The Increasing Role of Artists’ Estates in the Preservation of Contemporary Art

Abstract

Today’s challenges in dealing with the legacy of contemporary artists require new structural models for conservation and preservation and are leading to a radical shift of our western memory culture. The growing importance and discussion of artist estates in recent years is one of the results of this development. Based on my experience of working for the estate of German conceptual artist Anna Oppermann (1943–1992), I argue not only that artist estates become important sites of knowledge for the preservation and contextualization of contemporary art, but also that this major change and dissolution can be understood as a decentralized memory organization in which both private actors and civil society become significant stakeholders for contemporary art. In elevating preservation to a condition of contemporary art, the instituent potential of contemporary art preservation becomes apparent through these emerging so-called “networks of care.”

1 Introduction

Based on my work with the Estate of German conceptual artist Anna Oppermann (1940–1993), I focus in this contribution on the increasing responsibility of artists’ estates as legal entities in the preservation of contemporary art and the consequences this has for institutions.¹ Being an art historian, I write from the perspective of the second generation of caretakers of this Estate. Since 2010 I have been working on and with the Estate both in my scholarly research and in my curatorial practice, and I have been responsible for setting up the artist’s installations in several museums over the past years.² By starting from a description of the conditions and genesis of an estate, using that of Oppermann as an example, I identify generally emerging challenges in the posthumous dealing with artistic legacies that feature at the intersection of art history, conservation and curatorial practice.

The term “artist’s estate” does not only refer to a variety of concepts, but it also differs from one country to the next, and therefore it cannot be pinned down to one meaning. In a legal sense, an estate includes all assets and liabilities of a natural person that are transferred to their heirs:

In the context of succession, the law does not differentiate between art and other assets of an estate nor between the estate of an artist and that of another person. For the law, the only relevant question is organizing the restructuring of financial assets-including corresponding rights and obligations-that becomes necessary due to the death of an individual.³ (Würtenberger 2016, pp. 14–15)

In archive terminology the term “estate” describes all unofficial documents of a natural person stemming from their private, artistic or official activities.⁴ Depending on the definition, an artist’s estate will thus comprise more than the artistic work itself; it may also consist of written documents, publications, documentation and correspondence that contextualize the work and can provide important information for research. In this article I use “Estate” (with a capital “E”) for the legally authorized group of caretakers in terms of administration and rights, and “estate” (with a lower case “e”) as referring not only to the physical materials left behind by the deceased artist and posthumously added through processes of preservation, but also to the immaterial dimensions as well as interrelated intangible knowledge and practices. Finally, these two areas are of course not separate but deeply interconnected—e.g., in decision-making during the process of preservation.

2 Anna Oppermann’s Estate: The Early Phase

From the end of the 1960s onwards, the German conceptual artist Anna Oppermann developed extensive processual arrangements that she called “ensembles.” Each presentation of an installation was a unique iteration of the artwork. The installations continued to change over the years in a process of loops and recursive modifications, condensations, divisions and multiplications. Despite numerous solo and group exhibitions, including documenta 6 (1977) and 8 (1987) in Kassel and the Venice Biennale in 1980 (curated by Harald Szeemann), the ensembles were not collected by museums during Oppermann’s lifetime, nor was she successful on the art market, with the exception of a few private collectors who acquired smaller reductions of ensembles or individual canvases directly from Oppermann. By the time of her early death in 1993, she had created about seventy ensembles of different sizes, which were stored in her private residences and a rented storage. As indicated by Herbert Hossmann, her partner of many years:

Anna Oppermann had made no provision for the time after her death; only a few items were sorted and archived. She had also not bequeathed to me how to deal with the ensembles after her death. What should be preserved, what should remain hidden, what should be destroyed? Is it possible to show the ensembles stored in the depot again, without the situational additions, extensions? Is it possible to reconstruct the last publicly presented condition—usually 10 to 15 years ago? Do I (or who?) have the right to develop the ensembles further and reinstall them? Or can the work be shown only in its individual parts, the canvases isolated on the wall, the drawings under passe-partout in a frame?⁵ (Hossmann 1994, p. 3)

