The Living Process of Conserving Performance: Theory and Practice in the Conservation of Performance-Based Artworks at Tate

Abstract

The development of the documentation and conservation of performance-based artworks has been a key priority for Tate’s Conservation department. The rise in complexity of the relationship between the institution and the artworks entering the collection prompted the development of current practices relating to the documentation and conservation of performance within the time-based media conservation team. This chapter explores the development of the current documentation strategies for the conservation of performance at Tate, by highlighting not only the impact of collecting practices in the development of knowledge, but also how the process results on the creation of both theoretical and practical forms of practice. The chapter will focus on the development of core documentation tools and theoretical models for understanding performance art and how it relates to the museum.

1 Introduction

Historically, performance art has predominantly existed outside of the museum, with performances only finding their way into museum permanent collections in the form of documents, props, film, video and other material remains (Wheeler 2013; Calonje 2015). However, since 2005, it became increasingly common to see performance being collected as performance within institutions. Tate began collecting performance in 2005, and now has over thirty performance artworks. These works have different degrees of complexity depending on aspects of display, execution, or collection care activities (Lawson et al. 2019). Given the varying complexity, it can be difficult to pin down how such complexities affect the artworks’ current and future needs. Conservation, now arguably more than ever, needs to find ways to acknowledge various forms and sources of knowledge in its practice.

This chapter will explore the ways in which Tate has developed its Strategy for the Documentation and Conservation of Performance Art (henceforth Strategy). We will explore (1) how the development of the Strategy brought together what is commonly defined as theory and practice, considering how the relationship of these separate forms coalesce as knowledge-making activities, and (2) how the collecting and display practices intertwined with conservation, such as the acquisition and display of complex objects, triggers revision, readjustment, and the creation and development of conservation processes and procedures.

In framing the chapter, we start with a review of relevant literature on the conservation of performance. Although the exploration takes place within Tate, the chapter will discuss how and where Tate is situated within the wider museum ecology. Efforts to delimit the boundaries of the performance art object and how it behaves in the museum have been pioneered by researchers across the field, based in many institutions¹ and theoretical geographies.² This review will consider the ways in which the field of conservation has responded to the acquisition of performance artworks that ought to be activated as performance. Following on from the literature review, we will reflect on the development of theoretical frameworks and tools for the conservation of performance at Tate. We will draw on various examples from Tate’s collection to examine how the key-tool of our Strategy—called Performance Specification—has developed since 2016. In this sense, we will demonstrate not only how changes in collection practices have impacted the characteristics of such a tool, but also how forms of experimentation with similar artworks have consolidated the knowledge about conservation risks, or how to capture and create documentation for various types of performance practice. Through this exploration, we argue that the development of the Strategy demanded a model of working based on collective effort, built on accumulated interactions with people, structures and objects. Those interactions are at the core of our knowledge-making activities, which are as live as performance artworks are meant to be. The living process of conserving live performance we will be exploring here is, therefore, recognisably made of moments of revision, of disconnect between hypothesis and experimentation, of performative engagements of technique and knowledge, that in the end create the conditions to look at the conservation of performance as a step in the process of their own making.

2 A Brief Look into the Conservation of Performance

This literature review is drawn from the article co-authored by Louise Lawson, Acatia Finbow and Hélia Marçal in 2019 (Lawson et al. 2019). Marçal's contribution to both literature reviews was partially derived from her unpublished PhD dissertation From intangibility to materiality and back again (2018).

Performance art can be (and has been) considered one of the most volatile, intangible, precarious, and (de)materialised art genres (cf. Phelan 1993). This is due to its gestural embodiment, its resistance to categories, or its activation through forms of action. Performance art’s traditional resistance to commodification (cf. Goldberg 2011 [1979]) led many to be left to wonder if performance would find its way into the museum.³ Looking back at the history of how performance art has been displayed in museums, however, the first thing we notice is that performance artworks were never not part of the museum. Museums have been linked to performance art practice since the 1960s, when the genre was consolidated (Jones 2012). The first live art event held at Tate, for example, took place in 1968.⁴ When entering museum collections performance artworks, however, initially lost some of their so-called liveness, being acquired as photography, moving image, or installation. The transformation of performance artworks into these indexes became part of current practice, deeply influencing most debates in the field of Performance Studies (in relation to visual and media studies) and Museum Studies (at least the ones concerning with the places occupied by performance art) in the 1990s. Particularly in the case of Performance Art, studies stemming from these debates were mostly focused on performance art ontology; specifically on how the nature of performance was rehearsed in its alignment with,⁵ or opposition to,⁶ practices of mediation (cf. Marçal 2022a, 2022b).

