Tate Papers: Museology

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MICHELLE BARGER	Thoughts on Replication and the Work of Eva Hesse
	In 2002, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opened Eva Hesse, a comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s works including sculpture, works on paper and paintings. The advance planning required for assembling such an ambitious exhibition afforded conservation staff at SFMOMA significant time for the examination of condition issues in the artist’s work, especially sculptural works made from ephemeral materials.
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

LYDIA BEERKENS	Nothing but the Real Thing: Considerations on Copies, Remakes and Replicas in Modern Art
	During the modern art conservation training programme, many reconstruction exercises are undertaken for educational and research purposes. With the assistance of the artist or a relevant material specialist (for example, a woodworker or blacksmith), to-scale reproductions are made using the same materials and imitating the working techniques employed to create the original artwork.
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

CHRISTIANE BERNDES	Replicas and Reconstructions in Twentieth-Century Art
	For this workshop I would like to present three cases based on the collection of the Van Abbemuseum that – one way or another – deal with the notion of copyright and of the relationship of the replica to the artists’ original intentions. The first case is of a reconstruction that became an original, the second of a replica with a limited edition. The third case is that of a work which cannot be reproduced without losing its integrity.
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

SUE BREAKELL

Perspectives: Negotiating the Archive

Archives are more prominent than ever, not only in art practice and theoretical discourse but also in popular culture. An archive is now understood to mean anything that is longer current but that has been retained. This paper considers how archival practice can be integrated further within current discourses of art history, theory and practice, at a time when the concept of the archive is at both more widely known and less fixed in its meaning.

Spring 2008

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GUY BRETT	Hélio Oiticica
	The question of replication, reproduction and re-creation becomes particularly poignant in relation to Oiticica because he himself was very concerned with the life and afterlife of his works. Not only the existence they might have posthumously but how they would continue to live, retain their vitality and efficacy during his lifetime.
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

HELEN CHARMAN and MICHAELA ROSS	Contemporary Art and the Role of Interpretation: Reflections on Tate Modern’s Summer Institute for Teachers
	Recent research indicates that the taught curriculum in art and design secondary school education pays scant attention to meaning-making in visual art. This paper explores possibilities for teaching interpretation through a report on an action-research project based on Tate Modern's Summer Institute for Teachers, held in 2002. In doing so, it argues for the value and necessity of interpretation as a taught skill.
	Autumn 2004	View Paper

HELEN CHARMAN	Uncovering Professionalism in the Art Museum: An Exploration of Key Characteristics of the Working Lives of Education Curators at Tate Modern
	This paper attempts to articulate the distinctive qualities of the work of Education Curators at Tate Modern in relation to shifting conceptions of professionalism, specialist knowledge, responsibility and autonomy.
	Spring 2005	View Paper

LYNNE COOKE	Richard Serra: A Case Study
	A close inspection of Richard Serra�s sculptural oeuvre, based on consultation with the artist himself, reveals that issues relating to replicas and reproductions have relatively little applicability for his practice. While Serra�s sculpture has ranged widely in form over the past forty years, it can nonetheless be loosely subdivided into four principal groupings, each determined by the materials employed.
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

HARRY COOPER	Thoughts on Thoughts on Replication
	As Sebastiano Barassi and Yve-Alain Bois point out in their contributions to this symposium, Alois Riegl’s essay ‘The Modern Cult of Monuments’, 1903, offers a useful set of co-ordinates for thinking about the Tate’s Gabo project, both because Riegl is explicitly addressing the problem of restoration and because, rather than advocating one attitude or another, he offers a taxonomy of possible positions.
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

PENELOPE CURTIS	Replication: Then and Now
	Curators jumped at the chance of calling this colloquium ‘inherent vice’ because, what was a familiar term for conservation practice was a new one to them. In fact, the definition of inherent vice – while it reflects very accurately the problems posed by Naum Gabo’s plastic sculptures (which provoked this research project at its outset) by no means cover the range of questions raised by the question of replication.
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

