AIC 53rd Annual Meeting

Artworks involving live performance are now a small but not uncommon feature of contemporary museum collections. Much ink has been spilled over the last two decades around how best to keep the liveness of these works accessible for future generations. The enactment of most, if not all, live performance artworks in museum collections is achieved through delegation, whereby (re-)performances are made possible by individuals following written specifications and/or through practices of body-to-body knowledge transmission between performers. Artworks whose live performance cannot be delegated to others (e.g. those that can only be performed by their creators) have instead largely entered collections in the form of their archival traces or "supplements" that serve to stand in for the performance in a display context: photographic and audiovisual documentation; props, leftovers, or relics presented as artefacts; or a combination thereof, at times becoming installations. Using the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s recent acquisition of several performance artworks by Northern Irish artist Sandra Johnston as a case study, this talk critically examines what it means to both collect and care for a category of art that has been excluded from museum collections and consideration by conservation discourses: that of non-delegated live performance.

The live enactment of Johnston’s performance artworks cannot be delegated to others. Her performance practice is deeply personal and improvisational, a method of haptic, object- and site-responsive inquiry she often carries out in “contested spaces,” confronting traumatic memory retained in objects and sites. While some of her works have been (re)materialised for exhibition purposes in displays of audiovisual documentation of her past performances, IMMA's acquisition is notable in that these works were not subjected to the "rewriting" (Hölling 2017) that often comes with the acquisition of complex contemporary artworks and tends to transfigure them into "durable and repeatable" (Laurenson & van Saaze 2014) collection objects. Several of the works that IMMA acquired were sparsely documented and were acquired without any expectation or agreement, written or verbal, that Johnston would perform them again. The potential for their live (re-)performance instead depends entirely on Johnston's future ability and willingness to do so. Some of these performances are so site- and context-specific it is uncertain if their (re-)performance is even possible. 

Eschewing an anti-institutional critique that there is no place for these works in museum collections (beyond in the form of their documentary traces), this talk considers the value and importance of institutional collecting of non-delegated performance artworks. It examines how “external dependency” can and should be released from its negative framing, and reimagines the role of the conservator in caring for artworks whose “means of production” (Lawson et. al 2023) cannot be acquired by the museum. Significantly, this talk considers how a methodology of attunement—in this case, responsive to the logics, principles, and specificities of Johnston's artistic practice—revealed how an institutional care for these works depends not only on what conservators and collection staff do but also on what we stop ourselves from habitually and mindlessly forcing or repeating.