Présentation intervenant.e.s

[[Ingold, Tim*]]

Social Anthropologist, Professor Emeritus, University of Aberdeen Tim Ingold est un anthropologue social renommé pour ses travaux sur la perception environnementale, la pratique experte et l’écologie humaine. Il a mené des recherches de terrain parmi les peuples Saami et finlandais en Laponie, explorant les liens entre environnement, technologie et organisation sociale. Ses recherches récentes se situent à l’intersection de l’anthropologie, l’archéologie, l’art et l’architecture. Il est l’auteur de nombreux ouvrages influents, dont The Perception of the Environment (2000), Lines (2007), Being Alive (2011), Making Anthropology: Why it Matters (2018), Correspondences (2020), Imagining for Real (2022) et The Rise and Fall of Generation Now (2024). Membre de la British Academy et de la Royal Society of Edinburgh, il a été nommé Commandeur de l’Ordre de l’Empire britannique en 2022 pour ses services rendus à l’anthropologie.

[[Bodor, Judit*]]

Curator & Academic, Programme Director, University of Dundee Judit Bodor est une commissaire d’exposition et chercheuse spécialisée dans l’art post-1970, les archives d’artistes et les pratiques curatoriales. Elle dirige actuellement le projet international Curating the Digital Attic Archive, utilisant des méthodes open-source pour réactiver des archives d’artistes dispersées. Ses recherches portent sur l’Artpool Art Research Center de Budapest, qu’elle étudie depuis 25 ans, et sur la notion d’archive active. Elle a publié dans plusieurs ouvrages, dont Performance in a Pandemic (2021) et What Will Be Already Exists (2021). Elle est également directrice des programmes MFA Fine Art et MFA Curatorial Practice à l’Université de Dundee.

[[Ellis Josephine*]]

PhD Candidate, University of Bern & Bern Academy of the Arts Josephine Ellis est doctorante en études artistiques, explorant les intersections entre histoire de l’art, culture matérielle et conservation. Ses recherches actuelles portent sur la poussière comme matériau et méthode dans les pratiques artistiques, notamment à travers les œuvres de Robert Filliou, Sean Miller et Jorge Otero-Pailos. Elle s’intéresse à la manière dont la poussière peut repenser la conservation, non comme une préservation statique, mais comme une production continue de sens culturel. Elle a obtenu son BA en Histoire à l’Université de Durham et son MA en Histoire de l’art à University College London.

[[Lushetich, Natasha*]]

Professor of Art, Media & Theory, University of Dundee Natasha Lushetich est une théoricienne et artiste dont les recherches interdisciplinaires portent sur l’art global, l’expérience sensorielle, les médias critiques et la complexité. Elle est l’auteure de plusieurs livres, dont Fluxus: The Practice of Non-Duality (2014), Interdisciplinary Performance (2016), The Aesthetics of Necropolitics (2018), Big Data: A New Medium? (2020) et Distributed Perception (2021). Ses travaux explorent la pratique du Fluxus comme une forme de pensée et d’action non-duelle, ainsi que les implications des technologies contemporaines sur la perception et la culture.

[[Wielocha, Aga*]]

Researcher & Conservator, PhD in Contemporary Art Conservation Aga Wielocha est une chercheuse et conservatrice spécialisée dans l’art moderne et contemporain. Son doctorat, obtenu à l’Université d’Amsterdam, a porté sur la vie et l’avenir des œuvres d’art contemporaines dans les collections muséales, notamment celles qui évoluent dans le temps. Elle a travaillé sur le projet Activating Fluxus, explorant les possibilités de réactivation des œuvres Fluxus dans les musées. Ses recherches actuelles visent à repenser le rôle des institutions culturelles comme des espaces d’activation et d’inclusion radicale, plutôt que de simple conservation.

[[Hölling, Hanna B. *]]

Research Professor, Bern University of the Arts Hanna B. Hölling est une chercheuse et théoricienne de la conservation, spécialisée dans les pratiques de préservation de l’art contemporain et les enjeux écologiques. Elle dirige des recherches à la Haute école des arts de Berne et est Senior Fellow au Collegium Helveticum (ETH Zürich). Ses travaux remettent en question les paradigmes traditionnels de la conservation, proposant une approche centrée sur le flux, la transformation et la participation multispecies. Elle est l’auteure de nombreux articles et ouvrages sur la conservation post-préservation et les ontologies changeantes de la valeur culturelle.

