This blog post celebrates the publication of a new volume, Object—Event—Performance: Art, Materiality, and Continuity Since the 1960s (2022). The volume's ten chapters consider questions of conservation that arise with new artistic mediums and practices.
When we ask about how to conserve performance-based art, what are we asking? If we think of performance as itself a mode of conservation, what are we thinking? What is at stake in conserving changeability?Rebecca Schneider [1] Contemporary discourses of care emergent from recent art and material culture have long left behind both the stasis …
When we endeavor to preserve a work of art, what are we preserving? What does it mean to preserve, and how can an artwork be grasped in the context of its preservation? What is the difference between the preservation of a traditional artwork and the preservation of performance? How much is any work of art a creature of its context? In the following, I am thinking with, and through, the ideas of Alva Noë, a philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.
For Florian Feigl, performance is about practice, continuity, and processes—things that lead to one another, things we do. Known for 300 (2009 – ongoing), a series of performances built upon everyday activities that take place within a prescribed time interval of circa 5 minutes or 300 seconds, the series exemplifies the concept of continuity in his work. Born in the moment of crisis while feeling overwhelmed by domestic obligations, his concept for this series followed a necessity to allocate slots of time to work. One can always find five minutes for doing something.
Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge 