The matting, the vault security, the handling instructions...I think all of these contribute to the construction of the artistic aura for photography.

I'm not complaining--it made the experience 100x more enjoyable and awe-inspiring. Then again, this is the experience that keeps museums running even though libraries and the internet ostensibly show the same thing. If anything, I'd rather go to my arts library to see the damn Mona Lisa than go to the actual Louvre to see the disappointingly puny object. But there's still a weird, pleasurable juju around the first prints of an excellent photograph by a master photographer.

Quote of the Day: "MMMMmm...Oh...I could just eat this print."


Things I Learned Today:
-Don't go on Wilshire after 5pm.
-Carpool with people who live close to you.
-Supervisors doing impersonations=funny.
-Work=better than boredom.
-I hope to be the Patron Saint of Curators.
-Learned a lotta shit about computers.
-TOH Parking=bloated sense of superiority, similar to badges
-http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=46151&handle=li THIS, in person, in an original print, is one of the best photographs i've seen in my life.

Day 2; or, the End of Comfort

What I learned today, in a sentence: I should buy sunglasses to shield my eyes from the bright sunlight-reflecting white tavertine marble of the Getty.

This touches on the two major doings of the day: tech & safety training and grounds tours. I arrived at the Getty at around 8:40am and then headed over to the ITS training room. Just the name "ITS Training Room" made my soul shed a tear inside. This is the schedule we recieved:

9:00 a.m.–10:30 a.m. Phones and email training
ITS Training Room

10:30am - 11:00 am. Human Resources
ITS Training Room

11:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. Emergency Evacuation
ITS Training Room

12:00 p.m.–1:00 p.m. Lunch (on your own)

1:00 p.m.–2:00 p.m. Safety Training
ITS Training Room

I only noticed 5 minutes before 9 that I would be in the same room for 4 total hours in the day. This isn't really a challenge for me--except that it's a TECH TRAINING ROOM. My worst fears were confirmed as I walked into the room--no windows, 25 terminals, and a powerpoint screen at the front. The cabinet walls were all white board that could be written on. The room screamed "tool." And so, this morning I became xxYupp13xC0r3xx ...with the mind-decayingly boring technology training and required safety instructions of the corporate office space, I was initiated into a culture I thought I'd never fall into.

Key phrases: "You can use call forwarding to forward a caller to another phone, like say when you're on a business lunch." [emphasis added]
"Why is this important (referring to safety training)? [silence, and I mumble "because it's a matter of life and death?]
Because it's required by State Law."

Yesterday I walked into the visitor-closed Getty in business casual attire, and suddenly it looked like a corporate building instead of a museum. Being in the bowels of the North Building in the ITS Training Room really sealed this perception in--can you imagine an organization so affluent that it houses a world-class collection of art AND a tech training room full of newish computers?

A welcome respite to all of the pragmatic teaching were the training videos. Boy, those low-budget made-for-yuppie informational films are a RIOT. The first was an 11-minute one called

Office Safety: It's a Jungle Out There, complete with low-budget CGI animals mixed in with film of various office spaces. It was quite popular with everyone in the room--everybody was laughing. I mean, here we were, all from 19-21, sitting in a room watching office safety videos when we were at an ART MUSEUM. And on top of that, we were seeing the BEST stunts ever to come out of moving pictures--seriously! Office Safety had various clips of:

-people falling down stairs
-stepping on a ladder rung as it breaks and sends someone falling
-tripping on a wire on the floor that sends a man falling hard on the floor
-falling off rickety ladders

These were all shot in one angle, and no fancy editing. I was seeing real [stunt] people graphically tumble down stairs. Amazing. At one point, we focused on Larry at Shipping, who lifted objects incorrectly, bending over and such. What does that lead to? Aching back pains! Sleeping on his couch belly-down, a CGI gorilla repeatedly hopped on his back. This could only have been the work of some genius with the reincarnated soul of Salvador Dali. It is a jungle out there.

Quote of the day, from the ITS training room: "I want to check Facebook..."

I didn't enjoy the next video so much. It was on blood-borne pathogens, and it wanted us not to help people who are bleeding. Oh wait...

"Does this mean you should swear off helping people? Not likely...just remember to help yourself first!"

Because I understand now that I should "treat all blood as if it's infected," so my "teamwork" instinct in the office space would have to be shut down if my coworker gets a hangnail that could give me HIV on a friendly handshake.

Mercifully, by 2 pm it was over, and just in time--I was starting to doze off, which is always bad when you're in the first row. Now it was time for the fun stuff: Special Collections, and a tour of the Gardens.

Special Collections: I saw the coolest shit. 'Nuff said.

the Garden Tour: This was fun. I think they were pampering us as much as possible before work. Walking through the gardens this time of year was beautiful--the grounds manager revealed the blooming patterns of the flowers, and in July I can expect the Central Garden to be saturated with beautiful color au naturel. It was also good to learn the context in which I was meant to "experience" the garden by its designer, Robert Irwin I believe. Hint: it has a lot to do with lighting from the trees, the sounds of running water, and the textures and colors of the plants.

Things I Learned Today
-The very white surfaces of the Getty outdoors can kill my eyes if I walk around outside too much.
-Not stretching at my workstation will ruin my body and make me want to sue.
-Blood in the workplace is the root of all evil.
-Do NOT dial Emergency 7000!
-Do NOT send to "ALL" 1425 workers of the Getty on their webmail!
-Electrical cords can turn into CGI snakes as a metaphor for DANGER in the jungle-workplace,

-The tavertine marble blocks of the Getty are mostly hollow, and you can literally play the structure...hitting the hollow marble produces a beautiful tone in my opinion.
-Disputes between large ego-ed architects lead to interesting compromises.
-There are stalactites and stalagmites in rarely-walked-on parts of the Getty!
-The goats are brought in once a year and are terrorized by coyotes in their home pasture. Poor guys.
-The Danish Council demanded no people within 100 feet of their space, so the Getty converted a planned plaza into the Cactus Garden.

