Hello Everyone,

What a morning it's been! So much to talk about. We are taking the lunch
break now and afterwards, the breakout session. But first, a recap of the
Morning.

Check out the Twitter feed at #av10 and #ccvm for more updates.

*+Benjamin Weil, LABoral: Commissioning for a Collection *

"Variable Media is a Constellation of Data"

*+Lisa Panting, Picture This: On Commissioning New Work for a Collection*

"Commissioning new artwork is a risk-taking enterprise"

*+Graham Howard, artist: On being Commissioned*

"Pieces that are uncollectable take on certain challenges in terms of
collecting, commissioning, and curating."

*+ Lois Keidan, Live Art Network: On Commissioning Live work*

"Performance art is a rejection of image, objects, and markets. Is making a
documentation at odds with the performance?"

*Benjamin Weil, LABoral:*

Commissioning is a strategy to:
-experiment new curatorial practice
-support emerging art forms and artistic experimentation
-collect Media Art with a small budget
-Develop Collection Care policies for instable art forms

Commissioning is connected to Conservation. Conservation is a challenge with
media that is constantly being updated. Do you preserve the idea of the work
and the artist intent, or do you preserve the object?

how do you work with readymades in terms of conservation?
How do you conserve video? how do you project video? What if projectors stop
existing? What about intelligent fabrics or technologies of the future? Who
knows what the future will offer us in terms of materials?

Case Studies: Christian Marclay *Video Quartet*. 2002
Pipilotti Rist: Stir Heart, Rinse Heart, 2004. Web Project Commission:
Lynn Hersman Leeson: Agent Ruby EDream Portal, 1999-2002. digital media/web
project
Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Untitled series. Issues at stake: Artist is dead.
There are no longer incandescent lights. What do you do to update and
replace the lights? Flourescent bulbs? is it important that the light is
yellow, that the bulb is the same shape? Felix wasn't completely concerned
with those issues. But of course, curators are, for the better or worse. So
what's the future of his "Untitled" series? What are the equivalents of
decoration in the future that we can use as equivalents for the lightbulbs?
Big question: what will be the meaning of this in 20 years, 50 years, 100
years? Even if we continued to make incandescent bulbs, they will begin to
mean something much much different as time progresses. The "code" of art
history is very complicated, and complex around new media art.

Mr. Weil's policy: The Care Contract: Devised a contract where he invited
artists to produce work, and promised the artist the museum would care for
it as long as it was possible, but not own it.

Issue of archiving web project: If you take it off the web, it ceases to be
a web project. Is it still valuable? What is it's status?

Buying a work of art/ commissioning a work of art is making a lifetime
commitment to care for it and make a context for it to be viewed and
understood and enjoyed by an audience.

H-box: video-commissioning program
-Yearly commissioning program of single-channel videos. No ownership. MS
Foundation wanted to do it as true patronage of the artist. up to 25,000
euros. If the artist wants to sell it, they can. Only obligation with MS
Foundation: Let the foundation present their work for a minimal period of 2
years in the screening room, and keep an archival copy as a "trace".
-If MS is going to keep copies, it may end up that this archive has value.
Maybe the artist comes back in 10 years and says "hey, I'd like access to
the archival copy you made way back when"--has happened several times

Is commissioning more glamorous, b/c you get to try out new curatorial
projects (collectors don't get as much input).
Commissioning frightens a lot of people, because you don't know what the end
result is going to be. If the relationship is horrible, the project may be
horrible. If they balance each other, you end up with a beautiful project.

Is the choice to collecting politically or financially based?
-It's a huge responsibility, as a private institution you can do whatever
you want in terms of respecting the integrity of the artwork. But when
you're a public institution, there are no limits to the needs to care for an
object in terms of time. You need to build a team of technicians to care for
the objects and media. It's a huge task and very expensive. Idea of LABORAL
is to engage with contemporary culture, not to collect media. Similar to The
Kitchen in NY: the idea of having support to produce work. A collecting
institution is different than a producing institution, but they can be
intertwined (like SFMoMA).