Institutions started to collect performance artworks as performances, beyond their previous representational indexes in 2005. This was despite performance artworks being considered unruly,⁷ non-conforming to the museum’s long-standing principles and structures. This shift is partly related to the development of certain approaches to the documentation of performance, largely stemming from media theorist Philip Auslander’s attitude to documentation (Auslander 1998), or artistic developments that are akin to what art historian Claire Bishop has called “delegated performances” (Bishop 2012).⁸ These and other efforts made clear that documentation, instead being ontologically opposed to performance art, may, in fact, be crucial for performance artworks’ survival as plural and ever-changing manifestations.⁹ Or, in other words, to their conservation.¹⁰

The conservation of performance art has been developed in the context of the conservation of time-based media art.¹¹ Despite being a relatively recent undertaking in conservation, several dedicated studies have emerged in the last decade. These have been mostly developed by researchers and museum conservation teams.¹² One of the main research efforts from this decade was the research network Collecting the Performative, launched in April 2012.¹³ A key output from this pioneering effort was The Live List: What to consider when collecting live works (2014), which details some questions at the time of acquisition.¹⁴ These were collected in a meeting that analysed the project’s results and brought many people from diverse backgrounds together to discuss and agree the basic parameters of a performance work and how it can live in the museum. The results of this project offer pioneering perspectives on the challenges and possibilities of collecting and conserving performance. As identified by Pip Laurenson and Vivian van Saaze, the challenges are: (1) performance art is typically connected to a moment in time, called the original event, and is, many times, linked to the presence of particular performer (usually, the artist), (2) museum processes tend to be oriented towards material-based practices, and (3) performance artworks are part of a network of dependencies, and those relations are hard to maintain. (Laurenson and van Saaze 2014).¹⁵

Among the conservation strategies that have been suggested to tackle the challenges offered by performance artworks, documentation appears to have become the most prominently used by conservators inside and outside institutions. Annet Dekker and Vivian van Saaze, for example, shared the documentation process Extra Dry at NIMk (Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst, The Netherlands) in 2013, proposing a model that considers how documentation and artworks co-constitute each other (van Saaze and Dekker 2013).¹⁶ Hélia Marçal has been contributing for this discussion, particularly by reflecting on the relationality of this process (e.g., Marçal 2017, 2019, 2021; Marçal and Macedo 2017). Additionally, in the context of the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded research project Performance at Tate: Collecting, Archiving and Sharing Performance and the Performative (partnered by the University of Exeter), Acatia Finbow has identified documentation models stemming from museum structures (Finbow 2018). Based at the Tate, this Collaborative Doctoral Award was particularly relevant in the development of the Strategy, as it interrogated the role of documentation in the intersection of performance art and the museum, while confirmed the need for a conservation strategy specifically tailored to performance art (Finbow 2018, see also Lawson et al. 2019).

Albeit still concerned with this topic, studies on the conservation of performance art have expanded beyond documentation.¹⁷ Three recent collaborative research projects—Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in the Museum (Tate, 2018–2022, led by Pip Laurenson), Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge (Bern Academy of the Arts, 2020–2024, led by Hanna Hölling; a book resulting from this project was published in 2023 - see Hölling 2023), and Precarious Movements: Choreography & the Museum (University New South Wales, 2021–2024, led by Erin Brannigan, with an edited volume pending Spring 2024)—are worth mentioning, as they aim at devising novel ways to understand the relationship between performance and the museum, with some of these efforts engaging with one of the most crucial knowledge gaps from the field: how to document forms of knowledge that are not so easily described, called implicit, tacit and embodied knowledge,¹⁸ or, to use a term coined by the performance studies theorist Diana Taylor, that are part of a “repertoire” of practices (Taylor 2013). This chapter—and the work developed by the time-based team at the Tate—also seeks to bridge (part of) such gap.

As this chapter will demonstrate, capturing such forms of practice was not an initial concern to Tate, as most of the artworks acquired until 2016 were so-called instruction-based artworks—i.e., were easily activated by following a set of clear instructions that were either provided by the artist or developed as part of the documentation process undertaken by conservators (Marçal 2022b). These instruction-based artworks allowed for the creation of conservation strategies that were akin to the processes already undertaken in the care of other time-based media artworks. But, as we will see, the acquisition of artworks with growing complexity, dependent on knowledges¹⁹ that were not so easily conveyed or understood, led us to reflect on our process of documentation through a different lens. Specifically, it led us to analyse the ways in which we produce documentation: what and how we were recording information and what ought to be documented and through which methods. It also led us to discuss how we were engaging with theory and practice when producing knowledge about those artworks. On the one hand, we were asking ourselves what is the relationship between theory and practice in the work we do every day. On the other hand, we were keen to see if understanding the relationship between the two could lead us to reframe our assumptions and revise our tools to acknowledge and document the various types of knowledge that emerge in the conservation of performance.

3 A Dialogue Between Theory and Practice

Discourses about the difference between theory and practice have been rehearsed in various scientific fields, including conservation (e.g., Sully 2015; Muñoz Viñas 2014).²⁰ Many are the instances where we hear how much theory could learn from practice and vice versa, or how theory can indeed be considered a technique (Verbeeck 2016). The continuous assertions of what makes theory and practice distinct resonates with what the physician and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman articulated as the difference between mathematics and physics, stating that “mathematicians prepare abstract reasoning that’s ready ‘to be used’ even though they don’t know what it’s being used for,” while physicists have “meaning to all the phrases,” developing the understanding of how the abstract connects with “the real world” (Veisdal 2020, n.p.n.).²¹ Feynman explains that “the greatest discoveries, it always turns out, abstract away from the model” (Veisdal 2020, n.p.n.). In other words, the abstract world and the real world are not the same and yet, as Feynman explains, mathematics would lose applicability without physics, and physics would very likely be much poorer without mathematical thinking.²² We can think about theory and practice as a similar dichotomy, where theory would lose its applicability without the translation into practice and vice versa in terms of practice informing theory. However, we can see how the distinction between technique (from “techné,” also translated as “craft”) and knowledge expands way beyond the remit of mathematics (theory-driven) and physics (mostly experiment-driven). We can associate other dualisms to this type of binary: the one of the mind and the body, or humans and nonhumans. For the purposes of this chapter, these dualisms are worth exploring.

