Keywords

1 Introduction

Museum and gallery professionals tasked with caring for artworks have long observed that mechanical damage to objects is among the most common and destructive hazards to collections. It is noted also that the moments at which such damage is at highest risk of occurring are in those transitional phases when works are physically moved or handled: packing, crating and shipping for domestic or international transit as loans, movement to and from conservation studios for interventive treatment, transfers during storage reorganizations or renovations, and exhibition installation and deinstallation.

However, recent developments in contemporary art conservation theory have drawn attention to the unstable nature of many artworks even when they are not physically moving from one location to another. The “biographical approach to contemporary art conservation” (van de Vall et al. 2011) has highlighted how the dormant life phase of a work in storage can often engender risks like dissociation, technological obsolescence and loss of the knowledge required to assemble, install or activate the work.

Contemporary art conservation researchers have also investigated other museum-based biographical phases such as acquisition and installation, demonstrating the critical role of collections care professionals in shaping how artworks are presented and documented. In order to write biographies of works that “alter in appearance and require some kind of intervention by the museum to enable their continued display” (van Saaze 2013, pp. 15–16) these scholars must “take us to the backstage of the art museum, a space that has been conveniently left out from the grand narratives of art history, but without which such narratives would be simply impossible” (Domínguez Rubio 2016, p. 65).

Theories on artwork biographies have thus prompted greater investigation into how institutions affect artworks behind-the-scenes; but although these theories imply that every life phase should be a crucial locus of observation and action for conservators, the majority of conservation and collections careFootnote 1 activity still takes place in the transitional phases before and after exhibitions—not during. This chapter suggests that the exhibition period is an underrepresented life phase in conservation practice and argues for the integration of behind-the-scenes work with new activities that focus on the front-of-houseFootnote 2 areas where visitors encounter the art.

Divided into three main sections, this chapter begins with a discussion of the theory of a biographical approach to contemporary art conservation (Sect. 2) and examines why engagement in the front-of-house domain is an especially urgent undertaking for ephemeral artworks with interactive elements. Interviews with staff at the Fowler Museum at UCLA highlight the opportunities for a professional protocol that more closely examines the exhibition life phase of works that only fully unfold within a display space, as opposed to in an artist’s studio or a fabricator’s workshop.

The next section (Sect. 3) details the methodology which I believe is best suited to address the biographical approach to conservation in practice. The field of Museum Ethnography can inspire a holistic approach to the front-of-house arena through the use of participant observation, and literature is presented that demonstrates the burgeoning use of ethnographic methods in conservation research. I make a distinction between the reflexive ethnographies of conservation represented in that literature, and the notion that collections carers can also directly apply ethnographic methods for conservation in practice.

The following section (Sect. 4) presents the results from an exploratory case study into the potential of utilizing ethnography for conservation during the exhibition phase. I discuss the findings from participant observation during the preparation and opening hours of the 2017–2018 exhibition Take Me (I’m Yours) at Milan’s contemporary art space Pirelli HangarBicocca, and I address how some simple actions by collections care professionals to engage in the front-of-house space can help to better understand and assess risks, generate mitigation tactics in response to those risks, and forge new documentation methods for contemporary artworks.

Finally, in Sect. 5 I suggest expanding the conservation knowledge and engagement of gallery invigilators to round out a campaign of continuous collections care (Sect. 6). A summary of the argument serves as conclusion of this chapter in Sect. 7.

2 The Biographical Approach to Conservation and the Exhibition Life Phase of an Artwork

Instead of the traditional conservation aim of preserving physical matter, the goal of the “biographical approach to conservation” is to record the variability of artworks through significant life stages while preserving their artistic integrity over time. The authors who introduced this concept into conservation—Renée van de Vall, Hanna Hölling, Tatja Scholte and Sanneke Stigter—were inspired by anthropological theories on material culture to examine the museum context in which contemporary artworks are embedded and the ways those contexts inscribe meaning (intentionally or unintentionally) in artworks. Rather than relying only on artist interviews for information, it is now common for conservators to document the artistic processes of creating and installing or transmitting works (Matos et al. 2015; Scholte and Wharton 2011), and to critically reflect on how museological practices themselves affect the identity and interpretation of artworks (Davies and Heuman 2004; Irvin 2006; Marçal 2021; Stigter 2015).

The biographical approach has thus been widely embraced for the care of contemporary artworks.Footnote 3 Recent research has concentrated on capturing vital information during many of the biographical stages of artworks that are relevant to museums, such as collection and acquisition of works (Laurenson and van Saaze 2014; Moomaw 2016; Ryan 2016), artwork creation, fabrication or installation (Fiske 2009; Hummelen and Scholte 2004; Phillips 2015), and the storage stage mentioned by van de Vall et al. (Depocas et al. 2003). However, the discipline has largely ignored one of the most crucial biographical phases that contemporary artworks undergo: exhibition.

