Keywords

1 Introduction

What is a reversible treatment in the context of Urs Fischer’s large wax candle sculptures which melt, combust and disintegrate over the course of their display? What action would qualify as minimally invasive for Victor Grippo’s Analogía, I in which raw and perishable potatoes connected to electrodes generate electricity measured by a nearby voltmeter? And what does conservation documentation entail for a performance work by Tino Sehgal for which all forms of record-keeping is prohibited? (van Saaze 2015).

Such perplexing questions as these have prompted the widely held belief that some contemporary artworks are fundamentally different from old or so-called traditional artworks, necessitating conservation approaches beyond the traditional ethical framework of care.Footnote 1 This chapter challenges that belief, arguing instead that old and contemporary works of art have more in common than commonly held, in order to explore the relevance of contemporary art conservation theory to the care of old, “traditional” artworks, and in turn, how the study of old art may still contribute to theories of contemporary art conservation. After first identifying two qualities of contemporary artworks that signal an unconventional or non-traditional object ontology—immateriality and mutability— the chapter then points to several old works that share the same traits. The crux of the argument is that the perceived differences between old and contemporary artworks are neither inherent nor fundamental to those categories, but arise from an under-examined tendency to identify the essence of a traditional work with a more or less fixed material character. In other words, the contrast between old and new works lies in how conservators (and others who interpret cultural objects) approach them. Due to advances in the theory and practice of the conservation of contemporary art, there are now at least two accepted paradigms of care theoretically at the disposal of all conservators no matter their field of specialty—a traditional paradigm that focuses on material preservation and, what will be called here, a “contemporizing” paradigm that allows the perpetuation of essential immaterial, intangible characteristics.

2 Divergent Paths

The care and conservation of contemporary art has been on a separate path from that of the so-called traditional media like sculpture, painting and photography.Footnote 2 Early concerns tended to focus on the practical problem of experimental materials and technique in modern works (Cranmer 1987; Domergue et al. 1987). The discourse later turned to issues of artist intent, meaning and authenticity (Coddington et al. 2002; Graham and Sterrett 1997; Hummelen 1999). Artworks were increasingly multivalent and complex, often with essential but elusive characteristics. What aspects made the artwork authentically itself? Which were to be conserved? Such questions were elucidated through Laurenson’s concept of “work-defining properties” (Laurenson 2006).

As a response to insufficient or irrelevant guidance from the standard sources of ethical and practical guidance in the care of cultural heritage—e.g., codes of ethics, charter documents, treatment case studies—disjunction from the traditional treatment path has led to a robust infrastructure for the advancement of understanding and care of contemporary art. Networks of professionals, conferences, treatment protocols and terminology, paradigms of documentation and decision-making, and venues for training and education have been dedicated in its service because of the perceived unconventional nature of the contemporary.Footnote 3 Time-based media art (Engel and Phillips 2019; Laurenson 2004; Phillips 2012), installation art (Pugliese and Ferriani 2009; Wharton and Molotch 2009), performance art (Cone 2017; Marçal 2017; Phillips and Hinkson 2018) and otherwise variable media art—what makes them so problematic?

In the next sections, I describe two characteristics, often mentioned in case studies of problematic contemporary works, that seem to fundamentally distinguish contemporary art from old art. However, as counter-argument, I raise several examples of old art which also possess these seemingly unconventional qualities, re-opening the possibility for fruitful collaboration and exchange between the sub-fields.

3 No Longer Material

The first proposition is that having essential properties that are immaterial is a sufficient condition for a contemporary artwork to be fundamentally different from an old work.

