Critical Conservation receives support from the Swiss Research Council

We are thrilled to announce that the Swiss Research Council will be supporting our new four-year research initiative, Critical Conservation.

Critical Conservation redefines conservation as a critical practice, theorizing it as a discursive, pluricultural, decolonial and epistemic activity shaped by politics, conventions, education, the economy and institutions. Emerging from the critical-reflective developments of recent decades, Critical Conservation seeks to engage with and learn from present-day communities of practice, including traditional knowledge holders, makers, artisans and craftsmen, broadly defined, who have historically been positioned outside the expert domain of professional and scholarly conservation in the West. Through transversal conservation, the project fosters transtemporal dialogue, bringing together separate fields of practice that often operate in the silos of their specialisms. Finally, it explores experimental conservation as a means to envision our discipline’s possible futures.

The idea for this project derived in part from the essay “The Technique of Conservation: On Realms of Theory and Cultures of Practice” (2017) and in part from research and writing on the fringes of current initiatives. I am excited to deepen our expertise and engagement with critical, contemporary approaches to the field, working alongside a dedicated team. The projected start of the initiative is the beginning of 2026.

Flux Mystery Food by Ben Vautier

Here is a glimpse into my recent essay–a contribution to the Lexikon der Lebensmittel als Kunstmaterial [Von Apfel bis Zucker] (Engl. Lexicon of Food as Artistic Material [From Apple to Sugar]), edited by Ina Jessen and Fabiana Senkpiel. Originally published in German by Hatje Cantz Verlag.

An enigma surrounds Flux Mystery Food, which first appeared as canned food presented by the French artist Ben Vautier at the Fluxus Festival in Nice in 1963. A black-and-white documentary photograph captures Vautier consuming the contents of an unlabelled can— a unique and somewhat forgotten event, allegedly followed by him brushing his teeth [Image 1]. Whether appropriated for economic or aesthetic reasons, these unlabelled cans of food offered an intriguing experience. They emphasized gustatory perception, revealing their contents only upon consumption and thereby subverting the dominance of visuality.

The story of Flux Mystery Food can only be reconstructed from a few accounts. According to Hannah B. Higgins, in 1963, Vautier purchased “unlabelled cans of identical size in the grocery store and ate whatever was inside them—whether lychee nuts (as at the first performance), salmon, canned sausages, or sauerkraut.”[1] At Vautier’s request, George Maciunas later labeled them Flux Mystery Food [Image 2], transforming the riddle of canned food into a quintessential example of Fluxus’ multisensory nature.

Rather than being purely visual and perceived from a fixed perspective by a disembodied viewer, Flux Mystery Food demanded an active response from the spectator-recipient—participation, activation, and interpretation of the can’s contents. Today, its “container” also reflects the aesthetics of enclosures, a defining feature of Fluxus’ institutionalization and musealization.

Although not always immediately recognizable as such, the “artefacts” of the 1960s and ‘70s displayed today in vitrines of various collections were rarely conceived as autonomous objects. Rather, like Flux Mystery Food, they were integral parts of completed performances.

In the case of Flux Mystery Food, it is unclear when the act of eating unlabelled cans gave way to a more static presentation. This shift may have resulted from the cans’ incorporation into collections or the reluctance of recipients to consume their aged contents. Because the gustatory and olfactory experiences inherent in food-based art (as seen, for example, in the Nice festival’s event) were no longer guaranteed in later iterations of Flux Mystery Food—partly due to its editioning, which removed the performance from the artist’s control—the work could only conceal what it preserved.

As Ken Friedman observed, “the actual food in a can of Fluxus Mystery Food was a bit like the cat in Schrödinger’s thought experiment. Until the can is closed, the food can be anything. Once the can is opened, it takes on a concrete identity, and it is no longer mystery food.”[2]

The unopened Flux Mystery Food entices imagination and creates an anticipation of what might, indeed, be found inside, and in what condition. Not unsimilar to Piero Manzoni’s notorious Merda del Artista (1961)—the can filled with the artist’s faeces “conserved naturally”—the contents of Flux Mystery Food can only be guessed by a direct examination: touching, shaking, and accessing the can’s weight and the consistency—slight nervousness notwithstanding in the not improbable scenario when the metal enclosure incidentally gives in. The gustatory excitement increases the more one speculates what is hidden and what might unfold.

