Display As Part Of The Work example essay topic

Here is Stedelijk conservator Kees Herman Aben's description of what the Amsterdam museum must contend with each time it wants to exhibit the Mario Merz igloo Dal Miele Alle Ceneri (From Honey to Ashes, 1984) that is in its permanent collection: Dal Miele Alle Ceneri comes unassembled with a tubular aluminium frame and supporting iron bars, forty-seven tablets or panels of beeswax on gauze, six steel sheets, two fir-cones covered in wax, machine parts and the head of an antelope... It takes at least two people a full working day to put up the igloo. There are fifteen pages of instructions, complete with drawings and photos. Similar instructions were translated into a form to create Jonathon Dady's Construction Drawings 02: 2003 by Sarah Thomas, a giant ephemeral drawing erected in scaffolding outside the Art Gallery Of South Australia. As the range of forms and materials used by artists has expanded, so have the demands on the individuals and institutions that collect contemporary art. The prevalence of installation art today, which may run the gamut from modest wall arrangements to colossal environments like those of Jason Rhoades, is particularly telling.

Depending on their level of complexity, such works may come with detailed instruction sheets and documentation, and may require art handlers or studio assistants to be dispatched to aid in installation. The work may also be accompanied by something like an extended warranty or service contract, with both gallery and artist involved not only in the initial configuration of the work in a specific space but also in the repair or replacement of elements if they break down or decay. The frequently unstable materials found in many of today's sculptures and installations have required artists, collectors and museum conservators to consider questions surrounding the longevity of these art works. In some cases, artists may specify that materials which will change radically in appearance over time should be allowed to take their course. In other instances, artists might require all or part of a piece to be remade each time it is displayed. Of course, concern over the alteration of unstable materials is hardly unique to the contemporary moment, as discussions of the yellowed newspapers in Cubist collage or Robert Rauschenberg's early Combines attest.

What is new is the expanding range of problems presented by aging found elements or by works made from unusual or hitherto untested materials. New, too, is the increasingly active involvement of artists in deciding whether to intervene in the aging process and under what circumstances to consider re fabrication or replacement. Some Assembly Required Interestingly enough, it is the widespread acceptance of a procedure derived from Conceptual art, the use of certificates in which the artist defines the nature and constituents of the work, that has helped to establish a market for pieces that might otherwise be regarded as ephemeral. This practice is, in fact, doing much to free artists from the expectation that art-making necessarily means the production of objects that have a continuous physical life. Janine Antoni's 1993 sculpture Eureka, a lard-filled bathtub accompanied by a large block of soap, is a work that provides a good example of the difficulties posed by a work whose materials will change dramatically over time.

To make Eureka, Antoni filled the tub to the brim with lard and lay in it, leaving a deep impression of her body. She then took the overflow lard that she had displaced and added lye to create soap, which she formed into a large cube whose shape was further transformed when she bathed with it. Antoni had previously used lard in her 1992 Gnaw. That installation consists of two 36-by-27-by-27-inch elements, one of chocolate and one of lard, from which she bit pieces over many days; the cubes are shown with a display case filled with heart-shaped containers for chocolate, made from the bitten-off chocolate, and with lipsticks made from wax, pigment and the bitten-off lard. Gnaw's lard component proved far less stable than the chocolate one, displaying a tendency to ooze, crack and eventually collapse. But that very materiality is part of what interests Antoni: "I decided that if 500 pounds of lard cannot hold its form and topples right off its pedestal onto the floor, then that is what I would have to let happen rather than mixing it with another material or freezing it".

She therefore remakes the lard components of Gnaw and Eureka each time they are exhibited, and accepts the transformation they undergo while on display as part of the work. But rather than forming the lard in the same way that she did when she initially created the works, she casts it using moulds made from their first incarnation. The chocolate part of Gnaw is relatively stable, although its appearance will change over the years, since chocolate is susceptible to various forms of decay and insect infestation. If she chose to, Antoni could greatly slow down the chocolate's alteration, for enough artists have used chocolate in their works that conservators have developed detailed treatment strategies. The problem is that the most successful technique for chemically arresting decay and discouraging infestation has the effect of transforming the chocolate into a poisonous substance. The approach that a conservator takes depends on whether the artist judges it more important to preserve the work's appearance or remain true to chocolate's basic edibility.

