Infrastructures of Color and the "Skins" of Mark Rothko's Paintings

• In Event: The Matter of Photography: Decay, Conservation, Afterlives

Abstract

This talk explores the use of photography as a tool for art conservation and restoration. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research on the restoration of Mark Rothko’s Harvard Murals at the Harvard Art Museums, I focus on the sociotechnical practices that produced the paintings’ photographs and how those photographs constituted the infrastructure for Harvard Murals’ recent restoration, which was completed in 2014. In order to restore the faded paintings, conservation scientists created digital compensation images that could be cast onto the canvases during their exhibition. Without conservators having even touched the paintings, they claimed, this technique—what they called “inpainting with light”—allowed the viewer to experience the artwork’s “original” colors. I explore how the calculation and pixelation of these colors, dependent as they were on Etkachrome slides that were taken in 1964, emerged in a form afforded by the material conditions of photography. In the process of compensating for the artwork’s faded red, the scientists also compensated for Ektachrome’s emphasis on red, which had been designed to enhance the portraits of light-skinned people. Therefore, the skin of faded pigment on the paintings was not replaced, but supplemented, by a recipe of mid-century emulsions that had incorporated then-contemporary prejudices about skin tone. This is a story about how experiences of technoscience are more richly textured than its intended consequences and how race can matter—that is, to have significance and material substance—at the interface between the scientist’s mathematical abstractions and the artist’s painted ones.

Author

• Grace Kim, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)