Mobilizing Museum Minerals – Virtual Launch Event
January 15, 2025Introducing Archivetemporal
January 31, 2025Spending more time with The Fiction of Permanence: Materials Guides – Concrete
To start the new year, we’re spending more time with our new research project Objects as Temporal Entities. We begin with The Fiction of Permanence: Materials Guides.
Three: Concrete
1: One of the key points of tension in building a more sustainable institution is that between the duty of care museums have towards artworks, artefacts, and belongings in their collections, and
the energy and materials required to preserve those collections.
2: Shift (1970–72), the resulting work, [by Richard Serra and Joan Jonas] consists of six low concrete forms that trace the complex choreography of two bodies moving in relation to one another and to the rolling hills of the land itself, each sudden deviation in path marking a negotiation of the space.
3: Rather than a discrete object in a museum collection, this case study looks at a work of Land Art on private property that has been exposed to the elements without any documented intervention since its creation more than 50 years ago.
4: In 2024, Serra’s Shift exhibits forms of concrete deterioration that will be familiar to most. Thanks to the climatic conditions of Southern Ontario, the material has been exposed to varying temperature, levels of moisture, UV rays, weather events, winds, pollution, and salt.
Concrete is durable but not invincible.
5: When artists use industrial materials, when does change become damage? Specific to this case study, questions about authorship and ideology complicate how to care for Serra’s work – this was true before his passing in 1994, and has been amplified by his absence.
Download Concrete, part of The Fiction of Permanence: Materials Guides series: an expandable set of guides, each dedicated to understanding the degradation of a single material through a case study (either from France or the Great Lakes region).
Text: Katie Lawson
Design: Liza Eurich
Objects as Temporal Entities is a project developed by the Centre for Sustainable Curating with members of the Synthetic Collective as a part of the Sustainable Institution (TSI). The TSI programme is an artist-in-residence programme by LUMA Arles (Atelier LUMA), the E-WERK Luckenwalde, and Rupert Centre for Art and Education. It is co-funded by the European Union, Teltow Flaming and Lithuanian Culture Council.