Back to September 2002 Sticks and Stones and Lemon Cough Drops  

When the Eva Hesse exhibition opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in February, a number of the artist’s key pieces weren’t there. The problem wasn’t that owners were refusing to part with their treasures. It was that the works themselves, only 30 years after Hesse’s death in 1970, had deteriorated so badly that they couldn’t be shown. The Guggenheim Museum’s Expanded Expansion, a large sculpture made of latex-soaked cheesecloth panels attached to fiberglass poles, didn’t make the trip west. The piece is supposed to lean against a wall, but it’s too fragile to be placed upright without risk. Sans III, a 1969 wall piece made of latex and metal grommets, has fallen apart. Many of the latex pieces Hesse made in her last years have discolored and lost their fluidity.

In 1988, when Eva Hesse's Expanded Expansion was last placed upright, the latex panels had become brittle and threatened to tear off the supporting poles.

Courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York/Gift, family of Eva Hesse, 1975

The fact of deterioration was unavoidable—and alarming, because Hesse wasn’t the only contemporary artist to use ephemeral materials. In her case, they barely outlasted her own life. Artists today are experimenting with materials that were never intended to be used in art making—from chocolate to excrement, foam rubber and fluorescent tubes, bodily fluids and banana peels—materials that are difficult or impossible to preserve. They create artworks that are destined to be consumed or to be constantly remade. Such works have compelled curators and conservators to come up with new preservation strategies. The people who are responsible for taking care of artworks have been considering more than the technical solutions to conservation problems. At a series of recent symposia in New York, Los Angeles, London, and Amsterdam, conservators, curators, and artists have been talking about the mortality of contemporary art and the morality of preserving it.

The organizers of the Hesse exhibition confronted the problem at a daylong meeting in New York in 2000. After examining Expanded Expansion in the Guggenheim’s conservation lab, curators and conservators, along with a number of Hesse’s friends and colleagues, discussed the artist’s practices and intentions, her feelings about her own mortality and the mortality of her works. The discussion, moderated by Ann Temkin, Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was published in the exhibition catalogue. Lying in a specially constructed crate on a table in Carol Stringari’s laboratory is one of the three panels of Expanded Expansion. Stringari, the Guggenheim’s senior conservator for contemporary art, runs a hand over the latex to show how hard and brittle it is. If the piece were placed upright, the latex-impregnated cheesecloth might tear right off the strong fiberglass poles.

The fate of Expanded Expansion is uncertain. It’s "unexhibitable in the state it’s in," Stringari says. What should be done with it? "The jury is still out," she replies. "There’s no ideal answer to this question, which is particularly complicated because it arouses so much passion among conservators, art historians, and artists. Some people, especially those who knew and worked with the artist, feel that even in its state of deterioration, it still has tremendous impact and that the artist would embrace the changes. A small group of people think it should be remade as an exhibition copy, but that would be difficult because it’s so large and you would inevitably lose the spontaneity of the original. Then there are people who think it needs to be retired and we have to accept that." Unfortunately, she adds, "economics enters into the discussion because you need quite a bit of funding to treat such a large-scale work. If this were a very small piece, we might have conserved it long ago, but the logistics of carrying out the treatment, knowing that there’s no perfect solution. . . . We keep putting it off, to see if we can find a better method and funds to support the undertaking."

There is one work of Hesse’s that is still virtually pristine because it has spent almost all of its life in storage. A test piece for the sculpture Contingent has been in the National Gallery since 1996 and has been on exhibition only twice since then, for a few months each time. It didn’t travel to San Francisco. Its value, Stringari says, is that it allows us to see what a Hesse latex piece is supposed to look like—but only if we don’t look at it very often.

Eva Hesse knew that her works wouldn’t last, but she didn’t make clear what she wanted done with them when they did deteriorate. Her friends and colleagues didn’t always agree about whether she would have exhibited pieces that had deteriorated badly or would have wanted other people to repair or even refabricate them. The lesson was obvious, at least to conservators. Artists should be articulating their thoughts and feelings about such matters to the people who will be responsible for the fate of their works.

Conservators today think it’s crucial to talk to artists. In 1991 Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, then the chief conservator of the Menil Collection in Houston, started the Artists Documentation Program to film interviews with artists in front of their works. Mancusi-Ungaro, who now holds a joint appointment as the first director of conservation at the Whitney Museum and founding director of the Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art at the Harvard University Art Museums, says that "artists and conservators share a love and complete respect for materials and the working properties of materials. So the kind of questions a conservator asks are different from the ones a critic asks." The free-form, wide-ranging interviews are intended not only to elicit technical information but to "document artists’ reactions to their works in front of their works, as well as their feelings about the aging of the work and about its future preservation."

