Works of art are living things. Few artists would doubt the truth of this claim, nor anybody who spends their life with objects that can inspire such overwhelming feelings, that seem to speak to us, and with which we establish relationships that can last a lifetime.
As living things, works of art change and grow older (thus the “Old” Masters), just as we do, finding their place in the world, surviving—or more often not surviving—the ravages of time. It is something that we feel directly when encountering works of art, the inner life and accumulated experience of time, the mysterious vitality, and independence—indifference, even, to our generally over-enthusiastic interpretations of what they might “mean”.
Recognising works of art as living things is a consciousness-changing act, both liberating for art and for our own imaginative response. At the instigation of its director, Jago Cooper, the recognition of “living art” has been made policy at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich, which houses the collection of Robert and Lisa Sainsbury, donated just over 50 years ago to the University of East Anglia.
It is a bold and ambitious shift in policy from considering works of art as property primarily requiring preservation and protection, to one that recognises objects and images as “alive and animate”. The Sainsbury Centre claims to be the “first museum in the world formally to recognise the lifeforce of art”, and, as Cooper says, has changed its governance guidelines in the light of this changed understanding of art.
“We believe that great artists, makers and creators transfer their lifeforce and physically materialise it in their art. In this way they create new living entities, which need to be met and understood as such,” Cooper writes.
How this lifeforce of art is conceived is necessarily harder to define. It might be compared to the philosophical puzzle of human consciousness, or to the age-old animistic understanding of non-animal things—trees, rocks, the wind—as having souls and inner lives. It echoes the vitalism of the ancient Greeks, who saw the universe pervaded by pneuma, or the breath of life, but is at heart a non-Western idea, gainsaying the idea of works of art as things to be owned, assets to be controlled and managed.
The result is a deep shift in the very purpose of a museum, not solely in the way works are displayed, but also in the decisions made about their conservation and care and, most importantly, about the language that is used to describe them. Encountering a work of art should be like falling in love, Cooper says, forming the basis of a lasting relationship.
Art is born, not created
It is, of course, much easier to fall in love than to sustain that strength of feeling over a lifetime. Recognising works of art as living things, either symbolically, or in the radically literal sense taken on by the Sainsbury Centre, raises questions about how those works of art are kept and looked after—how they are cared for and conserved. At the Sainsbury Centre, works are no longer described as having been made or created, but rather (at least on caption details), as having been “born”, which leads to the question of what it means for a work of art to die, and whether works of art should be preserved artificially beyond the term of their natural life.
As Kim Kraczon, a conservator of contemporary art specialising in sustainability, observes, acknowledging the natural lifespan of works of art still meets with significant resistance from a profession that is understandably dominated by traditional views, but also by extreme technology, leading to ever more refined methods of life support for works of art. Artificial intelligence, for example, has been enlisted to determine the best location in a museum where polymer-based works will degrade at the slowest rate (certain types of plastic are, paradoxically, among the most volatile and irreplaceable of materials for conservators).
There is also the very significant question of the amount of resources and energy expended on the preservation of works, many of which will never in fact see the light of day. “Producing eternity”, as Fernando Domínguez Rubio wrote in his 2020 book Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum, “is extraordinarily expensive… one of the largest expenses in the operating budget of the museum”.
It is also highly carbon intensive, obliged to run 24 hours a day, year-round, and accounting for well over half of most museums’ energy consumption. Rubio calculates that the energy consumption for the high-tech storage facility for MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, New York, consumes more energy per square metre than a large hospital, meaning that “keeping artworks alive demands more energy than caring for human bodies”.
Frances Morris, the former director of Tate Modern, points out that museums fail in their public mission if they privilege collecting and conservation over public access and planetary welfare. At heart, it comes down to the question of whether keeping things for longer is better, or if this comes at the expense of the very purpose of a work of art, to communicate with and enrich the surrounding world.
“There is no automatic ethical requirement for conservators to keep things as long as possible”, Jane Henderson, a professor of conservation and the secretary general of the International Institute for Conservation, wrote in 2020; “Life-experiences should be of equivalent concern as ‘longer lifetimes’ because it is the way that objects connect people that creates their value”.
Do not respect art—love it
Henderson’s words bring to mind Brancusi’s advice to collectors not to respect his works, but rather to love them (quoted by Eric Shanes in his 1989 book on the artist)—which meant using them, rearranging them, doing what they wanted with them, as long as it was out of love. Nowadays, artists are increasingly aware of the need to honour environmental accountability over the perdurance of their work.
Phyllida Barlow, in an interview in 2022, described the “breaking point” that she had reached with environmental questions in her studio work, and with the large amounts of work being kept in storage, perhaps never to be shown or sold. Her exhibition at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover that year was created entirely using local materials, with the intention that they would be recycled or reused, and not necessarily as works of art. It was fitting that the exhibition was the result of winning the Kurt Schwitters Prize—Schwitters being the original recycler, for whom nothing was rubbish, and whose Merz collages and room-filling assemblages are filled with a strange and indefinable life.
The recent announcement that the Factum Foundation is to create a digital facsimile of Schwitters’s Merz Barn at the Cylinders Estate in the Lake District raises questions of whether such projects are in keeping with the idea of works of art having natural life spans, and the ethos of authenticity and found materials at the heart of Schwitters’s work.
The recognition of works of art as living things, subject to ageing and death just as we are, remains a complex and emotive idea. It is a subject I am exploring in a series of lectures, Everything Worth Saving at Snape Maltings in Suffolk. It is a liberating thought, far more so than any ideological or political claims on works of art, because it is not about what art means, but what it is, fundamentally.
Lectures are one way of trying to get the point across, but spending time in museums, our last meaningful public spaces (at least when they are free to enter), is a step closer still. Museums are the best place to fall in love with living art, even when this remains, as elsewhere in life, a risky business.
