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Contemporary Art Conservation at Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum
Poziom:
Temat: Sztuka i rozrywka
I'm Gwen Ryan, and I'm the sculpture conservator
at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
The Hirshhorn Museum is the branch of the Smithsonian that
houses primarily the modern
contemporary collection. So you'll find things from
early 20th Century spanning all the way to last week.
We have two parts of our collection-- that that's
housed indoors and then we also have
our outdoor sculpture garden
where you will find some of
the most prominent artists of the 20th
and 21st Century
Contemporary artists still work with bronze
and stone
however, they also incorporate a lot of
unusual an unconventional materials.
You'll find things like chocolate
or pollen or
potentially art with live insects. There's
a wide range of materials that you could
find and
they're not necessarily intended to keep use
for artwork in the first place. So our role
as a conservator is to look at that and say,
"How can we
continue to have this artwork last into posterity
even though the materials themselves have inherent
issues with their longevity?"
One example of an artist working the materials
that weren't necessarily intended to be incorporated
into artwork and last into the centuries
is Paul Thek. He was working in the late 60s
with latex
in 1969 he produced this piece,
"Fishman" and adhered to the surface are
replicas of fish also cut out of latex.
So in the material has degraded to such a degree
that we've already lost a couple of the
fingers
You can see the the internal material that's
supporting the latex is so brittle
that it's broken right off.
KATE MOOMAW: "You know I think we might need to consider about his face them rather
sunken in and distorted
I don't know if there's anything that we can do
to sort of
correct that. It's a very delicate area. There's already
a lot of
tearing and repair work that needs to be done. GWEN RYAN: Yeah you can
really see there is no flexibility in
the material anymore.
Our first step so far haa been to work with scientists
at the Smithsonian's Museum Conservation
Institute
to do some analytical work on the material.
We've taken samples such and such as this
cross-section
Which shows how the rubber is degrading.
It has a very brittle exterior surface while
on the interior you can see the original color
of the material. It's also much more flexible
on the interior
When we approach the conservation
of a work that is employing really unusual or
unconventional material
that might have an inherently low lifespan
you know, we're talking just maybe even
a couple decades,
we have to consider
the message or the intent of the artist is.
Is it really about the original material or
is it about
the experience of viewing the piece? What part
of the artwork is
important for us to preserve?
When it comes to something like rubber or latex
that only has
the life span of a few decades,
we do have to weigh
preserving it, which would mean keeping it
in an isolated dark environment,
versus having it out on display.
Putting something on display will naturally
shortens life span
but if that means that people get to see it,
isn't that sort of the point?
