About
Upcoming Exhibitions
BGC Gallery will resume its exhibition programming this September with the return of Sèvres Extraordinaire! Sculpture from 1740 until Today, originally slated for fall 2024.
Bard Graduate Center is an advanced graduate research institute in New York City dedicated to the cultural histories of the material world. Our MA and PhD degree programs, Gallery exhibitions, research initiatives, scholarly publications and public programs explore new ways of thinking about decorative arts, design history, and material culture.

About
28th Annual Iris Foundation Awards
Honoring Irene Roosevelt Aitken, Dr. Julius Bryant, Dr. Meredith Martin, and Katherine Purcell
Events
Wednesdays @ BGC
Join us this spring for weekly programming!





Research

Bard Graduate Center is a research institute for advanced, interdisciplinary study of diverse material worlds. We support the innovative scholarship of our faculty and students as well as resident fellows, guest curators and artists, and visiting speakers.

Photo by Fresco Arts Team.

Our Public Humanities + Research department focuses on making scholarly work widely available and accessible through the coordination of the fellowship program and public programming that combines academic research with exhibition-related events. Across the institution—from the classroom to the gallery, from publications to this website—we utilize digital media to facilitate and share original research. This section outlines current programming and provides a repository for past scholarly content.

On November 7, 2013, Cultures of Conservation Visiting Professor Hanna Hölling presented her research to the BGC community in a paper entitled, “On the Aspects of Time, Continuity, Archive and Identity in the Conservation of Multimedia Works of Art.”

The abstract of her paper follows below, but you may find the full article now published in the Autumn 2013 issue of Nescus: European Journal of Media Studies. Congratulations, Professor Hölling!

Abstract:

As no other artworks, multimedia installations that have been created since the 1960s and that are comprised of a wide range of components test the ruling conventions in conservation, presentation, and museum practices. Through the cycles of their materializations, performed and performative qualities, on and off status, distributed authorship and with the involvement of display and playback apparatus, various formats of film and video, sculptural and painted elements, organic components and photography, they dispute the validity of what has for decades been understood under the notion of a static, unique, or singular ‘conservation object.’


In her presentation, analyzing a number of Nam June Paik’s multimedia installations, Hölling posed questions that consider what the ‘object of conservation’ is (or might become) in relation to its material constitution and the ways in which it functions within and beyond a certain historical moment. She introduced different modes of thinking about time in conservation (with regard to active media and technological ruin) and conservation’s paradigms of reversibility, and minimal intervention. Furthermore, she discussed how the changeability of multimedia artworks and – equally important – their persistence through change divorce us from thinking about their evidential, material authenticity to be preserved and evoke a profounder engagement with the archive in which and through which the works are sustained and continued.