TATE
Nahnou-Together is a partnership programme involving art museums and an informal art school in Amman, Damascus and London. This paper examines the structure, methods and progress of the programme, looking at learning from theory and practice, museums as sites of authority or participation, and individuals taking artistic, managerial, professional and amateur roles as they negotiate between institutions.
In 2002, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opened Eva Hesse, a comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s works including sculpture, works on paper and paintings. The advance planning required for assembling such an ambitious exhibition afforded conservation staff at SFMoMA significant time for the examination of condition issues in the artist’s work, especially sculptural works made from ephemeral materials.
During the modern art conservation training programme, many reconstruction exercises are undertaken for educational and research purposes. With the assistance of the artist or a relevant material specialist (for example, a woodworker or blacksmith), to-scale reproductions are made using the same materials and imitating the working techniques employed to create the original artwork.
This paper examines the operations of post-Kantian aesthetic discourses as parts of cultural technologies that induct individuals into particular kinds of independent and critical reflexivity modelled on the autonomy of the work of art. While acknowledging the historical force of these technologies in producing a form of ‘guided freedom’, the paper reflects on their limitations, particularly as exemplified in the writings of the philosopher Jacques Rancière.
For this workshop I would like to present three cases based on the collection of the Van Abbemuseum that – one way or another – deal with the notion of copyright and of the relationship of the replica to the artists’ original intentions. The first case is of a reconstruction that became an original, the second of a replica with a limited edition. The third case is that of a work which cannot be reproduced without losing its integrity.
This discussion of two films made for television in 1971 by Flemish filmmaker Jef Cornelis brings into relief an underlying characteristic of his documentaries of art-world events: the privileging of conflict over consensus. The paper also includes translated transcripts of interviews with the artist Daniel Buren included in the two films.
Archives are more prominent than ever, not only in art practice and theoretical discourse but also in popular culture. An archive is now understood to mean anything that is longer current but that has been retained. This paper considers how archival practice can be integrated further within current discourses of art history, theory and practice, at a time when the concept of the archive is at both more widely known and less fixed in its meaning.
This paper looks at a number of exhibitions planned and installed by artists from the late 1950s until the present. From these comparisons we see the extraordinary elasticity that the notion of exhibiting can provoke, ranging from an (apparently) empty gallery to the exhibition as an elaborate pretence, from taking the artwork to pieces and changing it into something else to an ‘endless’ proposition for engaging the creativity of the viewer.
The question of replication, reproduction and re-creation becomes particularly poignant in relation to Oiticica because he himself was very concerned with the life and afterlife of his works. Not only the existence they might have posthumously but how they would continue to live, retain their vitality and efficacy during his lifetime.
Recent research indicates that the taught curriculum in art and design secondary school education pays scant attention to meaning-making in visual art. This paper explores possibilities for teaching interpretation through a report on an action-research project based on Tate Modern's Summer Institute for Teachers, held in 2002. In doing so, it argues for the value and necessity of interpretation as a taught skill.
This paper attempts to articulate the distinctive qualities of the work of Education Curators at Tate Modern in relation to shifting conceptions of professionalism, specialist knowledge, responsibility and autonomy.
A close inspection of Richard Serra’s sculptural oeuvre, based on consultation with the artist himself, reveals that issues relating to replicas and reproductions have relatively little applicability for his practice. While Serra’s sculpture has ranged widely in form over the past forty years, it can nonetheless be loosely subdivided into four principal groupings, each determined by the materials employed.
As Sebastiano Barassi and Yve-Alain Bois point out in their contributions to this symposium, Alois Riegl’s essay ‘The Modern Cult of Monuments’ 1903, offers a useful set of co-ordinates for thinking about the Tate’s Gabo project, both because Riegl is explicitly addressing the problem of restoration and because, rather than advocating one attitude or another, he offers a taxonomy of possible positions.
