To ‘Pass On’: Conservation at the Interstices of Life and Death

By Josephine Ellis

“I’m happy to think that the worms will eat me! I like this continuity! Until now I have eaten animals so it is only right they then eat me. So, I will live on in a certain way!”

– Daniel Spoerri 1

What can activation mean, and what can it mean to activate? These two questions linger at the back of my mind in a small and dusty basement located behind the Medical Museion’s main building in Copenhagen. This basement formerly housed The Living Room, an exhibition stroke experiment curated by Martin Grünfeld which ran between 2018 and 2023. Rather than caring exclusively for cultural heritage objects, The Living Room considered what it might mean to also care for cultural heritage eaters to shed light on activities that are usually hidden from museum visitors – activities pertaining mostly to the role of conservators and their frequent dealings with creeping, crawling things of different scales and sizes. When I first read about The Living Room, the exhibition’s central question immediately piqued my curiosity: What if museums hosted, cultivated, and nourished biological life instead of ousting it? On one level, this offered an unconventional approach to the materiality of the traditional museum object which, to exist in an ideal state of material fixity, tends to be strictly guarded from the onslaught of seemingly invasive organisms. But further still, this question broadened the horizon for my understanding of activation beyond cultural modes of transmission even in its expanded sense.2

While biological life, ranging from the animal to the fungal (and we surely should not exclude humans from this equation), are understood to be wholly destructive in nature within museological infrastructures, The Living Room sought to explore other possibilities offered by these unruly agents, demonstrating the intricacies of decay, so often associated with death and yet the very basis on which The Living Room considered itself living. Upon closer inspection, the processes of deterioration teem with much overlooked life, materialising new worlds in themselves, and in doing so, complicate the oft-separated realms of the living and the dead. From an art historical perspective, The Living Room’s investigations into the hazy boundaries between life and death are perhaps reminiscent of Netherlandish Still Life paintings that proliferated during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The featured photo, an oil painting by Balthasar van der Ast, Still Life with Fruit and Flowers (1621), is one such example, less invocative of nature-morte than nature-mourant – of a dying rather than dead nature. 3 The flowers wilt and the fruits mould and death is surely taking over, but not without reminders that death both names and precipitates other ways of living.

What kind of life then, is possible under the rubric of activation? When we speak of an object, an artefact, or an artwork’s ‘life’ and ‘death’, what exactly do we mean? Conservation involves acts of passing on, such as of objects and knowledge. But to ‘pass on’ in English also exists as a euphemistic expression for death that simultaneously speaks to death as a transitional event rather than an end. In this short intervention, I consider the ambivalences and ambiguities of life and death and the implications of this for the notion of activation. I take, as my starting point, the fragmented recollections of my experience in the Museion’s basement several months after the exhibition closed and my conversations with Grünfeld and Amalie Scjhøtt-Wieth, one of the conservators at the Museion. I then situate these thoughts in dialogue with Grünfeld’s theorisations of different kinds of museological life and existing literature in conservation discourses before tying these threads into speculations about the possibilities and limitations of activation. I end on the continuity of Fluxus art and life more broadly prompted by archival research which, I suggest, not only of conservation’s role in the shaping of art and how it persists but further still, of how conservation might implicate constructions of human subjectivity.4  

23rd January 2024 – In the Medical Museion’s Basement

Standing in the Museion’s basement some four months after The Living Room’s closure feels somewhat fitting. Although technically ‘finished’, some of the exhibit still lingers on although clearly no longer for show. I have grown to like spaces that are not meticulously curated. Interesting things always happen underneath the shiny sheen of an exhibition, although the Museion’s basement by no means adheres to the aesthetics of the typical white cube. The basement is rather disheveled – there are many cracks in the walls where the paint has peeled, the radiators are rusting, and the floor is covered in a fine layer of dirt and dust (Fig. 1). No wonder I was advised me to leave my jacket in the separate office space to keep it clean.  

