AIC's 41st Annual Meeting

In 2005 Tate acquired its first two performances, a work by Roman Ondak called Good Feelings in Good Times 2003 and This is Propaganda 2002 by Tino Sehgal. Despite no material component existing for either work, Tate’s conservation department shares the responsibility for ensuring that we can continue to display these two works, and our increasing collection of performance-based artworks, into the future.
This paper explores impact of this move by contemporary art museums to collect performances on conservation and reflects on how an engagement with these works has lead to some surprising shifts in perspective for other areas of more traditional conservation practice. For example working with these forms of intangible heritage has had an effect on thinking around the museum’s ongoing relationships with artists, the role of memory in the conservation of a collection and an emerging conception of the museum as archive.
The research that informs this paper has been carried out under the auspices of the research network Collecting the Performative which is jointly funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council within the UK and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. This network looks at practice within dance, theatre and activism and asks how methods for creating legacy within these arenas can inform emerging conservation practice for performances collected by contemporary
art museums.