Curatorship as conservation
The role of the curator in the preservation of performance-based artworks
Draft 1: Between the Subject and the Object

Ana Raquel Dinger Moreira Duarte, Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisbon

Preamble

Preservation and presentation of (contemporary) art are intertwined in the sense that a work has to be preserved so it can be exhibited and exhibition is a way of preserving it, assuring a place for it in (the collective) memory. Each presentation of an artwork is an essential part of its trajectory, at the same time informing the past and the future, by influencing the history (of presentations) and enabling (re)new(ed) frames.  

Multiple questions rise with the display of performance-based artworks. Where lies the ‘identity’ of such works? Is it established in the inaugural presentation; is it somehow captured in (one of) the frozen exhibiting moments; does it rest somewhere in between or in the sum of all those temporarily stabilized framings?

“Performance´s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representation of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.” (Phelan 1993, 146.) 

Despite performance’s resistance to be ‘commodified’ and to be fixed, it still remains vulnerable to be drawn by the spiral of musealization. It is saved, recorded and documented, even if in a fragmentary way, and it does participate in the “circulation of representation of representations”, even if in some other form (“something other than performance”).

There is always a certain absence. There is always something lost.

The inaugural event can never be recovered just as much as no moment of everyday life can. As often stated, we cannot step on the same river twice: history (or life) unfolds inexorably and continuously. Repetition is marked by “difference” and the “document”, functioning as a “spur of memory” (Phelan 1993, 146), refers to what is not there as much as to what is. And perhaps it is legitimate to say that, as the body of the performer “is metonymic of self, of character, of voice, of “presence”” and it “represents something else – dance, movement, sound, character, “art”” (Phelan 1993, 150), also each presentation is metonymic of the whole of presentations (and/or of the inaugural one).

There is always a certain presence. There is always supplement.

The strategies adopted by the curator, like the decisions made by conservators, attained individually or in dialogue with the artist (or his/her representatives and/or other actors in the process), are potentially responsible for either maintaining a pre-existing ‘identity’ (flexible as it may be) – some kind of presence - or altering it – some kind of (additional) loss. 

About the subject

The subject in the phrase “between the subject and the object” can, according to different perspectives or framings, represent different ‘actors’ involved in the process of creation and the occasion of reception of the work on display (the object). Reception is here understood as one of several moments included in the expanded time-space of ‘creation’ or ‘making’ that, in turn, is not restricted to the instance of production (of the object), but extended to further operations, synergies and interactions. Although far from being new, this notion that the ‘work of art’ (object exposed or exhibited) does not correspond to the product of an individual (act) but is rather the result of a complex combination of factors, decisions and actions, has recently been enhanced and systematized in studies such as Doing Artworks: An Ethnographic Research into the Presentation and Conservation of Installation Artworks (Van Saaze 2009). Many ‘actors’ are active (with leading or more secondary roles) in the construction of the object besides the artist or collective of artists conceptually responsible for its existence. Often, it is a long way between the first mental sketch and the final and necessary fixation of a form, a route between immateriality and materiality, between intangible and tangible. Not infrequently, it is a path full of detours and possibilities, in which different points of arrival may condition the ‘identity’ or ‘integrity’ (both form and essence/ container and content) of what was taken as the starting point, ie, the artwork. The complexity of this process, not being exclusive of performance-based artworks, seems nevertheless more obvious or acute in their case, perhaps as a particular form of redundancy, if accepting the thesis that all art can be consider as performance (Davies 2004). By performance-based artworks let us understand, for the time being, whilst avoiding an excessive questioning and admitting an operative simplification, those who are linked to a previous inaugural event (something happening in a specific time and space made somehow explicit to an audience) originated in the context of the visual arts or that, otherwise, entered its sphere. 

About the object

The object, in this same frame, corresponds to what is exhibited, exposed, presented to the public. The viability of this ‘presence’ before an audience depends on some kind of embodiment/materialization (Potts 2008). Considering that the ‘object’ exhibited refers to a performance-based artwork, it can take forms as diverse as: (1) a repetition of the event, re-presentation, usually called re-performance or reenactment, (2) documentation of some sort produced prior to, during or after the event (pictures, video and/or audio recordings, written instructions, descriptions, relics or surrogates, etc.) (3) something articulating the previous two (combination of various documental sources, the juxtaposition of a re-presentation with documentation etc.). Let us, for the purpose of this text, equate re-presentation with the two other expressions, commonly used as synonymous, re-performance and reenactment, and understand it as the repetition of the event considered the original (or first), or, as we prefer, inaugural, performed either by the artist or performers he/she has chosen and/or duly authorized.

