‘That Was Then’: Documenting Transient Art

Picture a motorized loveseat that bangs against the wall and the floor, as an audio book plays from an attached pair of headphones. Or imagine an opaque, reflective black box made of Plexiglass and engraved with the sort of gibberish characters familiar from incompatibilities in word processing programs. Such pieces of installation art are no longer actually in existence, but images documenting their impermanent lifespan form part of a new exhibit, entitled “That Was Then and This is Now: interventions, installations, and performance art documented.” The showing, affiliated with The Harvard Advocate, will run in the Center for Government and International Studies from April 30 through May 12.

“Performance art is hard to exhibit and because of that it often has to be sought out. And the ones who do that are generally an already self-selected group of art appreciators,” says Alexandra M. Hays ’09, who curated the show. “The exhibit is intentionally placed outside of an officially sanctioned Harvard art space so that a new audience is witness to the revisiting of past works.”

This raises questions about the nature of documentation itself: “Is it a fair re-creation or expression of the original?” asks Hays.

“That Was Then and This is Now” is a unique exhibition in that it features two-dimensional documentation of previously displayed three-dimensional projects, such as installation and performance art.

“The range of works really does vary, but the thing that unites them is that they’re either large-scale works or temporal works,” Hays says.

The exhibit also places emphasis on the holistic process and conceptualization of creating such art. It contains written statements from its 10 contributors, artists both affiliated and unaffiliated with the Harvard community.

“Every piece will have an artist statement with it, and that’s an important part of the exhibit. This exhibit treats the artwork as a process, or as willing to exhibit an entire process from conceptualization to its actualization to documentation. So, you have the entire process represented,” says Hays.

“In some cases, the pieces you see in the show won’t just be documentation,” she adds. “It’ll also be images of the entire process, like the creation.”

Contemporary Chinese artist Zhang Yue has two pieces in the exhibit. “Installation art is a full engagement with the world around you—it isn’t bound by any materials or specific set of rules and practices,” she writes in an e-mail. “It is most often a full sensory experience, more so than painting, photography or video.”

Unlike those other mediums, the documented artwork featured in the exhibit has a short life expectancy. None of the original projects in the exhibit still exists materially. The process of documentation also precipitates a rethinking of the original work.

“Through documentation, we can rethink these works or revisit and appreciate the work that went into realizing them rather than a painting which is painted and then continually exhibited. These works, if they’re not documented, then they’ll never be seen again,” says Hays.

Enzo A. Camacho ’07 contributed work to the exhibit. “It’s really exciting for me to have the opportunity to show the piece after it self-destructed,” he says.

In discussing his documented installation piece, Camacho (creator of the aforementioned motorized loveseat) has this to say: “The piece was moving for maybe the first couple of hours and then after that, the couch would just sort of sit motionless in the space and the audio continued to play through the headphones.”

“It damaged the wall and the floor of the gallery space and eventually it damaged itself so badly that it stopped working,” he says. “I knew that it might happen, but that kind of unpredictable nature was a part of the piece."