“What If?” Digital Documentation as Performance and the Body as Archive in Deborah Hay’s No Time to Fly

*By Linden Hill

Dance is like a living thing. You can’t force it, you can’t catch it. You have to make yourself aware and it will come to you. And the complexities which arise will not overwhelm you. They will only inform you. Just that. And you learn every time.
– William Forsythe[1]

The fleeting nature of dance is both a blessing and a curse. Knowing that dance works are ephemeral gives dancers and choreographers a freedom of experimentation; it is liberating to know that whatever happens during the performance might disappear once it is finished. On the other hand, how are future dancers and scholars able to analyze these dance works if we allow them to vanish? With an aim to preserve choreographic works, a number of methodologies of dance notation have existed for centuries. Most widely known, Rudolph van Laban’s theory of Labanotation is a written system for recording and analyzing human movement. Other platforms exist, including reconstructions through video, oral history, and “restorers.”[2] Though these platforms are certainly suitable for more traditionally codified dance forms, once we shift into the realm of post-modern contemporary dance, [3] where all boundaries are broken, it is much more difficult to find an effective way to document, archive, and ensure the passing down of this body of choreographic work. These types of dance pieces cannot be reduced to a shared, written notation. Choreographers and dancers alike understand the urgency to document these ephemeral works, some of which are singular events rather than a series of repeated performances. It is crucial, therefore, to resist freezing dance performances to a singular instantiation, but simultaneously allow for fluid discourse to continue into the future.

This article explores two distinct, yet complementary notions: the idea of documentation as performance and the idea of the body as archive, using William Forsythe’s Motion Bank[4] as a case study. Before going into an analysis of these two concepts, it is important to have a brief background on Motion Bank and the choreographers involved in it. American, Frankfurt-based choreographer William Forsythe is a pioneer in facilitating collaborations between choreographers, graphic designers, and digital technicians, which allows for a complex exploration of the choreographic process. In his Motion Bank platform, Forsythe presents choreography as online visual data. In doing so, he acknowledges the transience of dance and creates what he calls “choreographic objects,” which are “models of potential transition from one state to another in any space imaginable.”[5] His choreographic objects are also a form of dance documentation and they have the potential to open up a range of phenomenological investigations.

For the continually expanding Motion Bank library, Forsythe plans to collaborate with choreographers who work in a variety of movement idioms. This article focuses on one iteration, American choreographer Deborah Hay’s solo No Time to Fly. In addition to briefly touring with Merce Cunningham’s company, Hay was a member of Robert Dunn’s composition class, presented her work at the earliest Judson Dance Theater performances, and participated in other collaborative events including Robert Rauschenberg’s “Nine Evenings: Theater and Engineering.” From early on, Hay, whose works have been described as being “more like rituals than concerts,”[6] limited the number of personal decisions made by herself (as the choreographer) and preferred to give the dancers more agency. It is unsurprising, therefore, that Hay’s practice largely revolves around score-based solos. These pieces consist of Hay (either orally or through written text) giving her dancers broad, yet highly specific cerebral images as scores. She frequently frames her scores in the form of “What if” questions like “What if every cell in the body had the potential to get what it needs, while surrendering the habit of a singular facing, and inviting being seen?”[7] The goal is not for the dancer to “arrive at an answer,”[8] but rather to notice the possibilities and potential for movement outside of one’s habitual movement comfort zone. Hay divides her questions into three categories: (1) the unanswerable, (2) impossible to truly comprehend, and at the same time, (3) poignantly immediate.[9] These questions open up the possibility of non-linearity in movement, which would require dancers to notice feedback on the body as they are performing the solo. The dancers are not expected to repeat the same exact solo in each instantiation; rather they occupy the same present as their audience. Hay’s aesthetic aim is to challenge her dancers to “re-choreograph her perceived relationship to herself, the audience, space, [and] time”[10] through a heightened cellular consciousness. Hay uses language as an object that lends itself to the creation of both movement and a physical environment; in this way, the performance informs the process.

Figure 1: All seven of Juliette Mapp’s recordings of No Time to Fly overlaid

For No Time to Fly, written in 2010 and recorded in Frankfurt in April 2011, three dancers, Jeanine Durning, Juliette Mapp, and Ros Warby, each performed Hay’s score-based solo seven times. Among the many layers of material one could explore, the online Motion Bank gives users the option to watch each dancer’s recorded dance performance side-by-side with Deborah Hay’s written score, read the dancer’s written notes and responses alongside Hay’s score, listen to interviews with Hay and her dancers, and look at a variety of movement diagrams, which translate the dancers’ movement paths into two-dimensional pictorial scores. Users also have the opportunity to control time by pausing or restarting the videos. There is no prescribed path of using the Motion Bank.

“What if” No Time to Fly was both autographic and allographic?

A discussion of the identity of No Time to Fly goes in tandem with a discussion of documentation as performance. The most effective way to analyze this piece is to divide it into three sections: (1) Hay’s written score, (2) the individual performances of each dancer, and (3) the movement scores depicted in the form of pictorial movement paths. Hay’s written score is autographic; she is its sole author. The performance of the score, however, is allographic. Each dancer has the agency to respond to the instructions according to her own interpretation of Hay’s text. We cannot trace the choreography to an “original moment” because the movements that a viewer would witness occur as the performer responds to the feedback from her own body resulting from the score’s instruction in that particular moment of the performance. Hay intentionally complicates the viewing experience by creating a score in which she claims, “No one moment, no one single meaning, movement, image, character, [or] emotion exists long enough for either the dancer or an audience member to identify what the dancer is ‘doing.’”[11]

The discussion of No Time to Fly’s constituent parts becomes more tangled by the subsequent visualization of the dancer’s performed movement paths in pictorial form, which become like a second score. Analyzed from one perspective, the visualization can be interpreted as autographic because one can trace each movement score to a specific iteration by an individual dancer; the drawing derives from her own physical movements. Additionally, the movement score could be read as autographic on the part of the graphic designer who translated the movement to a visual score, which could potentially exist independently as a work of art. Without the designer’s activation, this new score would not exist in a pictorial form. The after-drawings transpose Hay’s score into an entirely new medium. In the Cagean sense, the score becomes a work of art— except in this case, these scores are produced after the performance. From another point of view, however, we could see the movement score as allographic as well, taking into account the element of chance that is inherent in the creation of the movement path. In Nelson Goodman’s discussion of scores and notation, he explains that, “a score, whether or not ever used as a guide for a performance, has as a primary function the authoritative identification of a work from performance to performance.”[12] The No Time to Fly movement score complicates Goodman’s assertion that “the function of a score is to specify the essential properties a performance must have to belong to the work”[13] because each of these scores (for each individual dancer’s seven iterations of the performance) has different properties, yet each is an “authentic” rendition of No Time to Fly. Simply because one dancer interpreted one of Hay’s instructions in a manner vastly different than another does not make it any less “authentic.”

In this case, therefore, the pictorial score is a visualization of the allographicity of the dancer’s performance. This visualization cannot be attributed to a singular author, yet much of its genesis is from a singular body and the decisions that particular body made in a specific time and space. Ultimately, this three-part organization illustrates scholar Rebecca Schneider’s argument of the “solo working against its own singular status.”[14] There is no single solo, single author, or single performance; rather, No Time to Fly is an accumulation of adaptations. The solo cannot be distilled down to “essential properties,” unless one considers the “essential property” to be the dancer responding to the feedback on her own body without hesitation as she follows Hay’s instructions. As a whole, No Time to Fly exhibits qualities of both allographicity and autographicity. The subsequent documentation of the piece, therefore, allows for a fluidity of interpretations.

Figure 2: Six recordings of No Time to Fly with Deborah Hay’s score at right

“What if” the documentation of No Time to Fly functioned as performance?

With these ideas about authenticity in mind, the focus can shift to a discussion of documentation. How do we document these fleeting danceworks, while still staying truthful to the spirit of the work? Peggy Phelan’s contested notion about the temporality of performance argues that performance can only be perceived in the present; once it moves past its initial moment of appearance, it is no longer the same work.”[15] Many scholars have responded to this charged statement, including Schneider and Amelia Jones,[16] but Christopher Bedford’s notion of the “viral ontology of performance” is especially captivating for this study. He argues that,

There is no performance outside its discourse. […] A given performance…splinters, mutates, and multiplies over time in the hands of various critical constituencies in a variety of media, to yield a body of critical work that extends the primary act of the performance into the indefinite future through reproduction. This approach in turn forces us to relinquish our attachment to the performance as primary act and instead submit to the notion that the object of performance art is in fact a long, variegated trace history that begins with the performance, but whose manifestations may extend, theoretically to infinity.[17]

We must divorce ourselves from trying to locate a singular “object” of the dance performance that begins and ends with the physical manifestation of choreographed movement. Rather, it is more productive to see dance performance on a larger space/time continuum. Deborah Hay believes that “Performance as practice suggests…that there can be more to the moment than just ‘being’ in it.”[18] “Being in it” is not just the physical performance of the movement, but also includes what happened before (the writing of the score) and after (the creation of the drawings), as well as all of the afterlives and permutations of No Time to Fly that could materialize in the future.