Collections care remains principally a backstage operation, and rarely, if ever, is there an attempt by collections care professionals to systematically study how artworks live while on display during the opening hours of a museum or gallery. In museums of all types, the majority of conservation activity (e.g., condition checking and reporting, testing and treatment, documentation, preparation, packing and crating, mountmaking, installation and deinstallation) takes place in the transitional phases before and after exhibitions—not during—as the skills and energy of conservators turn back behind-the-scenes to prepare for upcoming exhibitions soon after the previous installation is complete. This blind spot in conservation is a particularly urgent deficiency in the practical care of works that are only fully active or activated when on display in an exhibition space, such as performance art,Footnote 4 relational art or interactive installations.

There is a behind-the-scenes/front-of-house disconnect in current museum and gallery working methods that must be overcome in order to bridge the gap between theoretical developments regarding artwork biographies and the ways those biographies are accounted for in daily collections care practice. This disconnect is acknowledged by professionals from various museum and gallery disciplines whose schedules seldom permit them to experience and explore their institution’s front-of-house areas, restricting their knowledge of many artworks on display. The way in which many museum professionals currently consider the front-of-house arena is typified in the words of the Head of Public and Educational Programs (HPEP) at a contemporary art institution:

“There’s a sense of guilt, just spending 30 minutes in the exhibition space” (personal communication, 2017-11-20).

It is the job of this professional to create public content centred around exhibitions; and yet, the HPEP lamented, there is a feeling that taking time to really absorb the works on display from the visitor’s perspective would be shirking the urgent duties waiting to be addressed back in the office. There is often an understanding, whether self-imposed or explicitly ordained, that the work to be done—and a professional’s proper place—is backstage.Footnote 5

The HPEP further explained that this feeling has consequences in the form of missed opportunities when workflow and protocol do not provide professionals with the time to examine what happens in the front-of-house, or provide a platform to process and address those activities amongst staff members. A good illustration of how current collections care practice, with its lack of emphasis on the exhibition life phase, affects the ability to care for and document interactive works can be drawn from the Fowler Museum at UCLA’s history of exhibiting interactive contemporary altars and artworks.

The Fowler Museum, which “explores global arts and cultures with an emphasis on Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the Indigenous Americas—past and present,” has included (inter)active altars and shrines—some of which were also contemporary artworks—in many of their exhibitions for over twenty years (Fowler Museum at UCLA n.d.). Created in collaboration with communities of believers, spiritual practitioners, and artists, these altars have provided context to exhibitions such as: Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou (1995), Botánica Los Angeles: Latino Popular Religious Art in the City of Angels (2004–2005), Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas (2008), Transcultural Pilgrim: Three Decades Of Work By José Bedia (2011–2012), In Extremis: Death And Life In 21st-Century Haitian Art (2012–2013) and Sinful Saints and Saintly Sinners at the Margins of the Americas (2014).

Research into these altarsFootnote 6 revealed that the production and installation phases of the assemblages do not suffer from a lack of attention. Interviews with staff members yielded detailed accounts about the production and development of altars; from the names and locations of the stores where objects were bought to construct them, to the names of the Vodou or Santería practitioners who consecrated them.Footnote 7 Curatorial and conservation records contained step-by-step textual and visual instructions for altar installation and packing processes. Complete “walk-through” photographic documentation depicted the entire exhibition space, providing the spatial context for each altar installation.

Once the exhibition phase began, however, standard professional protocol no longer required such painstaking attention. Memories about how these ephemeral accumulations lived while on exhibition do remain with staff members today; but these memories are unevenly distributed and recalled with varying levels of certainty. When asked about the kinds of visitor interactions that took place during the exhibitions, staff members from conservation, registration, collections management and exhibitions, as well as curators, did not respond with the kinds of specific details they provided for the creation and installation stages. Instead, there were a number of responses that included phrases such as: “I don’t know,” “I don’t believe so,” “That might have been…,” “I’m not sure if…,” “I think we would have…” and “I’m trying to remember…” interspersed with more vivid memories.

The absence of information about the exhibition phase is in no way evidence of these professionals not doing their job. On the contrary, the paucity of information about the works while on display is precisely because these practitioners had dutifully turned to their subsequent tasks and were hard at work preparing for the next exhibition. The museum’s Head of Conservation (HoC) considers this an issue of resources and time, explaining that:

when the show goes up, we’re on to the next thing. There are some times when I never step into a show again; the whole time it’s been on display. If something happens, then I’ll go down there and check it out, and usually a guard will alert me or someone’s walked in and seen something. But I think [more systematic visits] should happen […] You put everything into this show to open it, and then once it happens, you just kind of forget about it almost; which is a shame. I guess it’s not so much maybe on the education end, if they’re doing public programs. But certainly on my end. And I know on exhibitions’ end. And, I’m pretty sure, registration and collections; we don’t have time to examine and review the exhibition until deinstall. (Personal communication, 2017-08-09)

The HoC’s statement highlights how conservators do of course enter the display areas to address any issues that arise regarding the condition or safety of objects; but they may rely on initial reporting by others whose professional commitments already include the front-of-house arena, such as guards. It also draws attention to the fact that some museum staff members do consistently spend time investigating the front-of-house activities during the exhibition life phase; however, the work conducted by Education and Public Programs staff is focussed on the benefit and well-being of visitors. In this chapter I make the case that collections care professionals should consider how front-of-house activities during the exhibition life phase can be made to work for the benefit and well-being of the artworks.

