Interview Text with Laura McCann by Glenn Wharton and Diana Kamin on 12-08-2016

For Glenn Wharton at Fales Library, NYU Glenn Wharton (GW) and Diana Kamin (DK) interviewing Laura McCann (LM) on December 8, 2016

GW: Today is December 8th, 2016. I’m Glenn Wharton here with Diana Kamin and we are interviewing Laura McCann, Conservation Librarian at NYU Libraries. So, welcome, Laura; thank you for the interview.

LM: Thank you.

GW: Could you tell us first of all just a little bit about your professional background?

LM: Sure. So, to start with, I’m the Conservation Librarian at NYU Libraries, a position I started in 2006. And before that I trained in paper conservation with a specialization in books and archives. I trained in the United Kingdom, where I also had studied archeology and art history, as undergrad, partially, and then also in the States. When I moved back to America, I worked at the Municipal Archives for a number of years, eventually being the head of their conservation lab and deputy director. Prior to coming to NYU Libraries, my conservation experience was really centered mostly on very typical kind of government records at Municipal Archives, all the way – obviously, the history of New York is going to be, in terms of the Colonial history, 17th century up to present day. Most of my time I spent there I worked either on Central Park drawings, Brooklyn Bridge drawings, and then some earlier manuscript materials, were the major projects. And other places I worked – rare books, materials, but very little contact with 20th century materials until I came here to NYU Libraries and began working and heading up a conservation program. [0:01:47]

GW: Okay. And now could you tell us a little bit about the work that you actually do here at the Libraries, and then specifically with the Fales Downtown Collection?

LM: Sure. So, when I started here in 2006, the program was very much what’s called a hybrid program, coming from a term that Whitney Baker coined, is a hybrid conservator, meaning, a conservator who is running both a special collections conservation program, which is much more in the art conservation tradition, and also a collection care program, where you’re really repairing circulating books and managing a preventive program to keep those circulating books coming and going and free of pests, molds, et cetera. Over about the first five years or so, I shifted that program to be almost entirely special collections, which is really perhaps just a response to demands and changes at NYU, but also it remains to be seen if this is a national trend or not. It’s uncertain at this point. Changes in pedagogy and definitely initiatives at NYU at the provost level, we’re really focusing on undergrads using special collections, and that meant that the collections needed to be in condition to be able to be handled, both at the research level, but even more so in instruction and small-group instructions led by both the librarians or in tandem with teaching faculty.

GW: And the Fales Downtown Collection is a special collection.

LM: Yes, and especially when you’re talking about teaching and research, it is probably one of the most heavily used collections in all of the NYU special collections. And in particular, it’s challenging when you talk about the condition, because many of these materials don’t necessarily arrive to us in a stable condition because of both the nature of how they were collected, or weren’t collected and eventually came to us, and also their manufacture and materials .

GW: And how many people do you have on staff? Or do you actually work with students to do the actual conservation work? How does that play out? [3:50]

LM: Sure. Currently in the lab, we’re pretty much - permanent staff, there are three of us. So, there are two Special Collections Conservators which were positions that evolved from Technician, so again, that evolution to a more specialized treatment lab. And then we, pretty much soon after I started, I started hiring IFA Conservation Center students, and that’s been a real joy and a real resource, as well, as it’s created relationships at IFA and also Museum Studies and other places. That has helped us with our program. We do get grants and other opportunities to hire people in, and so, for instance, right now I have another two conservators who are working in the lab, and a third-year Fellow from the Buffalo program for our conservation training.

GW: And a little bit on the history of conserving the David Wojnarowicz papers here at NYU.

LM: Sure. I’m not sure if any pieces of David Wojnarowicz’s came down before I started working here. I’ve found no evidence of that. But I know the first item that I treated was early in my time here, and it was the wolf head, the papier mâché. And at that point, I believe the materials, the collection was here and had been mostly processed, but a lot of the material had been processed but not necessarily stabilized, because they were sort of waiting for somebody to come and help them, for me to arrive or whoever was going to get this job. So when the wolf head had come down, it was in a box filled with packing peanuts, and clearly nobody had really done too much with it, that the archivists sort of knew what was in there, left it alone, and then brought it down to the lab. And myself and actually an IFA conservation student very carefully removed the packing peanuts, which, it’s amazing how they can get into every single... everywhere. Not an ideal packing material for a variety of reasons, but partially because of the fact that it kind of breaks up and gets all into those nooks and crannies of a complex, oversized, three-dimensional sculpture. [6:05]

GW: I know the conservators have the technical skills to do material analysis, and sometimes, if it’s warranted, they do that to identify exactly what the object is made out of. At other times, they don’t have the time or the resources aren’t there. Were you able to do any technical research on the wolf head?

LM: I was not. Library and archives conservation, it can be often tricky to do material research because of the fact that we don’t usually have those facilities. I do think that that is going to be changing as there is an increased interest from our users. Our users are primarily faculty and students and independent scholars in that type of analysis. That that analysis which used to really inform our work and maybe some technical art historians is now of great interest from people involved in digital humanities, that same kind of much more interest in data and material culture. So I’m hopeful we’ll get more support for that. But with that piece, we did not do any analysis. What we did, had some time for, was looking at its composition and really just trying to study how it was made, what are the materials, what was the dates. It was made with newspapers so we could get some dating material. But in terms of the exact, is it a true papier mâché or is it sort of a hybrid method, we’re not 100% sure.

GW: So, research for the future.

LM: Yes. Totally. Yes.

GW: There’s always that.

LM: Exactly.

GW: And it’s good to be at a university for future research projects. And I can see that that would be very interesting, to identify maybe the newspapers, the headlines, the source of the papers but also the actual fabrication technique, the kind of paints that he used; the red, white, and black paint that he used on it.

LM: Exactly.

