I am excited to announce the publication of my latest essay, titled “Matter Minding, or What the Work Wants: Aldo Tambellini’s Intermedia,” in Afterall Journal(issue 52). The essay explores the connections among blackness, mediality, and intermediality, as well as materiality and physicality. I argue that Tambellini’s work “teleports” us into a space where blackness moves between different mediums, performing an aesthetic of change.
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.
Cover of the upcoming book, Object—Event— Performance: Art, Materiality, and Continuity Since the 1960s.
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.
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.
Imi Knoebel, Raum 19, 1968. Installation at dia art foundation NYC 1987
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.
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.
탈-보존: 백남준의 가상 아카이브 POST-PRESERVATION: PAIK’S VIRTUAL ARCHIVE, POTENTIALLY
(Korean version below)
This paper, delivered on the occasion of The Gift of Nam June Paik 13 at the Nam June Paik Art Center in Yongin, South Korea (and available as recording below), offers insights into the different modes of existence of, and understanding, the archive. I propose an archive that encompasses both time and material—an index of evolving attitudes toward objects and subjects, the contingency of time, discourse, and culture. The archive participates in creating the identity, and maintaining the continuity, of works of art. In its physical form, it documents the work’s past manifestations—in reports, instructions, scores, contracts, correspondence, and manuals. The physical archive is completed and complemented by what I call the virtual archive, that is, an archive that takes on a non-physical dimension. The virtual archive harbors tacit knowledge, memory, skill, and technique, but also meta-knowledge related to the archive’s internal functionality.
Works of art, I argue, are actualized from such physical-virtual archive. To explain this, I will implement the dialectic of the virtual and actual derived from the philosophical projects of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. The actualization of an artwork is not one-directional. Rather, the archive is recursive, oriented toward both the past and the future—it is a dynamic source that sustains the artworks’ identity. Our engagement with the archive, therefore, becomes an active and creative “presencing’” of artworks, contingent on various cultures, attitudes and affordances of those interacting with the archive.
How does the digital archive come into play? The second part of my presentation will explore how the multiplicity of existing versions, variations and variants of Paik’s video works—fragments and instances, remixes and citations but to the same extent the variety of his recordings’ formats, such as 1/2 inch, 1 inch and 2 inch tapes, 8mm and Super 8 films, laserdiscs, VHS, Betacam SP and U-Matic, prompt us to rethink the traditional museological approaches to the care for works of art. For a considerable time, these approaches have cultivated the concepts of material preservation and truthfulness to the singular material and authentic original emergent in the effect of an intentional act. I will argue that, firstly, the versatility of Paik’s filmic and video media renders these traditional museological approaches obsolete. Secondly, and most importantly, the actualization of these works from the archive—if done creatively by employing the digital and analogue research tools— might bring about new imagination of what video might become in the vein of what I name a critical, experimental post-preservation.
Post-preservation will be conceived as intertwinement of discursive and physical practices bound with the domain and activity of the archive, which becomes, rather than a realm of fixation and stasis, a condition of possibility for these works’ change and survival. In other words: Paik’s virtual archive, potentially.
이 글은 아카이브가 존재하는 여러 가지 양식, 그리고 아카이브의 이해에 통찰을 제공한다. 나는 시간과 물질—객체와 주체에 대한 계속 진화하는 태도의 지표들, 시간 속에서 일어나는 우발적 사건, 담론, 문화—모두를 아우르는 아카이브를 제안하려 한다. 아카이브는 예술 작품의 정체성을 만들거나 지속성을 보장해준다. 아카이브는 그 물리적인 형태—보고서, 안내문, 악보, 계약서, 서신, 설명서—안에 작품의 과거 현시를 기록하고 증명한다. 이러한 물리적 아카이브는 내가 ‘가상 아카이브’라 부르는 것, 다시 말해 비물질적 차원을 취하고 있는 아카이브에 의해 완성되며 보완된다. 가상 아카이브는 암묵지나 기억, 뛰어난 솜씨, 기법뿐만 아니라 아카이브의 내적 기능과 관련된 메타 지식까지 품고 있다.