Curators jumped at the chance of calling this colloquium ‘inherent vice’ because, what was a familiar term for conservation practice was a new one to them. In fact, the definition of inherent vice – while it reflects very accurately the problems posed by Naum Gabo’s plastic sculptures (which provoked this research project at its outset) by no means cover the range of questions raised by the question of replication.
This article explores the difference between learning and education within the context of contemporary cultural institutions. It discusses current theory and practice and argues that learning needs to shift from the margins to the heart of these institutions. It identifies structural and practical obstacles that need to be overcome for change to take place and concludes with suggestions as to how this might be achieved.
The desire to blur the boundaries between art and life was shared by a great number of artists working across the world in the 1960s. One of the most radical forms to emerge from this shared concern was a type of art that emphasised the lived experience of its viewers by requiring them to adopt new forms of active participation.
This paper explores the aims and outcomes of an artist’s residency in the Archives of the London School of Economics. It considers the impact of the residency on archive staff and on the arts community, and its role in attracting new audiences to the Archives.
The Other Story, 1989, the first retrospective exhibition of British African, Caribbean and Asian modernism, was received with derision and acclaim in equal measure. The paper discusses the roots of the controversy in Britain’s imperialist attitudes to race, nationalism and internationalism, the exhibition’s contribution to the erosion of ethnic barriers in the art establishment and its role in opening up a cosmopolitan perspective on British diasporan art.
This paper describes the findings of a practice-based research project to assess the qualitative shifts in learning made by participants in the Schools Programme at Tate Modern. It establishes learning frameworks in relation to this programme which is considered in the light of the Generic Learning Outcomes framework proposed by the Museums Libraries Archives Council in 2004.
Soon after the opening of Tate Modern in 2000, a fragment broke off a work by Naum Gabo, Spiral Theme, 1941, in one of our displays. Though this has yet to unleash terror, it was, as far as I was concerned, a spontaneous and unexpected action certainly raising amazement and unease. However, from talking with colleagues in conservation, it appeared that the various plastics of which the sculpture is composed were pulling against each other, and the most fragile gave way.
This paper examines some the changes that digital technology has wrought upon conceptions of space, time and culture, and how ‘new media art’ has historically reflected upon these. It suggests that such art might be better represented in institutions such as Tate, which in turn might help them engage with the question of what their own role might be in the digital age.
In the late 1960s, a number of artists who had trained as sculptors, and whose most well known work was sculpture, started working with film (Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson). Around the same time, independent film makers who did not necessarily identify themselves as ‘artists’ began to consider the sculptural dimensions of film – paying attention not just to the images that they presented on the screen.
In this paper the author reflects on the early history of the documenta exhibitions held every five years in Kassel, Germany, from 1955. Recalling his long engagement with the topic of the historiography of exhibitions, he compares documenta with earlier exhibitions at Recklinghausen and with Skulptur-Projekte Münster, drawing out the special features of what he calls periodic exhibitions.
Since the replica steering group was formed in September 2006, this is the first time we have invited other experts to join our discussions. Perhaps now, therefore, is the moment to resume our work in terms of its hopes and disappointments.
The author discusses the proliferation of the new genre of ‘remembering exhibitions’ as part of the recent interest in the history of landmark exhibitions, and focuses on three forms of re-enactment which she terms replica, riff and reprise. She also considers open-source, open-access online archives that can reshape the recording, reception and reiteration of an exhibition.
This paper discusses the role of the archive in relation to the artistic process, through the work of Lucy Gunning, and in terms of day-to-day interactions, with reference to the Studio International Archive held at Tate, the Wordsworth Trust Archive and the Henry Moore Institute Archive.
The artist Hans Haacke presents a career overview of his involvement with recurring exhibitions, from documenta 2 (1959) via the Venice Biennale (1993) to the 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008). Citing examples of his own contributions to major museum exhibitions (including Information at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1970), he explores the complex relations an artist has with institutions and their curators.