GW: And do you remember what the conservation measures were? Or was it mainly archival rehousing? [8:03]

LM: I think the first thing was to get rid of these potentially harmful packing peanuts, which was more time consuming than you can imagine. Also, there was a very heavy layer of grime on there that, at that point, we went to the archivist, Ann Butler, who was then in charge of the collection, and talked with her. And she felt it was appropriate to remove that. We’ve had some different approaches with some of David Wojnarowicz’s work, which we can talk about in a bit, but I think in this situation it was felt to both obscure it and be potentially damaging to the work. And so we did some dry surface cleaning, both with light suction and brushes. I think then, as we did some photo documentation and also just examination and reporting, we noticed that it was, either it was initially a little under-engineered, or through the decay of time with all the sort of acidic cardboards and newspapers, we were seeing that there were some major structural issues with the piece, in that this elongated nose which of course makes it very clearly iconically a wolf – it differentiates the wolf and the dog, which sometimes he plays with that imagery in his work – we could see that it was starting to collapse, which would then cause a lot of structural issues in the back. Also, there was damage to the ears, in terms of dents and bends. Our approach, which actually we revisited a few years later and actually added additional armatures, was to do kind of a preventive conservation treatment, so it was cleaning, documenting, and then building supports which are not attached to the object but support those ears. And again, we didn’t straighten out the ears either; we allowed that damage because that was felt, again in conversation with the curators who really are the ones who drive and have to approve the treatments, evidence of possible use. I mean, this is a papier mâché head; right? This was used in film, photography, performance. [10:00]

GW: Right. So let’s definitely get back to the issue of cleaning, the issue of history of use. We’ll talk about a few different things, or categories of objects that you’ve conserved, and I think the same larger issues are going to come up.

LM: They definitely are.

GW: So maybe we can hold them and then come back to them at the end. I think they’re particularly significant with Wojnarowicz’s work. Is there anything else that you can think of that you might want future researchers to know about this piece? Or should we move on?

LM: I think one of the interesting things about this piece that people may or may not know, depending upon whether they saw the piece in a performative aspect, is that the tongue element is loose and sort of moves. And that was actually very tricky because it was attached with kind of typical masking tape, most likely a rubber-based adhesive, which had dried and become detached. And we had a lot of back and forth. In the end, we did decide to reattach that, but we kept his original carrier, the top of the tape, because we felt it was important to keep all of his sort of materials that he used. But we did add a synthetic acrylic copolymer to adhere that, because we didn’t want it shifting too much during storage beyond where it was. And we thought it was important that it was partially attached but could move, that element. Which I don’t know, that’s something that like when you’re really into these pieces you discover.

GW: Yes. How do you document the research that you do and the treatment steps that you do, the materials that you’ve added to an object?

LM: Documentation is a subject near and dear to my heart. I think that in general, library archives conservation, because our work tends to, we tend to have this overwhelming, you know, there’s 3.5 million books in Bobst. There’s 350,000 volumes in the Fales Library. I forget how many thousands of linear feet of archives there are. And this is how it’s often spoken of. So there’s this constant pressure to produce and be very productive in a lab, that I think is a little bit different than a museum setting. But of course, we’re doing some similar work, and there’s all this, so how do we document it while still having that has been something I’ve been trying to aim for. I think one of the things is to have really good photo documentation, because photographs are so helpful to everybody and they speak very quickly. I think also, when I designed our documentation database, what I tried to do was have it be very open and not check-box-y, because I think that when you start having checkboxes, then people are not, all the stuff in their head doesn’t come out. And if you have an open-ended, kind of, describe the object, describe what you did, describe your treatment proposal process, you have an opportunity for that person to really put it out there. Of course, the disadvantage of that sometimes is how well it’s written or what have you, and you have to go back, and if you want to share this, but it gives you an opportunity to share. So I think that that’s where it is. I think sometimes it’s done better than other times because of that time pressure, that you’re like, is this really necessary to tell somebody? Like, this information is great, but if it doesn’t inform the treatment decision-making, I think sometimes it doesn’t get in there. [13:40]

GW: And just for the sake of a future researcher, if they, say they were examining an object and they were curious about its conservation history, how would they, at Fales, request information or access information?

LM: Sure. This is something that is a very good question and something that I’m really working on. Their first step would be to speak to whoever the curator is in charge of that collection, and that person would have the research files and should know that. I’m also working right now with our Archival Collection Management department, which is in Technical Services. And we have a new collection management system called ArchivesSpace, and trying to find out where, in that, can we record this information. And ideally, I would like to see that pushed out to researchers in terms of the publication. We’ll see what that happens. But there is a thing called an “archival event” -- I think is what it is – and I think that that’s where we’re going to see that this is an event, that something occurred. And basically what that would say, and the same thing would be is that there is a unique number that we identify for every single treatment that comes down here. So my first treatment of David Wojnarowicz was 06-040. So that was 2006, the 40th item that came in the lab. And all of those records are deposited in the University Archives for forever, and accessible to users. I also think we’d like to come up with ways to have this information be more readily available, clickable, and what have you, but it can be tricky with the images because a lot of these images are, of course, they’re not open because they’re artist materials and we can’t just put them on the Web openly without sort of going through a certain process. But I’d like to get it better, and I think that people are really starting to become interested.

GW: So there’s a movement towards more transparency, more access, better software.

LM: Yes. I think so. And I think also, we might be benefitting from sort of digital humanities and the interest in just data, that this I data that maybe could be interesting to other people, and we need to get it out of the dark, as often they talk about data that’s hidden.

DK: I actually just had one specific question about the wolf head before we completely moved on. I was just thinking about how in our interview with Sur Rodney Sur, he was sure that Wojnarowicz applied some kind of medium, he thought, potentially a lacquer, on top of his papier mâché work. And I know you weren’t able to do the material analysis, but just if you recall that there was something that had been applied over the newspaper pieces or not.

LM: There is a possibility that there is, but of course, in the papier mâché process it would have a coating because it would have probably that starch coating. So what I can say is that I did not notice something that was very heavy or heavily discolored, so if he was using a surface medium, it wasn’t some sort of varnish that was going to react. And again, we had a lot of surface dirt, too, so it wasn’t sticky. It didn’t discolor. But if he was using some sort of very thinned... it’s possible. Definitely the paint on there is quite shiny, but that is somewhat typical because with his aesthetic, it’s sort of spray paint that tended to be where he went from. But I don’t recall noticing anything particularly heavy; it wasn’t a heavy application.

DK: Okay, that’s interesting to know. And then the photo documentation for conservation projects would be with the files that are housed in with the University Archives.

LM: Exactly. Yes, exactly.

GW: Shall we move on? Stencils?

LM: Stencils; lots and lots of.