No Time to Fly, as recorded in the Motion Bank, is a clear example of both this type of “viral ontology of performance” and documentation as performance. That is, the act of documenting the dancer’s performances and the subsequent creation of the movement scores is its own type of performance. Philip Auslander writes at length about the performativity of documentation: “The act of documenting an event as a performance is what constitutes it as such. Documentation does not simply generate images and statements that describe an autonomous performance: it produces an event as a performance and, as Frazer Ward suggests, the performer as ‘artist.’”[19] This notion would not necessarily apply to No Time to Fly if it were performed in a typical proscenium theater setting, but because it was performed specifically for the Motion Bank, it is a performance of the act of documentation. This process of documentation offers a more complex knowledge of the dance piece than what would be afforded in a traditional performance setting. While an audience member sitting in the theater can be more-or-less neutral in her interaction with performed piece, the Motion Bank No Time to Fly viewer inherently has control over her experience. The Motion Bank viewer can control the work by suspending or manipulating time, and investigate the piece on her own. The possibility of fast-forwarding, rewinding, or repeating time gives the viewer the power to direct her own experience with the documentation. This philosophy aligns with Deborah Hay’s beliefs about giving the dancer more agency, rather than forcing her to realize a pre-conceived piece of choreography. In this documentation as performance, the viewer, too, can make decisions about how they interact with the dance. No two viewers will see the solo in the same manner.

Figure 3: Ros Warby, Juliette Mapp, and Jeanine Durning’s travel paths in relation to Deborah Hay’s score

In this way, No Time to Fly does not reject objecthood and finds an alternative solution to the paradox of immateriality versus the inherent desire to preserve. Documentation in the Motion Bank allows for multi-dimensional, intersubjective engagement with the dance material. As Auslander claims, “It may well be that our sense of the presence, power, and authenticity of these pieces derives not from treating the document as an indexical access point to past events but from perceiving the document itself as a performance that directly relates to an artist’s aesthetic project or sensibility and for which we are the present audience.”[20] By giving this virtual audience member agency in their present, the feeling of a performance is maintained. There is still a “liveness” that would be lacking if one watched a regular video recording of the work. The Motion Bank erases the privilege typically offered to live performance and instead places value in the act of documentation. As Amelia Jones articulates, “While the live situation may enable the phenomenological relations of flesh-to-flesh engagement, the documentary exchange (viewer/reader ­­–– document) is equally intersubjective.”[21] Forsythe’s platform exemplifies the potential for rich, engaging, complex relations between a viewer and the document.

The question remains: on what level do we engage with this digital information? Unlike other forms of dance notation, the Motion Bank is not necessarily about being able to reenact No Time to Fly in the future. Because the piece is score-based, the recorded generated movement is individualized to a specific dancer in a specific space, time, and relation to her body. It would not make sense to learn the movements from one of these videos and copy another dancer’s movement. If a dancer had an interest in performing No Time to Fly, she could obtain a copy of the score online.[22] The Motion Bank, rather, is available for anyone who seeks to learn more about the choreographic process. Removing dance from a typical performance setting broadens the audience demographic to include those outside the dance community. Allowing more people from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines to interact with and think critically about dance performance, the Motion Bank may instigate new conversations on the art of dance.

“What if” the Body became an Archive?

Forsythe’s digital information is a multi-dimensional approach to the documentation of dance and adds to the ever-expanding archive of No Time to Fly. However, the physical, live, human aspect of dance cannot be fully accounted for in this medium. I propose an idea external to the Motion Bank: a more thorough investigation of the body as archive.[23] Instead of trying to access information about a dance work through external “objects,” why not look to the instrument of production itself: the body? Learning about dance through solely watching a video or reading written documents is not sufficient for a well-rounded understanding of a dancework; rather, experiential learning must be included in the process of accessing any form of a dance archive. A dancer’s body stores information worthy of analysis that is unobtainable through other measures except through direct interaction with the body of that dancer. By communicating with a dancer on a human level, layers of knowledge that make up the identity of a given dancework can be revealed, layers that a dancer would be able to extrapolate from her body through the disciplined practice of performing, but wouldn’t ordinarily be visible to a viewer. From physical reenactments to oral histories, this knowledge could be approached through a variety of means, making it accessible to dancers and non-dancers alike.

Scholars in a variety of disciplines have been exploring the notion of embodied knowledge. In his work The Tacit Dimension, scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi argues, “we know more than we can tell.”[24] He believes the entire extent of our knowledge cannot be articulated verbally; rather, it revolves in a more virtual sphere. Because of this intangibility of knowledge, he favors the notion of transmission of this tacit knowledge through personal contact rather than through written document. In a similar vein, sociologist Richard Sennett traces the idea of skills beginning as a bodily practice.[25] Although his work focuses on practices that fall into the realm of “craft,” he highlights the vacant “gap that can exist between instructive language and the body,”[26] which helps illustrate the argument for an archive that includes the bodily dimension in order to help close that gap. In the bodily archive, the personal and human aspect needs to be complemented (but not replaced by) written documents. There must be balance between the imaginative and expansive virtual sphere and the framed context of a document.

In recent years, a number of scholars in the realms of time-based media and performance studies have also begun debating issues related to an archive dissociated from tangibility. As scholar Hanna Hölling articulates, “Archives are more than physical repositories. Archives exist on another intangible, non-palpable, and non-physical level of being, which is not as many suggest, metaphorical, absent, and conceptual; rather, […] is virtual and real.[27] The bodily archive simultaneously breaks down the fetishization of the tangible archival object and gives the dancers greater agency in the afterlives of the performance. Rebecca Schneider explains that, “When we approach performance not as that which disappears (as the archive expects), but as both the act of remaining and a means of re-appearance and ‘reparticipation’ (though not a metaphysic of presence) we are almost immediately forced to admit that remains do not have to be isolated to the document, to the object, to bone versus flesh.”[28] Even though we are drawn to the tangible thingness of an archive or document, movement-based art does not always lend itself to a wealth of physical remains. The thingness cannot be separated from the human body; it resides within the dancer. André Lepecki, a performance studies scholar, has done a thorough analysis of the body as archive. He proposes a “‘will to archive’ as referring to a capacity to identify in a past work still non-exhausted creative fields.”[29] For Lepecki, the end of a performance is the new beginning of a dance’s afterlife, which permits the work to undergo numerous permutations and manifestations. He continues, “The archive as border becomes the vertiginous skin where all sorts of onto-political ‘rewritings’ take place, including the re-writing of movement, including the re-writing of the archive itself.”[30] Here, Lepecki refers primarily to the notion of being able to access or enter the bodily archive through re-enactment of a choreographic work. Lepecki’s idea of porousness within the dance archive and focus on the living dancer as a carrier of the archive, which can then be shared with others is especially poignant.

As a dancer performs or studies the work of various choreographers, her body creates a “lineage machine,”[31] which sustains both Hay’s movement and her overall aesthetic principles in the dancer’s subsequent practice. Deborah Hay hopes to “loosen the tyranny of the myth of the dancer as a single coherent being. [Her] vision of the dancer, through the intervention of performance as practice, is a conscious flow of multiple perceptual occurrences unfolding continuously.”[32] Hay’s notion coincides with the idea of an active bodily archive. It is unrealistic for this archive to be immaculately in order; rather messiness and imaginativeness should be acceptable, as well as the understanding that this archive will inevitably change over time. In documentation and archiving, the focus can largely rest on the “author.” In the case of dance, the choreographer is usually given this idealized status. However, since dancers other than the choreographer are frequently the ones who embody the choreographer’s vision, their embodied knowledge must be taken into account when discussing the afterlife of a given dancework. Amelia Jones claims that the body “is not self-sufficient in its meaningfulness, but relies not only on an authorial context or ‘signature’ but on a receptive context in which the interpreter or viewer may interact with this body.”[33] Jones’s “receptive context” could take the form of the bodily archive that physically interacts with future generations of dancers or interpreters.

