Like a lot of people, Thomas Unger is pretty particular about his coffee. How it tastes is important, but the Houston artist’s principal interest is how it works as a painting medium. “I use brewed coffee sometimes, but mostly instant coffee,” he told Observer, mixing it with water until it reaches the right consistency for him to paint with. Darker grounds produce deeper and glossier browns, while a somewhat more watery slurry generates tans. Then, he starts painting on either thick watercolor paper or canvas that has been primed with motor oil. Again, he is pretty particular about the oil, preferring Pennzoil. “I use a mixture of used oil—carbon deposits make it darker, new oil and graphite powder,” he said. Unger doesn’t go into why an artist might use coffee grounds and motor oil when watercolor paints and commercial primers already do the job satisfactorily, but perhaps the fact that his artistic sideline—he’s a lieutenant in the U.S. Coast Guard—is called “CarsinCoffee” is reason enough.
He is part of a small but notable group of artists who create works using nontraditional materials or use traditional mediums in nontraditional ways. Creatively stepping away from tried-and-true materials and techniques can result in unique output but may also create what art conservators call “inherent vices”—a flaw or defect that will cause an artwork to deteriorate. Unger asserted that his painting surfaces are stable and do not smell of oil, although some have a “pleasant” coffee aroma.
Sometimes unconventional mediums just work. Artist Kiki Smith told Observer she “once had blood removed from my veins with a syringe and made drawings with it. I don’t think there have been any conservation issues.” That’s not always the case, however, and art conservators face challenges of all types. Ellen Moody, conservator of contemporary art at the Getty Conservation Institute in California, told Observer that she has worked on pieces made from chocolate (Dieter Roth), hair gel (Anicka Yi), milk and ketchup (Pope.L), epoxy and dried corn (Fernando Mastrangelo) and even a living beehive (Pierre Huyghe).
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Jackson Pollock used paint on canvas, but he used industrial paints such as house paint and automotive lacquers rather than more traditional artists’ paints. “These paints were never designed for flexible supports and can become brittle and flake over time,” Moody explained. Her first job, after determining what she is dealing with, is to “stabilize the surface by introducing a suitable adhesive beneath partially detached areas, often using a syringe, then gently re-adhering and securing the flakes. We then tone the losses with materials that are stable, reversible and distinguishable under examination methods such as U.V. light.”
It’s not all bad news. She added that “many artworks using unconventional materials have aged surprisingly well. David Hammons’ 1970s works incorporating grease, hair and chicken bones are a great example—they remain in good condition, likely due to careful construction and stable environments.”
But not every experimental artist is as fortunate. In the late 1970s, Andy Warhol created a series of what he called “Oxidation Paintings” that involved studio assistants urinating and ejaculating on canvases prepared with copper-based metallic paints, which caused a chemical reaction resulting in abstract images of different colors. Urine, which is somewhat acidic, contributed to the oxidation and patina but did not eat through the canvas. “From my experience, if kept in the right environment, they are quite stable, but any high humidity can cause irreversible changes,” Suzanne Siano, a conservator in New York City, told Observer, adding that “the dried pee liquifies and runs down the work.” Urine also smells, but in the intervening years any odor has largely gone away. “A few piss paintings that were left after Warhol died that the foundation had me treat did smell of pee because they were stored in a drawer for many years, but I suspect that the smell has dissipated now that they are out in the air.”
While the “piss paintings” (as they are often called) are in several major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Tate in London and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, those that used semen as a material (the “cum paintings”) are all stored at the Warhol Museum and generally are not on view.
More recently, artist Dan Colen has produced numerous paintings that use, instead of paint, flowers, Hubba Bubba bubble gum, bird poop, tar and feathers. Siano, who has worked on many of Colen’s artworks, told Observer that one of the first issues she dealt with was building stronger stretchers since the material on these canvases was far too heavy for the supports to hold. The chewing gum created separate problems, as pieces began oozing color and just falling off. The long-term prospects for these paintings were not part of his thinking, and Colen side-stepped the conservation issues of his work, noting that “my paintings are about the things they are made of.”
In 1991, British artist Damien Hirst acquired a preserved tiger shark that he submerged in a glass tank of water and formaldehyde, titling it The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. The level of formaldehyde in the tank was not sufficient, and within a dozen years, the shark began to deteriorate and the water became murky, requiring the artist to replace the shark with another and to submerge it in a solution with a higher formaldehyde content. (As to whether it’s still the same artwork, Hirst called the question “a big dilemma.”)
