Conservation-Restoration of Modern and Contemporary Art

The ‘Wifredo Lam’ Contemporary Art Center, in Havana, Cuba, is the stakeholder of a valuable cultural heritage produced during the Havana Biennials, since 1984. Although the study and care of the collection is a priority of the institution, the staff in charge does not have specialized training in conservation and has not been able to maintain an adequate storage space or a complete registration system. All of which has caused the loss of information and, in many cases, of the artworks’ physical integrity. The characterization of the collection, in particular of twenty-two art installations, allowed defining this as the most vulnerable section, due to the works’ conceptual and material complexity and the difficulties for their storage and display.
This presentation included some results from exploring documentation models for contemporary artworks, including methods for communicating with artists. Gathering the views and experiences of museum professionals, curators, and artists, was essential to reconstruct the “biography” of the artworks examined. Most of the artists in the collection reside outside the country and given the current limitations in Cuba, including access high-speed internet connections that would allow conducting virtual interviews, it was necessary to establish the communication through online email questionnaires. These allowed obtaining information on some of the artists’ creative processes and approaches towards the conservation of their work, becoming a starting point towards establishing the communication between the institution and the artists in its collection, with the participation of a conservator, as a crucial practice in the process of making decisions about the care and display of the artworks to preserve their authenticity.

The prototype of the Futuro, designed in 1968 as a ‘ski-hut’ by the Finnish architect Matti Suuronen, recently underwent a major conservation treatment. The construction had suffered from transport and handling during the many assemblies on various sites and periods of storage in the past. The gelcoat surface of the moulded cast fiberglass reinforced polyester elements that form the outside shell of the house, had deteriorated due to years of exposure to the outdoor climate both in Finland and in the Netherlands. To enable future exhibition of the Prototype the current owner Museum Boijmans van Beuningen started to research the options for conservation as the Futuro urgently needed cleaning and repair. A clear vision about appropriate ways of exhibition had to be developed to avoid further progress of deterioration and new damage, also considering the amount of separate parts in the interior and the size and weight of the outer shell elements. Essential for the conservation treatment was the decision to present the Futuro from now on only in-doors. Although this is in contrast with the original function of the series produced Futuro-houses as a summerhouse or ski-hut, it gives this unique Prototype the best change of being preserved for the future.

This paper discusses the use of solvent-gel systems for the cleaning of poly (methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) surfaces. Aqueous polymer gel systems have been introduced to the conservation field with a particular focus on paintings, painted surfaces of wooden artefacts and stone. However, their application on plastics is very recent. Statistically designed experiments aimed to assess the efficiency and damage potential of materials constituting selected solvent-gel cleaning systems. The effect of the free solvents (deionized water, ethanol, isopropanol and petroleum ether), the hydrogel carriers (Agar, Pemulen™ TR-2, Carbopol® EZ 2-Ethomeen® C-25 and 80% hydrolysed PVAc-borax) and their combinations after 5 and 60 minutes of application time on PMMA surfaces, were evaluated through qualitative visual microscopic observation and SEM imaging, and quantitative weight change measurements. Visual observations revealed that the action of solvents (i.e. ethanol and isopropanol) was moderated by gellation (i.e. Agar), while other gel systems (i.e. Pemulen) were unsatisfactory. Results of gravimetric studies showed that most solvent-gels resulted in inconsistencies and large weight changes.

