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Permanent Impermanence: A General Survey of Performance Art Conservation and Mona Hatoum’s Roadworks

Emma Huerta, University of Chicago

Introduction

Tate Modern defines performance art as “artworks that are created through actions performed by the artist or other participants, which may be live or recorded, spontaneous or scripted.” In the context of this genre, “artwork” is not only limited to the actual performance of said work. Rather, it serves as an umbrella term for “film, video, photographic and installation-based artworks through which the actions of artists, performers or the audience are conveyed.”1 The expansion of the definition of performance art to include visual representation and documentation beyond the mere enactment of the work could arguably be attributed to efforts to conserve performance like other forms of art. By nature, the earliest works of performance art defied not only art convention but also art conservation convention. That is, some works were only manifested in a live and ephemeral instantiation. However, as art institutions have hosted such performances over time, the desire to make at least some aspect of the work permanent, continuously observable, and (in some cases) exhibited also became of interest.2 At the same time, there exists the pressure to uphold the essence of the original performance instead of diminishing it with replications or reproductions in other mediums. Thus, performance art bears a sort of a tension between ephemerality and conservation.

This paper will discuss the various ways in which performance art can be conserved. Three institutional models for performance art conservation from Tate Modern, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the International Federation of Liberty Associations and Institutions will be compared. Finally, the aforementioned strategies for performance art conservation will be applied to the work of artist Mona Hatoum, particularly her performance entitled Roadworks. This paper ultimately strives to provide a comprehensive account of how performance art is conserved in an attempt to reconcile the tension between the idiosyncrasy of performance and the desire to preserve it over time. 

How Performance Art is Conserved

Before discussing the various ways in which a performance art work can be conserved, it is imperative to distinguish between the different potential processes that make the existence of an artwork, including performance, continuous. Conservation generally refers to the sustainment of works of art, and includes the concepts of documentation and preservation.3 Documentation is the recording of an artwork’s information; within the context of performance art, this may include all artifacts involved before, during, and/or after the work.4 Preservation is the effort to make an artwork last as long as possible.5 Because performance art is mostly if not entirely ephemeral, typical conservation practices for other forms of art do not usually apply. If anything, preservation is relatively counterintuitive to the essential experiential quality of performance. Documentation therefore becomes a sort of proxy for the conservation of performance, in the sense that one can only store inactive information about a formerly active event. Documenting a performance usually serves to remember the essence of the artwork, but can also gather information to potentially repeat the performance of the work.

After a performance artwork has been completed, one way to conserve it is to save any artifacts or relics from the performance. Such relics can be objects used in the performance itself or even byproducts of the performance. For example, Yves Klein staged his Anthropométries series (1960), performances where nude women would paint blue figures on paper using their bodies as “living paintbrushes.”6 Although the paintings are now considered artworks themselves, they are not the actual performance work itself, but the residue of it. The paintings are inactive forms of the performance insofar as it is an artwork. Rather, they demonstrate what the actions from the performance caused as a sort of memorabilia of their enactment. 

If the objects or residue involved in the original performance are irretrievable, the performance could also be recorded via visual documentation. In the most traditional sense, photographs or videos of the performance could be taken remotely to immortalize its occurrence, even when no physical traces are kept. Ana Mendieta performed various artworks with the earth for her Siluetas (1973-78) performance series, many of which have naturally perished.7 For instance, one performance involved Mendieta positioning her body within some wildflowers, an instance so unique its only manifestation is in the form of a photograph.8 Thus, the memory of the work only exists in its photographs. There are also more unconventional ways to visually record performance, such as drawings. As a matter of fact, artist Mike Parr utilized sketches as proof of his performances to counteract the simple capture of the photograph.9 For his works like A-Artaud (Against the Light) Self Portrait at Sixty Five (1983), the “gesture” and “time” involved in the performance are recorded by the strokes of the drawn image. Consequently, the image represents exactly how the performance of a portrait by Parr was dynamic. Though works like the aforementioned are limited to their documentation rather than the actual experience, the distinction remains between the work as performance and whatever remains as documentation. 

