Art, Lies, Conservation, and Complicity (MA Thesis)

TITLE
Art, Lies, Conservation, and Complicity: Ethical Implications of Material Specificity in Contemporary Art

ABSTRACT
Theories of material specificity abound in art history, and many major thinkers have argued that the affordances of particular materials are integral to the form and interpretation of the artworks they compose. Specificity in materials includes their physical and chemical properties, but also their histories and associations, some of which are created through the alchemy of artmaking. This paper considers the material specificity of artworks descendent from conceptual traditions wherein the poetics of the materials themselves are paramount. It traces the affordances of certain media and formats; what is lost when they are migrated or otherwise replaced (as happens so often in contemporary preservation practices); and the ethical implications of caring for artworks with simulated material construction.

Art and artifice are deeply intertwined, and artists have had myriad motivations to deliberately misrepresent the materiality of their works throughout history. These motives are often based on cultural associations with given materials, as well as shifting relative value assignments. The reception of exposed artifice in artworks is also historically various, from applauded skill to accusations of forgery, and audiences continue to respond across this spectrum today. However, in much global art of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, a conceptual focus on materiality has created a situation in which the discovery that a described material is false risks destabilizing the artwork’s meaning. This may seem paradoxical, as conceptual art is so deeply rooted in language and sometimes called “dematerialized”, but when the relationship between material and language is foregrounded as it is in conceptual artworks, the specific qualities and identity of the material is crucial for the cultural power and meaning of the work.

Conceptual and post-conceptual artworks can create ethical quandaries for their stewards, who risk changing the meaning of the works significantly through their well-intentioned interventions, but this paper focusses particularly on the ethics of conserving artworks in which a conceptually relevant material component is artificial, unbeknownst to the viewer. In such cases, it may be true that this “lie” is actually a component of the work, and thus may be something the conservator charged with the work’s care would be compelled to preserve. Yet, the scientific “objectivity” with which a conservator protects their authority is threatened when they cannot reveal material truths about the object of their care, which is also their object of study. How, then, should a conservator proceed, what should they reveal or conceal, when faced with preserving a work which relies on both material and mythology to function as the artist intended?

The case studies herein include works of contemporary sculpture, performance, installation, software, and video art, all of which rely on the poetics of their materials or mechanisms to generate meaning, and all of which suggest that those materials are other than they seem. Together they illustrate the difficulty of determining who (or what) a conservator is ultimately responsible to: the artist; the audience; the scholarly community; or the conservator’s own understanding and interpretation of the piece itself.