ANNA DEZEUZE	Blurring the Boundaries between Art and Life
	The desire to blur the boundaries between art and life was shared by a great number of artists working across the world in the 1960s. One of the most radical forms to emerge from this shared concern was a type of art that emphasised the lived experience of its viewers by requiring them to adopt new forms of active participation.
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

SUE DONNELLY

Art in the Archives: An Artist’s Residency in the Archives of the London School of Economics

This paper explores the aims and outcomes of an artist’s residency in the Archives of the London School of Economics. It considers the impact of the residency on archive staff and on the arts community, and its role in attracting new audiences to the Archives.

Spring 2008

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MICHÉLE FUIRER	Jolt, Catalyst, Spark! Encounters with Artworks in the Schools Programme at Tate Modern
	This paper describes the findings of a practice-based research project to assess the qualitative shifts in learning made by participants in the Schools Programme at Tate Modern. It establishes learning frameworks in relation to this programme which is considered in the light of the Generic Learning Outcomes framework proposed by the Museums Libraries Archives Council in 2004.
	Autumn 2005	View Paper

MATTHEW GALE	Amazement and Uneasiness: Early Thoughts
	Soon after the opening of Tate Modern in 2000, a fragment broke off a work by Naum Gabo, Spiral Theme, 1941, in one of our displays. Though this has yet to unleash terror, it was, as far as I was concerned, a spontaneous and unexpected action certainly raising amazement and unease. However, from talking with colleagues in conservation, it appeared that the various plastics of which the sculpture is composed were pulling against each other, and the most fragile gave way.
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

CHARLIE GERE	New Media Art and the Gallery in the Digital Age
	This paper examines some the changes that digital technology has wrought upon conceptions of space, time and culture, and how ‘new media art’ has historically reflected upon these. It suggests that such art might be better represented in institutions such as Tate, which in turn might help them engage with the question of what their own role might be in the digital age.
	Autumn 2004	View Paper

MARK GODFREY and ANTHONY McCALL	Anthony McCall’s Line Describing a Cone
	In the late 1960s, a number of artists who had trained as sculptors, and whose most well known work was sculpture, started working with film (Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson). Around the same time, independent film makers who did not necessarily identify themselves as ‘artists’ began to consider the sculptural dimensions of film – paying attention not just to the images that they presented on the screen...
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

WALTER GRASSKAMP	The Rules of the Game
	Since the replica steering group was formed in September 2006, this is the first time we have invited other experts to join our discussions. Perhaps now, therefore, is the moment to resume our work in terms of its hopes and disappointments.
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

LUCY GUNNING, JO MELVIN AND VICTORIA WORSLEY

Tangentially: The Archive and the Bathroom

This paper discusses the role of the archive in relation to the artistic process, through the work of Lucy Gunning, and in terms of day-to-day interactions, with reference to the Studio International Archive held at Tate, the Wordsworth Trust Archive and the Henry Moore Institute Archive.

Spring 2008

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STEPHEN HACKNEY	Degradation of Naum Gabo’s Plastic Sculpture: The Catalyst for the Workshop
	Some dramatic events have occurred to several sculptures by Naum Gabo in Tate’s collection. Quite suddenly they have changed from being relatively intact sculptures to being unstable and unusable items. This is because they are made from cellulose acetate. Gabo created many sculptures by cutting, bending and gluing sheets of transparent material, beginning with cellulose nitrate, which proved to be highly unstable...
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

JACKIE HEUMAN AND LYNDSEY MORGAN	Tate Sculpture Replica Project
	This paper describes the first phase of a multi-disciplinary research project that Tate is currently undertaking to document plastic sculptures by Naum Gabo. The project is a case study for a much wider debate about replicating art works. The Tate has the world’s largest collection of Gabo’s early sculptures, thanks to donations from the artist and his family. Despite storage in controlled conditions and a programme of regular monitoring...
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

