What about the notion of ownership – how does that work in the context of performance? It’s a loaded word, to be sure, but one that comes to mind for many in the museum community when you start talking about performing arts, using language like “commissions”, or “collections,” or “acquisitions.” The question arises in the group discussion: Is it even appropriate to use such language in the context of performing arts? If not, then what, exactly, is the museum’s stake in its commissioned works, and what sort of institutional history is tied up in its internal cataloguing of its investments in such performance pieces?

Peter Taub, of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, observes:

 “The notion of individual ownership just doesn’t apply; there are usually multiple commissioning partners behind the development of any given performance work, with shared, vested interests who are all involved in bringing that work to the stage, bringing it to completion. But those commissioning institutions also invest in residency time, in developing contextual material, and building and maintaining a web presence. How do we effectively use all these cohorts, these collaborative partners with a stake in a work, to create a commitment to quality and protocols for consistent documentation of that work? Various museums may have a different valuation for such archival materials and their use; there is no guarantee ‘documentation’ means the same thing to all of them, across the board.”

Chuck Helm of the Wexner Center for the Arts responds, “How then do you position your own investment and institutional history? Your ‘reputational capital’? Is ‘collection’ the way to talk about that?”

Joan Rothfuss, a curator and art historian, clarifies the point nicely, saying:

 “How does any institution actually ‘own’ a commission? A collection includes more than just the objects owned by the museum; an institution’s holdings are not really about collecting and buying, at their heart. ‘Collecting’ works is primarily about preserving and protecting them, presenting them for the public. The process of documenting a performance work for the ‘collection’ provides an institution with the opportunity to delve into what that work is about, to introduce it to people, expand the context to place it in conversation with other objects and projects also important to the museum. ‘Collecting’ a piece is a way an institution declares its commitment to making the work a community resource, something shared –  it’s not a declaration that the work is something to have and hold, separate from that community.”

Sarah Schultz, in the Walker’s education and community programs department echoes that sentiment, saying, “Yes, in my experience, including something in your ‘collection’ speaks of commitment. Given the notion of a museum as a body of people who are producing knowledge around objects and performances, as such when it commissions a piece, its intellectual capital is then dedicated to keeping these works alive. If it’s not in your ‘collection’ you may give these things less attention than those your institution has committed to in that way.”

Ben Harrison of the Andy Warhol Museum then brings up the sticky issue of profit: “Where does packaging and restaging the works in a museum’s collection fit in? Is the work remounted? Beyond stewardship, what about the financial considerations, the revenue generated for an institution by loaning out or remounting its ‘owned’ pieces? At the Warhol Museum, for instance, we generate much of our income through preparing curated packages of work in our collection for touring exhibitions.”

Merce Cunningham Dance Company performing "Interscape" (2000), with costumes and décor by Robert Rauschenberg. Courtesy Tony Dougherty

And what about this: Even if you’re unconcerned with remounting a performance piece, what if, as an institution, you simply want to “animate” the pieces in your collection? What sorts of gestures can you use to bring the history of a work to life, in the exhibition of archival information and materials about a performance work after the fact?

Along those lines, Sarah Schultz of the Walker asks, “Do we have the rights to recreate those Rauschenberg costumes (in the Merce collection) for educational purposes, for a program or event? Can we create a facsimile of those materials for the sake of ‘animating the collection’ for gallery visitors?

Trevor Carlson, of MCDC quickly responds, “No, your ownership doesn’t extend that far.”

Bonnie Brooks, the Legacy fellow for the Cunningham Foundation, continues, “This brings to mind George Ballanchine: When he passed, he left his dances to a number of people, each of whom then owned the rights to those dances. What that suggests to me is there’s a precedent we’re not talking about – that particular works could be owned by someone other than the maker. There isn’t a lot of precedent for the situation, granted, but an institution might suggest they want to ‘buy’ intellectual rights to a piece, that they want to actually own every aspect of it. That may be part of what lies ahead in terms of various rights to and ownership of work.”