Sometimes, artists just have to throw up their hands and consign an artwork to the trash bin. Painter Tom Christopher once used “roofing tar on a piece as a background. It eventually hardened, and chunks fell off.” He let the buyer pick a work from his inventory as a replacement. Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum had to do the same when an unconventional medium from one of his paintings detached from the canvas.
A redo is rare in the art field, however. More often, artists do the best they can. British artist Chris Ofili applied some concoction to the elephant dung pedestals used to hold up some of his paintings to eliminate the smell, but still, those “pedestals were breaking apart and needed to be stabilized,” Kelly O’Neill, an art conservator in New York City, told Observer. But it’s impossible to control everything. The doors of the gallery in which the paintings were displayed were regularly opened and closed, which altered the levels of heat and humidity, affecting the dung’s chemical composition.
Artworks don’t hold up well for a variety of reasons, and not just because the artists were experimenting with materials. Timothy Burica, an art conservator in Manhattan, told Observer that he worked on the canvases of the Spanish-born abstract expressionist Esteban Vicente, who had a studio at 42nd Street and 10th Avenue. In that studio, “the windows were wide open, and the New York City Port Authority buses were going back and forth outside,” he said. He described Vicente as “a wonderful kind man, but all his canvases were coated with grime and soot.” That soot got between paint layers on his canvases, causing what is called delamination (separating layers). Burica did what he could to remove the soot and help bond those layers.
He additionally said that some artists have mixed oil and acrylic paints (oil and water do not mix) or mixed different paint manufacturers’ products (“they look the same, but they have different ingredients and different drying times”) or applied paint to improperly primed canvases or loaded up their paints with additional oil (affecting drying time) or items like sand and grit (which becomes too heavy for the canvas to hold). “Vincent van Gogh was sent properly prepared canvases by his brother, who was rich,” Burica said, “while Gauguin, who was poor, painted on sacks. You can guess which artist’s work had more conservation issues.”
Art conservation is always a slow and painstaking process, and it can be quite expensive for the owner or possessor of the art. Gwen Manthey, a private art conservator in Washington, D.C., has all her clients sign a contract noting that “the cost for treatment may exceed the market value of the artwork(s).” In generations past, art schools taught students about the materials they were using and the techniques that led to longevity, but that has largely been replaced by a focus on artistic expression and theory—developing ideas that will be realized in an object to be called Art. “Artists have gotten really wacko,” Paul Himmelstein, a partner in the New York City-based art conservation lab Appelbaum & Himmelstein, summarized. “Anything goes.”
That said, obtaining reliable information for the proper use of traditional art materials is not difficult. The Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts in Philadelphia includes a page on its website for artists with information and advice about materials. Art supply manufacturers provide best practices and health and safety information on their websites—Golden Artist Colors in New Berlin, New York, for one, has a page of safety tips and a contact link specifically for technical questions about products. Other companies do the same. In other words, if artists create artworks that are unstable, it’s usually a choice rather than an accident.
Conservators who are sent artworks with inherent vices may find themselves with a science project on their hands. First step: figure out what types of materials the artists used and how they put it together. Siano recalled that once, when attempting to find a fix for Dan Colen’s gum paintings, she had her staff chew gum, which she then tried baking and microwaving to see if that would stop the ooze.
“Sometimes we are lucky enough as conservators to be able to contact living artists and find more information or even to find written accounts of their materials and processes,” Alexa Beller, paintings conservator at the Midwest Art Conservation Center in Minneapolis, told Observer. “Oftentimes, though, we are unable to access that information and, in those instances, we try not to rely on our own biases or assumptions but rather evaluate the materials and aesthetics in a way that best preserves what remains and what intended aesthetic we can deduce.” She doesn’t fix problems as much as stabilize things, providing work for the next generation’s conservators.
There is no “lemon law” for artworks as there is for automobiles, and the onus is on each collector to find out if an artist has a propensity for creating works that don’t hold up well. Art dealers generally do not know or are reluctant to mention that artworks they are selling are likely to have future conservation issues. “Dealers just want to get things sold, get them out the door, and they’re not going to breathe a word about problems,” Himmelstein said. Theoretically, artworks with inherent vices should affect the reputations of the artists who produced them and their prices, but Warhol and Colen’s standings in the art field certainly haven’t been diminished.
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