-Badges that gives you a 30% discount on food = awesome, and give you a bloated, illusory feeling of superiority over the visitors.

And this was the easy part so far. Tomorrow the real work starts. Can't wait.
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editorial: So I think I've found a format for entries
1st there'll be Personal Commentary, then a Quote of the Day in context, then Things I Learned. Any comments and critiques are greatly welcomed.

Day 1.

Who thinks the Getty's a cool place to work in?

It's definitely weird coming from a small nonprofit community art gallery where I just worked w/ the executive director. On a normal day, it was just the two of us. In a normal week, we'd get probably 4 visitors that we don't know. My first minute in the Getty, I'm arriving to a parking lot which already had 2 levels full by 8:30am. Later in the day I found out that the Getty has about 1500 people working at the actual Getty Center. This doesn't include the newly reopened Getty Villa.

So from incredibly small to ridiculously huge is what I've experienced. From an intimate workspace to a giant "campus" of people who don't know each other from other departments.

I don't think the goats are counted in the 1500, but they definitely work. Apparently the Getty hires a goatherd and some goats to trim the grass on the hillside and they do a good job with the weeds. Supposedly that costs about $8000 but I don't know if that's per session or per year, but to quote someone today: "The Getty hemorrhages[sic] money."

I knew one of the issues I'd be noticing was the incredible amount of wealth the Getty's sitting on without an equal amount of care about the organization of that wealth. The way I heard it, it's like the Getty would throw money at problems instead of going to the core of the problem to fix it and prevent any similar things in the future. But if they're throwing money at me, I won't complain for these ten weeks.

One good thing a took away from my first day at the Getty is a bloated ego--that I am 1 of 21 interns selected from a pool of 145 or so applicants. My colleagues go to school in Columbia and Yale and Stanford and a lot of small colleges. Damn, I felt like small fish until I found out how exclusive we were, so Praise for that.

My supervisors are really cool guys, but I hesitate to say they're "chill" since they know how to keep busy. They've pretty much got my schedules for the whole week and probably the whole 10 weeks planned out. I like the tight ship they're running but I was also looking forward to exploring the other departments, but honestly, I think the Dpt. of PHotoggraphs is one of the best.

They took me into a study room full of art books--specifically, photography. I've never seen such a comprehensive collection in my life but I guess I should've expected it at the Getty. Then they took me to the actual collections room...55 degrees farenheit for the black and white stuff and a chilly 40 degrees for the color collection. I actually got to see a Nadar self-portrait from the 1860's in person.

All of Benjamin's talk of the imposed aura of the art object in photography was definitely coming alive there. Photography, an intrinsically reproducible medium, has recently become imbued with the same aura as the unique art object--the sculpture, the painting, the combine...yet this is still weird conssidering its dual nature as a reproducible medium. But for old photographys, I think this is a little more valid. Looking at things in person will always be different, and I'd say better, than seeing reproductions in art books.

I don't know what else to talk about. I considered making this a clandestine Dirty Little Secrets of the Getty-type thing but I have a feeling they'll find out somehow and thatll ruin me. To be honest however I'm excited to see how the next 10 weeks are going to go. I'm sur ethere'll be no shortage of interesting experiences. Today was even someone's bday in the Dpt. of Photos and I found out my dept. heads really do birthdays, despite runnning a tight ship. Too bad my birthday was earlier this month.

Living in Westwood rocks. I feel like every post-work afternoon will be full of Los Angeles adventure, gas willing. Please visit me.

I like how Multicultural implies "not-white." In reference to the program I'm in, the Multicultural Getty Undergraduate Internship, one said that it's basically affirmative action. And while I didn't quite agree on the exclusionary nature of the seemingly inclusive term "multicultural," it was revealed to me that most of the high positions in the world of art discourse and exhibition are held by white men. Apparently even women getting high curatorial titles is something that's big talk--AND WE'RE IN 2006.

So I came to appreciate this affirmative action internship. One visiting professor told me in response to my desire for a career in arts management--"That's good, what the art world needs is more non-white people."

Okay, let me qualify this by saying I'M NOT RACIST. Nor do I believe in reverse-racism which I've been exposed to quite a bit in the past few weeks. I don't say "kill whitey" or whatever. But to ignore the fact that a prolifically male, caucasian-dominated elite of arts managers and administrators supports hegemony is foolish. Diversity will naturally bring more democratic, heterogenous discourse, and that's long overdue.

That being said, it'll be a blast schmoozing my way into a position where I can help change the art world and thay it's thought about.

Oh, I totally forgot to mention my lament at the beginning of my yuppie-dom. Well I have to go, because tomorrow I start the day early at the Getty to learn how to recieve and send phone calls and e-mails, and I'm gonna be given an orientation of Human Resources.


*shivers*


God bless.


edit: there's a friggin' grass helipad at the getty. but al gore's the only one ot have used it. and firefighters needing it to fight fires in the hills.


the orientation game was exactly what i expected it to be: a bunch of yuppies such as myself running around the getty in a funny lame scavenger hunt for weird places in the getty for some mediocre prize. but i can't say it wasn't fun. it wasn't fun. losing, tha tis.