Conservation of Contemporary Art

Front matter

Conservation of Contemporary Art

Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Practice

A Springer

Part II The Identity of the Art Object

The Enfolding Object of Conservation: Artwork Identity, Authenticity, Brian Castriota

When Old Was New: Rethinking Traditional and Contemporary Cybele Tom

Languages of Conservation: A Comparison Between Internet-Based Artand Built Herita. 05% 23.954 be 4 oe 6 GOSH EERE Loa ee enat iati Claudia Roeck

No Longer AQtWOIK s iccesdiaecs ease dbbosatened ud eee eee dks Marina Valle Noronha

Part III Professional Roles and Identities: Conservators, Curators, and Artists

Visible Issues. Insights Into the Professional Identity of the Consirvaló S64 80S EEE SE AE ROE LEER EEHE HEROS EL EOE Rita Macedo viii Contents

Sanneke Stigter

Reinstalling Thomas Hirschhorn’s Doppelgarage (2002): Bridging Gaps Between Theory, Practice and Emotion

Maike Grün

The Increasing Role of Artists’ Estates in the Preservation

öf Contemporary AM. 246046034 terde keue pD AEEA A 203 Anna Schäffler

Part IV Documentation and Decision-Making in Theory and Practice

Documenting Hybrid Mixed Media Art Forms: The Role of the Andes 65 Lajas bd hee edo tita pi ari nri i Eeee id 217 Gabriella Giannachi

Sharing Knowledge in Art Conservation: From Repository Dušan Barok

Collections of (An)archives: Towards a New Perspective

on Institutional Collecting of Contemporary Art and the Object

Of CONSOPVAUON 2.4465 4 ab iatt ire Ha DEKE HE SERGE RECS ES 259 Aga Wielocha of Thermoelectronic Chewing Gum (1970), a Political Environment

De oll Vosti 2.00i3524444045¢29% 14904 RENARE DERE RRE OAR EWM 281 Julia Giebeler, Gunnar Heydenreich, and Andrea Sartorius

Part V The Role of Research in the Art Museum The Living Process of Conserving Performance: Theory

and Practice in the Conservation of Performance-Based Artworks

BU BAe oe 5s WAG ESAS OREO E Oe oe ee EE 315 Louise Lawson, Duncan Harvey, Ana Ribeiro, and Hélia Marçal

Integrating Front-of-House with Behind-the-Scenes Practice Caitlin Spangler-Bickell

Is Trust Enforceable? The Conservation of Contemporary

Pip Laurenson

Introduction to the Volume A)

Renée van de Vall and Vivian van Saaze

For several decades, the conservation of contemporary art has constituted a dynamic field of research and reflection. At first, in the 1990s, this research field consisted primarily of conservation professionals working in or with museums and other heritage organizations. In those years, the condition of many experimental artworks dating from the 1960s and 1970s in museum collections became a concern, while conservators were often at a loss as to what to do with them. Organic materials used in sculptures or installations, like fat, chocolate or wax, were prone to decay; plastics became brittle or discoloured; media devices which grew technologically outdated would soon prove difficult to repair. Conservation of these works often meant intervening in the original materials to a degree that was difficult to justify in terms of prevalent conservation ethics. Conceptual, site specific and performance artworks complicated the focus of conservation efforts on the preservation of a material object in various ways. As a result, practical conservation problems called for technical and theoretical research and reflection, while, in turn, technical and theoretical research and reflection made it possible to frame practical problems of conservation in new ways.

In the Netherlands, the scandal around the restoration of Barnett Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III and a discussion about the remaking of a Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing in the Kröller-Müller Museum served as important motivations for launching the Modern Art: Who Cares? research project (Hummelen and Sillé 1999, p. 14). As part of this project, a theoretical and a practical working group investigated ten non-traditional works of art, such as Citta Irreale by Mario Merz, Gismo by Jean Tinguely and Still Life of Watermelons by Piero Gilardi. Modern Art: Who Cares? was not the only project, nor the first one, to address the difficulties of modern and contemporary art conservation. More or less at

R. van de Vall (BX) - V. van Saaze Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands e-mail: r.vandevall @ maastrichtuniversity.nl; vivian.vansaaze @ maastrichtuniversity.nl

© The Author(s) 2024 1 R. van de Vall, V. van Saaze (eds.), Conservation of Contemporary Art, Studies in Art, Heritage, Law and the Market 9, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-03 1-42357-4_1 the same time, comparable projects were organized and many more were to follow, such as Tate’s conference From Marble to Chocolate (1995), the Getty Conservation Institute’s conference Mortality Immortality (1998) and the Variable Media Initiative’s conference Preserving the Immaterial (2001).

Based on these initiatives, an international research field emerged, driven initially by a small group of dedicated researchers mainly affiliated with museums, heritage institutions, conservation studios, institutes for professional education and conservation curricula of universities of applied sciences. This group consisted largely of a community of practice (Amin and Roberts 2008) of conservation professionals, while involving fairly few academic scholars. Research was case-oriented, with a focus on individual artworks posing challenges as to their long-term conservation; researchers met in projects, working groups and conferences to exchange approaches, insights, and results. More general research work aimed at the development of models for registration, documentation, and decision-making.

Increasingly, however, more academic researchers and universities became involved as well. This is reflected for instance by the growing number of PhD dissertations devoted to challenges in the conservation of contemporary art, but also by more sustained research collaborations between academic and professional institutions. This development was facilitated by the establishment of national and international research projects initiated by consortia comprising both museums and universities (Laurenson et al. 2022). This volume is a result of one such project, the Marie Sktodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network New Approaches in the Conservation of Contemporary Art (NACCA).!

Central to NACCA’s research agenda was the conviction that given the current state of the field, the research already performed and the practical strategies being developed, it was time to take stock of and take a careful look at conservation practices themselves as a major factor in (co-) determining which works were being conserved and which were not, and, regarding the first category, what exactly it is about these works that is being conserved (cf. van Saaze 2013). The NACCA project, in other words, concentrated on the investigation and comparison of practices, defined by Schatzki (2001) as: “embodied, materially mediated arrays of human activity centrally organised around shared practical understanding” (Schatzki 2001, p. 11). The project’s main question centred on how the identity, authenticity and values of modern and contemporary artworks are affected by the practices governing their conservation.

This volume consists of a selection of papers from NACC4’s final conference held at Maastricht University in March 2019 and several additional, commissioned

'The NACCA programme (2016-19) was coordinated by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University. In total, fifteen PhD projects are part of the programme, each investigating underexplored aspects of contemporary art conservation. The Marie Sktodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network NACCA was funded by the European Union H2020 Programme (H2020-MSCA- ITN-2014) under Grant Agreement n°642892. https://nacca.eu.

Introduction to the Volume 3 chapters.” It investigates whether and how theoretical findings and insights can be translated into the daily work practices of conservators in the field, and, vice versa, whether and how the problems and dilemmas encountered in conservation practice find their way into broader research questions and projects. The volume is structured around five topics: (1) Theorizing conservation as a reflective practice; (2) The identity of the art object; (3) Professional roles and identities: Conservators, curators and artists; (4) Documentation and decision-making in theory and practice; and (5) The role of research in the art museum.

1 Theorizing Conservation as a Reflective Practice

The first part of this volume contains two reflections on what it means to study the conservation of works of contemporary art in museums through the lens of practice theory. As explained above, it is vital to examine actual conservation practices as a strategic research site for the identification of problems, strategies and solutions in contemporary art conservation. It is productive to conceive of conservation professionals as “experienced pioneers” (Mesman 2008), active in a scarcely mapped field requiring new kinds of decisions and interventions.

In the past twenty years, important contributions have been made to the development of conservation theory and ethics, including the formulation of practical protocols for modern and contemporary works of art. Many of these contributions emphasize the open, contextual and evolving nature of contemporary artworks and the situated character of conservation-ethical deliberation and decision-making, suggesting that it is in and through reflection on the day-to-day routines, the difficulties and dilemmas encountered on the work floor and the new directions tried out to solve problems, that adequate and shared approaches will eventually emerge. This raises the need for a deeper understanding of how to theorize practices and in particular of how to account for the interdependency of conservation’s materiality and its reflexivity.

In a critical discussion with contributions inspired by Actor-Network Theory (Yaneva 2003; van Saaze 2013), Theodor Schatzki provides both a precise definition of what practices are and a fine-grained and differentiated account of the various ways material entities play a role in practices and contribute to social change. Here, Schatzki defines practices as activities “organised by rules, pools of understanding, and teleoaffective structures”, thereby taking material entities (unlike ANT) not as part of practices but as intimately connected to them. Artworks and museums, then,

