An Empress Without Clothes (So To Speak)

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The New York Sun

Carol Stringari, the chief conservator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, admits that some people might consider her a little, well, compulsive.

She has made a specialty of working on Minimalist and monochromatic paintings — works that are especially hard to conserve, because every little mark or variation on the surface shows. “We like it; it’s a challenge,” Ms. Stringari said. “But working six weeks on a little scuff? I imagine there’s a bit of obsessiveness in that.”

The conservation of Modern and Contemporary art poses many challenges that conservators of older art don’t face. There is the issue of nontraditional materials — animal skins, latex, car engines — and how to preserve art that employs contemporary technology. When was the last time conservators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art had to search eBay for an obsolete laptop computer?

This July, the techniques and philosophical problems involved in conservation will be on display in an exhibition at the Guggenheim called “IMAGELESS: The Scientific Study and Experimental Treatment of an Ad Reinhardt Black Painting.” In 2001, an irreparably damaged Ad Reinhardt painting was donated to the museum by AXA Art Insurance, to be used for experiments in the use of laser technology for the conservation of monochromatic paintings. The exhibition will discuss the results and the evolving role of lasers — which can be more precise and consistent than the human hand — in conservation.

Monochromatic paintings are only one aspect of the Guggenheim conservators’ varied workload. On a recent tour of the conservation lab, Ms. Stringari showed examples of the wide variety of projects that she and her team of four full-time conservators work on.

On a table were mock-ups of Brice Marden paintings, which conservators had deliberately gouged in order to examine the damage under a microscope and then experiment with techniques to redress them. Elsewhere was a tiny painting by Van Gogh, the pigments of which had faded; a wire sculpture by Alexander Calder, the “feet” of which no longer touched the wall evenly, and several ruptured sheepskins from the museum’s Cai Guo-Qiang exhibition.

Pieces come into the lab for a variety of reasons. Some are headed to exhibition. In addition to assessing condition, the lab will often do research on these pieces, such as materials testing or X-rays, that may contribute valuable information to the catalog.

The lab also does work related to new acquisitions. Whenever a piece by a living artist comes into the collection, Ms. Stringari and her colleagues interview the artist extensively about his or her techniques and issues relating to the work’s preservation. In the case of art that employs technology, such as Internet art, the Guggenheim now has a standard questionnaire that asks artists how the work should be allowed to change in response to technological obsolescence. When the hardware is no longer available, for instance, can the work be shown on new hardware? What is important to preserve visually — the size of the screen, the colors, the speed at which the program runs?

“My strategy is, you maintain the original for as long as possible,” Ms. Stringari said, “but have all the options in place that you need to move forward with some other technology.”

The most fraught issues come up in relation to works that are damaged or have aged badly. One such challenge facing the Guggenheim’s lab concerns a large-scale sculpture by Eva Hesse called “Expanded Expansion,” which Hesse made shortly before her death in 1970 from brain cancer.

“Expanded Expansion” is composed of rubberized cheesecloth suspended between 14 fiberglass poles. On a recent afternoon, one segment of the piece rested on one wall, while a mock-up leaned against another.

The contrast between the two showed how much the materials had aged since the work’s creation. In the mock-up, which was months old, the latex with which the cheesecloth was infused had just started to yellow. In the original, it was now a dark orange. More dramatically, in the original, the latex had stiffened, “freezing” the drapes in the cheesecloth. For years, it had been stored folded up, coated with talc to keep the layers of rubber from sticking.

Some artists and art historians think that “Expanded Expansion,” in its current condition, no longer reflects Hesse’s intentions. (The work hasn’t been shown since 1988.) In a roundtable discussion of “Expanded Expansion,” included in the catalog of a 2002 exhibition of Hesse’s work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the late artist Sol LeWitt suggested that the only solution was to show an exhibition copy.

Ms. Stringari, for her part, disagrees: She believes that the work is still visually powerful, and that making a copy would betray Hesse’s intentions. “We go to the Met, and we see all kinds of signs of age and deterioration,” she said. “That craquelure on a painting? You look right through it. But when it comes to works like these, it’s harder for us to accept.”

At a recent conference at the Getty Conservation Institute, Ms. Stringari displayed both the mock-up and a section of “Expanded Expansion” that she and her staff had restored, cleaning it and mending local tears.

“Once people saw it, they were actually quite encouraged by what might be done,” Ms. Stringari said. She hopes that her presentation at the conference convinced curators of the possibility of showing “Expanded Expansion” again.

Like many conservators, Ms. Stringari, who has been at the Guggenheim since 1992, began her career as an artist. After graduating from college, she went to live in Italy, where she supported herself working for art dealers — repainting old paintings. “I was working on 15th-century panels, which would come to me with just the baby Jesus, and I would make [everything else],” she said.

Today, as a professional conservator, she would regard that kind of “restoration” as unethical. Recently, a painting from the 1960s came into the lab with pale streaks in the background — the result, most likely, of some kind of irregular light exposure. The artist came to look at it and suggested that he simply repaint the background, but Ms. Stringari said she didn’t feel comfortable with that.

“What does it become? What goes on the label?” she asked. “Because we’re a museum and our mission is to preserve cultural patrimony, having an artist come and renew the work is problematic.”

These are the kinds of questions conservators face every day, yet the public is hardly aware of them, Ms. Stringari said.

“You walk through any museum, and you’re looking at a lot of restoration,” she said. “If it was done well, you don’t see it.”


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