This episode features Benjamin Patterson’s work Hooked (1980) from the collection of Getty Research Institute, acquired in 1985 as a part of Jean Brown Archive. Formally, Hooked is a fishing tackle box that contains several found, similarly unrelated objects adorned with either hooks or lures. One of the items included inside the box was a can of sardines. Our guest, conservator Albrecht Gumlich shares with us his story of how Hooked performs independently and beyond the control of its long-gone creator, disrupting the habitual functioning of a reading room in art archives. It is also a story about challenges related to conserving organic matter and often difficult decisions that need to be made to maintain Fluxus art materiality for future generations.

More details about the work, the guest and the artist are available here.