Conserving Active Matter—Activating Conservation

Conserving Active Matter—Activating Conservation? Peter N. Miller and Soon Kai Poh (eds.), Conserving Active Matter New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2022 (distributed by the University of Chicago Press), 400 pages, 56 color plates, $ 65.00, ISBN 978-1-941792-32-2 (PDF and EPUB $ 45.00, ISBN 978-1-941792-33-9) Reviewed by Hanna B. Hölling “... We have to conserve because conservation is innate to human nature. We’re pack rats. We pile things up. We collect. We save. We hoard. Why do we do this? Because we’ve learned that we need to save in order to survive. We store up food and clothing and other goods to survive physically. We store up skills and habits and memories to survive socially,” contended the cultural geographer and heritage scholar David Lowenthal in his Harvard Baxter lecture in 2014.1 He subsequently countered, “... nothing survives forever, the notion of keeping anything forever is a counter-productive delusion. We need instead to focus on how things change over their finite life-spans.” 2 I was fortunate to share a few moments with the late Lowenthal in his London apartment, when he, his wife and I mused over dinner about the notions of permanence and change. His books, like his thoughts, resonated with me again and again while I was reading Conserving Active Matter, a considerable volume edited by Peter Miller and Soon Kai Poh within the Bard Graduate Center’s Cultural Histories of the Material World series.3 This is a book about the titular activity of matter in all its forms, dimensions and complexities, which, instead of asking, “why,” “what” and/or “for whom” we conserve, lets changeable matter— as seen through the lens of conservation—take center stage. Conservation as conceived on this book’s pages is an intentional human activity 426 Open Access. © 2023 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. that has been present throughout human history. Put in the simplest possible terms, most historic artefacts, performances, practices and behaviors have reached our present moment because someone decided to pass them on. My reading of the book, however, activates conservation as a socio-technological formation and positions it as a human practice rooted in changing ideas and shifting cultures. Whether read from the chapters or from between the lines, the volume reveals the vastness of conservation, its plural cultures of practice and ways of thinking and being in the world, including the mindsets and affects, ethics and aesthetics, and not least the variety of conservation specialties. And conservation so understood is disclosed in relation to its subject—changing and active, at times nonidentical with its former self. Importantly, the book allows other actors—that is, individuals different from those wearing white gowns and wielding cotton swabs who commonly perform conservation—to take a stance and to become co-conservators through practical-theoretical entanglements. The book builds on the premise that the continuous activity of matter requires a context that, as the editors assert, is provided by conservation. In other words, it frames conservation as an intellectual-practical activity and a realm of conventions and normative structures in which the activity of matter unfolds and through which it is critically captured and assessed. This book pursues conservation as an interdisciplinary endeavor, bringing together scholars of material culture, history, philosophy, Indigeneity, material scientists and conservators to take a stake in conservation, “together-apart,” borrowing from Karen Barad, in a mindful way and on a scale that is unprecedented to date.4 Peter Miller and the Bard Graduate Center, a research and teaching institute focusing on https://doi.org/10.1515/zkg-2023-3008 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. decorative arts, design history and material culture and located on the Upper West in New York’s Manhattan (hereon abbreviated to BGC ) have a considerable history of thinking through—and with—conservation questions. Thus the book is a part of a tripartite structure which begun with the BGC ’s research projects Cultures of Conservation and its derivate Conserving Active Matter (both Mellon-funded 2012–2022) accompanied by an extensive program of scholarly exchanges evidenced in the book’s appendix (382–386).5 A five-part symposium Conserving Active Matter followed, together with an eponymously titled exhibition (May 25—July 10, 2022) with its own digital publication.6 There is a perceived need for multidisciplinary thinking in, about and through conservation 7 and the BGC ’s Cultures of Conservation initiative remains one of the few sustained inter- and cross-disciplinary endeavors which brought humanities scholars together with conservators to meet at eye level. Conservators and conservation scientists immersed themselves in the questions posed by scholars of the material culture – oriented human sciences (represented at the BGC by art historians, historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and philosophers) and vice versa. The results of the nuanced program of research and a concluding exhibition, which formed an interwoven and reciprocal whole with the book, have been captured in the audio-visual archive on the BGC ’s website.8 This crossdisciplinary immersion ultimately also gave rise to thinking about the activity of matter and to this volume. The book has been divided into four sections