Oftentimes, the multitudinous aspects of performance art can lead to the usage of several documentation forms. Both image and object relics may be stored to represent a performance. Such is the case with works like Pope.L’s Tompkins Square Crawl (1991). During this performance, the artist crawled military-style around Tompkins Square Park in New York City, while wearing a business suit and holding a potted flower, until his boots began to deteriorate.10 Documentation of the work exists in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in various forms, including five inkjet print images of the performance, the boots Pope.L wore during the crawl, and a block of the asphalt he crawled on. The images demonstrate what the performance looked like and the objects from the performance itself provide insight into what physical effects the performance caused. In this case, neither of these objects encompasses the work Tompkins Square Crawl in and of itself. Nonetheless, they contribute to a comprehensive understanding of what the performance entailed both during and afterward. 

Furthermore, documentation of a performance is not limited to visual representations. Written descriptions, criteria, and parameters for certain works can be articulated to both record what the original performance was like and/or what performance(s) of a work in the future, if possible, should involve. This was done by Tate Modern for Amalia Pica’s work Strangers (2008/2016), which features two people standing ten meters apart and holding either end of a colorful paper bunting string.11 The art is very simple at the surface level, yet involves specific instructions by Pica. For example, she asks that the “bunting string should be long enough that the two performers cannot easily communicate with one another without also including museum or gallery visitors in their conversation.”12 Even with works like Pica’s that involve few moving parts, specifications are key to enacting successful iterations that respect the integrity of the work. Without Pica’s requests documented in Tate’s collection, the proper reenactment of her art would not have been possible. Like Tate, various institutions have developed their own documentation processes to coordinate the performance artworks that they acquire, and these will be discussed in more detail below. 

While there are certainly performance artworks with reiterations that differ in some ways from the original, to the extent that the idea of a static original is incompatible with the work, there are still ways to conserve the overall essence of the work. Take Tino Seghal’s This is Propaganda (2002/2006) as an example.13 This performance supposedly involves a performer (dressed as a gallery attendant) singing “This is propaganda you know” repeatedly, before concluding with a verbalization of the details about the artwork in the fashion of a wall label and allowing viewers to ask questions, all conducted as per very specific instructions. No material or written information regarding the work exists. In fact, the selected “interpreter” of the work can only receive their instructions verbally. Extreme cases such as This is Propaganda may seem to demonstrate the incompatibility of performance art and conservation. However, this is still a false dichotomy, as even this work has been acquired by Tate Modern and exists in an edition of four (of which only two have been realized). Neither the parameters of the work nor Tate’s ownership of it are formally documented. Although these two factors essentially comprise the integrity of the work, they do not rely on formal documentation to conserve the work without violating its essence. 

Documentation indubitably is the best-suited facilitator of conservation for performance art. After all, the instantiation of a performance is temporally dependent, while its physical producers and products are not necessarily. And yet, this process does not wholly constitute conservation in exactly the same sense as for other forms of art, since it conserves only aspects of a work, not the original itself. The inability of performance art to be entirely conserved calls into question whether products of conservation efforts for a performance work—such as restagings, documentation images, or videos—can be considered part of the work; or, rather, if anything derived from the work itself is automatically secondary to the performance.

Three Institutional Models 

With the execution and acquisition of performance artworks in museum contexts, several institutions have established their own parameters for documenting performance art. Though each institution’s specific considerations may differ, they all share the same concern for conserving the integrity of performance art and perhaps reproducing certain works if possible. The following section will focus on the documentation procedures of three such institutions— Tate Modern, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions—to elucidate how protocols may converge and diverge. 

Tate Modern

Since revisiting the performance works in their collection in 2016, Tate Modern has developed several guidelines to standardize their conservation efforts for such works. The goal of these tools is to systematically record the details surrounding each work in their collection and, when applicable, conserve each work’s potential of being activated in the present and the future. Their strategy essentially includes documentation tools, workflows, and document review. 

