Building a Legacy In this ongoing series we speak with experts in the field of artists’ estates and legacy stewardship to offer insights that might prove useful to artists, their staff, foundations and estates, scholars, and others. Here Glenn Wharton, professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, chair of the UCLA/Getty Program in the Conservation of Archaeological and Ethnographic Materials, and former media conservator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, speaks with the Quarterly’s Jennifer Knox White about the conservation of time-based media. They discuss best practices for the storage of digital media and approaches to addressing the evolution—and obsolescence—of technologies.
JENNIFER KNOX WHITE Let’s start by talking about the
type of work that we call “time-based media.” Single-channel videos and films immediately come to mind, but of course the term encompasses other forms of work as well. What would you include under this umbrella term, and what are we not talking about? GLENN WHARTON Well, it’s a problematic term, but so are all such terms. I’ve landed on it rather than on “audio art,” “video art,” “technology art,” “media art,” and so on, because I like its implication that time is part of the medium, that duration is involved. It’s problematic in that some works that I might consider time-based—some software-based works, say—really don’t take that much time, but it’s a better term than any others I’ve found. For me it covers film, audio art, video art, software-based art, performance art, human interaction, and of course there are often installation works and sculptures that include time-based media. JKW I’m curious how you found your way into this field. You specialize in archaeological conservation as well—that’s an interesting range. GW Yes, I trained as an archaeological conservator and worked on excavations for many summers. I also trained as a sculpture conservator. For a number of years I worked in museums and ran a private practice, and I spent a lot of time with public art, working with public-art agencies to maintain their collections of outdoor 86
sculpture. Through this I became interested in artists who were creating works that engaged communities in their fulfillment, and in 1998 I closed my practice to pursue a PhD at University College London’s Institute of Archaeology with the idea of developing a model for participatory practice in conservation, engaging communities in research and decision-making about traditional cultural heritage. After completing my PhD I moved to New York and started teaching in the Conservation and Museum Studies programs at New York University. After about a year, Jim Coddington, then the chief conservator at the Museum of Modern Art, approached me and told me about a grant that the museum had received to bring somebody in for two days a week for two years to survey what they then called their video-art collection to help them figure out how to take care of it. And I said, “Well, great, Jim. But why are we having lunch?” And he said, “Well, name one video conservator.” I knew of only one person, Pip Laurenson at the Tate, but she had a job. And he said, “We could bring someone in with a technical background in audiovisual technology or we could bring in a conservator who would put a conservation mind on this problem. I’d rather bring in a conservator, because a lot of the issues that we’re dealing with are beyond the technology. It has to do with working with artists and capturing their concerns.” I said, “If you’re
willing to have me, I’m willing to give it a try.” And I became the nation’s first time-based media conservator. This was in 2005. JKW I imagine the field has changed considerably since then, and quite rapidly, too. Could you talk about some of the shifts that have taken place, and about the role of artists in the conservation process? GW Yes, there’s been a seismic shift in our field regarding contemporary art and how we approach conservation problems with living artists. We’re trained as material scientists, so we understand an art object through its materiality: how it was made, what it was made out of, how it’s deteriorated over time, and how to slow down or arrest that deterioration and bring it back to what we think it looked like at some point in its life. Conserving an object from the past also involves decisions around aesthetics and symbolic intent. With the changes in art production over the last thirty or forty years—starting with Conceptual art, where the idea was sometimes more important than its physical manifestation, or, say, with installation art that’s variable, meaning that the artist hands over interpretive authority to the person who buys the work—there’s now a whole new set of questions involved in conservation. Often it’s not just about shepherding an object through time, it’s about understanding from the artist, What is this thing? What’s the relationship between