GW: Do you want to talk about your work with the stencils? [17:45]

LM: Yes. So I think, depending upon how you count them, there’s at least 55 stencils. And the majority of these came down to the lab at the end of 2014. And basically, they were found in a portfolio, kind of in the back of the archive, and they hadn’t been processed, and I think there was a note with them, because there was such a condition issue. And again, they were incredibly busy, so many collections coming in, and this just kind of got pushed to the back of a queue. And then it came up, and the curator at that time, Lisa Darms, asked us to have a look at them. And basically, it was a big group, just all stuck together, of stencils. Sometimes it would be probably twenty or thirty of them, sometimes two or three stuck, sometimes just two stuck together. And at that point, I felt like it was important, as we approached the issue with the stencils, to get all of the stencils and think about it holistically, instead of one stencil, this object, at a time, kind of more of a collection-based approach. That’s both because I wanted there to be consistency across the collection in how we treated them. I figured, if we look at all of them, we’re gonna have more interest, more information for me. [19:09] And also, it’s really economy of scale that if I’m rehousing this group that she brought down, if there’s another ten or fifteen, let’s do it all now and we can come up with a solution, or one or two solutions for all of them. So I removed a few from the collections and actually just on Friday, I brought down another box that actually had a few more in them. So we’re almost done, in 2016. [laughing]

GW: Wow. And, do you want to talk about the materials, and then we can talk about the conservation solutions.

LM: Definitely. What you see that’s interesting is that there’s a great consistency in the support material that he’s using. It’s Bristol board or, 20 point, generally, kind of almost between a 10 and a 20 point board. It’s white, very white. It’s hot press, so it’s shiny in its appearance. Sometimes there’s still the bar code on it from when it was purchased, so you kind of see that. They could be purchased, the typical ones that you would find in the back of a drugstore, but they could have also been purchased at an art supply shop, definitely either or. They’re not terrible quality, but they’re also not very precious quality, either. You can tell that by the bar code.

GW: Not acid free. [20:30]

LM: I doubt it. But at the same time, not, I think I was surprised in the end at the consistency of it, that there was definitely an intentionality in terms of the type of board that he’s working with, I feel, like, after a while. Now, while many of them are all 22 x 28, there are many that he, assuming that it was him who did it, tore off a part of it, and there’s these fragments where there’s a stencil on a fragment or other ones that are cut. And there’s also ones that aren’t finished, which are really helpful to see. And generally, it appears that his working method often was - I think sometimes he’s also making copies, and then it’s going to be a little bit different, because you’re tracing rather than drawing - graphite, and then probably what we would call a Sharpie, some sort of heavy marker or porous-pointed pen [unintelligible].[21:25] And then he would start to cut out the elements. And what you really see is that he had really good hand skills, in terms of his ability to cut through relatively thick board and make incredibly detailed designs, is really impressive. This is not skills that many people have, and that everyone in the lab – and these are all people who have extremely advanced hand skills, many of whom are also very, very fine book binders, which tends to be incredibly detailed work – really, really impressed with, like, wow, how did he do that? Also became apparent that the reason why they’re all sticking together is that he used some sort of spray adhesive. And in fact, on one of them, we found a reference to something which is in the documentation, it’s not in my mind right now unfortunately, but as to a brand. And that, he would spray these and then put them up against a wall, if he was doing wall, or against a piece of paper which was against the wall, which we know from other documentation was a method that he worked vertically. And because of this spray adhesive, it stays sticky for a long time. And you could definitely see patterns. And we did do a little bit of looking at them in different lights, UV in particular, and there you can kind of see the different concentration of it, where it’s lighter and where it’s darker in terms of how heavily it was sprayed. And of course because it’s sticky it’s dirty, and it’s got hair in it and muck. And it’s got footprints on it, too, which is interesting; I’m not sure where those came from. Sometimes notes, somebody’s phone number. So you really see these things in looking at the, and coming across them, we’re separating them very carefully, using our standard paper conservation techniques, sometimes having to apply heat, so we have a nice hot-air pencil here, heating tools, and going in. But then you’ve got all of these sticky stencils, and how do you deal with them? You’re also dealing with this collection in an archive environment which has very different reading room environment than necessarily a prints and drawings. So, thinking about the reading room, thinking about how these are going to be handled, thinking about the fact that I can’t put everything in a 4-ply sink mat, it was a little bit challenging. And this is where I felt really fortunate to have this relationship with the IFA Conservation Center. I hired a student named Christine Hayes, and we worked together and came up with a number of prototypes. Because the first idea of, all right, well we can deal with the stickiness by maybe we could put cellulose powder on it and document that, which would remove the stickiness. It would be very apparent to anybody, a conservator or somebody who had some good technical art history background, you could really see it easily in a microscope or what have you, and it would contain the stickiness. It wouldn’t be removing it, which to us felt wrong, but also way too time consuming when you’ve got so many. [24:30]

GW: When you say “apply cellulose” are you talking about a water-borne application?

LM: No.

GW: Or are you talking about a sheet?

LM: It’s actually just powder, so it’s basically just pure 100% alpha cellulose that’s in a powder form. And we use it routinely, well, pretty often in paper conservation. If you’re removing an adhesive or tape, sometimes you can take off the carrier. This is a tape that you’re not retaining, unlike the one from the wolf mask that we talked about before. And you’ve got this sticky adhesive, and you want to get it off, if you apply this powder to it, it can often give you something to grab onto. And it’s incredibly neutral; it’s not harmful in any way to the object. And so in that way, it would grab onto this adhesive, it wouldn’t remove it, but therefore it wouldn’t be sticking to things. So if we put it in a folder or put it in a Mylar sleeve, it’s going to be okay. We talked about this with a lot of different people, because it just wasn’t sitting right, even before we went to the curators, because we recognized too, the curators are busy and they need us to do this work. And it didn’t sit right. Particularly, I talked to another conservator at the Met, and it felt like, to us it seemed so obvious, but what does that mean ten, twenty years from now? What if people don’t have access to the documentation as well as I’d like them to? This important information will be gone; I’m really changing the object in a way I don’t want to. So then we decided, okay, we can’t do that. We have to keep them sticky, or sticky as long as that adhesive is sticky, because probably eventually it’ll fail. So we ended up using double-coated, silicon-coated Mylar. And then, because the versos we felt might be interesting, to kind of also see that process and the muck and the whatever, we felt that we needed to make it so that these can be seen. So when they’re in large sheets, it’s easier. But when they were small pieces or really fragile, it became harder, because all of these little cut-outs create stresses, and that as you turn the page, they want to tear and bend and break. And many were torn and broken. So we ended up putting them into Mylar pockets with this silicon coated Mylar, sometimes on both sides, because sometimes there was stickiness because of the way he would work in different directions sometimes. And then those are cornered into boards so that if somebody wants to see the verso, it’s easy. And all the kind of repair work that was done in terms of reassembling stencils where parts had broken or flipping things that had bent, we would have many reviews with Marvin Taylor and/or Lisa Darms and kind of go over all of that, and we felt really strongly that... we call them down a lot. Many times we’ll kind of come up with a general protocol when we come across this, but what we found, and actually, I find frequently in David Wojnarowicz’s works, that he does... standard protocols don’t work. All of his work is so specific and challenging in a wonderful way, that sometimes, when we had to guess too much as to where something went, we wouldn’t reattach it but we would store it with the object, adjacent, in the same Mylar pocket if it had one, so that we knew it was there. [28:00]