Philip Bither weighs in, saying, “That’s a very provocative idea, isnt’ it? But right now, a bedrock value [here] is that ownership stays with the artist. It’s written into all our commissioning agreements at the Walker: We don’t own the meat of the performance itself. Maybe, if ‘collection’ as the working lexicon is a distraction, perhaps we should change the vocabulary – call these performance commissions our ‘archive collection’ or something less loaded with connotations of ownership.”

Michele Steinwald, assistant curator for the Walker’s performing arts, goes further, saying “We’re like early investors, entitled to something like royalties if a show turns into a blockbuster, but that’s the extent of our ‘ownership’ to a work.”

“The desire to monetize the investment around commissioning work is a controversial one,” responds Bither. “And it’s something we, as the commissioners. have mixed emotions about it. You hear about the occasional blockbusters, which offer dividends to their investors (like, say, A Chorus Line). But the fact is: most of the artists we work with will never see commercial benefits, or any sort of big compensation for their work. Even if they do, our contract still doesn’t really stipulate hard details about ‘royalties,’ just that we’ll have a conversation about profit sharing if the situation arises.”

Bonnie Brooks, with the Cunningham Foundation, says, “Commissioning performance isn’t acquisitive, though. As you describe it, it’s a transactional relationship between the artist and the institution. In that case, you can discuss the trail of the performance, the tracings left behind – but the work and its documentation is simply not a collectible, as such. With regard to performing arts and visual arts: you just can’t compare the two; it’s apples and oranges.”

What happens when those categories between disciplines aren’t so neatly defined?

Robin Dowden points to an example: “Tino Seghal was commissioned by the Walker as ‘performance art’, and his work is catalogued and marked as part of the visual arts collection. Eiko & Koma were commissioned also, but Naked is not in the catalog because it wasn’t formally acquired in that way, but rather served as a kind of ‘performance’ in the galleries. How do we mix these very different sorts of projects the institution’s supporting together in a meaningful way, a coherent way – regardless of whether they came in through door #1 (visual art) or door #2 (performing art).”

And this brings the conversation in the group down to brass tacks: Assuming the artist and institution are on the same page about documentation, its contents and aims and end users – What is the best way to keep track of the information?

Merce Cunningham Dance Company performing "Minutiae" (1954) against the backdrop of Rauschenberg’s work of the same name. Photo by Herb Migdall, 1976, courtesy Cunningham Dance Foundation

This is where the grant from Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) comes in. Three partner organizations, funded by IMLS, are working on a new project to develop open source innovations to help with such institutional information gathering and preserving, CollectionSpace. Those partnering organizations – the Walker Art Center, Museum of the Moving Image, and University of California-Berkeley — are each working in a difference “community of practice” to build cataloguing software that might be seamlessly integrated into the working lives of museum professionals working with a variety of objects and information. For its part, the Walker is in the process of developing such cataloguing software for performing arts. The larger interest, by CollectionSpace and IMLS, is in establishing common tools for museums and institutions to use to change how we manage, care for, and store collections information.

Angela Spinazze, our workshop leader, closes the day’s conversations by inviting a group critique on some of the Walker’s initial forays into that new way of classifying and storing performing arts information; Robin Dowden presents a series of “wireframes” to give an idea what various cataloguing ‘pages’ might look like.

Spinazze raises this issue to the group: “At CollectionSpace, we’re trying to move in a direction that keeps true to record-keeping practices that we already know work, while also taking advantage of new software tools so that adapting to changing technologies isn’t such a burden.” She goes on to ask, “Why do our software applications feel so clunky to use? As we develop these common tools, we want to make our respositories for information more intuitive to use, because the cumbersome applications we’ve been using thus far have resulted in unhelpful silos of information, separated by department and which can’t easily be cross-referenced with one another.”