Guggenheim conservators and curators, in partnership with the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology in Montreal, are working on an ambitious project called the Variable Media Initiative, which was explained at a symposium at the Guggenheim last spring. The project is codirected by Jon Ippolito, the museum’s associate curator of media arts, and Alain Depocas, head of the Langlois Foundation’s Centre for Research and Documentation. The aim is to ask artists themselves how their ephemeral artworks should be preserved and how they can be transferred to new media when the original media have worn out or been used up or become obsolete. The artworks range from film and interactive Net art to performances and installations.

Stringari says that the questionnaire, developed by Ippolito, is designed to describe as fully as possible "what an artwork is in its ideal state and what it could be in some future reconfiguration." It will be available on the Internet next year.

Stringari confesses that she sometimes feels she is "imposing on the artists and their creative process" by asking them so many questions. "I often feel they shouldn’t have to worry about any of this, and I’m always concerned that I’m putting restrictions on them when I ask them to think about their mortality and the fate of their work, especially the younger aritsts. Most of them don’t ever think about things like that. Just call me, they say. Well, I often work on things that are over a hundred years old, and I can’t do that anymore."

Caitlin Jones, who is spending the year in the Guggenheim’s conservation lab as the Langlois Variable Media Fellow, sat in front of the computer and scrolled down the detailed questions that would be asked to elicit the intent of an installation artist, so that his/her wishes could be taken into account in any future refabrication: What kind of space does the artist consider acceptable? Can the piece be installed in a fine-art museum, a gallery, a movie theater? An indoor urban or rural space or an outdoor urban or rural space? Can it be installed in multiple locations at once? What about its boundaries? Does it have to fill an entire room or can it share a space with other works? Is there a limit to the number of viewers at a time? What about sound level, if there is sound, and lighting? Jones comments that the lighting question has come up with Nam June Paik’s TV Garden (1974), which had been installed that morning in the "Moving Pictures" show. "The artist prefers it in a dark space," she says, "but for this exhibition the curatorial team struggled to meet the challenge of the open space, and to give TV Garden the light conditions it required."

Using the Variable Media guidelines, John Hanhardt, senior curator of film and media arts, had recently spoken to the artist, and then a team of curators and conservators had interviewed Jon Huffman, Nam June Paik’s studio assistant. "We came up with a set of guidelines," Jones says. "One of the things we came up with was a ratio of plants to televisions, and just this morning, when the work was installed, it became clear that more plants were necessary to work within the exhibition space."

"That work has been shown in many spaces and many configurations since the 1970s and the artist is always involved," adds Stringari. "We are trying to pin it down so we have some guidelines for the future, but it’s quite difficult. Installation work is inherently about the space, and each space presents new challenges. The Variable Media Initiative does not intend to freeze the parameters but to establish the degree to which something can be variable or reinterpreted."

Meg Webster created the installation Stick Spiral for the first time in 1986 for a show at the Forecast Gallery in Peekskill, New York. The piece was made of tree branches arranged in a spiral. They came from an estate where, the artist says, "someone had done some pruning, taking down some saplings and so forth. I was just basically making forms out of the material that I found nearby."

Webster uses natural materials—branches, stones, water, mud, and moss—but it’s against her esthetic to destroy anything natural to make art, so when she re-created Stick Spiral for the "Material Imagination" exhibition at the Guggenheim SoHo in 1995, after it had been acquired by the Panza Collection and subsequently by the museum, she used branches that had been knocked down by a storm. There was more space in the museum and more material, so the piece was bigger and looked generally less constrained. Webster liked it better.

Anyone who wanted to re-create Stick Spiral would probably start with photographs of its past incarnations, but to Webster it’s not so important that the work look precisely the same every time it’s made. As long as she’s around, she says, she expects to be consulted, but, she adds, "I’m not fussy about it. If someone else wanted to do it differently, I would probably let them. But if it’s made badly, or if it’s made with materials that were destroyed to do it, I might be inclined to say that I didn’t recognize that version." What does Webster think is the essence of the work? "That’s a good question," she answers, "but I don’t know what it is yet. It has something to do with the quality of the making. The intention has to be right. The work just comes together. It is both material and something made and something to be directly perceived by the body." How much could the piece vary in appearance from its original incarnation and still be considered Stick Spiral? Say it were to be refabricated at the Guggenheim Las Vegas and no tree branches were available. Could Stick Spiral be made with desert cacti? "You couldn’t cut them down for the purpose," Webster answers, "but I suppose you could prune some branches—any kind of pruning that’s done in an agricultural way. "One of the most interesting things for me is to see how future installations can be better and change. I would love to see one of the forms built in a massive, massive way. So is that a new work? I don’t know, and I don’t think it’s important to answer the question."

