Tate Papers no.3

In 1986 Victor Burgin made a series of photographic works based on Edward Hopper's painting Office at Night 1940 featuring a female secretary and male boss. In this paper, which is based on a talk given at Tate Modern in 2004 at the time of a major Hopper exhibition, Burgin described the relationship of his own works to Hopper's painting, exploring the sexual codes implicit in both.

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.

This paper summarises the advantages and disadvantages of glazing options, focusing on works on paper. In light of continuous improvements being made to the physical and optical properties of glass and plastics, combined with improved museum practice and safer art transport, new products have been introduced and the suitability of glass as a glazing option is re-assessed. The author looks at the results of tests carried out on glazing at Tate and suggests that the performance and safety of any glazing is only as good as the quality of the framing, packing, handling and transportation to which the glazed work is subjected.

Time-based media installations are works of art that incorporate audio, film, video, 35 mm slides or computer-based elements. This paper aims to develop a practical policy for the care and management of display equipment that forms part of these works. It explores how to identify time-based media installations most at risk from equipment obsolescence. In so doing it touches on key issues, such as how does the conservator balance the artist's and the museum's views about what is important to preserve for the future? What does a conservator do when faced with total loss to a significant component? How can our conservation training and attendant concepts of integrity and authenticity contribute to the development of a good decision or response?

The artistic representation of British antiquity brings in its wake a problem of methodology: how are the working assumptions of artists and archaeologists to be reconciled? This paper looks at two examples of artists responding to the deep past, both concerned with sites in Wiltshire. Thomas Guest (1754–1818) painted the grave goods from two barrows at Winterslow excavated in the 1810s. His paintings survived and were rediscovered in the mid 1930s. In that same decade the British artist Paul Nash encountered Avebury for the first time and responded to the prehistoric site in his own terms. The paper considers the two approaches and what they may tell us about the relationship between art and archaeology.

This paper examines Marcel Duchamp's use of the collotype printing process for publishing the contents of his Green Box and Boîte-en-valise in the 1930s. It subsequently traces the linguistic and graphic interpretations of this work by the British artist Richard Hamilton in his 1960 The Green Book and in his recent fusion of this work with the 'topography' of the Large Glass in the print Typo/Topography, published in 2003.