According to the traditional conservation framework, the authenticity of an object depends on the persistence of its unique physical identity. The object may have immaterial properties but these are secondary to or dependent on its work-defining, or essential, properties, which are all material. Thus, with the goal to minimize further physical change, conservators would endeavour not to replace the wood planks of the Ship of Theseus, instead leaving lacunae where possible and, when structurally necessary, consolidating rotten boards in order to retain as much original material as possible. The Ship is an “autographic” object: anything that imitates its physical nature would be a forgery since it would not be the unique object that Theseus sailed upon.Footnote 4

In contrast, many contemporary works are no longer only material, but have work-defining properties that are immaterial, aspects that confound the traditional conservation framework. Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawings are well-known examples, existing beyond the physicality of the drawings themselves (Hogan and Snow 2015; van de Vall 2015). Able to be re-executed in any setting by following a set of artist-authorized instructions given on a piece of paper, they all share the key work-defining property of being the result of his written instructions. A LeWitt wall drawing inheres neither entirely in the executed wall drawing, nor entirely in the certificates of authenticity and instruction. Rather, its identity rests somewhere between those things and its processual concept. Hence, the confusion and differences of opinion among conservators when asked what measures should be taken to preserve a particular instantiation of one: if the work was only material, the primacy of its preservation would have been uncontested (van de Vall 2015). In fact, when an instantiation of a wall drawing is destroyed, the authenticity of the work is unaffected; but if an image (that visually conforms to the instructions) is printed on the wall rather than drawn according to the artist’s instructions, it would not be an authentic instantiation.

Similarly, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s candy installations are guided by loose concepts of candy type, ideal mass of candy and visitor participation (Buskirk 2000; Spector 2003). The material, candy, does not constitute the artwork, but serves to instantiate the interactive aspect of the work and convey a coded meaning. It is crucial that viewers are able to take candy away; preserving the original candy pile would in fact go against the authenticity of the artwork. Instead, the candy should be replenished when depleted by visitors.

In both examples, perpetuation of an immaterial work-defining property—for example, conceptual, processual, interactive and so forth— is more important to the work’s authenticity than preservation of its original material character. In contrast to these contemporary examples, removal of discoloured paint from a surface -- darkened chrome yellow from Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, say -- to expose unoxidized paint below, is unacceptable because original material is removed and the surface texture of the brushstroke skinned (Kendriks 2016). The difference seems stark indeed.

A glimpse into the medieval concept of object identity or object “origin” offers an alternate perspective to the primacy of material in old artworks (Nagel and Wood 2005, p. 404). Richard Krautheimer famously demonstrated in his 1942 paper that historical imitations of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem had many more differences than similarities when it came to physical form: some were circular, some polygonal, some with single nave, others an ambulatory, some with eight columns, others with 12, and so forth (Krautheimer 1942). The essence “copied” from the original building prototype seems to have little to do with its optical likeness, either in plan or elevation, rather a symbolic association based on medieval numerology (e.g., sides and columns adding up to a divine number), a spiritual concept, or gestured form (curved rather than precisely circular). Some pre-modern makers and viewers, it seems, found the identity of the Holy Sepulchre to inhere in something other than its visual appearance per se, such that its legitimate copies embodied a shared immaterial idea that instantiated the original. (Smith 1992).

Alexander Nagel has observed that depositing soil from the site of the Crucifixion “soaked with the blood of Christ” in a chapel in Rome entitled that secondary site to be known as Jerusalem (Nagel 2012, p. 100). A site double was generated, he writes, but “rather than a visual replica, the constellation/installation initiates a process of activation” (Ibid.). In both architectural examples, it is the transfer of an immaterial aspect—a concept, an arrangement, a referenced event—that perpetuates the original work. Material plays a role, but a secondary one.