Firstly, the Cartesian mind-body dualism seems, at the first glance, to be self-evident if we think about the activity of solving a mathematical problem versus learning how to perform a choreography. One could say that it doesn’t matter how much you read about performing, for example, Trisha Brown’s Set and Reset, or Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker—that is something you only learn and practice by doing. Similarly, it is quite common to hear that, no matter how much you practice, you either are able to develop abstract concepts or you are not. What we see by looking closer, however, is that the body and mind are profoundly associated, intertwined. This is, of course, a political and theoretical stance²³ but, as much of the theories and models that are brought into the “real world,” this one also has practical ramifications. Going back to performing a series of specific movements, somewhere during the twentieth century (Borgdorff et al. 2020), research came to acknowledge the methodological affordances of dance and movement in the constitution of knowledge that, although often implicit and untranslatable, can be essential in performing tasks related to performing movements and beyond—this is specifically the case with the development of studies around “tacit” or “embodied” knowledge (Borgdorff et al. 2020). And in producing artistic research looking for so-called practical or technical outcomes, it is clear that dancers, artists, researchers engage in experimentation and develop their own interpretations (or theory) about their own practice (cf. Borgdorff et al. 2020). To use the words of Henk Borgdorff, Peter Peters and Trevor Pinch in the introduction to the edited volume Dialogues Between Artistic Research and Science and Technology Studies, the shift in the past century in recognising the ways in which implicit and explicit knowledge are co-constitutive “corrected the focus in epistemology on propositional forms of knowing and understanding: a correction correlating to phenomenology, that would eventually also be taken up by contemporary non-reductive cognitive science” (Borgdorff et al. 2020, p. 11).

It could almost be said the same type of co-constitution also happens in the interaction between humans and the so-called nonhumans, such as technology, nature or, for example, artworks.²⁴ Although intuitively humans associate knowledge-making activities as a one-way street, studies in material culture (e.g., Ingold 2013), or new materialisms (e.g., Barad 2007 or Haraway 1988), have unveiled how much of the knowledge we, as humans, develop is dependent on the object or material being studied. The agency of these objects can be seen in various knowledge-making activities, including conservation: as an example, the types of knowledge one can produce from conserving a relatively stable artwork on paper are expectedly quite different from the ones emerging from the interaction with a degraded polyurethane sculpture (see e.g., Marçal 2019, 2021). It is through our interaction with different types of objects that we develop our own theoretical models. Those models can, in turn, be refuted in each interaction with a new type of object or, even, when we get to see an object that we have known for many years through a different lens.

Through this exploration it is clear that exchange of theory and practice is critical within conservation. Knowledge-production for conservation is driven by interaction with people, structures, and objects, being characterised by the melting pot that happens, to use the words by the scholar and conservator Hanna Hölling, “at the crossroads of theory and practice” (2017, p. 7). Theory has been defined by the philosopher and conservator Muriel Verbeeck as a way “to distance ourselves from the profusion of specific cases and formulate principles; not rules, but guidelines,” with theory working as an instrument that “clarifies our decision-making choices, prior to any intervention” (Verbeeck 2016, p. 238). In the context of our work in the conservation of performance, we can define theory as the development of a series of ideas and hypotheses that are built on what we observe through thought-experiments and practice. That is the case, for example, when we categorise forms of performance practice depending on their characteristics—such as defining them as instruction-based artworks—and then make assumptions about their behaviour with time. The empirical data collected by engaging with artworks is, therefore, synthesised in developing further experiments, tools or concepts that might be relevant for our ongoing practice. From these descriptions and the above discussion, it becomes evident how much of the process of knowledge production in conservation, usually defined and described as consisting of separate phases of theory and practice (hence discussions about the divide between them), actually seems to be inevitably intertwined. When considering the conservation of performance, this discussion on theory-practice further leads us to two questions:²⁵ (1) What are the affordances of conservation, collecting, and display practices in the creation of theoretical models? And (2) In which ways can the development of theoretical models respond to the needs of the “real world,” and to the call to capture and translate knowledges that resist forms of abstraction? Although answering these questions in full goes beyond the scope of this chapter, in drawing on the process of developing our Strategy for the Documentation and Conservation of Performance Art²⁶ we can begin to explore some of the answers.

