New media art conservation

Evolutive Conservation Theory based on cases

Lino García Morales

• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9788411233675
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9788411234436
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

New media art, produced at the intersection of art, science and technology, makes up the majority of a Museum of Contemporary Art's collections. However, technological obsolescence and technical fragility of the artworks make their conservation-restoration an ongoing challenge. A new theoretical approach to permanence through change addresses this problem and offers alternatives and solutions from the production to recreation of new media art.

Theories

Restoration with a capital “R”,¹ is immanent to Art, with a capital “A”. Theories of Restoration can be best described as an organized set of ideas that explain Restoration, arrived at through observation, experience, and logical reasoning, rather than as a set of rules, principles, and knowledge of the science of Restoration. One could say that they constitute a framework for action that shifts from the physical to the metaphysical in pursuit of the conservation of the identity of the Object of Restoration.

Whereas Art has many stories, the story of Restoration, which is based on the substance of the Object of Restoration, can be seen has having just two milestones or qualitative leaps. The first of these is when “indiscernible counterparts that may have radically distinct ontological affiliations” [Danto, 2011, p. 25] appear in art, and the second when the substance of these indiscernible counterparts dematerializes.

Arthur Danto proclaimed the “End of Art” when the story of Art collapsed, in the mid-1990s, at the moment when the distinction between life and its representation disappeared. Aesthetics alone could not explain this phenomenon, and so it became necessary to seek out a “philosophy of art”.

Danto sets up the problem beginning with a square of red paint described by Sören Kierkegaard. It was, according to Kierkegaard, a painting of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea, except that the painting is of the moment when the Israelites “had already crossed over, and that the Egyptians had drowned” [Danto, 2011, p. 21]. Danto proposed another “exactly equal” painting to the one described by Kierkegaard, a painting by a Danish portraitist entitled Kierkegaard´s Mood. He then proposed adding to these a landscape of Moscow called Red Square, a minimalist geometric painting also called Red Square,ametaphysical painting of Nirvana (because the Samsara world is known as Red Dust by those who deprecate it), Red Table Cloth by a disciple of Matisse, a canvas grounded in red lead on which Giorgione would have painted a Sacra Conversazione had he lived, and lastly a surface painted but not grounded in red lead that is not an artwork (and is interesting art-historically only because it is has no art historical interest) but “just a thing with paint over it”. In short, these works form a series of seven “indiscernible counterparts that may have radically distinct ontological affiliations”.

Figure 1: Danto’s seven red paintings.

Danto provides a “solution” to the problem of the red paintings with the following sentence: “The difference between art and reality is just a matter of those conventions, and that whatever convention allows to be an artwork, is an artwork” [Danto, 2011, p. 61]. Such “conventions” are displaced from the signifier to the signified.

According to Leibniz, two objects are identical if they have the same properties; Danto disagrees. He quotes Borges to “avert our eye from the surface of things” and force us to search for an answer beyond what the eye can identify (retinal indiscernibility). One could argue that the properties Leibniz observes are intrinsic to the object, while the properties that Danto and Borges observe are extrinsic to it and belong to what Danto calls “conventions”. According to Danto-Borges, these extrinsic properties of the work “penetrate, so to speak, the essence of the work” [Danto, 2011, p. 69].

A signifier can have many signifieds, depending on such conventions, the interpretive context, or the individual. Danto, however, starts from “retinal indiscernibility” to theorize on whether or not it is the same. He takes for granted that these radically distinct ontological affiliations mean that there are intrinsically identical properties. In other words, if the seven red paintings were different, there would be no meaning to the whole discussion. In some theories of Restoration, this “philosophy of art” only makes sense if the identity of the seven red paintings is conserved. Identity, in this case, exists in relation to the intrinsic properties of the Object. These are “retinal” properties, in Danto’s terms (i.e. objective, measurable, etc.). There are, however, other theories of Restoration according to which certain extrinsic properties of a work (albeit of other types of conventions) also penetrate the essence of the work, à la Danto-Borges (i.e subjective, non-measurable, etc.).

