As usual, Jon Ippolito's comments on documentation and preservation
got me off my butt to send a follow up.
Documentation is indeed often used in a "conservative" sense in that
it provides a way to safely contain and neuter art practices and art
works that were formulated as institutional critiques (watching a
video of people cutting clothes off of Yoko Ono''s body years ago is
not nearly as impactful as sitting 7 feet away from the live act
feeling very uncomfortable and complicit). Museums and galleries
sometimes add insult to injury by presenting documentation as if it
were the artwork, without coming clean to the public and instead using
it as an opportunity to talk about the fluidity of certain art
practices. Sometimes the "document" is intended by the artist to be
the ultimate art work, but as often not, and I've rarely seen that
nuance make it into exhibition wall labels.
But, let me play devil's advocate by proposing that the boundary
between documentation and artwork is often not as clear as it seems.
Of course there is a whole genre of contemporary art works whose
medium is "documentation" and work at confusing those boundaries, but
there are also agents entirely outside the creation of the artwork who
can change these definitions after the fact. I'm no historiographer,
but I know that the status of an artwork can change from "primary
evidence" to document depending on the object of study. For instance,
if a scholar is studying a particular artwork, then that artwork is
the primary object and a contemporary review of that artwork or museum
record are forms of documentation. But if the scholar is studying a
period of history, history of ideas, or an art movement, then review,
record, and painting all become documents in relation to that primary
object of study.
It's important to draw the distinction between at least two very
different types of documentation: that which records a snapshot of the
object, frozen in time (re-cording) and that which is used to re-make
the object or maintain or keep it alive (re-generative). As Jon
hinted, musical recordings fit the first form and musical scores fit
the latter form. Using Jon's analogy of the footprint and the beast;
perhaps the plaster cast of the footprint fits the former form, and
the DNA of the beast fits the latter. It would greatly behoove museums
and galleries to apply as much rigor to documenting in the latter form
as they have in the former for 100 years.
Lastly, Jon, perhaps there's no debate about the authenticity around
the Lituus because at this point, we're simply talking about an
instrument in the abstract. Once the taste-makers of Western high
culture create an art superstar of the Lituus and set about preserving
one of her performances, I'm confident that the debates around
authenticity would quickly ensue.
Richard Rinehart
---------------
Digital Media Director & Adjunct Curator
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
bampfa.berkeley.edu
---------------
University of California, Berkeley
---------------
2625 Durant Ave.
Berkeley, CA, 94720-2250
ph.510.642.5240
fx.510.642.5269
On Jun 6, 2009, at 4:29 AM, Jon Ippolito wrote:
> I sometimes think of documentation as conservative in both senses of
> the word--a strategy that satisfies itself with preserving the
> footprint rather than the animal that made it. But as Alain Depocas
> and Rick Rinehart continually remind me, documentation is essential
> to some of the most radical techniques for resurrecting the beast
> itself.
>
> This was certainly the case for the Lituus, a long-necked trumpet
> that was ubiquitous in Roman times and cropped up in musical scores
> by Bach yet disappeared after the Baroque period. Now researchers
> have re-created a real working Lituus after designing software to
> emulate its sound, based solely on existing descriptions of the
> instrument:
>
> http://tinyurl.com/mv8bgs
>
> What's interesting to me about this example is how little fuss
> people seem to be making about the authenticity of rebuilding an
> instrument that no one living in the past half-millennium has ever
> seen or heard. As one of the commenters on Slashdot put it, "What
> they have here can almost certainly be called a Lituus."
>
> In the visual arts, meanwhile, Dan Flavin's former technician is
> devising a special wiring technique that the Flavin estate can fuse
> into certain fluorescent light fixtures that it decides are
> "authentic" sculptures by the artist. This, despite the fact that
> Flavin maintained that the medium of his work was light, and that
> the bulbs were interchangeable. (I suppose if you tried to reverse-
> engineer one of these wiring schemes, you could be prosecuted under
> the anti-circumvention clause of the Digital Millennium Copyright
> Act.)
>
> Yet this visual art world that is so fixated on authenticity is also
> happy to collect "net art" as JPEGs on CD-ROM and "performances" as
> silver-gelatin prints. Instead of seeing documentation as a means to
> an end, galleries and museums too often see documentation as *the*
> end.
>
> Is this contrast between music and the visual arts simply a function
> of their different economic models (selling objects versus selling
> rights)? Or is it a consequence of the fact that, at least until the
> age of recordings, music was always re-performed based on scores
> rather than locked away in vaults?
>
> jon
>
> ______________________________
> "ThoughtMesh invites you to push beyond the surface of your screen"
> --Tara McPherson, USC
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