Only if you don't want it to

September 3, 2018 5:21 PM

Plastic objects in museums are falling apart.

Of an estimated 8,300 million metric tons of plastic produced to date, roughly 60 percent is floating in the oceans or stuffed in landfills. Most of us want that plastic to disappear. But in museums, where objects are meant to last forever, plastics are failing the test of time.

posted by clew (22 comments total)

All art degrades. I had an art history professor who spent her time carefully removing 3rd century BCE Egyptian funereal encaustic portraits from wood that was turning into powder. But perhaps it is fitting a disposable culture creates disposable art...
posted by jim in austin at 5:42 PM on September 3, 2018 [15 favorites]

American Masters, this week, featured artist Eva Hesse, whose work utilized a ton of fiberglass, latex, polymers, and the like. She coordinated her work with a plastics supplier who warned her that the plastics would eventually degrade and fall apart. Hesse reportedly replied “Good. Let the museums deal with it” or words to that effect.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:49 PM on September 3, 2018 [10 favorites]

Plastic objects become useless garbage almost immediately, but then persist in garbage form for hundreds of thousands of years. I think of all plastic items as "future trash."
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:08 PM on September 3, 2018 [3 favorites]

One of my friends was also an artist in a medium that cannot be preserved. He pioneered the use of large arrays of LED lights to give powerful new visual experiences. Since all LEDs degrade, especially when they're put to intense use, and all electric circuits are also prone to degradation, conserving his installations is worth the effort but ultimately doomed to fail. Also, he did this early one, when blue LEDs were a novelty. The dim light they provided will never be replicated by state of the art LEDs today, so when these have to be replaced, the experience of viewing his installations as originally presented (note I do not say intended), will one day be given to one person for the last time. There is no way to avoid regarding him as a conceptual artist whose conceptions will have to be re-implemented one day, and to make sure his circuit diagrams and blueprints are conserved well enough to allow that.

Same with any artist in any other ephemeral medium. If you can call yourself a conceptual artist ad not induce eye rolling, you can write down instructions for reimplenting your work and save curators the trouble of having to research plastic chemistry and the like.
posted by ocschwar at 6:09 PM on September 3, 2018 [7 favorites]

Of course, I'm wearing plastic shoes, plastic pants, a plastic shirt, plastic sunglasses, and even plastic underwear right now so who am I to talk?
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:11 PM on September 3, 2018 [5 favorites]

It's not just plastics. Despite being theoretically a solved problem, I have several model train items that have suffered zinc pest.
posted by ckape at 6:12 PM on September 3, 2018 [7 favorites]

Shades of Vonnegut's Rabo Karabekian.
posted by Iris Gambol at 6:21 PM on September 3, 2018 [7 favorites]

It's a bit off topic, but only a bit, but I'm continually impressed by the staying power that well made things from the pre-plastic period can have*. In my scope of semi-expertise it'd be things made of metal or wood. Be it wooden furniture (from rockers to work benches, shoutout to Christopher Schwarz for his studies on both benches and staked furniture, among other things) and hand-tools (be they user-made or mass-produced by companies like Millers Falls or Stanley).

I always assumed it was consumer economics and/or a more disposable, or perhaps fashionable, based culture that was to blame for the gap that I always perceived but couldn't really define or defend as a real thing for *things* of quality and longevity being perhaps more of the norm and less of the exception. Instead, it seems that I may now be a bit more forgiving, though undeserved from various views because I'm cynical as hell, for humans since the actual fact may be that plastics like nylon or what not just weren't understood as well as things that had been used since antiquity like wood or, to a lesser degree, metals or even stone.

Thanks for this post.

*Yes, I'm aware of the theory that basing assumptions on the present-day perception of the "quality" of goods of the past is fraught because we only have the surviving examples for study, thus giving a bias of opinion, but I have come to terms with that.
posted by RolandOfEld at 6:40 PM on September 3, 2018 [4 favorites]

Of course, I'm wearing plastic shoes, plastic pants, a plastic shirt, plastic sunglasses, and even plastic underwear right now so who am I to talk?
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 21:11 on September 3 [+] [!]

