Practice question · Multiple choice
Art history has shifted 'from conservation to documentation' for many post-object practices. What does this transition require of the historian analysing a 1970s performance piece?
Hints
- Where is the historical work located once the live action has finished?
- Why can photographs, scripts, and eyewitness accounts never be identical to the performance itself?
Show the answer
B. She must treat surviving traces as mediation rather than the work
Why
Equating documentation with the work mistakes the record for the event, while seeking material permanence reverts to traditional object-connoisseurship. Documents are not transparent re-enactments; they are secondary, partial witnesses that require critical contextualisation.
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.
- 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…
- Arrange these questions in the order a historian should ask them about a non-object work.
- Match each practice to the conservation response it requires.
- The problems these practices pose are entirely new to art history.