Talk of activation leads quite naturally to relics, another class of objects that transcend their material nature. On the one hand, a relic depends on its unique physical history, for instance that it is the shroud that wrapped the body of Jesus, or that it is the staff that Moses used. A relic is therefore a unique object, where something that merely resembles it carries no meaning since it does not have the revered history of the relic. In this sense, a relic seems like a totally autographic work dependent on its physical history. However, the primary function of relics was to serve as a source of sacred power. Their physical history may be unique, but they function through replication. Medieval accounts of pilgrim worship tell us explicitly that relics have the ability to transfer their power. The relic of the cross at Golgotha was “offered…to the pilgrims to kiss—just once a year…Little ampullae filled with oil from lamps that burned at the Sepulchre were presented to the relic. In a miracle that mimicked the pilgrim’s own sanctification…the fluid in the ampullae once touched to the cross bubbled up and would have overflowed if not quickly capped and preserved. Such fluid had the capability of holding “the blessings received from many martyrs” (Hahn 1997, p. 1086). On the sides of the ampulla is a moulded depiction of kneeling pilgrims at the foot of the cross (Sever 2016). The image documents the source and the process by which the liquid inside is made holy, much like LeWitt’s certificate and diagram for a wall drawing. That which makes a relic is something supra-material: its holy power to bless, heal, save and so on.

One might object that a relic functions through physical contact, and thus is dependent on its material nature after all. But the stuff of a relic is often nothing much to look at. Consistently referred to by early Christians as “dust,” a relic was usually hidden inside a reliquary, covered in layers of material like fabric, parchment, and precious metals adorned with gems (Nagel and Wood 2010, p. 298). It was rarely even visible to the worshipper or pilgrim. The reliquary, the rich framing, promotes the relic within, and yet the reliquary is nothing without the relic; its costly material is substantive as long as the relic is known to be within. And because the relic alone may not be believable, authentics (certificates of authentication), and inventio (narratives of finding) accompany the relic to prove its unique lineage (Hahn 2017, p. 7). In the end, whether it is actually the bones of so-and-so or constructed to be the bones of so-and-so through sanctioned mechanisms, is quite literally immaterial. A relic’s substance is secondary, a replaceable instantiation of the socio-religious narrative erected around it.

In considering old, and in particular religious objects when they were contemporary, we are reminded of the immaterial power and spiritual functionality they carried when embedded in their ritual contexts. Moreover, it becomes clear that they have lost their immaterial characteristics because they are out of context within the modern secular museum ecosystem (inclusive of conservation, registration, exhibition) which defines them by their physical properties and condition. The Annunciation of the Rosary by Veit Stoss, still set within the dazzling architecture of St Lorenz Church in Nuremberg, makes the point dramatically. Painted in the eyeball of its Angel Gabriel are accurate reflections of the church’s surrounding windows (Taubert and Taubert 2015, p. 70). This tiny detail marks the sculptural group as a part of a much larger complex that is the church itself. The whole is a site-specific installation. The sculptural group has physical features that directly refer to and depend on its architectural setting for subtle meaning. Historical records also indicate that the Annunciation was intentionally lowered for high-ranking visitors throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, arguably itself a form of ritual or performance (Ibid., p. 73). Out of original context, the sculpture would lose its relational, dialogic quality with its suprastructure and surroundings—an important immaterial aspect— becoming a different kind of thing altogether. Imagine extracting one of the paintings from the Rothko Chapel, or displaying only one reel of slides from Robert Smithson’s Hotel Palenque: the isolated part can still be appreciated, but a viewer ignorant of its origin experiences either a fraction of its meaning or a disparate one.

Some contemporary works are unconventional because their material identity is secondary to their functionality. Similarly, many old works possessed a functional character essential to their meaning. Stripped over time of their affective powers, old objects become disproportionately reliant on their material character. But this common aging trajectory does not imply their ontological status is somehow different from that of a contemporary work. Both old and new works have immaterial work-defining properties.

4 No Longer Fixed in Time

A common traditional conservation goal is to stabilize the artwork, to arrest or minimize further physical change. Underlying this goal is the presumption that the pristine artwork—the state against which its authenticity should be measured—is sometime shortly after it has left the maker’s workshop, and that subsequent physical alteration, whether natural or interventive, subtractive or additive, is more or less undesirable.Footnote 5 Traditional artworks depend on a relatively static physicality. The more they deviate from their original physicality the less authentic they become.