extrapolated from the project’s four working groups: “Philosophy,” “History,” “Indigenous Ontologies,” and “Materials,” as if reflecting the B G C ’s institutional formation. General introductions by Miller and Soon Kai Poh are followed by a wealth of eloquent introductions by representatives of each discipline, setting the stage for each section. Miller’s concern that the book sections might be seen as preserving knowlZeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 86, 2023 edge in a siloed container of “discrete inquiries” (xiv) is simultaneously a call to the reader to actively think with the authors, in order to connect varied threads and to frame implications. The project’s premise of interdisciplinarity, even if variously construed, might be seen as a flaw in such sectioned structure, despite the presence of diagonal comparisons and the possibility of seeing this book, according to Miller, as “a report from a research project” (xv). With regard to the latter, he clearly understates. The “pervasiveness of activity” (19) not only provides the book with its raison d’être but also frames conservation as a backdrop to the persistent activity of matter. In a nutshell, there is no such a thing as inactive matter; the activity of matter is a desideratum and a condition of possibility for conservation to exist. And thus, the first of the book’s two introductions, authored by conservator Soon Kai Poh, offers a vision of conservation as an activity that forms a larger relationship between the sustenance of people and things. Soon Kai Poh’s essay concisely, and convincingly, lays out the conceptual underpinnings of the book’s sections and chapters, curated here into themes such as “material,” “time,” and “people.” His fervent intervention ends with a stirring vision of conservation playing a central role at the nexus of interdisciplinary inquiry. Peter Miller’s introduction strikes an historical tone, exposing, in a long-lens perspective, the author’s long-standing immersion in the history of knowledge, including, but not limited to, discourses considering ruins and ruination. Forging a critical view on the assumed normativity of what he terms Euro-American conservation, he postulates a more global, less Western-centric conservation thinking and one that is “… true to Europe’s own diverse heritage” (17). Braiding in the allusions to chapters that follow, Miller offers a complex, interdisciplinary perspective on active matter and conservation that he neatly concludes with lessons from quantum theory. 427 Introducing “Philosophy,” the first section of sual surface alone (95). A good restoration treatthe book that includes chapters by Sherri Irvin, ment, for example through inpainting, imitates Carolyn Korsmeyer, Yuriko Saito, and Alva Noë, a historical artifact as much as it exemplifies it. philosophers A. W. Eaton and Ivan Gaskell con- The two remaining chapters in this section are ceptually and empirically dissect the concept of by Saito on the aesthetics of repair, and by Noë the activity of matter and its value. They later as a philosophical reflection on conservation. turn to a normative query: When is matter’s While Saito reveals how repairs might explicate activity something in need of resistance and/or material intelligence, wisdom and a deep notion repair, and when should it be facilitated or sim- of care on the part of those who execute them, ply embraced? For those interested in analytical Noë argues that artworks cannot be considered philosophy, this is a highly engaging and dense outside of their world, or of the Deweyan experichapter, and a welcome theoretical intervention, ence. The “working” of the art-work in the world, especially since, as the reading progresses, we and its nexus with a wider world, are as fundasoon find out that the idea of activity of matter, mental to it as is its material component is to or its activation, is treated with various degrees traditional conservation. Just as the California of depth and directness in the distinct sections condor (a species that was at the verge of extincof the book. It might be argued that the chap- tion and that has become Noë’s often refereed-to ter’s claim to being a unique attempt to bring example) might exist only in relation to its enphilosophy and conservation together, reveals vironment, so can art conservation be about “... a surprising oversight of essential discourses in restaging, [and] maintaining the environment, contemporary conservation that have shaped the whole contexture in which the work can afthe discipline for over two decades, and that con- ford what it affords and can score what it scores” tinue to animate the field.9 (127).11 Maintaining the philosophical character Introduced by art historian Ittai Weinryb’s closer to the real-world encounter is the project invitation to try to make sense in the face of of Irvin’s chapter. It discusses the concept of “the endless complexities of cultural circumexemplification to shed light on the bodily and stance, communal intentionality, and ritualistic emotional effect that ruination and decaying consecration” that unfold from an Ur-moment works evoke. Irvin is widely read in conservation (139), the book’s second section, “History,” is the for her contributions to the topics such as the most diverse in terms of operating on a common artist’s sanction and the rules in contemporary ground. To set the tone, Weinryb chooses a sourart.10 In her articulately formulated intervention, dough starter as an example