P O Box 920

Canal Street Station

New York, NY 10013

for updates, please write to

contact(at)salvageartinstitute(dot)org

Salvage Art Institute works to confront and articulate the condition of no-longer-art-material claimed as “total loss”, resulting from art damaged beyond repair, removed from art market circulation due to it’s total loss of value in the marketplace yet stored in art-insurance claim inventory.

SAI POLICIES:

1. SAI is a haven for all art officially declared as total loss, removed from art market circulation and liberated from the obligation of perpetual valuation and exchangeability.

2. SAI claims stewardship over all total loss inventories as they are declared, wherever and whenever, with or without physical transfer.

3. SAI considers the formal declaration of total loss an act of transformation and subsequently refers to the transformed property as "No Longer Art."

4. SAI seeks to maintain the zero-value of no longer art and recognizes its right to remain independent and divorced from the demands of future marketability.

5. SAI aspires to make the No Longer Art inventory accessible to public view. SAI provides an autonomous yet accessible space for No Longer Art to reveal its qualities via interdisciplinary debate.

6. SAI approaches the No Longer Art inventory through a non-hierarchical system and aims at democratic principles. Each item of SAI inventory can potentially deliver equally valid revelations.

7. SAI conceives the declaration that an object is No Longer Art as the symmetrical inversion of the subjective declaration that any object may be art. The signature of the adjuster meets and cancels the signature of the artist.

8. SAI eschews the aesthetics and sensationalism of damage. Rather, it is devoted to examining the structural implications of total loss across art's conceptual, material, legal, actuarial and financial identities.

9. SAI is centered on the tactile objecthood of No Longer Art, on its obdurate survival, and on its transformed physicality. SAI confronts viewers with the material signs of alteration and the legible traces of each piece's history. 

 SAI TIMELINE:

November 30, 2012: Roundtable Discussion with Art Historian Alexander Dumbadze, Poet, Novelist and Critic Ben Lerner, Architectural Historian Andrew Herscher, Artist Elka Krajewska, Artist and Art Lawyer Sérgio Muñoz Sarmiento, Architecture Theorist Felicity Scott, Anthropologist Michael Taussig, Certified Appraiser and Valuation Specialist Renee Vara, Director Of Exhibitions Mark Wasiuta. Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, Buell Hall, Columbia University. 2:00 – 6:00 PM

November 14, 2012: SAI and GSAPP open  No Longer Art exhibition at Columbia University, Arthur Ross Gallery with a conversation with political theorist Jane Bennett, President and CEO of AXA Art Insurance Corporation Christiane Fischer, artist Elka Krajewska, conservator Christian Scheidemann, Director of Exhibitions Mark Wasiuta, and GSAPP Dean Mark Wigley, , 6:30pm.

July 10, 2012: SAI inventory moves to Morgan Manhattan Storage

April 13, 2012: SAI signs the Deed of Gift of AXA Art‘s total loss inventory

July 27, 2011: AXA Art’s Matthew Knight presents at GSAPP studio

July/August 2011: Second studio focused on SAI at GSAPP, Columbia University

March 2011: Copyright of No Longer Art preface

March 30, 2011: Visit to AXA Art Storage in Brooklyn, NY

November 4, 2010: AXA Art confirms their participation in SAI program

October 13, 2010: Request to visit to AXA Art storage

July 23, 2010: AXA Art’s President/CEO Christiane Fischer‘s visit to Columbia GSAPP studio (with Fine Art Specialist Matthew Knight)

June/August 2010: First studio focused on SAI at GSAPP

June 18, 2010: GSAPP studio trip to Staten Island, inspection of 7 Bank Street lot

May 25, 2010: Salvage Art Institute, (DBA), registered in the State of New York, Richmond County

April 7, 2010: Meeting at AXA Art with the President/CEO, Director of Claims, Fine art specialist and Head of Global Public Relations

February 9, 2010: Meeting with Mark Wasiuta discussing SAI and GSAPP collaboration

February 8, 2010: Submission of application for Rockefeller cultural foundation grant. Proposes Salvage Art Institute on the shores of Staten Island as the first public salvage art research space

January 29, 2010: first presentation of SAI at AXA Art's office - meeting with Matthew Knight

January 11, 2010: First official contact with AXA Art via Rosalind Joseph. Same day, Matthew Knight    responds "Your endeavor is of interest to us."

November 25, 2009: Studio meeting with Felicity Scott, GSAPP Columbia University, who proposes the project to the Dean of GSAPP. The museum concept transforms into the concept of an institute.

July 2009: First draft of Salvage Art Museum mission statement

May 16, 2009: The idea of Salvage Art Museum conceived at a meeting with Rosalind Joseph, Head of Global Public Relations, AXA Art

 SHORT HISTORY BY ELKA KRAJEWSKA – SAI PRESIDENT AND FOUNDER

In May 2009 I spent an afternoon with my neighbor, Roz, a PR person for AXA Art, the only globally operating specialty art insurance company. I was told about AXA warehouses that store "Salvage Art", the industry name for no-longer-artworks that become AXA's property after the company paid out full market value on a claim in a total loss case. There is a sea of them behind walls.

Since that conversation, I have not been able to think of much more than all that non-art, art?, dead-art or what?.. and have become absorbed in trying to articulate my thoughts around these cadavers, the material that lives in limbo, in secret, as invisible, petrified "art-no-longer" that is scrupulously databased and stored all around the country, all over the world perhaps.

The condition that interests me begins when an artwork is declared a "total loss" and ends when it resurfaces in the art market in some form. A pure and radical realm of the un-explored, with implications in many different realms and disciplines I feel I am just beginning to uncover.

At the start of 2010 I applied for a Rockefeller grant (Idea ID 1491) as Salvage Art Institute (SAI), proposing to focus on "art material" removed from art market circulation due to accidental damage. I approached AXA Art with a proposal for intellectual cooperation and was promised access to their storage. In May the Salvage Art Institute was registered with a State of New York, Richmond County Clerk and later was invited to Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation to focus a graduate studio course Damage Control on SAI's possible "home". (Summer 2010, Summer 2011)

 What I imagine for the future is not simply one more gallery show, but rather the development of an arena of discussion centered on the subject of "total loss art" condition exhaling behind warehouse walls, shut off from the world of commerce and consciousness.

 Together with a board of SAI advisors I am devoted to developing discussion and conversation, new themes related to this phantom art world, engaging the most interesting minds from a variety of disciplines, and I see Columbia's support as just the beginning.