FIGURE 3 – Figure 3: Ros Warby, Juliette Mapp, and Jeanine Durning’s travel paths in relation to Deborah Hay’s score

Does No Time to Fly infiltrate the dancer’s later performances, even if they are by a different choreographer? Jane Blocker articulates, “If one body in performance transmits an earlier performance by another body, but does so unintentionally or unknowingly, can it still be said to function as an archive of that earlier action?” [34] The Motion Bank participants are all choreographers in their own right and perform in the works of other choreographers; consequently, they perpetuate Deborah Hay’s No Time to Fly as it exists in residual form in their bodies. Perhaps it is not the same degree or intensity of performance as exists in the Motion Bank or through other archival instantiations, however, in terms of the virtual bodily archive, even if unintentionally, the bodily residually carries with it the remains of performances past. With Deborah Hay’s dancers, this residue is more conceptual and exists in the heightened bodily awareness a dancer brings to her movement.

Effective dance documentation requires a multi-layered approach, resulting in collaborations with experts in a range of fields. William Forsythe’s Motion Bank technology is extremely rich and, when used in conjunction with a bodily archive, it can allow for future generations to interact with the ephemeral category of dance in order to better understand its process. Issues with this technology include cost, the documentation of site-specific performances, and spontaneously occurring performances. The Motion Bank is an open-ended entity. At this point, it is unclear whether the Motion Bank methodology can be universalized to encompass the entire ever-expanding category of “dance,” but it will be intriguing to see, as new Motion Bank websites are released, how Forsythe deals with these same issues with choreographers of different styles.

---

*Linden Hill graduated cum laude from Barnard College, where she studied art history, dance, and French literature. She is completing her MA at the Bard Graduate Center, where her interdisciplinary research combines twentieth-century fashion history, dance history, and gender studies.

---

[1] William Forsythe quoted in Johannes Odenthal, “A Conversation with William Forsythe on the Occasion of the ‘As a Garden in This Setting’ Premiere, December 1, 1993,” Ballett International/Tanz Aktuell 2 (February 1994), 36.

[2] For a thorough discussion of dance notation see Ann Hutchinson Guest, Choreo-Graphics: A Comparison of Dance Notation Systems from the Fifteenth Century to the Present (London: Routledge, 1998).

[3] In this paper, I will use the term “post-modern dance” to refer to those dance idioms that flourished with the Judson Dance Theater in the early 1960s. The term “contemporary post-modern” will refer to more recent dance works whose choreographers’ ideologies draw from those from the Judson Dance Theater.

[4] William Forsythe’s Motion Bank website: http://scores.motionbank.org/dh/#set/sets

[5] William Forsythe, “Choreographic Objects,” http://www.williamforsythe.de/essay.html

[6] Susan Leigh Foster, Reading Dance: Composing the Choreographer, the Dancer, and the Viewer (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 6.

[7] Goldman, 164

[8] Danielle Goldman, Deborah Hay’s O, O, TDR 51, no. 2 (Summer 2007), 164.

[9] Deborah Hay, “How Do I Recognize My Choreography?” 2007, http://www.deborahhay.com/Notes_how_do_I.html

[10] Hay, “How do I realize my Choreography?” 2007

[11] Deborah Hay, “A Continuity of Discontinuity: Readings about Non-Linear Learning” lecture at Tanzkongress, June 7, 2013.

[12] Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1976), 128.

[13] Ibid., 212.

[14] Rebecca Schneider “Solo, Solo, Solo” in After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance ed. Gavin Butt (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 36.

[15] Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 146.

[16] See Amelia Jones, “’Presence’ in Absentia: Experience Performance as Documentation,” Art Journal 56, no. 4 (Winter 1997).

[17] Christopher Bedford, “The Viral Ontology of Performance” in Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History. Ed. Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 78.

[18] Hay, “Performance as Practice” http://www.deborahhay.com/Notes_Performance_as.html

[19] Philip Auslander, “The Performativity of Performance Documentation” Performing Arts Journal 84 (2006), 5.

[20] Auslander, 9.

[21] Amelia Jones, “’Presence’ in Absentia: Experience Performance as Documentation,” Art Journal 56, no. 4 (Winter 1997), 12.

[22] William Forsythe does, however, have additional projects that I think could be more useful if someone wanted to reconstruct one of his dance works, such as his Synchronous Objects (2009) digital platform documents his work One Flat Thing, reproduced (2000): http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu.

[23] See Andre Lepecki, “The Body As Archive: The Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances,” Dance Research Journal 42, no 2 (Winter, 2010): 28-48.

[24] Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966), 4.

[25] Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 10.

[26] Ibid., 179.

[27] Hanna Hölling, Re:PAIK. On Time, Changeability and Identity in the Conservation of Nam June Paik’s Multimedia Installations, Ph.D thesis (University of Amsterdam, 2013), 232.

[28] Rebecca Schneider “Performance Remains” in Perform, Repeat, Record, 142

[29] Andre Lepecki, “The Body As Archive: The Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances,” 31.

[30] Ibid., 38.

[31] Schneider, quoted in Jane Blocker, “Repetition A Skill which Unravels,” in Perform, Repeat, Record, 199.

[32] Deborah Hay, “Performance as Practice.”

[33] Jones, 14.

[34] Jane Blocker, “Repetition: A Skill which Unravels,” in Perform, Repeat, Record, 199.

Artificial Artifacts: Paul Sietsema and the Work of Conservation

*By David Crane

1.

The whole thing stands unceremoniously on a pair of sawhorses: a scale replica of Clement Greenberg’s apartment circa 1961, replete with miniature versions of mid-century modern furniture surrounded by paintings by Barnett Newman and Morris Louis (among others). The structure has an uneasy presence in the gallery. With an exterior consisting of blank walls of foam core, the piece is too self-enclosed to stake a claim as a freestanding sculpture. For the artist, Paul Sietsema, this room and its pendant, a similarly scaled recreation of the Salon de la Princesse in the Hôtel de Soubise, are merely a byproducts of his 2002 film Empire, in which they function as opposing art-historical nodes. “It’s nothing that’s meant to last and it never was,” Sietsema told Andrew Berardini in 2008, speaking of these structures. “I made them out of such cheap materials that they’re basically eating themselves alive. I don’t want to call them trash, but it’s like the stuff here in the studio.”[1] After completing the film, however, Sietsema hesitated when it came time to destroy them himself, having spent years on their creation. With the structures in limbo, Sietsema accepted an acquisition offer from the Whitney Museum of American Art, despite having “never wanted those to be shown anywhere.”[2] Thus, these self-disintegrating byproducts, artifacts of the studio, were displayed alongside Empire in Sietsema’s first museum exhibition at the Whitney in 2003.

2.

A recent New York Times article details the twelve-year-long journey of Tullio Lombardo’s sculpture of Adam from seemingly-irreparably shattered masterpiece to triumphant restoration. As part of the collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the sculpture was handed over to an expert team of conservators, whose work, captured on video, has been placed on view alongside the newly restored work. This type of presentation of conservation as part of an exhibition display is a growing trend in museum practice. Conservation was previously considered to be backroom, even clandestine work. Now its various forms of presentation extend to glass-walled conservation laboratories, interactive displays, and time-lapse videos that recall episodes of CSI, sometimes even including a whodunnit[3] angle. Regarding the myriad ways in which museums have recently put conservation-as-such on view, Emilie Gordenker, director of the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis in The Hague, states that, “restoration is the cutting edge of art history.”[4] Recent technological advancements in the field of conservation, and the ways in which these new tools can uncover previously untold material histories of the objects under observation, make this a plausible assertion. But at what point do these advances begin to bleed into the museological field in general, affecting not only the way in which centuries-old sculptures and paintings are studied and presented but the acquisition and display of contemporary art as well? What would it mean for restoration and conservation to be art itself, not just the at the cutting edge of art history?

Sietsema has tied the Whitney’s presentation of the two Empire-derived artifacts alongside the film in which they figure to an “anthropological view of [his] work”[5] Organized by Chrissie Iles, Sietsema’s Empire exhibition coincided with preparations for a Robert Smithson retrospective, on which Iles was simultaneously working.[6] The Smithson exhibition included a variety of preparatory drawings, sketchbooks, documentation, and ephemera alongside Smithson’s “proper” artwork. Describing this curatorial approach, Sietsema states: “It was like everything [Smithson had] done laid open … He’s no longer around, that kind of a view of him makes more sense.”[7] The “anthropological” presentation of an artist’s work can appear fitting when applied to an artist who, like Smithson, belongs to the (albeit recent) past. However, when applied to a young artist’s first museum presentation, the approach can breed a historicizing of the present, a flattening of chronology in which contemporary art is always-already an artifact ready to be entered into the museological complex of conservation. Chafing against this kind of premature ossification, Sietsema counters: “Just let the art be itself.”[8]

Smithson himself was often critical of the art world’s institutional complex, repeatedly characterizing the museum in his writings as a tomb or graveyard. For Smithson, the collection within a single institution of objects from the most various geographic locations and historical time periods leads to a deadening of difference, an endless homogenization in which “things flatten and fade” and the museum itself “becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that immobilize the eye.”[9] From this perspective the museum, in its static practices of classification, cataloguing, and conservation, halts the flow of time through which objects naturally deteriorate and decay. The dynamic disorder of entropy, a concept central to Smithson’s worldview, is thus cancelled by the museum. Smithson’s disdain for museum conservation extended also to his approach to the natural world. His pioneering works of land art in the late 1960s and early 70s did not function as celebrations of the natural world, but more often as explorations of disuse and degradation. “I’m not a salvationist,” Smithson once said, going on to assert that, “It might be quite natural that Lake Erie is filling up with green slime.”[10]

3.

