Materials of film are generally held in an archive.
So they're typically not put on display. But in this instance,
the film is what you're there to look at, these strips of negatives.
And in that way it's rather unique.
So the work is in the laboratory right now because it's getting ready to go in a
major exhibition of Latin American art.
The artist is very interested in archives that are considered retired
or dead, and she's trying to comment on, well,
who has access to this? When I first saw this work,
I didn't know what to think, because we had so many questions.
How do we display this work? Is it stable?
And that's when we turned to our colleagues in conservation science because
they're the ones who can help us with the analysis and answer some of these
questions. So first, let me, uh, show you what we have here,
So this is a work by the Brazilian artist, Rosângela Rennó.
The work was made in 1996,
but it's from a group of negatives that the artist retrieved from Havana when
she was visiting there in 1994.
The name of the work is "Wedding Landscape," and they're all images
of different wedding ceremonies or some of the celebrations that were happening.
And this was a huge cache of negative material from a portrait
studio. They wanted to get rid of it and the artist said,
"Give it to me." Basically this work is composed of four sheets
of plexiglass. The top one is like a quarter of an inch.
There's nothing attached to that, but there are three sheets of plexi below.
And on the recto side of each of those sheets of plexi are these
strips of negatives. We do have some questions, though,
for one, do you see these white spots?
What is that? Is that mold?
So in these areas here, I'm seeing where it's like a fold.
You can see the white powder following that fold. That to me doesn't read mold.
It would kind of branch out in a more organic way rather than following that
line very like precisely. Yeah. Do you know what I mean?
It could either be coming from the negative itself or maybe from the
plexiglass. Yeah.
Okay.
Are you only seeing the white spots on this like top layer or do you feel like
you're also seeing the white spots in the lower layers?
We have seen some evidence, particularly around the edges,
where we can see it continue on from one layer to another. Yeah.
And then would you treat all the layers or you think you might just try to treat
the top layer?
Well, you know, it really depends on the condition of each layer.
I think we could definitely take samples now and then start the analysis and at
least get a baseline so that we can start then figuring out further steps.
They're looking good. Okay, great. The light? Okay?
That feels good.
All right. So just shine there. Okay. Right here? Yeah, that's perfect. Okay.
Will.
We had two leading theories as to the white spots. The first was the mold.
Then the other leading theory is something that is referred to as plexi disease.
The acrylic starts to break down. It's decaying,
it's crumbling into small chunks.
The comparison to a peeling of a sweatshirt is it balls up.
And so you have these little globs of the material that are cast off.
And FTIR analysis is what our conservation scientists used
to basically see what the component of those hazy spots were.
All right. All right. Yep. That,
to me, definitely doesn't look like mold.
What we're looking for with the mold is this, um, chemical called chitin.
Chitin is like a carbohydrate.
So you would see a lot of activity in that 1000 region,
which we're really not seeing here. And then also there are a lot of OH groups.
And so we would have a huge amount of activity if that were the case above that
3000 area. And we have nothing like that here.
Do we have a spectrum for chitin? Just to double check?
Yeah. Let me look.
Yeah. Okay. We actually do have a spectrum. Perfect.
So I'm gonna pull that up and we can compare it.
Awesome.
There we go. Okay. So that's chitin, and then that's our sample. And yeah,
you see all of that, that I was talking about in that 3000 range.
We have none of that.
And this was all the activity I was talking about in the 1000 range.
So it's not mold. That's great news.
Yes. I would say that's good news.
So like what if we just do a library search for the unknown and figure out what
the library thinks it is.
Okay. Polymethyl methacrylate.
Oh, so it thinks that it's the actual plexiglass itself.
It's a 93% match. So let's, okay, let's pull that up.
All right. Yeah, so that's a really good, that's almost a perfect match.
Okay. So it's probably plexi.
And Lee Ann said it could be that plexi disease. So it could be Like a physical,
mechanical thing. It could be that the plexiglass is rubbing against itself.
Yeah. And then abrading it. Yeah, that could be it.
Or is there a chance there could be like a chemical degradation happening
in relation to the rest of the piece? Like with those, the photo negatives?
Yeah, so when you have, um, photo negatives are made with cellulose acetate,
right. And they, when they degrade chemically, they give off acetic acid.
And you know, acetic acid has been known to also solubilize,
like you can dissolve plexiglass in acetic acid.
So like maybe there's something, it could be a chemical thing,
could be a physical thing. We'll have to like investigate that a little further.
So that's definitely something we should bring up with Lee Ann and Craig.
Yep, absolutely.
Okay.
We think it's kind of the combination of these varying factors.
We have acetic acid in an enclosed environment, and we have vibration.
All these things are adding up to sort of the perfect storm for degradation.
We really wanted to know how old the film was.
Acetate negative film does have a shelf life,
so that's when Craig started looking at the codes along the side.
I started off by taking a look at the edge markings.
Oh yeah. Look at that.
It was really consistent all the way through. Everywhere I looked,
it all seemed to be the same type of a film, which was called NP 22,
which I found was manufactured by a company called ORWO.
Okay. I've never heard of them.
Yeah, I had never heard of them either.
I found out that they were related to a brand that I'm sure you have heard of
AGFA?
No way!
Yeah. After World War II, when Germany was partitioned,
there was an AGFA West and an AGFA East.
And the AGFA East ended up changing their name, rebranding to ORWO.
Got it. I mean, AGFA, you know, is just like the Kodak of Germany. Oh,
that's so interesting.
And I wonder if there's also that sort of communist socialist connection between
East Germany and Cuba.
Yeah, I think so.
I think that had a role in sort of who was distributing to certain regions.
