Episode 001: Pip Laurenson
Ben Fino-Radin 0:04
From Small Data Industries, this is Art and Obsolescence. I'm your host, Ben fino Radin, welcome so much to our first episode. I'm so excited to be here with you. In this podcast, you'll be sitting in on my conversations with artists, collectors, curators, and art conservators that are shaping the past, present, and future of time based media art. In today's first episode, I wanted to start with somebody who has been just hugely influential on my career and to the field in general. And that's Pip Laurenson. Pip Laurenson, is the head of collections care for research at the Tate. But before she held this role, she had a very different title…
Pip Laurenson 0:45
Sculpture Conservator for Electronic Media
Ben Fino-Radin 0:48
Now if that sounds like a weird job title, it is. Pip was really one of the first museum conservators specializing in time based media art, so there really just wasn't a name for it at the time. Before we get into any of that though, I wanted to learn more about Pip's path that led her to this career.
Pip Laurenson 1:07
My brother and I came from a family that was interested in kind of books and music, but you know, contemporary art? No, not really. My mother had a kind of bookbinding you know, she had a kind of craft base. But I would say we did go to museums, I remember my first museum memory was the V&A and this enormous bed of ware, which is Henry the 8th's bed. And so we did go to museums, but not really kind of art museums so much, or, you know, it's funny how these things work out, because somehow and I have no idea how some somehow I became a young friend of the Tate when I was about 13. I mean, this is odd, I've got a feeling that my grandmother and this is really not like my grandmother actually, you know, had done this thing of giving me this young friend of the Tate thing, but he gave me an excuse to get on a train. And to go up to London, we lived about an hour outside London. And to go, you know, just to go to Tate. I applied when I was 16 or 17, probably 17 becuase I was doing my a levels to do a kind of work placement. And the education department took me in they'd never done anything like that before. And so I worked with Simon Wilson, on this great work placement and stayed at a youth hostel and went to all these performances and these experimental art spaces in the evening. And it was great. It was great. So and had these moments where like I went on this trip to Much Hadham and met Henry Moore, stuff like that. It's quite extraordinary. My undergraduate degree was in philosophy, which I really loved. And I was in a hardcore Wittgensteinian department at King's College London and had really great people, great philosophers, Peter Winch, and Norman Malcolm and Ray Gator who were massive influences. But by the end of it, I think I was pretty ready to stop living in my head, and my great friend at college, and I used to laugh that, you know, on graduation, we'd be sort of handed our brains in vatts, and a degree. So I think I was kind of drawn to go back to doing something that, you know, involved my hands. I started living on a boat in London, and I did up a narrow boat I, I had a lot of good tool experience, and a very keen interest in the deterioration of steel and wood. I think that's where my hand skills came from thinking about, you know, what drew me to conservation, you know, romantic images of being a wall painting conservator. I think a month in the country had just been released. So I had a very kind of romantic idea of what the job was going to be. But I'd also had a kind of long connection with contemporary art. I didn't quite know how they were all going to come together. But I got this idea in my head that I wanted to be a conservator. I was singularly unqualified. But in between doing a philosophy degree, and getting accepted into a program, I had this great job where I answered the phones and was a general dogsbody to these four guys who'd bought a building in Hoxton square, which wasn't fashionable at that point. Had a recording studio and a couple of film production companies and a PR company and I just I worked for them anyway. The second engineer had a background in chemistry. And he taught me chemistry. And I applied to the city of guilds of London art school for their polychrome wood and stone program. And amazingly, they, they let me in, and so I had a great three years learning about polychrome wood, and stone. So I started life as a stone conservator, very physical. It was very practical. We learnt to carve wood, and stone and guild and cast bronze and learnt to draw, importantly. And it was very much kind of had this ethos that in order to kind of work out how to approach the conservation of an object, you needed to understand how it was made. So that was great. That was three years, I had a short break, where I worked as an assistant stone conservator on a training program in Sri Lanka, which was amazing. And I worked a little bit for the National Trust's stone Conservation Studio, which was also great, you know, traveling around Britain in a little van, fixing stuff.
Ben Fino-Radin 6:17
Okay, so like me, at this point, you might be wondering, how did Pip go from being a stone conservator to a pioneer in a field dedicated to preserving things like film and software and performance…
Pip Laurenson 6:32
People have affinity to materials, and my grandfather and my father both ran a camera shop. And so and my dad did, you know, film shows for the local hotel, you know, and I go with him with a 16 millimeter projector. So when it came to kind of working with Tacita Dean and her films and trying to find projectors for her, you know, all these old guys, they knew my dad, and they knew my granddad. I used to go with my dad to pick up the films, you know, the people just drop off their photos. And I used to go to the labs. And so that smell as well of a photo lab. And you know, I've had so many moments where I've gone to work with different labs, and they've kind of gone Oh, really sorry about the smell, the smell of my childhood.