?The symposium aimed to strengthen the exchange between theory and practice in the conservation of contemporary art by exploring promising practices (and failures) and by critically questioning its conditions and drawbacks. The symposium was organized in collaboration with the Maastricht Centre for Arts and Culture, Conservation and Heritage (MACCH) and museum the Bonnefanten in Maastricht. In addition to presentations of the fifteen NACCA PhD projects, the symposium hosted several keynote lectures, panels, and round tables. https://nacca.eu/conference-2019/.

figure in his account as “components of material arrangements, constituting settings in which practices proceed.” Schatzki distinguishes five types of relation between practices and material arrangements: causality, prefiguration, constitution, anchoring/institution and intelligibility. The second part of his chapter focuses on the contribution of artworks to social change. Distinguishing four main ways in which the material world can be responsible for change—bringing about, inducing, mediating and prefiguring—Schatzki argues (in contrast to Dominguez Rubio 2014) that works of art only make a very small direct contribution to social change, and that art is rather a conserving force in society. Their indirect contribution to social change, however, can be considerable, through changes in cultural forms and in people’s perceptions, thoughts and motivations.

An important “gap” between conservation theory and ethics on the one hand and conservation practice on the other is that theory and ethics tend to generalize, whereas professional research into conservation questions tends to focus on individual case studies. The chapter by Renée van de Vall argues that the professional field has developed reflexive, “middle-ranging” practices of ethical deliberation that diminish the distance between the individual, empirical conservation case and the abstract and general guidelines or rules of conservation theory and ethics. She investigates a process of deliberation about the conservation of a contemporary artwork, Joost Conijn’s Hout Auto, organized in the form of two “Platform meetings” by the Dutch Foundation for the Conservation of Contemporary Art (SBMK). Van de Vall’s analysis of these discussions shows how this middle-ranging ethical work proceeds through a combination of various, theoretically contrasting deliberative techniques and suggests that the kind of ethics at work in the practice of conservation of contemporary artworks may be fruitfully understood in terms of posthumanist care ethics.

2 The Identity of the Art Object

Part 2 investigates the kind of “thing” conservators of contemporary art try hard to care for. From the start, the inadequacy of conventional (“scientific” or “modern’”’) conservation guidelines to address contemporary works of art has been explained in terms of the latter’s distinctive constitution. Although still thought of as objects, they were defined by conceptual or immaterial properties, rather than material ones. A gamechanger in the discussion about what made contemporary art different was Pip Laurenson’s (2006) paper “Authenticity, Change and Loss in the Conservation of Time-Based Media Installations.” Using Nelson Goodman’s distinctions between autographic and allographic arts and between one-stage and two-stage arts, Laurenson proposed to think differently about the ontology of time-based media installations and installations in general: not primarily as a kind of object, like a sculpture, but more like a performed event, such as a theatre play or music. Rather than being tied to an authentic material entity which should be preserved in its original state, she defined installations by instructions stipulating their

Introduction to the Volume 5

“work-defining properties”, and they can therefore be re-executed time and again, in the same way as theatre plays and symphonies are being re-performed according to their scripts or scores, without losing their identity. Laurenson’s proposal has been widely used, amended and criticized (e.g., Fiske 2009; Caianiello 2013; Phillips 2015; van de Vall 2015, 2022; Holling 2017), and it also strongly resonates in the contributions to this part.

Brian Castriota’s chapter aims to go a step further in decentring the artwork’s ontology. Drawing on previous comments on Laurenson’s paper and on poststructuralist/deconstructivist theorists in the wake of Derrida, Deleuze and Butler, Castriota challenges the idea of a single, fixed identity for works of contemporary art, whether secured by preserving an original, or preferred, material state or by a set of instructions. He questions the validity of the requirement for conservators to comply with a score by pointing at works that keep changing beyond the variability allowed by the score: works may continue to develop and be variously interpreted by different audiences and stakeholders. Instead, he conceives of works of art as potentially having multiple and evolving “centres”, while the task of conservation is not to protect a singular identity but to safeguard the conditions that allow it to continue evolving and becoming.

Two contributions challenge the specificity of contemporary art. Cybele Tom’s chapter argues that supposedly specific ontological characteristics of contemporary art, like variability and context-relatedness, can equally be ascribed to other heritage objects such as relics and religious statues. Rather than positing a fundamental difference between contemporary art and old art, she proposes to adopt an alternative, contemporizing care paradigm for both. Claudia Roeck shows how in spite of the seeming contrasts between the immateriality of internet-based artworks and the materiality of built heritage, the work-defining properties of both can be fruitfully compared. She uses this comparison to demonstrate how principles for the conservation of built heritage can be applied to conservation of internet art—including its preservation and presentation as a well-maintained ruin; but she also shows how built heritage conservation can benefit from notions like “reinterpretation”, currently used in media art conservation.