Works that are intended to be consumed entirely pose a similar problem for curators and conservators. At the Guggenheim symposium, which was titled "Preserving the Immaterial," Ippolito used Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s candy pieces as fascinating case studies in the treatment of duplicable artworks—works that can be "automatically cloned with no loss of quality from one copy to another." It soon became clear that they can’t be cloned but must be reinterpreted each time they are refabricated. According to Andrea Rosen, Gonzalez-Torres’s dealer and friend and the executor of his estate, that’s what the artist intended.

Gonzalez-Torres’s piles and beds of candy are about mortality. People are invited to eat the candy, so the piece is slowly consumed. It can be re-created, but it can’t be preserved. But since the artist, who died in 1996, left few directions aside from the "ideal weight" he assigned each piece, the curator and the conservator have to decide in what form it should be re-created, and what to do if the candy the artist used is no longer available.

"Untitled" (Throat) was originally made of Luden’s Honey Lemon Cough Drops, which were packaged at the time in opaque yellow and blue wrappers. Now the same drops are packaged in clear cellophane wrappers with yellow lettering. Since the materials the artist used are no longer available, anyone who wanted to remake the piece would have to choose among several options. The Guggenheim’s questionnaire outlines those options.

The first is storage. The conservator, knowing that any candy is likely to become unavailable, might store an extra supply, but that wouldn’t be a good idea, Ippolito told the Guggenheim audience. Candy attracts bugs, "and the bugs like to take a nibble out of the Kandinsky along with the candy." Furthermore, storage in a warehouse is very expensive.

The next option would be emulation, and this is the strategy the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art curators chose when they borrowed the piece (meaning they borrowed the right to remake it) for a retrospective exhibition. They combined yellow-wrapped candies with blue-wrapped candies to emulate the visual appearance of the original.

When the show traveled abroad, Ippolito and Nancy Spector, the Guggenheim’s curator of contemporary art and organizer of the retrospective, chose the third option: migration to a different medium. They went to a drugstore and bought the same Luden’s cough drops. At this time the drops were packaged in clear cellophane wrappers with white lettering, which meant that the piece looked very different from the one Gonzalez-Torres had made. "Yet, in some ways," Ippolito said, "this option of migration—that is, just choosing the up-to-date standard—seemed to connect to a story I had heard about the relevance of this work for Felix, which was that his father had died of throat cancer, and this was the only type of candy that helped him feel any better." Ippolito had "posited some potential allegiance to the brand of Luden’s honey lemons that went beyond the physical look of the piece."

Was that justified? Ippolito asked himself. "I’m not sure," he answered. Then he speculated about "an even more radical strategy of reinterpretation, where you might put inhalers or patches or Claritin or some new drug that didn’t exist in Felix’s time, that was nevertheless somehow the functional equivalent of what cough drops were in 1991." The museum that wants to preserve Gonzalez-Torres’s works, Ippolito concluded, will have to determine first what the works mean.

"Should the museum be thinking about how best to interpret what the piece meant?" Rosen said later. "No, it isn’t their responsibility to make interpretations. They can decide on the form of the work they own—if the flavor is more important than the color of the wrapping. They have the right to perpetually change these decisions—next month they can decide that the color of the wrapping is more important. Although our desire is to be in awe of an artist’s decision, part of Gonzalez-Torres’s intention is that the audience and the owner are forced to make the decisions themselves."

Of "Untitled" (USA Today), which belonged to the late Elaine Dannheisser (candies individually wrapped in red, silver, and blue cellophane; endless supply, dimensions variable, ideal weight 300 pounds), Rosen commented that "it was originally installed in a corner, but that isn’t essential. People have the right to install it as they like, and when they loan the work they loan the right for someone else to make that decision." Moreover, "all pieces can exist in more than one place at the same time."

Cloning isn’t a possibility for Zoe Leonard’s Strange Fruit (For David) (1992–97) in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Mortality is at the heart of this installation, too. Made while the artist was mourning the death of a friend, the piece consists of 302 peels of bananas, grapefruits, lemons, and oranges. After the fruit had been eaten, Leonard sewed up the skins with thread, wires, zippers, and buttons.