In many ways, the genesis of Sietsema’s 2008 film Figure 3 relates directly to his experience exhibiting Empire alongside its constituent sculptures/artifacts at the Whitney. Sietsema described this in a 2011 interview, writing, “If my work is going to be turned into an artifact I might as well make artifacts and show it in a museum and see what kind of resonance this redundancy can create.”[11] Shifting away from the type of iconicity inherent in the architectural and art-historical subjects he had worked with in Empire, Sietsema centered the new film on artifacts from pre-colonial South Pacific island cultures. The artifacts that appear on screen in Figure 3, however, are not pre-existing “readymades” culled from various historical and anthropological collections and assembled for the film; rather, they are sculptures produced in Sietsema’s studio specifically to be recorded on 16-mm film. These are ideologically-slippery, indeterminate objects — at once both contemporary sculptures channeling canonic post-Minimalist work and ethnographic artifacts that appear to have been pulled directly from archaeological sites. Sietsema’s filmic work mines the fundamental tension between the museological drive toward conservation and the artist’s creative impulse toward dynamism.

Paul Sietsema, Figure 3, detail, 2008, 16mm film, black-and-white and color, no sound. Approx. 16 minutes. ©Paul Sietsema, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Paul Sietsema, Figure 3, detail, 2008, 16mm film, black-and-white and color, no sound. Approx. 16 minutes ©Paul Sietsema, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Shot in black-and-white, the film progresses patiently. Subtle dissolves provide transitions between the static shots. A number of different “artifacts” appear one by one on screen: ceramic vessels, cutlery, straps, nets, coins. Sietsema frames each object simply against a black background. In addition, intense close-ups document the weathered surfaces, cracks, and abrasions of the artifacts. The slow and measured manner of the shots and their attention to the minute details of the objects’ physical states recall the impersonal look of the conservator, whose work demands the study of each square millimeter.[12]

Figure 3 does not only recreate the act of close looking fundamental to the work of cataloguing and preserving physical objects. Ever-present and yet unspoken in the film is the problem of these objects’ origin, their implied life and function before their presentation. Sietsema described that he was drawn to artifacts from pre-colonial Pacific cultures because of their relative isolation from Western society.[13] The objects on display within the film would have functioned not as art-objects, but as tools produced and utilized for specific and necessary purposes within everyday life. Traded for by early colonizers, objects like these began to circulate throughout Europe, eventually settling into the precursors of modern day museums: the collections, cabinets and Wunderkammern that categorized and conserved them.[14] The film presents the results of this transformation, displaying the objects as if they were part of an archive or ethnographic slideshow. Separated from their activation as tools created for a distinct, utilitarian purpose, the objects have become ossified, out-of-time, or, in Smithson’s words, flattened and faded.

The film is not an elegy for the past lives of these artifacts or a Romantic recapturing of a “supposedly pure culture” through their re-presentation on film.[15] Rather, the film reveals the achronic, dissonant, and contradictory character of these forms, particularly in their physical construction. Writing in Artforum, Sietsema described the link between the utilization of available materials for the creation of tools within the cultures he was researching and the artistic approaches of post-Minimal artists. About post-Minimal work, he writes, “The sculpture took the simplest form that it could and was entirely based on the properties of the material.”[16] This type of “truth-to-materials” dictum forms for Sietsema an ahistorical bridge between the tools of the pre-colonial South Pacific and the medium-specific heyday of Greenbergian modernism.

In order to create a similarly-ahistorical object, Sietsema counterposed the pre-colonial forms of the artifacts with the materials from which they were made. These include substances commonly used by post-Minimal artists such as Hydrocal and other semi-industrial, non-traditional artistic materials. Most important, however, is the incorporation of materials used in anthropological and archaeological techniques of recording and preservation. For instance, Sietsema utilized both aluminum powder and gum arabic in the creation of his sculptures — the former used to add reflectivity and contrast to difficult-to-photograph objects, the latter a key tool in the reassembly of fragile fragments found on archaeological sites. The cracked vessels that appear in the film were created by pouring Hydrocal and printers’ ink around a plug; once the materials had hardened, the only way to remove them from the form was to shatter them. Sietsema reassembled these shards in order to create and film the vessels, but unlike the anthropological artifacts they resembled, the break-up and reassembly of these objects were natural by-products of their method of creation, rather than a preservationist attempt to oppose the material effects of time. Yet, the sculptures were ephemeral, already “deteriorating” upon completion, despite the methods and tools of conservation used in their creation.[17] Although Figure 3 visually, aesthetically, and even phenomenologically recalls the museological archive, the objects displayed within it are dynamic and shifting. Their filmic capture does not mark an endpoint in their existence, a “salvation” from the entropic nature of time through the work of conservation. Instead the film represents the ongoing fluctuations between a series of disparate-yet-overlapping locations and temporalities.

4.

A key component of Sietsema’s work is 16-mm film itself. Today, few films are shot, much less projected, on actual celluloid, particularly 16-mm. A running 16-mm projector in a gallery gives the viewer the impression of entering a time capsule: for older viewers, the experience of watching Sietsema’s 16-mm films may bring to mind their time in elementary and high school, when similar projectors ran educational reels.

Like the artifacts in Figure 3, the exhibition of 16-mm film, described by Sietsema as an “undead medium,”[18] engenders a temporal disorientation in the viewer. In Figure 3, this confusion is compounded by the subject of the work, as 16-mm film, due to its low cost, high sensitivity to natural light, and lightweight camera, often functioned as another tool of preservation for anthropologists and archaeologists working in the field throughout the mid-20^th century. Because Figure 3 performs in this way as a “lost” (or “found”?) film, an author-less visual record hidden in the archives now uncovered, it is difficult to recognize the work as the product of a contemporary artist’s studio.

Photography itself can be approached as a kind of conservation, wherein the deleterious effects of time on objects can be halted, albeit through the act of representation. The image stored in the archives of a museum often outlives the object it represents—a slice of the past that continues to move forward through time. The temporal disjunctions inherent to the separate acts of recording, viewing, and preserving film feature prominently in Sietsema’s 2012 film Telegraph. The film visually recalls Figure 3, as dissolves connect discrete presentations of objects against a black background. However, these objects are not studio creations, but real fragments of material histories: found wooden shards, assembled from a variety of sources including studio scraps and the wreckage left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. As the film progresses, the configurations of these shards alter slightly, suggesting an abstract linguistic code that has been stripped to its essentials. In one interview Sietsema states that the piece is “about transmission: simply how and what does this work transmit, what can any artwork transmit.”[19] Utilizing the iterability of the filmic medium, Telegraph explores how this kind of transmission can occur across time. In another conversation, Sietsema states: “I made the piece partially in the spirit of sending a message to a formalist painter who died very young in the 1970s. It is me sending a signal out into the time-space vacuum…”[20] Like Figure 3, the subject of the Telegraph lends itself to temporal ambiguity. The earlier film plays off of the “timeless” nature of the museum archive, but the chronological confusion exists between three discrete historic periods: the time of the objects (15^th-16^th centuries), of their entry into the archive (mid-20^th century), and of the creation of the film itself (early 21^st century). The objects in Telegraph, however, have no clear historical referent, appearing plausibly as both pre-historic and post-apocalyptic. The ahistorical nature of the wooden shards subverts a key task of conservation, in which an object is tied concretely to a specific historical moment through the maintenance of its condition at that point in time. The ongoing possibility of the shards’ transmission is enabled by photographic preservation—however, once filmed, the recorded message in Telegraph is no longer tied to any specific time except for that of its viewing.

Paul Sietsema, Telegraph, 2012, 16mm film, black-and-white and color, no sound. Approx. 12 minutes, looping ©Paul Sietsema, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

5.

