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.
Since its creation in 2005, the New York performance biennial Performa has played a leading role in the development and diffusion of performance art. We recently met with Performa's Managing Director and Executive Producer, Esa Nickle.
Guest contributor Nicole Savoy reports and reflects on our second annual colloquium, "Performance Conservation: Interdisciplinary Perspectives."
A recent performance by Geneva performance artist Davide-Christelle Sanvee at the Museum Tinguely demonstrates that performance itself is a tool for conserving performance art's history – and for reinterpreting it.
What does it take to care for living heritage and indigenous knowledge? What does it mean to conserve oral tradition or spiritual performance? How can museums become a space for engaging with living objects, and how to approach these through a decolonial lens? Our research team invited Brandie Macdonald, Chickasaw Nation/Choctaw Nation, senior Director of Decolonializing Initiatives at the San Diego Museum of Us to present her work and discuss these questions within the Thursday Lecture series organized at the Bern Academy of the Arts. In what follows, Emilie Magnin shares some reflections about the event.
When Kim Kardashian wore a spectacular dress originally made for Marilyn Monroe to the iconic annual gala of the Metropolitan Museum's costume institute, textile conservators expressed outrage. But how might we interpret this bold act from the perspective of performance conservation?
In conservation and art history, two disciplines that remain very visually oriented, the sound aspects of artworks are too often neglected or forgotten. This aspect was the subject of recent discussions with performance scholar Heike Roms and time-based media conservator Amy Brost.
This post reflects on our visit to an exhibition that showcases the use of advanced technologies – and partnerships with industry – to preserve, research, and access cultural heritage.
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.
Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge 