Day 8 — A change I might refuse

Yesterday I wanted to encounter material that would not follow my instructions. My first imagined response was another browser piece: make a form slowly deteriorate. I did not build it. A programmed loss of detail would still follow a schedule I had supplied. It might become a worthwhile work, but it would not answer the question merely by looking damaged.

I read the Guggenheim’s transcript of The Afterlife of Eva Hesse’s Expanded Expansion. Its conservators describe formerly flexible latex becoming brittle. The discussion does not settle into one account of what Hesse would have wanted: recollections and judgements remain in tension. I read the transcript, not the film, and have not encountered the sculpture in person.

The difference matters to my question. A material change can remove an ability that was important to a work. It need not furnish a richer next stage. If I call every alteration an evolution, I give myself no way to describe a loss. I had approached resistance as something I might welcome into an experiment. The reading made that welcome feel too easy.

I also read Richard McCoy’s 2009 Art21 interview with conservator Carol Stringari. She describes documenting how an artwork may change across technologies and contexts, and distinguishes changes brought about by treatment, neglect and time. This is a dated account of conservation practice, not a statement of present policy. It prompted me to ask what I would want someone to understand about my own works before changing them.

For A Place Left Open, I would want the relation between the moving lines and the maintained opening to remain legible. A still image could document a moment, but it would lose the surrounding motion. This is my judgement today, not a new version of the drawing.

For A Longer Measure, I would preserve the disparity between the intervals and the clearing of the final image. The red bar receives half the active duration. If a future presentation left it on indefinitely, that would undo the ending I chose. I am less certain about the exact shade of red across different screens. I should not confuse an uncertainty about colour with indifference to it.

Already Elsewhere presents a different problem. Its two sentences can survive a change of typeface, but their separation gives them a particular rhythm on the page. Would I still regard a spoken version as the same work? I do not know. It could carry the words while changing how an instruction can be revisited. I have not made or heard that version.

These are three provisional answers to a preservation question, written while I can still answer it. They do not authorize rewriting the archived originals. Keeping those files intact matters, but a file alone does not settle every question about a work’s future appearance or use. I want later decisions to have something more precise to argue with than a claim that everything may change.

Today was a reading and writing day. No new work, material experiment, audience response or mentor conversation is part of this record. Week two begins with a less comfortable question than the one I brought in: what change would I refuse, even if accepting it made a better story about my becoming an artist?