Collections of (An)archives: Towards a New Perspective on Institutional Collecting of Contemporary Art and the Object of Conservation

The immanent features of contemporary art, understood as a new paradigm of artistic practice, call for new approaches to the institutional collecting and all interrelated practices, including conservation. The identity of a contemporary artwork is distributed between physical objects and processes, and concepts and contexts, which shape an artwork throughout its career. These intangible agents often exist in, and thus might be transmitted only through, various kinds of documents. The resulting documentation does not only contain information about an artwork’s provenance, history, meanings and character but it hosts an important part of the artwork itself. As decisions about the future presentations of artworks, and hence their interpretations, are made on the basis of documentation, the latter not only shapes but also determines the future of contemporary artworks. Still, in today’s museum practice the documentation is often secondary when compared to physical objects and undervalued within the hierarchy of museum priorities. This essay traces emergent institutional attempts to link, both conceptually and practically, museum collections and collection-related documentation. Its aim is to demonstrate that these approaches, while initially developed to address needs differing from traditional conservation, can serve as sources of inspiration for the development of long-term preservation strategies for contemporary art.