The next major leap in the story of Restoration occurs with the dematerialization of the “indiscernible counterparts”. When Danto decreed the “End of Art” there were other problems –the loss of “aura”, for example– which could only be explained in the philosophical sense he demanded. Yet Danto limited his thinking to the “Object”.

Beyond immateriality, with the emergence of computation, art objects can be virtual, ubiquitous, etc., in which case they are not indiscernible counterparts, but identical copies.

Figure 2: Axiological degradation of a work of art, where A is the original and B is a copy or transformation of A to another state of authenticity.

One could say that judgements (objective or subjective) that penetrate the essence of works are “value judgements”, understanding “value” as the scope of the signification or importance of a thing, action, word of phrase. The choice of both sets of attributes –intrinsic and extrinsic– that determine the “identity” of a work of art are value judgements, and never irrefutable truths. These values are essential (for an individual), social (for a community), commercial. . . and belong to the dynamic of a “cultural economy” in continual transmutation.

If we were to take the red painting described by Sören Kierkegaard (to the left in fig. 1) as an Object of Restoration, it is a unique, autograph work that is begotten intellectually and materially from its author². A heterographic work comes intellectually, if not materially, from its author. It is also expected to be the original. Unicity is common in “traditional” art, and in fact, multiplicity (in printmaking, for example) is understood as a degradation of value relative to each unit. Unicity is, in general, highly valued as a thing that is singular and unrepeated, and in this regard is closely related to exclusivity and scarcity. Within these practices, multiplicity is not unusual, but it is inferior in value. The act of copying a pictorial work was a mechanism of learning rather than of representation, and the very nature of the print diminished as the print number went up. Restoration must maintain the authenticity of the work, understanding the authentic as a certification that testifies to its identity and truth.

For the purposes of the story told in this book, “‘traditional’ art” refers to what is otherwise called classical art, pre-modern art, the fine arts or, plainly, art, or even part of modern art, etc. It is the first stage of “art”, whose origins date back to the Renaissance. In short, it is art produced according to a series of formal rules, among which is a certain concern for the stability of matter and its permanence into the future; in other words, an interest in its conservation. This is what I mean by “tradition”.

This tradition was thrown into crisis by the desire to blur the boundaries between art and life. The emergence of photography in 1839, film in 1895, performance in 1900, conceptual art in 1917. . . gradually broadened the concept of what hitherto had been recognized as art. From a conservation standpoint, the appearance of the readymade in the early 20th century produced the final rupture with tradition.

Readymade is a term that Marcel Duchamp created to designate a reaction against retinal art³.

With the emergence of “contemporary” art (understood as “the End of Art”), multiplicity acquired a conceptual connotation. Artists copy and authorize others to copy them, and technical reproduction –a set of practices that Walter Benjamin argued destroy “originality”–was normalized. Art became an object whose value cannot be established by how it functions within the tradition. This departure is allographic in nature (variance and alternance)⁴, and the multiple is degraded depending on the degree to which it is a faithful representation of the reference model or example (the “original”). The contemporary art Restoration Object carries a degree of immateriality, in its use of ignoble materials alien to tradition, as well as ephemeral practices, the use of communications media as a ground or support, the idea that “every human being is an artist”, the disaffection or negation of any earlier rules “imposed” by tradition, etc. The term “contemporary” is used here, although contemporary art is normally associated with the 1950s, and is clearly indebted to modern art, and it is not always apparent where one ends and the other begins. Strictly speaking, contemporary art stopped being contemporary. . . since then.

The Restoration Object in new media art, corresponding to a third period, sits at the intersection of Art and Technology, inheriting the complexity of both. By then, the active⁵ contemporary art object (performance and film, for example) already existed, but new media art uses the digital computer as the ultimate remediating and metamedium, and completely expands reality. Here too there was a diffuse period of technology-related and electronic art that began in the 1960s, at the height of contemporary art, to which new media art is indebted.

In figure 2, “value” diminishes from top to bottom and from left to right. For A ≈ B, A A is not equal to B but is indistinguishable from...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Epigraph
• Theories
• New Media Art
• Restoration of New Media Art
• Methods
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright