What we're reading: on conserving and collecting the ephemeral

In recent decades, art historians, archivists, conservators, curators and academics have devoted a great deal of attention to the issues raised by collecting new forms of art, from performance and installation pieces to interactive new media. The scale of the challenge was already clear by 1999, when scholars at the Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles, organised a conference titled Mortality Immortality? The Legacy of Twentieth Century Art.

Many of the questions raised by other new artforms also apply to ceramics in the expanded field. The particular materiality of clay brings its own complications. Some of the issues which are especially significant to the Future Ecologies of Clay project include:

• How can we preserve or document the non-material aspects of a work so that it doesn’t become a mere material trace or detritus?
• To what extent can performance be detached from the skill, presence or body of the artist? If skill is inherent, can the work ever be ‘translated’ into a medium that can be collected or kept beyond the physical or temporal reach of its creator?
• How do we separate notions of an object’s significance from its persistence? Is it useful to think of the artwork as a process, which may begin before it is collected and continue afterwards, perhaps ending in its disappearance?
• How can museums accommodate, welcome, or document decay?
• How can we preserve the physical sensations of interacting or being present with a work when it no longer exists in the same form?

Some useful recent publications which address these questions include:

Baldacci, Cristina, Clio Nicastro and Arianna Sforzini (eds.) (2022), Over and Over and Over Again: Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory, ICI Berlin Press

DeSilvey, Caitlin (2006), ‘Observed decay: telling stories with mutable things’, Journal of Material Culture 11:3, pp. 318-338

Hölling, Hanna B., Jules Pelta Feldman and Emilie Magnin (eds.) (2023/2025), Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care, vols. I-II, Routledge

Irvin, Sherri (2022), Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art, Oxford University Press

Muller, Lizzie (2008), ‘Towards an oral history of new media art’, Fondation Daniel Langlois, https://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=2096

Pelta Feldman, Jules (2023), ‘Reperformance, Reenactment, Simulation: Notes on the Conservation of Performance Art’, 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual, pp. 675-711

Pollard, Joshua (2004), ‘The art of decay and the transformation of substance’, in Colin Renfrew, Chris Gosden and Elizabeth DeMarrais (eds.), Substance, Memory, Display: Archaeology and Art, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research

Scholte, Tatja and Glenn Wharton (eds.) (2011), Inside installations: theory and practice in the care of complex artworks, Amsterdam University Press

Van de Vall, Renée and Vivian van Saaze (eds.) (2024), Conservation of Contemporary Art: Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Practice, Springer International

What other readings do you recommend that speak to these questions?