"When I started working on the piece," says Leonard. "I didn’t consider it a work of art. It was a practice I was enjoying—sewing every day. Much later, when I realized it was a sculpture, I went through a period of time working with a conservator, trying to find a way to preserve it." Leonard worked with the German conservator Christian Scheidemann, who eventually came up with what she considered "a perfect method of preservation," which involved shock-freezing the peels and then soaking them with the consolidant Paraloid B72. At that point Leonard realized that preserving the piece wasn’t what she wanted. "Eventually I reached a decision that the piece needed to be perishable and that in fact the heart and soul of the piece was about its being temporary and fragile. So I made a conscious decision not to preserve it. The kernel of the piece is that it does decay."

Both Paula Cooper, her dealer, and curator Ann Temkin supported the artist’s decision. The museum’s conservators, Leonard says, "were freaked out at first, but now they love the piece and understand it."

"The last time I went to install it," Leonard adds, some of the fruit had been stepped on or crushed, and two had an insect infestation." The conservators had carefully picked up all the pieces and slipped them into acid-free envelopes. Leonard wasn’t so concerned about the damage. "This is part of the process of decay, so I felt that as long as you can pour it out of the envelopes onto the floor, I would like to keep installing it." The insect infestation had to be treated before it spread to other objects, but otherwise, according to Leonard, the piece was conceptually intact.

"I would love for it to be a permanent installation and just decay over time until finally it would be little piles of dust on the floor, with buttons and zippers," Leonard says. Will there come a time when Strange Fruit is no longer exhibitable? "It’s hard to say," Temkin answers. The museum and the artist have agreed to keep in touch and will make that decision together. "For the most part," Temkin says, "it’s lasting really beautifully." Leonard has installed it herself in the past. After she’s gone, says Temkin, "we’ll use our own discretion."

The issue of artist’s intent didn’t originate with contemporary art, says James Coddington, Agnes Gund Chief Conservator at the Museum of Modern Art. It was always relevant. Rembrandt, for example, "didn’t mean for all those cracks to be on his paintings, but we’ve come to accept them. What is our approach going to be to a video installation that isn’t displayed on the original equipment because it can’t be or because nobody bothered to document what that original equipment was or because it’s no longer available to us? Will we still feel that we’ve got enough of the artist’s message in whatever format we’re displaying it in to say, yes, that’s the work of art?"

It’s a question of history as much as conservation, Coddington adds. "It’s for the art historian and the curator to judge that the cracked Rembrandt carries enough of Rembrandt still, that the video displayed on a flat-panel state-of-the-art screen is close enough to the original that was displayed on a cathode-ray tube 20 years before." Ideally, the judgment is guided by what the artist has told us.

But judgments on whether and how to intervene in the life cycle of an artwork are based on what we value about it as well as on our sense of the artist’s original intent. Coddington uses the example of a Picasso papier collé (paper collage) to illustrate the different values that may attach to an artwork. "When it was first made," he says, "with that newsprint he put down there, what was valued was its newness, its shockingness. But that’s no longer the value assigned to it.

"Let’s say someone found that identical newspaper hidden away in a drawer somewhere, in absolutely pristine condition, and they bring it to me and say, I can give you the exact same piece of newspaper, and this is what it looked like new. Take the old one off and put it on. Of course I wouldn’t. Why not? To put it on would be much closer to the artist’s original intention, we all agree on that, but we’ve assigned a different value to that papier collé. We’ve assigned age value to it and to that particular piece of newsprint. That’s why we don’t do it. By one set of standards, to get back as close as possible to the artist’s original intention, we should intervene, but we don’t contemplate intervening in this instance, even if we have the perfect piece of newspaper."

When Wadsworth Atheneum associate curator Kimberly Davenport decided in 1995 that Duane Hanson’s 1971 Sunbather in the museum needed conservation and refurbishment, she had to consider to what extent the polyester sculpture of a woman sleeping on a lounge chair should be returned to its original condition. The woman’s navy-blue-and-red polka-dot bathing suit was disintegrating, the magazines on the ground next to her were yellowed, and her bags of snacks looked shabby. Davenport, who is now director of the Rice University Art Gallery in Houston, didn’t want to update the sculpture; she wanted to restore its power to shock and amuse, which had been blunted by the deterioration of both the figure and its accessories.

In 1978, when the sculpture entered the collection, Hanson had been asked about its care. The bathing suit had already faded, but Hanson didn’t mind. "If it gets too bad," he wrote, "you can replace it. I don’t object to any other adjustments if it benefits the sculpture by contributing to a better—fresher—illusionism—so that paper & magazines should be replaced periodically. If any old non-faded papers & magazines from 1971 can be obtained that would be ideal." He was consulted again in 1995 and said he didn’t care if the sculpture didn’t look exactly as it had originally. As for the bathing suit, "anything that’s kind of foolish looking" would do.

