How Do You Conserve Art Made of Bologna, or Bubble Gum, or Soap?

As contemporary artists get more ambitious with their materials, conservators have to find creative ways to preserve the works.

Featured on theatlantic.com

Art critics noted the stink as soon as the elevator opened. Indeed, the morning of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial preview, Pope L.’s contribution smelled like rotten lunch. For good reason: Claim, on view through June 11, consists of 2,755 bologna slices nailed in grid formation on the walls of a small, freestanding room within the exhibition.

Plastic basins catch the grease run-off along the museum floor. By early April, nearly a month later, the stench had faded considerably and in May, it seemed gone, as the bologna dried—or “cured” per ArtNews—into something probably more akin to beef jerky now. Claim considers the usefulness of race as a social category: Affixed to each piece of meat is a photocopy of someone who may or may not be Jewish. According to the Whitney’s label, the number of slices reflects 1 percent of the Jewish population in New York. Or not. The math, we’re told, is a “bit off”— a deliberate misrepresentation that doesn’t actually correspond to census data, the pictures taken at random. What, the artist is asking, makes us think we can recognize Jews—or any other identity—with certainty? On June 2, Pope L. received the Whitney’s prestigious Bucksbaum Award, which grants one Biennial participant— whose work demonstrates a “singular combination of talent and imagination”— a future museum exhibition.

But among the questions it presents, Claim, more than other artwork in the Biennial, stresses the unique problems museums and collectors face as contemporary art grows more ambitious in its materials: how to conserve works made of substances meant to last for several days or weeks. After all, it’s difficult to imagine bologna portraits transcending millennia like a classical marble bust or centuries like a Rembrandt. Getting a sculpture made of deli meat to survive the decade could even be a stretch. While Claim may be an extreme case of perishable art, Pope L. is far from alone. Today’s art world is filled with artists using seemingly banal, yet wacky household items— from a miniature Algerian town made of couscous to a huge Styrofoam cup cloud— elaborate, significant work that challenges not only what art is, but how exactly, future generations will be able to experience it.

That conservators play a pivotal role in art history is a given. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s department of scientific research includes researchers with backgrounds in chemistry, biology, geology, and engineering. The director of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies at the Harvard Art Museums, Narayan Khandekar, has a Ph.D. in organic chemistry, with post-graduate training at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art. A conservator’s goal, he says is to ensure that viewers appreciate the art, rather than get distracted by the damages. But conservation decisions can stir up controversy both in and outside the art world. On a busy day, for example, nearly 20,000 tourists can stream through the Sistine Chapel, according to The New York Times, trekking dirt particles and humid air with them, slowly degrading the paint on the ceiling’s artwork. In 1990, after much debate and public scrutiny, a team of restorers completed a major cleaning of Michelangelo’s frescos. Ironically, the restoration might be too good. Some people worried that the chemical solvent, AB-57— a gelatinous substance that Vatican assistants applied to the 16th-century masterpiece and then wiped off with distilled water—produced sharper colors than the artist’s original artwork.

Click here to read the full article.