Eponysterical ...
posted by carter at 6:44 PM on September 3, 2018 [9 favorites]

The cellulose nitrate the toothbrush mentioned in the article is made of is also known as nitrocellulose, which is also the smokeless powder found in modern ammunition. It was used in motion picture film until after WWII, and is responsible for many fires in film vaults.

The thing about plastics is that you can make complex shapes for much, much cheaper with molding than you could using previous materials. See: 99 cents combs today versus their high price in O Henry's The Gift of the Magi.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 7:10 PM on September 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

The problem is that something plastic needs to retain form to be useful and degrading from that state happens fairly quickly. Garbage on the other hand is just formless plastic shit that hangs around being harmful and it lasts for fucking ever.
posted by Definitely Not Sean Spicer at 9:16 PM on September 3, 2018 [2 favorites]

I know it's not high art, but I've always been fascinated by the 1959 Barbie dolls, whose faces were made of a type of plastic that loses its color over the years. They look like vampire victims.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:17 PM on September 3, 2018 [2 favorites]

ocshwar--

I didn't get into the large scale LED scene until 2012. Ephemeral was kind of the default. I was quite proud when the cubes caught fire (wasn't much fire, a bit of plastic and wire on steel frame) and whatever wasn't burning, still glowed!

I think that thing lasted a bit over a year before the welds started to fail. We were taking that thing around to various festivals...other people had bugs.

We had insects.
posted by effugas at 10:09 PM on September 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

I wonder whether Elon Musk is taking to heart the anecdote about Armstrong's spacesuit. His missions to Mars are going to be fraught if the components of the life support systems have a short finite lifespan.
posted by ardgedee at 6:29 AM on September 4, 2018

One of my favorite mean things from my time working with the American Visionary Art Museum was watching traditional arts conservators coming in to work on artwork created by self-taught artists with unconventional media.

"Jesus," said one, as I watched her at work on a piece. "Went to school for a decade and I'm repairing house paint on an aluminum storm door."

I could only smirk. Self-taught artists living in poverty seldom have access to the body of current research on archival materials practice. They just find what they can for a canvas and mark it with media they can afford, and the joy is in the creation and freedom of expression, for as long as it lasts.

I work in mosaic when I'm not up to my less abstract pursuits, and could carefully manage my materials to make artwork that'll last nearly as long as figures chiseled into stone, but I find it more satisfying to think of art as an ephemeral performance rather than some sort of narcissistic contribution to a permanent fossil record.
posted by sonascope at 8:37 AM on September 4, 2018 [5 favorites]

Let me assure you, many school-taught artists may theoretically have access to the body of current research on archival materials practice, but it's not like they care.

Signed, somebody who has seen a lot of artists make...interesting... choices with their materials.
posted by PussKillian at 9:34 AM on September 4, 2018

To work in a museum or archive is to be constantly made aware that life is ultimately a losing battle against the second law of thermodynamics.
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:55 AM on September 4, 2018 [6 favorites]

Welcome to Living in the plastic age
posted by twidget at 11:57 AM on September 4, 2018

Fascinating!

I love entropy so very much.
posted by aspersioncast at 3:37 PM on September 4, 2018

Though the upside of manufactured objects is that it is easier to make replicas: often the patterns exist (or can be reverse-engineered) and the manufacturing technique is a matter of process rather than the work of a unique artisan. Which allows the structure/pattern of the artefact to be separated from the unique materials of the individual item.

It would be theoretically possible to make an exact replica of Neil Armstrong's spacesuit, or a LED art installation, and put that on display, and repeat the process once that degrades. For unique items, like the spacesuit, they would effectively be split into two artefacts: the matter and the structure, which would follow separate paths, the former eventually ending up as a pile of decayed fragments which had once been to the moon, and the latter showing the form it had when it was there.
posted by acb at 7:10 AM on September 5, 2018 [1 favorite]

previously (?)
posted by numaner at 11:12 AM on September 5, 2018 [1 favorite]

alternatives for new production are difficult
posted by clew at 11:48 AM on September 6, 2018