Part 2 ends with a contribution by Marina Valle Noronha, who proposes to turn around the conventional notions of time that are foundational for museum collections and policies. Museums try to preserve artworks, in the present, as if they were in a supposedly initial (hence past) state in order to transmit them in an unaltered state to the future. But what do past, present and future mean? She uses Tristan Garcia’s “flat ontology” as a frame to rethink these notions, which are constitutive for traditional museum collection and conservation practices, in terms of intensities of presence. In those terms, the present is a maximum of possible presence, the past is relatively present and the future is the maximum of absence. Rather than considering a presently disintegrated work of art (her example is Two Cones by Naum Gabo) as a total loss for an imagined but actually absent future (compared with its initial yet past state), the museum should accept its current presence together with its past yet still relatively present initial state and in combination with all other objects—replicas, re-interpretations—as a complex artwork family.

3 Professional Roles and Identities: Conservators, Curators and Artists

The care for and management of contemporary art as future European cultural heritage are in need of a fundamental rethinking of traditional professional expertise and roles. The traditional distinction between the professional roles of conservators, responsible for the material integrity and condition of artworks, and curators, responsible for the intellectual care for artworks, tends to become less relevant: conservators have to engage with art-historical and art-theoretical questions and curators with the future condition of the work. Both types of professionals need to be able to connect different kinds of scientific and technical expertise and relate conservation issues to the broader fields of art management, care and cultural policy. Moreover, there is an increasing awareness that museums need to adapt their infrastructures and go outside their institutions to collaborate with stakeholders— such as artists and their estates; technicians, programmers, and the public; and external experts—to care for works of art (Laurenson and Van Saaze 2014; van de Leemput and van Lente 2022; Goldie-Scot 2023). The challenge for conservators thus shifts from caring for the material artwork to maintaining the ecologies that support the perpetuation of the artwork. The contributions in this section investigate the challenges and opportunities of shifting boundaries between conservators, curators, artists and the broader “‘network of care” (Dekker 2018).

Rita Macedo addresses the professional identity of the contemporary art conservators in a museum context and analyses how practitioners think they are seen by their colleagues and audience members, and how they see themselves in their profession concerning their values, beliefs, the functions performed and the perceived relationships with colleagues. Drawing on a literature study and a large body of interviews, the chapter offers insight into the identity of the conservation professionals and their reported invisibility to colleagues and the public. Macedo argues that while some of the factors that negatively influence the conservator’s self-perception come from beliefs and stereotypes formed along the construction of the professional identity, others are consolidated and perpetuated in the context of the museum, where these identities do not seem to have room for transformation or renegotiation through professional agency.

The following two contributions provide reflections from contemporary art conservators on their own working practices within the museum. Sanneke Stigter advocates that such an autoethnographic approach helps conservators to gain a better understanding of the shaping of an artwork’s physical form, while also laying bare the conservator’s personal bias as revealing traits of the profession. To illustrate the value of such an approach for conservation, she reflects on her own personal testimonies of encounters with artworks from the 1960s through the 1980s. Scrutinizing the histories of these artworks, she furthermore demonstrates that although conceptual artists set out to dematerialize the object in art, the importance of the materials and techniques used should not be underestimated. This insight, according

Introduction to the Volume 7 to Stigter, has repercussions for the way conservators and curators should engage with conceptual artworks.

Maike Griin reflects on her own conservation practice by investigating her role and decision-making in the reinstallation of Thomas Hirschhorn’s room installation Doppelgarage (2002) in the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany. The decision to work from documentation of previous iterations, rather than involving the artist in the reinstallation process, had several consequences that provide insight into potential tensions between curators, conservators and artists. In this instance, the artist reacted adversely to the reinstallation, and this led to unexpected changes in the roles of the actors involved.

In the last section of this chapter, Anna Schaffler reflects on her experience of working for the estate of German conceptual artist Anna Oppermann. The chapter argues that the care for the legacy of contemporary artists requires new structural models for conservation and preservation and may lead to a radical shift of western memory culture. Schaffler sketches a future of decentralized memory organization in which both private actors and civil society become significant stake- and memory holders for contemporary art.