There are four types of documentation tools created by Tate: Performance Specification, Activation Reports, Material History, and Map of Interactions.14 Performance Specification, the main document of the four, determines what materials are needed to maintain the work in the museum. Material History delineates what changes in materiality the performance work has witnessed over time. The Activation Report additionally notes what ensued with each execution of the work, while the Map of Interactions pans out how each moving part and activation of the work contributes to its overall essence. Although these separate categories have been rendered, Tate also emphasizes that each tool relates to the others in particular ways via three workflows: from Performance Specification to Activation Reports, from Performance Specification to Map of Interactions, and from Material History to Performance Specification. Hence, the categories and their interrelations are adaptable to the particularities of each unique performance work.  

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

In 1999, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum pioneered the Variable Media Network (VMN) to address the permanence, or lack thereof, of time-based media and performance art in their collection.15 The principle goal of VMN is to define the changes that are expected of and acceptable for dynamic artworks without compromising their essential nature. 

VMN examines the known and potential changes of performance art generally by distinguishing the materials from their medium. More specifically, they identify four possible types of behaviors that contemporary works can embody: being contained, installed, interactive, or performed. Being “contained” indicates the support required to uphold a work, being “installed” regards the physical space a work takes, being “interactive” considers viewer participation with a work, and being “performed” denotes all the factors involved in the execution of a work. Works are determined to possess certain behaviors via the VMN questionnaire, a set of qualitative queries the Guggenheim asks contemporary artists to articulate what the ideal state of their work is. Although the fourth of these behaviors evidently applies to performance works, such works can also embody the other qualities insofar as they are ephemeral yet may change over time because of documentation, reproductions, or other factors. 

Once the nature of a work is determined via the VMN questionnaire, its institutional longevity is addressed via one or multiple of the VMN’s four preservation strategies, which range on a scale of traditional to radical: storage, migration, emulation, and reinterpretation.16 Storage, or preserving the original work in its entirety, is the most common option for works that are materially tangible, yet sometimes not applicable to ephemeral performance works. Migration involves upgrading a work to contemporary materials. Emulation is the creation of a work using a different medium, while reinterpreting is when a work is redone using vastly different settings, objects, and other variables such that the work is somewhat different from its original.17 Because the performance of a work cannot be permanent nor identical each time, the most tangible options from VMN’s strategy for performance works are emulation and, in the most difficult cases, reinterpretation. At its core, the VMN model centers artist’s narratives to define what comprises a work, using tangible objects and other physical measures as descriptors. 

International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions

Similar to the interflow across documentation categories present in both the Tate’s and the Guggenheim’s practices, the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR), created by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), can be molded to the documentation of performance.18 Their model, which is generally used to make catalogs more conceptually representative of their contents, proposes four levels of representation: work, expression, manifestation, and item. For performance art, the performance idea is seen as the “work,” while each iteration manifests its “expression.” Further, the dependent parts, or “manifestations,” of the work are any objects that are involved in its execution. This includes documents, artifacts, remains, etc. Finally, “items” of a performance work are any of its physical representations; that is, objects that are left behind post-performance. The intention of the FRBR model is to create the most composite record possible of each catalog item. When applied to performance works, this necessitates the consideration of the aforementioned components in cohesion with each other to make up what is known comprehensively as a work.

All of these models aim to work with, rather than against, the true nature of the performances they hope to document and preserve. For the Tate, Guggenheim, and IFLA, this necessitates an awareness of the multifaceted and ephemeral nature of performance works. Instead of diagnosing ephemerality as a natural quality of performance that deems it incompatible with conservation efforts, the models presented by these three institutions work under the assumption that each unique performance brings about different considerations both within and across documentation practices and categories. In different yet cohesive ways, they operate with a layered view of all the components that construct a complete view of a performance work, including the concept, execution, reproductions, materials, and ephemera involved. Concurrently, they maintain that the work exists distinctly from its documentation.

Mona Hatoum: Roadworks

Mona Hatoum (b. 1952 in Beirut, Lebanon) is a British-Palestinian contemporary artist whose works span across performance, sculpture, and installation. Arguably, one of her best-known performances is Roadworks (1985). Although Roadworks was enacted once, the different ways in which it has been documented deem it an interesting case in performance art conservation. 