By contrast, some contemporary artworks are considered unconventional because they are no longer fixed in time. Rather than having a single ideal state, they have dynamic trajectories because they are meant to be ephemeral, variable or in transition. Zoe Leonards’s Strange Fruit involves real pieces of fruit that have been hand-stitched and embellished by the artist, scattered on a floor, and allowed to decompose in real time (Temkin 1999). The decay of the fruit, intimate and made unique by the artist’s hand, is intentional and essential, a work-defining property. Unlike Gonzalez-Torres’s candy, the fruit cannot be replaced. Rather, the sense of loss compounds with each subsequent iteration of the artwork until, presumably, the fruit disintegrates. (Its trajectory is remarkably similar to a relic: as more pilgrims visit and participate in the ritual of the relic, its power grows.) The Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2018 exhibition Zoe Leonard: Survey, which included Strange Fruit, about thirty years after an early iteration in Philadelphia, advanced this trajectory (Cotter 2018). Though not typically categorized as a time-based media artwork, Leonard’s installation is certainly one which has duration.

Another contemporary work, Sharon Hayes’s In the Near Future, exemplifies multiple ways in which an artwork is no longer fixed.Footnote 6 First, the work exists in two phases, as a performance and an installation. In the first phase, performances were staged in several cities where the artist held up anachronistic signs of protest on the street. In the second phase, the artwork transitioned to a museum installation involving 35 mm slide images taken of phase one that are projected onto walls with self-advancing slide carousel projectors, themselves a technological anachronism. Although it seems the first phase is firmly of the past, its place in generating the content of phase two continues to be essential to the artwork. It is not clear whether phase one could be re-performed, generating additional or alternative content for the installation and contributing more possibility for change. Second, the installation is dimensionally variable, meaning that the size of the room and arrangement of the projectors can change. Important to note is that its variability in this regard doesn’t only mean that it can be displayed differently in many contexts, but also that the artwork will morph with each successive iteration. As more details are put to the test in different settings, the set of its work-defining properties may grow and change, eventually describing an artwork quite different from its first iteration. Its physical variability opens the door to fluidity of identity and authenticity.

Compared with a sculpture or painting that has rigid dimensionality and form, such contemporary artworks seem unconventional indeed. But if we probe further, we encounter many old objects that were variable as well, with mutable meaning. A polychrome wood sculpture of St John the Baptist by Juan de Mesa is hollow and fully carved-in-the-round, made to participate in religious processions. A deposition crucifix has jointed limbs, built to be taken down from the cross in re-enactments of Christ’s Passion. Such objects were first and foremost performative, (another immaterial property), needing at the very least, ritual, right timing and interaction with viewers to be fully activated. For full meaning to unfurl, they also required duration. Winged altarpieces remained closed until high holy days when they were opened to reveal a rich paint and sculptural program within—an old and slower kind of time-based medium unfolding over the liturgical year (Taubert and Taubert 2015, p. 11). Their comparatively static existence today only means they have transitioned to a different phase from their performative or kinetic one, which is now dormant. One scholar writes that the “modern museum presents images in stasis. But in earlier periods, instability was a fundamental part of their being” (Jasienski 2020, p. 25).

There were also ephemera, objects intended to die, or prohibited from surviving.Footnote 7 Wax votives, lit and placed in devotion at a shrine, would burn down just like one of Urs Fischer’s Untitled wax candle sculptures. The circulation of the Eucharistic wafer was closely guarded; any not consumed during liturgy was properly disposed of (Kumler 2015, 2011). Today, only documentation of their existence—press moulds, illustrations and of course the ritual itself—survive.