The interview on which this article is based took place at the artist's home, three years before his death. The two carefully selected interviewers were a sculpture conservator and a curator of modern art, a combination of two people who complemented each other and who were attuned to the work of André Volten. Guided by photos, the artist discusses his oeuvre in chronological order, right from his early years as an artist up to the moment of the interview. A conscious choice was made to focus on a number of key themes that are predominant in his work: the creation process, the execution and the materials used. The interview reveals that his choice of materials and his preferences spring from a particular ideology of life in which the materials fulfil the function of metaphores. He draws, for example, parallels between the different stages of iron processing and our own life cycle. Another important factor in choosing materials is his perception of their 'authenticity'. His realistic and down-to-earth approach to the conservation practice is remarkable, leaving conservators much room for interpretation. Volten claims that the works in themselves have no meaning, but that it is all about the shape. It is rather simple to infer a number of basic principles from the interview, which can be used for future management and preservation of his work. The surface finish of his works, i.e. the skin of his sculptures and their treatment, requires special attention. During the interview, another essential aspect crops up, i.e. the environment in which his works are placed in public space. If the environment were to change, or the sculpture would have to be moved somewhere else, he does not hesitate to also mention clearing the site and bidding his art farewell as options, especially when the original relations on which the artwork is based are lost. THE ARTIST André Volten (Andijk, 1925-Amsterdam, 2002) is one of the Netherlands' most important sculptors from the Post-World War II generation. He dedicated himself to making abstract art at a very early stage in his career and was passionately involved in art in public spaces. This led to the erection of numerous constructivist sculptures in various cities across the Netherlands and abroad. Columns, tubes in series and geometric constructions made of metal bar are recurring themes in both his monumental work and his smaller sculptures, which, apart from in Dutch museums, can also be found in many German collections. THE INTERVIEW The setting for the interview on March 22, 1999 is the artist's studio. The focus is on both indoor and outdoor sculptures. The oeuvre interview is one with an elderly artist. Themes covered in the article are the creation process, the execution, material use (metal), collaboration with the industry, the importance of the surface and the surface finish. THE INTERVIEWERS Piet de Jonge, at that time curator at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen Rotterdam. Sandra Weerdenburg, head of conservation / conservator at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

Conserving Performance, Performing Conservation at CAA Chicago, March 3


Join us for a very exciting panel taking place ONLINE on Thursday, March 3, 4-5:30 pm Chicago / 11:00pm-00:30am CET at the College Art Association Chicago! Registration required.

How can a work of performance – ephemeral, site- and time-sensitive, possibly tied to the body of the artist – be conserved? This question has long been answered by recourse to documentation and performance “relics,” the tangible, exhibitable and, above all, collectible remains of performances. Yet in the past decade, museums have begun to acquire live artworks and restage historical ones, lending urgency to the practical as well as theoretical problems of conserving works of art long considered too ephemeral to be conservable. As contemporary art has grown more demanding, conservation has also grown as a discipline, developing new discourses and practices that both revise and expand the conservator’s role. No longer confined behind the scenes, conservators are now routinely asked to consult on acquisitions, direct complex installations, or even creatively partake in the reinstantiation of conceptual and performance works. Conservators accordingly have a new consciousness of their influence on the work of art and thus the course of art history. This panel, which has been organized within a collaborative research initiative Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge, examines performance as the object of conservation, seeking contributions from scholars, conservators, archivists, and others who address theoretical and practical questions related to the ongoing life of performance works in institutions and beyond, as well as explorations of the conservator’s role in bringing liveness into the museum.

Presenters in order of appearance
Denise Petzold, Maastricht University
Megan Metcalf, Lauren Rosati and Limor Tomer, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Paul Couillard, Toronto Performance Art Collective
Ian Wallace, Graduate Center, City University of New York

Introduction, discussion and chair:
Jules Pelta Feldman, Postdoctoral Fellow, Bern University of the Arts
Hanna Barbara Holling, Associate Professor, University College London / Research Professor, Bern University of the Arts

ABSTRACTS

Denise Petzold: Conservation as transcorporeal labour and play: An ethnographic study on calibrating classical musical works in bodies

In the last decades, contemporary art has become increasingly diverse and thus challenging to conservators. In performance art, bodies – human as well as nonhuman ones – have come to play a key role in processes of conservation, for example through practicing, rehearsing, and re-performing artworks. One place in which bodies have been trained for centuries and still are trained to conserve artworks is the music conservatoire. By understanding the conservatoire as a place where musicians become expert maintainers of musical heritage, this paper turns to classical music to explore what insights contemporary art conservators might gain from how musicians learn to perform works. I show how students and teachers – rather than being mere ‘transmitters’ of artworks – actively engage in a conservation practice in which human bodies and nonhuman instruments intertwine in processes of transcorporeal labour and play. Drawing on a year of ethnographic research (observations and qualitative interviews) of three violoncello classes at the Conservatorium Maastricht, I examine how in bodies and cellos together the ambivalences and boundaries of the works’ identities are negotiated. Thereby, musical works become engrained into bodies as sets of individually choreographed, fine-calibrated motions, turning the musicians’ bodies and instruments into material archives through which musical memory and history are actualised. From this, I draw conclusions for contemporary art conservation about the role of human and nonhuman bodies in processes of conservation, conservation as a transcorporeal effort, and the idea of who or what a conservator can be.

