Doing Artworks. An Ethnographic Account of the Acquisition and Conservation of No Ghost Just a Shell.

Abstract

On challenges and changes in the conservation of contemporary artIn the summer of 1997 I came to a shocking discovery.It was during an internship at the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht Netherlands, that I found out that several of the original components of the installation La natura è l'arte del numero (1976) by the Italian Arte Povera artist Mario Merz (1925-2003) had been replaced over the years.Okay, I understood that the organic and ephemeral materials such as the vegetables, the fruit and the wooden branches were not authentic anymore.I also accepted the fact that the broken neon numbers had been replaced by ones that functioned.The surprising showdown concerned the clay tablets: the fingerprints in the clay -in which I recognised the hand of the artist himself -turned out not to be from Mario Merz.The grand master himself had not moulded the clay, but one of the museum workers had made the exhibited clay tablets as they had been missing when the work was shipped to the Bonnefantenmuseum.My belief in the authenticity and 'aura' of the artwork had vanished on the spot.The museum story turned out to be an illusion, only existing for the sake of naive visitors like me.Although amazed at first, over the years I have learnt that the interference with La natura è l'arte del numero was far less radical or even unique than I thought it to be at the time.Despite the fact that the art work's physical history is not often a topic in museum display or art historical readings, La natura è l'arte del numero is only one of the many contemporary artworks which has undergone some form of material change -even after it entered a museum collection.Due to the use of ephemeral material or their conceptual, instable, variable or processual character, many contemporary artworks alter in appearance and require continues intervention by the museum to enable display, thereby challenging the notion of art as a 'fixed' material object.For such artworks traditional conservation strategies and theory become problematic as the traditional storage and 'freeze frame' paradigm is not always adequate.Unlike the commonly accepted hands-off approach of conservation of more traditional art forms, these works require continues intervention by the museum to enable display (Depocas 2003; Wharton 2005; Irvin 2006; Lauren-son 2006).

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