Conservation as transcorporeal labour and play: An ethnographic study on calibrating classical musical works in bodies

Activity: Talk or presentation / Performance / SpeechesTalk or presentation - at conferenceAcademic

Description

In the last decades, contemporary art has become increasingly diverse and thus challenging to conservators. In performance art, bodies – human as well as nonhuman ones – have come to play a key role in processes of conservation, for example through practicing, rehearsing, and re-performing artworks. One place in which bodies have been trained for centuries and still are trained to conserve artworks is the music conservatoire. By understanding the conservatoire as a place where musicians become expert maintainers of musical heritage, this paper turns to classical music to explore what insights contemporary art conservators might gain from how musicians learn to perform works. I show how students and teachers – rather than being mere ‘transmitters’ of artworks – actively engage in a conservation practice in which human bodies and nonhuman instruments intertwine in processes of transcorporeal labour and play. Drawing on a year of ethnographic research (observations and qualitative
interviews) of three violoncello classes at the Conservatorium Maastricht, I examine how in bodies and cellos together the ambivalences and boundaries of the works’ identities are negotiated. Thereby, musical works become engrained into bodies as sets of individually choreographed, fine-calibrated motions, turning the musicians’ bodies and instruments into material archives through which musical memory and history are actualised. From this, I draw conclusions for contemporary art conservation about the role of human and nonhuman bodies in processes of conservation, conservation as a transcorporeal effort, and the idea of who or what a conservator can be.
Period3 Mar 2022
Event title110th CAA Annual Conference : Advancing Art & Design
Event typeConference