Conservators to the rescue – two losses and one find

We conservators generally achieve our five minutes of fame when one of three events happen – something priceless gets broken (can we fix it?), something valuable is found and needs conservation, and an artwork gets re-attributed whilst undergoing conservation (being no longer a Rembrandt, Monet etc or as a newly ‘found’ Rembrandt, Monet etc etc).

Well, my colleagues at the Met in New York have been in the media this week due to damage to Picasso’s The Actor. Apparently a visitor attending a class ‘lost her balance’ and ‘fell’ into the painting, tearing the canvas in (luckily) a background area in the lower right hand corner. The Museum’s painting conservators have come to the rescue and expect the repair can be achieved ‘unobtrusively’, which in technical parlance means you will have to look very closely to see any evidence of it.

It reminded me of the conservation in 2006 of the three Qing vases at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, UK. Amongst the Museum’s best known artefacts, they were comprehensively smashed also by a visitor (see below photo). One Nick Flynn apparently tripped on his shoelaces and fell down a staircase before crashing into the vases on a window sill (what IS WRONG with these people??). Rather bizarrely the Fitzwilliam’s response was that they were lucky that at least 9 million people had walked past them before they were broken! However once again conservators to the rescue, in this instance ceramics conservator Penny Bendall, who by all accounts did a fabulous job.

But to happier times, and hot off the presses (media release 5th Feb 2009) is news that conservators are going to work out how to thaw and preserve crates of Scotch whisky, which have been found in the ice under Shackleton’s Hut in Antarctica. This is part of a long term project conserving the huts and contents left behind by the early explorers, for which we have acted as technical advisers. We have known for a few months that the whisky was there, but it was only in the last couple of weeks that the team has been able to get access to the area and discover there are no less than five unopened crates, three of whisky and two of brandy (see photo below). Alcohol freezes at much lower temperatures than water so the sound of liquid sloshing around in these frozen crates is exciting, not to mention the strong aroma in the air during excavation suggesting that at least one bottle has broken. Quite what happens next is being debated, but it will be conservators that work out how to safely thaw them and possibly extract some of the whisky for sampling. But that is where the fun starts as the original whisky manufacturers , Whyte and Mackay , are truly excited about it , describing it as a gift from the heavens for whisky lovers. If the contents can be confirmed, safely extracted and analysed, the original blend may be able to be replicated. Given the original recipe no longer exists this may open a door into history being able to analyse the blend. For more on this, visit this blog.

All in a day’s work for conservators, we could justifiably say

International Museum exhibition standards – what exactly are they?

I am always intrigued by the statement that a museum is building new exhibition space to ‘international standards’. For instance the UK National Maritime Museum (headed by former Powerhouse Museum director Kevin Fewster, with his deputy director at the Powerhouse, Kevin Sumption now head of exhibitions) is building a new wing which will include an 'international standard special exhibitions gallery'. Likewise the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery is creating a major exhibition gallery for Temporary exhibitions, “providing approx. 1000m2 of exhibition space to international museum standards”.

Some years ago we were the conservation consultants for the revamp of the Ipswich Regional Art Gallery in Queensland, which included providing for ‘AAA’ exhibition space. We were never quite sure what this meant, but provided specifications for the environmental controls that ensured they could operate to the tight parameters of international loan conditions, and had a series of alarm and back up alarm systems which identified when conditions strayed from these.
Whilst these environmental controls were not at the time identified with alphabetical ratings, the work of David Grattan and Stefan Michalski at the Canadian Conservation Institute has brought attention to the 5 classes of controls (AA, A, B,C and D) that are delineated in the ‘Museums, Archives and Libraries” chapter in the bible on these issues , the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air Conditioning Engineers Inc ( ASHRAE) Handbook. Thus ‘AA” exhibition space is required to have short term fluctuations of no more than +/- 5% RH off a set point of 50% and +/- 2C off a set point of between 15 and 25C. No seasonal fluctuations to RH are allowed, but up or down 5C seasonal temperature changes are allowed.

So far so good, but what I wondered are the broader non environmental international standards. I turned first to the Museums Australia National Standards for Australian Museums and Galleries. This worthy document is about helping museums get their act together on a whole range of issues, from staffing to storage, but speaks only in generalities about having stable and secure exhibition areas.

