This has been a busy lecture preparation season for me.  Most of the summer was spent preparing for talks given at the Savannah College of Art and Design in early October 2008. The school is wonderful, and the professors could not have been more welcoming and open to discussion on a variety of topics. However in meeting with students, some intriguing ideas were exchanged in our conversations. 

Students at Savannah, and any other art school, are in the processing of finding their own niche, staking claim to their personal voice in artistic expression. In their experimentation, they may stumble upon an art material or industrial fabrication that works to meet their needs. It might be a type of paint that they modify to perform a certain way or a substrate that acts to their liking. After investing a lot of time in working with these “out of the mainstream” materials, they attend one of my lectures. I tend to scare them with stories and pictures of what can happen when artists don’t think through the long-term problems and issues regarding inherent vice.

I define "inherent vice" as elements within the physical makeup of a material that will cause it to change in appearance, fail to maintain long-term integrity or compromise the existence of an object. As art objects age, the potential for degradation of any materials rises.This is especially true as new, industrial materials and/or combinations of commercial and artists’ materials and experiments with mixing various formulations enter the art realm. 

The vast array of products found at a home improvement store can be used to make art, but will they hold together for a reasonable amount of time and sustain the visual appearance an artist intended when the piece was fabricated? Some of my conservator colleagues will say, let artists make whatever they want, however they want, out of whatever artists want. My counter argument to that is as follows. If you don’t do a bit of “homework” and think through the fabrication process, the mixing of potentially disparate or incompatible materials and how they will become integrated as an art object, you might doom them to a premature death. I am not a firm believer in the notion of trusting artists to use whatever they want, however they want for one main reason. In talking to artists I find that in many cases they select materials impulsively, without thought as to how they will work together or hold up to the effects of aging. Mature artists may have very sound reasons for selecting materials and wishing to exploit the effects of the interaction between disparate products. They may even select a material for its symbolic meaning. I respect that notion and applaud it. However, lots of artist will take shortcuts and skip basic research into what would be best to use to achieve an effect and maintain the look and feel for an appreciable length of time.  Experiment all you want, but don’t expect your potential buyers to support the brunt of your cutting edge work as the piece you create melts or crumbles before their eyes. To use a color related analogy, we would not want the folks who apply the highly technical paint application to the car we buy to “go creative” one day and add something strange to the coating mixture because they thought it would look really cool. That might be fine if you want to give away the car, but if I am paying for it, I expect the paint to perform over a long period of time without failing.

Let’s go back to the world of art students starting out with building their portfolios and satisfying their class assignments. I see so many of them work with materials that they have no idea as to how they will perform over time. Some even pick paints or substrates that are made with products that are known to be incompatible with paints or adhesives they are using. However, they like the way the stuff looks. They did not pick a clear sheet of acrylic glazing material from the hardware store because it symbolized the death of natural products in what is an endless sea of artificial, chemical confusion. They selected it because it was on sale and rubber cement mixed with plastic beads they spread about the surface of the acrylic sheet looks good. Using materials that we know will change in appearance fairly quickly will have a dramatic impact on how their artwork will be viewed and interpreted. Their artists' statements should anticipate the acrylic changing as the solvents interact with the plastic. They should preemptively comment on the brown appearance of the rubber cement even though at the time the art was created the adhesive was clear and colorless. A few better-planned choices made with some thought could have saved them from the inevitable changes that would take place by using materials that change so drastically in a short period of time. Many artists however continue to struggle to attempt to perform the equivalent of the mentalist Kreskin and bend spoons before our eyes. You can try to defy physics, but in the end, physics always wins.