AIC's 47th Annual Meeting

Welcome and Introductions of speakers

Cultural heritage institutions are increasingly sites of conflict as previously accepted or imposed societal norms are questioned and replaced with more inclusive values and practices that reflect changing social demographics and ethics. Phrases like “Museums are not neutral” and “Archives are not neutral” are rallying cries for a new generation of practitioners who seek to confront structural racism and sexism in their collections and places of work. Despite the best of intentions and a strong ethic of care, conservators and the field of conservation as a whole is no more free from the socio-economic constraints the guide the acquisition and exhibition of collections work than our curatorial peers. In her 2016 talk “Race, Diversity and Politics in 21st Century Conservation,” Sanchita Balachandran challenged conservators to consider how the core function of our work is to preserve the intangible heritage of material objects to support diverse communities of practice. This talk reflects upon the role of conservators within American heritage institutions and how our service-based profession ends up upholding the traditional racial and gender hierarchies of American society, whether through treatment priorities, conservation methodologies, or value-based assumptions. This talk will also explore the unique role that conservators and preservation staff hold in heritage institutions with broad responsibilities for the preventive care and maintenance of collections and how the authority derived from these responsibilities can be leveraged to better address the care and promotion of more diverse collections that better reflect American society and ideals.

Few paintings in the Yale Center for British Art are as damaged as Bartholomew Dandridge's A Young Girl with an Enslaved Servant and a Dog, (ca. 1725). Long consigned to storage with a thick, yellowed varnish and expanses of discolored overpaint, the murky conversation piece was rarely seen in the galleries. It had no community of scholars, no audience nor appreciation and in our presentation, we will argue, little understanding. Twentieth century British scholarly practice emphasized eighteenth century grand manner portraiture by artists such as Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, or nineteenth century British landscapes by the accepted greats William Turner and John Constable. The works of older, lesser-known masters fell to the background and their rich histories, which tell stories of artist's migration, colonial enterprise, and racial relations have, until recently, been ignored. Additionally, in New Haven, a diverse city where every third grader in public school visits Yale's museums, the display of black sitters needed reconsideration. When proposed for inclusion in the exhibition "Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth Century Atlantic Britain," the painting conservation department gasped. Old restoration obscured and misinterpreted Dandridge's composition; the harmony of the scene was thrown off balance by the figures' disparate readability. Layers of old varnish warmed the color temperature of the sitters' skin and skewed the reading of the black slave to a generic figure rather than an observed, possibly from life, portrait. The space of the painting, and thus the distance between the owner and owned was compressed by a coating that darkened highlights and lightened the darks, supporting the argument that a cleaned painting would permit a truer view of its original content and intended social dynamic. The project offered an opportunity to engage routine painting conservation with the contemporary academic discourse on the depiction of race in Western painting, supported by technical analysis to explore the picture's paint structure and degradation. It also provided insight into Dandridge's fairly unstudied painting practice, a style described as English Rococo underpinned by the technical traditions of immigrant artist Godfrey Kneller and the St. Martin's Lane Academy. Our presentation will review what is a routine painting treatment and describe how the project grew to include a community of curators, art history faculty, scientists, graduate students in the history of art, school of art, and painting conservation. The finished project helped all to better understand the picture's place in the history of art and aesthetics as well as broaden the Yale Center of British Art's relevance to New Haven's population. Beyond that it has also sparked a deeper investigation into the portrayal of flesh tones in British painting history with direct relevance to contemporary discussion of race in America and the world.

