Manual making for ephemeral art

Since September 2022, I have regularly met with Rochelle Haley about her new performance work A Sun Dance. Haley wanted to hear about my creative practice in archiving works of ephemeral art. In my experience, artworks like A Sun Dance, that involve live bodies in space combined with other changeable elements, benefit from a user manual that supports future performances or activations. These manuals are designed to guide curators, conservators and performers in delivering future works in a way that maintains the essence of that work.

Manuals bring an authentic experience to future audiences

My colleague Lucas Ihlein and I have used manuals to support performances and activations from the 1970s that involve performers and 16mm film.¹ Archives of these performances, such as recordings, photographs, programs, film elements and notes, do exist.² But to rely on these records and elements alone offers the 20-year-old of the future a pale shadow of the original 1970s experience.

Our development and testing of manuals suggests they can support an experience of these works in the future, in 50 and even in a 1,000 years. By experience, we mean an in-the-flesh event that deploys the key features of the work that make it ‘what it is’.

Media art conservator Hanna Hölling wrote a sustained analysis of video artist Nam June Paik’s work. Hölling’s analysis focused on the ways in which the elements in Paik’s work are subject to change, both in their configuration and in the elements themselves. Hölling investigated various layouts for Paik’s work and different technologies to deliver them.³ Hölling’s word for this kind of work is changeable.

The key features that make a work ‘what it is’ have been called, by some scholars, essence or authenticity. Some preservation practitioners call them significant properties.⁴ Hölling’s analysis is not that anything goes. She is conscious that the decisions of conservators and curators have an impact when these changeable artworks are restaged. Her solution is to encourage practitioners to embrace the subjectivity and authorship they must bring, giving them permission to be involved in these decisions without the artist.

A user manual is an invitation for future iterations

A thorny element remains about the limits of the work. That is, when is it no longer itself? Finding out what makes the work ‘what it is’, and then transmitting that to the future, is what Ihlein and I have described as our user manual’s creation process.

There are three phases in our manual creation process. First we learn from the artist, then re-enact the artwork ourselves.⁵ Finally, we stage the work and create a category of records archivists call ‘notes-for-file’. These are notes about an event made close to the time in which the event occurred. Our notes-for-file about the reenactment experience capture what emerges as crucial to the work, what we call its DNA. They form the core component of the manual.

A Sun Dance involves variation, adaptability and change. It is subject to available light, to the building in which the performance occurs and to the configuration of performers. Haley was drawn to to the flexibility expressed in the user manuals Ihlein and I have developed and the way a user manual provides a ‘window of tolerance’ that allows for interpretation of the work but also constrains it. The user manuals consist of a series of notes collated from practical experience rather than a set of fixed rules.

Haley was also attracted to the potential for playful expressiveness. In her manual for A Sun Dance, she plans to include watercolours, a musical score and the details of consultation with choreographers and dancers. These less explicit modes of communication reflect Ilhein’s and my experience during the testing process for our own manuals.

A consequence of a fun, expressive document is its potential to entice users. The manual as an invitation to future uses is another quality Haley and I have discussed. Other manuals Ihlein and I have created involve a letter, speaking directly to the manual user, inviting them to give the work a go and giving them explicit permission to do so.⁶ For me, this is a crucial point—doing all that’s possible to promote future circulation, such as directly inviting others through a letter to stage the work in the future. This is part of what I believe will keep artworks like Haley’s available for the long term.

Manuals put the artist at the centre

There’s another reason to be excited about manuals. A Sun Dance was commissioned by the National Gallery of Australia. This places Haley in dialogue with the traditional collection carers, the conservators and curators. The manual doesn’t replace their care and methodology but it does put Haley’s view of the future for A Sun Dance at the centre.

For archivists, this is an important point. Our field recognises harm caused in the past by making records about people without their consent or participation and without involving them in the life of the records later on.⁷ This leaves a one-sided story written from the perspective of the record maker. Artists, conservators and curators have since begun to collaborate on user manuals, but Haley's approach will be unique in that it centres the view of the artist.

In the manual for A Sun Dance, Haley is supporting the future of her work—she is laying out a recipe for future performers. It’s not the archivist and it’s not the institution, it’s the artist themself in more direct contact with the future. Haley makes it clear that for A Sun Dance, the institution and the collection carers maintain their vital roles, but in collaboration with the artist’s view for the future of the work.

Manual making is a double-step

The experience for Haley in making the manual is a double-step. The artist has immersed herself in the creation of A Sun Dance while at the same time working on the manual, making notes about the work as it emerges. Note taking is a usual part of Haley’s studio practice. But here the notes, images and sketches she is gathering are more consciously filtered and organised for the user manual for A Sun Dance.

The double-step has an impact on the work—Haley is both observing the process of making the work and participating in it. In our manual creation, Ihlein and I describe our experience of being in the present while also connecting to a time that has passed.⁸ In contrast, Haley is connecting to a time in the future.

This double-step offers the chance to reflect on the gap between the original work and its restaging. The manuals allow that flexibility. Once the faithful effort to capture the notes-for-file based on adhering to the rules and rigours of the work as the artist intended it is complete, the manual splits the work from the artist and allows a future circulation in unpredictable ways.⁹

All things are connected

There are other methods used to support the preservation of live works. Efforts to get the knowledge of the work to reside in a custodial body are present in the dance community here in Australia and internationally.¹⁰ Recording methods have been developed and used by the conservation community, the variable media questionnaire being an example.¹¹ The Ihlein-Curham model of the user’s manual behaves as middle ground. It still has a place of apparent safekeeping by committing knowledge to a recording through writing, drawing and printing.

Haley is preparing a manual to connect A Sun Dance to its future as she creates the work. She is experiencing a double-step as she participates in both the current time of making her new work and future time of its restaging. She is literally putting these experiences of time in contact, enacting a model of archives in which all things are in contact, as described by filmmaker and artist Ross Gibson.¹² This process, Haley reports, makes her think more deeply about the consequences of what she does now, the impact and their meaning in the future.

A Sun Dance is a new performance commission by artist Rochelle Haley to be performed at the National Gallery 24 February 2024.

A Sun Dance is a free, ticketed performance.

Drop in anytime between 9.30am – 4.30pm to experience the work.