The argument that the exhibition space provides new opportunities for conservation finds confirmation in a further statement by the Fowler’s Head of Conservation. He recalled a contemporary artwork where visitors were invited to participate by writing messages and attaching these to the installation. Although the artist did not request any monitoring or reporting on the condition or development of the installation and was well aware of changes in condition over time from similar installations, the HoC now feels that observing the work during opening hours would have been beneficial,

just to see where those elements are being attached, if there’s some kind of damage occurring to the original structure of that substrate that it’s being pinned to… Are visitors grabbing on to things? Handling things poorly? To see visitors’ contact with it, how that would affect the work. (Personal communication, 2017-08-09)

Just as contemporary artworks may undergo active processes of change while they are unobserved by conservators in storage, they may also undergo important changes while they are unobserved by conservators on exhibition—especially if, as in the examples listed above, they are participatory, interactive and ephemeral. If the theoretical paradigm of the biographical approach to contemporary art conservation is to be implemented in practice, this blank spot in the biographies of artworks can no longer be ignored.

In order to develop collections care methods that are capable of apprehending what knowledge can be gained during the exhibition life phase of artworks, I now turn to literature on Museum Ethnography and the increasing body of texts in which ethnographic methods are used in conservation research.

3 Opportunities of Participant Observation and Ethnography for Museum Research and Practice

Although a review of literature on museum visitor studies, visitor research, or audience studies shows that observation has long been used amongst visitors in display galleries, these have predominantly been undertaken not to focus on artworks, but to “focus on the experiences, attitudes, and opinions of people in and about museums of all sorts” (Hooper-Greenhill 2006, p. 363). While some visitor studies have indeed instrumentalized field research in the museum space to gain insight into presentation strategies of artworks as well as visitor behaviour,Footnote 8 most publications in the visitor studies field have sought to learn about visitor demographics (Golding and Modest 2013), learning styles and attention patterns (Bitgood 2013; Falk and Dierking 2000, 2013; Hein 1998; Hooper-Greenhill 1994) and visitor pleasure or satisfaction (Kirchberg and Tröndle 2012, p. 442). Useful methods from this field such as surveys, interviews and observation are all also present in the methodology used by anthropologists; but “ethnographic” research perspectives are more holistic in scope and maintain an emphasis on the subjective personal participation of the researcher in the subject matter under investigation.

3.1 What Is Ethnography?

The word “ethnography” refers both to the research methodology used by anthropologists and to the textual (or audio-visual) presentation of the results of that social scientific fieldwork.Footnote 9 Although it encompasses the use of statistical data, surveys, and formal and informal interviews, paramount within this eclectic method of inquiry is anthropology’s signature concept of “participant observation.” Participant observation is built on principles of phenomenology (the study of structures of consciousness and experience) and cultural relativism (the idea that every culture should be studied in terms of its own internal logic), and it follows the assertion that in order to truly understand a practice, an event, an object or a ritual, one must experience it first-hand using all the senses instead of just sight and/or sound (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007).

Since the end goal of ethnography is to better understand the learned and shared ideas and patterns of behaviour that constitute a certain culture—as well as the means by which they are learned and shared amongst cultural members—ethnographers constantly shift focus between immersing themselves in intimate, personal everyday experiences, and discerning larger configurations of social norms and comportment. This combination of participating oneself and actively observing others, I argue, makes ethnography particularly well-suited to the conservation of art that is interactive. However, I am by no means the first to explore this methodology in conservation research, or the museum world in general.

3.2 Museum Ethnography and the Rise of Ethnographic Methods in Conservation

The field of Museum Ethnography provides many examples of how ethnographic research methods have been used in cultural heritage institutions.Footnote 10 Ethnographic studies have been carried out in various types of museums to interrogate the professional working cultures in ethnographic museums (Durand 2010; Herle 2008), science museums (Macdonald 2001, 2002), art museums (Bunzl 2014) as well as the art worlds that comprise artist studios, galleries, art fairs and auction houses (Rothenberg and Fine 2008; Thornton 2008). Other ethnographic studies in arts organisations have not sought purely to analyse and explain the social processes that govern the art world and its institutions, but have also taken a critical approach to find out what effects those processes have on the artworks themselves.

Albena Yaneva used the technique of “following” an object (a bus) as it was transformed into Mückenbus, an artwork by Carsten Höller and Rosemarie Trockel, at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris in 1999. Yaneva states in her article that the museum as such is only visible “in the ordinary operations, everyday attitudes and gestures [where] the artistic work is related to the manual work of different collectivities of actors”; a world which can best be uncovered through ethnographic methods developed precisely to capture “everyday attitudes and gestures” (Yaneva 2003, p. 126). Conducting participant observation as a museum intern allowed Yaneva to contrast the simple and clear-cut image of installation artworks held by museum visitors with the “unstable state of art” revealed behind-the-scenes during her research.

