Towards the Understanding of the Aging Behavior of p-PVC in Close Contact with Minced Meat in the Artwork POEMETRIE by Dieter Roth

Abstract

This paper presents scientific investigations into the materiality and aging behavior of a copy of Dieter Roth’s multiple POEMETRIE (1968), mainly made of p-PVC components and minced meat, with the aim of informing conservation-restoration strategies. The main issues were represented by plasticizer migration, fat diffusion, and leakage, which led to the formation of a sticky surface layer. Replicas of p-PVC without minced meat were prepared and artificially thermally aged, while several techniques were used to investigate both the artwork and the replicas in terms of materials and degradation state. These include UV/Vis imaging, pH measurements, FTIR-ATR, and Py-GC/MS. In addition to showing that p-PVC-based materials composed of slightly different plasticizers were affected by similar degradation pathways (i.e., plasticizer migration, yellowing, etc.), this study reports that fat components were also shown to be unstable, resulting in migration/leakage in different directions, where their degradation amplified that of the p-PVC bags. This work represents a first study of plasticizer migration and fat diffusion in the art and conservation context. Also, an ammine-wax type of lubricant was identified in the most recent p-PVC formulations as the replicas selected for this study, thus providing an important source of information in different polymer-based research areas.