GW: So this question of history of use, which you brought up before, I imagine since many of them are torn, many of them were probably torn during use, you were doing repairs but were you only doing repairs when you felt that they needed them structurally in order for future researchers to handle them? Were you allowing some tears to exist?

LM: Yeah, it’s a good question. I think that that’s, one of the questions we asked ourself in the treatment process was, when do we think this tear or break would have happened, and what was the intention of it? And if we felt that it was a cut or an intentional, we left it. And there are situations where a stencil was used in one form and then more was subtracted and then it was used, and then more was subtracted, almost like printing. And in those situations were particularly tricky, when we would have the interiors. And in fact, I have one that I’m still working on that is in that case. And I’m struggling with how, reattaching or putting these all in proximity to each other, a) it’s going to be technically challenging, is going to be kind of reconstructing this thing as it wasn’t. But then if I store everything separately, to the user, it’s just totally deconstructed, and it doesn’t mean anything. So one option we thought of is to actually try to encapsulate these in Mylar. And of course when we’re encapsulating things in Mylar, it’s this archival polyester, and it’s being welded adjacent to the object, not on the object, so that it’s non-adhesive, and that they be layered upon each other, and we’ve done that successfully with one other piece. So that, you can sort of see both, but it’s challenging. I think most of the damage that we felt we were repairing had more to do with sort of storage and life after. Like, it felt, by the way the paint was, that this was at one time all together and that in its bundle, or when it came from the loft, or when it came from the site, somehow it got bent and kind of mixed up, but that it wasn’t intentionally damaged during the act of creation.

GW: And can you talk about cleaning? I imagine that was not so straightforward either.

LM: Not so straightforward either. I think in this situation, we were even more conservative in the cleaning. And the sense was that any loose particulate matter, so dust, would be removed. In some ways it has to be removed because it’s just going to get all over the hands of the user or the housing, but that this would be very, very light. So we did not do – just soft brush cleaning with sort of the vacuum on the side, but no sort of aggressive cleaning in any way. And we allowed all of those little bits of hairs and what have you stay right where they were, with the object.

GW: And the footprints.

LM: And the footprints; exactly.

GW: Definitely part of the object, at this point.

LM: Definitely.

DK: And so just to put a fine point on some of the working methods that you were just describing throughout describing the process of dealing with these materials, we know he cut directly into these boards?

LM: Yes.

DK: That he may have torn – do you think he used tears as a method of extraction, or were those more?

LM: I think the tearing was more like, he would have a large sheet and maybe he didn’t like what was going on on one side, and he’d tear off a bit, then he’d create, that would become a new support. But not, the creation of the stencils, they’re all hard cuts. I’m assuming he’s using some sort of X-acto blade, an Olfa knife, something like that, that allows for that. It would have to be something finer than a Stanley blade. It would be possibly an X-acto. He would have had to change it a lot though, to maintain that, so it would be curious to know what type of knife he was using.

DK: And then, going along with the subtraction techniques, there would be iterative, in some cases, subtraction. So he would use the stencil once and then subtract more from it.

LM: Yes. Exactly.

DK: In order to create a layered image. And so there are the subtraction techniques, but then it sounds like there are also addition techniques, where he would join two pieces of paper?

LM: I think you might see that more in the sort of finished product than in necessarily the stencils.

DK: So it would be cut from a single sheet.

LM: Yes. I mean, there’s moments where he’s taped and repaired some of the stencils. There’s also stencils that defy – the word stencil is hard, too, because when most people think of a stencil, they think of the work that is created with an object that has losses, and a media is put through it. But if course, it also is the tool. So it’s a tool and an image, at times, or an artwork. And many of the tools also clearly were used to create stencil images, prints, or whatever you want to call that, or installation works, but were also artworks in and of themselves. So that the stencil itself has been stenciled upon. And this is like, to me, kind of classic David Wojnarowicz, that he again defies sort of easy characterization. One of the things I was trying to do is, I do have some of the stenciled posters and other works that he made for his band or for just artworks that were made with stencils. And I said okay, two categories here: these are works that are stencil images, these are artworks; and these are tools. And I have about five of them, and I’m like, “I don’t know.” And I think, at those moments, that that’s really classic, because he’s just interested in mixing things up and trying new things, and being like, this stencil looks really interesting, and hey, could I use that as a prop in a photograph? And so we definitely have that, we have this kind of dog wolf head that he uses it in some of his photographs, but it also was used clearly, because of some of the paint that’s on it, as a stencil tool against a wall. What happened first, I have no idea, but maybe it doesn’t matter, either. [34:40]

DK: And those were the terms you settled on, right? Was “stenciled work” and “stencil tool”?

LM: Stencil image and tool.

DK: Stencil image and stencil tool, to distinguish.

LM: Yes. And they’re not totally satisfactory, but they’re from the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus, so when in doubt, find another authority, and then you can blame them for not being satisfactory. [laughter] So yes, now I have stencil tool, stencil image, and then stencil image/tool. [laughter]

GW: Okay. Can you think of anything else about the stencils that you would want people to know?