But the idea of purchasing unlabelled cans by thrifty consumers has been widely practiced inside and outside the artistic circles (see the cartoonist John Kricfalusi’s biographic illustrated accounts[3]). Drawn to processed food, Maciunas himself—committed to a living at economic limits, or even on the brink of financial collapse— used to buy and consume, from discounters’ shelves, large quantities of cans whose labels were missing.

Flux Mystery Food is neither a unique phenomenon amongst the food art generated by Fluxus, nor is it the last mysterious work in Vautier’s oeuvre (Vautier produced a series of mystery works such as, among others, an envelope included in Fluxus I (1964) containing black offset print on blue cardboard and concealing a blue card stating, “NO MYSTERY.”)[4]

In the mission to render the elitism and preciousness of art obsolete, Fluxus artists realized their avant-garde intention to merge art and everyday life in a wide palette of meals and dishes, using food as a medium.[5] Employed with the awareness of the process of consumption, degradation and decay, the canonical “Fluxfoods” include works by John Chicks, Maciunas, Benjamin Patterson, Takako Saito, Daniel Spoerri, Vautier, and Robert Watts. Not exactly food art, but rather a leftover from Maciunas’ avant-garde anti-diet, the collection of food containers from his consumed, often identical, meals in One Year (1973-1974), manifest the way in which the habitual—the ritual act of taking a meal—leaked into the aesthetics.

Not only did Fluxus generate one of the most fascinating food arts in the history of the 20th century avant-garde, but also established eating practices as sociality and conviviality, an occasion on which the wider social circles of Fluxus gathered, talked and celebrated the everyday. Among these events were Alison Knowles’ Identical Lunch(es) and George Maciunas’ themed banquets. Possibly taking inspiration from Spoerri’s extant culinary experiments,[6] these banquets were organized as “monomeals” that utilized either only one ingredient, e.g. eggs or fish, or they were composed of transparent foods or of dishes maintained in one colour.[7] Preceding by decades the relational aesthetics[8]  and metabolized, as David Joselit puts it, both in the bodies and in consumer networks, Fluxus food became a post-Duchampian bio-readymade to be consumed in an everyday ritual.[9]

Against the belief that food conservation provides a stable artifact, Flux Mystery Food only apparently might be regarded as docile, fixed and well conserved matter. Whether considered art or culinary culture, the contents of such edible objects, if kept too long in storage, might corrode the can and contaminate their immediate surroundings with their smelly, sticky expulsion. The processes of aging and decay, which are intrinsic factors of all works of art and material culture, impact the way in which the cans interact with their environment. A story has it that a food can from the Fluxus collection at the Getty Research Institute—a can of sardines which necessarily lacked an expiration date— needed to be replaced due to its corroded, ready-to-burst character.[10] An event like this can only be imagined: A work spreading its toxic, aged, and reeking contents over its surroundings (other works!)— a convulsion of degradation, decay and age, and an evidence of conservation’s fallacy in purporting to keep things stable. Here is the programmatic Fluxus outpour—an unstoppable discharge and flux at its best.


From: Hanna B. Hölling. “Fluxus Mystery Food by Ben Vautier.” In Lexikon der Lebensmittel als Kunstmaterial, edited by Fabiana Senkpiel and Ina Jessen, Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2024.

Continue reading in German, or purchase this book.


[1] Hanna B Higgins, Fluxus Experience, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

[2] Author’s email correspondence with Ken Friedman, August 21, 2022. Though an argument might be made that the visibility of food does not necessarily reveal its full identity.

[3] Randy Ludacer, “Cans without Labels,” Beach Packing Design, …..

[4] George Maciunas, ed. Fluxus I (New York: Fluxus, 1964). Vautier also endured a 24-hours performance spent  in a nailed box that offered yet another variation on the theme of mystery. Rolf Beil, Künstlerküche: Lebensmittel als Kunstmaterial -von Schiele bi Jason Rhoades. Köln: DuMont 2002, 124.

