Keywords

1 Introduction

Contemporary art presents a challenge to the preservation of artworks, a task considered to be one of the principal duties of the museum as a collecting institution. This issue is not new and has been addressed multiple times by academics and museum practitioners from different disciplines, such as art history and theory (e.g., Buskirk 2003; Dekker 2018), curatorial studies (e.g., Altshuler 2005; Graham 2014), cultural anthropology (e.g., Domínguez Rubio 2014) and conservation (Wharton 2005; Scholte and Wharton 2011). Building on this body of work, this essay proposes that this challenge originates in the object-based nature of art museums, and offers an approach that may help museums to adapt to the needs of contemporary art.

In contemporary art the boundary between artworks and documents is increasingly blurry, a development stimulated by a dynamic coming from both sides. On the one hand, a great deal of performance and conceptual art documentation that has entered museums in various ways, whether as photographs or videotapes, has taken on the status of belonging to “the work” itself over time (Westerman and Giannachi 2017). On the other hand, the physical art objects acquired by museums often deteriorate or cease to function, leaving behind documentation that can substitute or represent the artwork or be used for the artwork recreation (Gordon 2015; Hölling 2015). Furthermore, many contemporary artworks when not installed “exist” only in the form of instructions and documentation (Laurenson 2004; Phillips 2015). Many consider documentation a primary tool for conservation of contemporary artworks, such a sin relation to, for example, time-based media art (Laurenson 2006; van Saaze 2015). And finally, the appreciation, comprehension and use of many contemporary artworks rely on the documents produced around it.

Unlike other memory institutions like libraries and archives, museums have been designed as collectors of objects from the outset. Whereas over the last decades the concept of “heritage” changed significantly and now also includes intangible forms of expression and art has become more conceptual, processual, relational and less focussed on physical finished products, the organisation and practices of art museums have remained by and large object-based. Even though the documentation of a contemporary work of art carries a large part of its identity and often renders the physical object readable as an artwork, museums do not tend to consider art objects and documents as equally important categories. While art objects enter the collection, as part of the museum’s core activity, more or less related documents are distributed between various, often unstable micro-archives (Wharton 2015; Hölling 2013) which traditionally fulfil an auxiliary function. The practices related to collecting and collection care are prioritised accordingly. Upon acquisition, art objects need to be crated, insured, shipped, registered, catalogued, checked and stored in appropriate conditions. In comparison, the effort and resources allocated in the production and care of documentation are usually significantly smaller.

In this chapter I argue that to secure the continued cultural relevance of contemporary art, museums need to address this ambiguity involved in the role of artworks versus the role of documentation. Museums need to revise the corresponding practices by considering artwork-related documents as objects of conservation that are as important as the art objects collected. To do so without revolutionising the traditional concept of the museum as built around a collection of objects, documents need to be included in the museum collection and be accessible on the same terms as art objects. Departing from the notion of artwork as an archive introduced by conservation theorist Hanna Hölling, this chapter outlines a theoretical proposal that could potentially facilitate incorporating this change.

My argument in this contribution develops in four steps. First, I focus on the content and structure of artwork-related documentation in art museums, touching on rising importance of documentation as a conservation tool and the challenges related to documenting contemporary art within the museum setting. Next, building on the approach of French documentalist Susan Briet and her concept of “the dynamism of living documentation,” I propose a conceptual framework for documentation of an artwork within the context of an institutional collection. Thirdly, I provide a description of practices employed by two museums together with the context in which those practices were developed. Both institutions have approached the challenge of bridging the categories of artworks and documents for different purposes, but following similar conceptual underpinnings. The case studies demonstrate that it is possible to rethink the traditional museum structure and adjust it to the needs of contemporary art and that the effort to question and challenge their own specific systems allow to shed new light on artworks, the process of their musealisation and their institutional lives and futures. Finally, I introduce the theoretical model of artwork-as-(an)archive, as a reflection on the challenges regarding the implementation of this model, while also indicating several potential directions of further research.

