Performance The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care, Volume II (2024)

Introduction: Caring for Performance

Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care, Vol. 1, Routledge , 2023

Can performance be conserved, and if so, how? And what does it mean to conserve performance? Performance works—ephemeral, sensitive to site, embedded in history and often tied to the body of the artist—have long been considered beyond the reach of conservation and restoration, which have traditionally focused on objects, rather than moving bodies. And yet, situating conservation next to performance offers an intriguing point of entry for theoretical and practical investigations. Examined through the lens of conservation, what is performance, and what might it become? What might this new disciplinary lens reveal about performance—and what about conservation? As an evolving practical-theoretical paradigm and a way of theorizing and bringing objects to conscious attention, how does conservation itself change vis-à-vis these new “objects”? Is conservation sustainable, as an imperative, principle and category, or do performative works necessitate distinct modalities of care? Our book begins with these questions. The authors in this volume investigate performance and performance-based artworks (henceforth abbreviated to “performance”) as material and conceptual entities through the lens of conservation. Employing diverse disciplinary, professional and personal perspectives, they both set and examine the conditions of possibility for the continuation of performance works.

Performance The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care, Volume I

Routledge , 2023

This book focuses on performance and performance-based artworks as seen through the lens of conservation, which has long been overlooked in the larger theoretical debates about whether and how performance remains. Unraveling the complexities involved in the conservation of performance, Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care (vol. 1) brings this new understanding to bear in examining performance as an object of study, experience, acquisition and care. In so doing, it presents both theoretical frameworks and functional paradigms for thinking about-and enacting-the conservation of performance. Further, while the conservation of performance is undertheorized, performance is nevertheless increasingly entering the art market and the museum, meaning that there is an urgent need for discourse on how to care for these works long-term. In recent years, a few pioneering con servators, curators, and scholars have begun to create frameworks for the longterm care of performance. This volume presents, explicates, and contextualizes their work so that a larger discourse can commence. It will thus serve the needs of conservation students and professors, for whom literature on this subject is sorely needed. This interdisciplinary book implements a novel rethinking of performance that will challenge and revitalize its conception in many fields, such as art history, theater, performance studies, heritage studies and anthropology.

Performance Conservation: A Condition Report, or a Para-Ethnography in Three Acts

Revolving Documents Narrations of Beginnings, Recent Methods and Cross-Mappings of Performance Art, edited by Sabine Gebhardt Fink and Andrej Mircev, 2024

In this experimental chapter, three members of the research team Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge (funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, 2020-24) set out to perform a condition report that considers performance and performance-based art (later abbreviated to performance). A condition report is a central document in conservation practice that details the condition of an artifact at a given time, supplemented by photographs and symbolic mappings, so that any changes in its material state are documented. But the condition report meant here concerns the very concept of performance and performance conservation. We ask: What would it mean to understand performance through the lens of conservation? And how, in its manifold (after)lives, does performance resist classifications along with the standard curatorial and conservation procedures? Merging critical sensibilities with different tactics and methods in an experimental conservation-conversation that does not adhere to the conventions of academic discourse, we dissect, from our individual perspectives, and map into this chapter, both performance and performance conservation as inherently mutable concepts. Responding to a set of questions that formally guide our writing process, we argue for the necessity of close looking, and sensing, when faced with questions about the performance’s continuing life. Importantly, midway through the project, we are less concerned with delivering ready answers, but rather, in pursuing a certain form of para-ethnography, in which collaborations are forged between distinct actors and expertise. We are keen, moreover, on expanding discussions we have held amongst ourselves and with the project’s guests since its beginning. This is, by default, also an extension of an invitation to the reader to think with us and ultimately enter our conversation.

Caring For Performance: Recent Debates

CeROArt, 2020

Research Festival and Exhibition "Conserving Performance, Performing Conservation," Tanzhaus Zürich, Aargauer Kunsthaus, ADC Geneva, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts Lausanne, Dampfzentrale Bern, and HKB Bern, September 14-29, 2024

Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge, 2024

This is a first glimpse into the schedule for our long-awaited research festival and exhibition, "Conserving Performance: Performing Conservation," which is currently in its final planning phase. The events, which also mark the conclusion of our research project, will take place in venues across Switzerland from September 14 to September 29, 2024. Please save the dates and join us this fall in Zurich, Geneva, Lausanne, Aarau, and Bern! Can performance be conserved, and if so, how? And what does it mean to conserve performance? Examining performance through the lens of conservation, this research festival and exhibition celebrates performance in its social, material and epistemic networks by bringing together practitioners of performance, dance, museums and conservation with researchers across disciplines.

Charisma and desire in the conservation of performance art

Routledge eBooks, 2023

Peeling the Paint off the Walls: Kelli Morgan on Black Performance and Racial Justice in Western Institutions—A Conversation with Hanna B. Hölling, Jules Pelta Feldman and Emilie Magnin

Performance The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care, Volume I, 2023

In conversation with editors Hanna B. Hölling, Jules Pelta Feldman and Emilie Magnin, Kelli Morgan—critical race scholar, curator, educator and social justice activist—discusses challenges relating to Western conceptions of institutions and their underpinning values. Addressing the colonialist roots of modern museums, Morgan talks about the challenges she has faced as a Black woman in several US American museums; emphasizes the importance of creating change in museum collections (rather than only in temporary exhibitions); considers alternative practices for conserving art and knowledge; and explains her efforts to address these problems in her pedagogy.

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

Studies in Art, Heritage, Law and the Market, 2023

Potential afterlives Cauleen Smith on the relation of film to performance—A conversation with Hanna B. Hölling and Jules Pelta Feldman

Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care , 2023

Cauleen Smith is a filmmaker and multimedia artist who produces street perfor­ mances, flash mobs, installations, drawings and art objects. Smith holds a BA degree in Cinema from San Francisco State University and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles and is a professor in the School of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles. In the conversation below, Smith discusses films such as the highly acclaimed Drylongso (1998), Sojourner (2019) and Space is the Place (A March for Sun Ra) (2011), the last of which documents the Solar Flare Arkestral Marching Band, a “flash mob” Smith organized in Chicago, for which a high school marching band played the music of Sun Ra. She also speaks about Black Love Procession, a collective perfor­mance—part celebratory parade, part political protest—that she organized in Chicago in 2015. Throughout the conversation, Smith reflects on the possible afterlives of her works, the relation between film and performance, and the importance of contingency in her process. As Smith explains, revisiting the past has the potential to resurrect old traumas but also to improve the future.

Living materials

Routledge eBooks, 2023