In a similar effort to make backstage museum processes visible, Vivian van Saaze’s book Installation Art and the Museum. Presentation and Conservation of Changing Artworks (2013) describes the process of conducting research in van Saaze’s own professional milieu of art museums by stepping out of her role as practitioner and into the more unstable position of ethnographer.Footnote 11 Van Saaze called her work “an empirical investigation into the working practices of contemporary art museums involved in the presentation and conservation of installation artworks,” taking the staging, or the “doing,” of three artworks by museum professionals as case studies to openly examine the typically invisible practices that exist behind-the-scenes in museums (van Saaze 2013, p. 16).

This is indicative of a trend within the larger field of Museum Ethnography that centres research explicitly around the discipline of conservation. Another example can be found in the work of Fernando Domínguez Rubio, whose participant observation was based in the conservation lab of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Like Yaneva, Domínguez Rubio followed the material components of artworks and used an object-based approach to demonstrate the agency of those objects in the museum setting. He cites examples of what he calls “unruly” objects to show how “artworks organize museums as much as museums organize artworks” (Domínguez Rubio 2014, p. 641). The contrast of conservation’s historical efforts of stabilisation, control and neutrality, juxtaposed with the ethnographic data he collected, allows for an explicit case to be made that artworks are forcing a change in conservation and collections care practice. This echoes what van Saaze’s “empirical research into several case studies” proved: that “much of conservation theory and ethics is distant from the day-to-day practices of contemporary art conservators. A theory of contemporary art conservation,” van Saaze concluded, “should therefore be more in tune with its practices” (van Saaze 2013, p. 183).

The work produced by Yaneva, van Saaze and Domínguez Rubio have provided captivating evidence of the misalignment of traditional conservation theory and current practice; but though they have brilliantly raised the necessary questions to prompt professional evolution, they do not attempt to provide answers in the form of practical day-to-day professional techniques to be adopted. They have produced incredibly valuable examples of ethnographies of, instead of strictly for, conservation.

3.3 A Distinction: Ethnography of and for Conservation

I make a distinction between the two main ways that anthropological methods can be applied in the conservation field: by conducting an ethnography of conservation, and by employing ethnography for conservation.Footnote 12

Ethnographies of conservation are reflexive studies of the ethics and philosophies of professional cultures of conservation as they are manifested in practice. Such studies can be carried out either by researchers or by practicing conservators in order to shape the future of the discipline in a broad, long-term sense by influencing evolved ethical standards, setting new best-practice guidelines, and providing precedents for future conservators who face similar challenges. Such research entails an ethnographic study of museum and conservation professional practices in order to generate theoretical analyses that will serve future and/or other conservators, and only by extension serve the artworks in their care.

Ethnography for conservation is not about interrogating the nature of conservation itself; it is rather the use of ethnography-inspired research methods for the express purpose of completing imminent conservation duties such as ensuring proper display of, creating adequate documentation for, or treating works of art and cultural expression. An example of using ethnography specifically to further conservation efforts for an artwork can be found in Nina Quabeck’s use of the ethnographic approach of “messy text” to interrogate the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen’s acquisition of Wolfgang Tillmans’ large-scale work Life is Astronomical Installation (2001–2012) (Quabeck 2021). Ethnographic methods have also gained traction in the conservation of performance art, which often revolves around the role of embodied knowledge in performer transmission, as collections professionals begin to engage more deeply with artworks by learning and performing them (see Hélia Marçal’s writing on the conservator’s body-archive (Marçal 2017), Athena Christa Holbrook’s reflections on learning Simone Forti’s Dance Constructions at MoMA (Holbrook 2018), and Robert Lane and Jessye Wdowin-McGregor’s consideration of the work of Tino Sehgal alongside oral and bodily transmission strategies from cultures like Australian Aboriginal communities (Lane and Wdowin-McGregor 2016)).

The data for these two types of methodological engagements—ethnography of and for conservation—inevitably overlap, and the findings from each of them can and should inform each other; but the first remains a scholarly pursuit that academic researchers will more likely be able to perform, while the second has more practical elements that can be utilised by professionals working in museums and galleries.Footnote 13 Rather than meeting requirements of academic ethnography, such as the deep immersion in a culture through participant observation over long periods of time and the complete analysis of that data, ethnography for conservation is closer in nature to the “Rapid Assessment Procedures” used in the field of Applied Anthropology. Applied Anthropology has sought to find ways that balance reliable and rigorous data collection with realistic research constraints and the goal of putting what is learnt through ethnographic study into immediate and effective use. Rapid Assessment Procedures (RAP) “are ethnographic methods for quickly gathering social, cultural, and behavioral information relevant to specific […] problems and prevention programs” (Harris et al. 1997, p. 375). With RAP, “the task is not to solve theoretical puzzles or generate theory but to reach more rational decision-making processes in real-life circumstances” (Taplin et al. 2002, p. 81).