Concurrent with the strategy of (re)presentation (either re-presentation or new presentation taking any other form) are the status given to the object on display and the nature of the relationship of that object with the referent (the event): symbolic, iconic or indexical. This tripartite classification (Peirce) does not, however, mean that the categories exclude each other. What usually occurs, as with any sign or system of signs is an overlap, although in this overlap, one of the three categories can, in fact, override the other, in an intricate and complex set of potentialities. ‘Remain’, ‘trace’, ‘relic’ or ‘document’ are some of the epithets that can be applied to objects that, separated from the radical referent that is distant (the inaugural moment), can either refer to him or replace it.  The object is always simultaneously a place of presence and absence (of that moment).

Between the subject and the object: the interval

Is the present a moment of crisis for curatorship? Is the figure of the curator facing a new identity crisis? Practice continues despite the lingering doubt, (perhaps) inevitable consequence of an over-theorized self-reflexivity (Charlesworth 2007). Possibly there is no “ontology” of the curator (or “middleman”) and the question is less ‘what is a curator?’ and more ‘what does a curator do?’ The “middleman” is an agent described as “performative”, one that brings subjectivity to the act of mediation. (Andreasen and Larsen 2007).  The location for action operated by the curator is an intermediate space, somewhere in-between (different entities).

Action and interval are also starting points for this reflection on the presentation of performance-based artworks (usually the material results of what either remains or is construed from that work). Let us put aside for now the strategy of reenactment or re-performance, which consists in a new presentation (re-presentation), but also a new representation (the supplement is inherent to the iterative). In the absence of a repetition of the action (the event), what we can find exhibited are usually remnants or reconstitutions of some kind: objects that were used or produced during the event (props, remains or results of/from an action or sequence of actions); photographic, video and/or audio records of the event taking place; descriptions, lists (of requirements, instructions, etc.), sketches, models or other additive information created by the artists (or others); testimonies recovered from the audience or performers, etc. Whatever the chosen strategy of presentation might be (and here again is included the re-performance), there is always, in the sense that the exhibited functions as trace, an indexical connection to a first action-situation (even given the case of it being fictional) and there is also always a gap between presentation(s)/representation(s). Even when a performance-based artwork is presented for the first time in a museum context, even when ‘the artist is present’ for the total hours of exhibition (The artist is present, Marina Abramovic), the interval still exists, as it does in anything that has a duration and is intrinsically variable.

Any attempt to define or circumscribe what constitutes a performance-based work is probably doomed to refutation by an existing example that failed to cross one’s mind (vicissitudes of memory) or by another soon to emerge from the artistic stream (which is constantly challenging the assertions we weave about it). Overlooking for now the argument that all art is somehow ‘performative’, let us make use of the opposition between ‘objectual’ and ‘performative’ (being the two possibilities of tangibility of the conceptual) to reflect on the distinction pointed out by the following question. Where can reside the difference between an objectual-based artwork and a performance-based artwork? An objectual-based artwork has the production of an object (more or less stable) either as a means to an end or an end in itself, but always as the core of the project. A performance-based artwork, even when entailing the production of objects, has its origin or fulcrum in an action or set of actions, an event, a situation located within certain spatial and temporal goals (generally planned, although it can, and often does, include improvisation). In the first case, the resulting object is essential, enclosing the process of its production, therefore, containing its own history. In the second case, the object is residual, trace of an action that it seeks to represent or repeat and/or element (incomplete) of a history that integrates but does not exhaust.

Artworks, as their authors, have their lives, their careers (Appadurai, Tamen, Latour, etc.), their paths, their “biographies” - term adopted by the research group NEWs (New strategies in conservation of contemporary art) after the notion of “social life of things” (Appadurai 1986). Central part (sometimes considered the final stage) of that trajectory can be ‘musealization’, which some see as a kind of death, as if the museum is a kind of storage of corpses. We do not exclude the hypothetical evolution and transformation of museums as a response to the ever-changing challenges and demands of contemporary art (the same museums house) but we question the ability for maintaining the life that animates the performance-based artworks, rather then condemned them to a painful and prolonged euthanasia. This frontier line between the heart of the work and its carcass, not always clear, not always discernible, is the border in which curators and conservators move, constantly searching for balance.

