New Strategies in Conservation

Re:Paik. Rethinking materiality. Concept, object and installation after the advent of new media (working title)

The thesis poses questions that consider the constitution of conservation objects, our understanding of what the artwork is and how it functions within a certain historical moment. The novelty of my approach lies in the attempt to reconsider the very materiality of complex multimedia installations in relation to their conceptual dimension. Tracing the changeability of artworks in time, their diverse embodiments and incarnations I strive to define their identity in relation to the processes of transformation they undergo. In studying media installations of the 1960-90s, I observe commonalities with early conceptual art 1960-70s regarding, to name a few: the importance assigned to the pure idea, the presence of instruction or score, delegation of the material realization (fabrication), and the simultaneous existence of physical realizations of a concept in time. In their variability, multimedia installations appear as complex entities that embody in different stances in relation to space and time; they are - following Umberto Eco’s concept of open artworks - works in progress, committed to an everlasting process of becoming. Their behaviour is similar to musical performance as they reject the adaptation of common notions of nominal or expressive authenticity applied in traditional arts. In my project, I propose a different approach to installations – as allographic works experiencing autographic moments. In my thesis, the musical allegation is justified by the focus on Nam June Paik, whose roots in classical western music and composition, studies with Stockhausen and Cage and involvement in Maciunas’ blurring boundaries Fluxus movement were influential. My engagement with Nam June Paik’s oeuvre owes much to his pioneering role in the introduction of video-, television- and global communication technologies to visual arts and its implications for the transformation of the understanding of material uniqueness from its conventional sense of being embedded in an object that endures. A further reason for choosing this topic was the fact that as a museum conservator at the Centre for Art An Media (ZKM), I was, among other artworks, in charge of one of the largest collections of Paik’s objects and installations in Europe.

The association with music as a temporal form of art and the concept of indeterminism propagated in New Music has led my thinking towards the changeability as a phenomenon occurring in connection with time, but time understood in other than sequential and chronological dimensions. I have found a number of alternative conceptions of time helpful in rethinking the temporalities of artworks in ways other that those of linearity, continuity, and permanence that have tended to lie behind the assumptions of conservation. Going further, I discovered that time governs not only objects but also their archive, which follows its own intrinsic rules and temporalities. The last chapter of my project is devoted to the artwork as an archive.