*+ Lisa Panting, Picture This*

Picture This: "develop artists film and video through commissions and
exhibitions. Our resources are used by artists and art organizations, and
our events, exhibitions and publications contextualise projects within
current developments in contemporary art" (from their website front-page)

Risk-taking enterprise: commission work that has not been done, don't know
what the end-product is going to be.

Self-reflexive program, trying to bring works into conversation with one
another. Trying to become more curatorial in their approach.

Commissions: partnerships and residencies. Work closely with Film London.
Idea of "restaging". Picture This has been around for 20 years; need to
restage things now.

Commissioner/ artist/ institution/potential collection: lots of tension!
-most important points: these conditions are specific to UK contexts. Clear
that people in other countries have different economic and intentional
imperative. Commissioning is about money in the end, institutions want to
recup costs from their commissioning. But this starts to cut down on
commission value, no longer about experimentation it's about success within
a collection. When you commission an artist, there is a right for the artist
to fail.

Question: Commissioning Workshop Process: Johanna Billing was given a clear
mandate to do whatever she wanted for the Biennale. Ideal opportunity to try
something else and be really open. The Camden money was able to underpin
that. Was she under pressure to document her process, not just to make the
performance piece but also to document it? She was supposed to make a video
to compliment the piece for the archive.

*+ Graham Harwood, Artist*

Pieces that are uncollectable take on certain challenges in terms of
collecting, commissioning, and curating. Some solutions include
commissioning a documentary or a photographer to create tangible objects and
records of the event or the art. Challenge: everything is very
site-specific. Are you taking things out of context by displaying it in
different media? Is the photographer or filmmaker creating a new work? All
about particular agency, institution, and relationship between
artist/curator/ documentation.

If an open source object is bought by a museum, the object is still free for
everyone. What are the challenges in this situation?

Case Studies:
ZKM 2005, acoustic installation, software memorial to the 4,500 slave
laborers. Take the database, which had been anonymized, and were able to
calculate how much breath they had in their lungs when they died, and
"breathed" the life back into Zed Kai-Yam.

*+ Lois Keidan, Live Art Development Agency*
The Agency offers resources and encourages development of artists, students,
critics, theorists, etc working in live arts and related practices.
Live arts have changed museums and institutions into lively, animated
community spaces
Can temporal works become concrete and collectable? Performance art is a
rejection of image, objects, and markets. Is making a documentation at odds
with the performance? Renditions and restagings through different media are
unclear and rarely successful in recreating the feeling and artist intent.

Case Study: The burning issue of live art photography: predominately the way
live art collecting is talked about
Marina Abramovic
Art must be beautiful, Artist must be beautiful
--had it photographed at first, did not like the result, destroyed the
media. Had it filmed, was satisfied. Is it a performance document, a
personal record, a performance to camera? All depends on who's diagnosing
it: artist, art collector, critic, institution, viewer, etc.

Carolee Schneeman Interior Scroll (photomontage): Many people's only
experience with the performance are these photos. Does its value lie in the
object or subject of medium?

Zhang Huan. 12 Square Meters (Chinese art project and artist). The
photographs, not the subject, were placed in an art historical context. The
performance was being written out of history: it was being decontextualized
and depoliticized.

Performance photographs are not always photo performance. Manuel Vason
"Exposures" creates collaborative photos that try to create the idea or
possibility of performance, not the documentation of the performance itself.


Question: who's work is it exactly? What does it mean for live art?

Case Study: Various: To add one meter to an unknown mountain

Carolee Schneeman does not own the documentation; her friend at the time did
it, and then claimed he owned it. She hadn't even seen them before he
started publishing and selling them.

Manuel Vason: always in collaboration with artist.
Is Vason commissioned by galleries or performance artists to collaborate on
their work? Does Vason pursue performance artists himself? What is Vason's
agency in the system? Are you hiring Vason as a service provider?
Lois responds: Vason is asked by performance artists, but whether or not he
was a service provider was a grey area. Always gets mucky when money is
involved.