A bout of carelessness on the part of those in the art storage business has recently been lining the pockets of lawyers. The infamous Great Art Warehouse Fire of 2004 destroyed work by Tracy Emin, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Damien Hirst among others. In January 2007, the company responsible, Momart, paid tens of millions of pounds to artists in damages. At the time of the fire, the loss to artists and collectors was valued at up to £50 million.
Despite narrow-minded tabloid snickering about the value of works like Tracy Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With tent, it represented a real loss to the UK’s cultural heritage – not just wealthy art collectors, who are perhaps harder to sympathise with than the artists themselves.
Poor Anish Kapoor, for example (although in the emotional and not the financial sense of the word). In March, courts slapped a £350,000 legal bill on Fine Art Logistics, the company that accidentally tossed an important work by the sculptor in a skip. As for the sculpture itself, the judge has said: “It is not possible for me to describe it. One expert described it as sensuous and sexy, the other as clumsy and somewhat absurd.” Kapoor has expressed sadness about the loss of the work, reporting that it was created in a year when he only made six or seven other pieces.
These are isolated disasters in the usual business of the logistics of art – the shipping, storage and maintenance of prized cultural assets. We’re used to seeing artworks enshrined in tastefully lit galleries, treated with respect or at least critical attention. But at any given time, many British galleries show only a fraction of their collections. The rest is hidden away by professional storage teams who have perfected the art of protecting art.
Kate Jones, of the family-run art framing company John Jones, says that handling and storing artwork requires more practical know-how than aesthetic sensibility: “It definitely requires a knowledge of art substrates and mediums, but not necessarily an appreciation of the art.
“We take extreme care when handling all artworks but particular care if needed for certain works, i.e. fragile papers or fragile surfaces. The only way you’d know that a work needed special handling is if you know about substrates and mediums and which to look out for.”
Understandably, some artists find it hard entrusting their work even to a specialist company. Kate Jones says, ”Some artists are extremely particular about their works, others aren’t. One young artist was so nervous about her work – delicate chalk pastel – that she wanted to make sure that we knew how to handle it and see where it was being stored before we gained her trust. Another artist sends in work that is covered with dusty footprints from where it has been kept on the studio floor.
“We carry out condition reports on each artwork that comes to us so that we can record every existing scratch and dent. This enables us to put the client in touch with a conservator if needed and also means that we have a record of the work’s condition, just in case the client might think we caused the damage during framing.”
Storing a painting is one thing, but contemporary art has produced new challenges. Richard Franklin is director of the Video Art Gallery in London. The storage of digital art presents a set of problems that bring into question not only how to reconcile art with technological progress, but even the nature of the artwork itself. He says, “It’s a real hot subject at the moment. There are all sorts of debates going on – Tate Britain is headlining a conference on the preservation of digital arts and there’s European-wide consultation on that.
“It breaks down into two areas: the first is degradation in use and the second is longevity. When we sell a piece of video art, we sell limited editions of three or six or 10, and when we sell it to a client they get a master tape which is copyright encrypted, an everyday play DVD and a certificate of authenticity.”
So which of these copies is the ‘original’ artwork? For Franklin, the question isn’t as complex as it sounds: “The rule is very simple for us – the digital master tape is the work of art as an object and it’s up to the owner to ensure that they don’t lose it. If they came back a couple of years later and said they’d lost it, it would be like losing your Bridget Riley. The everyday play DVD is different: we recognise that they get scratched and left in conditions where they degrade. Our view on that is that they can take copies or we can produce it from our archive and that’s something that we’re happy to do for people.”
Most clients stash their master tapes “in a fireproof safe or in a vault at the bank”, Franklin says. He describes himself as “anally retentive” about storage at the Video Art Gallery, where works are carefully filed away in a digital archive.
“We have to take a view of how long a digital master tape will remain a viable archive. Everything we have in the gallery is archived back to removable hard disk storage, which is probably the safest current long-term storage mechanism. We have two separate hard drives, which are RAID-connected so the two hard drives can talk to each other and have an uninterrupted power supply.
“We back it up about as often as stuff comes in and we have it in three separate locations around the gallery. You can also buy computer storage space and keep it on a server, another cost-effective way of preserving work. Technology is going to move on, and we have to move with it. Think about something who’s working in 16mm – people are archiving that sort of work all the time, and actually digital work is a lot less susceptible to damage, compared to film that needs to be kept out of sunlight.”
Kate Jones would probably agree that digital work could easily turn out to be a lot less hassle than more traditional artworks. She describes John Jones’s work on Mario Testino’s Portraits show as “the most challenging project we’ve worked on to date. It launched at the National Portrait Gallery in 2002 and has been travelling the world since. There are 120 images in total, ranging in size, the largest being two and a half by three metres. The majority of images were so large they couldn’t be printed in one go, so we received the images in two halves.
“We then dry-mounted the images and positioned them together within the frame. The works had to be carefully placed exactly together and the join retouched by hand. After the NPG exhibition the show travelled to Milan, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Tokyo and Rio. When the images arrived in Tokyo and Rio the change in temperatures caused them to expand and exposed the joins. We had to fly two technicians to each location to rejoin and retouch the works before the exhibitions opened.”
Jones has little to say about the Momart fire, describing it as simply “one of those things”. Richard Franklin is cautiously sympathetic: “It’s a shocking loss for everybody involved, and it’s a little reminder not to have all your eggs in one basket, but I’m as guilty as the next person of having all my pieces on one place. We’re less prone to those problems as it’s easier to spread digital files around.” And they’re also less likely to end up in a skip.