So I asked the question of some of my colleagues in the museum/gallery sector. They responded that the details of required standards are locked up in facility reports and loan agreements, and inevitably vary according to the value and fragility of the loans. At the top end, these are goverened by the Federal Government’s indemnity guidelines for high value and high risk exhibitions, covering such things as security, packing, and condition reporting. At a broader level, exhibition areas require appropriate floor loadings, ceiling loadings, fire suppression systems and flexible space to be deemed of ‘ international’ standard.

But at the end of the day, interestingly, there is no document to which one can point where the standard required for an ‘international exhibition space’ is identified.

Curatorship

I come (just) from the era when curators were top of the pile in the museum hierarchy. And I remember well when Elizabeth Esteve Coll, as director of the V&A Museum, London in the early 1990s took a broom to that hierarchy and restructured the staff, demoting the all powerful ‘keepers’, as head curators were called at the V&A. She was roundly condemned and ultimately hounded out of office, but she had started an inexorable process.

Bear in mind these were the days when there were no visitor services staff, probably no marketing staff or education staff, and certainly no Heads of IT, but today’s museum/gallery curator does not carry anything like the clout he or she would have done 20 years ago. Whilst there remain highly erudite occupants of curatorial roles in collecting institutions throughout the country, there is a move to generalist curators as against the specialist, with the result that technical in-depth subject knowledge is now more likely to be found at a university than at a museum.

So what is the role of the modern curator? I fell upon a recent article in the English National Trust’s ABC Bulletin entitled "The Curator: No-sayer, custodian, interpreter, impresario or host?" particularly as it involved a conversation with the Chairman of the Trust, Simon Jenkins. Jenkins is a most interesting bloke , a journalist and former editor of The Times and author of the popular 1000 Best Churches and 1000 Best Country Houses. He had been somewhat critical of the Trust before becoming Chairman, including describing their curators as "no-sayers, keepers of screens, blinds and padlocks".

But his comments in this article on the role of curators is positively inspiring. I quote: “The Latin root of curator is intriguing, a mix of care, anxiety, management and love. The curator liberates the sprit of a property and is the person most likely to understand its genius. The curator by virtue of background and education brings to a property an educated eye. In the case of fine houses, it must be hard for those without that eye fully to read their genius loci. Only the curator can release their stories. It takes confidence to grasp a room and so present it as to make it a moving experience for a visitor to walk through. Impresario is the right word, implying the skills of stagecraft.”

To my mind this approach applies equally to curators in museum and galleries as historic house museums. Curators are the conduit to the knowledge about the collections for which they care, and it is their responsibility to open up and reveal the stories that these collections tell. Freed of most of the management responsibilities that curators had twenty years ago, they must now be all about maximising access to their collections whether through exhibitions or on-line, and telling their stories.

Museum Directors – changing of the guard

No sooner have I cited the eminent scholar, Christopher Menz, Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia as an example of a scholar director, than he chooses not to renew his contract after 5 years at the helm. The reason Menz gives is that state funding is inadequate to run the Gallery at a professional level. John Mcdonald (the art journalist and formerly senior curator at the NGA) has picked this up and delivered a broadside at the general paucity of gallery funding in SMH today.

Whilst I am sure John has a good point, I am not buying into that discussion today. Of more interest are a couple of things:
1) The AGSA Chairman, Michael Abbott was clearly put out that Menz did not consult him before resigning and, reading between the lines, is not close to Menz. That may partly be because Menz directly criticizes the Premier, Mike Rann, for not recognising the need for more ongoing funding, and Abbott in his role as a QC is currently representing Rann in a defamation action against Channel 7. That is always going to be a problem for a state/national gallery if the director and chair are not in alignment. The excellent recently published book on the history of the National Gallery, London by Charles Saumarez Smith is a fascinating read about this very issue of director/trustee tension, particularly pertinent as Saumarez Smith resigned as director in 2008 as a result of clashes with his Trustees.
An example of where it works well is the Edmund Capon (director) and David Gonski (Chair) relationship at AGNSW.

2) In regards to his successor, there seems to be a current trend to recruit museum directors in our region from the UK. Just before Christmas Te Papa announced that their new director (after the tragic death last year of Seddon Bennington whilst hiking) is to be Michael Houlihan, Director General , National Museum of Wales. Almost at the same time the WA Museum announced that their new director is to be Alec Coles, Director of Tyne and Wear Museums in the UK. And I understand that the replacement for Craddock Morton at the National Museum is unlikely to be appointed until mid year and is likely to be from overseas.

