Conference Day 1 – AM
Conserving contemporary artworks that may challenge the very notion of art and its materiality, has seen the practice and profession of conservation expand to webs of relationships and infrastructures that have direct impact on the Planet. This conference asks questions about the sustainability of those practices and networks of care. SUSTAINING ART sees conservators, artists, curators, technicians, collectors, researchers and more, coming together to challenge assumptions, examine practices, and imagine equitable futures. Through experience pieces, research talks, panel discussions, workshops, and short films the sustainability of people, practices, and the planet will be pursued in relation to the conservation of contemporary art.
Jina Chang
Reading Sustainability: Through the Looking Glass of Changing Roles of Contemporary Art Conservator
Arts and heritage sustainability discourses have evolved in recent years not only to reflect on the changing roles and effects of these institutions on the economy and environment, but also as a tool to re-evaluate and rethink the validity and priorities of these institutions’ daily operations, which has remained outside conventional economic and social frameworks. What, then, has been the dominant trend of the sustainability discourse within the field of art and heritage, and how can its growing volume and diversity inform us about the ways in which we view and engage in the collection and preservation of art within institutional settings?
In the first part of this paper, an overview of sustainability discourse within the art museums is presented, highlighting how the discourse on sustainability has evolved in the conservation field: Ecological discourses concerned with the environmental impact of conservation materials and methodologies, to the techno-economic perspective on the synergy between technology, agents, time, and cost of preserving digital art, to the networked and human-oriented conservation ethics and methodologies in contemporary time-based media art conservation.
In conclusion, the study of the three dominant sustainability discourses in conservation suggests that attention has been shifting from the conservator’s traditional role as a caretaker of collection objects to a managerial role that devises and enforces policies promoting sustainability within a museum’s collection and preservation practices. The paper suggests that this new role of
conservator signals a shift from act-centred conservation to agent-centred conservation, which focuses on the long-term sustainable patterns of preservation actions rather than the particular preservation actions. Currently, the shift can be seen most clearly in contemporary art conservation, but it can also be applied to a broader museum context where the sustainability
discourse can be helpful to formulate a new conceptual framework to evaluate existing museum
practices.
About Jina Chang
Jina Chang is a time-based media art conservator at the Nasjonalmuseet, Norway. Initially trained as a media artist (photography at Pratt Institute (BFA) and Studio Art at the University of New Mexico (MFA)), she taught New Media and Video Art at the University of Rochester and Brown University. Upon graduating from the Object Conservation program at the University of Oslo (MA), she conducted a 2-year project surveying, documenting, and devising comprehensive preservation plans for the contemporary installation artworks in Nasjonalmuseet’s collections.
Since 2018, she has worked exclusively with the museum’s time-based media and digital art collections. She specializes in the preservation planning and documentation of time-based mediaand digital artworks, and her research interest includes the conservation of the immaterial and the history of conservation from cultural and social science perspectives.
Sarah Nunberg
Sustainability Tools in Cultural Heritage
Sarah Nunberg has been in private practice as an object’s conservator in Brooklyn NY since 2006. She focuses on preventive care, environmental management and treatment of organic and
inorganic 3D objects. Sarah has become a leading expert in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for sustainable practices in cultural heritage. She has spearheaded a Tier I and Tier II National
Endowment of Humanities Grant to create STiCH, Sustainability Tools in Cultural Heritage, which includes an LCA library of Case Studies and a Carbon Calculator supported by the Foundation for
the American Institute of Conservation for Historic and Artistic Works.
Along with continuing her private practice, Sarah is an adjunct professor teaching materials properties and life cycle assessment at Pratt Institute. Sarah was awarded the 2021-22 Adele Chatfield-Taylor Rome Prize in Historic Preservation and Conservation for continuing her work with LCA for the cultural
heritage sector. Sarah received her advanced certificate in conservation and her MA in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts Conservation Center at New York University in 1994 and
her MA in Archaeology from Yale University in 1990.
Brian Castriota and Hélia Marcal
Networks of Care
This paper critically re-evaluates the notion of retreatability in conservation, expanding its meaning to include sustainability beyond that of the object and its futures. The concept of retreatability emerged as a response to criticisms of “reversibility” as a principle of conservation treatments, which is not always an achievable goal (e.g. cleaning). In this paper, we propose a new reading of retreatability, as retreat-ability: a permission to step back and widen our scope of care, and an ethical principle that demands accountability to the ways in which our practices can be dominating and exploitative.