Some dramatic events have occurred to several sculptures by Naum Gabo in Tate’s collection. Quite suddenly they have changed from being relatively intact sculptures to being unstable and unusable items. This is because they are made from cellulose acetate. Gabo created many sculptures by cutting, bending and glueing sheets of transparent material, beginning with cellulose nitrate, which proved to be highly unstable.
The author introduces her in-depth survey of the exhibition Les Immatériaux, conducted during the show at the Centre Pompidou in 1985 (and published in 1986). The survey allowed new, non-statistical methodologies to be tested and today represents a valuable source of information about Jean-François Lyotard’s and Thierry Chaput’s landmark exhibition.
This paper describes the first phase of a multi-disciplinary research project that Tate is currently undertaking to document plastic sculptures by Naum Gabo. The project is a case study for a much wider debate about replicating art works. The Tate has the world’s largest collection of Gabo’s early sculptures, thanks to donations from the artist and his family. Despite storage in controlled conditions and a programme of regular monitoring.
How did the public respond to the reading room in the 2008 Turner Prize exhibition? This report suggests ways in which the purpose and design of the room should be reconsidered in the future.
Les Immatériaux, Jean-François Lyotard’s and Thierry Chaput’s 1985 groundbreaking exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, is discussed as a temporal and pictorial experience of working through (as in psychoanalysis) that which resists being seen according to conventional exhibition practices and the spatial logics of linear history.
For the past several decades art theorists have been wrestling with the consequences of fine art’s accelerated absorption into technologies of reproduction. Following Walter Benjamin’s qualified embrace of this situation in 1936, some have greeted technical replication as the final deliverance of art from outmoded notions of authorship, originality and uniqueness. The more democratic dissemination possible with photography, film and video positioned them as the contemporary artistic media.
For a number of years the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main MMK has been collaborating with artists that come to Frankfurt for a period of time to install their works of art or fulfil commissions. Many works originate on site and are at least partially affected by local conditions. In such cases we have a golden opportunity to accompany the artist’s activity for some time, which generally generates mutual trust.
‘History is not data but conquest, renewed in time and space by a thorough knowledge, unceasingly continued, unceasingly supplemented. This is indeed the lesson which we must learn from Paris-Moscow’. In these words Pontus Hultén introduced, in his lead article in Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, the project of the Paris-Moscow exhibition, organised in the spring of 1979 at the Centre Pompidou.
László Moholy-Nagy’s Light Prop for an Electric Stage 1930, is one of the key works in the history of twentieth-century sculpture, standing at the intersection of the histories of kinetic art, of the machine aesthetic, and of material innovation. Building on the artist’s exploration of effects of transparency and movement in his painted and photographic oeuvre, the Light Prop has also had a rich and influential afterlife, too.
This paper looks back at the author’s curatorial practice, with a focus on her ‘number shows’ and their randomly ordered ‘card catalogues’, from 1969 to 1974. These were related to the blurring of identities between artists, curators, and critics in conceptual art of the 1960s, and anticipated some more recent exhibition strategies.
For Naum Gabo, the issue of making replicas, copies, and reconstructions emerged with some force during his lifetime. Like many of the sculptors working in Russia during the revolutionary period, he was sometimes forced to execute his ideas in poor-quality materials, and works frequently became lost or damaged through the upheavals of the time. His colleagues, such as Vladimir Tatlin, who remained in Russia, tended to move into design.
This paper briefly discusses key legal and ethical issues involved and arising at the colloquium held at Tate on 18–19 October 2007, Inherent Vice: The Replica and its Implications in Modern Sculpture. It explores distinctions, if any, between the works of living and dead artists. he first and paramount reason for distinguishing between the works of living and dead artists – in the context of conservation, restoration and replication – is legal.
Sir Norman Reid, former Director of the Tate Gallery and a close friend of Naum Gabo (1890–1977), gave a powerful account of his last visit to the artist’s home in Connecticut in 1976. To his amazement, Gabo and his wife brought out quantities of drawings, sketchbooks and models that had been carefully put aside throughout his career. ‘They were not all in perfect condition,’ Reid recalled.