4 Conservation of Performance Art at Tate: Bridging Practice and Theory

The development of the Strategy started in 2016, drawing on an infrastructure of practice that had been created since the appointment of the first Curator of International Art (Performance) in 2003, and the acquisition of the first live performance artwork into the Tate permanent collection two years later in 2005: Roman Ondak’s Good Feeling in Good Times (2003). It is impossible not to recognise the impact of this curatorial trend in the shift that was observed in the conservation department. The somewhat unruly (after Domínguez Rubio 2014) behaviour of these works led to the development of strategies and procedures, in movements that resemble—in the words of Vivian van Saaze and her co-authors—“processes of adaptive change” (van Saaze et al. 2018). Similar to what is described by van Saaze et al., there were key moments that indeed triggered change and, yet, the consolidation of practice and the reframing of institutional processes are both developed through the accumulation of such moments. One of those key-moments came with the opening of the Blavatnik building and the simultaneous development of the curatorial programme BMW Tate Live, which led to the activation of five key performances from Tate’s collection in one single weekend in June 2016. In response to the announcement of the displays, the, at the time, Time-based Media Conservation Manager Louise Lawson and Collaborative Doctorate Award student Acatia Finbow began to research the five proposed artworks with the goal not only to understand the ways in which they would be activated in the gallery and the conservation documentation’s role in such process, but also to probe the ways in which the processes for documenting and conserving performance could be systematised and formalised. This process prompted a review of the applied documentation models, leading also to a reassessment of our existing conservation strategies.

The approach to the conservation of performance was further developed in the years following the first acquisitions of performance artworks into the collection, mostly by applying and adapting existing procedures. This process of adaptation took into consideration the short to long-term needs of each work, negotiated through ongoing collaboration with artists and their representatives. At this early stage, the time-based media conservation team used existing documentation strategies and templates to answer the needs of time-based media artworks like video and film installations. The template “display specification,”²⁷ is one of these documents, and is typically used to gather the display characteristics of installations.

The adaptation of existing strategies was first clearly seen in 2014 with the acquisition of A Tax Haven Run By Women by the artist Monster Chetwynd (created in 2010–11). The work has multiple sculptural components, including a large bus in the form of a cat and several costumes, which can be exhibited alongside a digital video of the performance. Working in close collaboration with the artist, curatorial and conservation, a display specification for the video element of the work was written.²⁸ The use of this template, however, shifted in both form and narrative style, with the conservator adding specific fields, such as performance instructions and casting and make up guidelines. These fields were added as the display specification in its standard template form did not have existing sections that could be utilised. The narrative style changed to become more fluid, with the incorporation of hand drawings from the artist, which, besides the extensive research on audiovisual materials from previous activations, were used to capture the movement of the performance at different moments across its duration. This change in a working practice of the team highlighted that the operative models of understanding and interpretation were not immediately sufficient to capture the contingencies offered by performance artworks. The knowledge production process undertaken by conservators, and triggered by the characteristics of this work, prompted a change in established paradigms, namely the ones that were allowing us to define the boundaries of performance artworks as with any other time-based artwork in collection.

The issue witnessed with Tax Haven Run By Women was also prevalent with other artworks in the collection, and the BMW Tate Live programme in 2016 prompted an analysis of the information we had specifically for the five artworks that were going to be activated. The Live List: What to Consider When Collecting Live Works, which was an output from the research project Collecting the Performative, was used to analyse the existing documentation held by conservation on each artwork. This analysis identified gaps in the existing documentation. The Live List proved to be a robust tool to facilitate such an analysis, but it also identified themes that would be useful to group together, such as space, time and documentation and to situate existing questions and develop new questions that would further probe that specific theme. It also became clear through the analysis that the information was separate and could benefit from being pulled together in one main documentation tool, moving the live list from a tool to prompt at the point of collecting to a tool that could also be used for the ongoing care of the performance. Discussions between the conservation and curatorial departments allowed for testing the assumptions that were underpinning this first model.²⁹ These discussions determined the expectations we had regarding documentation process—from contextual information to the development of material histories and a clear understanding of technical information—looking towards the integration of these in future development efforts.

Through their interaction with the artworks in their activated state, and knowledge transfer with other internal Tate teams, Lawson and Finbow worked to ultimately create what is now called the Performance Specification. This document has multiple incarnations and names, initially when created it was called the Tate Live List, a proto-documentation model that captured the parameters that were essential for each of the five artworks as a series of questions and answers. This then developed to become a blank template that had ten themes; space, time, condition, performers, physical components, logistics, audience, documentation, previous and future performances. Each theme has a series of promoting questions. This was called Display Specification – Performance-based Artworks. This was later refined to seven themes (space, time, condition, physical components, performers, audience, logistics) with two themes (previous and future activations) becoming separate supporting documents (Lawson et al. 2019). This document was ultimately renamed Performance Specification, to reflect more accurately its applicability and use, later on becoming the key-tool to apply to artworks entering the collection. However, the development of this work would need to be further stretched in both the possibilities afforded by this tool and the horizons of the operative concepts on which it was based.

5 Redefining Boundaries, Rehearsing New Models

In exploring the affordances of the Performance Specification, it was important to continue examining how this tool would be stretched with the acquisition of more complex performances. Working to consider how, with Tate’s ambition to collect more significant and complex performance, the characteristics of a tool would develop, require revision or adjustment and where and how new processes would be needed. The opportunity to further test and stretch the performance specification continued across 2016, which was a critical year with the proposal to acquire both The Reverse Collection, by the artist Tarek Atoui, and Your Face Is/Is Not Enough, by the artist Kevin Beasley. The Reverse Collection would highlight the need for creation of a comprehensive strategy that would have to include the formalisation of theoretical models, such as terminology and overall assumptions about the role and purpose of the documentation produced by the time-based media conservation team. Your Face Is/Is Not Enough would, on the other hand, highlight the importance of creating additional moments where conservation would engage with the artwork, such as the rehearsals and different moments of activation, leading to the development of new tools.