Ben Fino-Radin 7:32
So with conservation Diploma in hand, what was it that ultimately led Pip to a position at Tate?
Pip Laurenson 7:39
Well, I was lucky, this Henry Moore foundation fellowship came up. And suddenly all of these things, my interest in contemporary art, my conservation training, and obviously, you know, fed also by my interest in philosophy, which was useful for working with contemporary art conservation. So I applied, and I got that in sculpture conservation. So then I started at Tate.
Ben Fino-Radin 8:03
And after a couple of years, Pip eventually got that really cool title that we heard at the beginning:
Pip Laurenson 8:09
sculpture conservative for electronic media.
Ben Fino-Radin 8:12
Now, considering this is the first episode of the podcast, I figured it would be a really good time to introduce folks who aren't familiar to what it is a time based media, art conservator actually does.
Pip Laurenson 8:27
What I think is consistent, actually, throughout time based media conservation, and probably other areas of conservation, actually, is to understand what it is you're trying to preserve, and to work with the artists to develop that understanding to really learn the work, and then work out what you need to do in order to keep that work displayable. And that might involve understanding, you know, the relationship of the media, to the meaning of the work, it might be about what's important, that needs to stay the same, or to change about the display of the work, how it was made, the decisions the artist has made along its way, you know, it's life because, you know, artworks have lives before they come into museums, and they continue to have lives in museums. So I think it's that, you know, once you've worked that out, then you need to kind of get going with your technical and conceptual solutions that might be working out how to preserve the film element and how you're going to make sure your prints are accurate. Or it might be in thinking about how you document the sound of an installation so that somebody coming after you will understand how to install that work and feel confident about that. And of course now I mean, it's a it's a great field, because it's, you know, this is the exciting thing about working with contemporary art is that it's always evolving. And in time based media. There's so much work happening around the transmission of performance thinking about software based art. Thinking about just how to transmit a variety of works over time, I think has become really key. And then there are kind of also works that are projects or socially engaged practice or lecture demonstrations, things that are really ephemeral. And you know how we think about how to represent those things, or whether we should even be doing that within collections is an interesting area as well.
Ben Fino-Radin 10:24
When a conservator works in a museum, the work that you get to do is very much shaped by what the museum collects. I was fascinated to learn that a lot of Pips early research was, in fact, really an outgrowth of a limitation on the Tate's collection,
Pip Laurenson 10:42
Because Tate is governed by museum and galleries act that doesn't allow us to have things in the collection. At the time, it was very much, you had to have title to something. So it's only really recently that we worked out how we could have within our collection, things that were licensed. So all of those single channel works that went from the distributors, into collections, such as MoMA's, didn't come in to Tate's collections. So really, the collection has its basis in a moment in the 1970s, where the curators got together and decided they really needed to sort out acquiring some conceptual art. And so they made a list of artists, which was interesting. So it's completely media agnostic. And they decided that they wanted to acquire Dan Graham, Gilbert and George, David Tremlett, and as well as sort of, you know, some photography. So we had the first works that came in were Gilbert in George's Gordons Makes You Drunk. And it's a trilogy, Gordons Makes You Drunk, In The Bush, and Portrait of the Artists as Young Men, and they were three kind of video works fascinating actually, because they came with certificates that could also be displayed alongside the work. So they were kind of very conscious of the challenges of selling video art to museums. And we also acquired Dan Graham's Two Correlated Rotations, which was a work that was originally on eight millimeter film and came with these extraordinary kind of domestic beautiful Technicolor little, eight millimeter projectors that had cassettes that went in. These works then got transferred to 16 millimeter kind of much later, but they were sitting they'd never been displayed. Nobody quite knew what to do with them. And then there were kind of in the 80s, we acquired our first work that could be described as a video installation. So we had that work. And then of course, at the time I started, we hit the YBA's – Young British Artists, Steve McQueen, and Gillian Wearing and Tracy Emin, and the Wilson twins and Georgina Star, those artists, those, you know, Douglas Gordon was another one, they were young artists, and the Tate really wanted to represent them. And so we started to acquire a huge number of time based media works at that point, you know, the American artists who were coming through the gallery system at this point, and they were expensive works, you know, and there was kind of Bill Viola and Gary Hill, and Stan Douglas, and James Coleman to some extent as well, at that point. So, you know, the types of artworks that I was dealing with, really did shape, I think, my