Let me hasten to add I see nothing wrong with this. Some of our great directors have been from the same source, notably Edmund Capon (AGNSW) and Patrick Greene (Museum Victoria), and it is unlikely the Powerhouse Museum would ever have been built with out the forcefulness and personality of Lindsay Sharp ( who went onto the Royal Ontario Museum and the UK Science Museum).

Vale Thomas Hoving and the role of museum director

I see Thomas Hoving the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from 1967 to 1977 has died (SMH 29th December 2009). I still consider his book about those years at the Met (“Making the Mummies Dance”) to be the best yarn about life at the top of a great museum, particularly as it was written at a time when the Met was flush with money for acquisitions and also coining the term blockbuster exhibitions. It reads like a good detective novel as Hoving jets around Europe tracking down acquisitions and exhibitions with all the related intrigue.

Interestingly he indulged in a fair bit of deacquisitioning (see my previous blogs on this here and here) to fund these, no doubt in the days before the Met had a policy on such being largely at his personal whim. As the SMH Obituary points out he almost lost his job in the process, selling off important modern paintings to fund the purchase of a Velazquez painting.

It’s got me thinking about the role of directors of museums – should they be showmen or scholars? Hoving was a showman, as was largely his recently retired successor Philippe de Montebello. However his successor is an English scholar and sculpture specialist Thomas Campbell. Michael Brand, the Australian director of the Getty is in the same mould of scholar, now overseeing a 25% reduction in the Getty’s operations - not of his own making I hasten to add. Across the Atlantic, the new director of the National Gallery, Nicholas Penny is a scholar, who succeeded a more publicity conscious (if not actual showman) director Charles Saumarez Smith.

In Australia we see a slightly different type of director in the form of bureaucrat – for instance Dawn Casey at the Powerhouse Museum, Frank Howarth at the Australian Museum and Craddock Morton at the National Museum – all public servants in government departments in former lives. But we also have the showman in the form of the odd sock wearing Edmund Capon at the AGNSW (though he is an Asian scholar of some note), and the scholars with Christopher Menz at the Art Gallery of SA, and Stefano Carboni at the Art Gallery of WA.

Carboni incidentally just to take us back to where we started, came from the Met where he was curator of Islamic Art.

Showman or scholar (or bureaucrat)? Not sure what makes a great director, but probably a mix of all three. What is clear is that great museum/gallery directors are very few and far between.

Visitor trends that disagree

I have blogged before about the lipstick phenomena and its impact on museums, and also the effect that the GFC and the resulting increase in domestic holidays have had on visitors. Now comes conflicting information from a number of sources on the issue.

AFP reports on 15th December 09 that Madrid’s Prado Museum reported near record numbers for 2009, and the Art Newspaper on 9th December 2009 also reports in its annual survey of major collecting institutions from around the world that two thirds saw an increase in visitors.

However The US Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a downturn in visitor numbers (11th December 09) based on a recent National Endowment for the Arts survey on American art habits. The survey reveals that more and more Americans have stopped going to museums, though before we slit our wrists, let it be clear that we are in the same company as music concerts, opera, ballet and even movies.

To be fair the information is not in conflict. We know there is a short term rise in museum going, but the overall trend is unfortunately negative. And why? The article is well worth reading not just for itself, but also for the ensuing blog commentary. In summary the reasons given are:
· The economy
· Lack of relevant teaching and arts education at primary and secondary level
· Losing our sense of the public sphere – we would rather look at things in the privacy of our own home
· ‘Disneyfication’ of museums (this was in a blog comment) , i.e. too many bells and whistles and not enough real things
· Disallowance of photography in museums (also in a blog comment) thus stopping any ‘fun’. Interestingly the blogger gets the need to limit photography for conservation reasons, but believes ( probably with some justification) that the ban is more about a matter of control over images for reproduction purposes
· And finally Adoration of the internet , i.e. we can get it all on-line, including close ups of all those great paintings – “Who needs to go to the Frick to see Rembrandt’s self portrait when the picture can be had for two easy clicks on the keyboard?”

The last point is interesting. We have consistently said , based on evidence out of French research (though I could not put my hands on it) that the more people look at art museum images on the net the more they want to see the real, but this is now suggesting that is not the case.

Sobering stuff, but at least we now have the ‘metrics’ identifying the problem, so we can plan what to do about it.

Tracking visitor numbers – metrics rule

‘Metrics’ seems to be the new buzz word around town. Metrics are everywhere. It is increasingly with them that we decide what to read, what stocks to buy, which poor people to feed, which athletes to recruit, which films and restaurants to try. The once-mysterious formation of tastes is becoming a quantitative science. Check out a rather cynical article about their pervasiveness in the New York Times November 20th 2009 edition.