By performing a rapid ethnographic assessment of the front-of-house environment in which artworks are exhibited, collections care professionals can gather information in real time about specific problems that may endanger the artworks, to inform improved decision-making for the means to prevent or remedy those dangers. The following section presents results of such an assessment study, outlining some examples that showcase the potential benefits of adopting ethnography for contemporary art conservation.

4 Case Study Application: Take Me (I’m Yours) at Pirelli HangarBicocca

4.1 Behind-the-Scenes

In an exploration of how to integrate behind-the-scenes with front-of-house collections care, I conducted an ethnographic study during the exhibition Take Me (I’m Yours) (TMIY) at the contemporary art space Pirelli HangarBicocca (PHB) in Milan, Italy. Originally conceived by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Christian Boltanski in 1995 for London’s Serpentine Gallery and resurrected twenty years later in various cities, Take Me aims to break all the rules of exhibiting art. It interrogates the “myth of the unique artwork and question[s] its methods of production” by creating an exhibition of interactions amongst artists and visitors “characterised by its open form which evolves in time” (Monnaie de Paris 2015). The Milan edition of the show, curated by Obrist and Boltanski in collaboration with Chiara Parisi and Roberta Tenconi, ran from November 2017-January 2018 and featured an exhibition booklet that explained to visitors that they were meant to actively take, create, participate in, exchange or buy the artworks.

Many of the artists and artworks included in TMIY can be categorized as Relational Art, a school which considers “the work of art as social interstice” (Bourriaud 2006 [1998], p. 160). This genre was first theorised for the 1996 exhibition Traffic by curator Nicholas Bourriaud, who later published a treatise on what he called “Relational Aesthetics,” in which he described how the artists working in this field “create and stage life-structures that include working methods and ways of life, rather than the concrete objects that once defined the field of art. They use time as a raw material. Form takes priority over things, and flows over categories: the production of gestures is more important than the production of material things” (Bourriaud 2006 [1998], p. 170). My study aimed to integrate the more oft-studied backstage biographical phases of preparation and installation with the exhibition-phase where those “social interstices” and “life-structures” manifest themselves in the front-of-house arena.

Participant observation in the exhibition space cannot replace the invaluable knowledge gained through the traditional professional pursuits of research, interaction with artists, and exhibition preproduction; but it recalibrates those experiences with new perspectives. Before conducting the front-of-house study for TMIY, I participated in the preparation of Pirelli HangarBicocca’s show by researching the exhibition’s history—online, in materials from previous exhibition venues, and with PHB’s curatorial resources—and by writing the exhibition label text for a number of artworks.Footnote 14 During this period of research, I became familiar with how the works had been interpreted, documented and described by different institutions in the past; perceptions which could then be measured against my personal experiences during the exhibition phase. I then encountered the physical media of the works for the first time as I joined the PHB production team for four days to install the exhibition, during which time I was also able to speak with many of the artists about their vision for the work.

It cannot be overstated how drastic the shift in mentality was from the role of professional to that of visitor; and how different were the kinds of knowledge about each work gained from either side of that divide. Many works I felt I “knew” or “got”—a belief buoyed by my research, artist interviews, caption drafting and installation—radically transformed once I encountered them in the front-of-house as a visitor.

4.2 Front-of-House

Once Take Me (I’m Yours) opened to the public, I began participant observation in the exhibition space,Footnote 15 which was open Wednesday-Sunday. To gain a representative understanding of the front-of-house domain, I conducted this work twice a week—one weekday and one weekend day—making sure to evenly cover opening, midday, and closing hours. This amounted to 75 hours of observations over the two-and-a-half-month run. The mobile phone was chosen as a research tool for taking notes and photographs rather than a large professional camera and paper notebook, which allowed me to conduct fieldwork that was not disruptive for visitors, was easy and efficient, and aligned my own experience with that of fellow exhibition-goers who were also snapping photographs and reading or typing on their smartphones. These methods allowed me to build up a holistic picture of the patterns of behaviour seen in others, while also “captur[ing] the versatility of tacit knowledge and non-tangible aspects” of artworks that can only be gained from first-hand, subjective experience (Hummelen and Scholte 2004, p. 212).

Scholars of contemporary art conservation, and particularly of performance art, have written about the difference between seeing and speaking about a work cognitively, and the bodily knowledge that comes from physically experiencing it (Holbrook 2018; Lane and Wdowin-McGregor 2016; Marçal 2017). My study of TMIY confirmed this as I engaged in works like Francesco Vezzoli’s Take My Tears (2017). For this piece, another artist acts as Vezzoli’s alter ego in the exhibition space, as he sits at a table for two and draws street-style portraits of visitors one at a time while making conversation with them. As a bystander watching someone else in the seat, the conversation is inaudible, and there is no sense of what it feels like for the visitor to sit under spotlights being studied by Vezzoli’s stand-in and being watched by a crowd of onlookers in the shadows.