Before proceeding to this chapter’s main body, three additional remarks are relevant. While the first remark pertains to clarifying how I conceive of contemporary art in the context of this chapter, the second remark explains how I approach the difference between artwork and art object here, and the third one sheds light on the specific notion of conservation employed. The way the term “contemporary art” is used in this study is related less to a particular moment in time or an art-historical period than to art that exemplifies particular features. As such this approach follows the definition by sociologist Natalie Heinich, who proposes that contemporary art should be considered as a new paradigm of artistic practice, an aesthetic category within the arts. Within this framework she contends that “the artwork is no longer exclusively the actual object proposed by the artist, but rather the whole set of operations, actions, interpretations, etc., brought about by this proposition” (Heinich 2014, p. 35). Following this particular understanding of “contemporary art,” this chapter will distinguish between “artworks” and “art objects.” Both terms commonly circulate in the fields to which this study relates—art history and conservation—and are often used interchangeably. Nevertheless, as I argue, in the case of contemporary art the substance and identity of the artwork lies beyond its physical embodiment, which, in the context of a museum collection, I will call an “art object.”Footnote 1 Starting from the assumption that the traditional notion of conservation needs to be expanded in order to ensure the future of contemporary works of art, this chapter uses the term “conservation” in a specific way. Conservation is understood here as an approach that includes all activities that stem from the methodological recognition of an artwork’s identity, is aimed at safeguarding the artwork’s continuation, and is performed in an informed, structured and documented manner (Wielocha and Markevicius 2019). This expanded notion of conservation, crafted for the purpose of addressing contemporary art with a primary focus on a museum framework, is understood as a set of scientific, technical and social activities that are performed by various individuals and groups, including conservation professionals (Avrami et al. 2000). Moreover, conservation is regarded here as a comprehensive effort of the entire collecting institution that acts on behalf of the communities which it represents.

2 Documentation in a Museum Collection Context and Challenges Related to Documenting Contemporary Art

Conventionally, artwork-related documentation—seen from an institutional perspective—encompasses the description of the physical characteristics of an artwork, contextual or interpretive writings relating to it and information required to manage it (Seren 2001). It may consist of various types of documents of different provenance (Haylett 2019). The first type is information supplied by an artist, artist’s studio, former owner or a gallery that facilitates artwork’s purchase or acquisition, and this category covers drawings, sketches, certificates, installation manuals, artist’s statements etc. The second one is the information on an artwork’s biography and the context of its creation gathered by an institution, including artwork’s provenance, exhibition history, information about the artist and the description of similar artworks by the artist held in other collections. The third category includes documents coproduced by the artist (studio, estate, gallery) and the institution, such as contracts, pre-acquisition questionnaires, communication with artists, interviews. The fourth type comprises documents produced by a museum during the institutional life of an artwork, for example descriptions, visual documentation, technical manuals, equipment lists, display requirements, condition reports, loan agreements, treatment reports, iteration reports etc. The last type consists of documents produced by the artwork itself, such as records of interaction with the public for participatory works (see Haylett 2019). This category often includes physical objects, such as props produced for a particular iteration of a performance piece, or obsolete functional equipment that bears witness to the artwork’s technological history. If all abovementioned categories might overlap and intermingle, one will always run into documents that fit neither of them. The way the documentation of a musealium can be outlined and organized within an art museum varies from one institution to the next and depends on a museum’s history, subject, scale and structure. Still, there are various common approaches, procedures, workflows and standards (Wythe 2004). In most institutions the operational core and the main reference in structuring the information about collected artworks is the Collection Management System (CMS), software that offers a database for tracking information related to particular objects. Usually, the record of a musealium in the CMS includes all the basic factual data about an artwork, as well as references to other sources of information. However, the CMS often does not allow for storing and managing multiple graphic and textual documents (Barok et al. 2019), which are therefore frequently placed in various micro-archives, both analogue and digital (Hölling 2018).Footnote 2 The way the documents are dispersed among these archives varies depending on an institution’s departmental structure. For instance, correspondence with the artist about the artwork collected may be kept in the acquiring curator’s private archive, while information on how an artwork should be displayed may be found in the records of an exhibition in which it was presented. Numerous institutions work with so-called “object files” that compile essential information related to artworks, and allow this information to be shared between departments and with the public, mostly by appointment. Still, the content of “object files” and the way information is organised and gathered changes from museum to museum, to the extent that in some institution different departments run their own “object files,” e.g., Curatorial Object Files or Conservation Object Files (Hölling 2018; Wielocha 2021; Wythe 2004).

Traditionally, the goal of documentation as a conservation tool focused on describing the art object “in the best objective way possible” (Dekker et al. 2012, p. 22), mainly by means of text, numbers and images. Most of the conventional documentation methods consisted—and in many museums still consist—of different kinds of imaging techniques and measurements and are akin to natural science research. Yet, with the shift in artistic practices in visual arts, the scope and the role of documentation has changed significantly. To ensure the future comprehensibility of the art created in the last decades, documentation has to cover multiple dimensions of the artwork’s nature. This may pertain to documenting its physical appearance such as the space, acoustics, light levels, tactility and olfactory effects, as well as the way one enters and leaves the installation (Laurenson 2004; Trevisan 2013), but also relate to conceptual characteristics such as function, interactivity, variability and meanings, which are hardly representable by images and numbers. Moreover, as the identity of a contemporary artwork is defined in the introduction, which renders it less a physical object and more a set of operations, actions and interpretations to a certain extent conveyed through its intangible aspects, the importance of documentation as a conservation method for contemporary art forms has shifted significantly (Almeida Matos et al. 2015; Heydenreich 2011; Hummelen and Scholte 2004, 2006). As Pip Laurenson once claimed, in reference to time-based media art: “conservation is no longer focused on intervening to repair an art object; it is now concerned with documentation and determining what change is acceptable and managing those changes” (Laurenson 2004, para. 5).

