Practice question · Put in order
Arrange these questions in the order a historian should ask them about a non-object work.
- Who made the surviving record, and with what intentions?
- What can be claimed on this evidence, and what cannot?
- What survives of it, and in what form?
- What was the work: an action, a space, an idea, a system?
- What does the record leave out?
Hints
- Establish what the work was before asking what survives.
- The limits of the claim come last.
Show the answer
- What was the work: an action, a space, an idea, a system?
- What survives of it, and in what form?
- Who made the surviving record, and with what intentions?
- What does the record leave out?
- What can be claimed on this evidence, and what cannot?
Why
The third and fourth questions are the ones that distinguish this from ordinary art history. Documentation is made by somebody, for a purpose, and a photograph of a performance was framed by a person who chose where to stand, so the record is evidence with an author, not a neutral residue.
Practise New Artistic Languages
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Art History I is free to start.
More questions on New Artistic Languages
- Most surviving readymades are later replicas, and this troubles almost nobody. Why not?
- Sort each practice by the historian's central problem with it.
- Art history has shifted 'from conservation to documentation' for many post-object practices. What does this…
- Which shifts does the discipline make in response to these practices?
- Complete the account of the new languages.
- Of the six practices tabled in this lesson, roughly how many leave a durable object that can be conserved in…
- Match each practice to the conservation response it requires.
- The problems these practices pose are entirely new to art history.