From dung to bulbs, fine-art fixers can restore any work
If Christian Scheidemann had been a conservator in, say, Michelangelo's day, his job would have been much simpler. Fading fresco? Grab some paint and get to it.
If Christian Scheidemann had been a conservator in, say, Michelangelo's day, his job would have been much simpler. Fading fresco? Grab some paint and get to it.
But most artists don't make frescoes anymore. They make works such as Blossom, Nigerian-British painter Chris Ofili's sensuous 1997 portrait of a bare-breasted black woman, composed, in part, of elephant dung on canvas. That's why Scheidemann, proprietor of Contemporary Conservation in Manhattan, found himself in Copenhagen a few years ago, bent over Blossom with crap in his hand.
The conservator, who had previously restored Matthew Barney's pound cakes that had become infested by rats, ordered a new dollop of dung, trimmed it to the right size and plugged the gap. And where did he acquire the excrement? "The London Zoo. Ofili always used dung from a particular group of elephants there, like he was collaborating with them," he says.
Scheidemann and other like-minded specialists basically do the same work as traditional conservators: performing what amounts to cosmetic surgery to extend the lifespan of a piece. The difference is the unorthodoxy of the materials they're preserving. To conserve Barney's pound cakes, for example, Scheidemann baked new ones and then replaced the fats with resin through a process called plastination.
Not every piece of contemporary art requires such profound rehabilitation, although even the most basic maintenance is seldom straightforward. Take Dan Flavin's minimalist fluorescent-light sculptures.
"No one who buys a Flavin ever thinks about the lights going out," says Steve Morse, conservator at the Dan Flavin Studio in Manhattan. "And then, inevitably, it happens."