In parallel to changes in the role of documentation in contemporary art conservation practice, both theoretical and technical approaches to documentation have evolved as well. In the first place, the field has, by and large, come to acknowledge the subjectivity of the documentation process as being dependent on the selection criteria of documentalists, as well as other factors (Stigter 2015; van Saaze 2015). This, in turn, coincided with the accessibility of new technologies for document management, storage and retrieval systems, and later on with the large-scale digitalization of information. As a consequence of these changes, new ways of thinking about the practice of documentation have emerged, resulting in numerous local and international research projects focussed on developing new documentation models for contemporary art.Footnote 3 Although in most cases these models have not been implemented directly in the museum context, they have often served as a basis or inspiration for building institutional strategies for documentation.Footnote 4

Despite numerous initiatives undertaken during the last two decades, the notion and organisation of artwork-related documentation in museums that collect contemporary art remains neither standardised nor fixed, and, moreover, it is currently facing major challenges. The investigation of documentation practices by various museums with contemporary art in their collections conducted between 2016 and 2019 (Wielocha 2021) led to the conclusion that these challenges are often related to the traditional structure of the art museum as oriented towards a unique, relatively stable object—a condition incompatible with the processual, relational and changeable nature of contemporary art.

Contemporary artworks are often complex entities and their rigorous documentation might be a complicated and time-consuming enterprise. Objects are settled at the core of art museums’ identity and, consequently, institutions allocate an important part of their resources to their maintenance and care. Thanks to developments in science, refined preventive methods of care are likely to ensure their longevity for hundreds of years. In the meantime, the gathering, production, management and preservation of artwork-related documentation is usually undervalued within the hierarchy of museum priorities and in consequence receives less attention, time and resources. Despite the recognition of the importance of the intangible characteristics of contemporary artworks and their potential to change, institutional conservation-oriented documentation is still mainly geared to objects. At the same time, intangible features of contemporary artworks are usually recorded in documents produced and/or collected outside the conservation domain, for instance in the curatorial department. In many cases, these documents were conceived for purposes other than conservation, and as such they are frequently not taken into consideration when evaluating an artwork’s possible futures. As a consequence, one of the major problems with documenting and therefore preserving contemporary art lies in the lack of interaction between documentation produced expressly for conservation purposes and other kinds of documents that might be essential for an artwork’s longevity.

3 The Art Object as Document and Documented: Shifting Our Perspective on the Notion of Contemporary Artwork Documentation

Adopting the perspective applied in the field of performance art studies (Giannachi 2016, 2018; Gordon 2015; Macdonald 2009), this section offers a theoretical reflection on the ontological dimension of documentation. It considers the nature of documentation from the point of view of information sciences and introduces the notion of the art object as a document, and of documentation as a matrix or network of signs. The latter concept will allow for a reflection on documentation’s internal hierarchy, and for re-defining the documentation of contemporary artwork within the museum context.

Although traditionally, documents are considered as text and visual records, this perspective started to shift in France when in the late 1920s museum objects too were included by some documentalists within the definitions of “document” (Buckland 1997). In the mid-twentieth century, the work of European pioneers of information science such as Paul Otlet and Suzanne Briet brought other physical forms of “information” to the discussion over the nature of documents. Otlet is known for his observation that documents could be three-dimensional, which enabled the inclusion of sculpture (Buckland 1997). His view on what a document is, comprised objects originally not intended for communication, for instance traces of human activity such as archaeological finds. Briet in her seminal book What is Documentation? developed even further the idea of the possible forms a document could take, stating that “the forms that the documentary work assumes are as numerous as the needs from which they are born” (Briet 2006, p. 36).