Notes

Introduction — Hannah Hölling

“You have to accept that the art will change.” _ Eric Andersen emphasizes the importance of constant change and confusion in art, rejecting the notion of fixed identities for artworks. He explains why he prefers the term “intermedia” over “Fluxus,” highlighting the fluid nature of his work that exists between traditional media boundaries.

Participant of the project :

• Aga Wielocha, project coordinator
• Josephine Ellis, PhD student

Visit the complete website, the radio, and the book. also consult Fluxus.gram Commitment to research with continuous diffusion.

What is Fluxus? — Aga Wielocha

Resistance to definition. A set of practices more than a movement. Maciunas uses the term for the first time. Poetry, performance, design, and object-making. Dissolve boundaries between art and everyday life. Make it accessible to everyone. Fluxbooks: event scores. Self-contained artworks.

What is Conservation? — Josephine Ellis

Conservation as an open and exploratory term. Conservation as a mode of activation, not of fixing. A form of interpretation and care.

Activity and Activation. Discussion: Hannah Hölling & Tim Ingold

“Remembering” — Tim Ingold, in a catalogue.

Presentation of Ingold. Lives of Lines.

HH : You never spoken in the context of conservation — what do you think of it?

Ingold: An art thief has to make themselves invisible, in spite of security systems. This is exactly what the conservator does in a standard gallery, they should leave no trace of their work or touch on the artwork. But if we abandon that model and accept that conservation is about care, and that we leave marks on art just as art leaves marks on us, then the art thief is out of a job!

Distinction between restoring and repairing:

• Restoration: Bringing a work back to what it was when it was made. About establishing permanence in the present.
• Repair: Picking up things from the past and giving them new life. Like an old engine starting again, moving from the past toward coming times.

Fluxus is more attuned to repair than restoration. We might imagine conservation as a form of repair.

On the notion of generation as influence / meshwork:

The present is an invention of modernity, setting up a difference between past and future. Other ways of thinking don’t have a notion of the present, but of presence. There is a slight disagreement with Kaprow’s idea of the radical present. Emphasis on ephemerality aligns with the radical present, but not with the natural presence of an animal. Fluxus moves in a temporal flow like a river, like the wind. Ephemerality is an expression of this way of thinking, always seeing the past in the future.

[Write my text on the conservation of flow]

On linearity and duration (from your publication):

Deleuze is all about flux. An intellectual hero.

On the notion of meshwork:

Ingold’s father was a mycologist. Anthropologists are the mycologists of social science. If biology had started with mycelium, everything would have been very different. Meshwork: everything is entangled.

• Network: relations between points.
• Meshwork: every line is a line of life.

He tried to speak with Latour about it, but he didn’t get the difference.

[Could explain why I am not convinced with Latour for my thesis. Also for conservation-as-meshwork?]

On interconnection and becoming:

Ontogenesis is crucial, the idea that everything is caught up in the process of becoming what it is, while ceasing to be what it was. This speaks to the notion of generations of beings.

[I am developing an ontology-based model to represent exhibitions as living meshworks of relations. But I keep wondering whether formalizing a living network kills it. How do you think about the difference between mapping relations and fixing them?]

(An)Archives (Wielocha): Notion of repertoire. Ingold uses the metaphor of a potato farmer. Every potato that is far below will resurface at time.

Preservation: He talks about making preserves to fight rotting apples, suggest we talk about preservation as something like making jam.

[Exhibition as anarchive? In the sense that it draws artworks out.]

In modern times, we tend to think of things as already formed. We should instead care for allowing newly born life to flourish. The rear-view mirror metaphor: when we talk about culture, we imagine looking at past things in the rear-view mirror, we want to save what we see there. Western thinking conceives of things as being born and dying. Not like trees, as in some African theories of being.

Should we think of monuments this way?

Fluxus started with destroying the piano (bourgeois culture), should it be in a museum?

Should Fluxus be in a museum? Benjamin and Arendt, in the book on the rise and fall of generations.

[See indigenous conservation practices.]

On participation-observation:

For Ingold, this is equivalent to ethnography. He feels it destroyed anthropology and would not want it to destroy conservation.

[If artworks are meshworks, what should we document? Today, relational databases document networks, not meshworks. We need to document movement.]