Begun originally during the creation of Figure 3, Sietsema has continued to produce a number of drawings that fall under the rubric of what he has termed “figure/ground studies.” The drawings consist of detailed reproductions of newspaper pages in ink, often inverted or askew, on top of which appear “accidental” drips and rings of paint. More recently, deft enamel trompe-l’oeil depictions of paint can lids, notebooks, pens and pencils, and other typical studio tools covered in paint appear atop the pages. Some of the pages display biographical information – Untitled figure ground study (New York Times) (2009) features a review of the Empire exhibition by Roberta Smith, with white paint drips partially obscuring a “photograph” of the model of Clement Greenberg’s apartment. Others are more inscrutable, displaying non-sequitur juxtapositions common across pages of newsprint: for example, an image showing President Obama reversing key Bush-era counterterrorism policies appears side by side with a story on Sri Lankan rebels, both of which are flanked by an image of a Degas ballerina, an advertisement for an upcoming Sotheby’s auction.[21]

Paul Sietsema, Untitled, figure ground study (New York Times), 2009, Ink and enamel on paper, 31 x 34 3/8 inches, 79 x 87 cm ©Paul Sietsema, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

In many ways, these pieces function as the inverse of the objects that appear in Figure 3. The artifacts in that film embody a host of conflicting geographies, temporalities, and ideologies and their transition from everyday tools to art objects forms part the foundation of present-day conservation and museology. On the other hand, the figure/ground studies represent the preservation, even the memorialization, of studio detritus, of pieces of discarded paper whose typical length of value is 24 hours.

Yet, the fragments recreated in the figure/ground studies lasted for Sietsema. He explains that cleaning out his studio every few months became an “extensive editing process”[22] and, month after month, certain newspapers remained in his studio for indefinable reasons. Eventually, these few scraps became “artifacts of the studio.”[23] Here Sietsema again simultaneously reenacts and subverts the work of conservation, as the reproduction of these ephemeral pages in ink (and the careful working-over of each tiny fold, tear, and smear that this requires) resembles the single-minded obsessiveness evident in the work of the conservators who repaired the Met’s priceless statue of Adam. Unlike Smithson, whose forthright dismissal of conservation in particular and museological practice in general was linked to his interest in entropy, Sietsema’s investigation of preservation is a constant play of tangled contradictions. Perhaps the image of the model of Greenberg’s apartment that appears in Sietsema’s New York Times drawing functions as a totalizing mise-en-abyme, a crystalline reflection and refraction of the antinomies of conservation as mined in his work: an ephemeral-model-turned-reluctant-artifact preserved through photography, reprinted into the transiency of newsprint, finally conserved through the careful act of representation.

---

*David Crane was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio. 

---

[1] Andrew Berardini, “Dig Forever and Never It Bottom,” in Paul Sietsema: Interviews on films and works, ed. Quinn Latimer (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), p. 52.

[2] Ibid. p. 52.

[3] Carol Vogel, “Recreating Adam, From Hundreds of Fragments, After the Fall.” New York Times, November 8, 2014, accessed November 25, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/arts/design/recreating-adam-from-hundreds-of-fragments-after-the-fall.html#. Regarding the fall of the sculpture of Adam, Jack Soultanian is quoted in the article as saying, “Nobody knew what happened — it could have been foul play.” It was eventually determined that the sculpture’s pedestal had collapsed under the weight of the sculpture itself.

[4] Ibid. Gordenker also provides the link between the technological work of conservation and “crime scene investigation” in the article.

[5] Beradini, “Dig Forever,” p. 53.

[6] The Smithson exhibition was organized for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles by Eugenie Tsai and traveled to both the Dallas Museum of Art as well as the Whitney.

[7] Ibid. p. 53.

[8] Ibid. p. 53.

[9] Robert Smithson, “Some Void Thoughts on Museums (1967)”, in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 42.

[10] “Interview with Robert Smithson (1970),” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 237

[11] Gintaras Didžiapetris, “Interview: Paul Sietsema,” in Paul Sietsema: Interviews on films and works, ed. Quinn Latimer (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 16.

[12] In her catalogue essay for Figure 3’s presentation at MoMA, curator Connie Butler likens the act of viewing Sietsema’s diptych Ship drawing (2009) to the “hypnotic tedium of a conservator’s examination.” I believe the same kind of close looking Butler describes is active both on the part of the camera and the viewer in Figure 3. Cornelia Butler, “The Crystal Land: Paul Sietsema’s Figure 3,” in Figure 3: Paul Sietsema (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009), p. 9.

[13] Berardini, “Dig Forever,” p. 53.

[14] Discussing the dissemination of these objects within Western Europe, Sietsema states, “It’s where museums started.” Ibid. p. 53.

[15] Ibid. p. 53.

[16] Ali Subotnick, “1000 Words: Paul Sietsema talks about Figure 3,” in Paul Sietsema: Interviews on films and works, ed. Quinn Latimer (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), p. 86.

[17] Subotnick, “1000 Words,” p. 87.

[18] Christopher Bedford, Bill Horrigan and Paul Sietsema. “Chinese Ink: A Conversation,” in Paul Sietsema (Columbus, Ohio: Wexner Center for the Arts, 2013), p. 22.

[19] Ibid. p. 24.

[20] Adam Szymczyk and Quinn Latimer. “Impossibly Clean Models: Paul Sietsema in Conversation,” in Paul Sietsema: Interviews on films and works, ed. Quinn Latimer (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), p. 96.

[21] The title of this piece—Untitled figure ground study (Degas/Obama) (2011)—reinforces the unmotivated nature of this juxtaposition, managing to connect the unrelated personages with just a single backslash.

[22] Carter Mull, “Paul Sietsema: Interview,” in Paul Sietsema: Interviews on films and works, ed. Quinn Latimer (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), p. 32.

[23] Ibid.

Purposeful Impermanence: Biodegradable Art and Its Challenge to Conservation

*by Caroline Barnett

Dieter Roth, P.O.TH.A.A.VFB (Portrait of the artist as a Vogelfutterbüste [birdseed bust], 1968. Multiple of chocolate and birdseed; 8 1/4 x 5 1/2 x 4 3/4 inches (21 x 14 x 12 cm). Image courtesy The Museum of Modern Art.

Modern artists turned to unconventional materials throughout the twentieth-century as a way to signal their departure from traditional artmaking. But the shift should also be read as an active and purposeful engagement with the associations specific to artists’ chosen media. In the case of foodstuffs, ephemerality comprises just one facet of its meaning. Food’s capacity for social and art historical connotations should not be overlooked. This paper investigates the use of food in the practices of artists Dieter Roth and Janine Antoni. The conception, creation, and afterlife of their works will be key in properly interpreting the intended and actual meanings of their material.

A focused comparison of two self-portraits by Roth and Antoni, P.O.TH.A.A.VFB (Portrait of the artist as a Vogelfutterbüste [Birdseed Bust]) (1968) and Lick and Lather (1993), captures the constellation of challenges food-based art poses to the conservator. As Gwynne Ryan, the sculpture conservator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, has said, an art object in this unconventional vein “develops a life of its own”; examining statements by the artist is therefore not only helpful, but also often imperative to defining their work.[1]

Janine Antoni, Lick and Lather, 1993. Chocolate and soap; 24 x 16 x 13 inches (60.96 x 40.64 x 33.02 cm). Image courtesy Luhring Augustine.

Art compromised by inherent vice is invested with change at its core, and the typical system of values —such as those set out by Alois Riegl in 1903—is undermined.[2] Historical, age, art, and even commemorative value form an intricate web of competing aspects of the artwork that directly affect conservation considerations.[3] Should the conceptual thrust of the piece be privileged above its material appearance? If so, how does replication alter the discussion? Perhaps the solution is, as Ryan suggests, to treat the ephemeral art object as autonomous. From this vantage, the conservator is responsible first and foremost to the object and only secondarily to the artist.

Just over eight inches high, five inches wide, and four inches deep, Roth’s P.O.TH.A.A.VFB (Portrait of the Artist as a Vogelfutterbüste [Birdseed Bust] packs a substantial statement into a small package. The work, a portrait bust of the artist, is made entirely of chocolate and birdseed. It is both an example of and a critique on the long tradition of self-portraiture in art: steeped in conventions and associations, the portrait bust immediately connotes prestige, immortality, and, typically, white male dominance. Roth’s criticism arises directly from his chosen medium: not only is the chocolate dark brown—nearly a polar opposite to the purity of oft-revered Carrara marble, and a sly visual reference to excrement—but it is also diminutive and, more importantly, intrinsically unstable.[4]

Conceived for outdoor display, much of the original surface of the sculpture has been eaten away by birds and insects, Roth’s “collaborators.” The term implies an equitable, or at least dialogic, relationship, and is borrowed from ARTnews editor Robin Cembalest. In reference to Roth’s Basel on the Rhine from 1969, Cembalest wrote that the piece “is in constant flux: the metal is corroding, fat “blooms” on the surface, and small holes all over it mark the trails of Roth’s tiny collaborators, bugs.” Once-smooth contours disappear beneath a blanket of pockmarks. P.O.TH.A.A.VFB defies Riegl’s concept of deliberate commemorative value (implied by the portrait bust), which mandates that the monument remain legible.[6] Two issues for the conservator immediately arise: in the absence of the original surface, where does the authenticity of the piece reside?[7] And how does the birds’ and insects’ chiseling of the sculpture complicate Roth’s position as the artist?