Briet’s theoretical approach deserves a closer look, because besides allowing objects to be included in the definition of a document, it also provides a vision of documentation as a dynamic network of interrelations and a crucial aspect of knowledge production. Briet challenges the traditional, positivist vision of the document “as a proof [evidence] in support of a fact” and expands it to “any concrete or symbolic indexical sign [indice], preserved or recorded toward the ends of representing, of reconstituting, or of proving a physical or intellectual phenomenon” (Briet 2006, p. 10). According to Briet, a star is not a document, but a photograph of a star is; a stone is not a document, but a stone in a mineralogical collection is; an animal in the wild is not a document, but an animal in a zoo is (Briet 2006, p. 11). The implication of this categorisation is that documentation should not be viewed as only related to a textual record, but needs to be understood within a broader notion of access to evidence and context.

Is an art object in the museum collection also a document? Following Briet’s definition, it might be seen as such. If so, an art object included in the institutional collection would be evidence of the artistic practice of a particular artist, a document of particular tendencies in visual arts of the time, of the institutional collection policy, curatorial choices, and finally of the artwork as such. In this light, inclusion of an artwork into the museum collection, or, in other terms, its musealisation, might therefore constitute a shift in an artwork’s nature from artwork to artwork/document.

Furthermore, Briet classifies documents as primary, secondary and auxiliary. The second category refers to those documents that are created from the initial documents and the third to those which are created from the interrelation of documents (Giannachi 2018). These categories should not be regarded as hierarchical in terms of value, as they merely illustrate ways in which a document can be produced. Briet notes that instances of documentation are contextual, and, rather than delivering the remains of an isolated phenomenon, they form a matrix or a network of signs. Through the juxtaposition, selection and comparison of documents, a process that for Briet is genuinely creative, the content of documentation becomes “inter-documentary” (Briet 2006). Briet referred to this shift away from a traditional static documentary model as “the dynamism of living documentation” (Briet 2006, p. 41; Macdonald 2009). The assumption that an art object is a document situated within networks of other primary, secondary and auxiliary documents may allow for a new understanding of documentation of contemporary artworks.

The concept of documentation as built upon Briet’s approach comprises documents/signs that represent the artwork or some aspect of it. It allows for the inclusion of an art object as a document that is equally important as the other elements comprising the artwork. Documentation understood in this way is a dynamic system of interrelated documents that create knowledge by interacting with each other. To complete the conceptual construct, the issue of internal hierarchy should be addressed. For this purpose, the Deleuzean trope of the “rhizome” might prove useful. The term, borrowed from botany, was developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to characterize networks. Unlike a tree, whose branches all grow from a single trunk, the rhizome does not develop out of a single source; rather, it is heterogeneous and multiple, with no beginning, no end and no centre. It has many different entry points, all of which connect to each other (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Accordingly, rhizomatic documentation is open-ended, decentralized and has non-hierarchical multiple entry and exit points.

The notion of documentation based on the above-described terms comes with certain features that may harbour solutions that move beyond the incompatibility between the object-based organisation of museums and the character of contemporary artistic production, and, as a consequence, facilitate the task of safeguarding the continuation of contemporary artworks. Conceptualised following Briet’s approach, artwork-related documentation challenges the traditional classification principles of museums in two ways: first, by implicitly diminishing the privileged position of art objects within the museum’s ecosystem and placing them on equal terms with documents, and, secondly, by elevating the importance of documents in relation to artworks.

Applying Briet’s perspective on the nature of documents I argue that upon musealisation a contemporary artwork transforms into the documents that represent it. Because this transformation is de facto and automatic, my proposal is ultimately not to treat art as documents, but to recognise that this conversion already took place, and to adjust institutional practices accordingly. Therefore, the musealised contemporary artwork is a set of documents of the same provenance, and as such resembles an archive.

4 Merging Collection and Archive, Artworks and Documents: Radical Institutional Practices

Over the last decades, several collecting institutions have addressed the discrepancy between the traditional object-centred structure of the museum and the character of contemporary artistic production. Some of them have responded to this challenge by revising the traditional separation of artworks and documents or collection and archive, and the interrelated classification principles. This section features two examples of institutional practices that meet these characteristics—that of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. Although the purposes behind this institutional, critical self-reconsideration differ from those that motivated this chapter, which is oriented towards preservation, its practical results might clarify, illustrate and expand my argument. Moreover, the purpose of emphasising similarities between innovative approaches to institutional contemporary-art collecting, as discussed in the curatorial and conservation fields, seeks to bring them into closer connection and encourage future collaboration.