These were the questions Hossmann had to address after Oppermann’s death. She in fact left neither a will on how to proceed with the installation of the ensembles after her death, nor any information as to who should actually take on this task. In their common living spaces, an apartment in Hamburg and a house in Celle, where Oppermann spent her last years, she left behind numerous ensembles in various stages of development. Hossmann decided not to convert one of the locations into a kind of artist’s house and open it to the public. This would have been one way of preserving the last structures created by Oppermann. According to Hossmann, however, the domestic environment was hardly a suitable setting for making her oeuvre accessible to the public. Recalling his thinking at the time, he often refers to the bewilderment he experienced when entering the house of the late writer Arno Schmidt, located in a village near Celle. While looking at the walking stick in the corner, the pair of glasses on the desk and the jars with homemade jam on the shelf he decided not to stage his partner’s life as if she just had gone out and would return any moment. Apart from that, Hossmann wanted to keep on living in the house in which he himself grew up. Although Oppermann’s ensembles are closely interrelated with her personal environment, this early division between private and public realms set the tone for the subsequent dealing with her oeuvre. Another decision of Hossmann was not to set up a foundation and keep the estate together, but rather to work towards the insertion of the ensembles in public and private collections in order to keep them contextualized with other artworks.

On Hossmann’s initiative, in the year of Oppermann’s death a publicly funded working group for the processing of the estate was formed, which included Hossmann himself as well as Ute Vorkoeper and Karolina Breindl, who both did research on Oppermann’s ensembles at the time.⁶ Moreover, he tried to establish a broader advisory group of custodians, art historians, linguists and computer scientists with university and museum affiliations, but this endeavour failed. In his view, the primary task of securing Oppermann’s estate involved initially examining all ensembles and cataloguing them. At first the working group divided the existing materials into object areas, such as photo archives, lost individual parts, individual works after 1967, diaries and sketchbooks, general written analyses, comments, and reflections on her method, technical accessories and variable architectural elements, as well as correspondence and biographical documents. Based on the first catalogue raisonée published jointly by Oppermann and Hossmann in 1984, a review of the estate furnished a total of 66 ensembles in various stages of development. In accordance with the last public presentation in each case, the components of individual ensembles had been kept by the artist in boxes and sometimes in plastic bags. However, these boxes were often incomplete because the same materials were used in different ensembles, thus spanning a network of references between them. Clearly, this artistic self-archiving according to a individual systematic arrangement and based on Oppermann’s artistic output and occasional presentations of her works does not follow any institutional archival logic or standardized methods. Although she handled the materials more cautiously in later years, her self-archiving conforms to the image of the active artist who knows that in the event of loss or damage new material can always be added, redrawn, photographed, collected—an attitude that posthumously can turn into quite a challenge. After she died, the various materials left behind took on an additional meaning of uniqueness, of unrepeatability.

The examination of the materials also confronted the working group with the difficulty of deciding which parts should be assigned to which ensemble—a controversial undertaking since potentially everything could be part of an ensemble, including photographic documentation, common decoration elements or newspaper clippings, children’s toys or pendants, furniture and tablecloths. With the private and artistic estates merged, in the case of the ensembles these secondary sources and contextual pieces form part of the artwork. Furthermore, the ensembles’ logic of interwovenness subverts any clear allocation of some of the materials. And above all there always existed more materials than had ever been used in the installations as such, for example photo prints and duplicates of installation shots. Over the course of several months, the working group attributed the existing materials and classified them as so-called active or passive ensemble elements, i.e., work or archive components. From today’s perspective, this decision-making process was the first and crucial phase of structuring Oppermann’s work for posterity. The challenge of this systematization was and still is the fixity and homeostasis of a single posthumous order, which in fact hardly reflects the artist’s quite flexible attitude during her lifetime. This needs to be taken into consideration in today’s analysis of the ensembles as well. My own starting point as a member of the second generation of posthumous installers of her works differs from that of the first generation. My examination of the ensembles is based on a meanwhile largely catalogued body of work and established installation practices.

3 Artist’s Estates as Sites of Knowledge

Without Herbert Hossmann’s private commitment over many years and his long-term administration of her estate, Anna Oppermann’s ensembles would simply no longer exist today. Because large ensembles were not collected by museums during her lifetime, the Estate alone took care of their preservation for over twenty-five years. Hossmann and Oppermann lived together since the late 1970s, and from this time onwards he assisted in nearly all installations of her ensembles. It was fortunate for the estate that a competent person took on this task, even though Hossmann was not her legal heir (Oppermann’s son Alexander is). Hossmann and Oppermann never married, and, as indicated, she left no will. Apart from legal responsibility, then, what is also at stake in this case is moral and artistic responsibility: is there anyone who feels the need to pass on an artist’s estate to later generations and does this person feel capable of doing so? It was only recently, after dedicating a lifetime to the care of her work, that he has begun to address the fact that he was never asked if he wanted to take on this burden.