They started manufacturing in 1964, but they ceased production in 1994.
So that's a nice window right there. And 94,
that's the year that the artist got all the negative film when she was in
Havana.
Yeah, so already we're down to a thirty-year period.
The next step was to start looking at these images that we took in transmitted
light by inverting them in Photoshop to create positive images to go through and
look for recognizable clothing, cars,
any shred of evidence we could find to kind of narrow things down.
Here we have a shot, the guy's wearing some acid washed jeans,
some more clothing. That looks like maybe mid-Eighties,
early-Nineties would be my guess.
There's also some nice exterior shots with vehicles.
This one stood out right away with these motorcycles. This one was my favorite,
bit of evidence I've found so far, because on the back wall,
if you look closely, you can see a poster. It says 1985.
No way. So that means it couldn't,
this negative film could not date from before '85.
Could after, if it's an old poster.
Yeah, but then we also know on the other end, it can't go more recent than 1994,
so.
- That's a nice tight.
Yeah. It's a nice tight window.
Yeah. Let's see, let's do the math then. If it's on acetate.
And you think maybe mid-Eighties. So,
and now we're in 2023. So that's like what?
That's almost at like a 40-year timeframe.
Yeah. How are we going to test
the off gassing of acetate? Well,
we could borrow what they typically do in like film preservation in the Image
Permanence Institute produces those A-D Strips.
Yeah. Huh. I think we should try it.
We might wanna ask Catherine to come over and weigh in on that.
We're kind of right on the doorstep with this artwork,
so something to have in all of our considerations.
After, you know, 40 years or so,
you might start to see some serious deterioration.
If it's off-gassing acetic acid we definitely wanna see
if there's stuff in the middle, because like there's very little airflow there.
Right, right.
And so if there are acids, it'll be easy to detect them with the strip.
If you have acid, you wanna see if the acids are possibly getting out,
so I think you would also wanna have a strip near an edge.
Okay. That sounds good.
Does that seem reasonable?
Totally. I think I could probably get one in here, but yeah, that Craig,
maybe you or Catherine can get one in here.
I feel like anywhere in here.
Okay. So how far do you think we need to go up? Amazing.
Okay, great. So now I'm gonna go for the next one.
How about right there? So how long do you think we should wait?
So they, I feel like they say you should do about 24 hours,
and also we should probably cover this up.
So we'll come back in the morning and we'll see what happens.
Okay.
Actually can I hand that to you. Okay. Where are they? Oh wow, look at that!
Oh man.
Let's pull these out and like compare them to the card.
Wow!
Oh boy. Look at that. This level here should be "rapid decaying starting,
point of autocatalytic decay." You know, with our ad strips,
we happen to have this, um, sample.
I don't know if you've seen this yet.
No.
It's a sample of a really badly deteriorated.
That's what you expect down in level two or three.
I don't think we're there yet, but these are nowhere near that. I mean,
they're in much better condition.
So they shrink and then they crack.
It's the acetate layer that really undergoes the deterioration.
The emulsion will be fine,
but it channels because it has nowhere to go because the shrinkage of the
acetate.
It's really surprising to see a color of the paper strips that
corresponds to a fairly advanced level of degradation. Yeah. Yeah.
Because to the eye, they look like they're in really great condition.
They really do.
What would explain that kind of discrepancy between what our eye is seeing and
what the data is showing us?
A lot of times when they start off gassing the acetic acid,
they can start to buckle and shrink.
This is why it's actually in this instance good that you have these plexiglass
sheets because they're applying this pressure.
It's not letting them cockle; it's not letting them shrink or curl.
It just sort of changes everything about this work in terms of like what we can
do, how we're gonna handle it.
I think for the exhibition there's not really anything we can do,
but for the storage situation, we definitely need to think about cold storage.
Mm-hmm. When
we realized we can't clean the negatives,
we can't really clean the plexi where the negatives are because of all the
manipulation that we'd have to do.
But we did know we could change the cover sheet and that should improve
the appearance and it actually was incredible how much it did.
Just have to make sure none of the film comes with.
Okay, perfect.
Okay. Are we good?
Yeah, we're good. Thank you so much, Peter.
So it's pretty incredible what you can see now that it's off, I mean,
look at this right here.
And this. Le'ts
see what happens when we put that behind so we can really see. Oh my god,
look at that.
Oh yeah.
It's almost a continuous strip. I mean,
there's something going on with that particular negative I think.
Yeah, You're right. It goes all the way down.
Oh my god, wow. Look at that! Oh wow.
And there's that big scratch.
Yeah.
That is pretty significant deterioration.
Wow. We were, uh, optimistic at how much would be removed. Yeah.
And it's really, it's bearing out.
Exactly. It's like a haze that was really covering.
I mean, and when we look at the work now, it's so much clearer.
Almost all of the white spots on this half look gone.
And we always knew that there were voids areas where there wasn't any film on
this top layer, but it was kind of hard to see. And it's just,
you get in the right angle and it's just so much easier to see the layering.
It also makes reading the images that much easier, the groups of people,
the backgrounds.
I think that's what the artist described in our artist interview was kind of it
being a murky landscape before you approach it. But when you get in,
she wants you to engage with those individual images.
So I think this will really restore what she was after in the first place.
Totally, oh, she's gonna be so excited.
The cumulative effect of all the white hazy spots and the scratches.
It was like you were looking at it through a blizzard.
It's like this snowstorm between you and the art,
and now the skies have cleared.
Exactly.
The thing that I really love about this work is the fact that it really is an
ephemeral work. It's got a lifespan, but while it is in still good condition,
we need to show it.