An assortment of commissioned artworks, exhibition texts, display equipment, and what Grünfeld calls ‘fringe objects’ – residual things that exist at the museum’s margins, their value largely associative and fragile, generated through their tenuous links to the collection – are variably scattered around the room without order or narrative on the floor, shelves, and walls.5 As Grünfeld and Scjhøtt-Wieth show me through the room, their memories and stories of the exhibition as we walk from object to object help me piece some of these disparate parts together. 

Figure 1. Aftermath of The Living Room exhibition, Medical Museion, Copenhagen. Photo by author, 2024.

In a perspex box filled with an assortment of de-accessioned medical objects and equipment from the Museion’s collection, related mostly to gynecological practice, pink oyster mushrooms were also purposefully placed in this box, nestled in and amongst the contents. I am told that this box, Slow Show by sound and performance artist Maria Brænder, is an installation of sorts, a world of growth and decay enclosed in a box as the objects interact with the mushrooms (Fig.2). Throughout the duration of the exhibition, the mushrooms not only accelerated the process of the objects’ deterioration (fungi is of course a scrupulous heritage eater) but also spawned mold spores at the bottom of the box. Moreover, special contact microphones were designed to allow visitors to listen to the sound of the mushrooms at work through a pair of headsets attached to the box, offering another point of entry into the metabolic activity of the pink oyster mushrooms.  

Figure 2. Slow Show by Maria Brænder in the aftermath of The Living Room exhibition, Medical Museion, Copenhagen. Photo by author, 2024.

Another interesting installation, Worm Dome, is brought to my attention. The dome, made of glass and placed inside another protective casing, has been smashed to pieces.6 Some of dome’s contents – more medical objects – spill over out of the dome and into the casing (Fig. 3). But Grünfeld shares that the dome did not always look like this. During the exhibition, the dome, a collaborative creation by Grünfeld, Scjhøtt-Wieth, and another sound and performance artist, Eduardo Abrantes, evinced a different kind of metabolic activity to Slow Show. Rather than fungi, wax worms were a key component in the dome. The initial idea was for the wax worms to feed on low density polyethylene plastics, a material notoriously resistant to biodegradation processes, and yet a sumptuous meal for this specific breed of larvae. Grünfeld and Scjhøtt-Wieth describe the difficulty of executing the dome, however – the worms never managed to survive for any lengthy duration, even with more adaptations to the design of the dome in hopes of better accommodating them. But a different kind of life thrived, that of sugar mites. Even in Grünfeld, Scjhøtt-Wieth and Abrantes’ attempts to work with rather than against the worms, these efforts still amounted to control the natural world which was inevitably met with resistance and other expressions of nonhuman agency and intention.

Figure 3. Worm Dome, a collaboration between Martin Grünfeld, Amalie Scjhøtt-Wieth and Eduardo Abrantes, in the aftermath of The Living Room exhibition, Medical Museion, Copenhagen. Photo by author, 2024.

While Grünfeld and Scjhøtt-Wieth talk, a peculiar object catches my eye and I pick it up: An old museum trap with an abundance of different insect species caught in its confines (Fig.4). The trap entered the collection from another Danish museum, although admittedly I can’t quite remember where specifically Scjhøtt-Wieth, said it was from. I laugh to myself – how biodiverse museums are! The museum is already a site of multispecies gatherings, a juncture between nature and culture. At some point the conversation turns to the topic of afterlives which presents an interesting paradox for The Living Room. The Living Room offered itself as a form of afterlife for discarded, neglected, and under-appreciated organisms and things reimagined in new constellations. But now that the exhibition had to come to an end, what would this second coming of afterlife look like? Grünfeld had agreed with the head of collections that none of The Living Room objects could be returned to the collection after the exhibition, perhaps a way of staying true to their fringiness. So, for now, they remain in the basement, although I like to think that they are accruing afterlives of their own. Or indeed, as Grünfeld suggests, one should think less about the ‘after’ and more about the ‘alter’ – that is, in his terms, of ‘alter-lives.’  

Figure 4. An old museum trap and its ensnared contents, in the aftermath of The Living Room exhibition, Medical Museion, Copenhagen. Photo by author, 2024.