Finally, it should be noted that most old objects have also had dynamic trajectories, sometimes changing dramatically because of human intervention. Archival photographs of one medieval sculpture show that it had changed from the centre image as Saint Alexis in 1864, to Saint Louis under art dealer Joseph Demotte in 1934, and to a figure of a king in 1952 in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (Kargère and Marincola 2014, p. 17). Such examples, in which the very identity or subject matter of an object changes, are ubiquitous. Replaced hands on Hindu sculpture may unintentionally signify through their mudras a different deity than originally intended. An oil overpaint on a Renaissance bas-relief subtly changed the subject matter from the sacred intimacy between mother and baby Jesus where the figures gaze intently at each other, to an outward facing Christ Child that beholds the viewer (Tom and Sutherland 2017). Spolia ensconced in a new setting take on political significance that didn’t exist in their original contexts. While these old works were not initially intended to morph in the ways they did, their ready mutability and the popularity of their afterlives suggest these old artworks can be continually made and remade as the evolving products of “many hands” rather than a fixed object by a single hand (Kemp 2020).

5 “Things not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art”

So far, this chapter has considered several old objects that share similar ontological qualities with “unconventional” contemporary artworks in that they are—or at least were—not only material, and not fixed in time. The examples have borrowed heavily from medieval Europe where the widely ranging and associative ways in which objects signified is well-known (Kumler and Lakey 2012). But other kinds of old objects bear these qualities as well. Pushing against the conservator’s emphasis on original material, stakeholders of indigenous collections have vocalized numerous other complex ways in which so-called ethnographic objects derive meaning from their network of human users (Peters 2016). For instance, a West African power association mask has jealously guarded secrets of making and restrictive codes of viewing that may be transgressed in a modern research museum context (Molina 2019; O’Hern et al. 2016). With clear performative and ritualistic aspects, exactly how or when it is activated is largely unknown to those who stand outside its circle of makers. Out of context, it loses its immaterial characteristics and is increasingly perceived as a fixed aesthetic or historical object. Design objects such as lamps may have their electrical cords cut in order to satisfy white box museum aesthetics, effectively denying its function (Delidow et al. 2009). Musical instruments that cannot be played, armour that cannot be worn, chairs that cannot be sat upon—the list goes on. Essentially, what these examples indicate is a category of objects that are not intended as art. Jeffrey Weiss has called them “things not necessarily meant to be viewed as art” (Weiss 2013). Claudia Brittenham, arguing that carved Mayan lintels would have been hard to see, in distinct contrast to the close, privileged view we have of them in the museum context, writes that museums are “utterly foreign to the moment of the works we now construe as ‘art’” (Brittenham 2019, p. 25). When brought under the conventions of the art museum, all objects not necessarily meant to be viewed as art become potentially alienated from their immaterial character.

It might be argued that such non-art objects automatically become fixed in materiality once they leave their original context: when comparing old objects with contemporary works, then, we should compare them in the museum setting; compared thus, old and contemporary works are fundamentally different. To this criticism, I argue there is a crucial distinction between a necessary alienation and one that is tacitly accepted without resistance. For old objects, the latter is true. But for many contemporary works, curators and conservators act as willing co-conspirators in breaking down the walls and norms of their institutions to accommodate the artworks and ensure no essential aspect of them is left out. The Guggenheim’s massive and costly manifestation of Doug Wheeler’s PSAD Synthetic Desert III from the artist’s drawings in the Panza Collection is one recent instance of how eager institutions are to do this.

Additionally, the work of the Salvage Art Institute (http://salvageartinstitute.org/), a travelling display of artworks that have been declared a total loss by insurance criteria and therefore no longer suitable for exhibition or participation in the art market, demonstrates how quickly the conventions of a museum can be upended to accommodate the needs—in this case, the legal requirements— of a (legally, economically) unconventional object: the legal restriction against displaying a shattered Balloon Dog by Jeff Koons dissolves as soon as we stipulate that the object is no longer the artwork it was, that Balloon Dog is now Balloon Dog*, where “*” signifies that it is no longer art.

The perceived fundamental differences between contemporary artworks and so-called traditional artworks appear to be misplaced. Old objects, particularly those not originally intended as art, are also unconventional if they are allowed to be so.