from the human/ Irvin skillfully examines the expressive import non-human frontier. He argues, “Mechanisms of decay through the works of contemporary art- for generation and maintenance are found in ists, including Zoe Leonard, Kara Walker, Marc theories of creation and of the magical efficacy Quinn, and Ai Weiwei. In the following chapter, of manmade objects” (139). The reader is asked Korsmeyer reexamines the concept of exempli- to grasp the relation between humans and their fication by calling upon examples of gradual materials, along with their desire to conserve and artificial decay structures. Providing a rich these materials’ activity. From André Laks’s elaboration of the term “aesthetic property,” she search for the historical precursors of active considers the notions of imitation, allusion and matter in the pre-Socratic philosophies, through exemplification, instructing the reader that aes- Guido Giglioni’s useful history of the activity of thetic apparition can never be detached from matter written with an admirable attentiveness reality, nor can perception be limited to the vi- to nuances and differentiations (e.g. activity as 428 Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 86, 2023 derived from within or activated by external pieces from the past that become “active reforces; 169), we begin to grasp matter as inher- sources for cultural futures” (239), intangible ently vital, plastic, active, retaining information knowledge becomes embodied in tangible things. and keeping the memory of things alive. The sec- The chapter is not only convincing but also emotion continues with conservator Spike Bucklow’s tionally moving in that it does not fall into the call to apply ecological rather than chemistry- lamentation for the lost past (despite the fact that based approaches to the conservation of heritage. it opens with a lamentation song), but rather celeInvestigating root screens in medieval East An- brates the activation of knowledge and its return glian churches, Bucklow weaves their material to community—an act of re-embedding into a and social histories together, arguing that our living context that will spawn the future of a new understanding of historical matter differs mark- generation of this culture’s bearers. Similarly peredly from those people who created and cared for sonal is Jamie Jacobs’s account in the following premodern artefacts. A telling conclusion of the chapter of Haudenosaunee people’s aquatic and History section is offered by Lee Palmer Wan- marine shells beads called wampum. Activated del’s illustrative account of transubstantiation as by an orator and a part of the indigenous people’s an example of the activity of matter, in which she history and culture on the east coast of the curlooks into the “when” of the body and the blood rent US , the wampum require not only scientific of Christ in the matter of wine and bread. conservation and care for their materials but also Cultural anthropologist Aaron Glass inaugu- spiritual care that involves speaking to them with rates the third section of this book, “Indigenous an incense of sacred tobacco by “proper Native Ontologies.” Activity might be concerned with stewards” (263). Kelly McHugh, a steward of materials that are particularly unstable, items collection at the National Museum of the Amethat demand intentional change over time, ani- rican Indian, calls upon the imperative of “relamate objects that possess “power” and works tional conservation care and treatment” (264). To whose activation depends on assuring their preserve the activity of matter, and its cultural embeddedness in networks and relations to signification means to get to the “essence of the knowledge, genealogy and practice. Among the work” and to implement an Indigenous pracquestions asked are: What if the fundamental tice of “active and relational conservation.” The nature of the indigenous objects (or “Subject,” Mi’kmaw idea of Etauptmumk, the “two-eyed seor “Being”) is change and transformation, live- eing,” is powerful in that it allows to combine the ness or even disappearance? (229)—a question Indigenous and the Western forms of knowing, strikingly reminiscent of contemporary art con- which might be beneficially applied to the care servation; and, What if practices of care are made of active heritage. This account intimately links intrinsic to the object? Abstaining from limiting with this section’s final chapter that addresses the agency and intentionality to one individual, process of revitalization of Maori knowledge in Glass invites social groups, communities of prac- light of the conservation of the cultural heritage tice and the material thing itself to be agential of Aotearoa, New Zealand. Rose Evans, a conserand intentional, across space-time. Indigenous vator of Maori descent, looks back at her 30-year stewards and conservators are invited onto the conservation career and through this autobiostage, beginning with Sugpiaq scholar and cu- graphic lens, tells a story of artifacts as forms rator Sven Haakanson, who revives knowledge of living people that carry their mana, their auabout a type of open boat called angyaaq from thority. The chapter is an invaluable contribution the Kodiak region of Alaska, previously forgotten to a cultural history of conservation, in which due to the impact of colonialism. Reawakening the main protagonist participates and mediates Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 86, 2023 429 two world views and glimpses, from a