To replace the suit, Davenport first looked for similar fabric of the period. When that search wasn’t successful, she considered replicating the original fabric, but that wasn’t practicable. She finally found a vintage dress that was a pretty good match and used that to make a new bathing suit. The next problem was the bag overflowing with snacks. Davenport explored the possibility of finding Fritos from 1971 that were still in their original packages, and even approached Frito-Lay about the possibility of silk-screening copies of the old bags. They told her it would cost a fortune. Finally, she chose some contemporary snacks based on their retro look.

The magazines posed another problem. The only 1971 magazines Davenport could find were faded copies of Life and Look. At this point, Davenport thought that the new elements worked together, except for the magazines and the can of Tab, which had become a historical artifact since Tab was no longer manufactured. It was replaced by a can of Diet Coke, and the magazines were replaced by current issues of Soap Opera Digest and the tabloid Star. Finally, the elements of the sculpture snapped together again to form a visual and conceptual whole. Hanson’s Sunbather had been revitalized through a series of interpretive decisions, with Hanson’s approval but without his participation. Davenport believed she had carried out his wishes by contributing to a "better—fresher—illusionism."

"Sunbather sprang from a period, but it wasn’t a period piece," Davenport says. "It was a statement about humanity at any time. Hanson didn’t see it as time-bound. He had made clear what his intent was—to keep the piece in the moment, to keep it fresh." The results aren’t always so satisfactory. In the summer of 1977 the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam decided to exhibit a work by Joseph Beuys called Corner of Fat in Cardboard Box, made in 1963. The work consisted of a battered corrugated cardboard box containing in one corner a piece of gray felt covered with a layer of ivory-colored animal fat. Because animal fat putrefies and smells bad, the museum kept the piece in a Plexiglas container, which served to protect both it and museum visitors.

Corner of Fat was unwisely exhibited under a spotlight, which made it very hot inside the box. Pretty soon the fat melted dramatically, spreading into the felt and the cardboard, making it look dirty and greasy. When the Plexiglas container was opened, the smell was terrible.

Although Beuys was still alive, he wasn’t consulted. Instead, the Stedelijk’s conservator decided to reconstitute Corner of Fat himself, using a mixture of stearin, linseed oil, and beeswax.

We can only speculate about what Beuys would have thought of the reconstruction. The museum’s present conservator, Herman Aben, points out that the artist accepted deterioration and decay. "The processes continue autonomously," Beuys wrote. "Everything changes." Would he have considered that the damaged piece still embodied his original intent?

Aben told the audience at the "Modern Art: Who Cares?" conference in Amsterdam that he preferred the damaged Corner of Fat. Is the piece still as the artist conceived it, he asked, or is it a relic of Beuys?

That was precisely the question that was asked about a number of Hesse’s works at the pre-exhibition meeting. To what extent did they still carry her message? Of the degraded Expanded Expansion, the artist’s friend Gioia Timpanelli insisted that "there is still a beauty about the piece." But Sans III, she judged, was "not alive. It is not a work of art any longer." The German conservator Martin Langer disagreed. Convinced that "the process of making Sans III may have been more important to the artist than the esthetic of the resulting work," Langer said that the piece ought to be exhibited.

Commenting on such disagreements, Carol Mancusi-Ungaro says that conservation always involves making decisions about "which qualities of a work must be preserved to preserve its essence." The artist herself may articulate different feelings at different times about the future of her works. Once the artist is gone and the years pass, it’s difficult to make such decisions because they are inevitably "time-bound," arising out of a context of our own concerns and values. Mancusi-Ungaro uses a striking image to make the point. "For years after the Sistine ceiling was painted," she says, "not one commentator focused on the colors. The subject never came up in the commentaries of Condivi or Vasari. Yet in the 1980s, the great controversy over the ceiling’s cleaning focused on the colors and whether they had been damaged by the treatment.

"In the end," she says, "it’s about judgment—the artist’s judgment of what is important for the survival of his work and the conservator’s judgment of how that can be accomplished."

Conservators take the long view. All of them say that they encourage artists to think about the aging of their works, but they don’t think artists should be constrained by the problem. Whatever the artist’s intention, it must be respected. Whatever the results, says Mancusi-Ungaro, "we would try—the field of conservation would try—to rise to the occasion and find a way to preserve it. When artists started to paint on canvas, contemporaries were convinced that it would never last. The prevailing thought was, you paint on the wall or you paint on wood, but you can’t paint on fabric and expect it to last. Well, a hundred years later, conservators who had to keep the pictures from falling apart learned how to line a painting. They rose to the occasion."

Sylvia Hochfield is editor-at-large of ARTnews.