Wishing to share an experience that broadened my perspective about conserving art – I started on a quest to bring Asian Conservation out of the basement of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) and into a “fishbowl” with a conservation-in-action project that was conducted in a gallery without glass walls. Wanting to get recognition for Asian Conservation’s dedicated staff and to show the public the amazing work they do every day to enhance the visitor experience – we planned for nearly five years to find funding, the extra staff and an available gallery space. We already had the perfect painting – Hanabusa Itchō’s iconic masterpiece, The Death of the Historical Buddha. It is a monumental Japanese hanging scroll from the Edo period, measuring 16 feet tall and 9 feet wide. This Buddhist painting came into the MFA’s collection in 1911, had not been on-view for more than 25 years, and was last treated/remounted in the 1850s. The painted image was surprisingly in good condition but the hanging scroll mount was in tatters. We needed extra staff to handle this oversized scroll so we partnered with the Smithsonian Institution. Two conservators from the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery joined us at critical moments during the treatment process. The project was generously supported by the Sumitomo Foundation. The key to our success was our partnership with the MFA’s Senior Associates – a volunteer organization that helped visitors to understand what was happening in the gallery on any given day – this was crucial as the treatment progressed. The lessons we all learned from this experience were numerous and at times difficult but always enlightening. We learned that even the shyest of conservators has a story to tell, that community is local as well as global, that a conservation-in-action project is like an evolving “happening” in the gallery. The museum visitor, given the opportunity to experience first-hand a conservation treatment and engage with museum conservators, naturally learns and goes onto share that experience. Go-Pro videos and social media also aided us in reaching a more diverse audience and audiences across the globe. The exhibition was called Conservation-in-Action: Preserving Nirvana.

Outrage and ridicule followed recent “botched” restorations of a sculpture of St. George and a fresco depicting Ecce Homo, both in Spain. What is the role of the conservation professional in responding to such “scandals”? Is it possible to uphold standards and ethics while remaining relevant and sensitive in a global, digitized world where stakeholders for artworks are geographically and culturally diverse? This presentation explores linguistic approaches as possible models for navigating the choppy waters of authority over authenticity. If linguistic purists had had their way, English wouldn’t have evolved into the rich global language it is today. On the other hand, unchecked, without standards, the shared meaning of language would have muddied, eroding its efficacy as a tool for communication. Does use determine meaning in art as it does in language? If so, current conservation paradigms may reign in the relatively controlled environments of museum and institution, but additional tools may be needed for the field to participate in the broader, popular discussion of cultural heritage. The presentation attempts to envision the field of conservation beyond the walls of museum and collection and on the world stage.

The recent Los Angeles Times article noted the “Getty Foundation initiative to preserve the art of art conservation itself” in this case, lining canvases. “’Knowledge is disappearing,’ says Getty Senior program officer Antoine Wilmering. ‘It’s a big problem’”. Indeed it is a problem, and one that not only Getty, but AIC members can help to solve. The research conservators do to determine treatments has dramatically changed in a relatively short time. Even as recently or as long ago, depending on your perspective, as the 1980s there was experimentation that has continued to this day. Previous treatment records are essential for determining new treatments, and for the historic record that accompanies an object. And sometimes old treatments are found to be the best option, even today, or they are the spring board for considering new options. From institutional records to private practice documentation, professional records are key to developing new treatments. Just as importantly treatment and testing are a vital record of our work. Past AIC presentations have urged and shown the importance of keeping test samples. Unpublished records of tests and samples provide a context for the final treatment. Examination and treatment can provide insights to future owners and conservators of art works preserved, which may again need treatment. Art historians might also benefit from having access to such records. A conservator in private practice knows that he or she has the responsibility of finding a home for his or her papers. Planning for that home may not be a top priority during a career. Institutional archives are limited in their storage capacities so a conservator working for an institution may find him- or herself with the dilemma of seeking a home for papers that are not directly related to current works of art in that institution's collection. The conservator whose records are in digital format must also be concerned with the preservation of records digitized or born digital that require organization, indexing, and a hosting server. How do we as a profession preserve our documentation history? And how do we help now and future generations to find that historical record? FAIC and dedicated members have done an amazing job in creating a legacy of oral histories of our colleagues. Those who started that effort were convinced of the need to preserve our history. The documentation of treatment is as essential to our professional history as the oral history effort already established. Let’s come together to share ideas for solving the preservation of our treatment histories large and small. Let’s close the gap of documenting our history by documenting our documentation so it can be found and used by future generations to make sure the as Wilmering so clearly states “”knowledge has to continue to exist—and be passed on.’”