diachronic they argue for an accounting for the changing perspective, at the preservation of tangible and meanings of materials alongside their changing intangible Maori culture. materiality. In the introduction to “Materials,” the book’s What remains after the reading of Conserving final section, conservation scientist Jennifer L. Active Matter is a rich imprint of many philoMass astutely reminds us that even the most sophical, historical, anthropological, and mastable work is constituted by material interact- terial ideas that collage in the reader’s mind to ing with its environment physically and chemi- offer a profound, multilayered view on—and to cally. The restiveness of materials is, in fact, the the same extent instigate new queries about—the daily business of a scientist. Mass observes that, manifold entanglements of conservation and (its) while new demands are being placed on cultural matter. The book succeeds in presenting a broad materials, the museums, whose aspiration is to range of thinking about conservation’s relation become something more than warehouses for to active matter and conversely, active matter’s objects, ought to relax their desire to keep things relationship to the various communities of care intact. The section involves rich insights into and stakeholders—makers and users, curators, conservation science. Chris McGlinchey tells conservators, beholders and museum visitors. the story of installing Tania Bruguera’s Untitled The book can be praised for its attempt to mo(Havana, 2000) at the Museum of Modern Art, bilize thinking about conservation beyond what New York, accompanied by a detailed account of might be perceived as a hermetic environment of the rotting medium of sugar cane pulp, or ba- conservators-specialists, putting it in dialogue gasse, a part of Bruguera’s ambitious, politically with other stakeholders—historians, anthrocharged work. Exploring the activity of metal pologists, philosophers, stewards of Indigenous soaps in paintings and disclosing misconcep- collections and Indigenous caretakers. The autions, Francesca Casadio advances an activist thors of the various introductions and lead texts view of conservation collaborations and argues went to great efforts to ensure that the activity of eloquently for a recognition of intersectionality, matter is not construed as metaphor but that the affirming the discomfort of not knowing. In a book’s individual sections demonstrate a depth highly informative technical excursion into the of thought intrinsic to their individual fields. preservation of holograms, Marc Walton, PengUnlike the rich picture of active matter that xiao Hao, Marc Vermeulen, Florian Willomitzer, might be taken away from this reading, the noand Oliver Cossairt explore spectral imagin- tion of conservation seems, at times, to mean ing and the light-field capture as their potential virtually any effort that makes things survive documentation—an intriguing task given the material oblivion. This status quo does not pair ephemeral character of the image documented up well with the absence of scholarship in the by a similarly ephemeral medium (the chapter is theory and philosophy of conservation from a real must-read for everyone interested in the the past three decades, generated, unexclusively intricacies of keeping and documenting holo- although with a great impetus, in the realm of grams). And lastly, Marco Leona and Henry D. contemporary art (exceptions are both introducSmith II offer an inspiring account of another tions, which briefly allude to this scholarship).12 type of activity by tracing the history and ge- And therefore, the understanding of contemponealogy of colors in Japanese woodblock prints. rary conservation as implied in the interstices of While they observe a “lively pattern of semiotic this book’s sections and chapters seems limited activity” (378) demonstrated in historical inter- to a selection of media and means that ultimately pretations of the changing qualities of the prints, either resonate, or speak to, mostly the material430 Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 86, 2023 based complications. There is no arguing that in their material intelligence, astute assessments, and smart conclusions the chapters of this book are a must read, and specifically for those interested in their respective subject matter. I would however argue that the book’s one shortcoming lies in its representation of contemporary conservation as reduced here mostly to a material and object-based science placed at the end of this notable anthology, as if in agreement with its “Western modus operandi,” where it can (too easily) be opposed by Indigenous care systems exemplified in the book’s preceding section. In that respect, the book does not give due respect to the fact that many of the ideas presented throughout its pages—of communities and networks of care, living knowledge, bodily and oral ways of transmission, environmental thinking, creative migrations/emulations, activation from ruin and reconstruction from loss—have been an intrinsic part of the scholarship of contemporary conservation. This criticism aside, it is important to recognize this book’s illustrious achievement: The coming together of the otherwise distinct fields of intellectual and empirical practice, the true effects of which might reveal themselves, as Miller predicts, only in the future (xvi). This, too, University of the Arts and Honorary Fellow at the University College London. Her research, publications and teaching focus on the art and cultural developments since the 1960s and 70s and on aspects of time, change, materiality and archive in relation to how we conceive of artworks in terms of objects that endure. Amongst her books is Paik’s Virtual Archive: Time, Change and Materiality in Media Art (University of California Press, 2017). | email: hanna.hoelling@ hkb.bfh.ch 1 David Lowenthal, Conservation Past and Present, Sylvester Baxter Lecture, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, November 17, 2014, 9. URL : https:// issuu.com/criticalconservation-harvardgsd/docs/cc_ lowenthal_transcript (last accessed March 17, 2023). 