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.
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.
[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.
[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.
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).