Antoni would rather risk changes in appearance than alter the nature of the material. Organic materials raise a special set of difficulties. For Robert Gober, visual appearance was the main concern when he created a sculpture in the form of a bag filled with real doughnuts. As part of the making of the piece, he sent the doughnuts to a conservator to be decreased and injected with a preservative. But apparently not everyone at the exhibition opening was attuned to the subtleties of Gober's play with familiar objects and forms: one man helped himself and took a highly unsatisfying bite from a treated doughnut. Zoe Leonard initially considered employing similar preservation methods for her Strange Fruit (for David) after curator Ann Temkin expressed interest in acquiring it for the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The work, which includes pieces of fruit peeling that Leonard has sewn back together, presented a host of conservation problems. A chemical treatment was proposed that would arrest the decay of the organic components without destroying the other materials. Leonard, however, decided against preserving the work in that manner, feeling that the ongoing process of decay was part of the piece. Surprisingly, the museum was prepared to accept the challenges posed by acquiring a decaying work for the permanent collection and by the artist's insistence that it be displayed on a regular basis. "I believe [Leonard's work] may be more alive for today's viewers than many of the objects apparently fixed and never changing", Temkin says. Under what circumstances is it appropriate to replace a common object that has gone out of production with a specially fabricated item?

When Duane Hanson's 1971 sculpture Sunbather, owned by the Wadsworth Atheneum, required elaborate conservation treatment to refurbish the swimsuit and other paraphernalia accompanying the lounging female figure, the idea of remaking the period Frito-Lay packaging was rejected mainly because of the expense. Art and Obsolescence Some of the more extreme maintenance problems arise from works that employ once-common technological parts that have become obsolete. Certain of the coloured fluorescent tubes that Dan Flavin used can no longer be produced because of manufacturing hazards arising from the materials, and museums that own Flavin works stockpile the tubes as they can. Similarly, James De Young, chief curator at the Milwaukee Art Museum, thought he had found the answer to the burned-out light bulbs in Otto Piene's Electric Rosebush (1965), a freestanding electronic sculpture made from rose-colored lights, when he heard about a stash of vintage bulbs that even had the right model number. Thinking that he could not only restore the work but service it well into the future, he ordered the lot.

He discovered, however, that the filament had changed shape radically during the 1970's, and the newer bulbs would have given the work a completely different appearance. The sculpture remains in storage. Artists have also become more aware of the problems raised by the technological aspects of their works. The decision to regularly replace old equipment and circuitry has already been made in the case of a number of Robert Rauschenberg's technology-based works of the 1960's and '70's. Billy Kluver, the engineer who was Rauschenberg's original collaborator, has had a continuing involvement with works such as Oracle (1965), which employs radio receivers tuned to ever-changing channels, and Soundings (1968), which uses sensors to respond to the presence of viewers by lighting up the screen prints that are layered behind the work's Plexiglas surface. Keeping these works running requires an ongoing commitment to maintenance as well as the occasional replacement of obsolete elements with new components.

Kluver strongly advocates such updating and criticizes the conservatorial tendency to preserve original technology as an historic artefact. Updating may be appropriate in the case of works that are primarily about a certain effect rather than the technology employed to attain it. In Nam June Paik's 1965 Magnet TV, however, the abstract pattern formed on the television screen is produced by attaching a large magnet to the side of a set containing a cathode-ray tube (CRT). Newer flat-screen TVs would not yield the same visual result, leading video artist Bill Viola to imagine future museum workers "relearning the art of blowing glass and circuit wiring to re-create CRTs from scratch so the late-twentieth-century Nam June Paik piece in the collection can be presented as originally seen". Viola's awareness of the preservation issues surrounding video and installation-based work was heightened by the preparation for his 1998 retrospective at the Whitney Museum, when he found that certain video works from the 1970's could no longer be played in their original form. Viola recognized that his works faced a double threat: first from the physical deterioration of the magnetic recordings used for sound, video and other electronic data, and second from the obsolescence of the equipment needed to play tapes, project films or decode older digital formats.