In Europe, critical thinking about the structure of the art museum, and its possible obsolescence in relation to new art forms and experimental artistic practices, developed within the framework of New Institutionalism. In the arts, New Institutionalism relates to a series of curatorial, administrative and educational practices that emerged at the end of the 1990s mostly in medium-sized, publicly funded contemporary art institutions, and involved the reorganisation of their structures and a re-definition of activities (Kolb and Flückiger 2013). As a term, “New Institutionalism” was introduced by the curator and critic Jonas Ekeberg, for whom the main aim of this development, at least on a discursive level, involved catching up with contemporary art and the changing working methods of artists. Novel practices aimed at de-emphasising the role of the exhibition in favour of fostering the production of artworks, promoting the participation of artists in institutional programmes, designing new approaches to mediation and education, and transforming institutions into discursive platforms for socio-political, economic and cultural issues oriented towards micro-publics (Preston 2014, p. 183). New Institutionalism was a temporary phenomenon related to a certain discursive context within contemporary art institutions identified by particular curators, rather than a fixed alliance or movement. Although its historical phase ended in the mid-2000s (Deiana 2017), its influence still resonates in many contemporary art institutions, and the concepts and practices presented in this section are rooted within this tradition.

The urge to critically reinvent contemporary art institutions as fostered within the framework of New Institutionalism found its continuation in the activities undertaken by the confederation L’Internationale. This consortium of six public and semi-public European modern and contemporary art museums has defined itself as a “transinstitutional organisation,” which, among other pursuits, promotes the shared use of collections and museum archives across its network. As indicated by the consortium, art and its institutions have the power to question and challenge their own specific systems, such as the bureaucratic and self-referential structure, by experimenting with new protocols and developing more decentralised models (Gül Durukan and Tezcan Akmehmet 2020; “L’Internationale,” n.d.). The internal experiments around the idea of connecting the collection and the archive were carried out mainly by two members of the organisation—MACBA and Van Abbemuseum. While the first works towards reinventing the registration and cataloguing system, the second uses display as its testing ground.

At the turn of the millennium, MACBA decided to address the growing interest in documentation in contemporary art and the need to embrace research within the scope of institutional activities by launching the Centre for Study and Documentation (CED).Footnote 5 Opened in 2007, the CED hosts and cares for the documentary material that constitutes the Archive and Library, and it is in charge of disseminating and activating the content of both. The Archive and Library, which constitute the CED’s core, act within the structure of the museum as a continuation of the MACBA Collection, and these three branches—Archive, Library and Collection—are conceptualised as “Patrimonio MACBA” (MACBA heritage), formed by materials in a wide range of formats and supports. In the words of Mela Dávila Freire, the former director of MACBA Public Activities, the CED’s collections “are not seen as subsidiary or secondary to the art collection; rather, they complement, expand and strengthen it, establishing ties, not of dependency, but of mutual bonding” (Dávila Freire 2012, p. 200). According to Fereire, this approach derives from the need to respond to the reduced importance of the end-products of artistic activity, namely art objects, and the need to shift the focus to relations between different actors involved in the creative process, as well as the creative process as such (Dávila Freire 2012). This line of thinking led the museum to reject the conventional categories of “artwork” and “document,” a separation that MACBA considers outdated (Dávila Freire 2011). To overcome this distinction in practice, the museum employed a cataloguing structure that no longer differentiated between “the artistic” and “the archival,” creating a single cataloguing method and system for both collection and archive.Footnote 6

To understand what this radical gesture entails from the perspective of this chapter, it is important to introduce the CED Archive and its holdings. The Archive is divided into three categories: Documentary Collection, Personal Fonds and MACBA’s Historical Fonds.Footnote 7 The first one consists of artists’ publications, publicity material, posters and other such materials. The second one contains documentary material generated by activities of actors linked to contemporary artistic practice, who could be artists and artistic collectives, collectors, curators, etc. The third one, MACBA’s Historical Fonds, holds the documentation generated by the museum in the course of its activities.Footnote 8 The common cataloguing method makes it possible to link information that is usually dispersed all over the institution in a common platform.Footnote 9 In practical terms this means that a search performed in MACBA’s collection management system by the title or inventory number of a particular artwork from the collection will yield all related items (records), such as the main entry of the artwork, documentation of exhibitions organised by the museum where the artwork was presented, all public activities related to the artwork including talks and conferences, articles, books, videos showing the installation process, interviews with artists in the form of transcripts and/or video recordings, and much more.Footnote 10 These records, which represent analogue or digital documents that are physically stored in various locations, create a virtual archive of the artwork. Simultaneously, the CED is the infrastructure for the systematic care and reservation of the archive, which stewards, replenishes and activates it by fostering research and providing accessibility.