That Hossmann was an administrative lawyer, had contacts with public funding institutions and was thus able to organize partial financing of the processing of the estate was a relief. Apart from this, he had already taken on the task of systematizing the photographic documentation (contact prints and slide frames, for example) during Oppermann’s lifetime. However, such an initial situation with a committed partner dedicated to the administration of the estate represents an exceptional ideal case. After all, works of art are legally indistinguishable from other objects bequeathed after death. This means decision-making power about art estates might devolve to private heirs who lack the necessary experience or knowledge for dealing with them. An Estate’s excessive demands can challenge heirs so fundamentally and overwhelmingly that due to a lack of knowledge artists’ legacies can be entirely lost.⁷ In retrospect, the posthumous handling of the Oppermann Estate is unusual because of its non-institutional preservation lasting for almost three decades.

Generally speaking, we see here an effect on the location of knowledge associated with conservation, which is no longer found primarily within museums but within an artist’s estate. Such estates become increasingly important as knowledge sites while they pass on practices, retain contextual information, and take on preservation tasks. The functions for a decentralized organization of the memory of the artists’ estates could be extended beyond the classical functions of the museum to include documentation, transmission and contextualization. Everything hinges, however, on the long-term nature of this task, which is why time and money become two basic factors. Managing estates is a considerable economic factor: long-term renting of storage space, continuous checking of the material condition and, if necessary, hiring a conservator to secure the material, ensuring the objects, continuously updating digital formats, and so on. Particularly if digitization is part of the conservation concept, an ongoing and continuous examination becomes inevitable.

The Estate of Anna Oppermann is proof of how a private administration and care can ultimately lead to the public recognition of an artistic oeuvre. But in fact, it was only quite recently, when Galerie Barbara Thumm started to create a market, that public and private collections began acquiring Oppermann’s ensembles. Today, when an institution wants to show one of her ensembles, they mostly contact the gallery, which has been administering the estate since 2010. The current strategy of the Estate is to place as many ensembles as possible in public and private collections. So, in contrast to a foundation, which would keep the works and lend them for exhibitions, the ultimate aim in this case is to dissolve the depository of her works. Still, the Estate continues to be the point of reference not only for sales, but also through building an archive of the trajectory of each ensemble, even for those sold already, fostering academic research on her work, continuing to inventory the materials and editing a new catalogue raisonée, including her early works from before the ensemble method.

Oppermann’s incompatibility with the market and museums while she was alive in retrospect turns out to be an advantage: it enabled her, and later the Estate, to develop an informal kind of self-preservation. Without institutional interference the Estate established a unique practice that was not formalized institutionally from the beginning. In 2010 I assisted Ute Vorkoeper for the first time at Temporary Kunsthalle Berlin where I was curatorial assistant and where I became acquainted with the approach of “Interpretierende Neuinstallierung” (“Interpretive new installation”) that the Estate had been developing since the 1990s, allowing a posthumous installation practice open for interpretation, change and process based on Oppermann’s artistic method.⁸

This strategy works insofar as more of Oppermann’s ensembles were acquired by private and public collections in recent years. Nevertheless, as mentioned, the Estate is still sought after by museums for the realization of the ensembles. As of yet there is no precedent of an ensemble that was installed independently by conservators. Reinstallations of Oppermann’s ensembles in a museum—regardless of whether the work is in the collection or on loan from the Estate—have so far been carried out mainly by members of the Estate. In recent years, as first-generation caretakers Herbert Hossmann and Ute Vorkoeper have retired, this has changed again. All decisions regarding the installing and reprocessing of works by Oppermann in a gallery will today be taken in consultation with the legal heir, Alexander Oppermann, and me. In retrospect, the knowledge transfer from first to second generation caretakers involved a smooth trajectory, through joint practice and accompaniment of installations and discussions over a time span of ten years. Looking to the future, it is now important again to redistribute the responsibilities of this practice so that it can be carried on independently of me. On the one hand, the goal is to involve even more people in the Estate, but, on the other hand, it is also important to encourage curators and conservators of museums who now own works by Oppermann to undertake the next installation themselves.

So far, however, elaborate realizations of Oppermann’s works tend to be delegated to external experts. Often the necessary preparatory work cannot be carried out in the everyday hamster wheel of an accelerated exhibition system, also given the scarcity of personnel, time and financial resources in public institutions—familiar subjects for conservators to complain about. In addition to the intensive preparation phase, i.e., researching the artistic position, contextualizing an artwork and conceptualizing a presentation, the installation of a larger ensemble will take several days and is a full-time task. And there is a further aspect: in order to ensure the preservation of a processual and installative work, an ongoing commitment is necessary, one that extends beyond the individual exhibition over a longer period of time and that requires constant engagement with the work. Who assumes this responsibility and develops such a long-standing passion?