His response has been to give greater attention to the documentation of installation specifications and to regularly transfer his master tapes to new digital media as they become available. Once the art object itself was thought to provide all the evidence necessary to understand its aesthetic. Today, however, the physical object may remain mute in the absence of external documentation detailing how it is meant to address its audience. At the moment, planning for the future of such art works is taking place mainly on a case-by-case basis, with artists or their representatives playing an expanded role in ongoing decisions regarding works already in public or private collections.

In view of the current plurality of artistic forms and practices, it seems likely that artists, collectors, curators and conservators will have to continue to deliberate just what, in fact, constitutes any given work of art, in situations where neither its nature nor its materials can be taken as self-evident.

Bibliography

William S. Burroughs, Painting And Guns, Hanuman Books, New York, 1992 John W.
Carlin, "Your Past Is Disappearing: What Museums Should Know about the 20th-Century Archives Crisis", Museum News, January / February 1999 Miguel Angel Corzo, ed.
Mortality Immortality? The Legacy of 20th-Century Art, Los Angeles, The Getty Conservation Institute, 1999 Kimberly Davenport, "Impossible Liberties: Contemporary Artists and the Life of their Work over Time", Art Journal 54, Summer 1995 Michael Govan, "Dan Flavin", web Jackie Heuman, ed.
From Marble to Chocolate: The Conservation of Modern Sculpture, London, Archetype Publications, 1995 Billy Kluver, "Four Difficult Pieces", Art in America, July 1991 Milwaukee Museum Of Art: web Philadelphia Museum Of Art web Responding To The Built, Adelaide Festival Centre Trust, Adelaide, 2003 San Fransisco Museum Of Modern Art: web Sarah Thomas, "Translation From Building To Drawing", Broadsheet, Volume 32, Number 2, Contemporary Art Centre Of South Australia Inc, Adelaide, 2003 web Kees Herman Aben, "Conservation of Modern Sculpture at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam", in Jackie Heuman, ed.
From Marble to Chocolate: The Conservation of Modern Sculpture, London, Archetype Publications, 1995, pp.
106-07. Sarah Thomas, "Translation From Building To Drawing", Broadsheet, Volume 32, Number 2, Contemporary Art Centre Of South Australia Inc, Adelaide, 2003, pp.
20-21 See, for example, Glenn Wharton, Sharon D. Blank and J. Claire Dean, "Sweetness and Blight: Conservation of Chocolate Works of Art", in Heuman, ed., From Marble to Chocolate, pp. 162-70. web See Ann Temkin, "Strange Fruit", in Miguel Angel Corzo, ed., Mortality Immortality? The Legacy of 20th-Century Art, Los Angeles, The Getty Conservation Institute, 1999, pp.
45-50. The treatment of the Duane Hanson work is described in Kimberly Davenport, "Impossible Liberties: Contemporary Artists and the Life of their Work over Time", Art Journal 54, Summer 1995, pp.
40-52. Michael Govan, "Dan Flavin", web web Billy Kluver, "Four Difficult Pieces", Art in America, July 1991, pp.
80-99,138. Bill Viola, "Permanent Impermanence", in Corzo, ed., Mortality Immortality, p. 89. See also John W. Carlin, "Your Past Is Disappearing: What Museums Should Know about the 20th-Century Archives Crisis", Museum News, January / February 1999, pp.
46-49. Carlin discusses the challenges facing the American National Archives and other historical collections, which must copy voluminous collections of archival material not just once but again and again in order to keep up with changes in technology. Such changes, for example, have already rendered obsolete White House dictaphone records from the 1950's and the machine used to record the infamous Nixon White House tapes.