Preface

For decades, contemporary art has challenged collecting institutions and, as a consequence, the conservators and others tasked with caring for the art. Conceptual art, the use of readymade and found objects, time-based media, performance art—many of these were attempts to expand the boundaries of traditional art forms and defy the conservatism of institutions. In response to such challenges, conservators had to expand the conventional definition of an artwork as a discrete object directly embodied by and contained in a set of materials and consider different forms of incarnation and manifestation, different modes of being. They also had to drastically expand their skill sets, and therefore their networks of collaborators, to address these new art forms.

The introduction of biological materials into the ever-expanding palette of materials used by contemporary artists has certainly been one of the greatest challenges to institutions, and a difficult puzzle to solve for conservators. Art that lives, breathes, grows, morphs, sprouts, mutates, oozes, decays, and might decompose entirely certainly goes against the idea of the museum as a static place where objects are housed, contemplated, and preserved as much as possible in their existing form. The challenges are both conceptual and practical. In this volume, Marcia Reed underscores that Fluxus works were specifically created to challenge institutional authority and questions the ethics of preserving works not meant to last; she reminds us that, literally, “Fluxus means change.” On the more practical side, Mercedes Isabel de las Carreras remarks that the conservation of Víctor Grippo’s Analogía I (Analogy I, 1970–71) hinges just as much on the proper selection of potatoes as it does on the museum’s environment, and notes that if the work were to be exhibited continuously for two years, the cost of more than 2,160 replacement potatoes and a minimum of 120 conservator work hours would have to be factored in.

The advent of bioart, in which artists draw upon scientific advances of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and other types of manipulations of living beings and tissues, poses yet another level of intertwined ethical and practical challenges, as outlined in Jens Hauser’s article. The responsibility of museums toward the living organisms they are caring for, and transparency toward the public, must be reckoned with. For instance the loan agreements can involve complex ethical negotiations, and shipments may need to be handled by biomedical companies rather than conventional art transporters.

A challenge to the institution is not, however, always the primary goal of using living matter in art. In many cases, it is the aesthetic, tactile, and poetic properties of biological material that the artist is forefronting. Flavia Parisi, Maura Favero, and Rosario Llamas Pacheco’s article in this volume discusses Precipitazioni Sparse (Scattered Precipitations, 2005), a work by Bruna Esposito in which white, golden, and red onion peels are scattered across a marble slab. The artist was attracted to the beauty of the onion peels—their infinite variations in color, shape, and translucency—which in juxtaposition with a traditionally noble art material, namely Carrara marble, call attention to the beauty and poetry discoverable in everyday things. Other times it is the process of change itself that the artist wishes to deploy for its symbolic value. The Mexican artist Darío Meléndez here discusses Símbolo descarnado (2013), a collective installation realized in collaboration with Omar Soto and Diana Bravo, in which he displayed the rotting carcasses of an eagle and a serpent inside a glass case to evoke “the atmosphere of deterioration in which [his] country is submerged.”

For some works, periodic replacement of their biological materials may be appropriate, even convenient, as long as the criteria are well defined and the resources are available. In fact, following this logic could represent the ultimate form of commodification, in one of those spins with which the art market is familiar. There is perhaps no better example of this than Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian (2019), which is in part a critique of the art world but nevertheless fetched $120,000 at a Miami art fair, where it fascinated patrons and became a social media sensation. When an edition of the work was donated anonymously to the Guggenheim, the museum’s conservators were happy to discover that, thanks to extensive instructions on how to select and install the banana and the duct tape, the work was rather easy to conserve (Bowley 2020). It is not always the case, though, that replacement is possible, or that it leads to commodification.

In 2007, Adrián Villar Rojas used a sponge cake in his installation Pedazos de las personas que amamos (Pieces of the People We Love). After the installation, the cake was brought back to Villar Rojas’s hometown of Rosario, Argentina, where his parents kept it for eight years, until it was shipped to Sweden in 2015 to be part of the exhibition Fantasma, and subsequently acquired by the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (see the essays by Adrián and Sebastián Villar Rojas and Thérèse Lilliegren et al. in these pages). The cake, made by the artist’s aunt and identical to cakes she made for his childhood birthdays, acquires more ontological value as an object with each year that passes and every event it survives. Reusing entire parts of an installation in a new one, in a process of continuity and reinvention, has become a feature of Villar Rojas’s work. The replacement of the now thirteen-year-old cake is not considered an option at the moment; rather, the Moderna Museet is working in consultation with the artist to store it in an oxygen-free environment. In fact, the artist sees his work on the opposite spectrum of commodification, with “the material dimension of [his] practice,” as he writes in his essay here, being more the “precarious act of bearing witness to an activity that is lost forever (all of the richness of a nomadic life in that community or of the processes of exploration) than the ultimate goal of a ‘career’ aimed at producing commodities.”

The symposium “Living Matter: The Preservation of Biological Materials Used in Contemporary Art / La Materia Viva: Conservación de materiales orgánicos en el arte contemporáneo” took place June 3, 4, and 5, 2019, in Mexico City and was co-organized by the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI), the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), and the Escuela Nacional de Conservación, Restauración y Museografía “Manuel del Castillo Negrete” (ENCRyM) of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH). Over the course of the three days, a lively international group of conservators, curators, artists, art historians, philosophers, and archivists explored the many different ways that living matter can be incorporated into art, its multifaceted significance, and different conservation approaches and institutional responses. Several artists were present throughout the conference, each at a different phase of their career and with very different and deeply personal practices, thus reflecting a plurality of artistic voices. The dialogue with the custodians of their works was curious, rich, and respectful.

As expected, no monolithic solution was found. Any consensus that did emerge was around the necessity to continue these conversations so that each work of art, each situation, can be considered in all its complexities, and to accept that while we want to preserve these works, we cannot tame them, fix them in a final state of unchanging objecthood. We want them to continue to live and to challenge us—as does life itself.

We would like to thank the MUAC and ENCRyM, who were wonderful partners in the organization of the seminar, and in particular Julia Molinar and Claudio Hernandez (MUAC-UNAM) and Ana Lizeth Mata Delgado and Claudia Coronado (ENCRyM-INAH), who worked tirelessly to make the symposium happen. Their enthusiasm, diligence, and efficiency made them a joy to work with. We also thank the director of MUAC, Graciela de la Torre, and director of ENCRyM, Gerardo Ramos Olvera, for their support of the symposium and being such generous hosts. At the GCI we are extremely grateful to Tom Learner, head of science; Kathy Dardes, head of collections at the time; Jeanne Marie Teutonico, associate director of programs; and Tim Whalen, John E. and Louise Bryson Director, for their support of the project. The symposium would certainly not have been possible without Reem Baroody’s work; her limitless energy and dedication made it possible to overcome all sorts of logistical obstacles. Nicole Onishi’s help was frequently crucial. Cynthia Godlewski, senior publications manager; Chelsea Bingham, associate editor; and Gary Mattison, senior project coordinator at the GCI expertly coordinated the preparation for publication of these proceedings. At Getty Publications, our gratitude to Tevvy Ball, production/managing editor; TKperson, designer; and Kelly Peyton, production coordinator; as well as editor in chief Karen Levine and publisher Kara Kirk. [to be tweaked]