The insertion of the artwork in the ‘exhibition circuit’, of which ‘musealization’ (understood here in the strict sense of inclusion in a museum collection) is one of the ways, implies some form of stabilization. Even when the artwork only ‘happens’ in imagination or in a different time and space from the exhibition, still it is needed a method of transmission. Think, for example, of the instructions by Yoko Ono, that the viewer receives and decides whether or not to follow, whether to do it ‘in thought’ or ‘in reality’ (when feasible), immediately or later. The words, usually written on pages hanged on the wall, are not (just) poems: they are performances (in potentiality). Even given the improbable case of the artwork being independent of any material medium (think of Tino Sehgal´s works or ‘situations’), if and when ‘musealized’, some sort of documentation has to be produced in order to repeat, describe and preserve it (documentation that can later turn into ‘commodity’ or ‘exhibition material’). Even the ‘chain of memory’ produced by the descriptions of the spectator(s) may and probably will surpass the mere hearsay (it may occur that spectators clandestinely record Sehgal´s performances).  The inevitable ‘fixation’ concurs to different presentation strategies, resulting in a multitude of possibilities for life beyond life (or life beyond live) or “the manifold (after) lives of performance” (expression used by the organizers of the symposium homonymous titled - De Appel and STUK, 2009).

Each new presentation of the artwork corresponds to a new ‘frame’ or ‘framing’ (not restricted by but having in mind the use of these terms by Bal, 2002). Making use of one same strategy/setting or several different ones, each presentation will contribute to the establishment of one or several versions of the same work. Different versions of an artwork co-exist and become equivalent or hierarchized through processes and procedures intrinsic to the sphere of art, with all its complex transfers of power (symbolic and/or effective).

In its tangible and intangible aspects, which contaminate each other, the artwork (in its successive presentations-representations) suffers losses and additions (of signification). How far can we go before an irrevocable loss of meaning or relevance takes place?

How to ‘capture the ephemeral’ [1] or, in other words, retain what is ‘life’, ‘essence’ or ‘aura’? 

The ‘here’ and ‘now’ of a performance-based artwork are situated in the past. The event took place ‘somewhere in time and space’. The original is lost. The authenticity, if seen, as traditionally is, as attached to originality, is, therefore, equally unrecoverable. All that subtracted, what is left is a fragile identity.

The authority and concomitant responsibility towards this ‘identity’ or ‘integrity’ are generally shared.  It is the combined action of several subjects that determines the object (and its continuity). Although they themselves are conditioned by the contingencies of the art world and its dynamics and, therefore, vulnerable to the action and influence of other actors and factors (agency of entities of various kinds), in particular subject to the dictates of the collector/stakeholder(s) (for example), we are interested in identifying three possible protagonists in what might be called ‘management of the identity of the artwork’ (a construction): the artist, the curator and the conservator.

Curators and conservators are figures whose paths have known proximity and detachment, as well as some overlap. Even today, depending on countries and languages, these nouns can continue to be understood as equivalent or to be confused. Nevertheless, at least in relation to the functions recognized in each of the professions, since the emancipation of the independent curator, differences become more and more evident. The intention here is not to determine what both ‘are’ (avoiding some etymological distress) but to clarify some aspects of what one and other ‘do’, meaning, not operating an ontological division but a pragmatic one, in order to support the latter statement that there is a coincidence of purpose in a praxis intended to be distinct.

Albeit the curator is going or not through a period of (radical) doubt (Charlesworth 2007), guided by issues such as the ‘authorial phantasm’ and the (possibility of an) artistic dimension in curatorial activity, the practice continues. Whether the curator works independently or either for or in collaboration with an institution, his action exceeds that of a mere “exhibition-maker”, as Harald Szeemann liked to call himself. Still, the planning and organization of exhibitions and events, often coordinating a multi-disciplinary team (it might be given the case of the team being of just one element having to assume all the roles  - one-man/woman show), continues to be the most visible face of a more profound diligence. The conceptual foundations that contribute to the construction of a narrative leading to the sensitive apparatus (the exhibition) work simultaneously as tools for the critical reflection that illuminates and contextualizes artistic production. In addition and through that practice, the curators have been replacing a place left empty by the critics, through the emergence of a discursive paradigm (O'Neill 2007b).