[5] See Hanna B Higgins, “Food, The Raw and the Fluxed,” in Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life, edited by Jacquelyn Bass, 13-21, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press and Hood Musuem of Art, XXX), 13; Natilee Harren, “The Eternal Metabolic Network: Fluxus, Food, and Ecofeminism,” in Living Matter: The Preservation of Biological Materials in Contemporary Art, Proceedings from a Conference Held in Mexico City, June 3-5, 2019, edited by Rachel Rivenc, Kendra Roth. Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2022. https://www.getty.edu/publications/living‑matter/

[6] John Hedricks, “Daniel Speori,” in Ubi Fluxus Ibi Motus, 1990-62, edited by Achille Bonito Oliva (Venezia and Milan: Edizioni Mazotta, 1990),262 translated from French in David Joselit, “The Readymade Metabolized: Fluxus in Life,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 63/64, Wet/Dry (Spring/Autumn 2013):193.

[7] Cecilia Novero, Anti-diets of the Avant-Garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 241; Higgins, Fluxus Experience, 47.

[8] Coined by art critic, historian and curator Nicolas Bourriaud.

[9] Joselit, “The Readymade Metabolized.”

[10] Marcia Reed, „Killing with Kindness? The Challenges of Conservation and Access for Living Matter,” in Living Matter: The Preservation of Biological Materials in Contemporary Art, Proceedings from a Conference Held in Mexico City, June 3-5, 2019, edited by Rachel Rivenc, Kendra Roth. Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2022. https://www.getty.edu/publications/living‑matter/; Albrecht Gumlich,“Hooked (1980) by Ben Patterson,“ Interview with Aga Wielocha and Hanna Hölling, Radio Fluxus, Episode 1, https://activatingfluxus.com/radio-fluxus/. My sincere thanks to Aga Wielocha for drawing my attention to the missing date.

The second volume of Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care has been published!

I am pleased to announce that the second and final volume of our series on performance conservation has seen the daylight from Routledge. The book is available Open Access from November 2024 and since a few weeks, also as a hard cover.

Representing the output of the research project “Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge,” this volume brings together diverse voices, methods, and formats in the discussion and practice of performance conservation.

Conservators, artists, curators and scholars explore the ontology of performance art through its creation and institutionalization into an astonishing range of methods and approaches for keeping performance alive and well, whether inside museum collections or through folk traditions. Anchored in the disciplines of contemporary art conservation, art history, and performance studies, the contributions range far beyond these to include perspectives from anthropology, musicology, dance, law, heritage studies, and other fields. While its focus is on performance as understood in the context of contemporary art, the book’s notion of performance is much wider, including other media such as music, theater, and dance as well as an open-ended concept of performance as a vital force across culture(s).

While providing cutting-edge research on an emerging and important topic, this volume remains accessible to all interested readers, allowing it to serve as a singularly valuable resource for museum professionals, scholars, students, and practitioners.

With contributing authors: Amelia Jones, Michaela Schäuble, Thomas Gartmann, Philip Auslander, Puwai Cairns, Black Art Conservators Valinda Carroll, Kayla Henry-Griffin, Nylah Byrd and Ariana Makau, Brandie MacDonald, Sandra Sykora, Rosanna Raymond, Urmimala Sarkar Munsi, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Gisela Hochuli, Joanna Lesnierowska, Ido Feder and the editors, Emilie Magnin, Jules Pelta Feldman and Hanna B. Hölling.

For more details, visit Publisher Link or read the book freely available via Open Access.

Natureculture Lab, a global think tank


January 27-29, 2025 | Institute of Materiality in Art and Culture | HKB Bern Academy of the Arts

We are calling for participation in this Lab from individuals from the Global South, especially those who belong to underrepresented groups and are in the early phases of their careers (e.g., PhD candidates or recent postdocs). See below for the description and specifics of the call.


This international workshop aims to bring together in a hybrid format experts and practitioners of conservation in two domains: on the one hand, art and cultural heritage conservation; and on the other hand, nature conservation. Except for singular activities, these two communities have rarely if at all communicated. This is highly remarkable especially considering recent developments both in art conservation and nature conservation. In both domains the “things”, “items”, “objects” or “sites” conservators and conservationists care for are increasingly recognized as natureculture hybrids. While art conservation, especially in its earlier guise of restoration, primarily considered artworks as the outcome of human—and especially the artist’s—intentions, the field of art conservation has increasingly recognized that the materials of artworks undergo unintentional, and sometimes unexpected, changes and are subject to loss and decay well outside human control. At the other end, while inspired by ideas of pristine wilderness, nature conservation in its earliest instances was primarily geared towards the establishment of national parks and nature reserves fortified against human intervention, conservationists have come to value humans as inherent to the ecosystems they care for. Given that the “things” and “sites” for which (art) conservators and (nature) conservationists hold responsibility are interplays of human and non-human agencies and thus nature-culture hybrids, both fields and communities consider ontologically similar objects, and should exchange views.