LM: I think a few other things that are interesting, and you see this in some of his other works and some of the more archival matter that I’ve seen is his often sketching out a frame, often close to a square, kind of a squarish rectangle. And sometimes there’ll be sketches that almost are just that. You can sort of see he’s done this in marker, you know, and very heavy line, and then he’s starting to come in with a little bit of pencil sketch, and then the work just didn’t. And I think that that’s an interesting, when you think about his works and how he’s thinking in this frame. I mean, I don’t know, again, I would really hesitate to say that he’s always doing that, because I think he’s just always trying different things. But there’s a certain time that -- and then kind of goes with these comics that I’ve seen in his works, and obviously his film work and photography. That’s one thing. I think also just like how delicate a lot of this work is. The stencils really, there’s the iconography that I think many of us who are familiar with his work know: the houses, the camo, the fighting men, dreaming or falling man, all that. But then there’s also all of these animals, these fish and flying fish, that kind of goes back to a lot of his interests that are great. So yeah, no, the stencils are wonderful.

GW: Okay. There’s one other piece that I want to talk about, the coffin piece, but before we get to that, are there other categories of works that you’ve conserved, or have we pretty much covered?

LM: We’ve worked on his photographs and they’re interesting. I think he was a wonderful photographer. I think that you see some of his experimentation in the darkroom. And I think that the prints that ended up here were clearly ones that were kind of considered the archival copies, and also sometimes ones that he was probably not finished, you know, sort of test prints. And you see that. You see the sort of sloppiness with some of the experimentation. You also can kind of see when I know some other people printed some of his images, and you sort of see the contrast with them. But those are interesting, to see some of his working methods and in the darkroom, it feels like he was in the darkroom learning how to do this, which was new skills for him kind of in the middle of his career, when he really started trying to do that, because before he had access to a darkroom he was having everything printed. I think that his journals, I worked on only in the sense that when they were digitized we went through them to make sure that they would be prepared for digitization. And my approach really there was that, I understand we want digitization to be very complete, but to me it was very important that we preserve these as they are, and this is not a moment to be aggressive at all. And I think that that was heard very much, and I think that Marvin and Lisa and I were all on page with that. There was sometimes some sticky residue from tapes in there that were holding pages together. That was pretty straightforward.

GW: What strikes me is the advantage of the conservator to be able to just really get in -

LM: Yes.

GW: And get your hands on these objects and look at them under the microscope and work with them. And the ability to just then think about what was he doing, what materials was he using, what has their history been.

LM: Right.

GW: And you really only get that from working with them, especially with an artist’s archive.

LM: Yes.

GW: As opposed to maybe in a museum collection, you are working with materials that are half finished or even experiments that were never meant to be finished. [39:20]

LM: Right. Exactly. I mean, I think that that’s the thing too with these stencils is that we’ve got everything from ones that were so heavily used that their edges – he probably rejected them and made a new one. Like, there’s many houses on fire. I think that’s a whole thing, that folks from PPOW talk about that they would make new ones all the time, because you want to keep those images crisp. And if you’re spraying them a lot, they’re going to get soft. Your flames are going to be a little not as dramatic.

GW: Fuzzy flames.

LM: Well, it’s got this lightning effect; right? The flames, and I think that that’s really important, I mean, I would assume. One other piece, there’s this letter he wrote to Dennis Cooper, and a photo collage, and that was interesting because I worked on that soon after I had started. And I think they had had a student write a paper about it. I think it might have been an IFA art history student, for a class. And it was interesting to read their approach. And a lot of these photos, they’re really wonderful photographs, and they’re very much fine art, important photographs. But he’s kind of taped them together with this sort of very poor quality tape. And I think the instinct of that person doing it was to remove the tape; and this was a conversation we had. And we, myself working with the archivists, we felt that like, while yes, the tape is going to damage it; it’s going to cause yellowing. And yes, the appreciation of those individual photographs is impacted, that the fact that he created this letter and he made this collage with this tape is much more important than each individual photograph. And I think that being in an archival environment, library environment, that’s what makes those decisions pretty straightforward, that we have them. But then of course, it’s the trick of, with tape, you know, it’s just like the stickiness on the back, we have to sort of preserve that, but then there’s problems with it because tape, most tapes, not all tape, the adhesive will creep out underneath the carrier over time and then will stick to things around it. So it’s a matter of like, how do you mitigate that damage very carefully, also while not scratching the photographs, and making sure, and then monitoring it over time. But that was something that was fun. And it had been stored folded in an envelope, and then this was the other issue, where we had to balance use versus – you know, in some ways, there’s a part of me that wants to preserve it kind of folded in that envelope as it was. Right? But then, the other part recognizes that people are going to need to use this. And we’re a busy reading room, and that if this is going to be pulled out frequently, then you’re going to have a lot of damage across those folds, and you’re going to have a lot of loss, and then the object is going to really start to look and feel different. And it did because of course it was not a heavily used object. It’s not something that was full of creases and things we already had. So we made the decision to store it flat. So there’s a moment when we did alter sort of format, but because we had to understand the context of the collection where it was decided to be deposited, and we want to say yes to users. So that’s just one other object.

GW: Very interesting. [42:45]

DK: I have two other specific questions about materials and about stencils and photographs, before we move on to the final project I know we want to talk about. The stencil, so, it was a consistent use of this similar or the same type of paperboard?

LM: Yes, exactly.

DK: There weren’t any outliers in terms of support or paint?

LM: No, not really. They’re pretty consistent. Once in a while in the sort of more images or finished artworks, there’d be some really fine art paper. And that’s a little bit surprising. You don’t see a lot of very, very fine art paper. You see more of the shiny Bristol board. But I do think that he was very intentional in his picking of his materials. I got a little bit of a sense of that too from Cynthia Carr’s book where sort of he knew folks who were working at New York Central and, you know, that, he wasn’t precious. He wasn’t trying to get this nice expensive stuff, but he was very thoughtful. It was a different type of process. It wasn’t like, what’s the best; it was like, what’s the best for my purposes?

DK: And then in terms of the experimentation in the darkroom, if there were particular processes you saw, just since you’ve looked a lot of the photograph collection. Are there sort of photograms? It looked like there was maybe some experimentation with chemicals in the darkroom?