Dieter Roth, P.O.TH.A.A.VFB (Portrait of the artist as a Vogelfutterbüste [birdseed bust], 1970. Multiple of chocolate and birdseed; ca. 9 x 6 x 4 inches (22.9 x 15.2 x 10.2 cm). Image courtesy artnet.

To begin answering these questions, it is first necessary to look to the context from which the works emerged. In 1968, at the end of a decade notorious for rejecting convention, Roth began utilizing chocolate as an artistic medium.[8] He intentionally opted for “good” store-bought chocolate (milk, dark, and white); he enjoyed its ordinariness, its place in everyday life, as well as its susceptibility to change over time.[9] Sarah Suzuki, a curator of Prints and Illustrated Books at The Museum of Modern Art, explains, “food products enabled [Roth] to incorporate into his art two of the basic elements of nature: time and biodeterioration.”[10]

Chocolate’s volatility stems from its fat—typically cocoa butter—and sugar content: both are prone to an effect called “blooming,” which manifests on the surface in an opaque, whitish film.[11] Precipitated by fluctuations in humidity or temperature, the bloom can significantly alter the look of an object, as is the case of Roth’s birdseed bust. Given the artist’s original intention, this effect seems fitting, even desirable: it combats the preconceived notion that portraits immortalize their patrons at a frozen moment in time. Roth’s chocolate is less about its social or cultural implications than its material qualities. Michel Delville read another chocolate piece by Roth, the Chocolate Lion (1971), as an “example of an art that allows the materiality of the work itself to describe the process of decay of edible matter.”[12] In a gesture of defiance, Roth chose a medium that was both untraditional and prone to degeneration, thereby rejecting the tropes of conventionality and timelessness engrained in art history.

Roth commented on conservation during his lifetime, expressing a preference for preservation through photography (in Roth’s words: “Photography can take the place of restoration as historical record.”). His interest in decay for decay’s sake bucks museum ideology. An art critic recounted his experience at an exhibition: “it’s hard not to smile…at the irony of museum-resistant art that celebrates the momentary being protected by DO NOT TOUCH signs.”[14] Indeed, Roth disdained museums, once likening them to funeral parlors.[15] The irony is thick, as Roth’s food-based works are destined to die if left untreated. Heide Skowranek elucidates: “It is less the result and more the continuing genesis of the work—its change and deformation through to decay—that is of importance.”[16] And, as conservator Elyse Klein insists, “Whatever the artist’s reason for willing his or her work to deteriorate, decomposition must be recognized and respected as the artist’s intent.”[17] But when deterioration is equivalent with the meaning of an object, what role does the conservator play?

For Suzuki, it means taking a passive approach: “[R]ather than letting nature take its course through decay or insect infestation—or, conversely, trying to restore the works to their original condition—the staff uses gentle tactics to maintain them in their current form.”[18] When a piece is infiltrated by insects, conservators will “set pheromone traps coupled with sticky platforms to ensure that no bugs live in the piece right now. They monitor the work often to make sure insects don’t return.”[19] Conservation through maintenance (or arresting the effects of decay at a particular moment before total disintegration) fits with what Theodora Vischer, a curator who was close to Roth, wrote about the artist’s desire to “record not an exclusive moment but a moment that endures…[and] that remains embedded and suspended in time.”[20] However, in this preventative method, the conservator projects historical value onto the object, and the decision of when to intervene in the decay process is both arbitrary and bound up in the conservator’s own preferences.[21]

An artwork can be “suspended in time” in two ways – through preservation or replication; Roth’s practice supports the latter. He explored the idea of replication in many of his works by producing them in series or multiple editions, diminishing the uniqueness of the art object.[22] He also collaborated with other artists regularly, thereby instigating the “dilution of his own authorship.”[23] For Roth, concept superseded content, as evidenced by his desire for the bust to be placed outside. The meaning of P.O.TH.A.A.VFB is tied to its decay, and its primary value, according to the artist, is age value.

The artist’s enjoyment of the serial object and his disregard for his own superiority as the sole author of his work understandably leads the conservator to the replica. When the work is in a public collection whose mission is to preserve and present the objects it houses, the work, particularly as a portrait bust, acquires a layer of commemorative value.[24] Replication provides a reasonable and fitting outcome as a supplemental, educational, and transparent option—the original would remain in the collection and, if possible, on view, while the reconstruction would be clearly labeled as such.[25] The replica “would repeat the process of decay for eternity,” doing justice to Roth’s concept while still making it available to later generations who can gain from experiencing it in a readable state.[26] Skowranek said it plainly: “If…we want to prevent the decomposition of works, we must first ignore Dieter Roth’s questioning of the eternal nature of art and either use the methods of conservation to fix an object in a particular state or create replicas of works with a short lifespan.”[27] The conceptual thrust, and its pertinence to artists operating in its wake, supports Skowranek’s claim.

Janine Antoni’s Lick and Lather (1993) comprises fourteen portrait busts and, like Roth’s sculpture, takes self-portraiture for its central motif.[28] The busts are larger than Roth’s and stand at approximately twenty-four inches high, sixteen inches wide, and thirteen inches deep, establishing a near-equal dialogue between artist, artwork, and viewer.[29] Completed in two parts, Lick and Lather contains seven busts in chocolate and seven in soap; only Lick will receive attention here.[30] To make the busts, Antoni created a mold from alginate and later licked the resulting chocolate forms to reshape them. Each is unique; the facial features range from detailed articulation to blankness. The impermanence of Antoni’s medium subverts traditional expectations of the portrait bust, while the intimate nature of her technique endows the busts with a by the sensuous connotations of chocolate.

Janine Antoni, Lick and Lather, 1993 [at the Hirshhorn Museum at Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., 1999]. Chocolate and soap; 24 x 16 x 13 inches (60.96 x 40.64 x 33.02 cm). Image courtesy Luhring Augustine.

Repetition of the busts in the museum gallery, elevated on identical plinths and arranged in a continuous line, subordinates the artist’s playful humor to the work’s austerity (Figure 5). Speaking about another piece executed in chocolate, Gnaw from 1992, Antoni described her practice as a whole: “I was interested in the bite because it’s both intimate and destructive; it sort of sums up my relationship to art history. I feel attached to my artistic heritage and I want to destroy it.”[31] Should ‘lick’ be substituted for ‘bite’, the overriding message in Lick and Lather becomes one riddled with tension, vacillating between homage and rejection. The structural precariousness of the medium reflects the same tension.

Antoni is indebted to Roth’s pioneering efforts using chocolate in art.[32] Unlike Roth, however, Antoni capitalizes on the host of associations that chocolate carries: indulgence, sensuality, nourishment, sweetness, pleasure, desire, appetite, obesity, and malleability. She appreciates its multisensory presence, banning vitrines so that viewers can smell and sometimes taste it.[33] As Antoni elucidates, “the thing about chocolate is that it has the product phenylamine in it. That product is the chemical that’s produced in our body when we’re in love. So, I think that’s why chocolate is so addictive.”[34] Addiction conjures its own set of social and political issues, but in the case of Lick and Lather, the overarching goal seems to be to evoke the idea of love, particularly self-love. The busts encapsulate a poignant push-pull between nourishment and deprivation, acceptance of one’s body and the endless desire to edit one’s appearance. These ideas are embedded in the chocolate, affirming that the physicality of Lick is exceedingly important.

Antoni’s statement about the chemical composition of chocolate demonstrates her familiarity with the material.[35] In an interview, Antoni conceded that she had researched “archivally safer” chocolate, but explained: “I feel it’s not chocolate without fat. By the time you take out the fat and the sugar, you might as well make it a bronze.”[36] Ultimately choosing a grade that will last 100 years, Antoni offered a hint as to what role decay plays in Lick: the aging of the chocolate, while pertinent to the subversion of portraiture-as-everlasting, is not the crux of the piece. Knowing the characteristics of chocolate and its vulnerability to heat and humidity, the artist’s method likely exacerbates the decay of her busts, but the technique is too important to sacrifice. The performance of bringing the busts into creation transcends all other components of the work, indicated by its memorialization in her titles. Indeed, Antoni has said, “How I made it is everything to me.”[37]

Janine Antoni, Lick and Lather, 1993 [at The New Museum, 2013]. Soap; 24 x 16 x 13 inches (60.96 x 40.64 x 33.02 cm). Image courtesy Jacinda Russell Art.

