Breathing Plastic Contemporary art conservator Louise Cone, Department of Conservation, Statens Museum for Kunst, explores the nexus of the PRIMI project: the specific challenges related to the preservation of the plastic artworks investigated by the project team. In 1986 Claus Carstensen (b.1959, Denmark) created what would later become a vital work in the contemporary collection at Statens Museum for Kunst. The work Ethereal body is a composite work consisting of soft polyurethane foam, grease, paint and urine on canvas, and was never intended to last. The artist
Claus Carstensen Ethereal body, as seen in 1986. Photo: Statens Museum for Kunst.
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states in a recent interview at the museum about this work: ‘…The work was originally conceived as a kind of implosive institution criticism; a kind of Trojan horse is acquired by an art museum or another public cultural institution and subsequently begins to decompose. It was
not the intention that it should hang in a museum today...’ The work not only hangs in the museum today, but is categorized as a work imbibing ‘unique cultural significance’, a status shared with works in the older part of the collection such as Andrea Mantegna’s impressive Christ as the Suffering Redeemer, ca. 1495-1500, or the Golden Age painter C.W. Eckersberg’s View of the Garden of the Villa Borghese in Rome, 1814. Ethereal body is, though, starting to live up to its name: the foam pieces hanging on the work have changed
colour, from blue and white, to green and yellow. Some of the surfaces of the polyurethane foam are also starting to crumble. Today, 26 years on, the foam pieces in this work are reaching their life expectancy. Ethereal body has been a central object to the PRIMI project. Not so much for the conservation work it has received (or not received, read on), but for the discussions it has spurned regarding the implications material degradation or damage can have for the appearance of the work, its impact on the viewer, and for its future existence. Questions
Ethereal body, 2012. Photo: Statens Museum for Kunst.
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