Conservation interventions inevitably draw boundaries around what the object is, affirming particular materialities (sometimes without flexibility) whilst excluding other material possibilities. A “duty of care” is frequently conflated with a directive to maintain fixed boundaries, despite the entities in our care existing in a world of ever-changing conditions, thus requiring flexibility and adaptability to flourish. Such thinking also increases the need for conditions that are not always sustainable (e.g. strict environmental conditions, or continuous, extensive documentation).
We re-affirm that conservation’s duty of care should not only be directed toward objects and artworks, but also to people and nature. We argue that binary oppositions—such as nature-culture or subject-object—rest on faulty foundations, and that people, the cultural manifestations we invest with meaning, and the environment we are a part of, are intra-related, mutually dependent, and co-constitutive. In this way, a conservation ethics within the realm of retreat-ability is about accountability to humans and more than humans.
About Brian Castriota
Dr Brian Castriota is a Glasgow-based researcher, educator, and conservator specialised in time-based media, contemporary art, and archaeological materials. He currently holds the position of Time-Based Media Conservator at the National Galleries Scotland and is a freelance conservator for time-based media and contemporary art at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
He also servesas Supervising Conservator with Harvard Art Museums’ Archaeological Exploration of Sardis and has worked with the expedition since 2011. He is a Tutor in Museum Studies (MSc) at the University of Glasgow, and an adjunct lecturer in time-based media art conservation at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. He completed graduate-level training in conservation at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts in 2014 and received a PhD in History of Art from the University of Glasgow in 2019.
About Hélia Marcal
Dr Hélia Marcal is Lecturer in History of Art, Materials and Technology at University College London, an Integrated Researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History, in Lisbon (IHC-FCSH/IN2Past),and the Coordinator of the Working Group on Theory, History and Ethics of Conservation of the Committee for Conservation of the International Council of Museums (ICOM-CC).
Dr Lynn Wilson
Artworks as Commodities. A Circular Economy Response to the Environmental Challenges of Art Conservation in a World of Depleting Resources
This presentation will give a brief overview of the circular economy framed within the context of artworks as commodities. The circular economy is regenerative by design (EMF, 2010), an antithesis to the current linear economy – take -make – use – dispose commodity culture that has rapidly evolved since the industrial revolution in the 1700s, which has created a catastrophic environmental global crisis. In the linear economy, artworks are created, marketed, and collected commercially, privately and by the state and consumed by one or many for short or long periods of time, dependent on the subjective views of individuals, committees and experts evaluating their relevance at any given time. Artworks themselves are the embodiment of energy, labour and material resources, the latter of which the world is rapidly running out of.
The definitive model of the CE is the EMF butterfly, which has a green and a blue wing. The greenwing represents the bio-regenerative system that relates to products from organic matter, explored by environmental artists and presented as temporary and permanent structures, intended to be in harmony with the earth. The blue wing encourages industrial systems of collaborative consumption, ensuring when a product is no longer functional, it can be processed, and material valorised to produce a new product. Artworks have always been part of collaborative consumption models of sharing, lending, and passing on whether in private ownership or public galleries. An overview of how to maximise artworks as commodities in a sharing economy and to evaluate when they are more useful as regenerative materials sources, other than objects is discussed.
About Dr Lynn Wilson
Dr Lynn Wilson is a circular design practitioner, researcher, and educator, who recently completed her PhD at the Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow, the focus of which was consumer behaviour and the transition to a circular economy. Dr Wilson is the founder of Circular Design Scotland which provides consultancy support to businesses transitioning to circular business models and material practices and is currently a Creative Entrepreneur within the Creative Informatics Programme, University of Edinburgh, where she is developing a Circular Materials Repository. In addition, she is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the University for the Arts, London, Centre for Circular Design. From 2013-2017, Dr Wilson was the Sector Manager – Textiles, Circular Economy team at Zero Waste Scotland, contributing to the Scottish Government, Making Things Last – A Circular Economy Strategy for Scotland. In 2015, she undertook a Churchill Fellowship, spending one month researching circular textile heritage, technology, and clothing retail systems in Japan. Dr Wilson originally trained in Constructed Textiles at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee University and in Fashion Textiles, Nottingham Trent University. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts, Commerce and Manufacture (FRSA).