The co-authors of this case study, Gert
Hoogeveen, head of the audiovisuals department and chief media art conservator
at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam[1], and Simona Monizza, film
restorer and experimental film collection specialist at the film archive-and-museum,
EYE Film Institute Netherlands[2] describe the process of reconstructing
and reinstalling Dutch computer art pioneer and multimedia abstract artist Peter
Struycken’s Projekt I-’90, a media
artwork composed of 16mm film loops and slide projections displaying a
programmed sequence of colors and patterns, after a hiatus of almost twenty
years.[3] The outcomes of this
endeavor are best characterized as mixed;
reflecting a hard-won but qualified measure of success and a process fraught
with difficulties, some surmountable, others not. Nevertheless, the authors
assert that their case study represents “ …a fine example of a productive
collaboration between an art museum, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and a film
archive, the EYE Film Institute Netherlands, on a preservation process.”[4] Perhaps surprisingly,
there is much evidence to back up this assertion!
The intrinsic necessity of forming a
Stedelijk/EYE partnership became obvious to both institutions almost
immediately after the Stedelijk’s audiovisual preservation department took on
the reconstruction project in spring 2008 and sought to locate the various
image components from the original 1990 installation.[5] The search revealed a set
of slides, a potentially irreparable exhibition copy of the 16mm film, and
various parts of the original equipment in storage at the Stedelijk. The
original 16mm film print, meanwhile, was being stored at the EYE Film Institute
Netherlands, in accordance with a 2005 agreement between Peter Struycken and
EYE to have all his film material stored and preserved at their archive.[6] Beyond the partnership
they forged on the reconstruction of Projekt
I-’90, the two institutions already shared a common collection focus on
modern and contemporary fine arts media and regarded their principle institutional
mission to be the conservation and preservation of these media for posterity.
Their partnership, therefore, was obviated by these various areas of overlap
and by their complementary fields of expertise:
“Realizing
that the expertise of the audiovisual preservation department resided in the
fields of equipment, video technology, and installation of art works and not in
film preservation and restoration, the EYE Film Institute Netherlands was asked
to cooperate on the project, which helped both institutions enrich their
knowledge and set new guidelines for similar future projects.”[7]
In their capacity as conservators, Hoogeveen
and Monizza confronted an almost identical array of options and dilemmas in
determining which elements of the original installation could be used in a
re-creation of their original function, which elements were still sufficiently
viable for adaptation to the present (2009) state of technology, and which
elements had to be discarded altogether in favor of a completely new and
different means of presenting the essence of Projekt I-’90. The authors
were somewhat stymied at this juncture because the existent documentation from
the 1989-1990 installation provided only a limited and incomplete overview, and
most likely, insufficient information to guide their joint decision-making
process.[8] They conceived the
following workflow to address these obstacles and challenges:
- Researching the documentation on the artwork that they had at their disposal, and potentially supplementing that with several interviews of its creator, artist Peter Struycken
- Gathering the remaining physical components of the installation for functional evaluation
- Bringing in specialists to preserve the still viable components
- Reassembling and reinstalling the artwork and inviting outside experts – contemporary art curators, film curators, art and film historians, etc. – to view the reconstruction and share their critical assessments
- Disassembling, documenting, and ultimately, storing the artwork[9]
One of the inherent advantages to
conservators who work with modern and contemporary fine arts media is that they
often have the opportunity to meet and converse directly with the artist, and
gain his/her input -- even active cooperation -- on the proper stewardship of
the artwork. Yet involving the artist can have significant drawbacks as well.
In terms of the first listed activity of the proposed workflow, the authors’
successive interviews with Peter Struycken yielded indispensable information
about the artwork, minutely detailing, among other things, the exact
calibrations of the playback equipment used, the desired impressions the work
might have on the viewer when the installation was ideally executed, and the
requirements necessary to successfully present the installation in accordance
with Struycken’s intentions. In short, Struycken’s input filled in all the gaps
that the recovered documentation – consisting of directions for coordinating
the timing of the three simultaneous projections, rudimentary sketches mapping
out the planned installation, an exhibition catalog photograph and an excerpt
of a video documentary both covering the 1990 Energieën (Energies) group
exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum[10] which first featured
Struycken’s Projekt I-’90 – could not
fill. Indeed Monizza and Hoogeveen acknowledge their indebtedness to Struycken’s
contributions of information and insight, even devoting over a page of the
report to the artist’s biography and his ideas regarding the artwork.
Unfortunately, Struycken’s summation of the project diverged sharply from the
conservators’ aims and motives governing the reconstruction and reinstallation
of Projekt I-’90:
“According to Peter Struycken, the essence of ‘Projekt I-’90’ merely
consisted of the three projected images and their interrelated synchronicity.
In Stuycken’s view, the display technology was just a means to an end, and
reconstructing the work would mean transferring the images to digital formats,
using modern digital display technologies.’