How does the structure introduced by MACBA differ from the traditional cataloguing systems used in museums? The difference lies in the way the information is structured and the scope of interaction between the documents. In most of the Collection Management Systems used in museums today, documents related to the artworks, such as certificates of authenticity, instructions provided by the artist, lists of equipment necessary for displaying the piece, exhibition publications or conservation reports can be attached to the artwork’s record. The structure of information about the artwork in the CMS is thus fixed and linear: the entry for a particular artwork contains limited information that has been assigned to it. Documents that define the artwork are predetermined—one can add new ones or delete the existing ones, but the scope of the information that defines the artwork is constrained. By contrast, the system implemented by MACBA makes it possible to access documents that, although only indirectly related to the artwork, nevertheless provide data that are significant for its comprehension. Let me take as an example a list of fifty artworks featured in one exhibition. In a traditionally structured CMS this list would need to be attached to the record of every artwork separately. In MACBA’s system this list is catalogued independently and appears in the search related to each of the listed artworks. An example of a document that defines the artwork is the recording of a public talk by artist at one of the museum events, which, despite being created for reasons other than documenting the artwork collected by the museum, includes key information for a proper understanding of the work. In the traditional system this document, produced by employees responsible for public events who are not involved in collection care, would not be attached or linked to the CMS record of the artwork. At MACBA this kind of documents are separate archival entities represented in the database by a record that appear while searching by the name of the artist, title of the artwork or inventory number of the latter. Thanks to the cataloguing structure which treats artworks and archival material equally, MACBA’s system allows for a deeper contextualisation of artworks and increases the possibility of constructing alternative narratives.

From the perspective of this research, the structure built by MACBA so far presents several weak points, the most notable of which is related to the scope of the information comprised. The CED Archive does not encompass all the documentary material generated and kept within the museum. The archive of the collection department (or “area” in MACBA’s terms), which includes for instance artists’ installation instructions and the majority of conservation-related documents, remains separate, and access to the information it contains is restricted. Furthermore, as there is not a system for archiving correspondence, the museum does not collect emails exchanged between stakeholders involved in the acquisition and/or presentation of an artwork, another aspect identified in the field of contemporary art conservation as important for understanding processes behind the shaping of the musealium. Nevertheless, the MACBA team has acknowledged these gaps as important to address within a series of challenges to take on in the long-term process of reinventing the institution. More experience and the potential of existing infrastructure built through the years will offer room to address these challenges methodologically.

Another member of L’internationale that experiments with the traditional museal classification systems and bridging the taxonomic separation of artworks and documents is the Van Abbemuseum. In 2004 this museum started to test new ways to work with institutional resources—not only the collection, but also the archive and the library (Bishop 2013). In line with the theoretical underpinnings of MACBA’s practices, the idea behind the novel approaches of Van Abbemuseum was to look at and use the museum’s collection as a whole without making distinctions between the artwork and the “paperwork around the artwork” (Esche et al. 2012, p. 5). As argued by museum research curator Steven ten Thije, this shift was necessary because art changed following the logic of the ready-made and was now produced by installing things without as much attention to the quality of the “thing itself” (ten Thije et al. 2013, p. 11). This is why the strong similarity between “the artwork itself and a sort of collection or archive” (ten Thije et al. 2013) serves to blur the boundaries between traditional categories of collection and archive. However, while at MACBA the merging of categories was tested “behind the scenes,” at Van Abbemuseum the main space of experimentation involved the display. The Van Abbemuseum was not the only or the first art institution to bring archival materials into the exhibition space, but they did it in an unorthodox way by elevating documents to the same level of importance as the artworks from the collection (Gül Durukan and Tezcan Akmehmet 2020).Footnote 11 In the series of research exhibitions called Living Archive, copies of the archival material were shown on the walls together with the artworks. Contracts and letters exchanged between artists and successive directors told stories about the circumstances of the acquisition, whereas other sources, such as reports or press clippings, contextualised the artwork within broader discourses.Footnote 12 This approach shifted the emphasis away from artists, their oeuvre and their place in the canon, to the biography of the artwork and the context in which it was created and functioned, or, in other words, to change from one universal, linear art historical narrative to various site-specific and context-specific micro-stories (Esche 2017; Esche et al. 2012).

5 The Museum Collection as a Collection of (An)archives

As argued above, upon crossing the threshold of a museum a contemporary artwork transforms into documents that represent it. Following this line of thought, the artwork-related documentation is a set of documents of the same provenance and as such can be conceptualised as an archive. To facilitate the shift of importance of artwork-related documents within a museum, regarded here as a prerequisite for perpetuation of contemporary artworks, this chapter adapts and expands on the notion of “artwork-as-an-archive,” introduced by conservation theorist Hanna Hölling (2013, 2015, 2018). Hölling’s concept encompasses both a physical and a virtual sphere of an artwork, where the former contains “all documents, leftovers and tangible materials produced by the artwork” while the latter “entails tacit knowledge, skills, and memory of everyone involved in the process of shaping the work” (Hölling 2015, p. 86). This combining of the physical and the conceptual under one umbrella concept is similar to the notion of “artwork-related documentation,” as discussed above. Given that subsequent manifestations of an artwork produced on the basis of the archive in turn enter the archive and transform it, the archive evolves as a dynamic entity directed towards the future shape of the artwork (Hölling 2015). This theoretical construct embraces the artwork’s possibility for and the inevitability of change. Although Hölling’s concept was proposed principally in the context of media art, in my view it is also relevant to contemporary art as defined in the introduction to this chapter. Conceiving an artwork as an archive might lead to a re-conceptualisation of the museum collection as a collection of archives.