In Roadworks, performed on May 21, 1985, Hatoum tied Doc Marten work boots to her feet by knotting the shoelaces around her ankles and walked around the Brixton community in London, England—dragging the shoes behind her—for a total distance of three blocks and a duration of one hour.19 Hatoum’s intention for her performance was to symbolize and protest the police brutality occurring in the neighborhood by alluding to the shoes that policemen wear and putting herself through intense pain. The public nature of her performance also exuded further significance by imposing the sight of her dragging her feet onto passersby. The performance was part of a larger exhibition by Brixton Art Gallery also entitled “Roadworks,” running from May 18 to June 8, 1985 and involving  ten artists participating in public art in the Brixton area for ten days and reporting their results back to the gallery daily.20 According to the announcement poster for the show, “the daily cycle of meeting/action/documentation” played a key role in the overall theme of the show: “to challenge conventional notions of the gallery space.”21 Thus, artists were tasked with documenting their public displays and showcasing the documentation in the gallery space, making for an ever-changing exhibition that shifted with each performance and corresponding recordings. 

Documentation and Conservation

Due to the nature of the show that Roadworks was a part of, the performance was documented in several ways and these documentation efforts were spearheaded by Hatoum herself. The primary documentation of the performance was a VHS video recording that was later edited down to be six minutes and forty-five seconds long.22 Directed by Hatoum, the video demonstrates multiple perspectives of the performance with intermittent clips at various angles, distances, and zooms (fig. 1).


Figure 1. Roadworks. Performance by Mona Hatoum, May 21, 1985. Documentation of performance, Brixton, London. Color video with sound; 6 minutes, 45 seconds. Photo: Stefan Rohner, courtesy Kunstmuseum St. Gallen.

As described in chapter two of the book Feminist Visual Activism and the Body, the camera seems to observe both Hatoum’s action as well as the bystanders walking around her, alternating between “mapping and dissecting: constantly distancing and zooming in.” Hatoum’s video of Roadworks “uses the virtual sphere to make palpable precisely what eludes the habitual, institutionalized gaze: the dispersal of the body into a field of forces that resist fixed representation.”23 The significance of Hatoum’s performance is constructed both by her behavior and by the reactions of those around her in public. The video thus provides a short snapshot not only of what Hatoum’s performance was actually like, but also of the surrounding environment and viewers who are involuntarily being subjected to an artwork. 

Hatoum managed the recording of her performance such that it serves as an informative document of the live work. However, her further creation of a visual representation of Roadworks differs—albeit, intentionally—from documentation. Performance Still (1985-95), an image taken by Hatoum in 1995 from the video of her performance (fig. 2), demonstrates how the portrayal of a performance after its original execution can change at the hands of the artist.24 

Figure 2. Performance Still. Image by Mona Hatoum, 1985-1995. Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper, mounted on aluminum. Photo: Mona Hatoum, courtesy Tate Modern.

The image solely shows Hatoum’s feet and the boots tied to her ankles as she takes a step; it crops out the rest of the surroundings in Brixton to focus only on the artist’s body. After grabbing and cropping the image, Hatoum printed out the photograph in black-and-white and mounted it on aluminum, ultimately making fifteen editions. The photograph, measuring 764 × 1136 × 4mm to appear at a life-size scale, must always be shown directly on the floor and leaning against a wall, rather than being mounted.25 Performance Still exists as both photograph and sculpture in its display, forcing viewers to look down at the work as if Hatoum were walking beside them. The conversion of the performance from its corresponding and arguably comprehensive video documentation to a mere image was manned by Hatoum as a way to confront her viewer with a more static object.26 In fact, it parallels the artist’s shift in practice from performance to sculpture and installation work, as a means to engage with audiences in a wider and more continuous sense instead of deeper yet instantaneous performances.

The color video of Roadworks is typically exhibited on television monitors and is labeled as “documentation of performance.” Conversely, Performance Still is referred to as an artwork itself and, as aforementioned, always displayed on the ground leaning against the wall.27 While their individual relationships to the original performance of Roadworks differs, both the recording and the photograph are seen as secondary articulations of the original work. 