As the place of action for the curator is one that communicates with the public, the work of the conservator remains backstage (although recent initiatives have been trying to narrow that gap by unveiling the decision-making process that precedes – hopefully - any restorative intervention). Though research (historical, theoretical, methodological, technical, etc.) and subsequent production of knowledge are fields both share, their approaches differ. The curator's perspective is that of critical discourse, the conservator´s is to formulate guidelines for conservation practice thereafter. If the activity of the curator can (not without controversy) claim an artistic or authorial stamp (in order not to over complicate the issue, let us avoid introducing the artist-curator variant and/or institutional critique undertaken by artists into the discussion), the conservator (-restorer) is neutral, still embroiled in an ethics based on concepts more or less illusory (that are often obsolete or inapplicable, as the above mentioned originality and authenticity, or minimum intervention, reversibility, etc.).

The conservator influences the strategies of presentation only to the extent that he opines on the conditions for the preservation of the artwork, trying to find the balance between accessibility, (maintenance of) the integrity of the work and respect for artistic intent. This juggling between different commitments (with the artist, with the work and with the audience) is also the curator´s problem, who by the presentation, dissemination and promotion of the production of artistic projects, executes yet another form of conservation.

The dissemination of knowledge is a way of preserving that knowledge.

With regard to the performance-based artworks, the coincidental task of the curator and the conservator is to capture and preserve an identity that presents itself fleeting, partial and permeable. Curatorship can be understood as conservation to the extent that the curator plays a crucial role in preserving the identity of the work, not only by including that artwork in the extended space of collective memory but also by interfering with the construction of that same identity).

To exert its function as mediator between object and subject (artwork and viewer/spectator), the curator has to operate between subject and object (artist and work).

One of the first curators, if not the first, to achieve, through an exhibition, this notion of the art object as something that can escape the materiality, was Harald Szeemann, with When Attitudes Become Form: Live in Your Head (1969), whose subtitle was an enumeration: Works, Concepts, Processes, Situations, Information. Thanks to the financial support of two companies (Philip Morris and Rutter and Finn), Szeemann could exercise the ‘control’ he understood over the ‘chaos’ that invaded Bern´s Kunsthalle. As Daniel Birnbau points out, this was not a display of works of art but of attitudes, implying that the artists, subjects with creative and eccentric personalities, were as much exposed (exhibited) as the work, much of it ephemeral, they produced [2] (Birnbau 2005). Szeemann was warned: to continue as director of the Kunsthalle, he could no longer ‘put lives at risk’. Shortly after, he would initiate the schism that marked the beginning of a trajectory considered paradigmatic for the contemporary understanding of the profession of the curator or, at least, to the figure of ‘independent curator’. His tendency to emphasize the subject or the "individual mythologies" had yet another highlight at Documenta 5 (1972), in which Szeemann transformed the “100 days Museum” in (an) “100 days Event”.

Almost 30 years later, Paul Schimmel, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, organized another (legendary) exhibition that illustrates the pendulous movement that has been guiding this text, immediately present on the title: Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object 1949-1979 (1998). Schimmel, in an article written more recently, will stress the need for, beyond the immediate stabilization of the artworks that are produced contemporarily, the conservation of the legend, the artistic personality, considering more worrying/dangerous/problematic/serious a neglected artist than the material damage of an artwork. However, Schimmel does not advocate a total subordination to the artist(s´ wishes/intents). It is the curator´s and/or conservator´s job to avoid that hesitations, idiosyncrasies and other vicissitudes of the artist be responsible for subtracting from History works that the artist, by he/she’s choice, would exclude and that might play a crucial role in the overall understanding of the entire work (oeuvre) and, eventually, the unfolding of History (Schimmel 1999). Art historian and curator, Schimmel oscillates between object and subject, making it very difficult to discern which way he´s inclined to. Though he finishes the article above mentioned with the reiteration of the primacy to the preservation of the stories of artists and their work (rather than ‘save one or two masterpieces’), he, nevertheless, reveals a sometimes exacerbated fascination by the ‘objectual’. [3]

The lost stories (or yet to tell) are a longstanding concern of Roselee Goldberg, as evidenced by her seminal Performance Art: From futurism till the present (1979), an attempt (successful one) to fill the gaps of the history of performance art (or, maybe, the large hole that was, by that time, the lack of systematic information on ‘performance’ within the visual arts). Fragmentary and always in need of revision, History does not condescend with what is, by nature, ephemeral and less likely to leave a trace. Underlying the last paragraph of a text she recently wrote, seems to be the idea of the exhibition as a form of recovery or disclosure of those stories that should not be lost, purpose for which the historians and curators have, nowadays, new technologies that, articulated with new or improved strategies of presentation, are increasingly able to capture the artistic works and the specifics of historical events that surround them (Goldberg 2003). Goldberg invested in creating a biennial dedicated to performance art (Performa, New York), which, since 2004 (first edition in 2005), strengthens itself as an international platform for presentation and as a catalyst for new artistic projects (commissioning), guaranteeing a place in this other (hi)story of the ‘curatorship as conservation’.

