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Chapter
3: Preserving installations Making decisions on what is key to a work is extremely difficult with works of art that could be categorized as “performative” in the most explicit sense. That is, works of art that are “designed for reproducibility” [“auf Reproduzierbarkeit angelegt[es]“], as one could say in reference to Benjamin’s canonical essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”.15 Reproducibility can be understood here as the possibility of repetitive reproduction. These works, unlike traditional works of art that are handcrafted and almost impossible to copy, are destined to be reproduced from the very beginning. Copies are no longer imitations or secondary representations, but equally valuable instances of the same thing. If there are differences between copies this is not because they differ from an original. Instead, there is no original; they only differ from each other. Changes in appearance can no longer be measured against the unchangeable features of an original that never changes its basic features (which is actually an illusion that cannot even be sutstained in the context of the preservation of traditional art objects like oil paintings). Hence, it is difficult to determine what is the first and last occurrence of a work that is always already a series. This specifically applies to a lot of work that could be subsumed under the category of media art. Many multimedia installations, for instance, change their appearance over a number of years, as they are adapted for a specific spatio-temporal situation. Moreover, there are always changes in the technology used and the functioning of that technology. For people working in the field of documentation and preservation that automatically leads to the question when an installation is still the same work of art (already including the possibility of variation) and when it has become something completely different. Here, the aforementioned tension between the wish to record and document – the need to collect “essential” information in order to make the work transferable to a different situation – and the changeability of installations is rather evident. In some cases, as in the case of many of Peter Bogers’ works, changeability is part of the concept, as the concept itself changes over time. As a consequence, multimedia installations ask for different approaches to documentation and preservation than traditional works of art. Not only their variability and site-specificity, but also aspects like interactivity and time-based-ness confront conservators and restorers with new questions.16 Like performances the nature of installations differs from traditional art objects. Works incorporating time-based media are understood in terms of their behaviours as much as their component parts. The works often anticipate an active involvement by the spectator (interactivity) and evoke a multi-sensorial experience (sound, vision, touch and smell). They are created for site- and time-specific occasions, and demonstrate specific vulnerabilities both in terms of the contexts and technologies on which they depend. In order to be able to display these works in the future it is important to understand what is important to preserve. And what is important to preserve goes beyond the object-based museal approach of the past. In order to adequately present installation art both today and tomorrow conservators have to carefully document the specific requirements for the presentation – a task that is complicated by the fact that the “optimum” form of presentation is difficult to define precisely for many works of media art. One of the greatest challenges in the area of documentation of multimedia installations is the stipulation of rights and restrictions with regard to future presentations, finding a balance between the description of the actual presentation and requirements and a more abstract description usable for future presentations. In documentation and preservation one tries to capture the minimum and maximum requirements to describe the ideal installation space, lighting requirements, distribution of elements, concepts and objects involved. Projects like Inside Installation and the Variable Media Network are working on models for good practise and formulate guidelines for the preservation of installation art.17 To describe works that are variable in nature, the Variable Media Approach, initiated by Jon Ippolito, Associate Curator of Media Arts at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, has defined medium-independent “behaviours” instead of medium-specific qualities. The questionnaire developed in this context offers a framework to interview artists and museum staff, for instance, in the case of installations, about space, boundary, access, lighting, sound, security, base/s, distribution of elements, display equipment for inert elements, architectural placement and equipment visibility. Within this context, there are different behaviours under which works can be categorized. According to the Variable Media Paradigm the term “performed” can apply whenever the re-creators have to re-enact original instructions in a new context. Asking questions about the setting as well as documenting the initial event are key for the preservation of works that can be classified as “performed”.18 There are two ways of understanding the notion of variability that is developed in this context: 1. as based on a distinction between the concept of the work of art and its appearance, and 2. as related to the assumption that the concept itself changes every time the work re-appears. Whereas the first approach remains committed to more traditional and definitely more philosophically idealist models of description (making a distinction between an idea and its representation), the second acknowledges the intertwinement of the concept and the medium-bound situation (which is a slightly more “materialist” stance).19 In the light of contemporary media theory, the first possibility to understand variability must appear quite problematic, as it seems to suggest that there is an “immaterial” concept before it is placed in a medium-bound context. However, this assumption ignores the fact that any concept, mechanism or behaviour identifiable in a work of art is only developed under specific conditions, that is, in relation to media that structure it as an event. Katherine Hayles has pointed out something quite similar when stating that the so-called information paradigm, which has been rather dominant in the field of media theory for a couple of years, often fails in acknowledging the inseparable entwining of information and matter.20 In other words: there is no software without hardware, no data without carrier, no behaviours without “body”.21 At the same time, taking the initial artistic and technological context as a definite frame of reference for any further evaluation must also appear problematic, since the work might still be recognizable as such when occurring in a different form, bound to a different medium. Even more so as it might be unavoidable to migrate or emulate the work of art in order to preserve it, that is, to make it accessible in the future.22 Once again we are confronted with the paradox involved in the preservation of media art: in order to preserve a work in its “authenticity”, it has to change its form/mechanism/conceptual content (form and content can obviously not be separated here). And this is partly due to the fact that technological progress makes old technologies obsolete. If this is the core problem conservators of media art face today, it might be necessary to look for alternatives in defining what elements constitute a “work” or “performance” (describing it in terms of ‘behaviours” is one answer to the problem). What types of repetition can be tolerated for the work to survive? Obviously, there is a hidden criterion of “family resemblance” that is applied to the specific situation. The only difficulty is that this criterion cannot be made explicit as a determining factor in the process of decision making, because, in the course of categorization, it must necessarily loose its force; strictly circumcised categories and intuitive patterns of likeness seem to exclude each other. In this regard, there always seems to be a certain contingency involved. Therefore, final decisions are often left to the artist, if still alive. On what grounds, then, could one make those necessary decisions considering the preservation of media art works? The notion of performativity as tied to iteration, i.e. repetition that allows for differentiation or variability, regarding every performance as a performative event that is both temporal (or time-based) and processual, could lead to a possible solution. Every occurrence in this field presupposes a necessary singularity of the event, which has to be distinguished from an idea of an absolute uniqueness in the sense of an unrepeatable fact. So, what does this imply for preservation? It means that it is necessary to determine what type of event the work of art in its different “occurrences” is (rather than describing it in terms of its “appearances”, a notion that remains committed to an idealist distinction between idea and representation), instead of searching for an originary concept or mechanism that holds the work together. There are a couple of questions that one could ask here: “In what respect could the work be called performative?” and, more importantly, “What does happen here?” Obviously, this is a strategy which does not apply for traditional art forms that are not explicitly time-based, processual and reproducible. It implies to have close look at the individual works and their specificities – it is a process that does not start from theory, but from practice, or practice-as-theory. The outcome of the process of decision making on how – in what way – to preserve a work, is therefore always undetermined in the beginning. In that respect, this method is not dogmatic. |
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ON THE PERFORMATIVITY OF DOCUMENTATION AND PRESERVATION
OF VIDEO INSTALLATIONS |