This example also underscores that the larger political issue here pertains to the resources of museums in the preservation of contemporary art. In this context, however, one could also consider whether there might not be a need for a third space in which these kinds of expertise converge and in which synergy effects are created across different institutions. For example, in media art: since not every museum can afford a media conservator, or even needs one due to the small number of works in the collection, several museums could share such expertise in a network, which would also be at the cutting edge of technological development. A similar approach could be thought of for complex installations like Oppermann’s: a public centre of expertise specialized in passing on and exploring such practices and being the point of contact for these cases. Such a publicly funded structure would have another important advantage: after all, for as long as knowledge remains solely within the private structures of Artists’ Estates, it will not be publicly accessible.

Of course, representatives from artists’ estates are only one of many negotiation process actors in a network of experts, who fill in, as it were, for the artist posthumously, such as conservators, curators, exhibition designers, technicians and insurance company staff. For this reason, there is the need to take a closer look at these networks when examining the preservation of installation art.⁹ This in turn requires an additional methodology from anthropology, which helps reveal these negotiation processes within the network, for example the construction of authenticity during preservation (van Saaze 2013). The diffusion of preservation tasks will engender “networks of care” outside the museum, causing expertise no longer to lie solely with museum staff (Dekker 2014).¹⁰ As a consequence, the institution has to establish and maintain lasting connections with people outside the institution. The fundamental shift in conservation practice towards a multidisciplinary network involving different stakeholders in the handling of artworks has also caused a shift in the understanding of preservation from material objects to the organization and control of a network of various actors. The museum itself is restructured, and conservation becomes the mediator of these collaborative processes:

We are now less inclined to discuss registration, conservation, and curatorial functions as separate activities. Rather, we mutually discuss collection care, collection management, and stewardship. Preservation efforts are often the result of collaborative efforts among conservators, curators, educators, archivists, and technicians.¹¹

Consequently, what will move to the fore next is the question of hierarchy: who decides? But also: whose values are considered relevant and who’s not? Who can and may receive valuable works of art? Which memory is preserved, whose history is told or not? The selective view of an institution can led to the exclusion of other value concepts. This is the case when, for instance, the conservation perspective prevails due to standardized protocols, excluding other aspects, or if the institutional formalization cannot do justice to these other aspects. Dean Sully has described this problematic hierarchical relationship between various participants in the conservation process as follows:

The authority to decide what is valued is largely the domain of heritage specialists as “insider” stakeholders. “Outsider” groups of other specialists, non-specialists and the public are likely to express values that diverge from those of the heritage specialists. These views may remain hidden to the conservation process, and excluded from it because of lack of opportunity, language, or incentive to participate. Obviously, this has implications for how decisions are made and ultimately how to conserve. (Sully 2015, p. 306)

As one approach in dealing with this dilemma, Sully suggests a self-reflective attitude towards one’s own role in the process.¹² He also proposes a reversal of the relations of authority and adaptation of the conservators to their environment:

Here the idea is that a community’s traditional systems, skills, and knowledge are privileged over universalized concepts of heritage. Consequently, the conservation specialist works within the custom, practice, and protocol of the communities involved, necessitating a reflexive approach in which the agency of all the participants, including the conservation specialist, are [sic!] acknowledged […]. (Sully 2015, p. 306)

This is in line with my own experience of collaborating with the staff of various museums on the installation of ensembles. The objects to be preserved structure the relationship between museum and public. In an unexpected way, this could in turn lead to a redemption of art and life, as demanded by artists in the 1960s.

4 Instituent Potential

The examination of the relationships of authorship and power between artists and institutions is in fact part and parcel of installation art itself. In examining these relationships, artistic practice shifted from the production of a single work to a broader reflection on the conditions of art production and reception itself. As argued by Boris Groys: “One might then say that installation practice reveals the act of unconditional, sovereign violence that initially installs any democratic order” (Groys 2009). By establishing a place outside the usual order, the artistic installation opens a vista onto the conditions of this very order. By subjecting the installation to its own conditions, installation art and the practice of installation therefore always include the emancipatory potential of the artistic assumption of control and self-empowerment over the context.¹³ Reflecting the contextual conditionality is now, posthumously, up for debate in a completely new way. As far as the preservation of Oppermann’s works is concerned, but also of other processual art practices of Paul Thek, Jason Rhodes or Dieter Roth, one could speak here of a certain compulsion to which preservation is subject.

Processual works generate preservation practices and processes themselves, for instance by being site-specific and thus enforcing a change of installation in new contexts. They also do so by implementing plants that need to be watered and taken care of beyond the exhibition periods —in the case of one of Oppermann’s grass lilies the museum’s registrar took the plant into his office. If one follows Von Hantelmann and Lüthy, a changed relationship between art and action arose in two respects with the concept of the integration of art into social processes, surfacing in the 1960s at the latest: “On the one hand, ‘action’ advances to become a medium of art, on the other hand, art becomes a medium of (social) action in a new way” (von Hantelmann and Lüthy 2010, p. 7). This ambiguity also underlies the present study. On the one hand, Oppermann takes her own procedure as the starting point for her artistic work while also explicitly making it the subject of her ensembles. On the other hand, the potential of her work’s preservation, according to this thesis, lies precisely in the social effectiveness—in creating and altering the social reality—of these preservation practices carried out on the basis of works of art. And what is more, it is only in the posthumous situation that the possibility of art practices as commons becomes explicit, as the actions are no longer carried out by the artist, but by various actors in the preservation process.

The institutional-critical potential of these works no longer lies solely in a commentary function, but rather requires institutional action to take a position and become visible itself. Domínguez Rubio calls them “unruly objects”: “They are active elements playing a key structuring role in the production of classifications by actively shaping how categories are drawn and redrawn and how different meanings and forms of value are produced and distributed within the museum” (2014, p. 13). Posthumously, these art practices gain an additional relevance because they not only demonstrate institutional critique, but also force the institution to undergo a profound change by demanding new forms of preservation, such as establishing relations outside institutional confines. Mastering these tasks leads to the transgression of existing institutional boundaries and at the same time allows new structures to emerge. The museum becomes visible as a system of relationships rather than an institution with universal interpretative sovereignty.

Redirected at the institutions, these artistic practices might even have a binding effect and call for a scaling down of institutional commodities through “instituent practices,” a concept that Stefan Nowotny and Gerald Raunig developed as a third phase of institutional critique after the canonized institutional critique of art practices of the 1970s and 1990s. The concept greatly helps us in understanding the challenges contemporary art poses for institutional structures. The revelation of structure is consequently “‘transforming the arts of governing’ not only in relation to the institutions of the art field or the institution art as the art field, but rather as participation in processes of instituting and in political practices that traverse the fields, the structures, the institutions” (Nowotny and Raunig 2016, p. 59). And it is only today, i.e., with a certain time delay, that the institution is really affected by these critical approaches. And this institutional effectiveness of institutional critique takes place not least in the preservation processes and practices transgressing traditional conventions.

Here an alternative form to institutionalized memory is emerging, namely collective memory as a place of preservation. Private artists’ estates, as the example of Anna Oppermann shows, become central carriers of knowledge and actors within the preservation of contemporary art. Is a new form of civil society memory organization emerging here? For the present context, I would like to propose the concept of memory organizations, since these are precisely non-institutionalized forms. Instead of the preservation of institutional memory we are dealing with cultural and collective forms of memory and their transmission of knowledge. As a result, artists’ estates are increasingly becoming the subject of the history of knowledge themselves—just as the institutional history of museums is used today to write the history of knowledge. The question of artists’ estates is not only about the advantages and disadvantages of digitalization or storage, but the estates themselves must be understood as places of tradition and knowledge transfer.

This shift can be seen in connection with concepts of the collaborative common good, as has also been observed in economic structures in recent years. Matthias Munkwitz speaks of the collaborative common good regarding artists’ estates:

The discussion now also in matters of recording and looking after artists' estates and estates takes note of the economic changes in society in the first two decades of the 21st century from the point of view of “production abundance” and draws the appropriate conclusions from this. The demands—and the involvement—are an expression of civic commitment, i.e., social capital in the sense of collaborate commons. […] This means that important activities for the maintenance of the community must be regulated even more than before through civil society, i.e., civic engagement. (Munkwitz 2016, pp. 49–50)

Under the rubric “creative commons,” this issue is also about the democratization of cultural goods and, above all, about making them accessible to the public. In the long run, this socialization of preservation tasks could prove to be the central upheaval that in the future will also change the understanding of art per se: as a collaborative public good.¹⁴