The Art of the Same: On the Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics of Maintenance and Repair at the Museum of Modern in New York

• In Event: Infrastructures, Maintenance and Care - II

Abstract

This talk offers an empirical exploration of what it takes to produce and sustain one of the most exotic types of objects, the art object, at one place: the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The talk will explore the very particular ecology through which this peculiar object is made possible and is sustained in practice. It will do so through an expedition into the museum’s backstage, exploring some of the technologies, climatic infrastructures, storage technologies, and forms of care and labor required to prevent this rather fragile object from falling apart. Through this expedition, the talk will emphasize the role that maintenance and repair play in artificially creating sameness and duration into the material fabric of the categories and symbolic orders we dream and inhabit. If everything goes well, the talk should be an invitation to think about how maintenance and repair are forms of labor through which the production, negotiation, and maintenance of social, political, and aesthetic orders we inhabit takes place.

Author

• Fernando Dominguez, UC San Diego