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Conservators Struggle When Modern Art Shows Its Age
ART
By CAROL VOGEL
Where do you turn when the 1960's fluorescent cherry-red bulb in a
Dan Flavin installation burns out? What's to be done when the
rubber used in an Eva Hesse construction begins to crumble? How do
you restore an all-black Ad Reinhardt painting damaged so badly
that it has visible blotches and scratches?
In their quest to preserve 20th-century artworks, curators and
conservators are riveted by issues of authenticity and
obsolescence, artistic intent and interpretation.
While science and technology have made it easier to restore an old
master painting damaged by water or sunlight, some paintings —
monochromatic works from the 1960's, like Reinhardt's, for example
— pose special problems. And the nature of some more recent works —
collage, conceptual art, performance and video art and
installations that use unorthodox materials or simple technology in
unexpected ways — can be a curator's nightmare.
"Suddenly the warning flags are going up all over the media
landscape," said Jon Ippolito, assistant curator of film and media
arts at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan.
"People in the trenches uncrating an Eva Hesse sculpture like
`Expanded Expansion' can see that the rubber applied to cheese
cloth is beginning to disintegrate, greatly altering the effect of
the piece, which is lying in a crate in the warehouse like a
patient on life support," he said.
"Or a curator trying to replace a fluorescent bulb in a Dan Flavin
installation suddenly realizes he can't get the same deep
cherry-red bulb that the artist originally used."
In a darkened auditorium at the Guggenheim last Friday night,
viewers watched images of crashing waves emanating from a pair of
16-millimeter projectors. Each frame of "Bitemporal Vision: The
Sea" was being carefully manipulated by the artist Ken Jacobs,
whose work was being shown as part of a conference on preserving
what the museum calls variable media. After Mr. Jacobs "performed"
his piece live — controlling the images almost frame by frame — a
state-of-the-art video recording of the same work was shown, and
participants discussed the differences.
"I'll have to see it as something else," Mr. Jacobs said when his
images unfolded without the hum of the projector. "I fear a
magnificent performance with no human frailty. I do wonder about
perfection."
Mr. Jacobs and the audience tried to imagine what would happen to
the piece once the projectors he used to compose and perform it are
as outmoded as a Brownie camera. How, they asked, could all kinds
of art from the last century be preserved?
The question is a hot one at museums around the country, as
institutions ranging from Harvard University to the Whitney Museum
of American Art to the Guggenheim grapple with the conservation of
contemporary art. At New York University the Conservation Center at
the Institute of Fine Arts is announcing $1.95 million in grants,
some of which is to be used to train art conservators.
At Harvard, officials are establishing a Center for the Technical
Study of Modern Art. The Whitney has a $5 million grant to support
conservation and is starting its own conservation department. The
initiatives at Harvard and the Whitney will be run by Carol
Mancusi-Ungaro, a leading expert on conserving modern art.
James Coddington, chief conservator at the Museum of Modern Art in
Manhattan, said that "as the number of collectors of contemporary
art increase and the values go up, these issues are becoming ever
more pressing."
Across town from the Guggenheim, at the museum's conservation
studio, Carol Stringari, senior conservator of contemporary art,
was examining a classic black painting executed from 1960 to 1966
by Reinhardt, who died in 1967. It looks like every other Reinhardt
from that late period: a geometric pattern of nine squares in
subtle variations of black. On closer inspection, many blemishes
are visible, like a large blotch resulting from poor restoration on
the lower right and two long vertical scratches at the top right.
An even closer look with a microscope and ultraviolet light reveals
other blemishes and a slightly cloudy spray that had been applied
to the surface.
Some of the damage to "Black Painting" occurred when the canvas
was in transit several years ago. The AXA Nordstern Art Insurance
Corporation deemed the harm to be irreparable.
A black Reinhardt from the same period in pristine condition would
fetch about $2 million today, experts say. Unsure what to do with
the painting, the company donated it to the Guggenheim Museum Study
Collection, which is exploring new technologies for conserving
monochromatic surfaces. The painting is now part of a two-year
study pairing conservation teams from the Guggenheim and the Museum
of Modern Art and financed by AXA Nordstern.
"Most conservators don't want to touch monochromatic paintings,"
Ms. Stringari said. "There's a level of forgiveness in conserving a
traditional painting that you don't get working with flat planes of
color."
Nestled in tissue paper inside a box on a nearby table was an
audiotape of Bruce Nauman's "False Silence" from 1975. Part of a
larger conceptual installation, the tape had begun to disintegrate,
and the Guggenheim had it restored and transferred digitally to a
CD. "We had to bring it to an audio restoration specialist with a
lab that had obsolete equipment," Ms. Stringari said. "The tape had
been spliced in the middle of the dialogue and we had to put in a
missing word, which we could only do on the digital version."
The original, which Mr. Nauman recorded on older equipment,
includes popping sounds from the microphone. Ms. Stringari said she
retained the popping sound during the digital transfer but also
retaped it without the noise. When the artist is alive, as Mr.
Nauman is, conservators and curators can go straight to the source
to deal with the issue of respecting the artist's intentions. If
the artist is gone, the conservator must try to deduce what is not
always obvious.
Ms. Mancusi-Ungaro said that conservators have worked on
conservation processes for so long that they often spend more
effort perfecting technical solutions than they do exploring the
nuances that matter to the artist. "We need to get our blinders
off, to talk to artists and see what they want," she said.
This is slowly beginning to happen at museums, she said. "Normally
the dealers and curators dealt with the artists," she explained. "A
lot more now, the dialogue is with the artist, the curator and the
conservator. It's more interesting since we all look at things from
a different perspective."
But how does a curator deal with the work if the artist has died?
What should be done, for example, to preserve installations by
Felix Gonzalez Torres, who sometimes used piles of candy that
viewers were meant to take away with them? What happens when the
manufacturer stops producing the candy or has updated the
packaging? Or when a work by Hesse, which could be worth more than
$2 million, begins to disintegrate?
"It's complicated," said Pam Kramlich, a San Francisco collector
who, with her husband, Dick, has been buying video art for more
than 12 years. "Maybe there is a 50- to 100- year life span to
these works."
In the case of Reinhardt's canvas, Ms. Stringari and Mr.
Coddington said, the opportunity to use a work from his famous
series of black paintings was invaluable. The conservation issues
range from undoing a poor earlier restoration to trying to recreate
unusual materials.
Reinhardt's surfaces are extremely delicate and the mildest
solvents tend to do damage, so conservators are considering several
methods of removing the misty coating that was applied in that
earlier restoration. One method is enzymatic digestion, in which an
enzyme is tailored to break down the overpainting. Another relies
on laser technology to delicately remove the coating without
affecting what lies beneath it.
The Reinhardts are especially difficult to work with because the
artist routinely poured turpentine into commercial oil paint and
then let the mixture sit until it separated like milk and cream.
Then he would pour off the top and use what would remained, a
powdery substance that dried to a suedelike consistency. His effect
is nearly impossible to imitate; Ms. Stringari has tried. Working
on a Reinhardt painting that has been written off as irreparably
damaged allows conservators to test possible solutions without
worrying about ruining the work. "Now we can use a substantial
portion of the painting to determine whether or not an experimental
treatment is possible," Ms. Stringari said.
Added Mr. Coddington: "This is one of the future old masters. Now
it's up to us to be responsible for it."
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