Expanding the notion of “artwork-related documentation” to “artwork-as-an-archive” requires a critical reflexion on the notion of the archive, which has been at the centre of discourses of cultural theorists, observers and practitioners over the last fifty years (Giannachi 2016). In the modern era the archive stands for the means by which historical knowledge and forms of remembrance are accumulated, stored and recovered, created both by institutions and individuals (Merewether 2006). The archive entails some form of organisation of storage media for purposes extrinsic to the archive itself, and connotes origin and order (Derrida and Prenowitz 1995). It is a powerful institution whose purpose is to maintain and expand the power of those who established and control it (Zielinski et al. 2014). That implies classification, categorisation and authority—terms rarely compatible with the liberal and experimental character of contemporary artistic practice. The contradiction between the traditional principles of the archive and the character of today’s art led media theorist Siegfried Zielinski to coin the concept of “anarchives.” Zielinski states that adding “an” as a prefix liberates the archive from “the obsessive sense of order and the detailed claim to leadership” (Zielinski et al. 2014, p. 22). The concept of “anarchives” emerged from the logic of multiplicity and variety, which makes them particularly suited to deal with time-based experiences, processes and events (Zielinski et al. 2014). They do not appropriate the truth about the origin of things, and most importantly, about their possible futures. They do not pursue a fixed design, and instead of promoting “the one and only story” they organise micro-narratives. Zielinski illustrates the idea of anarchives with the disorder of personal archives of, for instance, artists, scholars or curators. For him, an example of the transformation of an anarchive into an archive is the deconstruction of the archive and library of influential curator Harald Szeemann for the purposes of the Getty Research Institute. The “individual methodology” applied by Szeemann to develop his exhibitions and artistic objects was significantly altered by its adaptation to the “universal order of a hygienically organized, representative cultural research archive” on the Getty Institute’s immaculate white shelves (Zielinski 2015, p. 116; Zielinski et al. 2014). The concept of anarchives might strengthen the potential of the theoretical model of artwork-as-an-archive by offering the freedom to adjust its organisation according to the needs of a particular artwork.

To suggest, as this chapter does, that a museologised contemporary artwork might be conceptualised as an (an)archive is to view it as an open-ended set with a rhizomatic structure and a dynamic system containing interrelated documents (tokens) that represent an artwork. Particular elements of the archive create knowledge by interacting with each other, and this interaction is activated by means of research.

Why then might the model of artwork-as-(an)archive facilitate conservation and decision-making regarding the artwork’s future shape? On a conceptual level, the artwork-as-(an)archive grants the possibility of collecting and caring for contemporary artworks beyond their material embodiment. Gathering together the evidence of an artwork’s conception, as well as the knowledge produced around it during its “life,” makes it possible to represent its multi-levelled, complex nature. Although the archive’s own limitations prevent it from fully representing the artwork, the accumulation of documentation allows gaps to be identified and addressed, and, more importantly, makes it possible to foster relations between individual elements of the set. The artwork-as-(an)archive is a common source of information about the artwork that facilitates equal access to and distribution of information, and prevents the exercise of authority based on the appropriation of knowledge. This non-hierarchical (un)structure offers space for flexibility and (some) creativity in shaping the artwork-as-(an)archive on a case-by-case basis.