The workshop will explore questions such as, How should conservation practices in both nature and art be redefined in light of the inevitable and sometimes desirable changes to the material make-up of objects, landscapes and environments? How can new conservation theories that embrace change and transformation, particularly those emerging from contemporary art, inform and reshape traditional conservation approaches that prioritize permanence and stability? Who gets to decide where and how conservation occurs, considering the historical silencing and displacement of human voices in both ecological restoration and cultural heritage conservation? How can the field of conservation expand beyond top-down expert models to embrace decolonizing community engagement, thereby raising questions about the future role of experts?

The current global challenges of the climate, environmental and, in parts of the globe, humanitarian crisis create a strong urgency to intensify the exchange between the fields of art and nature conservation. To cope with these challenges, nature and culture heritage conservation requires alternative ontologies and distinct epistemologies. Ontologically, both fields require approaches that can deal with change and the dynamics accelerated by the climate crisis. Epistemologically, both fields need to develop more inclusive models of decision-making, in their turn, questioning the role of experts in conservation. This workshop will bring these two communities together not because we are under the assumption that one field has the solutions to the problems the other field is confronted with, but because both fields confront similar problems. Rather than transferring ready-made solutions from the domain of art and culture to nature, or vice versa, and simply having one community learn from the other, the workshop will offer a platform for both communities to learn together and progress facing the global challenges mentioned above. 

The confirmed contributors for this workshop are Lotte Arndt, Jackob Badcock, Marjolijn Bol, Josephine Ellis, Noémie Étienne, Sven Dupré, Rodney Harrison, Hanna B. Hölling, Laura J. Martin, Maeva Pimo, Christian Rosset, Friederike Schäfer, Anna Schäffler, Peter Schneemann, Yvonne Schmidt and Glenn Wharton.

We also invite applications from individuals in the Global South, particularly those from underrepresented groups and at early career stages (PhD candidates or early postdocs), to participate in our workshop. Participants may contribute by delivering a short presentation and/or joining discussion groups focused on the aforementioned themes. A subsidy of CHF 1,000 is available to support travel and accommodation for four in-person participants. The workshop and application process will be conducted in English.

Please apply by November 3, 2024, by submitting the following: 1. A motivation letter (maximum 2 pages) detailing your interest in participating in the workshop and a brief research statement explaining how the workshop would benefit your current research 2. A CV (maximum 5 pages), including a list of publications.

Natureculture Lab has been organized by Hanna B. Hölling (HKB Bern Academy of the Arts) and Sven Dupré (Utrecht University/University van Amsterdam) with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation Scientific Exchanges Grant, the Bern University of Applied Science Network Grant and the Institute Materiality in Art and Culture at HKB Bern Academy of the Arts.

Access the full call for participation here.

Research Festival and Exhibition “Conserving Performance: Performing Conservation”

This is a first glimpse into the schedule for a long-awaited research festival and exhibition, “Conserving Performance: Performing Conservation,” which is currently in its final planning phase by the members of the project Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge. The events, which also mark the conclusion of the research project, will take place in venues across Switzerland from September 14 to September 29, 2024.

Please save the dates and join us this fall at Tanzhaus Zürich, ADC Genève, Aargauer Kunsthaus, Muséee cantonal des Beaux-Arts Lausanne/PLATEFORME 10, Dampfzentrale Bern and HKB Bern.

With speakers: Sara Wookey, Megan Metcalf, Peter Pleyer, Catja Loepfe, Declan Whitaker, Florence Jung, Simona Ciuccio, Cori Olighouse, Thomas Plischke, Eszter Salamon, Rachel Mader, Eszter Salamon, Saša Asentić, Nina Mühlemann, Rebecca Gordon, Sabine Gebhardt Fink, Muda Mathis, Andrea Saemann, Dorothea Rust, Chris Regn, Gisela Hochuli, Tabea Lurk, Julia Asperska, Joanna Leśnierowska, Andrej Mirčev, Emilie Magnin and Hanna Hölling. 