Antoni’s choice of a more stable chocolate and her statements on the connotative power of that material prove that decay is not the crux of Lick, but more an addendum. The layers of significance in Lick have more to do with their material appearance than their conceptual underpinnings.[38] While, like Roth, Antoni embraced serial possibilities in her art, she also privileged her authorship above the intervention of others, which is apparent in her willingness to remake her pieces if they become damaged.[39] Antoni’s technique for Lick and Lather indicates that the busts should be treated as wholly unique objects – the lick marks are specific to her and, importantly, imbued with the gravity of self-portraiture. Replication by anyone other than the artist should be avoided. For Antoni, aesthetic and authorial value reign supreme.[40]

As Joanna Phillips, a conservator at the Guggenheim, has said of time-based media art objects, “The artist’s voice is especially important when the artwork is still in a stage of ‘infancy,’ and thus still developing.”[41] This notion of artworks as mortal, prone to disease, aging, and obsolescence as much as human beings, translates directly to food-based pieces. Adopting this view affords conservators and artists the flexibility necessary to fully understand a piece as it evolves, making room for editing as well as replication.[42]

When an artwork is acquired by a public collection, the piece assumes new obligations and new layers of meaning.[43] Institutions are beholden to the general public, artists, and art historians alike, preserving its objects as sources of inspiration and resources for knowledge. These organizations have private responsibilities as well, namely to the professionals who staff them, such as the conservator, whose job demands an active role (however “passive”) in the preservation of the objects they collect and display. The private collector is a separate matter, as his or her focus, unfettered by the wants and needs of society, is trained primarily on his or her enjoyment of the piece. Contemporary artists must accept that the artwork she or he makes enters into the art historical record, and that its contribution begs to be preserved accordingly.

The beauty of unconventional art materials lies in how they make available a number of implications and associations that traditional media never could. To claim that this essay has touched on all the implications of Roth’s P.O.TH.A.A.VFB and Antoni’s Lick and Lather would be to do them an injustice. Indeed, their many layers of meaning are as prone to change as their materials. To this point, there is a significant difference between one artist’s experiment with an unfamiliar medium and the fully researched exploration of uncharted territory by another. For Roth, delving into the realm of foodstuffs meant a series of largely unplanned discoveries of what nature could do. Antoni approaches the unfamiliar after much thoughtful planning and consideration. This distinction is essential in interpreting the meaning of decay in their work.

To echo Gwynne Ryan, food-based objects are autonomous actors in the scope of art history. Christian Scheidemann, a private conservator of contemporary art, corroborates this perspective, saying that conservators “are responsible to the art work, not to the artist or to the collector.”[44] But Albert Albano, Executive Director of the ICA, a non-profit art conservation center, has warned of “the odd result” that can occur when a conservator places her own ideals before the artist’s.[45] Therefore, it is crucial that in serving the object, the conservator takes into consideration the intended and realized meaning of the work—along with its environmental “collaborators.” And in terms of twentieth- and twenty-first-century portraiture, perhaps a new definition of the genre is in order.

---

*Caroline Barnett is a second-year M.A. student at the Institute of Fine Arts, studying modern and contemporary art. Focusing on the 1950s-1970s, she is interested in material art history and minimal, conceptual, and performance art.

---

[1] Gwynne Ryan, “Variable Materials, Variable Roles: The shifting skills required in contemporary art conservation,” Objects Specialty Group Postprints, Vol. 18 (2011): 105.

[2] Elyse Klein, “Food for Thought: the Use of Food in Contemporary Art and Problems Related to its Conservation,” unpublished manuscript, n.d., Art Conservation Program, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, 8.

[3] Indeed, Sebastiano Barassi cautioned against overestimating intentional commemorative value in contemporary art in his article, “The Modern Cult of Replicas: A Rieglian Analysis of Values in Replication,” Tate Papers, Issue 8 (October 2007), accessed April 30, 2014, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/modern-cult-replicas-rieglian-analysis-values-replication.

[4] In an online article, Sarah Suzuki expanded on the visual slippage between chocolate and excrement, writing of Roth’s Bunny-dropping-bunny from 1968: “What at first looks to be a chocolate Easter bunny is, in fact, made out of rabbit food (straw) and rabbit droppings. With this revelation, the initial appeal of the chocolate bunny is upended, becoming disgust at the thought of this excrement pile, and prompting a consideration of the cycles of consumption and excretion, birth and death, creation and decay, in art and in life.” Sarah Suzuki, “Dieter Roth’s Bunny Leaves More Than Just Chocolate and Jelly Beans,” The Museum of Modern Art, March 29, 2013, accessed April 14, 2014, http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2013/03/29/dieter-roths-bunny-leaves-more-than-just-chocolate-and-jelly-beans.

[5] Robin Cembalest, “Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Self-Destructing Chocolate Head,” ARTnews, February 21, 2013, accessed April 14, 2014, http://www.artnews.com/2013/02/21/chocolate-self-portraits-by-janine-antoni-and-dieter-rot/.

[6] This idea is recapitulated and challenged by Michael von der Goltz in his essay, “Alois Riegl’s Denkmalswerte: A decision chart model for modern and contemporary art conservation?” on pages 51 and 53. Von der Goltz reminds the reader that Riegl’s understanding calls for conservation and even restoration (reconstruction) of the object, but he questions the relevance of Riegl’s approach to more recent commemorative works. Michael von der Goltz, “Alois Riegl’s Denkmalswerte: a decision chart model for modern and contemporary art conservation?” in Theory and Practice in the Conservation of Modern and Contemporary Art (London: Archetype Publications, 2010), 50-61.

[7] As outlined in the “Nara Document on Authenticity” of 1994, “Authenticity…appears as the essential qualifying factor concerning values. The understanding of authenticity plays a fundamental role in all scientific studies of the cultural heritage, in conservation and restoration planning, as well as within the inscription procedures used for the World Heritage Convention and other cultural heritage inventories.” The conference surrounding this document centered its discussion on the slippery quality of the term, “authenticity,” acknowledging its manifold meanings in different cultural contexts. To do justice to this loaded term would require a longer paper; for the purpose of this essay, the exact definition and location of “authenticity” in Roth’s oeuvre is understood to remain up for debate. Raymond Lemaire and Herb Stovel, “Nara Document on Authenticity,” Nara Conference on Authenticity (1994).

[8] The Museum of Modern Art, “Selected Works – Wait, Later This Will Be Nothing, Editions by Dieter Roth,” The Museum of Modern Art, 2013, accessed April 14, 2014, http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/dieter_roth/works/small-garden-gnome-as-squirrel-food-sculpture-kleiner-gartenzwerg-als-eichhornchenfutterplastik/.

[9] According to the Dieter Roth Foundation, Roth “used three classic flavours: milk chocolate, dark and white chocolate…delivered in blocks of 2,5 kg.” Dieter Roth Foundation, n.d., accessed May 3, 2014, http://www.dieter-roth-foundation.com/en.

[10] Sarah Suzuki, Wait, Later This Will Be Nothing: Editions by Dieter Roth (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2013), 87.

[11] As Glenn Wharton explained, “Bloom signifies dire consequences within the chocolate. In addition to the unattractive appearance created by the bloom, the structure of the chocolate itself has been weakened. In the most advanced cases, the fatty binder that once held the solid particles together has been lost, the plasticizer that gave the chocolate its flexibility and resilience is no longer in place. The resulting material is a powdery, crumbling mass. Milk chocolate is not as susceptible to bloom.” Glenn Wharton, “Sweetness and Blight: Conservation of Chocolate Works of Art,” in From Marble to Chocolate, ed. Jackie Heuman. (London: Archetype Publications, 1995), 164.

[12] Michel Delville, Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics of Consumption: Eating the Avant-Garde (New York: Routledge, 2012), 139.

[13] Heide Skowranek, “Should We Reproduce the Beauty of Decay? A Museumsleben in the work of Dieter Roth,” Tate Papers, Issue 8 (October 2007), accessed April 17, 2014, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/should-we-reproduce-beauty-decay-museumsleben-work-dieter-roth.

[14] Peter Rainer, “Things Fall Apart,” New York Magazine, April 12, 2004, accessed May 4, 2014, http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/art/reviews/n_10131/#.