2 Ibid., 11. 3 Cultural Histories of the Material World has published this author’s recent anthology. Hanna B. Hölling (ed.), Object—Event—Performance: Art, Materiality and Continuity since the 1960s (New York 2022). An earlier book occurred in conclusion of her inaugural professorship in the project Cultures of Conservation. Eadem, Revisions—Zen for Film (exh. cat. New York, Bard Graduate Center Gallery), New York 2015. 4 Borrowed from Karen Barad, the notion of “togetherapart” accounts for entanglements of things that do not erase differences, “… entanglings entail differentiatings, differentiatings entail entanglings. One move—cutting together apart.” Karen Barad, Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart, in: Parallax 20, 2014, no. 3, 176, DOI : 10.1080/13534645.2014.927623. I use the “together-apart” as to emphasize a concomitant separation of the disciplines represented in the book. 5 In 2012, the BGC received its first substantial funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (now known as the Mellon Foundation) for the Cultures of Conservation research/curricular initiative which would be further supported by the Foundation over a period of ten years and include Conserving Active Matter. In his Preface (xii), Miller credits the Humboldt’s scholar of art history Horst Bredekamp and the research cluster Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 86, 2023 is a form of caring, and conserving through conveying, a form of non-egoistic, anti-individualistic afterlife, perhaps even akin in some respect to the sense envisioned by Lowenthal. I agree with Soon Kai Poh’s assertion, that “… by conserving, we reassure ourselves of our own activity in this world” (6). Along these lines, but changing the perspective, I would add that we also reassure ourselves of the activity of conservation, that is, the persistence of the cultural shifts and changes in doing and thinking conservation. Stepping aside from the view of conservation as merely a context for the activity of matter, what if it is not only the object and matter that change, but also conservation itself? HANNA B. HÖLLING is Research Professor at Bern 431 Image. Knowledge. Gestaltung for implicating the perspective of art, architecture and design on active matter, as well as the MIT Active Matter Summit which presented perspectives by materials scientists. “Cultures of Conservation,” Bard Graduate Center’s website, URL : https://www.bgc.bard.edu /researchforum /projects / 3 /cultures-of-conservation (last accessed April 16, 2023). For Conserving Active Matter, see the section “About the Second Phase (2017–22)” on the Cultures of Conservation website. 6 “Conserving Active Matter: Online Exhibition,” Bard Graduate Center website, URL : https://www.bgc.bard. edu/exhibitions/exhibitions/130/conserving-activematter (last accessed April 16, 2023). 7 This need is manifested in large and mid-scale interdisciplinary research projects such as the Marie Curie-Skłodowska-funded New Approaches in the Conservation of Contemporary Art, the University of Vienna’s Global Conservation project supported by the European Research Council and the projects funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation at the Bern Academy of the Arts, Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge and Activating Fluxus, to name but a few. 8 For a compilation of recordings from the BGC ’s Conserving Active Matter initiative, see URL : https:// www.youtube.com/@bardgradcenter/videos. 432 9 In addition to a significant contribution by Salvador Muñoz Viñas that gets mentioned by the authors, the incorporation of philosophy into the conservation critical considerations has a long tradition in writings authored, among others, and across generations and “genres,” by Pip Laurenson, Glenn Wharton, Hiltrud Schintzel, Iwona Szmelter, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Frank Matero, Tina Fiske, Rebecca Gordon, Hélia Marçal, Brian Castriota, and Anna Schäffler, to name but a few. Philosophers, too, have picked up the topic of conservation, to name only the fine writing of Jean Pierre Commetti, Renée van de Vall or Bruno Latour. Moreover, the conservation scholarship of the recent past—too vast to be refereed to here fully—does not shy away from philosophical queries. Rather, it draws from analytic philosophy, critical theory, philosophical aestheticist and, more recently, feminist new materialisms and agential realisms. 10 Sherri Irvin, Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art, Oxford 2022. 11 See also Alva Noë, Conserving Ourselves/Creating Ourselves, in: The Expanded Field of Conservation, ed. by Caroline Fowler and Alexander Nagel, New Heaven and London 2023, 84–91. 12 Note also the BGC ’s other publications on this topic, cf. footnote 3. Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 86, 2023