Between Metaphorical and Literal Life

That Fluxus artworks or artefacts have lives, and further still, can come to life, is one of the key conceptual underpinnings of activation. And yet, the term ‘life’ requires some clarification because in museums – never completely cut off from the entropic currents of the material world – there appear to be multiple competing definitions of what it means to be alive.  

In discourses of art history, conservation, and museology, life is often understood to refer to the cultural life of artworks manifest in their ‘biographies’7, ‘trajectories’8, or ‘careers’9 both inside and outside institutions. Inside institutions, the life of an artwork might comprise of the changes it necessarily undergoes, for example, in installation or exhibition, while outside of institutions, the life of an artwork might be revealed in terms of its shifting functions, uses and networks of circulation. Grünfeld’s description of this kind of life as ‘cultural-metaphorical’ is useful here, though one can push what he means by this further.10 For Grünfeld, cultural-metaphorical life generally refers to the historicity of objects underpinned by an assumption that museum objects necessarily remain in a permanent and authentic state, consequentially remaining tethered to the fixed time of their making before entry into institutions. Recent theories of contemporary art conservation, however, demonstrate that change and transformation are sometimes a necessary condition for the artwork’s survival.11 Far from stagnant, their histories are reinforced, enriched, and altered in the museum. This is particularly true of contemporary artworks such as performance and time-based media installations which, as already suggested, with every new instantiation might need to be displayed differently, in turn, resulting in always open understandings of both what a work is and what it can still yet be.12 The cultural-metaphorical life of artworks might then be extended from Grünfeld’s application to incorporate the continuous shifts they undergo both prior to and after its musealisation.

The Living Room’s provocation brings another definition of life into focus, that is, of life verbatim: bacterial, fungal, vegetal, animal (and human!) critters that can threaten the cultural-metaphorical life of artworks, encouraging processes of deterioration. These life forms are ubiquitous in museums, and as demonstrated by Fernando Domínguez Rubio, museological infrastructures, or what Domínguez Rubio refers to as ‘unnatural ecologies’, are designed to prevent such life from flourishing to produce the illusion of stable and legible art objects.13 Bearing my earlier comment on Grünfeld’s notion of the cultural-metaphorical in mind, Domíngeuz Rubio’s observations would be similarly enriched by deeper critical engagement with recent theories of contemporary art conservation that challenge the classical ideals of conservation. Nevertheless, alterations occasioned by these forms of life continue to, for the most part, fall outside the limits of acceptable change and are subject to measures such as rigorous temperature and light controls and in extreme cases, such as insect infestations, anoxic treatments that dehydrate and suffocate so-called museum ‘pests.’14

Grünfeld also has a name for this type of life: The ‘metabolic-literal’, in other words, the mechanics of breakdown and recycling of nutrients outside of museum spaces that make possible organic Life on earth – Life here capitalised to denote life in an ecological sense, that is, not of a life individually possessed, but Life as relational process sustained by the transference of energy from species to species and generation to generation.15 It was precisely these two divergent understandings of life, the cultural-metaphorical on the one hand, and the metabolic-literal on the other, that The Living Room sought to bring into dialogue with one another in all their apparent tensions and frictions to demonstrate that multiple and simultaneous levels of existence can reside in objects, for instance, as ‘food, habitat, images, sound, and stories’ all at once.16

On the Possibilities and Limitations of Activation: ‘Activation’, ‘To Activate’, ‘Active’

I cannot help but think that questions surrounding the flux of Life, its continuous becomings, and their implications for conservation – all so elegantly invoked by The Living Room – strike a resonant chord with Fluxus. To paraphrase Ken Friedman, Fluxus inhabits a Heraclitean universe, one in which everything flows.17 Returning to the initial questions I posed, on what activation means and what it means to activate, I have come to appreciate over the course of the Activating Fluxus project that both of these terms are fundamentally situated concepts, facilitated and constrained by the contexts in which they are mobilised. If one can understand The Living Room’s methods, of feeding, nurturing, and cultivating metabolic-literal life under the rubric of the verb ‘to activate’ within the Museion – an institution that otherwise, adheres to traditional tenets of conservation – it seems that the noun ‘activation’ also harbours radical potential to negotiate the status quo of what appears possible. Slow Show and Worm Dome might be understood as activations of a dormant collection, brought back to life through entanglements with organisms that encouraged the relational activities of de- and re-generation. They were both manifestations of The Living Room’s activating processes. But it is worth stressing that, as activations, they were neither static nor merely the end result of actions, but continued to be active themselves during the exhibition, and further still, on occasion, pushed back against how Grünfeld, Schøtt-Wieth, and their collaborators, chose to activate.