나는 예술 작품이 이러한 물리적-가상적 아카이브를 통해 잠재력을 발현한다고 본다. 이를 설명하기 위해 앙리 베르그송과 질 들뢰즈의 철학에서 파생된 ‘가상’과 ‘실제’의 변증법을 수행할 것이다. 아카이브를 통한 예술 작품의 실현은 일방향적이지 않다. 아카이브는 과거와 미래 모두를 향하고 있기에 재귀적이다—이는 작품의 정체성을 떠받치고 있는 역동적인 원천이다. 그러므로 우리가 아카이브에 관여하는 일은 작품의 활발하고 창조적인 ‘존재하기(presencing)’가 되며, 이러한 존재하기는 아카이브와 상호작용하는 이들의 다양한 문화, 태도, 행동 유도성(affordance)에 따라 달라진다.
디지털 아카이브는 어떻게 작동하는가? 2부 발제에서는 백남준 비디오 작업의 여러 버전이나 변형, 이형들—예컨대 프래그먼트(비디오 작업의 일부분), 인스턴스(비디오 작품들의 다양한 버전), 리믹스(편집이나 녹화 등으로 섞인 기록), 사이테이션(다른 작업을 차용하거나 다른 작업의 소스로 재인용된 클립들)을 포함해 1/2 인치, 1인치, 2인치 테이프, 8mm와 수퍼 8 필름, 레이저디스크, VHS, 베타캠 SP, 유매틱과 같은 다양한 레코딩 형식들—이 어떻게 우리로 하여금 작품을 다루는 박물관학의 전통적인 접근법을 재고하게 만드는지 살펴볼 것이다. 이러한 접근 방식은 상당한 시간 동안 물질적 보존, 단일 물질로서의 진실성 등의 개념을 구축해왔다. 아울러 이는 의도적 행위의 결과로 생성된 진정한 원본이라는 개념도 함께 정립해왔다. 나는 첫째로 백남준의 영상 매체가 가진 다변성이 전통적인 박물관학의 접근법을 시대에 뒤떨어진 것으로 만든다고 주장할 것이다. 둘째, 이것이 가장 중요한 지점인데, 아카이브에서 백남준의 다변적인 작업들을 구현하는 일은 내가 비판적이며 실험적인 탈-보존적(post-preservation) 아카이브라고 한 것의 맥락에서 비디오 작업은 무엇이 될 수 있는지에 관하여 새로운 상상을 유발할지도 모른다.
탈-보존은 아카이브의 도메인이나 그곳에서 일어나는 움직임으로 묶이는, 산만하고 물리적인 실천들의 얽힘처럼 보일지도 모른다. 그것은 고정되고 정지된 어떤 영역이 아니라 백남준의 비디오 작업이 변화하며 생존하기 위한 가능성의 조건이다. 다시 말해, 이것은 어쩌면 가능할지도 모르는 백남준의 가상 아카이브일 것이다.
This is an annotated reprint that features a new intro and conclusions, along with several images from the exhibition Revisions-Zen for Film curated by me at Bard Graduate Center Gallery in New York in 2015-16.
I owe my gratitude to the journal editor Prof Barbara Büscher for pursuing this reprint and to Franz Anton Cramer for his work on this publication. Big thanks to Daniel Lee, Director of Publishing at Bard for his permission to reprint and to Carolyn Brown for her invaluable editorial support.
Here is an excellent publication titled Nam June Paik Pre Bell Man: Eine Ikone der Medienkunst that features the conservation and restoration of a multimedia installation Pre Bell Man by Nam June Paik at the Museum für Kommunikation Frankfurt. It emerged from critical debates surrounding the issues of returning this canonical work to life in which I participated amongst many brilliant colleagues and speakers, Wulf Herzogenrtah, Bernhard Serexhe, Helmut Gold, Franziska Stöhr, and others. The book involves very short excerpts from the symposium, curator’s and restorer’s accounts, and beautiful illustrations of the conservation/restoration works conducted on Pre Bell Man. The symposium webpage is accessible here.