She says further, “This IMLS Grant gives us an opportunity to talk about ‘communities of practice’ – that’s why we’re talking with you, the people who work in these fields of practice, because you know best what you need to make your work flow more smoothly. We hope to share tools, share technology, and in so doing come up with common practices and interfaces that make all your jobs easier. But first, we’d need to settle upon some shared definitions of terms and establish some common goals for our ‘collections’ information.”

“Ultimately,” she says, “with a new way to gather and store information that’s more in keeping with the way your institutions and artists need to use the material gathered, we want to change the paradigm for the catalogue – not how you do your work. We’re building a new foundation, a framework on which to build what’s common across your institutions. Then, maybe we can also offer a way to configure an open-source software application to help toward that end, something any institution with similar concerns can access. This is a community-sourced approach that will always be freely shared and at no cost to users – it’s a public, not private good.”

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Related links:

Read the first post in this series on cataloguing performance - “How to Catch Lightning in a Bottle.”

Read the second post in the series – “How Do You Keep Both History and Magic Alive?”

Read the third post in the series – “Opening the Kimono – How much to reveal and to whom?”

Susannah Schouweiler serves as editor for the weekly updated arts writing and criticism published on mnartists.org, as well as the site’s twice-monthly e-mag access+ENGAGE. She has also written for a number of outlets, including Ruminator magazine, MinnPost.com, City Pages, The Rake, Minneapolis Observer, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Knight Arts blog.

As we move from topics of content to access, Trevor Carlson of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company introduces the question of restricting the flow of some information about a work, privileging the use of the archive of a performance work in its entirety for only a circumscribed field of researchers and objectives. He also suggests that as a group, museums clarify the important distinction between the work and its documentation, arguing that the relationship between them be articulated explicitly and managed consciously in consultation with the artist responsible for the piece, and from the beginning.

In response to talk from those working on the institutional side of things, about the desire for access to everything that goes into a work, about the need to catalogue as many aspects of its creation as possible for the sake of institutional and cultural posterity, Carlson demurs, “I hear something like, ‘we have to capture what we can’ from an institution, and I get more and more protective – of the dancers in the union, of our presenters, of the artists working on the production. When you’re commissioning a piece, there are opportunities for conversation with the living artist, to include them in the decision-making about what to include in the ‘catalogue’. If that conversation about documentation is in place before the actual event occurs, you’ll have a lot less push-back later, not to mention the opportunity to establish something greater than you’d have done without the artist’s insights.”

Joseph Beuys, Filz-TV (Felt TV), 1970. This multiple, a relic of Joseph Beuys' action Felt TV (1966), is composed of three props (the boxing gloves, felt pad, and sausage) and a film of the performance. (Courtesy of the Walker Art Center)

He goes on: “Let’s change the question about who sees the full archive, and direct it, generally, to the artist as the decision is being made. The artist as well as the institution needs to be involved in defining these terms: e.g. when we say something is needed ‘for archival purposes’ – what does that really mean? You need to ask the artist their position on how the information will be used and by whom. There’s a certain opportunity that exists in having that conversation, and in including all the artists responsible for a work — making those decisions about documentation on a case by case basis, rather than assuming there’s a certain formula applicable in every case, or a one-size fits all technique for preserving all work like this in the future. This has to be a two-way conversation. It’s just not something the institution can or should decide on its own.”

Besides, he says, “we’re putting the cart before the horse, talking about documenting something after the fact. Perhaps the artist could be asked the question about access at the time the commission is first made: ‘What do you want to capture and why?’ For instance, Beuys wanted to preserve the experience he created, and took steps to ensure that it was captured for posterity – but, even with all that documentation, we still don’t know what it was like to be in the gallery with him. With Merce, the relationship between [the work at the documentation] was very clear and comfortable: He was making performance, not film/dance [even if that performance was captured on film] until he was making film/dance. His performers wanted to work with him to perform, not to be documented. In fact, we have an agreement in place about such filming, because you go about performance in a different way when you’re being documented; the documentation piece is a separate work, an edited work that gives the illusion of capturing a discrete performance, but which takes place over the course of a whole day, maybe, in conversation with both a director of the film and the artist.”