6 A Contemporizing Paradigm

Rather than posit a fundamental difference between contemporary art and old art, it seems more accurate to acknowledge that the unconventional aspects of many contemporary artworks have engendered an alternate care paradigm to the traditional framework that privileges material integrity above all else. This alternate approach might be called the contemporizing paradigm because it seeks to perpetuate the functionality and mutability of new works by privileging its immaterial aspects and capacity to change. It resists the urge to freeze and preserve a work in time, instead embracing a conceptualization of the artwork as continually evolving.

The proposition, then, is that the disjunction between contemporary and “traditional” lies not with the ontological nature of artworks or objects themselves, but external to them as differences of approach that can result in markedly divergent work-defining properties over time. The 2007 display of Joseph Kosuth’s Glass (One and Three) at the Stedelijk Museum demonstrates the point well (Stigter 2011; van de Vall et al. 2011). Consisting of a pane of glass resting against the wall on the floor, a photograph of the pane of glass on the floor, and a printed dictionary definition of “glass”, the work presents a cheeky self-reflexive pun on the concept of “glass,” showing three distinct representations of glass that all have the same referent. After researching the short history of the artwork, conservators decided to replace the photograph of the glass against the wall with a new image that accurately represented the pane of glass in its new setting against a different floor and wall in the museum. Encouraged by the artist’s certificate of instructions for the work, it can be said that stakeholders, in this case, applied the contemporizing paradigm, thereby inviting the possibility of other modifications in the future to keep visual parity within the work. But they just as well may have applied a traditional paradigm, choosing to keep and preserve the original components. The result of the latter counterfactual decision would have set the artwork on a different trajectory, one that affirms the identity of the work’s dependence on the original materials and first instantiation.

Locating the difference in the approach rather than the object itself does not in any way undermine the work of conservators of contemporary art in recent decades: it does not imply that the separate path taken by contemporary art conservation has been in vain or founded on a false dichotomy. On the contrary, the astute sensitivity to and concern for the multivalent nature of contemporary works have enabled this alternate contemporizing paradigm of care. Now quite established, the contemporizing paradigm can be applied to a new work, setting it on a certain dynamic trajectory, but might also be applied, contrary to current custom, to an old work in order to reactivate an important characteristic, function, power, etc. that it possessed when it was itself contemporary. In the case of the proverbial Ship of Theseus, conservators might opt instead to closely document the ship’s course and maintain the ship’s ability to make legendary sea voyages, replacing boards and re-making parts as necessary. This ship would be more performance than relic. On the flip side, stakeholders are free not to apply the contemporizing paradigm to a new work. In this regard, close investigation of the trajectories of old artworks, specifically with an eye to identifying moments or phases when a new direction was taken, may be useful to conservators wondering about the long-term effects of certain kinds of decisions, and in which cases it is desirable to let an older-than-new artwork age. In examining very long trajectories, one might start with the following questions: is the need to update, redo, overpaint or re-refashion an object an indication that it has ceased to feel contemporary for viewers of that place-time? What factors contribute to the need to update? What are the mechanisms by which aging objects become documents of their own past? How have maker-communities in the past defined and responded to notions of obsolescence? Answering these questions with contemporary challenges in mind may help us understand and evaluate the future trajectories of contemporary artworks.

7 Conclusion

Things not necessarily intended to be viewed as art show themselves to be as unconventional as the most problematic works of contemporary art: not only material in their identity and no longer fixed in time. Thus, perceived differences between old works and contemporary works may be more accurately and usefully explained by the existence of two valid paradigms of care, one that privileges the unique material integrity of a work, another that honours the multivalent and often immaterial significance of objects. Liberated from the notion that old and contemporary works are fundamentally different, stakeholders are free to apply, or not, the contemporizing paradigm to old and new works alike. With regard to a contemporary artwork, the option not to use the paradigm may allow it to gradually age as its identity becomes increasingly determined by a particular instantiation of itself. With regard to an older artwork, the option to adopt the paradigm may lead to innovative approaches for conservation, interpretation and display.