Follow this link for a preliminary schedule.

Getty Podcast: Nam June Paik – I Don’t Want to Be Over Whelmed by Glory

I am thrilled to have been invited to contribute to this Getty Podcast “Recording the Artists. Intimate Addresses,” on the topic of Nam June Paik and his letter to Tudor, with my fellow speakers Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Anna Deavere and our host and moderator Tess Taylor . Below you may find a brief description of the podcast, its transcript and a link to its online experience.

Visit the Getty website https://www.getty.edu/recordingartists/season-2/paik/, or read on.

In the mid-1960s, Nam June Paik is living in a run-down studio in SoHo, struggling to make ends meet. But even as he jokes about his ongoing battle against cockroaches, he is building his network, seeking out support for his artist friends, and always experimenting with form. Paik’s vibrant personality is on full display in a letter from this period to musician David Tudor. Partially typewritten, partially handwritten, and full of wild punctuation and inside jokes, the letter’s main purpose is to help find work for his friend, Japanese musician Takehisa Kosugi.

In this episode of Recording Artists: Intimate Addresses, you’ll meet the wildly charming artist whose theories on technology and our relationship to it remain eerily prescient today; the man who coined the phrase “electronic superhighway” and advocated for artists to be at the vanguard of using the newest tech; and the person who tirelessly looked out for his friends. Host Tess Taylor unpacks some of Paik’s best-known artworks and traces his evolving thinking about art and tech. Anna Deavere Smith reads the letter. Korean American artist Sueyeun Juliette Lee and art historian and conservator Hanna Hölling help you make sense of Paik’s networks—both personal and electronic—and his legacy.

Transcript available here.

Our first volume is out: Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care!

This book focuses on performance and performance-based artworks as seen through the lens of conservation, which has long been overlooked in the larger theoretical debates about whether and how performance remains.


Unraveling the complexities involved in the conservation of performance, Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care (vol. 1) brings this new understanding to bear in examining performance as an object of study, experience, acquisition, and care. In so doing, it presents both theoretical frameworks and functional paradigms for thinking about—and enacting—the conservation of performance. Further, while the conservation of performance is undertheorized, performance is nevertheless increasingly entering the art market and the museum, meaning that there is an urgent need for discourse on how to care for these works long-term. In recent years, a few pioneering conservators, curators, and scholars have begun to create frameworks for the longterm care of performance. This volume presents, explicates, and contextualizes their work so that a larger discourse can commence. It will thus serve the needs of conservation students and professors, for whom literature on this subject is sorely needed.


This interdisciplinary book thus implements a novel rethinking of performance that will challenge and revitalize its conception in many fields, such as art history, theater, performance studies, heritage studies, and anthropology.

Co-edited with Jules Pelta Feldman and Emilie Magnin.

Contributing authors:
Pip Laurenson
Rebecca Schneider with Hanna B. Hölling 
Hélia Marçal
Gabriella Giannachi
Shadreck Chirikure
Iona Goldie-Scot
Brian Castriota And Claire Walsh 
Farris Wahbeh
Kelli Morgan
Kongo Astronauts (Eléonore Hellio with Michel Ekeba)
Dread Scott
Karolina Wilczynska
Cori Olinghouse with Megan Metcalf
Erin Brannigan with Louise Lawson
Cauleen Smith

The book is available OPEN ACCESS, thanks to the generous support of the Swiss National Science Foundation Book Publication Fund. Access its full version here: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003309987/performance-hanna-h%C3%B6lling-jules-pelta-feldman-emilie-magnin.

My new essay “Notation and Eternity” published in Nam June Paik: I Expose the Music, by Spector Books

My essay titled “Notation and Eternity in Symphonie No. 5 and Liberation Sonata for Fish” has been recently published in the exquisite new catalog, Nam June Paik: I Expose the Music, by Spector Books. This catalog serves as a companion piece to the exhibition of the same name, currently being showcased at the Museum Ostwall at the Dortmunder U in Germany. The exhibition highlights the pioneering work of video artist Nam June Paik, emphasizing live moments and musical aspects that defined his artistic journey. The exhibit is curated by Rudolf Frieling from SFMOMA, in close partnership with the Museum Ostwall.