He goes on: “And so many artists have bad video. How do you respect the artist’s art, what they’ve made, with the documentation that accompanies it? That’s an important question, too.”

Which raises another interesting concern: What is the status of the documentation as a work of art in its own right? Where does authorship come into play in this situation? How much weight does (and should) the mediated, historical documentation of a work have in relation to the temporal work itself in the archive?

Philip Bither offered this insight: “The reason for the tradition of single-camera documentation, a static video of a performance shot from the back of the house, is precisely to capture a temporal experience of the performance for archival purposes, to have something by way of a record, but where no one is telling you where to look, where no director’s vision is shaping the experience for the viewer, and no documentarian’s name is attached to it. It might be grainy, ‘bad video,’ but it’s as close as we can come to unmediated documentation. It’s never intended for public consumption, but it is something which is very useful for artists looking to recreate the performance later, or artists looking to glean insight into the process of creation.”

At this point, the workshop participants break into small groups, to brainstorm “user personas” for just who might end up using the information they and the artists gather for an institution’s collection catalogue. Who will access this historical data? What are their reasons for tapping the archive?

It’s interesting that, when all the small conversations are reported back to the group, everyone has imagined a user base for this 21^st century “catalogue” that includes but goes far beyond the usual assortment of library patrons. They’ve allowed for use of the collection catalogue by documentarians, scholars, museum professionals and working artists, all of whom are accessing the archive for information about staging or re-mounting work, or for historical context or behind-the-scenes details. But in addition, with the prospect of an open-source, digital archive for such information, universal access (or something very near) to at least some of the information gathered in the cataloguing process becomes a real possibility. Each small group’s scenario allowed for new kinds of public interest – e.g. the casual “sporadically interested cultural consumers” who happen upon a digital museum performance archive through the caprice of a random Google key word search, by way of a moment’s whim.

All the presenters and curators in the room, of course, are interested in the possibility of engaging those happenstance users of the archive. Perhaps, they argue, we can leverage what’s available in our online catalogue to entice these happenstance dabblers into attending some of the live events, or entering further conversation about the ideas raised by the work, or accessing related materials and programming the museum offers. All agree: part of the benefit of a compelling performing arts “collections” catalogue would be engagement of that new user segment, those who come via alternate points of entry on the web, to cultivate a broader audience base.

Jasper Johns, A set of seven inflatalble plastic pillows that are painted wilth images taken from Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) 1915-1923 that were created for Merce Cunningham's "Walkaround Time" dance performance 1968. (Courtesy of the Walker Art Center)

Then Ben Harrison of the Warhol Museum puts a fine point on the question: “How much do we want to open our kimonos to casually interested members of the public? How do we invite these users of a web-based archive in, engage them and encourage them to seek out accessing more, but without giving away so much sensitive and detailed behind-the-scenes data about the work to just anyone who happens by. If we give access to too much, I think we risk not serving the best interest of the artist or the institution?”

Walker visual arts curator, Betsy Carpenter, followed up: “And who among the stakeholders has the privilege of providing both public access and stewardship of those materials in the catalogue? Who ultimately owns the documentation about work in the collection? What if the artist’s and institution’s needs and desires in that regard aren’t aligned?”

And that’s the big question: Who owns what here?

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Related links:

Read the first post in this series on cataloguing performance - “How to Catch Lightning in a Bottle.”

Read the second post in the series – “How Do You Keep Both History and Magic Alive?”

Susannah Schouweiler serves as editor for the weekly updated arts writing and criticism published on mnartists.org, as well as the site’s twice-monthly e-mag access+ENGAGE. She has also written for a number of outlets, including Ruminator magazine, MinnPost.com, City Pages, The Rake, Minneapolis Observer, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Knight Arts blog.