5.1 The Reverse Collection, Tarek Atoui, 2016

In 2016, Tate invited Tarek Atoui to activate The Reverse Collection, the third stage of an ongoing performance project informed by an interest in the “oral tradition” in music, and the effect that the standardisation of musical notation and instrumentation had on this.³⁰ The artist characterises the work as an exploration of the “transformation of form through sound and orality”; its digital sound files, instruments and performances are a “result or consequence” of this exploration.³¹

The project began as part of the 2014 Berlin Biennale, the artist, with six percussion, six wind and six string musicians, was granted access to play and record over 50 instruments held within the collection of the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, Dahlem. Pivoting on the idea of oral tradition, the instruments were chosen on the basis that they lacked significant information regarding “their sociocultural provenance, or, crucially, any instructions on how to play them” (Sawa 2016). From the audio recording of the Dahlem performance, the artist created seven edited sound files which were presented to instrument makers and a ceramicist who were to create new instruments that would somehow reflect their response to the file. This “reverse engineering” was the process behind the creation of ten instruments that served as the focal point of the second and third stages of the project, The Reverse Sessions, performed in the Kurimanzutto Gallery in Mexico in 2014, and The Reverse Collection, as it was seen at Tate in 2016.

The Reverse Collection was collected by Tate as both a performance and a multimedia installation. As an installation it comprises six instruments and two installed sound recordings, one from The Dahlem Sessions and one from its display at Tate Modern in 2016. The performance version can be activated in one of two “modes,” “Happening Mode” and “Concert Mode.” “Happening Mode” refers to open-ended, purely improvisational musician-led performances to take place during the opening hours of the exhibiting institution; it is to be seen in contrast to “Concert Mode.” “Concert Mode” refers to a specific concert-style performance of a given duration with a distinct beginning and end led by a composer or ensemble of musicians presenting a pre-conceived improvisational composition.³² These performances centre around the notion of musical experimentation based on collaborative improvisation between the players. The approach was guided by a conscious desire to subvert typical methods of ethnomusicological preservation, a point further emphasised when one considers the subjects of his experimentation were instruments that had become static museum objects.

The central issues that were encountered with The Reverse Collection occurred primarily during the acquisition of the work. These focused on the complexities of attempting to articulate the critical aspects of the work in its two display modes, the sculptural elements, the requirement to identify and support the networks for the performance that existed beyond the institution and the need to articulate our theoretical models differently to address the contingencies brought to the fore by the work. The theoretical models developed until the acquisition of this work relied on an understanding of performance artworks as a series of events and movements that could be conveyed as instructions. As it will become clear, The Reverse Collection contradicted that model both in the ways that it defined the boundaries of performance artworks and how it led us to describe and conserve them through the Performance Specification.

The differences in the two display modes of the work led to a clear need to articulate what we called the “condition” of the work in ways we had not experienced before. The ways in which the Performance Specification template was made, namely its structure, did not allow for flexibility in making clear the two display modes, which led the team to undertake the first revision of the template, moving “condition” to the first page of the document. The inherent variability of the artwork also made evident that the word “condition” did not suffice the complexity of what we were trying to describe—i.e., the material conditions needed to display the artwork and how they could change with time. We, then, decided to change the name of this section from “condition” to “artwork requirements,” as we thought this term was more truthful to the practice we were trying to rehearse with this document. This change, however, led to many other reflections about what “requirements” could mean, and, ultimately, on what we were trying to achieve.

One of the main aspects that were particularly hard to grasp was how much a “requirement” would continue to be a “requirement.” Also, in recognising how much the will to respond to the word “requirements” could impair forms of change that were not only acceptable, but desired in the case of The Reverse Collection, the time-based media conservation team were determined to find a way to relay to lending institutions the features that were flexible. The possibilities afforded by this artwork—from its display modes to the sheer fact that it had the possibility of having the instruments remade in each iteration—made us think less about fixed properties, which could be deemed essential to the work, and more about how the artwork could change in each materialisation, repeating patterns and performing behaviours in each activation. This led us, once again, to revise the theoretical models we had rehearsed with instruction-based artworks, making visible that there the various elements that constituted the artwork were less static, and instead developing with the artwork itself. We began to consider what would be “constant” or “in flux” in each iteration of The Reverse Collection. We would define “constant” as material conditions that must exist for the work to be activated, while “in flux” would describe what would, could and should change every time the artwork was to be shown. The use of these terms highlighted a shift from a more essentialist (cf. Castriota 2019 as well as Castriota’s contribution in this volume (Chapter 4) - Castriota 2023), or somewhat formulaic, way of looking at performance art, towards an understanding of the identity of these works as existing in a flux and being manifested through their “ongoing historicity,” to use a term coined by the new materialist scholar Karen Barad (2007). Identifying the materiality of a performance artwork as a fluid process, or a balanced act between constant features and materialities in flux, highlighted the need to reflect on what remains after the event is over. In the case of The Reverse Collection, such reflection took the sculptural elements that are made and remade as part of the performance as a starting point.

