Reflections on a biographical approach to contemporary art conservation

Rather than preserving original objects, the conservation of contemporary art should be thought of as managing change. This raises the question of how to theoretically capture the variability of the work without losing the sense of its artistic identity. The researchers participating in the interdisciplinary project New strategies in the conservation of contemporary art propose to use a biographical approach to investigate and compare the histories of artworks, both before and after they enter museum collections. In this paper we claim that not only do decisive turning points in an artwork’s life occur at other moments than those conventionally recognised, but that, moreover, they are made up of various and diverging timelines, to be mapped as a river’s trajectory.