The first online edition of AIC News is now available! On May 6th, an email announcement was sent out to all members with the link to the AIC News site.
The May 2013 issue features the article “ASG, Past, Present and Future: Architectural Specialty Group at 25,” as well as annual meeting announcements, excellent Health & Safety and Sustainable Conservation Practice articles, and an interesting new cleaning method in the New Materials & Research column. FAIC thanks all the AIC-CERT volunteers and announces new grant and scholarship recipients in the FAIC News column. As always, Specialty Group and Network columns provide timely updates for their members.
Please remember to check the Calendar Listings for interesting conferences and workshops to attend, and for possible venues to present your next paper. This section will be updated continually as new events are announced, so check back often.
I hope you enjoy this new feature of AIC membership!
To access the AIC News, log into the AIC website and navigate to www.conservation-us.org/aicnews. The link is under the Current Issue heading, as well as in the email members received on May 6th.
Month: May 2013
What if later on someone took the piece to be restored?
The May 14, 2013 Arts section of The New York Times features an article (“An Artwork Turns to Mush, All According to Plan”, by William Grimes) about the work of the artist James Grashow and a documentary that Olympia Stone, daughter of the art dealer Allan Stone, filmed about it. When Grashow’s papier mache sculptures were ruined after being left out on Allan Stone’s lawn for six months, he decided to accept the ephemeral nature of his materials and make work that would “embrace its own destruction”. Thus he made “Corrugated Fountain”, a multi-figure cardboard sculpture that in 2012 was displayed out of doors for six weeks at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, CT) and then taken to a dumpster and disposed of. What would have been the ethical course of action if someone had taken the remains and brought them to a conservator for treatment?
Has a sculpture designed for a specific location been damaged when it is removed from its site?
According to The New York Times (“ Inside Art: Venice Plans to Evict ‘Boy With Frog’”, by Carol Vogel, May 3, 2013), Charles Ray’s sculpture, “Boy with Frog” which was commissioned four years ago by Francois Pinault for the tip of the Punto della Dogana in Venice is to be removed and replaced by a reproduction of a 19th century lamppost. The artist knew from the start that the permit for his sculpture had to be renewed several times a year and Pinault has offered to install the sculpture in the Palazzo Grassi where he has a museum, but Ray insists that the sculpture belongs in the location for which it was designed. Petitions have been circulated and criticisms have been flung. This incident raises the large question of whether a site specific sculpture has been damaged when it has been removed from its site.
The seductiveness of art
The May 12, 2013 “Lives” page of The New York Times Magazine features “Object Love”, an essay by Paul Gordon, a technician for a Los Angeles-based sculpture conservator which expresses so well the seductive qualities of art—- those qualities which led so many of us to choose conservation as a profession as it allowed us to hold and touch works of art. One wonders how many young people reading Gordon’s phrases like “there’s real magic”; “as I moved to the arch of her back, my stroke turned to a caress”; “only a fool could fail to feel the desire, the spirit inside such beauty”; and “I have witnessed the miracles. I have seen them happen under my own hand” will be drawn to conservation.
The 2013 AIC Great Debate
At the 2012 AIC Annual Meeting we hosted the first ever AIC Great Debate. By all accounts, it was a rousing success. While last year’s debate was good, this year we’re hoping to make it better.
The 2013 Great Debate will take place on Saturday, June 1 from 4:00 to 5:00 pm as the final session in the General Session. Now not only will everyone have the opportunity to attend, but you’ll have a good reason to stay to the very end of the Annual Meeting! And, as the ultimate way to promote dialogue, camaraderie, and, well, fun, we will have a cash bar in the room. Finally, I’m working on walk up music for the teams: hint all of the musicians were born in Indiana.
But, before I list this year’s debate topics and participants, I want to make a very important disclaimer: I created the AIC Great Debate as an intellectual exercise to demonstrate that conservators are clever enough to see a tough topic from both sides and discuss it openly.
With this in mind, in many cases I have personally invited participants to debate from a position that is contrary to their personal beliefs. This not only adds a fun twist it proves the point that the Debate is not meant to provide a forum so we can prove one side is right, but rather to engage in a public dialogue to surface all of this issues around difficult topics. And though I’m listing participant’s institutional affiliations (so you’ll get a chance to know them better), in no way am I suggesting that the participants are representing an institutional position in the Debate.
TOPIC 1:
The greatest act of preservation for inherently fragile or fugitive cultural property is exhibition, even if the duration goes far beyond what is currently recommended.
Affirmative Team
- Rosa Lowinger (Rosa Lowinger & Associates)
- Patty Miller (2 Arts Conservation)
- Jodie Utter (Amon Carter Museum of American Art)
Negative Team
- John Campbell (Campbell Contemporary Sculpture Conservation)
- Fletcher Durant (New York Public Library)
- Jessica Ford (University of Delaware Art Conservation Graduate School)
TOPIC 2:
While volunteers used on preservation projects often allow us to accomplish more work, they undermine our capacity to regularly employ conservation and collections care professionals.
Affirmative Team
- Rose Cull (Kress Fellow in Sculpture Conservation at Tate)
- Kelly Keegan (Art Institute of Chicago)
- Dawn Walus (Boston Athenaeum)
Negative Team
- Will Hoffman (Mariners Museum)
- Michele Marincola (Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts/Metropolitan Museum)
- Beverly Perkins (Buffalo Bill Center of the West)
Like last year, I’d like to ask you for help to make the AIC Great Debate successful. We need you! We need you in the audience to be lively, interested, engaged, and fun. And I don’t mean just to cheer on your favorite conservator or team; we need you to participate in the Great Debate at AIC!
There will be a significant amount of time in which the audience will get to ask each team questions to which they have to respond.
And, finally, we need you to decide who wins the debate. The winning team for each topic will be the one who sways the most opinions in the audience.
If you’re interested in reading about how the AIC Great Debate went last year, there are reviews on this blog of each debate topic.
2012 TOPIC #1: Publishing accurate and complete “how-to guides” for conservation and restoration treatments online is the best way for us to care for cultural heritage in the 21st century. Read the review here.
2012 TOPIC #2: Having conservators perform treatments in the gallery is the most successful way to generate funding for museums and raise awareness about the profession. Read the review here.
Rembrandt authentication has long been a problem
The Spring 2013 issue of Chemical Heritage contains a fascinating article (“Quest for Permanence”, by Augustin Cerveaux and Even Hepler-Smith) about Maximillian Toch (1854- 1946), industrial chemist and pioneer in the use of science– particularly x-radiography– in the authentication of art. In 1923, Toch who later warned of the deterioration of “Cleopatra’s Needle” following its installation in Central Park (New York City), was brought in by art historian John van Dyke as a scientific consultant in a dispute to establish authorship of the then fifteen “Rembrandt” paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection. This was forty-five years before the Rembrandt Research Project attempted to do the same thing for Rembrandt’s corpus.