LM: Yes, there’s some of that. And there’s like solarized prints, and that kind of, that’s where you sort of see, and that’s sometimes where you see that like he’s got some processing issues in terms of, it looks like either it’s just there’s a lot of chemical splash on the verso, or in the highlights you’re seeing some yellowing which, I mean, I’m not a photo conservator definitely by training, but in my understanding, might show that some developer hasn’t been washed out. There might be... it wasn’t really properly fixed and processed. But again, these might have been quick test prints. I mean, that’s very common. You make the print, and then you say, okay, am I going to do this, or am I going to also have – if he was – I’ve heard talk – I’ve heard that he’d worked with some master printers. He might be like, okay, I’m going to print this out; what does this look like as an 8x10, and do I want to? But again, that’s just my projection onto that.

DK: Okay. So those were the types of experiments that you saw.

LM: Yes, and all of the photographs in that group were just developed out silver gelatin photographs. There are Photostats in the collection, but those would have been done commercially. And that tends to be either photo reproductions of his own work or some sort of newspaper image that he was interested in, some sort of found material, because we know he incorporated that text.

GW: Okay, well, why don’t we move on to the coffin piece, or at least that’s what I call it.

LM: Yes, yes.

GW: What do you call it? [45:55]

LM: You know, it’s such a complicated piece, and it doesn’t have a name, like so many of David Wojnarowicz’s materials that we have, partially because they aren’t finished artworks, they don’t necessarily have titles. This work might be a finished artwork; we don’t know. But what we named it in the end was Coffin, I think, With Human Remains, Trinkets, and Textiles. I might have that wrong, but basically, we tried to describe what the main components of this object are, which, it is a coffin that has been painted, and recently treated by a student at the IFA Conservation Center because there was some water damage and loss to it. And inside the coffin is the human remains of most likely a six-year-old girl, which has been wrapped in a heavy woven blanket which was stenciled, most likely by David Wojnarowicz. It’s not an image I’m familiar with, but the technique and the type of image is consistent with his work. And some other different fabrics, and an old pink towel, and lots of trinkets that were everything from little vials of something, or sometimes I think they were empty vials; American flags, keychains, different kind of stuff. Jewelry that if you’re familiar with David Wojnarowicz’ Magic Box or some of the other material, because I have rehoused a lot of his other what they call “source material” I’m very familiar with. You know, watch parts, again, jewelry or beads, just funny little knick-knacks, mementos.

GW: Okay. Well, let’s, I do want to talk about the conservation, but I think we can’t get around talking about the first material you mentioned, human remains. So could you tell us a little bit about that and what concerns you have, the Library has, NYU has, with having human remains in its archival collection? [48:15]

LM: Sure. I think that the fact that we had human remains was very much, it was a surprise to me, but then, the collection is so vast that I don’t know it all. It’s a really large and complex collection. And it was described in the finding aids as “skeleton” which is in some ways accurate, because it is a skeleton. But of course, if you know David Wojnarowicz’s work, you will know that there are so many skeletons in terms of imagery and plastic skeletons. And there’s a Greer Lankton piece which is also described as a skeleton, when in fact it’s like a baked clay kind of two-headed body, but it’s entitled “Skeleton.” So again, sometimes, these descriptions, or maybe we all don’t want to recognize that we had this human remains there too, you know; who knows. But when it came to our attention, which was during the process of it being loaned, the coffin itself, the outside of it, so all of these other things are inside the coffin, to the IFA Conservation Center, it was a shock to me personally because I didn’t think when I was going to be a paper conservator I’d be coming across human remains. And I had never really thought about those issues in the way that many of my objects conservator colleagues at other institutions do and must. If you go on archeology digs you don’t know what you’re going to find, and you’re going to have to think about these things. And there’s a body of literature that surrounds it. And then also, the human remains are dressed up in a little dress, and there’s coins in the eyes, which of course helped with dating the piece. And it’s all wrapped, kind of shrouded; it’s almost like this burial. Which, again, would feel very consistent. I can’t remember the exact dates of the coins but I think they’re ’89 to ’90. So if you think about what’s going on in his work, a really powerful piece and very much feels like one of his pieces. And also then, the student who was working on the coffin did some archival research which was great, because as many things do, this popped up in the midst of many other deadlines, and discovered that there’s many photographs of this human remains dressed up and there with the eyes not with the coins, earlier. And basically, it looks like we think that it came from Paris, one of his trips to Paris, probably in the ‘80s. And when we first saw, to kind of backtrack, when I was first aware of the human remains, I really didn’t know how to deal with it. Because part of me was also: This is an artwork. It had been removed from the coffin. Unfortunately, it wasn’t documented when it was taken out, and some of the material we felt might have been disassociated. Marvin knew some information about it, but obviously it would have been better to have it be photo-documented. But that isn’t what happened. And I thought, okay, what do I do now? And I think, this is where I’m really lucky to work at a university, and to have actually studied some archeology in undergraduate. So I thought, I need to call what I would have called a physical anthropologist, now it’s a bio-anthropologist. And Professor Harrison, who is the chair of the Anthropology Department, answered the phone and said, “I’m coming over.” And he was over in ten minutes. And he was incredibly helpful. And again, that kind of collaboration with other professions is so important, and a big of what you do when you are a conservator is understanding who you need to talk to about what. And he was the right person at that time. So he identified that it was human remains, that it wasn’t a model, that it had been prepared, so it was very much on the market. This was not something he dug up or something; it was sold. Most likely in Paris. He explained to us the routes in the trafficking of human remains and how, and the various things that have happened since the late ‘80s that have sort of slowed down that market. He also said it was very unusual to see a child skeleton. He thinks that most likely it was a child who died sometime in the ‘80s, so it’s not an older skeleton; it would have been pretty contemporary. And he said that that’s unusual. Then it was sort of, well what do we do? And what was interesting was he spoke very much from his point of view and his profession and his ethics. And his point of view was like, this should not be dressed up. We don’t dress up human remains and we don’t really like to have them in museums or libraries. But you are legally allowed to have this here. I would ask that you describe it properly. And that he also – but you have to decide according to your set of ethics. This is my thing. If you do decide you don’t want it, he was very clear that they would take it, but not in the state that it was. They would not take it dressed, and they would not keep the coins in the eyes. They would take it as a human remain. It would become a part of their study collection, and it would be treated there. And I think that, I mean, this is a situation where I needed to learn a lot as a conservator, and also just for myself, about human remains and their place in collections. But the decision what to do with it was fundamentally the custodians, which would be Fales. And their decision to keep the object, I agree with wholly. If it was my decision, I would be there, because I think that there’s no other satisfactory answer. I also think that this is a work of art, and while it may be difficult for many people to sort of confront that this is a human being’s remains in there, it is what it is. And I think that a lot of David Wojnarowicz’s work for many people is hard to confront, and it is very emotional and raw and not easy. One of the most interesting things approaching it is how – and maybe this is true for some of David Wojnarowicz’s other work, is how people have such different responses to these human remains. Some people were very upset by it, and then other people were very, like, ‘Oh, I used to work at this other museum; they had lots of human remains.’ And that’s an interesting thing there. So in the end, what we did was, when the coffin, the treatment was completed, very successfully, I might add, we first photographed every element of the installation or the object. And the hardest thing was sort of the mementos and trinkets, to know exactly where they should go. And we ended up sort of treating them almost like archeological objects, which is interesting, in a way, because it was almost like we were doing this tagging and bagging, just like in a dig. You know? And we ended up putting her right back into the box in the way that we believed that David Wojnarowicz did. So we wrapped her in the blanket which has this image of sort of the shackled person, but these large arms that kind of envelope her. Right? And then the other things. And then the trinkets and materials, we sort of put more at her feet together in one thing, because we didn’t feel satisfactory that if we were sort of placing it here and there, it felt a little too reconstructed. I think that if this piece was going to be exhibited in some way, that would be a decision for the curator. But of course, it’s a closed coffin. So, I mean, is it a work of art, or is it sort of – I’m not sure. Is this something that you would exhibit in some sort of way because she’s of course completely clothed, covered. I mean, it’s more of a performative piece. It’s more the end of a performative piece, I would think, although there’s no evidence that this was performed.

