Restored behavior: Performing Materiality

Abstract

This paper reflects on the oeuvre of the Uruguayan media artist Brian Mackern and the Mexican performance practitioner Mónica Mayer as means to explore theoretical and practical challenges involved in the presentation, archivization, and preservation of variable media artworks. Drawing on a notion of materiality from a relational perspective, I will introduce the concept of unstable events as a methodology for discussing the modes of existence, continuity, circulation, and reactivation of transient and technology-related works of art. I will argue how an interdisciplinary knowledge across theoretical positions and practical approaches from the fields of Performance Studies, variable media, and artists’ transferring/reactivating strategies, might enhance the understanding about materiality of contemporary art works, thus provoking a paradigm shift over curatorial and conservation theory and practice. By exploring a definition of materiality not as fixed and “pre-given” property of an entity, but instead as relational pattern that refers to the logics in which actants interact, the roles they perform, and the relations they establish, this paper suggests that materiality is an act that may be performed over and over again. As a result, conservators may be able to “perform materiality” as means to “restore behaviour” of vanishing artworks. By restoring behaviour, conservators will be able to reanimate artworks, thus triggering artistic circulation patterns within museological circuits. What implications may this notion of materiality have over the practices of collecting, exhibiting, and conserving “objects”? How do conservators and curators “perform materiality”? How variable media artworks challenge core concepts of traditional conservation theory, such as original and material authenticity?