Since the mid-twentieth century, theoretical and practical approaches to heritage have caught the interest of a growing number of academic and professionals. Facing the expanding scope of what an always larger diversity of stakeholders consider necessary to hand in to the future, guidelines, sets of principles, charters and recommendations have multiplied in order to address each and every challenge posed by this ever-expanding corpus and its very diverse public. At the same time, the globalisation of heritage debates starting, in the field of architecture, which the Athens Conference in 1931 and booming with the World Heritage Convention, has questioned the most deeply rooted cultural traditions on which conservation and restoration principles had been built and developed. Despite some attempts to organise this prolific production and these fundamental questionings into a coherent theory (Munos-Vinas, 2003), experience shows that in front of practical problems, practitioners tend to come back to some fundamentals – the Venice Charter in architecture, Cesare Brandi’s theory in art, for example – despite the anachronism of using them to answer questions which couldn’t be foreseen at the time when they were thought. In parallel, a tendency to decontextualise practices, extracted from their traditional background, regularly helps to argue in favour of projects aiming at sustaining the capitalistic machine or questionable political interests rather than the safeguard and transmission of heritage (using the periodic rebuilding of Shinto temples to justify the rebuilding of any monument in the world is the clearest example). In this context, blurred interpretations of the concepts of identity and authenticity are in many cases responsible for a confusion in the debates and lead to unsatisfactory compromises mostly in disfavour the safeguard of heritage. At the same time, the expansion and diversification of cultural goods contribute in a positive way to a renewal of conservation and restoration approaches. Our ambition is to conjointly revitalize reflections on movable and immovable cultural goods, proposing methodological tools and resources for an interdisciplinary dialogue in a broad sense. The CoToCoCo project (Conceptual Tools for Contemporary Conservation) is based on borrowings from varied disciplines – sociology, anthropology, mathematics, philosophy, semiology – in order to draw alternative perspectives and submit them for practitioner’s consideration. For this conference, we will provide an example of our methodology and its practical application, starting from a text by the French sociologist Nathalie Heinich on “heritage emotions”. We will submit it to the reflection of two heritage professionals – a conservator of cultural goods, working with communities in Central America and an Irish architect, in order to demonstrate that in order to think “out of the box”, it is sometimes necessary to rejuvenate theory and to try it out just like any other practical tool.

Frameworks of business are sources that can empower us as conservators, advocates, managers and leaders. Looking through the business lens at the profession and practice of conservation, what might we learn? Can we harness concepts such as distributed networks, the sharing economy and design thinking to strengthen and inspire our work? How might tools like data visualization and negotiation methods help us demonstrate value and cultivate financial support? Does alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals help to contextualize our work? This talk will offer a big picture perspective on cultural heritage conservation, considering the profession within the setting of global trends and current international dialogues. Strategies adopted from the business sector will spotlight how we might reframe and communicate our impact to remain dynamic and relevant in the future.  

As professionals in a multi-disciplinary field, we naturally benefit from the diversity of experiences gained in academic and craft pursuits. Transferable skills from hobbies and previous occupations contribute to the uniqueness of an individual’s skill set, but what of transferable philosophies? Drawing from a six-year-long stint as a semiprofessional poker player, this presentation highlights aspects of the practice and serious study of a hobby that have informed the personal philosophy of a conservation professional. The parallels between the practices of poker and conservation are manifold and sometimes surprising. Long-term success in poker demands a complete understanding of game mechanics, personal discipline and risk management, strong intuition and interpersonal skills, continuous self assessment and iterative improvement, and engagement with shifts in best practices. A poker player’s education typically begins with low-stakes, fundamental experience; however, as one progresses toward mastery, the ideal approach is often less prescriptive and more nuanced, modulated by a collection of thousands of prior minute decisions. Uncertainty is inevitable and is often the source of stress, and the importance of luck, of course, must be acknowledged. It is in the consideration of minutiae where conservation professionals can learn from the deep study of games like poker. In this talk, three key themes are examined: embracing and managing risk, the importance of cultivating small and large communities with diverse approaches and skill sets, and the necessity for honest self assessment with an eye toward long-term growth. A final note about time investment, opportunity cost, and avoiding burnout ties these themes together with a call for more coordinated, efficient, and open collaboration among conservation professionals.