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 conservators, 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 thus 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.
List of figures List of contributors Introduction: Caring for performance HANNA B. HÖLLING, JULES PELTA FELDMAN AND EMILIE MAGNIN PART I Care: Theoretical entanglements 1 Charisma and desire in the conservation of performance art PIP LAURENSON 2 Not, yet: When our art is in our hands REBECCA SCHNEIDER AND HANNA B. HÖLLING 3 Vitality and the conservation of performance HÉLIA MARÇAL 4 Conserving the un-conservable: Documenting environmental performance for the twenty-first century GABRIELLA GIANNACHI 5 Innovation and preservation: Shadreck Chirikure on the performance of heritage—A conversation with Hanna B. Hölling PART II The politics and institutions of care 6 An experimental acquisition: Ralph Lemon’s Scaffold Room (2014) at the Walker IONA GOLDIE-SCOT 7 In the shadow of the state: Collecting performance at IMMA and institutions of care in the Irish context BRIAN CASTRIOTA AND CLAIRE WALSH 8 Towards a performance continuum: Archival strategies for performance-based artworks FARRIS WAHBEH 9 Peeling the paint off the walls: Kelli Morgan on Black performance and racial justice in Western Institutions HANNA B. HOLLING, JULES PELTA FELDMAN AND EMILIE MAGNIN 10 Performing the “Mask”: Kongo Astronauts (Eléonore Hellio and Michel Ekeba) on postcolonial entanglements HANNA B. HOLLING, EMILIE MAGNIN, VALERIAN MALY AND JACOB BADCOCK PART III Living conservation 11 Knowledge has to live: Dread Scott on Slave Rebellion Reenactment (2019) JULES PELTA FELDMAN 12 Conserving a performance about conservation: Care and preservation in Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s maintenance art KAROLINA WILCZYN´ SKA 13 Living materials: Ethics and principles for embodied stewardship CORI OLINGHOUSE AND MEGAN METCALF 14 Precarious movements: Contemporary dance as contemporary art ERIN BRANNIGAN AND LOUISE LAWSON 15 Potential afterlives: Cauleen Smith on the relation of film to performance HANNA B. HÖLLING AND JULES PELTA FELDMAN Index
Hanna B. Hölling is Research Professor, Bern University of Applied Sciences—Academy of the Arts and Honorary Fellow, Department of History of Art, University College London. Jules Pelta Feldman is a Postdoctoral Fellow, Bern University of Applied Sciences— Academy of the Arts. Emilie Magnin is a Doctoral Candidate at Bern University/ University of Applied Sciences—Academy of the Arts and a Conservator for Media Art and Installations at the Kunstmuseum Bern.