4 Documentation and Decision-Making in Theory and Practice

In contemporary art, the idea that an artwork is a finished and self-sustaining end product made by the artist alone has given way to a more open-ended and dynamic conception of the work’s modes of existence. As we have seen in the previous sections of this volume, installation, multi-media and performance artworks may vary considerably from one iteration to the next, depending on the context of their execution, the practitioners involved and their reception by different audiences. We already mentioned the importance of Pip Laurenson’s proposal (Laurenson 2006) to conceive the ontology of time-based installations, and installation art in general, as defined by a score or script that can be performed in various ways rather than by their original materiality. Subsequent responses to Laurenson’s article (for an overview see Brian Castriota’s contribution to this volume), including work by Laurenson herself (e.g., Laurenson 2016), commented on and further developed this notion, pointing to the changeability of not only “performances” but also “scores”, and foregrounding the open-endedness of artworks’ “unfolding” as epistemic objects. These theoretical developments put a lot of emphasis on the gathering, documenting, and archiving of information about the processes of production and reproduction constituting contemporary artworks. Taking care of these works depends on taking care of the various kinds of knowledge involved in these processes, to such a degree that it has become difficult, and perhaps no longer productive, to draw sharp distinctions between the work proper and the information about it. This has been argued for instance by Hanna HOlling, who proposes to think about works of art as archives, an archive being “not only a physical repository of documents, files and leftovers, but also an intangible, non-physical realm of tacit knowledge and memory in an ever-enduring state of organization and expansion,” a dynamic entity from which artworks are actualized and to which they contribute (Holling 2017, p. 260).

If Hélling’s proposal may be radical, the recognition that documentation constitutes the core of the identity of works of contemporary art is widespread. What is emphasized in theory, however, is not always easy to implement in practice, due to a lack of institutional resources, appropriate infrastructures, adequate procedures and working routines. The contributions of this section all scrutinize recent practices developed by museums and other institutions that have experimented with the organization of their collections and archives, with the engagement of networks of collaborators and audiences, and with sharing experience and knowledge within and across institutions. The final chapter demonstrates how the changed understanding of the identity of the work has not only led to a changed understanding of the role of documentation, but also of conservation decision-making, necessitating a revision of the well-known SBMK Decision-Making Model Contemporary Art.*

Gabriella Giannachi addresses the role of the audience in the design, experience and documentation of contemporary art. Her contribution reflects a change in the theoretical understanding of contemporary art, from an ontological conception of artworks as objects or events to an epistemic conception of artworks as sets of knowledge-producing processes and practices. It is important, she emphasizes, to document not only the canonical, but also the participants’ accounts of the trajectories of such processes and practices. Four case studies of mixed media artworks— Blast Theory’s Day of the Figurines (2006) and Rider Spoke (2007), a research project, Performance at Tate (2014-2016), and a prototype platform, The Cartography Project (2016)—illustrate the importance and the challenges of capturing, organizing and keeping audience-generated documentations updated.

Dušan Barok addresses the changing conditions for sharing knowledge and documentation across institutions. By investigating why the contributions to the once widely used INCCA database for conservation documentation decreased dramatically after 2011, he is able to sort out some of the main factors responsible for both its success and its decline. Part of the explanation lies in the tabular structure of the database and the availability of metadata only where information needs to remain confidential. There were also external developments, however, that made an interinstitutional, over-all reference catalogue less relevant, such as diversification of the field into specializations, changing EU funding policies, and a shift in orientation of dissemination formats, from distributing data among practitioner-researchers towards more narrative-based scholarly research published in academic journals.

Aga Wielocha’s chapter in this section challenges the separation of museum collections, which comprise art objects, from museum archives, which contain documents. Drawing on concepts from information science, Wielocha proposes to

$https://www.sbmk.nl/en/tool/decision-makingmodel.

Introduction to the Volume 9 afford equal importance to art objects and documents in a museum’s collection. She illustrates the feasibility of her proposal by two examples of institutions that have revised the traditional separation of collection and archive and the interrelated classification principles: the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. In her conclusion, Wielocha rephrases Hölling’s concept of the artwork as an archive by referring to the artwork as an “anarchive”, adding the freedom to adjust its organization according to the needs of a particular artwork.

In the last chapter of this section, Julia Giebeler, Gunnar Heydenreich and Andrea Sartorius present their 2019 revision of the SBMK Decision-Making Model Contemporary Art (1999) and test it for conservation and presentation of the political environment Thermoelectronic Chewing Gum (1970) by Wolf Vostell. The 1999 SBMK model still assumed the possibility to stipulate an original or ideal state of an artwork, which could be used as a benchmark to identify discrepancies between the current state and its meaning. Since then, the recognition of the complex trajectory and evolving character of many contemporary artworks and the diverging perspectives of different stakeholders involved in their reiteration has led to a more dynamic understanding of the decision-making process. The 2019 revision of the Decision- Making Model aims to incorporate this understanding. The authors describe the step-by-step use of the revised model on Vostell’s environment, and they conclude that the model indeed serves to structure complex decision-making processes, to document the various opinions held by the stakeholders and to contextualize and add transparency to their interpretations.

