Living Matter in Contemporary Art: Snapshots

This paper addresses three cases of documentary materials housed at the Centro de Documentación Arkheia at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM): works by Santiago Rebolledo of Editorial Cocina Ediciones; by Rocío Boliver, also known as “La Congelada de Uva”; and by César Martínez Silva. In each case, biological material plays a central role in the critical rethinking of practices and concepts in art. The paper uses historiographic methodologies and visual analysis to discuss the biological material and its conservation implications in each case.

Eat Art installations trace back to 1968, when contemporary artists began to use food to express different emotions and meanings. Food is indeed something that everyone can relate to, but not all food is equivalent from a conservation standpoint. Sonja Alhäuser’s Braunes Bad V (Brown Bath V, 2009/2015), Laurent Moriceau’s Found and Lost #1 (2003), and Janine Antoni’s Lick and Lather (1993) are installations made with chocolate, and at first glance, they seem like they might call for similar conservation approaches because they use identical materials. But they most certainly do not. Understanding their differences, both physically and in terms of artistic intent, aids in recognizing the appropriate preservation response: allowing programmed obsolescence through replacement; accepting consumption; or allowing for continual decay.

As soon as the reprogramming of human cell material became the state of the art, artists made use of this possibility, investigating its implications for humankind. And as biological substances such as blood, flesh, and DNA found their way into the art context, they caused unprecedented problems, demanding unconventional conservation approaches as well as innovative handling toward their care and presevation within the white cube. The British artist Marc Quinn and the French performance artist ORLAN’s collaborations with the Tissue Culture & Art Project in some ways exemplify this material turn in art, and raise ethical, legal, as well as conservational questions through their art production.

Connecting the disciplines of contemporary art history and conservation, this essay explores how living matter artworks produced by the 1960s neo-avant-garde Fluxus collective have generated an “eternal metabolic network” in which conservators and curators are enlisted in a program of permanent creation alongside the artists. The chemical processes that ostensibly degrade the work of art in fact sustain organic life, enriching the work’s conceptual value while engaging a shifting array of collaborators in its ongoing care. Special attention is given to food-related works by Fluxus artist Alison Knowles, discussed in relation to the ethics of ecofeminism and to contemporary artworks by Jae Rhim Lee, Anicka Yi, Kelly Kleinschrodt, and Emily Peacock.

An innovative newcomer to textile materials, dehydrated bacterial cellulose decays at a rate prohibitive to performance art and exhibition. This paper presents collaborative research realized between the art conservation department at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and the Speculative Life Biolab at Concordia University in Montreal. Results produced an immersion treatment for bacterial cellulose that allows the material to persist externally from fluid containment while preserving vital qualities of pliancy and fluid retention, thus achieving longer functionality as a wearable, performance-ready textile. This case study explores the role that conservation and future collaborations may perform in the development and preservation of biomaterials.

Biomedia art that appropriates the most recent technologies of the life sciences updates, at first sight, art historical tropes of “aliveness” and “creation” when coming close to “life” in a very literal, biological sense. However, while museums and collectors traditionally deal with the ontological paradox that aesthetic representations made out of dead matter can, indeed, appear as alive, such strategies fail with regard to artistic modes that insist on the authenticity of their staged biological agents, functions, and processes. Such contemporary practices pose unprecedented challenges in terms of staging, conservation, and transport. In addition, they may willfully challenge institutions’ status as art depositories or “cemeteries.”