In this essay, I aim to analyze the concept of eternity in Nam June Paik’s Symphonie Nr. 5 and Liberation Sonata for Fish, by exploring their formal and conceptual layers. Paik’s scores offer insights into the numerous possibilities for their interpretation, based on his objectual and textual instructions. Moreover, the materiality of the scores’ form is highlighted as a complex assemblage of constantly evolving matter. Through this analysis, the scores’ material condition presents an ontology of openness and indeterminacy, while also portraying a material-bound aesthetic of decay that may suggest finitude or closure. Throughout this essay, I will explore these themes and offer insights into Paik’s artistic vision.

You can download my essay here in English and here in German

The catalog is available for purchase at Spector Books here.

Open Access Publication Grant for the anthology on performance conservation!

How many books can I read? - The Statesman

We are delighted to announce that our forthcoming anthology, Performance: The Ethics and Politics of Conservation and Care, has been granted funds by the Swiss National Foundation to cover the Open Access processing fees. Published by Routledge, the book will be available in hardback, paperback, and e-book formats this summer. For a sneak peek, check out some key details and a brief summary of the book.

Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care

This book focuses on performance and performance-based artworks as seen through the lens of conservation, which has long been overlooked in the larger theoretical debates about whether and how performance remains.

Unraveling the complexities involved in the conservation of performance, Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care (vol. 1) brings this new understanding to bear in examining performance as an object of study, experience, acquisition, and care. In so doing, it presents both theoretical frameworks and functional paradigms for thinking about—and enacting—the conservation of performance. Further, while the conservation of performance is undertheorized, performance is nevertheless increasingly entering the art market and the museum, meaning that there is an urgent need for discourse on how to care for these works long-term. In recent years, a few pioneering conservators, curators, and scholars have begun to create frameworks for the long-term care of performance. This volume presents, explicates, and contextualizes their work so that a larger discourse can commence. It will thus serve the needs of conservation students and professors, for whom literature on this subject is sorely needed.

This interdisciplinary book thus implements a novel rethinking of performance that will challenge and revitalize its conception in many fields, such as art history, theater, performance studies, heritage studies, and anthropology.

With chapter contributions by Pip Laurenson, Rebecca Schneider with Hanna Hölling, Gabriella Giannachi, Helia Marcal, Shadreck Chirikure, Iona Goldi-Scott, Brian Castriota with Claire Welsh, Farris Wabeh, Kelli Morgan, Kongo Astronauts (Eléonore Hellio and Michel Ekeba), Dread Scott, Karolina Wilczyńska, Megan Cori Olinghouse with Megan Metcalf, Erin Brannigan and Louise Lawson, Cauleen Smith and Jacob Badcock.

Editors: Hanna B. Hölling, Jules Pelta Feldman and Emilie Magnin

The book has emerged from the collaborative research project, Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge, situated at the Bern University of Applied Sciences – Academy of the Arts and supported by the Swiss National Fund.

Book Presentation: Object-Event-Performance

Wednesday, February 22, 2023, 5 p.m. CET / 11 a.m. EST

The SNSF research project Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge, in collaboration with the SNSF research project Activating Fluxus, is pleased to host a public presentation of the book titled  Object-Event-Performance: Art, Materiality, and Continuity Since the 1960s (2022; ed. by Hanna B. Hölling). The event will take place within the Research Wednesday seminar series.

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 event features a book that 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 museum professionals increasingly struggle with issues of conservation for works created from the mid-twentieth to the twenty-first century that are unstable over time. As participants in conservation, the contributors to this volume—often non-conservators—form a community of practice that share common interests.

Speakers include: Hannah B Higgins, Gregory Zinman, Andrea Gyorody and Megan Metcalf. Moderator: Jules Pelta Feldman.

The book asks 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. With chapters by Hannah B Higgins, Hanna B. Hölling, Gregory Zinman, Andrea Gyorody, Alison D’Amato, Megan Metcalf, Rebecca Uchill, Susanne Neubauer, Beryl Graham and Johannes Hedinger, this book aims to become a welcome resource on contemporary conservation for art historians, scholars of performance, dance, theater and museum studies, curators, and conservators.

The book has been published by Bard Graduate Center, within the series Cultural Histories of the Material World (series editor: Peter Miller) and is available from the University of Chicago Press (PDF and cloth).