The aesthetics of change: on the relative durations of the impermanent and critical thinking in conservation1 Hanna Hölling ABSTRACT Can we conceive of artworks in terms of their temporal duration – as events, performances and processes? Can artworks, including the recent portion of artistic production as well as traditional artworks, be rethought in terms of time and their intrinsic temporalities? Why and how would it matter for their conservation? This paper offers an opportunity to rethink traditional paradigms of conservation and art theory that regard objects as fixed and static entities. It proposes letting go of the belief in the apparent stability of objects that for too long has offered a skewed message by isolating the negative qualities of change. The kind of thinking in the expanded field of curation and conservation presented here fosters the acknowledgement of changeability and impermanence of these media as a condition of possibility for their survival. Introduction assume a certain fixity of objects or even strive to accomplish it. You say: the real, the world as it is. But it In this paper, I propose to revisit some is not, it becomes! It moves, it changes! implicit and explicit concepts in art and conser- It doesn’t wait for us to change … It is vation theories that contributed to a notion of more mobile than you can imagine. You a static object with a particular emphasis on are getting closer to this reality when you the materiality of Nam June Paik’s filmic work say it ‘presents itself’; that means that it is Zen for Film (1962–64), also known as Fluxfilm not there, existing as an object. The world, No.1. Fluxus is a particularly fruitful terrain the real is not an object. It is a process for my query essentially due to its precursory (Cage 1981: 80). role in the development of performance art, its questioning of the status of the object and its With these words, John Cage, one of the most focus on the idea of temporality and duration. influential avant-garde composers, music theo- rists, writers and artists of the 20th century, reminds us of the change that the psychophysi- cal world undergoes. This change opposes From traditional to new conceptions the fixity and self-containment of objects and artworks2 – an issue frequently neglected, For some considerable time, both art and especially when we analyse the expanded field conservation theories were oriented towards of conservation, including presentation and a static, stable, unique and authentic object. curatorial practices. Too often, these practices In conservation discourse and practice, such AT-02-Hölling.indd 13 05/02/2016 10:52 14 HANNA HÖLLING an understanding of an object was bound with completed set of actions. In his writings, follow- traditional approaches established in the con- ing Rosenberg and with reference to Jackson text of the restoration of artworks conceived Pollock, Allan Kaprow approached Pollock’s of as unique things, often in a single medium, paintings in terms of concluded happenings embodying an (individual) authorial intention. (Kaprow 2003 [1958]). A painting was ‘hap- Because the goal of traditional conservation was pening’ now (shifting its status from gerund to render ‘objects’ stable, change was charged to a verb) (McLure 2007: 14), and an artwork with negative qualities, so it was often to be con- ‘worked’. As one of the most versatile artistic cealed and/or arrested. This also had an impact tendencies of the 1960s, Fluxus, too, radically on the notion of time implicit in thinking about questioned the status of the ‘art object’ as both the conservation of artworks. Associated with a representation and as a static entity. Art, since a negative aspect of change, time was smoking Fluxus, has become a do-it-yourself – but rather the picture (William Hogarth), often related than a do-it-yourself object, a do-it-yourself to the negative effects of yellowing, cracking reality. The functional, sacrosanct object, an and fading of painted layers. Paradoxes of the art object as a commodity and as a vehicle of ideas about time and their relation to the status its own history, was rejected by artists associ- of objects resulted in attempts to return the ated with Fluxus (which did not prevent it from pervious, ‘intended’, condition of an object fol- returning in the later phase of the commodifica- lowing – and at the same time subverting – the tion of performances).4 Instead, and as we shall linear conception of time (Hölling 2013: 157). see in the example of Zen for Film, art became With the introduction of changeable artworks that which happens and transitions – an art- sometime from the middle of the last century, work in the state of permanent impermanence. conservation theories gradually began to shift. New thinking in this field began to be marked by the dichotomy of the enduring and the ephemeral – two different conditions of art to Zen for Film be conceptualised and treated differently. Until the transformation in the understand- Zen for Film (Fig.1) is a filmic artwork