Understanding the possibilities of The Reverse Collection and how much of the process of conservation was based on the recognition of the ongoing historicity of artwork, led to the identification of two forms of performative existence, afforded by the sculptural elements that form part of the artwork. Besides discussions on the status of these objects, which were undertaken with the artist, the curator and registrars, there were other explorations offered by these objects. As the work had sculptural elements that would be stored, questions around what does a stored performance look like and mean began to surface. Some components of the work (such as sculptural or media elements) may be preserved or even stored, but the physical manifestation of performances is always in flux, appearing and disappearing in its multiple forms. This reflection was the first moment that led us to refute one of the axioms of the theoretical models we had previously applied to performance artworks in the collection that were considered to be instruction-based: that of the performance artworks disappearing when not being displayed in the gallery. How much of this model could be performed when considering the artwork as unfolding?

The musical instruments kept by Tate are testimonies of a process, which has many other witnesses, namely the people who made the instruments: the knowledge- and instrument-makers. Not only were the instruments a way of storing part of the performance artwork, but the act of making such instruments existed way beyond the gallery walls.³³ As a matter of fact, the practices sustaining the creation of instruments, which were at the core of the artwork’s formulation since its inception, continue to vibrate outside the museum, even as the artwork in its fullest stays invisible in the gallery space. The recognition of the hidden ways in which performance artworks remained in the gallery even after their physical manifestation in the galleries led us to reframe our understanding of artworks in the collection—instruction-based or not, moving from trying to contain the “disappearance” of the work, and rather changing our theoretical models to reflect shifts in its visibility and accessibility. We felt the need to articulate this shift in our interpretation of artworks in the collection by identifying states of existence as “dormant,” used to describe a performance work in storage, or “active,” indicating the period from the moment the artwork is selected for display until the last second of activation is over.

The recognition of these two states has also allowed the time-based media conservation team to rehearse and formalise the purpose of conserving performance art in the institution, as that of maintaining the conditions for artworks to move from a dormant to an active state. Articulating the purpose of conserving a performance artwork in the museum as a process of ensuring its activation and change across time not only reflects the ideal of keeping artworks live, but also promotes the expectation of keeping them alive. Assuming this expectation at the forefront of the overarching goals for our practice, it became clear that the documentation tool that was created for the preservation of performance—the Performance Specification—did not go far enough in writing the material history of these artworks, defining the ways in which they change over time, or mapping the people, networks, objects and technology that contribute to the ways they are made. This prompted an awareness of the criticality of articulating an overall Strategy that would approach the many issues raised by performance artworks not conforming to an instruction-based model, to provide context for the conservators now working with performance. The terms that emerged from our work with The Reverse Collection were put forward as a Glossary, which had the purpose of serving as an overarching framework for the Strategy, clarifying both its goals and its operative concepts. The development of the Strategy continued and, similarly to what happened in 2016 with the acquisition of The Reverse Collection, it was, once again, the acquisition and display of a complex performance artwork that propelled this effort, highlighting, in the process, aspects that were not visible with any other work in the collection. That artwork is called Your Face Is/Is Not Enough, and was created by the artist Kevin Beasley in 2016, the year it was also acquired by Tate.

5.2 Your Face Is/Is Not Enough, Kevin Beasley, 2016

First commissioned for the group exhibition Ticks of the Watch at the Renaissance Society in Chicago in 2016,³⁴ Your Face Is/Is Not Enough consists of twelve NATO-issued gas masks with megaphones sculpted by the artist into unique objects using several materials such as polyurethane foam, baseball caps and umbrellas, as well as eleven microphone stands and the participation of twelve hired performers. The hybrids of gas masks and megaphones are described as “poised both to defend against and to facilitate expressions of power.”³⁵ In addition, they can be seen as “transforming symbols of control,”³⁶ which “evoke gestures of empowerment and agency within individual and collective acts of protest, power and protection.”³⁷

It is required that the performance must occur at least once, on the opening of an exhibition. Prior to the performance, eleven microphone stands should be installed in the space. When the performance takes place the twelve performers wear the gas masks and carry the megaphones. Each enters the gallery space, stops beside a microphone stand, attaches the hand-held voice-receiver of the megaphone to the nozzle of the gas masks using Velcro, and begins a series of three deep and audible breaths followed by a loud “AAH” sound. This sequence is repeated thirty times over a period of approximately 25–30 min. At the end the receiver is detached from the gas mask and is re-attached to the megaphone. The megaphone is rested on the floor, and the mask is placed on top of the stand except for one, which does not have a microphone stand and is installed directly on the floor. The performers bow and leave the space. With the masks placed onto the stands, the end of the activation means that the work can be experienced as a sculptural installation. While visitors are not allowed to physically interact with the sculptures, they are invited to walk around them as no barriers are permitted in the space.

