Museums find it difficult to collect works of media and performance art, compared with traditional art objects like paintings, drawings, and sculpture. This makes sense. A media artwork might consist of a combination of software and hardware, as well as data-storage components (digital files, audio tapes, celluloid films, etc) all of which can be volatile – they decay, software goes out of date, etc.
And performative works are often made to be experienced “live” – they don’t exist as durable objects. So collecting media and live art is tricky. But it should be done! If not, museums are not honouring their responsibility to store and transmit significant cultural works into the future.
I (Lucas) have always struggled with the poor historicisation of conceptual and performance art. It’s difficult for younger generations of artists to access and build upon the work of our predecessors if we never get to experience those works for ourselves. So I believe it behooves museums to put in the effort, and skill up their staff on the best ways to collect and care for ephemeral / experience-based art.
Pip Laurenson, who I visited at UCL while in London, wrote an excellent and accessible chapter about all this stuff (co-authored with Viviane Van Saaze). It’s called “Collecting Performance-Based Art: New Challenges and Shifting Perspectives“, in the book Performativity in the gallery: Staging interactive encounters (2014).
Some artists who are mentioned in the chapter define their works as ‘limited editions’ and therefore pave the way to selling them to one (or more) museums. The article addresses some of the potential objections to, and justifications for, this commodification or compromise of a work’s “liveness”.
In a hypothetical situation where a museum acquires Malcolm Le Grice’s Horror Film 1, here’s what I think they would (should?) acquire. All of the following would be contained in the work’s “Users Manual” (ie what TLC has been working on recently):
- the 16mm film strips
- the instructions on how to make new film strips when these ones are broken or scratched
- the instructions on setting up the projectors
- perhaps 3 x 16mm projectors themselves
- Contact details for people who know how to operate and repair 16mm projectors
- the instructions on performing the work (choreography)
- a list of contact details of artists who are currently able to perform the work (the “custodians”)
- a stipulation for how often the work should be performed in order to maintain freshness (or to be ‘refreshed’ – a term discussed in Pip’s article), and therefore allow it to evolve and be relevant into the evolving cultural context
- a stipulation about training up new people at agreed intervals, and a procedure about how that should happen
[…what have i forgotten?]
It’s quite complex, but not at all insurmountable, as long as the collecting museum has a willingness to engage and set aside resources to care for the work and its network of custodians “in perpetuity”.
This “in perpetuity” question is interesting because it brings us back to Raja and the “1000 years” provocation. Two questions arise:
- How long will our national collecting museums continue to exist? (Given current global politics, it’s not difficult to imagine our “enduring” cultural institutions being disestablished at the stroke of a petulant leader’s pen)
- What other ‘backups’ (to use a data metaphor) are needed in case our national institutions crash to the ground?
In relation to the second question, I’m thinking of community-based archiving practices – where the work is kept alive through practice, iteration, repetition, and evolution by a community of enthusiasts. Community-based archiving is in itself precarious, but perhaps a combination of the two (institutional and community-based) is a good belt-n-braces?