Following Tate’s model for contemporary art conservation, it seems as though Material History and Performance Specification are the documentation tools most relevant to Roadworks. Because of the various circumstances that influenced Hatoum’s execution of the performance in 1985, namely the political context of Brixton and her primary performative practice at the time, the performance will most likely not be restaged, reiterated, or reactivated by Hatoum. Therefore, objectified documentation is the undercurrent to which the spirit of the work persists in the museum contexts it inhabits, whether that be the screening of the video recording or the display of Performance Still. Material History would track how Roadworks has been immortalized and Performance Specification would detail the parameters of Hatoum’s action.

The Guggenheim’s VMN would take a similar approach to consolidating Roadworks and its ephemera, especially as its questionnaire centers the perspective of the artist. More specifically, because Roadworks is no longer in the “performed” and “interactive” states it embodied on the day of its performance, both its documentation and derived artwork are “installed” in whatever display it partakes in. Similar to the reasoning warranted by Tate’s model, storage of the remnants of Roadworks would be best to uphold its integrity. Whereas migration, emulation, and reinterpretation would superimpose a new iteration of the work that does not necessarily coincide with Hatoum’s intentions for the ideal state of her artwork and its relics.

The FRBR would outline the relationship between the performance of Roadworks, its video recording, and Performance Still in a similar vein as the previous two models. Applying its layered approach would deem Hatoum’s concept for Roadworks as the “work” and its sole iteration in 1985 would be its “expression.” Because the recording is directly tied to the performance and does not exist as its own, non-informative work, it is considered a “manifestation.” Theoretically, if the shoes Hatoum wore during the performance were saved, they too would be considered a “manifestation.” The photograph is an “item” of the performance because it exists as an independent entity that nonetheless comes from the performance. The FRBR thereby colludes all aspects related to Roadworks into its cohesive concept.

The creation of a new artwork from the documentation of an original performance demonstrates the impossibility of wholly conserving a performance. It is the very nature of Hatoum’s performance that it was a singular event in which chance determined who in the streets of Brixton experienced it. From the Roadworks video, modern-day viewers are able to experience what Hatoum’s performance was like, yet the documentation stands differently than the work itself because we are incapable of experiencing it first-hand; the performance is inaccessible to us now. Moreover, the rendering of Performance Still from the Roadworks video commemorates the performance by extracting another artwork from it. In and of itself, although, Performance Still evidently does not execute the same impact of Roadworks and therefore must exist as a separate artwork from the performance itself, even though it clearly is derived from it.

From the various institutional models to the recording of Mona Hatoum’s Roadworks performance, it is evident that documentation is the ideal approach to conserving performance artworks. However, documentation is only successful to a certain extent. The experiential separation between the instantiation of the performance art and its recording deems it impossible to fully conserve a performance work as that—a performance. Therefore, it is inherent to performance art conservation that the relics of a performance are secondary to the performance itself. In that sense, it follows that the conservation of performance works operates with an awareness that the artwork must exist beyond its ephemera and documentation.  

