According to Allan Kozinn’s February 23, 2013 article in The New York Times, “A Plain White Square and Yet So Fascinating“, the exhibit, “We Buy White Albums” (on view at Recess Gallery, 41 Grand Street, New York City through March 9, 2013), is an installation of several hundred examples of the Beatles’ “The White Album” which were collected by Rutherford Chang. For those who are too young to know the record firsthand, the one color album cover was embossed with the title and each album carried a unique serial number. In the article, Chang is quoted as saying, “I was interested in the different ways that covers aged. Being an all white cover, the changes are apparent.” Back in 1968 when the album was first released, who would have thought of its cover as material for the study of damage and aging of paper.
Author: Rebecca Rushfield
An abundance of College Art Association meeting sessions on conservation, technical art history, and the material aspects of works of art
In a typical year, one or two sessions at the annual meeting of the College Art Association focus on conservation or the material aspects of works of art. The 2013 meeting which took place in New York City on February 13-16 included seven sessions on these subjects– “The Proof is in the Print: Avant-Garde Approaches to the Historical Materials of Photography’s Avant Garde”, “Destruction of Cultural Heritage in European Countries in Transition, 1990- 2011”, “Collaborative Understanding through Technical Investigations: Art Scholar, Conservators and Scientists Research in Tandem”, “Between Maker, Agent, Collector, Curator and Conservator: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Islamic Tilework”, “Technical Art History and the University Curriculum”, “The New Connoisseurship: A Conversation among Scholars, Curators and Conservators”, “Artists and the Manufacturing of Art Materials”– with a number of them stressing collaboration. Some day in the future will we look back to this meeting and see it as the beginning of a golden age of conservator-art historian collaboration?
What does it mean when an insurance company says that a damaged work of art no longer exists
In the December 24 &31, 2012 issue of The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead wrote a Talk of the Town piece, “Zombie Art” about The Salvage Art Institute’s exhibit in the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia University called “No Longer Art” and a related symposium (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lX9vW47sKs ) bringing considerable exposure to the category of “dead” or “salvage” art— i.e., damaged works of art for which the cost of conservation would be greater than the amount for which the works are insured. These works are therefore rendered as total losses by insurance companies and are sent to warehouses to live in limbo. In terms of the art market they no longer exist. However, they do exist physically and could be restored, raising existential ethical questions which conservators might well contemplate.
A forthcoming lecture on historic ceramic repair techniques
Mended china, like this 1700s English plate, will be the topic of a talk at the New York Ceramics Fair.
According to the January 18, 2013 “Antiques” column of The New York Times (“It’s as Good as Glue: Mending Shattered China“, by Eve M. Kahn), a small chapter in the history of conservation will be presented to the public at the New York Ceramics Fair on January 23, 2013. Angelika Kuettner, Associate Registrar for Collections Documentation and Imaging and Assistant Curator of Ceramics at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation will speak on “Simply Riveting: A Look at Broken and Mended Cermaics”, detailing the use of twine, metal and glue in the repair of fine china in the 18th and 19th century.
What will become of video art when there is no one let who can restore it?
According to a profile in the Wall Street Journal (“An Archivist Still Wired for Analog“, by Steve Dollar, December 22-23, 2012), seventy-one year old Chi-tien Lui, owner of CTL Electronics in the TriBeCa section of New York City since 1968, is one of the few people who still has the skills and knowledge required to restore video sculptures like those created by Nam June Paik from the 1960s until his death in 2006 (many of which are now on display in a retrospective at the Smithsonian American Art Museum).
It is unrealistic to expect conservation training programs to devote much course time to such a small and specialized group of art works. What will become of these works when replacement equipment is no longer available and Mr. Lui and his few colleagues are not here to execute custom modifications to the equipment that is?
Would any conservation program have accepted her as a student?
Dr. Miriam Clavir, conservator emerita of the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology recently published “Insinuendo“, a fun mystery novel which is one of the rare works of conservation fiction that presents conservation work as it really is. However, with the intense competition for places in the few North American conservation graduate programs, one wonders if protagonist Berry Cates would really have been accepted to any of them when, wanting/needing a chance of life after her husband walked out on her, she decided to study conservation.
Good Public Outreach Rendered Silly
The December 7, 2012 issue of The Wall Street Journal contained a small feature (“Pondering Pollock, by Ellen Gamerman) about the Getty Center/University of Iowa Museum of Art study of Jackson Pollock’s 1943 painting, “Mural”. Gamerman explained how investigators are using tools like microscopy, x-radiography, and lasers to discern Pollock’s working method. The positive impact of the piece is undermined by the accompanying (most likely staged) photograph featuring the rumps of two Getty officials, an artist, and a conservation scientist as the men bend over to examine the painting and by the mention of the fact that, while conservators have been known to spot clean paintings with their saliva, they could not have used the technique on this painting because it is eight feet by twenty feet in size.
A Timely Response Is Everything As Sometimes It’s Too Late to Salvage Damaged Works of Art
Workers cleaned out a sculpture studio on Friday in the basement of Westbeth Artists Housing in West Village, which was heavily damaged by flooding during Hurricane Sandy.
That there are limits to the ability to salvage large numbers of drowned art works was brought to the public’s attention by Christopher Maag in his New York Times article, “Lifetimes of Artworks Destroyed at Artists’ Colony” (December 8, 2012). Maag wrote about the many artists in the Westbeth Artists Housing development who lost years of their work in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy when, due to safety concerns, they were not allowed to go down into the flooded basement where the works were stored until nine days after the storm by which time the works were in such a bad state that they had to be trashed.
Some call us superheroes
According to Pia Catton in “Conservators Take Up Fight” (November 19, 2012), one of the many articles which The Wall Street Journal has published about the effect of Hurricane Sandy on the visual arts in New York City, conservators are now “art world superheroes” to the galleries and artists whose works were destroyed by the flooding. The widespread dissemination of information about the conservation profession –including its emergency response capability– may be the one good thing to come out of this terrible event.
When It’s Cats Versus Monuments
Rome is known for its street cats and for its archaeological sites. When the two come together there are problems as the cats and the tourists who come to see and feed them are damaging to the ancient monuments. The Area Sacra of Largo Argentina, an archaeological site in downtown Rome consisting of four Republican era temples is also the site of a very long standing but unofficial cat shelter. According to an article in The New York Times (“Strays Amid the Ruins Set Off a Culture Clash”, by Elisabetta Povoledo. November 8, 2012), when the shelter recently applied for a permit to install a toilet, it came to official notice and the Culture Ministry is now trying to close it down. Whether the shelter remains or is closed, there will still be cats at this and other Roman sites. Umberto Broccoli, Rome’s superintendent for culture acknowledges that “the cats of Rome are by definition as ancient as the marble capitals they lounge on”. Can the preservation of the cultural heritage prevail when the cats of Rome are seen as being equally important?