Yet, there are still questions that need to be answered regarding the practical implications of the model of the artwork-as-(an)archive and why its application might help institutions to safeguard the continuation of contemporary artworks from their collections. First, the artwork-as-(an)archive offers the possibility of switching from a single governing narrative of what the artwork is and does, to various micro-stories that foster alternative interpretations and broaden possibilities concerning the artwork’s future shape. Secondly, it helps shift the concept of conservation within the museum from a set of object-oriented actions to a collaborative effort encompassing the whole institution. In the framework of the artwork-as-(an)archive, a musealised artwork ceases to consist only of art objects in order to embrace documents gathered and produced by the artwork’s stakeholders. In turn, the artwork’s continuation relies not only on conservators but also, and explicitly, on other institutional actors. The artwork-as-an-(an)archive emphasises the contribution to and responsibility for the perpetuation of an artwork as the common task of a long list of figures: curators and educators who collect, produce and promote interpretations; archivists and registrars who gather and organise knowledge produced within the institution; librarians who take care of information produced outside the museum walls; photographers and audio-visual technicians who document and install artworks in galleries; event coordinators responsible for producing and staging the artworks, etc. The emphasis on conservation as a common task might help to overcome the divisions between different organisational domains, thereby making it a more attainable reality. Moreover, the artwork seen as an (an)archive can become a space for collaboration that encourages all stakeholders to take an active part in conserving the artworks collected. Thirdly, the model pushes museums to reconsider the act of acquisition as more than just purchasing art objects, and extending it to the production and gathering of documentation within the process, and consequently, to having this reflected in the acquisition budget. From this perspective, without collecting the documents that carry the artwork’s identity, the acquisition would not be considered complete. Fourthly, it fosters a need to build an infrastructure to facilitate collecting understood as documenting, and to create a space for documents to interact with each other as a network. And finally, it helps to embrace the complementation and activation of the archive through research within the framework of collection care and locates it at the same level of priorities as the-state-of-art high-tech storage that hosts the art objects. In other words, it supports the recognition of research as a full-fledged conservation tool for safeguarding the artwork’s continued presence and importance while respecting its changeability.

Despite having different raisons d’être, the experiments of MACBA and Van Abbemuseum and the model of artwork-as-an-(an)archive featured in this essay overlap in several ways. Concepts and practices rooted in New Institutionalism developed as a response to the artistic strategies of contemporary art, changing relations between museums and society at large, and coming to understand art not as a “thing in itself,” but as existing in dialogue with the social sphere (Aikens et al. 2016). As such, they invite users to think critically and allow them to construct their own narratives around the artworks collected. Although the concept of artwork-as-(an)archive was introduced not as a means to reinvent art institutions but as a strategy for securing artworks’ sustained life, it shares conceptual underpinnings with practices introduced here. Similar to the cataloguing and display practices of MACBA and Van Abbemuseum, the reconceptualization of the artwork as an (an)archive allows us to reconsider traditional museum classification principles and work towards the accessibility, transparency and activation of museum holdings. It opens up the institutional space to a multiplicity of perspectives and dialogue by rejecting a single governing narrative.

The concept of artwork seen as an archive is akin to the “object file,” since both gather documents taking the artwork as a classification principle, provide a space for assembling these documents together, and make them interact with each other. One of the major challenges in applying the model of artwork-as-(an)archive in a museum is the issue of accessibility and the scope of the institution’s willingness to disclose documents. In today’s museums the accessibility of “object files” depends on institutional policies, legal regulations, existing unspoken rules, social agreements and, most importantly, on the will, motivation and interest of the museums themselves. However, granting access to institutional documentation and sharing it with others means relinquishing power and giving up some authority over the collected artwork. The model of artwork-as-an-(an)archive is a tool for critical inquiry that makes it possible to confront notions of exclusiveness, closure and property traditionally related to museums. Its application would eventually give rise to questions about what it means to own an artwork whose nature lies in documents that, in the digital era, are not unique but reproducible, easily accessible and can even be cloned and distributed among different institutions. The artwork/archive model enables in-depth exploration of the difference between having and holding, or possessing and safekeeping, and opens up the possibility for institutional collecting to distance itself from the regime of the art market. However, the crucial question of whether museums are ready or inclined to take on this challenge needs to be addressed in further research.

6 Conclusion

Based on the postulation that the museum’s traditional division between objects and documents, and, as a result, between collections and archives is rendered obsolete by contemporary art, this essay proposes a different way of thinking about a musealised contemporary artwork. Instead of a discrete object or a set of objects to be preserved as autonomous physical entities a contemporary artwork has been conceptualised here as an archive that contains art objects and documentation produced about and generated by the artwork. The documentation of a contemporary artwork carries a large part of its identity, and acts as evidence of its potential changeability. As such, it needs to be dynamic and, in Susan Briet’s terms, “inter-documentary.” This implies contextual reliance and, in consequence, the formation of a network of documents that interact with each other. Applying Briet’s perspective on the nature of documents, art objects, too, can be seen as documents that are equally important as other documents in the set. Therefore, the musealised contemporary artwork is a set of documents of the same provenance, and as such resembles an archive. Departing from this premise, this essay advocated the model of artwork-as-(an)archive, aimed at adjusting traditional, object-based museum structure to the needs of contemporary art and thus securing and sustaining its unique cultural value for future generations.