The dynamic between activation and to activate becomes even more intricate if the term ‘active’ is also introduced to this relation. While activation can be understood as ‘making active’, it is also the case that a more delicate characterisation can be discerned, particularly when what is activated might already be considered active.18 I would argue that the organisms and objects that populated Slow Show and Worm Dome were not made active, but rather, drawing on Donna Haraway, might be better understood as the ongoing unfolding of a making active-with.19 The ‘with’ here is crucial in its implications for human-nonhuman connections – a recognition that activation is not only contingent on what the human wants, but also what fungi wants, what worms want, and perhaps also too what the materiality of the objects want.

Going further still, the already-activeness of things calls into question the necessity of activation which in turn, opens further productive lines of questioning. For example: When is activation required, and when is it not? In my research so far, I have been surprised and inspired by multiple instances of artworks created in and amongst the Fluxus orbit that have been nibbled away to varying degrees long after the initial moment of their creation. For example, artworks that, albeit stowed away for years in storage and might thus be considered dead in a cultural-metaphorical sense, have been festering with larval life. In some cases, the larvae have also been understood to inflict cultural-metaphorical death by threatening the material integrity of an artwork to such an extreme extent that it is no longer appreciated as a work.20

And yet, at the same time, it is difficult to argue that the artworks, especially at a granular, material level, were not alive in themselves. In fact, they were quite literally so as the materiality of the works hosted and became metabolised by hungry larvae. As the larvae ate their way through the materials, so too did they gnaw away at the boundaries that demarcated where the artworks were supposed to end and where the developing larval bodies began. It is as though the sacrosanct materials of art, offering themselves as sustenance and nutrition, also metamorphosed into adult insect life in, through, and as the growing larvae. Conversely, sustaining the cultural-metaphorical life of artworks usually means killing literal life in conservation, the history of which reveals toxic engagements with chemical pesticides used in large part to extinguish insect life from objects in the name of protection and posterity. Ironically, the long-term impacts of this violent impulse to cull insects have proved, not only to damage the objects, but also harm humans.21

Passing On

Perhaps the interaction between artworks, larvae and other ‘pests’ are not entirely antithetical to what it means to conserve. Most recently, in the Spoerri archives held at the Swiss National Library in Bern, I chanced upon records of several of his snare-pictures, parts of which had been eaten by rats. Notably, when asked to replace the eaten parts of his snare-pictures, Spoerri would instead choose to extend the original titles of the artworks and draw explicit attention to the damage with an addendum: ‘collaboration avec les rats’.22 I was reminded of a quote from Spoerri, who, in fictional dialogue with Lucretius, an Ancient Roman poet and philosopher, recounted a curious experiment with another kind of rodent – mice – from his time in Montargis, some 100 kilometres from Paris in France:

‘Mice came into the mill from the river, so I set up traps in the meadow. After the mice went into the traps and died, I decided to leave them on the lawn just to see what would happen. Nature immediately set about working on these little mouse corpses in the open air: attracted by the smell, the flies came and laid their eggs in the mouse corpses; two days later, they were swarming with worms and then the birds came to eat them and the cats ate the birds […] in a continuous and rapid cycle of production.’ 23

Here, Spoerri’s observations on the relentless breakdown and generation of things – through mice, flies, worms, birds, and cats – articulates the conservation of Life through matter’s transformation in death, perhaps fittingly for Spoerri, mostly as food.  Death is a necessity for life which in turn springs forth from death. Life carries on by passing on. There is another kind of immortality at play here, if we are willing to see it, one endowed with a more ecological sensibility and collectivist understandings of just what it means to live and what it means to die.  

