Support structures

Jessica A. Cooley

Neo Walk, Gatsby DNA Starry Skye Light Up Walking Stick. Image courtesy of BravoMikeMedia.

Polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA), more often known by its tradenames Plexiglas, Perspex, or Lucite, is an ever-present yet often unnoticed medium of the museum. Not that solid acrylic is commonly used to make art; rather, it is used to encase, support, and cover. Acrylic is valued in exhibition display and conservation because it is transparent, durable, lightweight, malleable, and protective. These same characteristics have been important throughout the material’s history, whether during World War II, when it served as a shatter-proof substitute for glass in aircraft cockpits, or in succeeding decades, when it revolutionized prosthetics. Acrylic sustains and protects, offering customizable support to human bodies and art objects alike. Yet, its very inconspicuousness can obscure this vital role of care.

When I introduced my concept of crip materiality, I argued that ableism—the belief that disability is an inferior state of being—affects our understanding and valuation of the chemical structures of art materials, their fabrication, curation, and conservation. It does so partly by framing some materials, those understood to be unintentionally deteriorating, as having inherent vice, a characterization that moralizes fragility by treating deterioration as failure. Such language reveals the pervasive nature of ableism that insidiously affects all things, not just human beings.

For example, Claes Oldenburg's 1978 polyurethane sculpture Soft Screw, in the collection of the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, Wisconsin, is unexpectedly reverting to a liquid state, and in the process, is challenging the ableist ideals of stability that shape how art is valued and cared for. Consider the accommodations that sustain Soft Screw in its instability. The custom-cut and padded acrylic mounts that hold it are as integral to the work’s ongoing physical manifestation as the sculpture itself. The use of acrylic in art conservation participates in a longer history of prosthetic care where PMMA was fashioned into dentures, contact lenses, bone cements, and facial prostheses; it also now enables the survival of artworks like Soft Screw, which are deemed too fragile for their own weight.

In his essay In Support of Difficult Shapes, Philip R. Ward emphasizes that “at every stage in an object's museum life…we are concerned with its proper support… because all materials have weight and all are, to some extent, flexible. These two factors, multiplied by a third, time, will eventually result in damage if the object is not suitably supported.” Ward’s point, echoed across mountmaking literature, is that while universal factors like time and gravity affect all artworks, conservation solutions must be tailored to the specific vulnerabilities of each piece. The same logic explains why acrylic transformed prosthetics—because their lightweight malleability allows for precise, unobstructive and unobtrusive customization.

Claes Oldenburg (American, b. Sweden 1929), Soft Screw [installation in the Chazen Museum of Art’s Objects Study Room], 1975, 121.3 x 37.2 cm (47 3/4 x 14 5/8 in.), cast elastomeric urethane with a mahogany base. Collection of the Chazen Museum of Art, Terese and Alvin S. Lane Collection. Accession No.2012.54.44.6. Photographer credit: Jonathan Prown.

In mountmaking, there is a level of consideration for the needs of artworks that offers an important lesson. All things require care, and all care should be individualized. The acrylic cradle mounts for Soft Screw are now part of the work itself; support structure and art entwine to become something new. The disability community’s celebration of prosthetic devices, mobility aids, and accommodations are similarly visible, meaningful parts of the self. Rather than disregarding the apparatuses that sustain fragile objects, we might acknowledge them as constitutive, and even beautiful, elements of what an artwork, like a body, becomes over time. That is, artworks and people not only survive through accommodations, the celebration of those accommodations emphasizes that care and support are central to that survival and not ancillary, nor optional.

The acrylic cradle mount that stabilizes Soft Screw may technically be detachable, but in reality they are permanent aspects of the artwork’s existence, just as prosthetics (perhaps screwed into a bone using acrylic-based medical materials) can be for a person. The inconspicuous, durable, and customizable qualities of acrylic enable support systems that affirm the reality of bodies and objects as they are—fragile, changing, and impermanent. We need to reimagine mounts and prosthetics as generative companions in the ongoing life of both body and artwork.

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Jessica A. Cooley (she/her) has two decades of experience as a curator and scholar of disability art. Her work focuses on histories, material conditions, and curatorial methods that shape what disability art is, how it is cared for, and why it matters. Cooley recently served as an acls Fellow and Guest Curator for the Liberal Arts Engagement Hub at the University of Minnesota—Twin Cities, where she coordinated the community-curated art exhibition The Art of Disability Justice Now. She is currently the Postdoctoral Curatorial and Teaching Fellow at the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University.