In 1991, the British artist Marc Quinn began a series of self-portraits, Self, consisting of a bust of his head cast in four and a half liters of his own frozen and coagulated blood. Trying to catch the flow of his own aging, Quinn has been creating a new sculpture every five years and selling them to private collectors or museums like the National Portrait Gallery along with refrigeration equipment. As he was with alcohol, the work will always be dependent on electricity: a prolonged power cut condemns it to certain death. Restoring it would require a new blood draw from the artist, and that is something that is beyond the reach of even the most experienced restorer. Quinn's is possibly one of the most extreme cases, but the truth is that artists are increasingly challenging contemporary art curators, who have to deal with fragile and ephemeral materials (soap, bird feathers, chocolate, milk, faeces or naturalized animals...) whose process of collapse, in many cases, forms part of the very life of the works.
The debate is not new. Already in the 1990s, the Italian art critic Achille Bonito Oliva was opposed to "forcing a work to endure beyond its time", hospitalizing it in a museum "in a mistaken longing for eternal youth". “Much better -he affirmed- is to respect the impermanence of the work and its desire for a worthy ending”. “Obviously, respecting the will of the artist, his original intention, is key when determining how to act before each piece, but without contradicting his philosophy, the museum's mission is to preserve it for as long as possible. And in that difficult balance we move”, says Silvia Noguer, responsible for Conservation-Restoration of the Macba.
In a fridge in the Barcelona museum, Noguer's team tries to extend the life of Mar de chocolate, a 1970 sculpture that the Swiss Dieter Roth modeled with chocolate bars and strips of paper from a novel that he never published. Roth worked with all kinds of materials, with a special interest in organic materials and their degeneration. “Works should change, grow old and die like men”, he considered. His Mar de chocolate “arrived at Macba with an insect and shortly after the bugs began to proliferate. How to intervene in a piece that cannot be played?
They installed it inside a display case that incorporated a pheromone-based treatment, causing sexual attraction to the insects and then eliminating them using a nerve inhibitor. The director at the time, Manuel Borja-Villel, asked Noguer: "How long do you think it will last?" "'Well, I don't know,' I replied. But to my surprise today it is still stable. The chocolate, the sugars, the fats are so spoiled that even the insects aren't excited about it anymore." One option is passive conservation, which in the case of Roth's works is followed by museums such as MoMA, while, on the other hand, the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne has decided to leave his works in the hands of fate. Sooner or later they will become part of the pantheon of dead art.
The Reina Sofía Museum also knows about the headaches that perishable or very difficult-to-replace materials can cause. The chocolate glove that is part of Objet surréaliste, an assemblage by Dalí from 1936, was also not spared from the arthropod attack. “When it entered the museum, the chocolate was very damaged and had already been treated with resin to cover the perforations and consolidate its appearance. We put it inside a display case with a controlled atmosphere, whose low oxygen content (anoxia) makes biological activity impossible, but maintaining these conditions in the room is very complicated, so we opted to make a resin replica for its exhibition," says Jorge García. Gómez-Tejedor, head of the museum's restoration.
Noguer and García Gómez-Tejedor agree that it is essential to obtain first-hand as much information about the artist, what their intentions are regarding the work and to respect them, "although -the latter clarifies-" when the artist dies and your interlocutor is the heirs or those who manage the rights may happen that the criteria change” and the dialogue is in danger of running aground. “In contemporary art it is impossible to establish a work methodology. Each artist and each work is a world, and when one of them starts to cause problems you don't even know where to start. You can never say this is done like this”, adds García Gómez-Tejedor, who recalls that when he entered the museum Tableau et tabouret avec œufs (Painting and stool with eggs) by Marcel Broodthaers, which includes eggshells glued to a canvas and a stool, they debated for months how to repair the damaged shells and even whether it was lawful to do so. They spoke with the artist's widow and daughter and even moved the debate to public opinion through Twitter. Would you replace the broken eggs or leave them as they are? "There were opinions of all kinds, but most preferred to leave it as is."
But with few exceptions, artists are interested in the state of conservation of their works and want to perpetuate them. This is the case, for example, of the German painter Anselm Kiefer, whose monumental canvases combine numerous materials. At Macba they are always attentive to the state of Montsalvat , a painting on cotton canvas that has quantities of sand, sunflowers, pipes and rope attached to it. “We are replacing the pipes and on some occasion we have asked permission to replace a sunflower flower. He told us that there was no problem, but that they had to be on his land, ”explains Noguer.
Here there is no shark suspended in a tank of formaldehyde like Damien Hirst's ( The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living ) that soon began to rot and give off a foul smell, but they have their own fauna: animals fantastic ones created by Joan Fontcuberta and Pere Formiguera with the help of a taxidermist for their Fauna project are in the fridge; while the bulls naturalized by Jordi Benito for his installation Las Puertas de Linares are safely stored in a warehouse outside the museum after a profound intervention by expert paleontologists from the Autonomous University. Problems are welcome in the conservation and restoration departments of museums, but pretending that they can preserve two morlacos seems like too much.
The conservator-restorer Xavier Rossell managed to make the typical toy squirt guns at home -which are no longer marketed- when he recently reinstalled the piece by Eugènia Balcells SUPERMERCART, a decalogue of consumption full of objects. Another of the installations in the Macba collection that every time it was set up required processions through the neighborhood groceries in search of rice or chickpeas is Miralda's Santa Comida. Finally, Noguer came up with the solution for grain conservation: put different types of spices in the jars.
“But where do you go when a colored neon from the 60s melts in a Dan Flavin facility if they are no longer manufactured?”, García Gómez-Tejedor leaves in the air, and Noguer puts on the table the uncertainty that opens before the future disappearance of technological supports (16 mm film projectors, slides) of audiovisual works, for which, he says, it is now time to stock up.
