NEWS

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.

A series of workshops titled Curating Living Archives organized by Dr Judit Bodor (Baxter Fellow Curatorial Practice) and Adam Lockhart (Lecturer in Media Arts, media archivist) at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design at University of Dundee, explores challenges and approaches toward the care for the *unruly* archives of contemporary art in academic (rather than in the museum) environment. In this series, I co-convened a workshop titled “Curation as Expanded Conservation” with Judit Bodor and delivered a talk on the intersection of curatorial and conservation cultures, titled “What does the work want?”

How do curation and conservation intersect when it comes to the presentation of post-1960s time-based artworks emerging from processes of what Lucy Lippard described as ‘the dematerialisation of the art object’? While in the case of works based on performance and installation each act of exhibiting – that is display or activation of an artwork – may already involve some aspects of preservation, not all preservation aims at displaying artworks. In this workshop, co-convened by Dr Judit Bodor and Dr Hanna B. Hölling, and with contribution from artist/curator Prof André Stitt and Benjamin Sebastian and Joseph Morgan Schofield from ]performance s p a c e[, we will examine how the intersection of curation and conservation might productively contribute to the way we engage with and conceptualize ephemeral practices. We will explore how curatorial acts and gestures are always reliant on factors such as the situatedness of curatorial knowledge and the limitations and/or excesses of the archive, and how they problematize and alter, if not derail, our understanding of the ongoing lives of artworks. What does it mean to curate and/or conserve an artwork? Can an artwork be conceived apart or always already in relation to curatorial and conservation practices – as an entanglement of many different hands and minds? Expect lively presentations by workshop leaders followed by group interactions.

The talks will be made available publically soon.

Published in the new issue of On Curating devoted to the topic of Fluxus, this essay, “Unpacking the Score: Notes on the Material Legacy of Intermediality,” seeks to build a theory of score-based works different from traditional approaches in which the score becomes a fPublished in the latest edition of On Curating, dedicated to the topic of Fluxus, this essay aims to establish a novel theory of score-based works that deviates from traditional approaches, wherein the score is merely a product of the performance’s archive. The essay delves deep into the ontology of the work, exploring its materiality and ontogenesis, which are regulated by indeterminacy and openness. The central question at the heart of this inquiry is how to perceive a score-based work as an emerging form, rather than a predetermined one, always on the cusp between the virtual and the actual. Furthermore, the essay raises crucial questions concerning the pursuit of such works and the ethics of care surrounding them.

Access the article here or download the whole On Curating issue here.