Megan Metcalf, Lauren Rosati, and Limor Tomer: The Future is Now: Digital Archives as Performance Conservation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Last year, when the majority of live events around the world were put on hold due to the coronavirus, producers adapted quickly to organize performances for virtual spaces. What will be their legacy once this time of crisis is over? This presentation uses examples from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to explore the role of digital documentation in producing performances for virtual audiences and to speculate on what the future holds for preserving these experiences. It argues that, as these performances incorporate distribution and documentation into their conception, they disrupt conventional thinking about conservation that characterizes it as something after or outside the artwork—and places it at the heart of a work’s creation. As such, these projects extend ideas about documentation as critical to a performance’s ontology, introduced in the performance art of the 1960s and 70s, and give them new expression today in the digital sphere. The demand for virtual events at the Met prompted its curators, artists, and digital producers to experiment with new ways of thinking about “liveness,” which has implications for the collection and preservation of time-based media at the Met. This not only pressures the distinction between an artwork and its documentation, the museum and the archive, but also distinctions between curatorial departments, museum protocols, and professional competencies. Finally, lost performances from the Met’s history—both recent and in the distant past—provide insights into the stakes of conserving the productions of this unusual time.

Paul Couillard: Conserving performance art: The materiality of the gesture

Performing arts traditions tend to treat works as texts—scores, scripts, and choreographies—that endure by being reinterpreted by new performers. Visual art traditions seek to preserve objects crafted by their creators. Contemporary performance art practices, however, tend to view the unique temporal, spatial, material and relational conditions of a performance's production as the very "flesh" of the work. Consequently, historical exhibitions of performance art tend to focus on material remains: objects, recordings and other documentation that both come out of and stand in for a body of work. While Jones (1997, 2011), Auslander (2006) and others have argued that such documents are a vital part of performance art practice, and, indeed, are likely to transmit an artist's ideas to a much wider audience than any actual performance, it is little wonder that Phelan (1993) has argued that the ontology of a performance is to be found in its disappearance. Exhibitions of remains often have a feeling of

Ian Wallace: An Ecology of Worth: The "Rediscovery" of Charlotte Posenenske, 2007–2019

The questions raised by the acquisition and conservation of Charlotte Posenenske’s Reliefs, Vierkantrohre (Square Tubes), and Drehflügel (Revolving Vane)— all of which were conceived in the mid-1960s to be sold, in unlimited series, at the cost of their production—lie at the center of a greater shift in museum acquisition policies whereby diverse materials have displaced the concept of an auratic, original object. While many museums have acquired Posenenske’s work in the past decade, there is wide variation in the material collected, from sketches and early studies (MoMA, New York) to aged particleboard prototypes (Tate Modern, London) and new refabrications (MMK, Frankfurt). This paper tracks recent curatorial approaches to Posenenske’s work through three key exhibitions that established what I call an “ecology of worth” around her work. 2007’s Documenta 12 situated her among a coterie of roughly-contemporaneous, international practices and paving the way for its reintroduction to the market. A few years later, a 2010 exhibition at New York’s Artists Space invited three contemporary artists to reconfigure Posenenske’s sculptures, retooling her emphasis on cooperation for the production of social capital. Most recently, Dia Beacon’s 2019 exhibition “Work in Progress” applied new standards of dating to demarcate new categorical hierarchizations within Posenenske’s oeuvre and to emphasize her works’ historical value. Through analyses of these exhibitions, I argue that the variable treatment of Posenenske’s work indicates a conflict between the artist’s intention of devaluation, the historical value of the performance “relic,” and art’s economic value as cultural property.

https://www.collegeart.org/programs/conference/conference2022/registration

Much of the artwork that rose to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century took on novel forms—such as installation, performance, event, video, film, earthwork, and intermedia works with interactive and networked components—that pose a new set of questions about what art actually is, both physically and conceptually. For conservators, this raises an existential challenge when considering what elements of these artworks can and should be preserved. 