Prior to participating, but having read the work’s caption that described how visitors “become protagonists of a fictional imagery” and having watched others being sketched, I imagined the work aligned with the exhibition’s push to invert traditional display technologies and would make the visitor feel that the art is now looking at you. However, once I sat in the chair across from the street artist, as I recorded in my notes,Footnote 16 “it was easy not to notice the people standing all around because I got lost in the conversation.” The artist told me how “it’s less about drawing an exact aesthetic image, but more about how the person’s spirit appears to him. As soon as they sit down there is an immediate connection.” Indeed, by experiencing the work as a visitor, I discovered that it had little to do with feeling watched or seen; the spotlights actually served to obscure the presence of the crowd around the table, making me instead feel hidden. While watching as a spectator placed emphasis on the drawing, as a participant the portrait itself became secondary to the conversation and connection with the artist. By participating myself, I thus gained a better understanding of the relationship between the lighting design and performance techniques, and the phenomenological responses they engender.

The Decision-Making Model for Contemporary Art Conservation and Presentation asks us to consider whether a work “evoke[s] associations or reactions that are important for its identity/meaning” (Giebeler et al. 2019, p. 11). There are many artworks for which associations and reactions are evoked simply by experiencing the works through non-contact senses such as sight, sound and smell: paintings, sculpture and performances can all provoke emotional responses even when spectators are only passively engaged. But how is it possible to truly know what associations or reactions are evoked for a portrait sitter in Take My Tears until one sits for a portrait? That experience is the work; and without having participated personally, any understanding of the work will be missing a vital element of its biography.

However, it was not only the emotional insight gained through participation that was significant; understanding the connections between the physical and material conditions in the front-of-house exhibition arena (like lighting design) and the associations or reactions evoked by these (like the intimacy of the encounter with Vezzoli’s artist/performer) is one of the most substantial benefits of this methodology. The Decision-Making Model prompts practitioners to determine if there is a discrepancy between the “current state” and “desired state” of an artwork in order to shape “conservation/presentation options and strategies” (Giebeler et al. 2019, p. 3). This ethnographic study produced a number of examples in which personal participation uncovered conditions in the front-of-house that distanced a work’s current state from its desired state and indicated possible practical measures to expediently minimize that discrepancy.

For Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s work entitled Or Not (2017), four chairs were set up as a locus for visitors to sit and give or receive advice. The seats were often occupied by people just taking a rest from standing in the exhibition space, and conversations did not always happen. When I sat down to try it as a visitor, leaning way out over my knees and straining to hear the other person, I realised that the chairs were too far apart for any meaningful conversation to occur. Adjusting the markings on the ground that designated the placement of these chairs was an easy, immediate intervention that the institution could take to more fruitfully support Gonzalez-Foerster’s intentions for the work. The visitor should have a choice to converse, or not; but if it is physically too difficult to converse, they have no such choice.

Regarding time-based works, the Decision-Making Model checklist asks: “Can the work be faithfully displayed/continued/perpetuated also when the time-based components are not functioning/performing anymore?” (Giebeler et al. 2019, p. 12). For a work like Or Not, the work’s time-based components are people, conversation and advice; and there is no way to know whether those components are “functioning” without observing and experiencing the work first-hand in the front-of-house.

Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art Julia Bryan-Wilson said after many years of teaching art history courses that included Yvonne Rainer’s iconic dance piece Trio A:

Having studied many photographs, screened the film numerous times for my students, and read incisive written accounts of it, I thought I had a pretty good sense of what it entailed. I was wrong. I now approach the question of the medium of Trio A differently, because in the fall of 2008, over the space of about six months, I took a class from Rainer at the University of California, Irvine and learned Trio A. (Bryan-Wilson 2012, p. 58)

This same kind of bodily learning, or learning through doing, occurred for me with Yona Friedman’s Street Museum (2017). One of the works for which I wrote the TMIY exhibition caption, Street Museum was installed as piles of hula hoops with posted diagrams sketched by the artist for visitors to collectively build their own structure and then transform it into a “museum” by attaching personal objects that became its “collection.” Like Bryan-Wilson, I too came to approach the medium of Street Museum differently after engaging with the work physically. An incredible amount of material knowledge was gained from participating: how deceivingly difficult it actually was and how long it took to make just one small structure; how frustratingly often the masking tape provided by PHB would break; just how much tape was required to secure each hoop; and the fact that the one roll of tape originally set out meant that only one group at a time could participate—something which hadn’t occurred to me until I began my observations, though in hindsight seems glaringly obvious. When I only observed the behaviour of others, I had noticed bits of tape strewn around the floor and felt that visitors were being slightly hasty or careless; it was only upon attempting the work myself, when I stood there with my own fists full of broken tape, that I realised… there was nowhere else to put it.

With these material conditions, the hula hoop structures often remained weak or were abandoned by visitors before completion, and few people left items on the structures. The current state of the work lacked one half of its desired nature: although construction of the “museum” occurred, there was hardly any deposition of “collection” objects. Luckily, these observations from having participated could be turned into actions: another roll of tape was added, a larger instructional sign was placed next to the work, a rubbish bin was added nearby, staff began leaving their own objects to kickstart the work’s desired deposition facet, and they began posting on the PHB website and social media pages encouraging people to prepare for their visit by bringing items to add to Street Museum and other works that invited visitor contributions. These interventions made a direct impact, and this ailing work was brought back to life.

