Why worry about inkjet longevity?

[tim atherton]

A load of rot?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main...y26.xml&page=1

From Antony Gormley's self-portrait in mouldy bread to the ageing condoms in Tracey Emin's bed, much of modern art has a short shelf life. So what should galleries and collectors do when it starts falling apart? Sarah Jane Checkland reports

I hate moths, just like everyone who has ever worn wool. But when I discovered the other day that they had munched their way through one of Tate Modern's silliest icons, I must admit I sniggered just a little. Evidently, those little critters have more discernment than I had hitherto assumed.

Pieces of art such as Damien Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living are susceptible to the ravages of time
The work in question was Felt Suit, by Joseph Beuys, created by the artist in 1970 to invoke 'notions of warmth and protection' as the Tate puts it. Now don't get me wrong, Beuys was an important artist. But it is for his thought-provoking performances that he should be remembered, not his products (more at)

[squiress]

Certainly the intent of the artist is the overriding concern. Yet if something is perceived as having value (and especially if patron dollars were spent for it) most displaying organizations want to maximize the people exposure. Most of what is described in this article is relatively short lived. So I am amazed at the efforts to preserve them and through imperfect preservation destroy original artist intent to create something essentially for a limited viewing public. I think of performance art where no filming is allowed. A fixed number will share the experience with the artist and that's it unless there are repeat performances.

To answer the question of inkjet ink life or paper achieval quality, I certainly think photographs are more durable than those pieces described in this article. Again, the real question is how do you preserve something that someone pays for and thus has invested dollars in either for some return or simply to enjoy. I haven't sold anything I've shot, yet will have roughly 25 of my pieces hanging in my office by the end of the week. I want to enjoy them for a long time so I did the archieval paper, the acid free mattes, the ultrachrome inks and the UV glass. I hope they stay exactly as they are while I'm still around and the modest expense to protect them from light and environment is well worth it to me.

Stew

[paulr]

Even if your prints don't fade, the museum might be crumbling down around them ...

(from todays times) http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/30/ar...rtner=homepage

[Anupam]

I am thinking of not bothering with stop baths and fixers. That way my photographs can be "performance art"!

-A

[paulr]

It crossed my mind that photography might be the first medium that was born out of an obsession with longevity. By 1826, almost everything needed to make a photograph was in place ... optics, light sensitive materials, the view camera. The only thing missing was a way to make the image permanent. Or kind of permanent. Experimenters marveled at the ability to record images from nature, but then had to watch them fade away like ghosts moments later.

What Joseph Nicephore Niepce invented was fixer. That was the true beginning.

Our obsession with making images last for posterity might be relatively new, but the medium was born out of a struggle to make them last long enough to look at.

[Mark Sampson]

Paulr, it was Sir John Herschel who discovered the use of fixer, after Niepce's death. And I think that over time, most artists (at least in the western traditions) have been concerned with making something that lasts, at least until the present generation.
And as for photographs, not long ago Peter Aaron put up a show of unfixed Polaroids, leftovers from his architectural work; with the intent that they fade while on display. I wonder if any avant-garde collectors paid millions for them?

[paulr]

Niepce didn't invent fixer as we knew it, but he invented the first method for fixing an image.

My thought was an aside ... just noticing how the origin of phtography as a process rode on the ability to make an image last. Obviously this isn't the same concern as the archival obsessions we have today.

On another note, while 20th century art culture popularized the idea of art made of junk or unconventional, untested stuff, it also carried the obsession with archival permanence way farther than ever before.

I think the phenomena are related. Previously, new media came along once every few hundred years or so. Oil paint might have been the last big shakeup before photography, and it was still paint, which used pigments that had been in use for thousands of years. No one worried too much about longevity, because the materials were at least similar to ones that had been around forever.

Photography was a big departure, but in its first several decades, few people thought of it as an art medium. The only ones who likely cared about longevity were using it for historical purposes. By the time we started noticing that we had a genuine art legacy in photographs, the materials had already been around a while. Most of them did ok.

Color photography was the first radically new set of processes invented in the era when photography was widely seen as art. Even though museums had been hanging work made from cardboard and newspaper for some time, it took three decades for color work to get taken seriously. Some of the hurdles were esthetic, but many revolved around longevity. It might be the first time longevity was the subject of so much controversy.

Digital media renewed the conversation in a big way, because many of the older dyes faded immediately, garnering general mistrust. That experience led to the first wide scale, heavily publicized longevity testing (Wilhelm, and several university and industry researchers). We learned a lot about the new materials and a lot about the old ones (not all of it good).

The mountains of new data have just given us more to obsess about than ever before. We know things about ancient paint pigments that the Rennaissance masters never knew. They used them because their teachers taught them to use them. Either they faded or they didn't. Nowadays, art fair painters argue in forums like this one about dark stability of titanium dioxide. Maybe we're better off for it; I don't know.

[squiress]

With digital files, one simply has to preserve the image file and print out something new whenever a previous image degrades. Some labor to remount and frame. For those that develop and print their own (especially artistically), you have some pretty labor intensive steps and then the preservation of the negative and print. When over at another member's house going over some of his processes, the negative storage envelopes and boxes and other things acquired to preserve and protect the effort seemed like a major bit of work with any serious number of photographs taken over one's career. At least with a digital scan of the negative I can avoid most of that.

Stew

[Jim Jones]

With digital files, one simply has to preserve the image file . . .
Stew

That may be a problem. An image preserved as a permanent print or photo negative can be replicated by the technology of the future. Many images saved only as digital files have been lost forever because we didn't understand how ephemeral they can be.

[paulr]

That may be a problem. An image preserved as a permanent print or photo negative can be replicated by the technology of the future. Many images saved only as digital files have been lost forever because we didn't understand how ephemeral they can be.

It took some bad experiences to get people thinking about this. Now it's halfway to being a mature field of knowledge. The problem isn't just for artists; we're heading into the 2nd decade where every big corporation, creative business, and even most government agencies create and store their assets digitally. Preserving them, and their usefulness, has become a major priority.

Artists with home computers are already benefiting from the lessons learned in the world of corporate archives and digital asset management.