Art, Modern--Conservation and restoration
Archival materials--Conservation and restoration
Art--21e siècle--Conservation et restauration
Art, Modern--21st century--Conservation and restoration
Documents d'archives--Conservation et restauration
This volume brings together the findings from a five-year research project that seeks to reimagine the relationship between conservation knowledge and the humanistic study of the material world. The project, "Cultures of Conservation," was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and included events, seminars, and an artist-in-residence. The effort to conserve things amid change is part of the human struggle with the nature of matter. For as long as people have made and kept things, they have cared for and repaired them. Today's conservator uses a variety of tools and categories developed over the last 150 years to do this work. In the next decades, new kinds of materials and a new scale of change will pose unprecedented challenges. As conservators turn to an ever-expanding set of constituencies, collaborators, and knowledge claims to do this work, how might they reconsider their role in conserving such "active matter" and in conversations about environmental and cultural sustainability? Conserving Active Matter explores the activity of matter through objects that span five continents and range in time from the Paleolithic to the present. From the things that clothe us to those that shelter us; from things that reflect our interest in the past to those that enable its performance in the present; and from sacred objects to the profane, Conserving Active Matter envisions the work of conservation as essential for the lives of the things that sustain us.
Preface. Report on a research project -- Introduction. Conserving active matter and the conservator / Soon Kai Poh -- Introduction. Conserving active matter and the historian / Peter N. Miller -- 1. Philosophy. One. Introduction. Active matter : some initial philosophical considerations / Ivan Gaskell and A. W. Eaton. Two. The expressive import of degradation and decay in contemporary art / Sherri Irvin. Three. The look of age : appearance and reality / Carolyn Korsmeyer. Four. The aesthetics of repair / Yuriko Saito. Five. Death and entanglement : some thoughts about life, love, and the aims of art conservation / Alva Noë -- 2. History. Six. Introduction. Conserving active matter and the art historian's craft / Ittai Weinryb. Seven. Active matter in Presocratic thought? / André Laks. Eight. Active matter : a philosophical aberration or a very old belief? / Guido Giglioni. Nine. Oak and oil, chalk and flint : rood screens and churches / Spike Bucklow. Ten. Bread and wine, body and blood / Lee Palmer Wandel -- 3. Indigenous ontologies. Eleven. Introduction. For the lives of things : indigenous ontologies of active matter / Aaron Glass. Twelve. Living knowledge in cultural collections / Sven Haakanson. Thirteen. The orator's dilemma : wampum as material, media, medicine, and memory / Jamie Jacobs. Fourteen. Always becoming better stewards : caring for collections at the National Museum of the American Indian / Kelly McHugh. Fifteen. Hoki Mauri : bring back the life essence / Rose Evans -- 4. Materials. Sixteen. Introduction. Developing informed and sustainable responses to the alteration of cultural artifacts : materials engineering meets material culture / Jennifer L. Mass. Seventeen. Contextualizing the installation of Tania Bruguera's Untitled (Havana 2000) / Chris McGlinchey. Eighteen. Moving beyond the binaries : exploring the active matter of metal soaps in paint / Francesca Casadio. Nineteen. Characterizing the immaterial : noninvasive imaging and analysis of Stephen Benton's Engine no. 9 / Marc Walton, Pengxiao Hao, Marc Vermeulen, Florian Willomitzer, and Oliver Cossairt. Twenty. Making Meiji red : semiotic activity in the colors of Japanese woodblock prints, 1864-1900 / Marco Leona and Henry D. Smith II -- Appendix. Events of the research project Conserving Active Matter.