Vivian van Saaze has pointed out the diminished role of materials in the way Relational Aesthetics are usually considered and discussed:

Although Bourriaud is the first to deny that relational artworks celebrate immateriality per se, many of the examples he describes seem to have discarded the physical object as the dominant form of expression and take on more immaterial, temporary and interactive forms such as events or services. An interesting question, though not addressed by Bourriaud, is what role is there for physical objects and the museum in relational art? (van Saaze 2013, p. 158)

This case study into the potential use of ethnography for conservation has brought the material conditions of relational works into focus and helps to answer van Saaze’s question: physical objects and the museum clearly play an active role in relational art insofar as they must create and maintain the material configurations necessary for relational artworks to live as intended.

5 An Expanded Role for Guards, Invigilators and Cultural Mediators

It is significant that the problems outlined above by staff from the Fowler Museum at UCLA were reflected identically by staff at Pirelli HangarBicocca, a very different kind of institution. The Fowler is both a collecting and exhibiting museum which displays a wide range of objects from the past and present; it is based on campus at a public American university, with permanent conservation staff and a steady stream of conservation interns working in an onsite conservation lab. In contrast, PHB is a private Italian contemporary art space with no permanent collection, no conservation professionals on staff, and without dedicated in-house conservation facilities. Yet despite their many differences in resources, infrastructure and audience type, both cases present a lack of—but desire for—detailed information about the exhibition life phase of the works they host, particularly ones with visitor participation.

I was told by multiple Pirelli HangarBicocca staff members how important they felt my case study was, because they themselves were not currently able to spend a significant amount of time in the front-of-house observing and participating. Next to my own research, they underlined the importance of the role played by their highly trained “cultural mediators” who act as guards to protect artworks and who offer deeper explanations and interpretation regarding the works. Recalling once again the Fowler Museum’s Head of Conservation who pointed to the role of invigilators in communicating information from the galleries to the collections care staff, these cultural mediators reported back on their experiences with Take Me (I’m Yours) during weekly meetings with PHB staff.

Many more mediators than usual were hired for TMIY because, the PHB curatorial team explained, “they really had to reinstall, restage, replace objects every single day… During the opening [hours], of course, but also when the show was closed—before and after.”Footnote 17 This confirms that the responsibilities to care for these works do indeed cut across the boundaries dividing afterhours from opening hours and backstage from the front-of-house. The PHB curators continued, saying that visitors needed more explanation than usual in order to even begin engaging with the works—something my observations confirmed as I heard parents preventing children from engaging with works while they searched for a sign outlining “the rules.” The curatorial team considered this mediation by the invigilators a vital part of conservation:

regarding the conservation of the pieces, it’s this parallel between the way you can activate the work and the way you take care of the work. There was this tangenza between these two aspects that usually are more disconnected […] This kind of relation is what made it really interesting; the idea of conservation within cultural mediation. (Personal communication, 2018-04-19)

Although I do strongly advocate for institutions to reorganize professional priorities to allow conservators and collections care professionals the time to engage with artworks personally, this statement presents an additional tool or alternative route for institutions in which that cannot (yet) happen. Many institutions already have workflows in place that allow conservation and exhibition departments to liaise with team members from security and gallery services for reporting on the condition of works and to adapt and adjust presentation strategies. These structures can be further utilised in addition to—or, if necessary, in lieu of—an expanded presence of collections care staff in the exhibition space.

A deeper relationship with invigilators who are already posted in the front-of-house can become an important conservation strategy; but it will have to be carefully crafted. Regular meetings between collections care staff and invigilators could provide consistent opportunities for what happens in the front-of-house during exhibition to be written into artwork biographies. Often invigilators are already given comprehensive information regarding curatorial communication about artworks, but I suggest that further training specifically on practical conservation issues and general conservation principles must be communicated to heighten their sense of which observations should be reported and with what degree of urgency. Guards will need to be counselled not only on what is meant to occur in the front-of-house, but also looped into the behind-the-scenes conservation plans so that they can fully contextualize how they protect artworks on exhibition with why they are ultimately asked to do so.

6 Continuous Collections Care

That contextualisation of the why and how behind collections care practice should be an evolving, iterative process; especially for Relational Art or any kind of art that is itself meant to evolve and iterate. A few months after Take Me (I’m Yours) closed I interviewed the curatorial team, who reflected on how, with TMIY,

you learn over time how to approach the care of the works; because it has so much to do with the interaction of the public, and that’s not something you can always foresee. For certain things that maybe we didn’t expect, or we thought were more obvious… [after the] experience of a certain number of weeks of interaction, then we would adjust. (Personal communication, 2018-04-19)

This continuous engagement with the exhibition and how to care for the artworks was a function of the need for constant maintenance, since objects for visitors to take home had to be restocked and replenished every week. One Assistant Curator said it felt “like every week was the opening of a new show.” If we think of this exhibition as suspended in that constant cycle of installation and deinstallation, then conservation and care should certainly also be ongoing. Engaging participant observation in the front-of-house space is a promising methodology to register and react—in real time—to the risks to and needs of ephemeral, evolving contemporary art. Furthermore, the reflections from staff at Fowler Museum at UCLA included in this chapter suggest that such a methodology would be welcome not only for contemporary art, but also for interactive altars or any cultural material on display that attracts museum visitor participation.