GW: Let me interrupt. First of all, thank you for that. We will get on to the conservation project, but thank you for that professional reaction which was obviously a very emotional reaction as well.

LM: Yes. [56:40]

GW: I think it’s very open and honest of you and it will be very helpful to future researchers, and I imagine there will be future researchers who want to learn more about this work. And I’d like to just mention at this point that Diana Kamin and I, but mainly Diana, interviewed Sur Rodney Sur, who also mentioned the three skeletons that David Wojnarowicz had purchased. And so, I won’t repeat all of that because it’s in the interview with Sur Rodney Sur. But thank you for that.

DK: Can I just add onto that because, so, we know that he purchased from a few sources from Paris and had shipped to him in 1985, but those were used that year in two different installations in which he covered them with, in some cases, actual pig’s blood, paint, I think some were collaged over. So my question with this, do you think it’s possible, having examined it, that this is a cleaned version of a piece that had previously – is it possible that it could be the same skeleton? Because given the material that was applied to it, I have been wondering whether they could be the same.

LM: I mean, it’s very clean. So, my feeling would be that – and bone is pretty porous; right? So, I don’t know. It’s hard to know. Yes, of course, you can clean bone again, but would he have gone to that extreme, to like – we definitely did not see or observe or document any paint residue or anything like that. And we were pretty –

GW: And it could also be, Sur Rodney Sur was also trying to remember, and it could have been the other skeletons that had been covered with materials.

LM: Sure. Did he mention a child?

DK: There were two adult and one child that were used in two installations in 1985, and those were what he was talking about. And Richard Kern also mentioned, he was excited about, I just bought this family of skeletons in Paris; they were talking about it in 1985. Maybe there was an additional child skeleton from that shipment. It’s not ruled out from what they’ve described. But what was used in those two installations and what these two interviewees recalled was two adults one child.

LM: I mean, it’s possible. And especially, I don’t know if there’s any documentation of that, it’s also possible that the child was not as inflected with the blood and the paint, perhaps. I’m not sure what he was doing in that.

GW: Well, this is certainly material for future research.

LM: Yes, people need to get to work on that.

GW: For any future researchers that are listening, we would welcome, I think, if we could find photographs, more photographs of the installation or more documentation. And it may even be in the David Wojnarowicz papers and we just haven’t discovered them yet.

LM: Exactly. There is so much in there to explore.

DK: And then I just had one more question with that.

LM: Sure.

DK: Because there was a coffin and skeleton included in a 1989 installation at the New Museum.

LM: Okay. [1:00:20]

DK: And I was wondering if that was identified or explored in the course of your research.

LM: I’m not familiar, but again, Joy Bloser was the one who really kind of did that research. My approach to it more felt like, a lot of the research that I perform here is often directly related to my decision-making. And I thought it was important, the work that Joy is doing, to sort of contextualize and to understand it there. But I think that what I was really trying to do in a lot of my discussions was just how do we approach this in terms of keeping this here, and how do we serve this? Because we can’t serve this object, because it’s fragile, number one, and also it’s just going to continue to sort of be more and more disassociated. And so it was really focusing on like how are we going to document this in terms of our photography. And that was my sort of, rather than the sort of history of the object. But once I knew it was a human remain, then I was like, okay, we have a human remain. Are we going to keep this? Yes, we’re going to keep this. And how do we do this in a way that is sensitive to the human remain and to David Wojnarowicz’s work and also sensitive to the people who are reporting to me and are collaborating with me and making sure everyone is sort of okay with this. Which, some people aren’t, and you have to be aware of that. Like, am I using this in the Reading Room? Am I, you know? That was sort of my approach. And sort of like, I feel like the research and the thinking I did was around that more than that. But definitely, I think that that’s something that needs to be looked at. And I think too skeletons are really a major part of his work, in terms of both the image of the skeleton and on also this use of the human remains is clearly something, you know. But it was a different time, too. I mean, human remains were sold openly in New York City up to not too long ago. But now, you can still buy them, but it’s a little different. Like, our culture is shifting.

GW: I think you’re absolutely right. We’re much more sensitive to the presence of human remains in collections than we were twenty years ago.

LM: Yes.

GW: And that’s because a whole lot of cultural shifts that we’ve been experiencing.

LM: Yes. Sure.