[15] Dieter Roth: Bilder, Zeichnungen, Objekte, discussion with Hans-Joachim Müller (Basel: Galerie Littmann, 1989), n.p., in Skowranek, 2007.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Elyse Klein, “Food for Thought: the Use of Food in Contemporary Art and Problems Related to its Conservation,” unpublished manuscript, n.d. (Art Conservation Program, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada), 8.

[18] Robin Cembalest, “Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Self-Destructing Chocolate Head,” ARTnews, February 21, 2013, accessed April 14, 2014, http://www.artnews.com/2013/02/21/chocolate-self-portraits-by-janine-antoni-and-dieter-rot/.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Theodora Vischer, in Randy Kennedy, “Time and Other Collaborators,” The New York Times, January 17, 2013, accessed May 5, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/arts/design/dieter-roths-works-live-on-as-a-family-business.html?_r=0.

[21] The way Barassi summarizes historical value and the conservation treatments it typically incurs led me to this conclusion. Barassi, 2007.

[22] The Museum of Modern Art, “Introduction – Wait, Later This Will Be Nothing, Editions by Dieter Roth,” The Museum of Modern Art, 2013, accessed April 14, 2014, http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/dieter_roth/.

[23] Roth also recruited his son, Björn, to help in various projects over the course of his career, and Björn continues to execute his father’s artwork with the help of his own sons. “Dieter Roth. Björn Roth,” Hauser & Wirth, 2013, accessed May 1, 2014, http://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/1649/dieter-roth-bjorn-roth/view/.

[24] The qualifying mission of the institution is key. Roth’s Schimmelmuseum in Hamburg, for example, is a conceptual installation geared towards dismantling the socio-cultural conventions of art (Figure 6).

[25] As von der Goltz underscored in his chapter, where age value is difficult to capture tangibly in the art object, “documentation is what lasts and should be treated as an intentional commemorative monument.” Von der Goltz, 55.

[26] Skowranek, 2007.

[27] The ethical questions surrounding replication are complex and nuanced, and while relevant, would require a much longer analysis not afforded by a paper of this length. That said, it should be understood that a replica would be acknowledged as a product of the cultural moment in which it is made, independent of the original artwork.

[28] According to the artist, seven other busts exist independently of the installation discussed here. This paper focuses only on the Lick portion of the fourteen-bust work. Janine Antoni, (presentation, Technical Art History Workshop, Institute of Fine Arts, New York, June 27, 2012).

[29] Roughly a third of each bust is allocated to an elongated conical base; the anatomical bust, therefore, is likely about twelve inches high.

[30] It is worth mentioning that Antoni liked the soap for its overt link to the aesthetics of classical sculpture, and was part of her intent when conceiving the piece for its debut in Venice, Italy for the Biennale. Worth noting, too, is that soap has a fat content, which not only correlates it with chocolate, but renders Lather susceptible to bloom (and other effects of decay) as well. For further reading, a student at the Winterthur University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation addressed this issue in an article, “The Art of Soapmaking,” on the Museum blog. Clara Curran, “The Art of Soapmaking,” Winterthur Museum and Library Blog, July 10, 2012, accessed May 9, 2014, http://museumblog.winterthur.org/2012/07/10/the-art-of-soapmaking/.

[31] Laura Cottingham, “Janine Antoni: Biting Sums Up My Relationship to Art History,” FlashArt (Summer 1993): 104.

[32] Robin Cembalest, “Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Self-Destructing Chocolate Head,” ARTnews, February 21, 2013, accessed April 14, 2014, http://www.artnews.com/2013/02/21/chocolate-self-portraits-by-janine-antoni-and-dieter-rot/.

[33] When the work was first shown, a girl visiting the Venice Biennale bit the nose off of three of Antoni’s busts. In her response, the artist has said: “There’s not a lot of time between smelling and biting. It’s a funny thing when you make pieces about desire and people succumb to their desire.” Robin Cembalest, “Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Self-Destructing Chocolate Head,” ARTnews, February 21, 2013, Accessed April 14, 2014. http://www.artnews.com/2013/02/21/chocolate-self-portraits-by-janine-antoni-and-dieter-rot/

[34] Janine Antoni in Art21, “Lick and Lather,” Art21, n.d., accessed April 14, 2014, http://www.art21.org/texts/janine-antoni/interview-janine-antoni-lick-and-lather.

[35] In her interview with Art21, Antoni described her process for Lick and Lather in detail: “I took a mold directly from my body. I used a product called alginate, which is the kind of material that you might be familiar with when you go to the dentist, that sort of minty tasting stuff. It’s an incredible product because it gets every detail, every little pore. I even cast my hair. So, I started with an exact replica and then I carved the classical stand. I made a mold, melted down thirty-five pounds of chocolate, poured it into the mold. And when I took it out of the mold, I re-sculpted my image by licking the chocolate.” Her knowledge of the products is obvious, not only because she can easily name them, but because she is so fluent in speaking about their characteristics and behaviors. Ibid.

[36] Robin Cembalest, “Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Self-Destructing Chocolate Head,” ARTnews, February 21, 2013, accessed April 14, 2014, http://www.artnews.com/2013/02/21/chocolate-self-portraits-by-janine-antoni-and-dieter-rot/.

[37] Antoni presentation, 2012.

[38] It should be said that Antoni has defined herself as a conceptual artist. That said, she has also admitted to how often she changes her mind about her work and her practice, and it seems reasonable to assume that she would accept the claim that the tangibility of Lick and Lather is crucial to its meaning.

[39] It is known that Antoni has willingly replicated and restored her work, namely Gnaw and Lather, usually in the face of extreme, unpredicted and unwanted effects of aging. The artist’s eagerness to rectify excessive decay illustrates not only her perspective that she, the artist, is integral to the work, but also her utter investment in the tangibility of the object. Susan Emerling elaborates: “To stay connected to certain pieces, Antoni continues working on them long after they have been placed in collections. The performance and installation piece Slumber, begun in 1994, involves Antoni recording her rapid eye movements on a polysomnograph…Slumber now belongs to the Greek collector Dakis Joannou, but each time it is exhibited, Antoni travels to where the work is, records new dreams, and picks up weaving where she left off.” Susan Emerling, “Looking After Their Own,” ARTnews, May 1, 2005, Accessed April 17, 2014 http://www.artnews.com/2005/05/01/looking-after-their-own/

[40] Antoni’s comments about the future of her artworks are interesting, as it is clear that she, too, struggles with their fate. In a talk in 2012, she discussed the possibility of producing more casts of Lick and Lather, so that when sold, the piece would come equipped with molds of the licked and lathered busts. But the absence of her physical body clearly presents a problem to the ultimate meaning of the work: would a bust made from a cast and executed by a complete stranger really hold the same significance as Antoni’s originals? Antoni presentation, 2012.

[41] Joanna Phillips in Caitlin Dover, “Analog to Digital: A Q&A with Guggenheim Conservator Joanna Phillips, Part Two,” Guggenheim Museum, March 5, 2014, accessed May 5, 2014 http://blogs.guggenheim.org/checklist/analog-to-digital-a-q-and-a-with-guggenheim-conservator-joanna-phillips-part-two/. To substantiate the connection, Ryan readily acknowledged in her 2011 essay that “time-based media conservation often pav[es] the way to solutions that become viable for the broader category of contemporary art.” Ryan, “Variable Materials, Variable Roles,” 106.

[42] In Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture and Literature, Paul Eggert cited Walter Benjamin’s concept of mechanical reproducibility, holding that the art replica is not unlike the revised edition of a book and going so far as to say, “If artists are still alive when their work deteriorates then they may act as their own conservators.” Paul Eggert, Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture and Literature, (Cambridge University Press, 2009): 103. Additionally, Carol Mancusi-Ungaro’s thought-provoking essay, “Authority and Ethics,” touches on the many categories of replicas and an artwork’s aura, asking how it might migrate to duplications and what might happen if it should “make its way to the marketplace.” Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, “Authority and Ethics,” Tate Papers, Issue 8 (October 2007), Accessed April 17, 2014, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/authority-and-ethics.

[43] In telling the story of MoMA’s acquisition of Gnaw, Antoni said that immediately, onlookers began to interpret the work as “about an ephemeral work being in a museum” – a meaning she had never been interested in nor intended. But to her, the issue is tied up in our human fear of death; in this, she acknowledges the museum’s vested interest in preserving its collection. Antoni presentation, 2012.

[44] Christian Scheidemann, “The Art Doctor,” The New Yorker, May 11, 2009, n.p.

[45] Albert Albano, “Art in Transition,” AIC Preprints – 16^th Annual Meeting (New Orleans, Louisiana, 1988), reprinted in Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage, ed. Nicholas Stanley Price, Mansfield Kirby Talley, Alessandra Melucco Vaccaro (Getty Publications, 1996), 183.