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Munich congress review

  
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The Object in Context: Crossing Conservation Boundaries.
A Review
 by David Howell, Bodleian Library, Oxford

This was an extremely enjoyable and well organised conference. Against my natural instincts I took copious notes throughout all of the papers and deliberately avoided reading the preprints until afterwards. In this way I could evaluate the usefulness of actually being there. I will not play Simon CowellI by evaluating each paper in turn, but instead will highlight what I gained from being there; after all, you can all read the preprints.

One thing that won’t be possible to get the experience of is Gaël de Guichens’ Forbes Prize Lecture. Gaël is a well known performer of many years standing and knows how to please a crowd, and this time he involved the audience by allowing us to vote on various issues with red or green papers. The main ‘topic’ of his talk was conservation language and defining the relationship between conservation and restoration, but in truth the content was almost less important than the delivery; an excellent warm up to the conference.

‘Context’ was interpreted in many different ways. I was moved by a paper describing the conservation of scraps of material excavated from First World War battlefieldsII. The contexts here were the connection with real people who had died in these battles, and the context of being filmed for television which was sometimes in conflict with conservation ethics. Another paper described a more general context in which conservation has somewhat been taken over by ‘Collections Care’, and warned of the possible loss of conservators ‘hands-on’ skillsIII. Another described the difficulties of caring for a large and important painting by Chagall in the context of an opera house with no environmental control and where it was even difficult to prevent the public smoking!IV

There was a wonderful contrast between two papers. The first described in detail a piece of modern sculpture composed of 44 pillared basalt blocks with textile elements for which a conservation strategy was requiredV. The build up of the presentation seemed to indicate the need for remedial conservation, but sensitivities to the artists’ intent dictated a preventive strategy instead. Conversely, the preventive strategy for the conservation of a Maori eel trapVI was ‘rejected’ by the traditional owners of the object who wanted it to be made stable for display (and the display has been very successful). There were several other examples of the context of religious or sacred art leading conservation practice.

From a very personal point of view I was fascinated by two papers on the Chinese terracotta army of Emporer Qin Shihuang (died 210 BC); both interesting in their content, but implicitly interesting because these figures are awesome in quality, quantity and age.VII VIII

One paper described the survival of objects in the context of an extremely hostile environment (the preprints do not show the image of the painting covered with ice crystals!)IX, while another dramatically demonstrated the extremely short ‘life’ of supposedly stable modern materials and the need for further research in this areaX.
There did seem to be quite a number of presentations on pigments. The one that most caught my attention was of 3 copies of an artist’s note book containing samples of pigments in varying degrees of preservation.XI I have asked curators here in Oxford if we have anything similar to research.

I apologise to all of the authors who I haven’t mentioned, but there were 46 presentations (just to prove I was there and attentive you will see there are 47 papers in the preprints; one speaker didn’t make it!) and there was no way I could comment on each one.

The event ended on a high point with the presentation of the Keck award to Eric Schindelholz representing the team involved with the conservation of the USS Monitor and the work they had put into publicising the project. They have a very good web site at www.mariner.org .

Now, for the second part of my review, “Bier Kellers in Munich”. The best by far was…………………………….Word count exceeded…….end of document!

  1. Simon Cowell is a judge on a UK TV series called “The X factor”
  2. Preprints p.12 Finding the fallen: conservation and the First World War, Renata Peters and Dean Sully
  3. p.30 The conservator in context: crossing curatorial boundaries, Caroline Butler and Mary Davis
  4. p.56 Commedia dell’Arte: when Chagall went to Frankfurt, Snejanka Bauer and Maria Kokkori
  5. p.69 Asking for the context: conservation strategy for Joseph Beuys’ The End of the Twentieth Century, Maike Grun
  6. p.128 Conservation of a Maori eel trap: practical and ethical issues, Catherine Smith and Heike Winkelbauer
  7. p.170 Stone armour 2200 years ago: early mass production methods in Chine, Sandra Bucher Fiuza, Duan Qingbo, and Wang Dongfeng
  8. p.177 A colourful world for the emperor’s soul: the polychromy of the terracotta sculptures at Qin Shihuang’s burial complex, Catharina Blansdorf and Xia Yin
  9. p.249 Skolloster Castle and its environment, Jan Holmberg, Bengt Kylsberg and Per Nelander
  10. p.273 Applique stained glass: the conflict between conservation and context, Norman H. Tennent
  11. p.254 Nomenclature et species colorum miniatae picturae: researching seventeenth-century pigments in Sweden, Cecilia Ronnerstam and Lars Halldahl

 

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