My presence as a researcher in pursuit of improved collections care for Take Me (I’m Yours) was certainly not the only source of information on how visitors and artworks behaved and interacted in the display space. PHB staff did visit the exhibition, but as mentioned, this was contingent on myriad other professional duties. Although cultural mediators posted in the space also had impressions and observations that they were able to share at weekly meetings, these were mentally noted and occurred only during their allocated working shift, during which time their primary professional tasks were to enhance visitor experience and intervene for security issues. I, on the other hand, was free to systematically observe and record vital information from a variety of sources, including statements from cultural mediators and curatorial staff, holistic observations of visitor and artwork behaviour, and my own subjective experiences from first-hand participation with the exhibition.

It is possible that some of the collections care interventions recounted in this chapter could have arisen from sources other than my own study—an invigilator may well have noticed visitors sitting too far apart from each other in Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s chairs, and staff members could easily see that Yona Friedman’s Street Museum was not receiving visitor-supplied objects for its “collection.” However, an element of unstructured happenstance plagues the care of interactive and participatory works without a dedicated eye on their exhibition life phase. The systematic nature of my activities and the centralised point of contact that my presence provided were crucial elements that demonstrate the value of recalibrating conservation practice to include front-of-house activities during the exhibition phase for continuous collections care.

7 Summary

The field of contemporary art conservation is at a significant and exciting moment of professional growth and maturity. Various developments in innovative practice by professionals all over the world in the past few decades have firmly and clearly left marks on the shape of conservation philosophy, and practitioners who have encountered these pioneering theories are embracing the adoption of novel methods to align their practice with those theories.

The biographical approach to contemporary art conservation was one such theory that has been acknowledged as a fruitful paradigm with which to approach the care of contemporary artworks. While undertaking research to discern how this theoretical approach could be put into practice, it became clear that the exhibition life phase of artworks has been underexamined by conservators and collection carers due to heavy workload, but also due to the perception of collections care as a backstage activity.

In determining the best methods of addressing this blind spot in conservation practice, literature on visitor studies in museums proves only partially useful. While visitor studies can yield valuable information about the behaviour of the public (through observations) as well as the opinions and impressions of the public (through visitor books, surveys, and interviews), the motivations behind that behaviour and the processes leading to those impressions cannot be fully understood except by experiencing the exhibition oneself from the position of a visitor. For this reason, the tradition of ethnography in the museum is a more appropriate field in which to situate efforts to apply the biographical approach to conservation. While there are many recent examples of scholars conducting ethnographies of conservation to build and refine conservation theory, this chapter presented examples of how ethnography can be instrumentalized for conservation.

Reflections on past exhibitions from staff at the Fowler Museum at UCLA highlighted the need for collections care-centred engagement in the exhibition life phase for interactive works of cultural material and contemporary art. This prompted the development of a case study to test the use of participant observation during opening hours for the exhibition Take Me (I’m Yours) at Pirelli HangarBicocca, a dissimilar institution where staff members nonetheless divulged similar concerns and constraints. This study yielded the benefits of being able to more deeply understand the artworks, the public, and the exhibition environment. It illuminated the very different kinds of risks to each of the varied works, and it gave the exhibiting institution the chance to adapt material configurations and communication strategies in real time to mitigate those risks. These small adaptations can have an immediate impact, lessening the discrepancy between the current and desired states of the works.

The added burden on collections care professionals to commit increased time to the exhibition space can be eased—if not always by an external researcher such as myself, then more realistically by a transformed relationship with the guards, invigilators, or cultural mediators who are already positioned in the front-of-house. The care of works would greatly benefit from increased training of cultural mediators that extends their capacity beyond the normal purview of security and of curatorial insight to include essential aspects of conservation and details of the conservation strategies in place.

With the added knowledge gained from employing ethnographic methods for conservation during the exhibition life phase of contemporary artworks, the front-of-house exhibition space can become a locus of conservation intervention; not only to maintain the proper function of technology (as Time Based Media conservators already do) or to capture vital documentation (as conservators of performance art already do), but also to ensure the necessary material conditions for the artists’ intended immaterial experiences to occur, and to guarantee that communication to visitors is adequate and effective.

The final point to be made is that integrating recent theory with practice will entail a shift in practitioner priorities, and ultimately in professional mentality. With this chapter I have made the case that collections carers who spend time during working hours in a gallery space—engaging with works from the perspective of a visitor and observing others around them—are working. This can only improve the way they care for the works on exhibition; something about which no collections carer should ever have to feel guilty.