For the time being, I find that it is increasingly important to not only think about activation, but even before this, to pay attention to the ways artworks can be understood as already active. It is those activities which are positively abject that interest me most – processes of fermenting, squirming, digesting, excreting, eating, pulsating with aliveness that never strays too far from invocations of death. In fact, reversing Julia Kristeva’s famous declaration of ‘death infecting life’ as the ultimate object of abjection, I would contend far more troubling to the modern human subject are instances where life infects death.24 Dead human bodies could all too easily be inserted into the transmission of Life Spoerri outlined in his short story to Lucretrius, our to-be corpses a potential form of food for other species in waiting. And are we not already being constantly chewed throughout our lives by things infinitesimally smaller than ourselves? In death, however, we cannot swat away a fly that lands on our leg to lay its eggs. But Spoerri doesn’t seem to mind. I end with his words, the same way this intervention started:

‘I’m happy to think that the worms will eat me! I like this continuity! Until now I have eaten animals so it is only right they then eat me. So, I will live on in a certain way!’25

  1. Daniel Spoerri quoted in Silvia Abbruzzese, “Nil mors est ad nos”: Der Tod betrifft uns nicht: (Un)möglicher Dialog zwischen Daniel Spoerri und Titus Lukretius Carus (Milan, Fondazione Mudima: 2014), 10. ↩︎
  2. Although the phrase expanded conservation is not explicitly defined everywhere, I have taken this to mean either an expansion of conservation into the realm of curation or as critical analyses of what it means to conserve within the rubric of cultural institutions.  ↩︎
  3. I borrow this distinction from Harry Berger. See Harry Berger, Caterpillage
    Reflections on Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Life Painting     (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 34. ↩︎
  4. Hannah Arendt, for example, famously associated conservation with the stability of human identity in The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 95-96. ↩︎
  5. Martin Grünfeld and Caitlin DeSilvey, ‘Fringe Objects: Cultivating Residues at the Museum’ In Band 18 Mueseale Reste, edited by Nina Samuel and Felix Sattler (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022), 35-44.  ↩︎
  6. The smashing of the dome had been performed in the aftermath of the exhibition, done so together with archaeologist Tim Flohr Sorenson. The performance amounted to an excavation of the dome, smashed with a hammer and its contents dissected.  ↩︎
  7. Renee van der Vall et al, ‘Reflections on a Biographical Approach to Contemporary Art Conservation.’ ICOM_-CC 16th Triennial Conference Preprints, Lisbon, 19-23 September 2011, edited by J. Bridgland. Paris: International Council of Museums, 1-8. ↩︎
  8. Bruno Latour and Adam Lowe, ‘The Migration of the Aura or How to Explore the Original Through its Facsimiles’ In Switching Codes, edited by Thomas Bartscherer and Roderick Coover (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2010), 275-298. ↩︎
  9. Vivian van Saaze, Installation Art and the Museum: Presentation and Conservation of Changing Artworks (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013). ↩︎
  10. Martin Grünfeld, ‘Culturing Impermanence at the Museum: The Metabolic Collection’ In Impermanence: Exploring Continuous Change Across Cultures (London: UCL Press, 2022), 272-291.   ↩︎
  11. Hanna Hölling, ‘The Aesthetics of Change: On the Relative Durations of the Impermanent’ In Authenticity in Transition, edited by Erma Hermens and Frances Robertson, (London: Archetype Publications, 2016), 13 – 24.  ↩︎
  12. Ibid. ↩︎
  13. Fernando Domínguez Rubio, ‘The Arts of the Same’ In The Expanded Field of Conservation, edited by Caroline Fowler and Alexander Nagel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), 142-161.  ↩︎
  14. One can almost observe a hierarchy of material change. While dust and dirt might be considered acceptable in some instances, loss caused by animals such as insects are vehemently opposed. ↩︎
  15. ‘Culturing Impermanence’.  ↩︎
  16. Ibid, 288. ↩︎
  17. Ken Friedman, ‘Fluxus Legacy’, Oncurating: Fluxus Perspectives 51 (2021), 107. ↩︎
  18. For example, the Merriam Webster dictionary defines activation as: ‘to make active or more active.’ https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/activate. ↩︎
  19. Donna Haraway, Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). ↩︎
  20. This happened on two occasions in the Archivio Conz in Berlin. Dead animal and amphibian remains attributed to Daniel Spoerri and a framed spaghetti box by Lawrence Ferlinghetti were both thrown away because they had been so overcome by larvae. A more famous example is Joseph Beuys’ Felt Suit (1970) that was deaccessioned from the Tate London’s collection to the archive owing to its infestation by moths.   ↩︎
  21. The entangled histories of conservation, chemicals and colonial pasts have recently been the subject of vibrant discussions by both cultural historians and conservators. See, for example Lotte Arndt, ‘ Collections, and the Threshold of Ethnological Museums’, Museum & Society 20, no.2 (2022), 282-301. See also Helene Tello, The Toxic Museum: Berlin and Beyond (London: Routledge, 2024). ↩︎
  22. For example, the snare-picture Amora (c.1960) was renamed to Amora: avec les rats de la Galleria Schwarz and Avoir du pain sur la planche (c.1965) was renamed to Avoir du pain sur la planche (en collaboration avec les rats de la Galerie Bruno Bischofberger).  ↩︎
  23. “Nil mors est ad nos”, 59. ↩︎
  24. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4. ↩︎
  25. “Nil mors est ad nos”, 10. ↩︎