Like almost everything, such matters seep through eventually to the museum and galleries sector. By the way, I used to refer to this as the ALM sector - for Libraries, Archives and Museums with museums of course covering art museums otherwise known as galleries. But the acronym increasingly in vogue seems to be GLAM - for Galleries, Museums, Archives and Museums. I like it and will run with that form from now on.

So where is the GLAM sector on metrics? The answer is two part, as the level of metrics varies enormously between the real and the virtual. Let me tackle each in turn.

On the real, namely how many visitors come through the physical doors, where they go and what they do once inside the institution, there is an embarrassing lack of knowledge. Almost all museums have some form of counting system, either through ticketing, or in the case of free entry museums, through counting systems. However even these are invariably inaccurate. There are many stories of attendants with hand clickers clicking away at random to ensure the visitor quota is achieved. Automatic counting systems give better accuracy, but still have difficulty distinguishing between visitors and staff ( and indeed inanimate objects like strollers or boxes). And once inside the institution there is no tracking of visitor paths, establishment of time spent within the institution or dwell times in front of exhibits quantified. One friend of mine admits that the closest he gets to this is sending staff out with a felt pen and a floor lay-out of the galleries, and tracking the route visitors take by hand. When they dwell in front of a particular exhibit, the felt pen is left on the paper in that spot, leading to a bigger splodge of ink. See my blog from June 2009 on the issue.

On the virtual, things are a little more advanced. We all know the power of Google Analytics, which is giving considerable granularity to web site metrics. But the Powerhouse Museum is now doing great work and mining more deeply into what their visitors do on the Museum’s web site. Read Seb Chan’s most interesting latest thoughts on the matter. Seb reports particularly on the issue of repeat visitations to web sites and understanding who is coming back, how often and why.

All is not lost on the real side of things however. We are looking at a mobile phone technology which allows tracking of visitors (all within privacy requirements) , with the added benefit it can reveal how long each visitor stays in the museum, where they dwell, whether they have been before, and, in the case of international visitors, which country they come from. We need to catch up fast to the same level of understanding that Google Analytics can provide for those web site visitors, and in due course work out the crossover.

Conservation of contemporary art – any clues?

Nothing to my mind as a conservator seems more problematic at present than the conservation of contemporary materials. I think of deteriorating David Hockney paintings covered in yellowing news print or desiccated rubber elements on artifacts, slowly shrivelling up and becoming embrittled. I was at the Australian National Maritime Museum a month ago, and they told me that their entire collection of rubberized bathing caps are melting before their eyes. Despite their being stored in optimum conditions, they are in significantly worse condition than they were 5 years ago to the extent that they will shortly be undisplayable.

The conservation profession has gamefully tried to tackle these issues, with research reported through a number of conferences and publications, particularly over the last ten years. Whilst these have tended to concentrate on the high value area of contemporary art (because this is where the potential diminution in value is greatest), there has also been extensive work undertaken in modern materials ranging from the many types of plastics to soap and chocolates. For a quick resume of what is currently going on, there are a couple of good sites to look at, namely the ICOM-CC Modern Materials and Contemporary Art Working Group and INCCA, the International Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art.

So I turned to the latest edition (Fall 2009) of the attractively revamped Getty Conservation Institute Newsletter entitled Conservation Perspectives – Modern and Contemporary Art with heightened anticipation that there might actually be some treatment solutions being discussed. Well there is lots of interesting chat of high calibre as one expects from the GCI, and some useful hints on cleaning acrylic paintings from Australian trained conservators Alan Phenix and Bronwyn Ormsby now respectively at GCI and the Tate. But the material problems remain with, by way of example, some horrendous photos of a 1926 artwork made of cellulose nitrate on copper with iron demonstrating extreme warping, cracking, discolouration and corrosion (who in their right mind chooses such combinations of materials anyway??!).

Tom Learner’s lead article does however contain some interesting food for thought, which I paraphrase:
· Today’s society requires us to deny any signs of ageing, putting considerable pressure on conservators to consider intervention in outwardly pristine contemporary works earlier than would traditionally happen.
· Perhaps contemporary art loses so much relevance within ten years of creation that it should be actively displayed and experienced, and allowed to deteriorate with a detailed record of its existence of its early life kept.
· Conservators are often required to carry out treatment on contemporary artworks without the desired level of understanding of the materials or knowledge of the long term consequences of the treatment. In such cases conservators are increasingly reluctant to execute treatments leading in turn to fewer case studies and less knowledge.
· The role of living artists in dictating conservation treatments is fraught with issues: their views need to be taken into account but we need to recognize that artist’s attitudes change throughout their lifetime, and materials available to them also change.

