Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum

How do you keep the cracks in Starry Night from spreading? How do you prevent artworks made of hugs or candies from disappearing? How do you render a fading photograph eternal--or should you attempt it at all? These are some of the questions that conservators, curators, registrars, and exhibition designers dealing with contemporary art face on a daily basis. In Still Life, Fernando Domínguez Rubio delves into one of the most important museums of the world, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, to explore the day-to-day dilemmas that museum workers face when the immortal artworks that we see in the exhibition room reveal themselves to be slowly unfolding disasters.

Still Life offers a fascinating and detailed ethnographic account of what it takes to prevent these disasters from happening. Going behind the scenes at MoMA, Domínguez Rubio provides a rare view of the vast technological apparatus--from climatic infrastructures and storage facilities, to conservation labs and machine rooms--and teams of workers--from conservators and engineers to guards and couriers--who fight to hold artworks still.

As MoMA reopens after a massive expansion and rearranging of its space and collections, Still Life not only offers a much-needed account of the spaces, actors, and forms of labor traditionally left out of the main narratives of art, but it also offers a timely meditation on how far we, as a society, are willing to go to keep the things we value from disappearing into oblivion.
"Iconic works of art such as Jackson Pollock's One and Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night draw around 3 million viewers to New York's Museum of Modern Art annually. However, between the museum's permanent collection and its temporary exhibits on display, only just a fraction of MoMA's vast collection and the infrastructures that support it are visible to the public. In Still Life, Fernando Domâinguez Rubio dives deep into the institutions, technologies, and histories that have made MoMA a cultural powerhouse. Domâinguez Rubio seeks to uncover the considerable forces that support and sustain this growth. He shows us the veritable army of conservators, art movers, and curators who try to fend off the slow and inevitable deterioration of the works in MoMA's prestigious collection, as well as the enormous and idiosyncratic technologies they rely on, ranging from air conditioning units to specially designed storage containers. And indeed, the vast majority of MoMA's immense collection is in storage. Of the museum's 1,221 works by Picasso, only 24 are regularly on display. These works are thus not only subject to the elements, but to trends in the art world. The prestige of a museum, then, is ultimately as fragile as the works it contains: not only do works of art decay over time, their perceived importance is constantly in flux"--
Fernando Domínguez Rubio is assistant professor of communication at the University of California, San Diego. He is coeditor of The Politics of Knowledge.