Your Face Is/Is Not Enough was first activated at Tate in 2018, as part of the Liverpool Biennial.³⁸ For this activation, the performance was instantiated once over two different days during the opening of the exhibition weekend, following a period of rehearsals conducted by the artist. Activating the work requires the involvement with either the artist or one of their representatives to direct the rehearsals with the performers and other aspects of the preparation for the display. In the days prior to the performance, hired performers are required to attend two three-hour rehearsals, where the artist or their representative transmits the work. Given this was the first activation of the work within Tate, it meant it was the first time conservators could not just experience it but also test documentation already gathered, logistics involved and understand what else should be considered beyond the documentation supplied to us as part of its acquisition.

The reliance on the artist or one of their representatives to activate the performance made us aware that probably there were forms of knowledge at play that perhaps were not conveyed as part of a set of guidelines, including those provided by the artist’s studio. Building on the practice that had been developed in the last two years, and on the theoretical models that had been first rehearsed and revised with the work undertaken around The Reverse Collection, the time-based media conservation team designed a protocol to interact with this artwork. This protocol was divided in three phases: (1) preparation of documentation and fieldwork, (2) fieldwork including interview with the artist and capture of the performance during activation at Tate Liverpool, and (3) completion and reflection of documentation tools post-activation.

In preparing for the fieldwork, we developed a detailed schedule around the performers rota and the scheduled activities with the artist, not only to determine the different roles of the time-based media conservation team members involved but also to ascertain what instances of the fieldwork were to be captured. Developing this schedule allowed us to be prepared to observe pivotal moments of both the performances and the rehearsals, alongside any other moments when decisions-making could take place. To avoid ending up with too many unedited hours of footage it was decided at the time that only the performances would be video- and audio recorded.

The fieldwork in Liverpool revealed aspects of the work that were unknown to us. The first aspect that became clear is that our plan to document the performances alone would not fulfil the intention of recording key moments of this activation. Although we were planning to observe the rehearsals, it became clear that these moments, which they called “workshops,” were actually an integral part of the work.³⁹ The inseparability between the rehearsals and the performance, once again spoke to our understanding of performance as a set of practices which are “in flux.” This relationship led us to capture the second rehearsal and to reflect on the possible need to document not only performance but also the process of their activation, which includes rehearsals.

The rehearsals highlighted the need for a close interaction between the artist and the hired performers. During the two scheduled rehearsals, but also in the times in-between, the artist transmitted more than a set of instructions and guidelines, indeed performing a practice alongside the performers. To use Diana Taylor’s words, the transmission of “repertoire” (Taylor 2013) complemented what is barely (or not at all) conveyed in words and descriptions. The intimate environment created between the artist and the hired performers was essential in creating the atmosphere where the artwork materialises. Transmitting the “repertoire” of practices for this work included embodied gestures and vocalisations, instructions on how to use and care for each mask, and also conversations around how the institution engages with the public and local groups from a diverse range of backgrounds are represented.⁴⁰ The importance of experiencing this first activation of the work within Tate made us acknowledge the need to further reflect on how these moments could find their way into our documentation, as well as on the role of “workshops” in shaping the artwork’s documentation.

Additionally, a discussion about the role of the masks and their continued use raised further queries about the role of documentation. The use of the masks raised some questions, particularly regarding how dependent the performance is on their ongoing use. The material of the masks, however, makes their long-term conservation challenging, particularly if they are to be worn as part of the performance. The reliance on these particular masks for activating the work does raise some issues not only on the care needed, but also on the possible uses of documentation for the artwork’s future materialisation. Alongside our experience with the forms of embodied knowledge that transpired through the interaction between the hired performers and artist, it was crucial to understand the possible future role of the documentation we are capturing.

The experience of activating this work led us not only to revise the templates in use—specifically the Performance Specification—but also to further reflect on the possibilities of the Strategy for the Documentation and Conservation of Performance. The Strategy was being developed in tandem with the process of documenting Your Face Is/Is Not Enough (Lawson et al. 2019), with Kevin Beasley’s work being the first complex artwork in which one of the Strategy’s main tools—the Activation Report—was used.⁴¹ The Activation Report records decision-making, with the indication of the stakeholders involved. These reports allow us to track changes and the ways an artwork evolves within the collection, and understand the risks involved in their ongoing transmission and its internal and external dependencies; in that sense, creating a record of the artwork’s material history. Testing out the tools that had emerged from the revision of our theoretical models led us to further explore the potential of our documentation tools, creating new techniques for capturing forms of embodied knowledge, and expand on the theoretical models themselves.

Reflecting on the Performance Specification, it was important with our new understanding of the importance of documenting both the rehearsals and the performance, to make revisions to its content and to add an additional field to capture “requirements for documentation.” This field captures the artist specified requirements alongside the key moments identified further, such as the rehearsals. Our experience dealing with lending performance works led us to understand that such an important feature of the artwork’s ongoing care should be placed right at the beginning of the specification so that the borrowing institution can see the requirements for documentation alongside the requisites for activating the artwork. The Performance Specification, however, did not allow for capturing aspects of the performance that directly relate to the “repertoire” of practices that was brought to the rehearsals and performance by the artist. We were particularly concerned with making visible the relative importance of documentation processes in our workflows, while also understanding how this work can be sustained by distributed forms of knowledge and developed through and with its documentation.