An in-depth audience survey for Tate Modern’s Rothko exhibition (September 2008 – February 2009) shows how visitors used the educational material provided. The report suggests how interpretation material can be better tailored to suit the needs of specific sections of the visitor demographic in future projects.
The idea that artists might reinvigorate and activate collections in new ways no longer seems a radical concept, but this understanding of the potential of collaborations between artists and archives was not always so widespread. This paper – based on a conversation held at the Archival Impulse Study Day at Tate Britain in November 2007 – explores the role played by Angela Weight as Keeper of the Department of Art at the Imperial War Museum between 1981 and 2005 in commissioning artists to work alongside the museum’s collections and archives.
Sophie Richard’s analysis, published posthumously in 2009, of the role played by the networks of artists, dealers, museum curators, collectors and critics in the development of conceptual art in Europe between 1967 and 1977 is introduced, with particular emphasis on the role of Konrad Fischer as the pre-eminent ‘dealer curator’ of the period.
This double question – the exact meaning of which can depend on the inflection of the voice saying it – embraces a wide range of issues and concerns about the pros and cons of replication. Looking ahead, it seems to me that as individuals we may conclude that a case-by-case review of various factors – including our knowledge of the artists’ intentions and the feasibility of creating adequate copies or reconstructions.
Advocacy – what is it? – and, indeed, stakeholders: who are they? The answers to these questions will be different for each individual institution, argues Andrea Nixon in a keynote address delivered in 2008.
One of the most important art works and myths in modern art, the inspiration for many installation artists, and still one of the most well known and published works by Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948), the Merzbau, in fact, no longer exists. It was destroyed in a British air raid in October 1943 in Hannover. By 1937, when Schwitters left his home town to follow his son into exile in Oslo, the Merzbau comprised a total of eight rooms.
I am a conservator working for the interdisciplinary research project AktiveArchive. We have been commissioned by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture to investigate questions relating to the preservation, documentation and accessibility of electronic art and to convey our discoveries to the museum professionals who are involved with Swiss contemporary art collections.
This paper examines the operations of post-Kantian aesthetic discourses as parts of cultural technologies that induct individuals into particular kinds of independent and critical reflexivity modelled on the autonomy of the work of art. While acknowledging the historical force of these technologies in producing a form of ‘guided freedom’, the paper reflects on their limitations, particularly as exemplified in the writings of the philosopher Jacques Rancière.
The problems that particularly interest me are those posed by the conservation or replication of works whose ephemerality is integral to their identity and conception. What attempts should be made, if any, to preserve the material integrity of such work, or of its residues if it was a performance or action? This might seem to be primarily an ethical issue, having to do with respecting an artist’s intentions, or, where evidence of this is lacking.
This paper considers a series of fundamental problems and paradoxes in accounting for interpretation in contemporary museum encounters, and explores the main contrasts between aesthetic and theological modes of encountering phenomena.
This paper explores the relationship between art practice and dialogic forms of gallery education. Drawing on interviews with selected artists, the text examines these practitioners’ constructions of art practice and their perceptions of how they engage with learners. The findings from this research illuminate the opportunities afforded by artist-led teaching and learning, whilst drawing attention to some of the challenges.
The 1985 exhibition Les Immatériaux – curated by French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard and Thierry Chaput at the Centre Pompidou in Paris – is cast as a pre-1989 event that foresaw the advent of globalisation, as a melancholic anticipation of the changing role of contemporary art in this era of accelerated exchange, and as a moment in a history of exhibitions in the wake of what was called, until recently, aesthetics.
I am currently in the midst of writing a book on Carl Andre’s poems and sculptures, so when I read through the list of issues the Steering Committee outlined for discussion, my mind immediately turned to the occasions when Andre has chastised museums for installing replicas, or ‘forgeries’ of his works. What light do these episodes throw on the larger debates surrounding replication?
