Art on Paper/Variable Installation: Sara Hughes’Torpedoat the Art Gallery of New South Wales

Changeability, Variability, and Malleability: Sharing Perspectives on the Role of Change in Time-based Art and Utilitarian Machinery Conservation

“…Interpretations also change in response to the development of new knowledge, new concerns and new mores within society, as well as ongoing changes in the design of display spaces (both in museums and in public spaces), enabling technologies and the financial resources available for maintenance and presentation of the object. Murphy (2019) suggests that over time museums become co-producers of a changeable artwork, participants in the development of what Van de Wall et al (2011) drawing on theories of the cultural biographies of objectscall the trajectory of the life of the artwork, as the complex relationships between material, artist concept, (re) installation, stakeholder decision making, and institutional memory progressively impact and re-shape the original instruction set for the work. Curham (University of Canberra, 2020, personal communication) calls this process 'tending', noting that each activation of a work provides new knowledge about it, particularly in 'the gap between what can be made explicit and … tacit knowledge' which cannot be easily recorded.…”