Aiming at fostering a transparent way of recording a distributed memory of the artwork, the time-based media conservation team set itself to design additional tools that were then applied to the documentation of the work, which were called activation and production diagrams.⁴² These diagrams map the live archive of the artwork and how it evolves, identifying different activations of the performance and linking them to the different documentation objects captured or developed for each one of them. Each activation of the work will produce its own documentation: video and audio materials, activation reports as well as other documents developed by the time-based media conservation team at Tate and other teams in lending institutions. These can all be tracked in one single document which helps visualise how the documentation is evolving and also moments of change in our approach to documenting this work. Although this map does not surface the intent of capturing instances of embodied knowledge, it does allow for a visualisation of the distributed nature of the “repertoire” of practice of the performance, making evident how much of conservation is a shared activity. Identifying the key stakeholders in making this performance what it is also allows for further investigation to be undertaken on how we can foster the development of knowledges outside the institution, and how we can interpret the theoretical models developed so far, specifically for artworks that depart from the instruction-based model and are dependent of a social environment.

With the need of mapping and characterising the networks of people, objects and technology that contribute to the ways performance is materialised in the gallery, or, in other words, answering to the need to adapt our theory-practice to the social needs of performance works, we have introduced and developed a new tool called the Map of Interactions as part of our Strategy.

The Map of Interactions is designed to map out the dependencies of artworks. These dependencies might be internal or external, and they are often critical in defining the means of production needed to activate artworks in the collection. Within the map the networks that support the artwork are identified, so those involved in the care of these artworks can understand and assess areas of possible vulnerability. Recognising the agency of people outside the institution in the making of knowledges in conservation practice also promotes creative ways to preserve and document these networks. This further allows conservation of performance to move beyond the transmission of a set of instructions and to extend it to the transmission of a “repertoire” of practice that is collaboratively shaped and is situated in as many places as the artwork is materialised, in its multiplicity.

6 Between Theory and Practice

The development of the Strategy for the Documentation and Conservation of Performance Art did not follow a linear route from identifying the needs of the collection and creating theoretical models and associated tools that serve to inform our practice; instead, it was developed through interactions with individual artworks. The production of knowledge is sometimes messy, characterised by revisions of assumptions as new data is collected, and as new experiences create layers of collective knowledge. The process of developing the key-tool for the Strategy was driven by our wish to create a practical outcome that could be used to effectively respond to the growing needs of the performance artworks in Tate’s collection. Theoretical models played a key role in formulating and testing various configurations of the Performance Specification, making clear the influence of the collected artworks—and hence, collecting practices—in the ways in which we redefined our assumptions, interpretations and how they were conveyed into the tools we now use.

The bridging of theory and practice was seen not only in the ways in which the Strategy was developed, but also in how it was informed by theories on documentation and performance art and its permanence, in the first instance, and, then, changed by the multiple encounters with artworks and contexts. The co-constitution of the artworks and the institution becomes visible with the process of understanding how, on the one hand, theory led to the development of the Strategy (and how this operative tool also works as a theoretical model itself), and, on the other hand, how the continuous relationship with artworks promoted the expansion and revision of this framework. While the co-constitution of the Strategy, the institution and its collection, and these artworks is particularly evident during moments of acquisition, we see how artworks, such as Tarek Atoui and Kevin Beasley’s works, participate in the development of the Strategy and the ways in which their impact as agents of change expands the network of their influence beyond specific case studies and moments in time.

The relationality inherent to this process also raises further questions about the unruly nature of these artworks. Critical within the development of the Strategy is to support the performance artworks unruliness and develop practices and processes that facilitate retaining this intention. At first glance, if we accept that these artworks are unruly because they do not fit the museum structures, one could argue that the process of entering a collection and the exchanges prompted by this process could promote some degree of domestication. However, assuming that each new connection among artworks, people and institutions comes with (big or small) transformations, we would hope instead that engaging reflexively with those processes of co-constitution can also lead to a continuous inquiry on the conditions of the museum structures, the relationship of these structures with the artworks and their wider networks. Thus, ensuring our “repertoire” of practices can support the artworks, coupled with an ongoing critique and reflection of our own work and knowledge production activities.

7 Conclusion

The process of knowledge production described here reveals some of the reasons why the dichotomy between theory and practice neither reflects the ways in which knowledge is created nor is useful in analysing the outcomes of such processes. It is not the case that gaps in our knowledge do not exist, but focusing on the lack of translation between practice and theory and vice versa, two processes that are mutually and recursively constituted, seems to be narrowing the scope of what we can learn and how. In other words, dismantling the duality between practice and theory is needed not just as a way to make evident implicit knowledges, but also to identify opportunities for documenting such knowledges in the development of our theory-practice.

Each new performance artwork creates moments of reflection and understanding. Married with the development of theory, either prompted by our own investigations or those more broadly emerging in the field, our work continues. The future development of the Strategy is focused on honing our approach and developing practical processes in the acquisition and display moments of a performance artwork. Our future work will look at how we can capture instances of embodied knowledge while also fostering the creation and sustainability of “repertoires” of practices outside of Tate. As we describe our work with performance artworks, as a living process, so will our strategies transform, mutate, and so does the symbiotic relationship between theory and practice continues.