The things that visiting lecturer Giulia Putaturo did not say in her lecture provoked more questions than the issues that she spoke about. The lecture began and remained very technical. She gave many examples of pieces that she had worked on, all of which were contemporary (20th century.) All the works that she described were analog — sculpture, painting, installation art — and none were digital or performance based. For each work, Putaturo explained the difficulties she faced — whether in choosing the right sort of glue to reattach paint spalls, or re-stretching a canvas while maintaining the seemingly inadvertent rippling of the fabric by the original artist.
In her work, Putaturo leaned more towards science than art. Having worked in an architecture conservation laboratory myself, I’ve found that things like chemical compounds, ionized versus non-ionized water and rigid documentation are more important than the usually more vague or abstract issues discussed by painters or sculptors. In all her examples except for one, Putaturo was extremely focused on preserving art to be exactly as it was when it was purchased — even if that included going to great lengths to conserve accidental or unintentional consequences of the artist’s process.
While the public knows the names of famous painters or sculptors, from Putaturo’s lecture it seems that the industry sees artists as just another cog in a complex machine that involves agents, dealers, gallery owners, collectors, conservators, preservationists, curators, etc. Putaturo responded very definitely “No,” when asked if she consulted with artists during the preservation of their works.
“Artists are not actually interested in the conservation problem. Sometimes they care, sometimes they don’t. I think that it is important to get them involved if you can,” she said, though the original artist was only involved with one work that she presented.
Putaturo’s work in conservation provokes the question: Who takes responsibility for art, the creator or the consumer? Many of the galleries and private owners of works wanted painting to be restored to the way that they had bought them. In this way, the art remains forever static; ironically, through intensive work and effort they remain exactly the same.
Similarly, Putaturo notably did not speak about money until questioned about it, though value seems intrinsically tied to the work she does. Also while speaking about the involvement of the artist, she said, “The problem is in the market. If you sell something in the market with a high price … if an artist makes an ephemeral work, he has to sell it at a completely different price. He has to let them know, ‘This is intended to live for ten years.’”
Value conferred to a painting or a sculpture, after all, is a social construct, which in the current downturn becomes even more apparent when works like Giacometti’s “Walking Man” sell for a price that could single-handedly save Haiti.
Putaturo’s work in conservation of contemporary art strikes me as much more bizarre and provocative than the work of museums in preserving works of dead artists, who are no longer around to state their original intentions. Because the painters or sculptors of Putaturo’s interest are alive, her hyper-precise preservation of a single moment in time makes the work seem precious, unchangeable, static. Contemporary art preservation seems like the work of a pack rat — one who deals not in shiny, messy things, but in socially-constructed value and a single moment of desire.