cre- ing of artworks created since the late 1950s ated by the Korean-American artist Nam June brought about different conceptions of what Paik (1932–2006) sometime between 1962 art might be, art theoretical discourse, too, and 1964. In its simplicity, Paik’s creative act revolved around the questionable term of a assumed a Duchampian gesture of a ready- static art object (Merewether and Potts 2010: made: what the work constituted was a blank 5; Heubach 1970). Since the late 1950s, art- 16 mm film leader run through a projector. works have gradually become associated with Although functioning as a concept rather than action, performance, happening and event. a physical arrangement of things, the work, as ‘“Art” is an artwork not as long as it endures, but originally conceived, was bound to a specific when it happens’, claimed German art theorist display apparatus, a film projector. The pro- and psychologist Friedrich Wolfram Heubach jector determined the behaviour of the work (1970).3 The idea of duration and temporality and resulted in a visual performance in which ruptured art-historical narratives and effectu- change – the accumulated dust, scratches and ated a certain detour in the understanding of marks – played a considerable role. Zen for the art object, formulated in the criticism of that Film leans on the aesthetics of bricolage: Paik’s time, notably in relation to painting. American creative gesture rendered a conventionally used critic Harold Rosenberg sought to understand film leader, a material widely available, and an a painting in terms of the transformation of ubiquitously present analogue film projec- its artefactual ‘thingness’ to the act of paint- tor, his filmic opus magnum. The more used ing itself (Rosenberg 1952). The event of the the better – the film, worn, used and stressed, painting resulted in the physical evidence of a was to represent the material condition of its AT-02-Hölling.indd 14 05/02/2016 10:52 THE AESTHETICS OF CHANGE 15 Figure 1 Nam June Paik, Zen For Film, 1962–64, Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Installation view during the exhibition Revisions–Zen for Film, Bard Graduate Center’s Focus Gallery, New York, 17 September 2015–21 February 2016. (Photo: Hanna Hölling.) own existence, as well as Paik’s thinking with programme. One of them, Fluxfilm Anthology and through the medium of film in the vein of (1962–1970),6 comprises some 37 Fluxfilms by experimental and structural cinema. artists including George Brecht, Dick Higgins, Zen for Film must have fascinated George Yoko Ono and Wolf Vostell. Zen for Film opens Maciunas (1931–1978), a self-proclaimed the compilation with a title sequence: ‘Zen for Fluxus impresario and organisational force as Film Fluxfilm No.1. Nam June Paik.’ In this well as a cinephile and enthusiast of film cul- film, the processual character of the artwork, ture. Producing unlimited homemade Fluxus its trace accumulation and the undetermined editions, Fluxkits, Maciunas encased various duration of projection became fixed (which did lengths of a blank film leader in several plastic not prevent the new medium from being worn boxes acquired in Canal Street in New York.5 and stressed in its own manner). Through this gesture, Zen for Film from Fluxkit The transposition of Zen for Film to its emerged: it indeed retained Paik’s initial con- Fluxkit variant and to Film Anthology effec- cept (a potentially projectable film), but it also tuated from Maciunas’ ideology of economic became something else – a collectable artefact. distribution of Fluxus artworks reassured Additionally, Maciunas also transposed Zen for by his leftist political attitude. Art making, Film’s simple logic – a leader that runs through according to Maciunas, should be available to a projector with no determination of dura- everybody and should use the simplest means tion – into a determined duration of a Fluxfilm available. From another perspective, Paik, AT-02-Hölling.indd 15 05/02/2016 10:52 16 HANNA HÖLLING Center in Minneapolis, among many others. Increasingly, the artwork has been displayed as a 16 mm projection, as a film from Fluxkit, as a film relic from the 1960s enclosed in a film can and housed by the MoMA Silverman Fluxus Collection (Fig. 2), and as a digital file.7 The work can also be viewed and is known to the majority of the Internet users in its digital form on YouTube, UbuWeb and through the Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) digital database. In the course of my research, Zen for Film materialised in many variants and variations. For instance, the Guggenheim Museum in New York presented Zen for Film as a projec- tion together with the 1960s filmic relic (The Figure 2 Remnant from the projections of Nam June Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Paik’ s Zen For Film, 1962–64, from the 1960s, Gilbert Asia, 1860–1989, 30 January–19 April 2009), and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Museum of while Tate Liverpool displayed a digital file Modern Art (MoMA), New York.