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abbruzzese, S.“Nil mors est ad nos”: Der Tod betrifft uns nicht: (Un)möglicher Dialog zwischen Daniel Spoerri und Titus Lukretius Carus (Milan, Fondazione Mudima: 2014).  

Arendt, H. The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

Arndt, L. Collections, and the Threshold of Ethnological Museums’, Museum & Society 20, no.2 (2022), 282-301.

Domínguez Rubio, F. ‘The Arts of the Same’ In The Expanded Field of Conservation, edited by Caroline Fowler and Alexander Nagel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), 142-161. 

Friedman, K. ‘Fluxus Legacy’, Oncurating: Fluxus Perspectives 51 (2021), 106-121.  

Grünfeld, M. ‘Culturing Impermanence at the Museum: The Metabolic Collection’ In Impermanence: Exploring Continuous Change Across Cultures (London: UCL Press, 2022), 272-291. 

Grünfeld, M and DeSilvey, C. ‘Fringe Objects: Cultivating Residues at the Museum’ In Band 18 Mueseale Reste, edited by Nina Samuel and Felix Sattler (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022), 35-44. 

Hölling, H. ‘The Aesthetics of Change: On the Relative Durations of the Impermanent’ In Authenticity in Transition, edited by Erma Hermens and Frances Robertson, (London: Archetype Publications, 2016), 13 – 24. 

Hölling, H et al. ‘Introduction: Caring for Performance’ In Performance: The Ethics and Politics of Care, edited by Hanna Hölling et al. (London: Routeldge, 2022), 1-20. 

Kristeva, J. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 

Latour, B and Lowe, A. ‘The Migration of the Aura or How to Explore the Original Through its Facsimiles’ In Switching Codes, edited by Thomas Bartscherer and Roderick Coover (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2010), 275-298. 

Tello, H. The Toxic Museum: Berlin and Beyond (London: Routledge, 2024)

van der Vall, R et al. ‘Reflections on a Biographical Approach to Contemporary Art Conservation.’ ICOM_CC 16th Triennial Conference Preprints, Lisbon, 19-23 September 2011, edited by J. Bridgland. Paris: International Council of Museums, 1-8. 

van Saaze, V. Installation Art and the Museum: Presentation and Conservation of Changing Artworks (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013). 

Featured photo: Balthasar van der Ast, Still Life with Fruit and Flowers (1621). Oil on panel: 39.2cm × 69.8cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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Josephine Ellis

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