Art Handling – Partituren der Logistik

The term “art handling” describes aspects of the (professional) art scene that often remain invisible: installation and de-installation, technical and conservation-related documentation, storage, transport, and legal issues. Discussions around materiality reveal that infrastructure and logistics are of constitutive significance to the production and presentation of artworks. Over the course of the professionalization of the global art scene, the requirements relating to installation-based, ephemeral, and performative artworks, and how these are handled by the institutions, have continually become stricter, and issues of documentation have accordingly become more complex. On the one hand, new work concepts or works are changing the requirements for the “infrastructure” of museums. On the other hand, such “infrastructures” that now exist in many places are also directly stimulating the emergence of certain art forms.