Using various strategies of presentation, the curator pursues the elusive aura or identity of the artwork, achieved, possibly, by a “re-territorialization” or rewrite - through an installation process - of the topology of the aura (Groys 2008), concurrent to which might be the performativity of documentation (Auslander 2004). Or in the hope that the aura migrates, being present not in a remote original, but constructing itself in the summary of all presentations (Latour 2008). This reinstatement/restoration of the aura, a kind of updated ‘here and now’, is largely dependent on the (movement of the) viewer. The curator makes this commitment with an initial public (present at the event) and/or a second public (who has access - often -only to documentation) [4] (Auslander 2004), therefore with memory (and History), in a dialogue (always supplemented) with the past. The proliferation of initiatives, in recent years, is symptomatic of (1) a particular interest in performance-based artworks, (2) an understanding of the (re)presentation as conservation and preservation and (3) the urgency of analyzing the problems inherent to artworks of this type. [5]

This paper, in particular the examples mentioned above, sought to illustrate that the place of the curator remains, always, between the subject and the object.

Notes

1. The same phrasing - “Capturing the ephemeral (and Unfinished)” - is used by Tatja Scholte and Ijsbrand Hummelen in their article under that title, published in Techné, 2006.
2. Among the eccentric personalities were included: Carl Andre, Giovanni Anselmo, Joseph Beuys, Walter de Maria, Jan Dibbets, Hans Haacke, Eva Hesse, Edward Kienholz, Yves Klein, Joseph Kosuth, Jannis Kounellis, Sol LeWitt, Mario Mers, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Dennis Oppenheim, Panamarenko, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Frank Viner, Lawrence Weiner. Two other exhibitions, close in time to "When Attitudes Become Form...", one held before - "12 Environments" - and the other after - "Happening and Fluxus" -, are further examples of the curator´s intent, that  sought to introduce a different understanding of the art object (and its dematerialization) as well as of what is eligible for exhibition.
3. “(...) I knew I was entering into questionable territory involving remaking the works and bringing back the elements - or parts and pieces of larger assemblages - in order to recapture the artist's intent. Once the exhibition was installed, I realized that it looked somewhat different than I had imagined - that, in fact, it was an exploration, to use an "ethnographic" term, into the material culture of the contemporary performative society. (...) As much as we may record artists' actions through digitization and photography and other forms of documentation, I think we are compelled primarily by a love of the object itself and its power to express the emotion and thinking of its maker - whether the object is only a trace of the action that produced it, a remnant of the work it once was, or a kind of cultural relic. I preferred, when planning the exhibition, to see a piece of the true cross than nothing at all.” (Schimmel, 1999, 135-136)
4. Documentation or other (re)presentations.
5. This is not an exhaustive list, but sufficient, we believe, to justify the symptom: “A little bit of history repeated” and “Will History repeat itself” (KW, Berlin 2001, 2007/08); “Art, Lies and Videotape: Exposing performance” (Tate Liverpool, 2003); “After the act” (MUMOK, Vienna, 2005); “Seven Easy Pieces” (Guggenheim, New York, 2005); “Life, Once More” (Witte de With, Rotterdam, 2005); “How to Perform? Re-enactement in performance art and documentation” (Kunsthalle, Friedericianum, Kassel, 2006); “A short history of performance” (Whitechapel); “The World as a Stage” (Tate Modern, London, 2007); “Theatre without Theatre” (MACBA and Museu Berardo, Lisbon, 2007/08); “Not to Play with Dead Things” (Villa Arson, Nice, 2008); “The manifolds (after) lives of performance” (De Appel, 2009); “The artist is present” (MOMA, 2010); “How to perform an artwork?” (“Contemporary Art: Who Cares?”, Amsterdam, 2010), etc.

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