This report provides an overview of Tate’s Social Media Communication Strategy, outlining the key objectives for each of its social media platforms. It also includes information about the Social Media Implementation Groups, Tate’s Social Media Code of Engagement, Tate’s Social Media Risk Register and an audit of current social media activity.
This text discusses questions of definition and of translation, both textual and cultural, in relation to local and global understandings of art made in the Middle East. In so doing, it explores tensions and contradictions that currently constrain research in this area.
This paper reflects on the development of Tate Forum, Tate Britain’s peer-led youth group (established 2002), drawing on interviews with past and present group members as well as those Tate staff and artists who have worked with them. It considers to what extent they are able, not only to participate in the gallery’s programme for young audiences, but also to influence how the institution and the Collection are perceived.
In twentieth-century sculpture, artists increasingly used new materials which were unfamiliar to them in terms of resistance to aging, and so were unable to foresee the speed and degree of decay these works would undergo – many of them turning out to have only a fraction of the lifespan which works from earlier periods had. On the other hand, artists played with the foreseeable and deliberate disintegration of works.
This report outlines the approach and vision shaping the development of Tate’s website. It reflects on recent technological changes (such as the growth of social media spaces and mobile internet connectivity) and expresses a new understanding of how Tate should engage with its online audiences.
The title suggests, with an air of irony perhaps, but that does not withdraw the implication, that replication in sculpture is an inherent vice (an internal flaw that will damage the value of the piece). Why should this be so? The vast majority of sculpture is replicated, and not merely in the cottage-industry of the artist’s studio but in industrial manufacture.
The following illustrated texts flag up a number of works from the last ten years, some of which are still in production, that take as their starting point existing objects or artworks and deploy processes of reproduction or replication as an investigative tool. All of these projects engage (to a greater or lesser extent) in, and have been generated through a close collaboration with, the mechanisms and culture of the museum.
There is the inside and the outside.
There is the interior and exterior.
Not as in the Foucault fold, but as in
essence, force and potency:
the interior silent power of art.
And it is here that hovers
Many contemporary artists operate beyond the studio and traditional exhibition spaces, providing both a need and an opportunity for galleries and museums to develop new models for the production and presentation of such work. Drawing on recent practice at the Serpentine Gallery, London, this paper explores some of these issues, and argues for an integrated approach to programming.
This paper reviews the challenges of attempting to negotiate complex cultural differences between the West and other parts of the world at a time when the balance of political, economic and cultural power may be shifting. Engaging with difference is seen as an ongoing process requiring depth and complexity.
How and why I became a sculptor is not of much interest. No one looking at my work will find me in it. I have nothing to say, I have no story to tell – at least not within the means of sculpture. What happens in the studio is not all that spectacular. You have no choice when it comes to actually making the works. Everything is decided in advance. The only thing you can observe in the studio is the production of the sculpture.
Early in 2006, in response to Tate, Nina and Graham Williams agreed that they would permit replicas to be made of some Naum Gabo constructions. The topic had been discussed with Tate on several occasions before this and previously Nina Williams, the major copyright holder, had refused absolutely to allow replication.
This paper considers the changing nature of art spaces in Beirut over the last fifteen years. Contrary to the experiences of nearby cities such as Cairo, Alexandria, Amman and Istanbul, the art scene in Beirut hinges on artist-led initiatives that, until recently, have been operating without spaces of their own. This paper explores the benefits and detriments of this now shifting situation, and suggests that ‘spacelessness’ has encouraged artists and curators to engage more meaningfully and directly with the city itself.
This paper looks at the interactivity of Carsten Höller’s Test Site 2006, using Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency (1998) and Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (1998). In the first part Gell is used to examine the interactive relationships between artist and participants mediated by the slides, the aesthetic quality and political significance of which are then revealed in the second part with reference to Bourriaud.
The popularity of art biennials has been taken as proof of the collapse of the concept of the centre and its peripheries, supposedly replaced by a more global, democratic and decolonialised art world. Drawing on data from documenta between 1968 and 2007, this paper explores the power implications of such art exhibitions with reference to the artists who are their lifeblood.
