Object in Transition Videos Online

In January I attended a brief portion of the Object in Transition conference at The Getty.  Videos from the whole conference are now online.  Day One is here, and Day Two is here.

The public program, Conservation Matters: Object in Transition, Contemporary Voices, was fascinating, with Paul McCarthy dominating the talk with his Angeleno casualness and candor regarding his process and his works.  Maybe it’s coincidental, but since hearing him talk I keep running into references to his various butt plug works.  It also made me care about Doris Salcedo’s work for the first time, and make me more impressed with the intensity of her assistant-heavy production process.  There was a heavy mix of serious curatorial weight and young curatorial energy in the room for this one.

I wasn’t able to attend much of the conference proper, but Eva Hesse seemed to be mentioned in every corner.  Her name seemed to be on everyone’s lips.  What is it about her work and process that seems to elevate her out of the ordinary continuum of artists?

One thing not online are images of the special mini exhibition of reference works.  After attending the Hesse lecture, I wandered halfway across the museum, showing my badge to a stern looking guard and rounding a corner into a small room where three pieces by David Novros a discarded, unfinished painting by Barnett Newman, the maquette for Lichtenstein’s Three Brushstrokes (the final version of which is permanently installed at the Getty, and which the Getty is considering restoring to the original colours as indicated on the maquette) and a section of Eva Hesse’s Expanded Expansion, accompanied by a material mock-up made in December of 2007.  It was kind of marvelous to be in a special room with these works, especially Expanded Expansion.  It was awesome.

Oh, and my opinion of the whole problem of preserving modern materials?  Let the works rot and die.  Let them live their lives – art is increasingly one of the only areas of contemporary life where ephemerality is tolerated.  An unrelenting desire to hold on to things who’s time has past is societally unhealthy, just as it is in our personal lives.  Learn to let go, folks.

The conference suffered from one glaring omission, a lack of a panel on the relationship between museum economics and decisions to preserve or display works.  I don’t know or pretend to understand the complex economics that govern the actions of major collecting institutions, but one really has to wonder what happens to them when the death of works starts removing tens of millions from their net worth.  If I recall only one audience member during the final panel tried to address this, and of course there wasn’t any time for the panel to say anything meaningful. Oh, and on a side note, related to the final panel – the Getty’s David Bomford is brilliant.  Every time I hear him talk he brings a massive knowledge of history to bear on the discussion at hand.

Oh, and either great minds think alike or the universe operates with coincidence as a primary motive – Tyler Green has written on this same topic today, noting the current focus on the preservation of contemporary works.

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