thinking around you know, works that were thinly or thickly specified, because I was dealing with artists, who were absolutely nailing down every detail that knew, you know, that wanted you to take acoustic measurements so that they knew the reverb of the space that had kind of thought through how you entered the space, how dark it was, you know, definitely the quality of the images, every part of that experience, the kind of question of how you conserve, works that were being specified so tightly with this backdrop of kind of rapid technological change was definitely the problem that I was confronted with by those artists. So I was in sculpture, conservation, and I was about halfway through my fellowship, and Tate acquired Bruce Nauman's Violent Incident. So that was in 1993, and I was assigned it, you know, I, you know, and I said, Okay, so what do we do with video acquisitions, you know, and as you say there was very little to look to, but it really sparked my interest. You know, I applied to the Gabo Trust for Sculpture, Conservation for money for a study tour. I mean, I talked to people in the UK like the British Film Institute and and read upon what kind of the archive community had to say about video, Association of Moving Image Archivists, those sorts of people. But I really wanted to know what people were doing in the world around thinking about artists kind of works. Media artwork. So I got this study tour money, I went to New York, and I met Mona Jimenez, she was working with kind of independent media arts groups and activists at the time, I went to the Whitney and I met with John Hanhart. I met Lori's Zippay at EAI and I think Steven Vitello, then I went to Chicago and went to the Video Databank and then finally went to LA and met with Bill Viola, and then up to San Francisco, where I went to BAVAC Bay Area video coalition, and also met Robert Riley at SFMOMA and he mentioned I should talk to Jill sterrett. And I also went to Montevideo in Amsterdam. Those were the kind of people that I found to talk to. And to be honest, I think at that time, the only person who really got what I was trying to do was Bill Viola. And he was just brilliant. And he invited me into the studio, and we completely nerded out on how to think about the documentation of video installations, how to kind of ensure that the color, we knew what the color should be on video, I spent a day with him in his studio, he took me to his favorite Mexican diner, which was the first Mexican food I'd eaten because there was no Mexican food in the UK at the time. So there were lots of very kind of vivid memories. And it was really being able to talk to him and talk to him about what he was doing in terms of preserving his work, and documenting his work that really kind of helped massively, to have somebody to talk to who kind of got it, there's definitely a good meeting of approaches, when kind of conservators meet an artist who wants to nail everything down. That's not a bad match, but for allmost everything you can't do that anyway, whatever the media, within time based media, every time something is installed, there's so many new variables. And I think what we've learned over the years is less about trying to kind of go for this perfect, objective measurements of things, so that you can kind of precisely nail things that really is a myth, you know, with sound with color, it's so difficult. So really trying to kind of think about how we approach that in a different way, and how we allow things to evolve over time, and how we have those conversations with artists. And I guess that's the kind of coming of age really, of time based media conservation.
Ben Fino-Radin 18:29
But Pip wasn't looking only to artists and archivists for inspiration and guidance.
Pip Laurenson 18:36
Also importantly, for me, were philosophers of music like Stephen Davies, and Lydia, Goehr, who talked about these ideas in terms of the performance of musical works. And so all of the variables that we were looking at, you know, all the discussions, there's a great quote, I'm trying to think who the philosopher is, it'll come to me in a minute, but it's basically this question if you play a Bach fugue on a choir of kazoos: is it still the same Bach fugue? That is like the same problem that time based media conservators face? You know, if we show a Tacita Dean film on a video projector? Is it still the same work? You know, that's the space completely that we're in. Do you want to go to a Handel performance and have everyone dressed up with wigs and candles and all that kind of nonsense? or not, you know, and those are still the kind of questions that we're looking at for a certain generation of works. But I think also what's really interesting coming to the kind of artists that I'm working with now, so much of what they're doing is producing works that really do unfold over time. So actually, the problem has moved from, you know, how do we try and nail these things down for artists such as you know, Bill Viola, or Gary Hill, or Stan Douglas, those sorts of people, James Coleman to a kind of how do we allow things to unfold, then we do come up against the kind of problem of the museum and the fact that it is a machine that has been designed to try and fix things. But we are trying to do something different with these artworks, and allow them to kind of flourish and breathe and have their lives within the museum and change, you know, within parameters that we're trying to work out with those artists now.
Ben Fino-Radin 20:35
Fast forward to 2010, and the Tate now had a whole team for time based media conservation, and Pip made a move to a different department.