MARGARET IVERSEN	Resistance to Replication
	For the past several decades art theorists have been wrestling with the consequences of fine art’s accelerated absorption into technologies of reproduction. Following Walter Benjamin’s qualified embrace of this situation in 1936, some have greeted technical replication as the final deliverance of art from outmoded notions of authorship, originality and uniqueness. The more democratic dissemination possible with photography, film and video positioned them as the contemporary artistic media.
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

ULRICH LANG	The Passing Away of Art
	For a number of years the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main MMK has been collaborating with artists that come to Frankfurt for a period of time to install their works of art or fulfil commissions. Many works originate on site and are at least partially affected by local conditions. In such cases we have a golden opportunity to accompany the artist’s activity for some time, which generally generates mutual trust.
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

NATHALIE LELEU	The Model of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International: Reconstruction as an Instrument of Research and States of Knowledge
	‘History is not data but conquest, renewed in time and space by a thorough knowledge, unceasingly continued, unceasingly supplemented. This is indeed the lesson which we must learn from Paris-Moscow’. In these words Pontus Hultén introduced, in his lead article in Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, the project of the Paris-Moscow exhibition, organised in the spring of 1979 at the Centre Pompidou.
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

HENRY LIE	Replicas of L�szl� Moholy-Nagy's Light Prop: Busch-Reisinger Museum and Harvard University Art Museums
	László Moholy-Nagy’s Light Prop for an Electric Stage, 1930, is one of the key works in the history of twentieth-century sculpture, standing at the intersection of the histories of kinetic art, of the machine aesthetic, and of material innovation. Building on the artist’s exploration of effects of transparency and movement in his painted and photographic oeuvre, the Light Prop has also had a rich and influential afterlife, too.
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

CHRISTINA LODDER	Naum Gabo and the Quandaries of the Replica
	For Naum Gabo, the issue of making replicas, copies, and reconstructions emerged with some force during his lifetime. Like many of the sculptors working in Russia during the revolutionary period, he was sometimes forced to execute his ideas in poor-quality materials, and works frequently became lost or damaged through the upheavals of the time. His colleagues, such as Vladimir Tatlin, who remained in Russia, tended to move into design...
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

HENRY LYDIATE	Posthumous Legal and Ethical Issues
	This paper briefly discusses key legal and ethical issues involved and arising at the colloquium held at Tate on 18–19 October 2007, Inherent Vice: The Replica and its Implications in Modern Sculpture. It explores distinctions, if any, between the works of living and dead artists. he first and paramount reason for distinguishing between the works of living and dead artists – in the context of conservation, restoration and replication – is legal...
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

ANNA McNALLY	Gabo Cataloguing Project at the Tate Archive
	Sir Norman Reid, former Director of the Tate Gallery and a close friend of Naum Gabo (1890–1977), gave a powerful account of his last visit to the artist’s home in Connecticut in 1976. To his amazement, Gabo and his wife brought out quantities of drawings, sketchbooks and models that had been carefully put aside throughout his career. ‘They were not all in perfect condition,’ Reid recalled.
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

CATHERINE MORIARTY AND ANGELA WEIGHT

The Legacy of Interaction: Artists at the Imperial War Museum 1981–2007

The idea that artists might reinvigorate and activate collections in new ways no longer seems a radical concept, but this understanding of the potential of collaborations between artists and archives was not always so widespread. This paper – based on a conversation held at the Archival Impulse Study Day at Tate Britain in November 2007 – explores the role played by Angela Weight as Keeper of the Department of Art at the Imperial War Museum between 1981 and 2005 in commissioning artists to work alongside the museum’s collections and archives.

