The Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) and Getty Research Institute (GRI) are pleased to announce that the video recording of “The Object in Transition” conference is now available to view on-line at:
http://www.getty.edu/conservation/publications/videos/object_in_transition.html
“The Object in Transition: A Cross-Disciplinary conference on the Preservation and Study of Modern and Contemporary Art”, was held in the Harold M. Williams Auditorium at the Getty Center from January 25-26, 2008. A close collaboration between the GCI and the GRI, the conference brought together conservators, curators, art historians, artists and conservation scientists to discuss interdisciplinary case studies on the conservation of some of the varied-and frequently untraditional-materials used by artists over the last seventy years.
The conference was comprised of a series of case studies to debate the conservation issues presented by specific works of art, dialogues between conservators and art historians on the interdisciplinary study of certain artists, and a number of more general panel discussions. The works chosen for study included Piet Mondrian’s Victory Boogie Woogie, Roy Lichtenstein’s Three Brushstrokes, Sol Lewitt’s 49 Three-Part Variations on Three Different Kinds of Cubes, James Turrell’s Trace Elements: Light into Space, David Novros’s 6:30 and VI:XXXII, and Eva Hesse’s Expanded Expansion. Interdisciplinary studies were presented on (Bruce) “Nauman’s Edge” and “Encountering (Barnett) Newman”, and panels on “The Painted Surface”, “Artist’s Voice: History’s Claim”, and the “Life and Death of Objects” allowed
for significant discourse on topics brought up in the conference.
In addition, a panel discussion “The Object in Transition: Contemporary Voices”, was held on the evening of January 24. This too is available to view online at http://www.getty.edu/conservation/publications/videos/conservation_matters.html.
Organized as part of the Conservation Matters series of public lectures, the event was a sell-out, and attended by 500 people. Elisabeth Sussman from the Whitney Museum of American Art served as moderator for a discussion between artists Rachel Harrison, Paul McCarthy, and Doris Salcedo, and conservator Christian Scheidemann, in which they described the often complex production processes of their art, the fleeting nature of some of the materials they use, and the implications for the long
term survival of their work.