Curators and conservators are working to save — and update — art made with aging hardware.
UP A BUCKLING flight of stairs on Murray Street in Lower Manhattan, the dusty workshop of CTL Electronics is crammed with once-novel relics: cathode-ray tube (CRT) televisions, three-beam projectors and laserdisc players from the previous century. Hundreds of outdated monitors are arranged beside money trees and waving maneki neko cats, an installation in a kind of mini-museum run by CTL’s proprietor, Chi-Tien Lui, who has worked as a TV and radio repairman since immigrating from Taiwan in 1961. At CTL, which he opened in 1968, Lui initially sold closed-circuit TV systems and video equipment, but for the past couple of decades, his business has had a unique focus: repairing video artworks that, since the onset of the digital age, are increasingly likely to malfunction and decay. tv power module
Many of CTL’s clients are museums looking to restore works by a single artist, the video art pioneer Nam June Paik, who died in 2006. Known for his sculptures and room-size installations of flickering CRT monitors, Paik began visiting the shop in the 1970s on breaks from his studio in nearby SoHo. While some conservators have updated his work by replacing old tubes with LCD screens, Lui is one of the only technicians who can rebuild Paik’s sets from spare parts, as if they were new.
Paik’s work was on view, along with video works from dozens of other artists, in “Signals,” a sweeping exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York earlier this year. Many pieces in the show, such as those in the video collectives section, played on boxy Sony CRT monitors, long favored by artists for their austere, stackable design, and which stopped being produced in the 2000s. The cube CRTs are essentially worthless to consumers, but museums are willing to pay a premium for them on eBay — “if you can even get your hands on one,” said Stuart Comer, the chief curator of media and performance at MoMA, who helped organize the show. “I had to tell security, ‘Pretend these are Donald Judds,’ because they’re basically priceless at this point.”
It’s an ongoing dilemma for the modern-art institution: New technologies are only ever new for so long. When the phaseout of the incandescent light bulb, a go-to material for artists from Robert Rauschenberg to Felix Gonzalez-Torres, began in 2012, museums either amassed stockpiles of the old bulbs or found a reliable supplier. Dan Flavin, who spent his entire career working with fluorescent light, always had his preferred manufacturers. Last year, the Biden administration proposed as part of its climate policy a sunsetting of compact fluorescents, and a few states have recently enacted legislation that in the coming years will also ban the longer tube lights that Flavin used. For now, museums continue to go through the estate of the artist, who died in 1996, to replace burned-out lights. Not all artists are so precious about their materials, however: In 2012, when Diana Thater presented her 1992 video installation “Oo Fifi, Five Days in Claude Monet’s Garden” at the Los Angeles gallery 1301PE, where it had first been shown 20 years earlier, she updated its clunky CRT projectors to digital ones. She digitized the video, a collage of film footage from Monet’s garden in Giverny, France — itself a technological update of the Impressionist painter’s vistas in oil — because, she said, “I don’t want my work to look fake old.” Paik, for his part, left behind a page of instructions specifying that his works could be updated, as long as the integrity of the original look of the sculpture was respected, to the best of what the technology would allow.
In conserving works made with more mundane materials, museums generally rely on an artist like Thater or on the artist’s estate to provide guidance — or even the materials themselves, as is the case with Flavin. But technology now moves at a much faster pace. A museum’s task of protecting art in perpetuity has remained fixed, even as artists’ materials have changed. Art institutions are likely the only places in the world that are currently planning how they might be able to fix an Oculus Rift 50 years from now. Rather than keep stockpiles of expensive and obsolete technology in storage, museums have to find clever ways around software updates, from video game emulators to server farms to niche businesses like CTL. But they, too, have a life span as short as, or shorter than, those of light bulbs. There are far more obscure materials for artists to choose from than ever before.
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