Pip Laurenson 20:45
So I moved over to Collection Care Research, to kind of start a new position within the research department. And of course, when I moved into research in 2010, there was already you know, a great team in time based media conservation and continues to kind of grow and make an extraordinary contribution to the field under the leadership of Louise Lawson. So I'm really lucky to work in an institution where I can work with those incredible practitioner researchers working in the field. So my job is I support the research within the collection care division across Tate. So that's the Conservation Department, collection management, library, archive, art handling and photography. And so there's a range of different projects. And my role is different for different projects. So I in some cases, just support other people to lead their research. And to kind of make that visible. I also lead some projects, and my current project, which is a kind of once in a lifetime opportunity is called reshaping the collectible when artworks live in the museum. It's funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. And it's just been an extraordinary way to really do that deep dive into thinking about the artists we're working with today. And questions about, you know, artworks that unfold over time that really question these boundaries between Archives and Records and artwork. Really works which quite often have these complex dependencies outside the museum's that might be on social networks, it might be technological networks, and kind of recognizing how these kind of strings go outside the museum and, and how we need these networks in order to maintain these works, and continue to be able to display them. So that's what I'm working on at the moment. And the artists that I'm working with right now, are Ima-Abasi Okon, who's a British artist who has three works that have just come into the collection, and also Richard Bell, who we have a work called Embassy, which is an extraordinary work, which references back to the original tent embassy, which was a site of protest for land rights that was erected outside the government buildings in Canberra in the 70s. And so this is a kind of continuation of that protest. And it acts as a kind of sovereign space within the museum for activism. The kind of wonderful thing about the project is it's really embedded within the collection care division. So we have embedded researchers in conservation in the Archives and Records department in the registrar's department, as well as a postdoctoral fellow who's working on curatorial practice. So it's really reaching, deep into the museum. What I love about this project is that it's contributing to practice as well as to theory. And that has been our kind of commitment throughout. The practitioner researchers, some of them come with PhDs and some of them come from a practice route, but they're all contributing to theoretical thinking and the practice. And then we have three academic fellows who are coming and spending four months each with us, and we have two doctoral candidates. So it's tendrils are going deep into the museum. But also, we're working really hard to make sure that there's legacy In our practice, as well as our thinking coming out of this project. And I think the other thing, just thinking about continuity, I think another really important theme is about learning from art and artists. We hold that really closely. And I think when I developed this project, it was very much on that kind of continuum of "art changes and so must we" you know, thinking about how artistic practice shifts the way that we're working, but of course, in the last three years, the world has changed really radically as well. So I think we're in a space where we're really listening to artists about how their works can exist within these really problematic museum structures, and how their works can be in dialogue with that, and how we can support that process happening. And so it's been a huge kind of moment of learning from these artists. And that became really explicit, I think, working with Ima-Abasi Okon, who has a reading list that goes with her sculptural installations. And so we have been going on this journey to really understand her theoretical framework, and broadening our network reading theorists and philosophers that we haven't read before, writers that we haven't read before, and really kind of broadening our network, which is something that's so important for the museum and the profession to do. If you take away that colonial infrastructure, and logic, what is left of the kind of museum mission, I think that's where kind of working with artists, we've just been really lucky. I think it's giving us a way to think through these really fundamental problems. We've all been on a massive journey, I think, over the last few years, you know, really understanding how conservation practice is fundamentally formed through a colonial lens. And, of course, I mean, you know, we are in a time of serious reckoning with our histories, and issues of social justice, and what our museum practices are built upon. And we know also that we are facing, you know, a massive climate crisis, which is also going to impact the museum in ways that I think we can't imagine right now. So yes, change is definitely a continuum here.
Ben Fino-Radin 27:02
before we say goodbye, I had to ask Pip, what advice she would have for young conservators interested in time based media art,
Pip Laurenson 27:09
I think it's still important to get your hands dirty, you know, install stuff for artists go and shadow somebody doing that make yourself useful. Intern in an artist studio, work with the installation crew on a media art show. You know, I think that kind of understanding how things go wrong is, is really foundational. I think we've got so much to do in terms of listening and learning and going slow, and paying attention. And never assume that you you know, never assume that you know, what the artist has in mind until you've spent time to learn that because things might look the same thing might mean something very, very different, and be trying to do something very different. And I think I think it's that understanding what the artwork is trying to do, I think is the way in which I would kind of phrase the kind of foundation of Contemporary Art conservation.
Ben Fino-Radin 28:24
Pip Laurenson. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for chatting with me. It was such a delight.
Pip Laurenson 28:30
Thank you so much, Ben. I've really enjoyed this. So thank you for the invitation.
Ben Fino-Radin 28:35
And thank you, dear listener for joining me on this first episode of Art and Obsolescence. We'll be coming out with new conversations weekly, so be sure to subscribe, share it with a friend and if you can leave a review for the show. All of that helps immensely. Art and Obsolescence is a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts. If you're interested in supporting our work, check out artandobsolescence.com and your donations will help ensure that we are able to pay artists for their time coming on the show. Thanks again for listening. My name is Ben Fino-Radin and this has been Art and Obsolescence.