Re-activating the Archive: The Past, Present and Possible Futures of Art Pool Art Research Center — Judith Bodor

University of Dundee

Filiou — Poipoi

Judith worked at Artpool.

Founding of Artpool, 1979: to collect material for a Museum of Artistic Inventions scheduled to open in 2079. — Gyorgy Galantai, founder.

The term “active archive” only appears in 2003, in the website manifesto.

[Use the notion of “active archive” in the thesis.]

Artpool Letter, 1983.

[Connection with RAGIL?]

Poipoïdrome reconstitution : not a reconstruction but a continuous activation.

artpool.hu

Refunctioning archival material.

“Preserve the infinity of interpretation!” [This resonates deeply with my thesis.] See text on art correspondence, exhibitions, and the web.

Gyorgy: Active archive research.

Artpool integrated into the Budapest museum: tensions. Digitization assistance was helpful, but the exhibitions are no longer experimental or active.

She created a diagram representing the conception of Artpool before and after its acquisition by the museum.

Interesting term: repurposing.

Towards an Ethics of (Flux-)Dust — Josephine Ellis

Use of dust by Marcel Duchamp. Photo by Man Ray. Photo of Filiou dusting paintings. He recovers the cloth used in “The Eternal Network Presents Robert Filiou: Poussière de Poussière de l’Effet Poussin (Écho et Narcisse)” . In the box: the cloth and a photograph of the dusting.

A box at MAMCO.

Dust is usually a sign of neglect.

Flux dust — a form of relic.

[The frame as protection too — like the box, it protects the cloth from dust. Considered Filiou’s work as an archive? Environmental conservation and archaeology embrace dust because it is so full of micro-information.]

Ruskin on artworks: peeling grime from artworks. Experimental preservation.

Citing Rubio: Is dusting a photograph of an artwork the same as dusting the artwork itself?

Do You Flux? — Natasha Leshetich

Larry Miller: Fluxus is about folding and refolding reality. Duchamp: “It is obvious we have multiple dimensions.”

Fluxus is a method.

Event scores: written instructions for making events.

Synchronization: moments of synchrony.

[Conservation of scores: what if an orange disappears?]

Prepared Ping Pong (1964–76) — Georges Maciunas. She does not consider activation as a conservator’s act.

The Ship of Theseus: the answer is yes and no. We need a discussion on identity, a Western obsession. Organizational principle: people are overwhelmed with things; we need to process everything. Identity is useful as a non-identity not to create contradiction, but friction.

[Write article on the playground project, drawing a parallel with indigenous critical conservation.]

Fermentation.

Learning from Activation: Towards Other Forms of (Institutional) Stewardship — Aga Wielocha

Post-doctoral fellow, HBK

See museum+

Breathing exercise.

House of Dust.

CalArts: pedagogic activation in 2018. Exhibition The House of Dust at CNEAI.

Nick Montfort: created a web-based recoding, calls it a ”reimplementation.” 3D printing The House of Dust, 1967–2021.

What is House of Dust? An object poem : a poem in progress. Objects, drawings, activations, etc. An art project developed since the 1980s. An open-ended project. Goals are ambiguous by choice. Questions of authorship. Perpetuation: transmission or conservation.

Question of value: value for the field, for the community, monetary value. What value does documentation hold as conservation? Caring for the printer: effort may not be well placed. A methodology for the future.

House of Dust as a method.

Flux, Fluxus, Fluxism: Conservation after Permanence — Hannah B. Hölling

Mystery food.

Intermediality as Flux. The Unstoppable Transformation of Fluxus Matter.

“We can’t accept it simply disappearing.” Zen for Film : book and exhibition. Brecht Exit — intermedia artworks that move through different media.

Condition report: Simon Fleury. Immobile slices of time, he evokes the movement photographs of Marey or Muybridge.

[The idea of movement!!!]

Artworks want to change. Can we survive as art conservators or who is the “we” that survives?

Multiverse of conservation.

[If I may offer a critique: this is an event about Fluxus… hosting a symposium this formal ? With a day reserved for invited guests only? Felt a little non-welcomed.]

Final Discussion

Duchan / Wielocha

Ken: Polycrisis. Art is not going to save us from climate change.

Judith: Talking about objects conserves them.

