Conserving contemporary art? You now have until the 15th of July … to save the Now!
Contemporary Art delivers contemporary problems to the conservation community…and may mean that we deconstruct and re-invent ‘standard’ conservation thinking and practice.
Saving the Now: Crossing Boundaries to Conserve Contemporary Works, IIC’s next Congress, to be held from the 12th to the 16th September 2016, links so very well with its setting, Los Angeles, in allowing things to be looked at in very different and new ways.
This can be a minefield – or a source of new and creative approaches to heritage conservation. As we move ahead with new artists, new materials, new concepts of what creativity is, we must adapt what conservation involves and tries to achieve. We may borrow from other areas of skill and expertise in doing this. We may change our concepts of what conservation is there to do in the first place …
What are your thoughts, your experiences, your predictions? Let’s start you off here:
• How do you work without the benefit or comfort of that well-established hierarchy of values available to colleagues working on more traditional heritage objects?
• Are you working with a range of different and varied conservation philosophies and approaches – from various countries and cultures, from differing disciplines and markets – to develop new methods for conserving contemporary works?
• What will we lose if your major guiding principle is the artist’s intent? If it is known at all, that is …
• Can
the commercial art market help influence Institutional thinking on conservation?
• How is public art influencing conservation practice and theory?
• Are the ethics and values used in conserving the built heritage applicable to the conservation of moveable heritage ¬– and vice versa?
• Can approaches used for conserving ethnographic collections be applied to contemporary art practice?
• Can non-materialistic philosophies help to move the field forward in broader terms?
Submit your proposal for a paper or a poster now! It’s easy: go to https://www.iiconservation.org/congress Share your expertise and learn first-hand what your colleagues around the world are doing!
A call for Student posters will be made later in the year.
Please contact us at iic@iiconservation.org if you have any questions or wish to receive further information on the Congress