Spring 2008

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JENNIFER MUNDY	Why/Why Not Replicate?
	This double question – the exact meaning of which can depend on the inflection of the voice saying it – embraces a wide range of issues and concerns about the pros and cons of replication. Looking ahead, it seems to me that as individuals we may conclude that a case-by-case review of various factors – including our knowledge of the artists’ intentions and the feasibility of creating adequate copies or reconstructions...
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

KARIN ORCHARD	Kurt Schwitters: Reconstructions of the Merzbau
	One of the most important art works and myths in modern art, the inspiration for many installation artists, and still one of the most well known and published works by Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948), the Merzbau, in fact, no longer exists. It was destroyed in a British air raid in October 1943 in Hannover. By 1937, when Schwitters left his hometown to follow his son into exile in Oslo, the Merzbau comprised a total of eight rooms...
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

JOANNA PHILLIPS	Reconstructing the Forgotten: An Exhibition of 1970s and 1980s Video Installations, Re-staged with Authentic Technology
	I am a conservator working for the interdisciplinary research project AktiveArchive. We have been commissioned by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture to investigate questions relating to the preservation, documentation and accessibility of electronic art and to convey our discoveries to the museum professionals who are involved with Swiss contemporary art collections.
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

ALEX POTTS	The Enduringly Ephemeral
	The problems that particularly interest me are those posed by the conservation or replication of works whose ephemerality is integral to their identity and conception. What attempts should be made, if any, to preserve the material integrity of such work, or of its residues if it was a performance or action? This might seem to be primarily an ethical issue, having to do with respecting an artist’s intentions, or, where evidence of this is lacking...
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

ALISTAIR RIDER	Carl Andre
	I am currently in the midst of writing a book on Carl Andre’s poems and sculptures, so when I read through the list of issues the Steering Committee outlined for discussion, my mind immediately turned to the occasions when Andre has chastised museums for installing replicas, or ‘forgeries’ of his works. What light do these episodes throw on the larger debates surrounding replication?
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

HEIDE SKOWRANEK	Should We Reproduce the Beauty of Decay? A Museumsleben in the work of Dieter Rot
	In twentieth-century sculpture, artists increasingly used new materials which were unfamiliar to them in terms of resistance to aging, and so were unable to foresee the speed and degree of decay these works would undergo – many of them turning out to have only a fraction of the lifespan which works from earlier periods had. On the other hand, artists played with the foreseeable and deliberate disintegration of works in which...
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

JULIAN STALLABRASS	Inherent Vice
	The title suggests, with an air of irony perhaps, but that does not withdraw the implication, that replication in sculpture is an inherent vice (an internal flaw that will damage the value of the piece). Why should this be so? The vast majority of sculpture is replicated, and not merely in the cottage-industry of the artist’s studio but in industrial manufacture.
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

SIMON STARLING	Replication: Some Thoughts, Some Works
	The following illustrated texts flag up a number of works from the last ten years, some of which are still in production, that take as their starting point existing objects or artworks and deploy processes of reproduction or replication as an investigative tool. All of these projects engage (to a greater or lesser extent) in, and have been generated through a close collaboration with, the mechanisms and culture of the museum.
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

STURTEVANT	Inherent Vice or Vice Versa
	There is the inside and the outside. There is the interior and exterior. Not as in the Foucault fold, but as in essence, force and potency: the interior silent power of art. And it is here that hovers
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

DIDIER VERMEIREN	Je Travaille sur la Présence
	How and why I became a sculptor is not of much interest. No one looking at my work will find me in it. I have nothing to say, I have no story to tell – at least not within the means of sculpture. What happens in the studio is not all that spectacular. You have no choice when it comes to actually making the works. Everything is decided in advance. The only thing you can observe in the studio is the production of the sculpture.
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

NINA and GRAHAM WILLIAMS	Replicas of Constructions by Naum Gabo: A Statement by the Copyright Holders
	Early in 2006, in response to Tate, Nina and Graham Williams agreed that they would permit replicas to be made of some Naum Gabo constructions. The topic had been discussed with Tate on several occasions before this and previously Nina Williams, the major copyright holder, had refused absolutely to allow replication.
	Autumn 2007	View Paper