So I am not sure I am much further on, beyond being slightly better informed about the issues.

Anish Kapoor

I have been (sort of) aware of the work of the UK sculptor Anish Kapoor through the copper coloured polished curved mirror in the Art Gallery of NSW permanent collection, but his work was highlighted to me by a paper given at the Sculpture by the Sea symposium held at the Art Gallery on 2nd November. At it Noel Lane talked about the extraordinary Gibbs Farm Sculpture Park in Kaipara Harbour, New Zealand of which he is the director. It’s difficult to explain the sculpture park and it has no website so you need to google Gibbs Farm Sculpture Park to get a feel for it. But it is the brainchild of one of New Zealand’s wealthiest men and long time patron of the arts, Alan Gibbs.

I met Alan in unusual circumstances when he visited Shackleton’s Hut in Antarctica in 2004, where I was undertaking a conservation survey of the artefacts. Alan distinguished himself by finding and then eating a small piece of dried parsnip that had fallen out of a corroded food can and blown across the site to the edge of a melt pool and become rehydrated. The parsnip was a revolting grey colour and had, if I remember rightly, a small piece of penguin guano that needed removal before Alan gave it the taste test. I was convinced he was going to die on the spot, but he lived to tell the tale.

Anyway back to his Farm, and on it he has commissioned Anish Kapoor to design a quite amazing, 84m-long, twisted, red cone. It cuts through a ridge like some celestial megaphone, its sheer size being just astounding. Fabricated from wires and red fabric it sways in the wind. Since then, being now somewhat fascinated by Kapoor’s work I have realised that the enormous stainless steel form outside the Chicago Art Institute is also by him.

So being in London last week, I was delighted to find a temporary exhibition of his work at the Royal Academy (and incidentally everyone talking about it and him). It certainly is quite an exhibition. Apart from more mirrored stainless steel forms and some new experiments in piles of concrete excreted from a computer- controlled three dimensional printer, the shows stars are both made from red pigmented wax. The first involves a cannon which fires 20 pound blocks of wax into a wall in an adjoining room every 20 minutes, which will result by the end of the exhibition in over 30 tonnes of wax accumulating and progressively melting out through the doorway. The second is even more extraordinary taking over 5 whole galleries. It involves a vast chunk of wax weighing over 30 tonnes and measuring 8 metres long moving very slowly along a track and being forced to squeeze through four adjoining doorways between the galleries, being sculpted by the doorways as it does so.

If you are in London before Christmas do make the time to see the exhibition.

The efficiency dividend – or not

Working as we do in the private sector, there are various public sector anomalies that we just don’t get. One of these is the so called ‘Efficiency dividend’ that year in year out federal collecting institutions, e.g. the National Gallery, the Australian War Memorial, the National Library etc, seemed to get pinged with. Certainly from our perspective we can’t see any more efficiencies, and all that it appears to achieve is a reduction in staff and services.

Well, now this has been confirmed as told in a fascinating article published in Public Space; The Journal of Law and Social Justice (2009) Vol 3, and available on line.

The article details that the efficiency dividend was implemented by the Hawke labour government in 1986, as a short term budget cut designed to require agencies to look for efficiencies in their operations. But here we are in 2009 with the ‘dividend’ still being ‘paid’ to the government at an average of a budget cut of 1.25% per annum.

And of course as the efficiencies have long since been achieved, what it really means is a budget cut year in year out. The result is what we have been seeing, namely a diminution in staff and services, and this article spells out in graphic detail what these are. The information in it is drawn from a Parliamentary inquiry into the ongoing effects of the ongoing dividend.

Its’ effect crosses many parts of the institutions operations, from reducing and delaying digitisation work, cutting staff (to a level where the National Library states that in 3 years time the effect of the dividend will mean through resulting staff cuts ‘it will not be a viable institution’) , limiting pay increases and thus losing skilled staff, and curtailing touring exhibitions (the National Gallery has reduced theirs from 14 to 9 over the last few years).

It’s a depressing article, the one hope being that the Parliamentarians that heard the evidence at their inquiry are finally going to remove the dividend. Given that Rudd promised as part of his election platform that if elected he would cut an additional 2% from agency budgets to ensure efficiencies, I fear the future for collecting institutions is looking pretty bleak.