A porcelain and aluminum sculpture by Jeff Koons that shattered in a fall. Courtesy: Salvage Art Institute
The Salvage Art Institute is a refuge for art in limbo.
By Jason Foumberg, CHICAGO Magazine
Once-valuable artworks cut, smashed, or scraped are the focus of a new exhibit opening at the Salvage Art Institute on April 23, a fictional art museum on the University of Chicago campus. About three-dozen paintings, prints, photographs and sculptures are highlighted as “orphaned” objects, disfigured by accidents. The shiny fragments of a shattered Jeff Koons sculpture, and a gashed Robert Rauschenberg print, are some of the ruins on display in No Longer Art.
Let’s say a canvas is punctured in transit by a forklift. If the estimated conservation bill outweighs the artwork’s market value, then the insurance company declares it a “total loss”—an actual categorization—and forbids it from being traded as art.
That’s where artist Elka Krajewska stepped in. A former employee of AXA art insurance company, she became fascinated by the “total loss” designation, and founded the Salvage Art Institute in 2012 as a conceptual art project. AXA donated a collection of damaged work—a lush charcoal drawing by Linda Bond smeared by a child’s handprint, for instance, or a canvas with a mold infestation on the backside, all of which would have otherwise been warehoused. The exhibition debuted at Columbia University that year. Its Chicago presentation at the U of C debuts the university’s newest art venue, inside the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, an interdisciplinary research center.
The exhibit’s curator, Jacob Proctor, says, “Even though their legal status has changed, the works in the exhibition are still extremely interesting, in part because they expose a tension between art and its materials.” But, don’t call them artworks, he says; “they’re now artifacts.”
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No Longer Art: Salvage Art Institute opens on Thursday, April 23, 5 p.m.–7:30 p.m., with a reception and panel discussion at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, 5701 S. Woodlawn. On view through June 26. neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu
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