Endnotes

  1. Tate, “Performance Art,” accessed May 23, 2023, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/performance-art. ↩︎
  2. Tate, “Documentation and Conservation of Performance,” accessed May 23, 2023, https://www.tate.org.uk/about-us/projects/documentation-conservation-performance. ↩︎
  3. Salvador Muñoz-Viñas, “Chapter 1: What Is Conservation?,” essay, in Contemporary Theory of Conservation (New York , NY: Routledge, 2011), 1–25. ↩︎
  4. Irene Müller, “PERFORMANCE ART, ITS ‘DOCUMENTATION,’ ITS ARCHIVES,” Revista de História de Arte, W, no. 4 (2015): 19–31. ↩︎
  5. Muñoz-Viñas, “Chapter 1,” 1–25. ↩︎
  6. Sotheby’s, “The Radical Nudes of Yves Klein’s Anthropometries,” Sothebys.com, January 21, 2020, https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/the-radical-nudes-of-yves-kleins-anthropometries.  ↩︎
  7. Nat Trotman, “Untitled: Silueta Series,” The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation, accessed May 23, 2023, https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/5221.  ↩︎
  8. Jennifer Brough, “This Artwork Changed My Life: Ana Mendieta’s ‘Silueta’ Series,” Artsy, September 1, 2020, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-artwork-changed-life-ana-mendietas-silueta-series.  ↩︎
  9. Tony Curran, “Picturing Performance Art: An Exploration into the Logic of Performance Documentation,” Fusion Journal, no. 7 (2015), https://fusion-journal.com/issue/007-fusion-mask-performance-performativity-and-communication/picturing-performance-art-an-exploration-into-the-logic-of-performance-documentation/.  ↩︎
  10. The Museum of Modern Art, “Pope.L. How Much Is That […] in the Window a.k.a. Tompkins Square Crawl. 1991: MoMA,” accessed May 23, 2023, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/292282?artist_id=37145&page=1&sov_referrer=artist. ↩︎
  11. Acatia Finbow, “Amalia Pica Born 1978 Strangers 2008,” Tate, October 2016, https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/performance-at-tate/case-studies/amalia-pica.  ↩︎
  12. Finbow, “Amalia Pica.” ↩︎
  13. Acatia Finbow, “Tino Sehgal Born 1976 This Is Propaganda 2002/2006,” Tate, August 2015, https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/performance-at-tate/perspectives/tino-sehgal.  ↩︎
  14. Louise Lawson et al., “Strategy for the Documentation and Conservation of Performance,” published as part of Documentation and Conservation of Performance (March 2016 – March 2021), a Time-based Media Conservation project at Tate, accessed May 23, 2023, https://www.tate.org.uk/about-us/projects/documentation-conservation-performance/strategy-and-glossary.  ↩︎
  15. The Guggenheim Museum, “The Variable Media Initiative,” The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation, accessed May 23, 2023, https://www.guggenheim.org/conservation/the-variable-media-initiative. ↩︎
  16. The Guggenheim Museum, “The Variable Media Initiative.”  ↩︎
  17. Jon Ippolito, “Accommodating the Unpredictable: The Variable Media Questionnaire,” Permanence Through Change: The Variable Media Approach, 2003, 47–53, https://www.variablemedia.net/pdf/Ippolito.pdf.  ↩︎
  18. Christina Manzella and Alex Watkins, “Performance Anxiety: Performance Art in Twenty-First Century Catalogs and Archives,” Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 30, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 28–32, https://doi.org/10.1086/adx.30.1.27949564. ↩︎
  19. Sara Diamond, “Performance: And Interview with Mona Hatoum,” Fuse Magazine 10, no. 5 (1987): 46–52, https://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/1792/. ↩︎
  20. Brixton Art Gallery Archive, “Roadworks Plus Kasia Januszko, Marc Elms & John Hewitt,” Roadworks Plus Kasia Januszko, Marc Elms & John Hewitt – Brixton Art Gallery, May 18, 1985, https://brixton50.co.uk/roadworks/.  ↩︎
  21.  Brixton Art Gallery, Roadworks Show Announcement Poster, 2022, Brixton Art Gallery Archive, 2022, https://brixton50.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/030.jpg.  ↩︎
  22. Roadworks 1985, video VHS, color 6min 45s. Collection Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’art moderne, Paris. ↩︎
  23. Astrid N. Korporaal, “Activist Intension,” Feminist Visual Activism and the Body, 2020, 31–45, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429298615-3.  ↩︎
  24. Capucine Perrot, “Mona Hatoum Born 1952 Performance Still 1985–95,” Tate, accessed May 23, 2023, https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/performance-at-tate/perspectives/mona-hatoum.  ↩︎
  25. Tate, “‘Performance Still’, Mona Hatoum, 1985, 1995,” January 1, 1995, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hatoum-performance-still-p80087. ↩︎
  26. Perrot, “Mona Hatoum.”  ↩︎
  27. Perrot, “Mona Hatoum.”  ↩︎

About the Author

Emma Huerta is a fourth-year student at the University of Chicago double-majoring in Art History and Philosophy. Her studies focus on the contemporary avant-garde and aesthetics theory, and she is currently writing her dual B.A. thesis on the work of the late artist Lutz Bacher. In her spare time, she enjoys dancing and choreographing, scoping out the Chicago art scene, and hearing live music.