‘ … [W]e wanted this preservation project to be aimed primarily at
researching how far we could go into preserving the original analog artwork,
including its original 16mm film and photographic slides, and how much of the
essence of the artwork would be altered or lost when adapted to modernized
equipment.”[11]
This conflict of interests presented the
project partners with the serious quandary of how to reconcile their allegiance
to their respective memory institutions, which were invested in extending the
life of the analog media installation with all its salient parts and in making
the documentation of that process available for potential future research
and/or reenactment purposes, with the artist’s wish to have his artwork reinvented
in a digitized version, thereby condemning the original analog version to de
facto obsolescence! Ironically, the technological factors associated with each
version of the Projekt I-’90 media
installation pointed the way to an eventual consensus. Some key components of
the analog version and its projection apparatus either couldn’t be located or
proved irreparable. As a result, the analog version only lent itself to partial
reconstruction and reinstallation insofar that it remained adequately true to the original artwork. By
transferring the 16mm film loops and the slide projections onto an all-digital
format, the artwork could be projected in its entirety via a single laptop
computer. Yet, while the digital version might reproduce the original installation
more fully and might be more technologically stable than the reconstructed
analog version, it did so at the expense of the rich color saturation of the
original film and slide projections and of the original ambient audiovisual
sensations elicited by the accompanying projection equipment. In other words,
each version was loss-y to some
extent. Having discussed the pros and cons associated with each version,
Monizza, Hoogeveen, and Struycken concluded that the original artwork could be most
faithfully and comprehensively represented by having the two newer versions displayed
side-by-side.
As alluded to at the beginning of this post,
the results of this compromise were mixed.
When the Projekt I-’90 exhibit opened
at the (now-defunct) Netherlands Media Art Institute (NIMk) in the last week
of February 2009[12],
reactions from professionals within the art and film milieus were notably
divided. The film professionals typically preferred the analog reconstruction
over the digital version, and were struck by the latter’s lack of “impressive
materiality … especially … the sound of the equipment”[13]. The modern art curators and researchers concurred
with the majority opinion that the digital version was superior to the analog
in that it better captured the essence of the original artwork and they deemed
the analog equipment superfluous. Perhaps the exhibit’s greatest detractor,
however, was Peter Struycken, who expressed dissatisfaction with both versions.
Despite this disappointing and lackluster
reception, the authors clearly felt a deep sense of professional accomplishment
and took pride in having forged a strong alliance between the Stedelijk Museum
and the EYE Film Institute Netherlands:
“After the exhibition, the film material, apart from an exhibition copy
in the Stedelijk Museum, was stored in the vaults of the EYE Film Institute
Netherlands. The slides, both original and used exhibition copies together with
the new digital copies, rest in the vaults of the Stedelijk Museum. The video
version resides on the video server of the Stedelijk Museum. All necessary
playback equipment is also kept in the Stedelijk Museum, including all
modifications made for this particular work. To complete the picture, a very
extensive written and visual documentation of the reinstallation was produced
for future reference.”[14]
~ Postscript ~
Gert Hoogeveen and Simona Minozza supply readers with a scant two references at the end of the article:
"Inside Installations," ICN, Amsterdam, 2007,
http://www.inside-installations.org/research/detail.php?r_id=83&ct=preservation
and
Peter Struycken, interview with the author, July 16, 2008, Audiocollection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 2008-004, 2008-005.
The first of these is a dead link from a now defunct organization. The Instituut Collectie Nederland (ICN) in Amsterdam, known in English as The Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage, was absorbed into the larger government-run agency, the Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed (RCE) -- in English, The Netherlands Cultural Heritage Agency -- headquartered in Amersfoort, as of January 1, 2011.[15] As a result, my attempts to recover any information about "Inside Installations," ICN, Amsterdam, 2007 by way of the RCE database, proved fruitless. As mentioned earlier in this post, the exhibition space that hosted the 2009 reinstallation of Projekt I-'90 -- the Netherlands Media Art Institute/Nederland Instituut voor Mediakunst (NIMk) -- also no longer exists. NIMk lost its funding and closed permanently as of
January 1, 2013; its collections and its activities of media art management,
preservation, and distribution were taken over by the LIMA agency, also
headquartered in Amsterdam, and formerly known as Montevideo.[16] Nevertheless, there is no trace of either iteration of Peter Struycken's Projekt I-'90 in LIMA's database. However, LIMA does feature three other installations by Struycken, along with extensive, multimedia research documentation that echo and build upon many themes of the Hoogeveen/Monizza article. You can access them here.
As for any additional information directly related to the focus of this blog post, I discovered this NIMk Flickr photo set and this Gutterlimbo blog post.
[1]
Hoogeveen, Gert and Simona Minozza. “When Visual Art Meets Cinema: The Reconstruction of ‘Projekt I-’90’ by Peter Struycken”. The Moving Image: The Journal of the
Association of Moving Image Archivists. 12.1 (Spring 2012): 119-28. JSTOR. Web. 18 Feb. 2016. p.127.
[2]
Ibid. p.128.
[3]
Ibid. p.119.
[4] Ibid.
[5]
Ibid.
[6]
Ibid. p.123.
[7]
Ibid. p.120.
[8]
Ibid.
[9]
Ibid. p.123.
[10] Energieen: 8.4-29.7.1990, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1990. Print.
[11]
Idem p.123.
[12]
Ibid. p.125.
[13]
Ibid.
[14]
Ibid.
[15] The Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage – Cultural Heritage Connections: (http://www.culturalheritageconnections.org/wiki/The_Netherlands_Institute_for_Cultural_Heritage). Web. 27 Feb 2016.
[16] Since NIMk is gone, LIMA appears | Wired: (http://www.wired.com/2012/12/since-nimk-is-gone-lima-appears/). Web. 27 Feb 2016.
