NEWS

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.

The Journal Art Matters has recently published a series of posts featuring my talented colleagues serving as editorial board members for the journal. I recommend checking out the Art Matters Twitter feed to see more. Additionally, there is a tweet about my own profile.

On this occasion, I’d like to remind everyone that in September 2021, the journal published a special issue on the conservation of contemporary art. The issue is freely available online at this link.

On May 24, 2022, Hanna Hölling delivered a keynote lecture at the “Neue Schule” webinar hosted by Something Great, an innovative Berlin-based performance collection that is challenging traditional approaches to creating, acquiring, and continuing live performance art. Jules Pelta Feldman delivered a response. Following their lecture, Mariama Diagne, a postdoctoral researcher at SFB 1512 Intervening Arts at Freie Universität Berlin, and Shelley Lasica, a choreographer and artist, engaged in a conversation moderated by Felipe Ribeiro, an associate professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. The entire event was fascinating and provided new insights into the intersection of art, performance, and conservation. For more information on Something Great’s collection and upcoming webinars, please visit their website at https://somethinggreat.de.

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 is an introduction to a volume titled Object—Event— Performance: Art, Materiality, and Continuity Since the 1960s which I edited for Bard Graduate Center, New York in 2022 (Cultural Histories of the Material World series). The book 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.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Series Editor’s Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Object—Event—Performance
Hanna Hölling

Introducing Fluxus with Tools
Hanna B. Higgins

Exhausting Conservation: Object, Event, Performance in Franz Erhard Walther’s Werkstücke
Hanna B. Hölling

Video Art’s Past and Present “Future Tense:” The Case of Nam June Paik’s Satellite Works
Gregory Zinman

Resurrecting Hannah Wilke’s Homage to a Large Red Lipstick
Andrea Gyorody

Mutable and Durable: The Performance Score after 1960
Alison D’Amato

Sometimes An Onion: Simone Forti and the Choreographic Logic of Objects and Institutions
Megan Metcalf

Views of Nature: Preserving Land (Art) with Collective Intent
Rebecca Uchill

Enlivened Pieces: Richard Tuttle at the Whitney Museum of American Art 1975
Susanne Neubauer

The Cheapness of Writing Paper, and Code: Materiality, Exhibiting and Audiences after New Media Art
Beryl Graham

The Propensity toward Openness: Bloch as Object, Event, and Performance
Johannes M. Hedinger and Hanna B. Hölling

Contributors

Index

To access the introduction, click on this link.

On the occasion of Dia Beacon’s concurrent presentation of works by Imi Knoebel, Charlotte Posenenske, and Franz Erhard Walther, I was invited by Ian Wallace to participate in a two-hour event, Rethinking German Minimalism. The event brought together a new generation of artists and scholars to reconsider the classification of “German Minimalism,” a term used to describe artistic practices that emerged in West Germany during the mid-1960s.

This event reflects Wallace’s long-term engagement with the topic, including aspects of his dissertation written on Charlotte Posenenske at the City University of New York. According to Wallace, the work of Knoebel, Posenenske, Walther, and their contemporaries engaged with Minimalist art from the United States through the use of industrial materials and processes, a reduced geometric vocabulary, the serial repetition of forms, and an emphasis on embodied relationships to sculpture. However, the work of these German artists can also be distinguished from US Minimalism in various ways, as the latter is traditionally understood through the abstract theoretical discourse of phenomenology.

Going beyond simple morphological comparisons, this symposium considered defining features of Knoebel, Posenenske, and Walther’s practices that depart from United States models. I was fortunate to join a panel of art historians and practicing artists who discussed an alternative historical view of German art of the 1960s and a new understanding of its relevance to contemporary artistic practices. The speakers included Gordon Hall, Hanna B. Hölling, Colin Lang, Gregor Quack, Michael Sanchez, and Sung Tieu, with Ian Wallace serving as the moderator. Ian Wallace is the 2020-21 Andrew M. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Dia Art Foundation.