The American Institute for Conservation (AIC)’s Contemporary Art Network, or CAN!, aims to embrace and explore the influence by and the influences on the conservator in our daily practice. The articles within this JAIC Special Issue on Contemporary Art Conservation stem from our network’s inaugural sessions at AIC’s 47th Annual Meeting in Connecticut. The May 2019 concurrent general session on “The Evolving Role of the Conservator” and the panel “The Evolving Influence of the Conservator” highlighted changes in the field, particularly when dealing with experimental art, materials, and concepts. We welcomed contributions for this issue that further describe the complex nature of contemporary art conservation, including typical (or atypical, in many cases) challenges they have learned to navigate to extend the expected life of contemporary art – or even investigate the underlying expectations of conservation altogether.
This special issue reflects the mission of the newly established Contemporary Art Network, which was formed as part of AIC in 2018/2019 by conservators Luca Ackerman, Kate Moomaw, Giuliana Moretto, Delia Müller-Wüsten, Mareike Opeña, and Martha Singer. We believe discussing the care of contemporary art provides an interesting addition to the American Institute of Conservation, as it is distinct from historic artifacts in several ways. Underlying all forms of contemporary art conservation are intellectual issues, material instabilities, and conceptual complexities – all which have received international attention for the past three decades. CAN! sees the need for providing a platform within AIC for addressing such challenges. We want to explore how contemporary art requires and inspires us to go beyond standard conservation procedures on a practical level, which in turn enables us to rethink these standards and professional guidelines.
Contemporary art is typically known for the often-experimental character of artwork materials and concepts, or of its rapidly developing new forms beyond sculpture and painting (e.g., time-based media, performance, street art, or internet web art). Unlike most of our cultural heritage, it is the only section that is still growing exponentially. What effect does that have on conservation decisions? Additionally, because it is so vast, it exists outside institutions at least as much as inside museums and established collections. Practicing conservators have long responded to contemporary art’s need of care “outside the museum realm,” as one can see by the flourishing private practice conservation studios in New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, and many metropolitan cities around the globe, where this type of art is commonly produced, exhibited, and marketed. More than half of CAN!’s founding members are from this sector of private practice conservation. CAN! hopes to encourage active participation from conservators in private practice in the future, as it is a vastly underrepresented area of the conservation literature.
Most significantly different from historic art is the presence of the living artist, their heirs, or their advocates. This often translates to an individual authority or agency that we must consider and consult with in our conservation decisions – not just morally, but legally. The social or cultural value placement of a particular contemporary artwork is closely tied to the artist’s intention. Therefore, the artist's opinion has gained significance in conservation decisions to a degree unprecedented in conservation history. This pushes the conservator into situations where subjectivity and contextual considerations become highly influential. Quabeck, Davis, Skopek, and Verbeeck explore these issues in-depth.
Another interesting aspect of our youngest cultural heritage is that the common art-historical designation “contemporary art” already spans over a period of six decades, with origins in the 1960s. While there is some tolerance for an aged physical appearance in early contemporary artworks from the 1960s and 1970s, contemporary art is still being exponentially produced. This tension of newness (communicated qua its designated “contemporary” title), struggling with rapidly aging materials yet ongoing production, stipulates a dilemma that contemporary art conservators often find themselves navigating. Barack et al. use in-depth case studies to address how recent theories in contemporary art conservation are being applied to design collections containing electronics and digital components. Moreover, Finn’s case studies explore this dichotomy of contemporary works aging out of repairability – leading to new pathways of conservation theory. It appears the contemporary art era is hesitating to overstep the threshold of becoming historic. There are modern works that expand the definition of contemporary, challenging even the definition of an artwork and its existence in time; Castriota uses a century-long artwork to expand on this point.
In our daily practice, contemporary art's timely closeness of the work's creation and its need for conservation care can shrink to a degree where the time-distance between the two moments is eliminated to become one and the same. They may even reverse. Such closeness can result in an immediacy that leaves conservators struggling with their ethical guidelines of preserving a work by staying neutral, scientific, and objective. Yet, in practice, we have been doing this for years! The ideal neutrality and rigor of the conservation profession and the volatility of circumstances at hand ask for creative negotiation or, as Claudine Houbart termed (in her talk “The CoToCoCo Project: A Conceptual Toolkit for Contemporary Conservation”) at AIC’s 2019 general session, “the creative destruction of brokenness,” in which we step out of traditional conservator’s roles to respond to an artwork’s needs.
A successful conservation result, however complex, seems to rely heavily on the dynamics among all involved stakeholders, human and non-human, as García Celma deeply explores. A connection can be drawn between long-term relationships, appreciation of expertise, mutual respect within any given collaboration, and a hopefully successful outcome of a conservation procedure. We need to “get along.” From our individual experience when working with artists, we often need to temporarily step out of our classic conservator’s mind such as Johnson who cared for artworks featuring live critters or as Wachowiak did when he assumed an “artist’s assistant” role to establish a fruitful relationship over time with David Lynch. This is not only to treat the given work, but also to carefully evaluate and develop a “feeling” of the artist's attitude towards the artwork's survival. This requires a sensitivity from the conservator that is not usually part of a conservator's education. Often only in the later phases of a close working relationship during an art preservation or installation project, or in subsequent projects, the conservator's perspective and professional expertise is not only accepted by the artist but may even become appreciated and sought after.
In addition, while our knowledge is usually recognized and much appreciated during internal discussions, with reference to the origins of the conservation profession, paired with social, or perhaps political reasons, it seems such knowledge needs to remain behind the scenes. Combined with the newness and therefore pristine, never-touched-before condition of many contemporary works of art, the first conservation intervention, which often stays visible at the least under UV-light, turns (visible) conservation into a stigma. We wonder why this “practitioner invisibility” is so ubiquitous – or could there be benefits of such “opacity” for the conservation profession? Miller discusses the growing need for conservators and their work to be not just visible, but at times explicit.
Finally, moving past the theoretical means we need to develop models that allow others to identify and involve the necessary stakeholders, materials, and data to preserve these new forms of art. Brost as well as Giebeler et al. have developed models to help capture the additional layers of information needed, while Kramer et al. provide a model and templates for assessing entire collections.
With this issue and with our ongoing activities, CAN! hopes to extend the conservation discourse in the US; and to reflect on us – professional conservators in a large field of caring for a particularly vulnerable, volatile, young form of art in many different contexts. But we wholeheartedly believe the topics discussed here should feel equally familiar to all conservators invested in the care and survival of any kind of art. We all navigate in the same moment, no matter how old the art, and that is today – in today's social understanding around our cultural heritage.
– Mareike Opeña, Martha Singer, Delia Müller-Wüsten
We thank CAN!’s founding officers for helping develop this network, related annual meeting programs that sparked this special issue, and additional resources for conservators: Chair J. Luca Ackerman, Program Chair Mareike Opeña (2019), Program Chair Kate Moomaw (2020), e-Editor Martha Singer, Treasurer and Secretary Delia Müller-Wüsten, and Communications/Outreach Officer Giuliana Moretto.