Notion of Repertoire for archives: The focus shouldn’t be on iteration but on expanding knowledge by studying differences. [USE “REPERTOIRE.”] The museum is not in the business of showing process, it separates objects from archives. [This is increasingly true because of technology.]

Natasha: Remediation as a term : a form of conservation that includes the original media alongside its remediation. More like an anthropological museum. Aga presented the network and its own revolution.

Tim: What about skills? Fluxus artists don’t have any. We might forget skills working on conservation of this kind of art. [Having fun is a skill.]

Natasha & Judith: Performance is a skill of the body: embodiment.

Tim disagrees, explaining the difference between performance and learning the cello. Embodiment is not quite the right word, it’s haptic.

Ken: Georges Maciunas said everyone could do it. But Fluxus training takes a great deal of effort. [Art brut? And why should everyone be expected to know classical forms?]

Aga: The carbon footprint of conserving anything. We need to stop accumulating. Wielocha argues we should stop wanting to document everything. Let it go. Experience it. [See also: accept-decay].

Frankfurt Museum: think tank working with artists. Mentions a work by Cattelan, for which there is no clear record of how it was produced.

[Holling : the museum spoken of as a hospice. We do talk about Musée Palliatif wit Anne-Sophie Miclo et Mélanie Boucher ]

Lien avec la thèse

Meshwork, ontologie et la peur de formaliser le vivant

La conversation entre Hannah Hölling et Tim Ingold m’a arrêtée net. Ingold distingue le réseau du meshwork : le réseau relie des points, le meshwork est fait de lignes de vie entrelacées. Chaque ligne est une vie, pas seulement une relation entre entités stables. Cette distinction touche directement à ce qui m’inquiète dans mon propre projet : je développe un modèle documentaire fondé sur des ontologies computationnelles pour représenter l’exposition comme un réseau de relations, mais je me demande constamment si formaliser un réseau vivant revient à le tuer. Ingold ne m’a pas rassurée, il a plutôt confirmé que la question est bonne. Un meshwork ne se cartographie pas, il se parcourt. Ce que je veux construire serait donc davantage un outil de parcours qu’un outil de capture.

Je dois relire Ciula, Eide et Marras sur la modélisation à la lumière de cette distinction. La différence qu’ils posent entre modèle de et modèle pour modélisation descriptive versus outil projectif me semble plus claire maintenant : ce que je cherche à faire, c’est un modèle pour, un dispositif qui accompagne le mouvement plutôt qu’il ne le fige.

L’archive active et la preservation de l’infinité des interprétations

La présentation de Judith Bodor sur Artpool m’a donné plusieurs choses concrètes. D’abord, le terme archive active, apparu dans le manifeste web d’Artpool en 2003 seulement, alors que la pratique existait depuis 1979 : ça dit quelque chose sur le décalage entre pratique et formalisation théorique, décalage que je vis moi-même. Ensuite, la phrase de Gyorgy Galantai, préserver l’infinité des interprétations, est une formulation que je cherchais pour ma conclusion. C’est ça que je veux que mon modèle documentaire fasse : non pas fixer un état de référence, mais maintenir ouverte la pluralité des lectures possibles.

La tension qu’elle décrit entre l’Artpool avant et après son acquisition par le musée de Budapest est aussi un cas concret de ce que je theorise sur la patrimonialisation : l’archive a été numérisée, donc mieux conservée matériellement, mais les expositions ont cessé d’être expérimentales. Conserver a produit de l’immobilité. C’est exactement le piège que je veux démonter.

Wielocha et le droit à laisser aller

Aga Wielocha dit la même chose que moi : il faut arrêter de vouloir tout documenter. Laisser l’expérience être.

Je ne cherche pas à tout documenter, mais à concevoir une documentation qui permettent d’arrêter de tout accumuler et qui sache ce qu’elle laisse aller. Une conservation consciente de ses choix d’oubli, plutôt qu’un archivage compulsif. La documentation comme acte éthique implique aussi de décider ce qui ne mérite pas d’être retenu ou ce qui refuse de l’être.

Je dois préciser ma réflexion sur les traces dans ma thèse (Ricœur, la trace comme médiation entre passé et présent) : et si les traces les plus riches étaient celles qu’on n’a pas produites intentionnellement ? Les photographies de travail, les mails informels, les résidus des processus, tout ce que mon schéma des documents d’archive classe comme secondaire est peut-être ce qui porte le plus de sens pour la conservation.

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