Marketing Mondays: Here Today, But What About Tomorrow? Who's Thinking Archivally?

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The iconic Flag has been well cared for. Here it is included in Focus: Jasper Johns in the second floor galleries at MoMA, February 2009

Jasper Johns is said to have remarked: "If I were the conservator of my paintings instead of the painter, I would be a far richer man."

While he's either understating his wealth or overstating the amount of work his paintings have needed, it's no secret that his early paintings have undergone significant conservational intervention.

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As a young artist, Johns adopted encaustic without knowing fully how to use it. Gluing newsprint to canvas and then painting on it with wax is not the most archival way to use any of those materials. Newsprint starts to disintegrate as soon as it comes off the press, wax is relatively brittle, and canvas has a boing factor—nice if you want that particular resistance against the brush, but not so good if your medium needs the stiffness of a panel. With each boing, the newsprint and wax vibrated. Cracks ensued. Then whole sections dis-attached from the canvas.

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Fortunately Johns became famous at a young age, so those early paintings have been restored in the best possible way by conservators at the best museums. Most artists will never get this kind of treatment.

Detail of Flag, above: Field of blue, cracks in the wax (in the "torso" of the star)

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The more materials you employ in one work, each with its own reaction to heat, humidity and various stresses, the greater the archival load. Here's an almost verbatim description of one artist's process, as told to me by the artist: " I build up the painting with acrylic and then switch to oil. Then I add tar and cold wax [not to be confused with encaustic]. When I think it's ready for the last step, I throw some turp on it and torch it."

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I asked if she had good health insurance for herself and fire coverage for her studio. As for the paintings themselves, big question mark, but I wouldn't be surprised at a worst-case scenario.

Mondrian's classic grids are riddled with cracks, some of which you can begin to discern on the (presumably conserved) Broadway Boogie Woogie, a detail of which is shown left. The blockbuster Mondrian show at MoMA in 1995-1996 included a surprising number of works in which the helter skelter net of hairline cracks vied with the rectilinearity and rhythm of the composition. Given the artist's singlemindedness with geometric precision, those cracks were surely not meant to be in the picture. Indeed, it was likely the artist's obsession with painting and repainting the composition--all those successive layers--that likely caused the crazing.

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Visit any exhibition by Anselm Keifer and you'll see mud, straw, seeds and other organic materials on the floor in front of his enormous paintings, ephemeral ghost works created as the paintings disintegrate. In a quiet gallery you can even hear the seeds drop, as I did at the San Francisco Museum of Art a couple of years ago.

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And of course there are the latex sculptures of Eva Hesse. Once so translucent and pliable, they are now yellowed and brittle some 40 years later, a fact all too apparent at the show of her work, Eva Hesse: Sculpture, at the Jewish Museum in 2006. In an audio accompaniment to the show—poignant because we hear her voice in almost every entry—she expresses little concern for how the materials will age. I don’t have notes, but my recollection is that she was not concerned with deterioriation, that it was part of her work. (Of course, one might ask if it was youth rather than prescience that prompted the sentiment.)
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Above: Hesse standing in front of Expanded Expansion in the late 60s, in which the resin she used for the work was creamy white and translucent

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Below,a more recent shot of the work, which has yellowed and become brittle over time. The was the condition of the work I saw at The Jewish Museum in November 2006

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The work in museum collections can be conserved and then stored in perfectly archival conditions. There's a budget for this kind of care. Pity the artists and the collectors of modest means who don't have those options at their disposal.

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In a recent post on this blog, I referred to articles that reported on the alarming disintegration of relatively recent artworks made from some early plastics. In response to those stories, reader Matthew Beall asked, "Who is responsible when a piece of art falls apart. Is it the artist? Is it the maker of the products/materials? Is it the gallery that sold the work? Does it even matter?"

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With Beall's questions in mind, I'm elaborating a bit to noodge you into telling all. Here are a few prompts:

. Are you working archivally?

. Do you employ classic materials and methods properly? If you’re using new materials, do you research them before you use them?

. Has a work changed significantly? How have you dealt with it?
. Who is responsible when a work of yours that is sold has fallen apart? Is it you? Or is it, as Beall asks, the responsibility of the gallery or the product manufacturer? Is it the collector?
. Does it matter to you?

Recent related links:

. Ed Winkleman on Artwork Health Care

. Hrag Vartanian on Swoon
. C-Monster's Ask the Art Nurse