GW: Well, maybe we should move on. If you could talk a little bit more about the actual conservation. I realize that Joy Bloser, the conservation student at the IFA, did the research, but you worked closely with her, and we will hopefully attach your report, her report, to the information resource so they’ll be there. But maybe you could just walk us through her approach and what she did. [1:03:10]

LM: Her approach with the coffin was supervised by another conservator, an objects conservator, so I won’t speak too much about that, because actually it was dealing with the painted surface. But primarily the issue was it had suffered water damage at some point after he had painted it, and there was loss and there was some blistering of the paint, which she consolidated, and they did some. What we did in terms of, and Joy collaborated with us on this, Joy, Lou Di Gennaro who is one of the Special Collections conservators, and I is we really, our conservation approach was documentation. So we just documented everything. There was a few places where the preparation of the human remain had gotten loose in terms of in the sort of mishandling of it initially. And in those situations, we put it back and it was quite straightforward in terms of realigning pins and this. But it was just a matter of again, it’s sort of that archaeological approach of, we’re going to just photograph every single thing, we’re going to sort of give it an ID number, and then we’re going to put it back together. We made a decision not to clean it. It wasn’t particularly dirty, but we didn’t take out the textiles and vacuum them in a way that I would when I get a collection from the Spanish Civil War, which is one of my other collections that I take care of. But textiles and uniforms, my first instinct is going to be, look for pests, freeze it if I have to, and then vacuum it. That wasn’t – I feel when I’m approaching contemporary art, it’s very different. We’re not necessarily doing that. We’re allowing the objects to be, unless we see evidence of pest damage, which we didn’t. So in that sense, and then in the housing outside of that was, we had another box built for it, and had it really labeled on the outside as to what it is. And then when we reassembled the object, we did basically very staged photographs so that you had the coffin empty, you had the coffin with the first fabric, you had the coffin with the next fabric, so it layers up. So that if you’re a researcher and you’re really interested in this piece, you can get a sense of all of the components without actually using it. And that was sort of my goal as I work for NYU Libraries which is the faculty and the staff, and I need to facilitate research. So I can’t just say, you know, like, no, you can’t see it. I need to find a way that will be satisfactory.

GW: And now it’s clearly labeled, so there won’t be any surprises when somebody opens up the coffin lid and finds a skeleton.

LM: Exactly. You know, that’s an interesting thing, too, is that we all went to this assumption that it wasn’t a real skeleton, which of course is interesting. Avoidance, you know.

GW: Okay, well, thank you, for that. I just want to ask you – we’re getting towards the end – are there any further thoughts you have about how conservators or technical researchers should approach materials by David Wojnarowicz? [1:06:15]

LM: Yeah, I mean,

GW: We’ve already talked about cleaning,

LM: Right.

GW: And recognizing history of use.

LM: Yes, exactly. And I think that that one might be very different with his works that were intended for market, you might have a different – because when it’s in the archive, its purpose is different than when it’s in a museum or in a private collector’s environment and we have to recognize those different purposes. I think one of – there have been times where I really felt – all right. There’s a – in so many ways he was not an artist in that trained sense, but in so many other ways he was. Okay, yes, he didn’t go to the art school, and he learned it here and there, and in some ways you want to sort of have him be like, oh, he just would work on anything. And in so many periods of his life, he was obviously impoverished and money was a great concern. And there is evidence of that, but in other ways, I feel like he was very particular about his work and he was very intentional about his work, and very skilled. And I think that is really important to recognize. And perhaps that that instinct to initially kind of just observe the footprints and the sort of picture of him in the loft and it’s this big mess, and then the sort of his also biography and to go to this like, this is just this super creative brilliant guy who’s just doing this stuff, is romanticizing it and not recognizing the skill and thought that he was putting into creating these visual works. That’s something I see. There’s an intentionality; there’s a consistency. But then, at the same time as that there’s a consistency, he’s just incredibly creative, and that’s where your protocols, you’re not going to apply one thing to everything, whether it’s calling it a particular category or not. He wasn’t interested in that. He was just always pushing on the edges, both himself, I think, but also the works. What can this do? What can this not do? And while he definitely had skill and cared very much about his work, we know that, he also wasn’t precious, and that’s where you sort of see the ripped paper and like, okay, I’ll just use this corner and I’ll redo this. Yeah.

GW: These are every interesting insights from a conservator who has worked so intimately with his work, that I find this fascinating that, right; he didn’t go through standard MFA training, but he was an incredibly creative expressive person.

LM: Right. Yes.

GW: And he did care about his materials, he wanted to activate these materials. And we can’t forget that he was a political activist as well, and that much of his art is infused with that.

LM: Right. Yes. And of course it’s a really amazing, and I’m a really lucky person to be able to work on his materials. But they’re also, they’re very powerful. I think another thing too is, when you think about his intentionality, about how his materials were displayed, and his message, especially when you’re looking at the last few years of his life where a lot of, you know, there’s this urgency of expression. There’s also this urgency of what’s going on, you know. Everyone is dying around him, and he knows he’s going to die, and his art is often addressing death. And we just talked about the human remains; right? That you see as much as there’s, you feel the energy in terms of the output, and you look at the kind of archives, but the same like very much intentionality that is there. And I just went through some archival materials from the later part of his life, and there’s tons of drawings of installation rooms, and I also just love the fact that he wrote on the bottom of it that these were to be mounted on 4-ply museum board. And to a conservator, that feels like something that I would write to my curator to say, okay, well, we need to get some 4-ply museum board. Because museum board is a very specific product. It’s kind of even copyrighted. And 4-ply board, he wants it to have a certain thickness. He’s not saying, “Mount it to board.” And I think that is important, that as much as the work may sometimes feel there’s all this surface dirt and little bit things are torn and whatever, there’s very much a plan there without a preciousness.

GW: Interesting. Okay, well, we thank you for this. And is there anything else that just comes to mind that you would like people to know? We’ve been pretty thorough here.

LM: I think so.

GW: I always like to ask one last time.

LM: I just think it’s a really amazing archive that we have here, I mean, all the Downtown artists, but particularly David Wojnarowicz’s collection or his papers, MS 092. And I would just encourage people to dive into them and to do research. I think that obviously, just about his work, his thoughts, his writing is also fantastic, and there’s room for exploration there, but also just the whole downtown, what was going on downtown and the history of AIDS activism and activism in general. There’s a lot in there, so, people need to get in, because it’s here for you.

GW: Great. All right. Well, on that note, thank you very much for your time.

LM: Thank you both so much.

END at 1:12:07