5 The Role of Research in the Art Museum

In the 2022 approved new ICOM definition, the term “research” figures prominently as the first museum function mentioned, presenting research as a primary responsibility of today’s museum. At the same time, what constitutes research in the art museum and what is considered appropriate research continues to be subject to heated debate as well as to be in transition (Pringle 2019). As mentioned in the first section, in this volume we consider reflection on practices an innovative theoretical way to understand the conservation challenges presented by contemporary art. In line with Emily Pringle’s influential Rethinking Research in the Art Museum (2019), museum practices may be considered forms of research in their own right. “Locating museum professionals’ practice as research gives space for practitioners to ask questions, which are explored through a process of enquiry, and generate new insights that go out into the world. It provides a framework that allows for experimentation, but also promotes thoughtful programming and embedded reflection.” (Pringle 2019, p. 70).

In the wake of these emerging reflective practices, conservators are increasingly drawing on ethnographic research methods to study actual, day-to-day, conservation practices entangled in larger networks of care. In the same vein, we see an increase in academic researchers from backgrounds as diverse as sociology, museum studies, philosophy and conservation theory, engaging with conservation practices through ethnographic research. Methodologically, this research in, of and with museums ranges from interviews to auto-ethnography, embedded research, participant observation and “immersed participation”, to use a term of Puig de la Bellacasa (2017). Besides an interest in conducting and reflecting on research in the museum, the contributors to this section share an understanding of research as a potential avenue for revisiting existing care practices and forging institutional change.

In the first contribution to this section, Louise Lawson, Duncan Harvey, Ana Ribeiro and Hélia Marçal trace the research process and development of Tate’s Strategy for the Documentation and Conservation of Performance Art. After discussing the history of how since 2005 performance art has entered museum collections, they discuss the collaborative work processes in Tate’s Conservation Department and analyse the documentation and conservation of performance-based art as knowledge-making activities. The aim of the chapter is twofold: first it explores the intertwinement of theory and practice in the development of the Strategy, and, second, it demonstrates how the acquisition and display of performance-based art in the museum also prompts revision of conservation processes and procedures.

If Caitlin Spangler-Bickell also discusses the relations between conservation and display practices, her investigations focus on the importance of the exhibition period for collection care. Because conservators need to turn their skills and energy to preparations for the next exhibition soon after completing work on an installation, Spangler-Bickell puts forward that the exhibition period is an underrepresented biographical phase in conservation—an especially urgent deficiency for works that are fully “activated” only when on display. She therefore argues for expanding the collections care remit to integrate the “front-of-house” with behind-the-scenes conservation practice by making use of “ethnography for conservation” during the exhibition life phase. A participant observation study in the gallery space of the interactive exhibition Take Me (I’m Yours) at Pirelli Hangar Bicocca illustrates how this methodology may improve practices of collection care.

The contribution by Anke Moerland and Zoé Miller draws on literature from the fields of sociology, art and law to assess the conflicts that occur in relation to the conditions of ownership, access, display and integrity of the artwork. The chapter explores the relationship between artists and museums in terms of trust and control and considers the role that contracts can play to manage expectations of artists and museums, as well as to regulate aspects of the conservation of contemporary artworks currently not addressed by copyright law. Their research in and of the museum shows how legal doctrinal methods may help to explain how copyright law applies to aspects of the conservation of contemporary art, and which provisions contracts could include to address parties’ expectations.

The final contribution of this volume provides an encouraging outlook on conservation as reflective care practice. Drawing on Tate’s research project on Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in the Museum, Pip Laurenson demonstrates how externally funded research might afford thicker care time to

Introduction to the Volume 11 enable an engagement with works that challenge the structures, systems and temporalities of the museum. She introduces the idea of a “timescape” (Adam 1998, 2008) and explores the different temporalities of the contemporary art museum, of works of art and of care practices. With Maria Puig de la Ballacasa, Laurenson argues for the importance of attending to this multitude of temporalities and demonstrates how “making time” has the potential to adjust modes of museum care that are potentially more just and attuned to artistic practices.