This provocative volume revisits the traditional notions of conservation and museum collecting that developed over the centuries to suit a conception of art as static, fixed, and permanent objects. Conservators and museums increasingly struggle with issues of conservation for works created from the mid-twentieth to the twenty-first century that are unstable over time. The contributors ask what it means to conserve artworks that fundamentally address and embody the notion of change and, through this questioning, guide us to reevaluate the meaning of art, of objects, and of materiality itself. Object—Event—Performance considers a selection of post-1960s artworks that have all been chosen for their instability, changeability, performance elements, and processes that pose questions about their relationship to conservation practices. This volume will be a welcome resource on contemporary conservation for art historians, scholars of dance and theater studies, curators, and conservators.

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/O/bo86883609.html

Σελ.124-133:                                                                                                             
      Στόχος του Συμποσίου Ανεξάρτητων εικαστικών σκηνών, που έλαβε χώρα το 2018 στο ΕΜΣΤ ήταν  η ανάπτυξη ουσιαστικού διαλόγου μεταξύ όλων των συμμετεχόντων, τέτοιου ώστε να μπορεί να ανατροφοδοτήσει το παρόν και το μέλλον και να συμβάλει στις εξελίξεις στον χώρο του πολιτισμού, των τεχνών και της εκπαίδευσης.
Κίνητρό ήταν η αξιοποίηση της δεκάχρονης εικαστικής δράσης  του Ορίζοντα και γενικότερης αναζήτησης γύρω από τον σύγχρονο πολιτισμό. Με την ανάδειξη – παρουσίαση όψεων της ανεξάρτητης εικαστικής σκέψης και δημιουργίας στην Ελλάδα του σήμερα, επιδιώκουμε τη χαρτογράφηση και δικτύωση των καλλιτεχνών στο εσωτερικό όσο και στο διεθνές περιβάλλον.

To access the journal publication, follow this link: http://journals.openedition.org/ceroart/8119.

Can performance art be conserved? If so, how, and if not, why not? Enhanced by short philosophical reflection surrounding conservation and its entanglement with the world, this essay reviews the debates that took place on the occasion of the international colloquium devoted to the conservation of performance, Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Care. The colloquium was organized at Bern University of the Arts on May 29-30, 2021 within the research project Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge (Swiss National Science Foundation, 2020-24). The essay investigates the notion of performance through the lens of its conserveability and through a multidisciplinary perspective represented by a diversity of voices during the colloquium. It ultimately presents both performance and conservation as inherently unstable categories that require a careful and reflective approach.

To access recording of the event, follow these links: Day 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hTOVW1A_w0&t=17398s&ab_channel=SNSFPerformanceConservation
Day 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQAIJ0DM59E&t=16535s&ab_channel=SNSFPerformanceConservation

The conservation of painted outdoor sculptures stands out in its complex decision making and wide range of treatment options. Permanently exposed to varying temperatures, sunlight and rainfall, and susceptible to damage, these artworks need different maintenance and more invasive conservation interventions than artworks indoors. The surface paint layer, that has both a protective and an aesthetic function, needs to stay intact for the artwork to sustain.

Cellulose pulp, mainly utilized as a support for cleaning stone material, in this study, is proposed as a filler for wooden supports. In the last 10 years, pulp has been used in many restoration works carried out in the laboratory of the Diocesan Museum (MDP) in Palermo, including both wooden sculptures and panel paintings. These artworks, exhibited in the MDP, are constantly monitored in order to evaluate the effectiveness of cellulose pulp as a filler, assessing its durability and bio-receptivity. In particular, struc-tural characteristics, drying time, shrinkage, loss in weight, affinity to the pigments, etc., were simultaneously evaluated. Tests were also carried out on artificially aged cellulose pulp samples, in order to appraise if cellulose could be a source of nourish-ment for microbial growth.