The falsification of time

Last month I attended the IIC Biannual Congress in Los Angeles. Entitled 'Saving the Now; Crossing Boundaries to conserve contemporary art' it proved to be one of the most exciting conferences I have been at for years.

Carole Mancusi Ungaro, Head of Conservation at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, kicked off in fine style to get us all deeply into the philosophy and ethics of contemporary art conservation with her paper ‘The falsification of time’. This was a direct quote from an interview she undertook with Sol LeWitt in which LeWitt proposed in reference to the cleaning of the Sistine Chapel that the artist is not responsible for the falsification of time in how his artwork changes and presents as it ages.

Carole used this to introduce the idea of preserving the concept rather than the materiality of the artwork, which both releases conservators from traditional restraints but also challenges them to approach treatments in very different ways. Citing artists and artworks she has worked with from Richard Serra to Cy Twombly, Carole explained the concept of replication and co-creation that conservators now need to have in their toolkit. If as she reminded us, the IIC Charter charges us to ‘take any action necessary to halt the deterioration of artworks’, then we do need to become co-producers in ensuring these contemporary artworks are preserved, either physically or conceptually.

That means conservators now need to understand the materiality of the artwork, know the technical issues, and be able to think through its conceptual context. This is ambitious, challenging, complex and exhilarating all at the same time.

Check out this article in the New Yorker for more on this fascinating issue.

And to get a broader feeling for the conference check out the IIC blog. Hours of fascinating reading there.

NZ Treaty Matters

New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi, or to give it its Maori name Te Tiriti o Waitangi, was signed at Waitangi on the North Island in February 1840 between the British settlers under Lieutenant Governor William Hobson (when NZ was technically part of New South Wales) and the Maori chiefs or rangatira. It is actually formed of nine sheets (the original and eight copies), which were then variously taken around the country to be signed by the rangatira. Eight copies are in Maori and one is in English.

It was meant to establish the fundamentals for land ownership, but its current condition (being variously rat eaten, fire and water damaged) perhaps more accurately reflects the way it has been viewed since (the Treaty agreement was broken within six weeks of signing!). This cartoon sums up one view of the Treaty’s value.

However, 175 years on it is now viewed by both Maori and Pakeha (white people) as the founding document of New Zealand, and one which reflects in a far deeper way than the document itself how New Zealanders should live together. 

Working with the NZ Department of Internal Affairs over the last eighteen months, I have been lucky enough to be involved in advising on the conservation issues of a major new interpretive display of the document along with two other key New Zealand historic documents; the 1835 Declaration of Independence of the Northern Chiefs and the 1893 Women’s Suffrage Petition (did you know that NZ was the first country in the world to allow women to vote?).

It all began with a big get together in Wellington at Archives New Zealand (who have responsibility for the care of the documents, though the new display will be over the road in the National Library). And it gave me a crash course on the political dimension of the Treaty as well as the opportunities this new exhibition provides. The purpose was to allow as wide a range of stakeholders as possible to have their say in how the documents are presented.  A neat forum was used to do this, namely by setting up nine tables with butcher’s paper and pens, each covering a different topic, such as:

• What are the stories we should be telling?
• What will the experience be like?
• What do we want our visitors to come away thinking?

The 45 participants circulated in an ordered program, with constant discussion and ideas bouncing back and forth, as one comment generated another thought. The session was interspersed with short five minute talks about particular aspects of the documents, and I came away buzzing with the opportunities this project provides (and the complexities that arise as a result). One nice idea I liked was to pose this question to visitors: If they were a rangatira, would they have signed then? And would they sign now?

One aspect that became very clear in the planning from day one was the embedment of the digital aspects of the project. New Zealand has been a leader in the cultural digital space, through Digital New Zealand ensuring a national perspective through gathering and interlinking the country’s culture digitally. And this project showed me how they do it – How this exhibition will be experienced online; how it will link with the physical visit; how online teaching materials are put together; how new stories inspired by it online are captured; and even how virtual reality technology may place visitors in the historical event. 

The exhibition is due to open early next year and is going to be a game changer in how to present and interpret a country’s most significant documents.

Walking on water Christo style

My colleague Matteo Volonté was on a quick visit to his native Lombardy earlier this month and managed to catch the extraordinary art event of the Christo installation on Lago d’Iseo. We had a chat this week when he got back. 

Julian Bickersteth: How did people get there, given the crowds? 

Matteo Volonté: You could get there by many modes of transport. You could go by train, car, bike and boat. The access to the piers is in Sulzano near Iseo. The village of Sulzano is very small and could not accommodate many vehicles, so designated car parks scattered on the outskirts of the lake were used and shuttle buses collected visitors to take them to the piers. People also walked from nearby villages.

JB: How is it constructed? 

MV: The piers were made of cubic barrels made of polyethylene and joined together like a puzzle and connected with large polyethylene screws. It was covered with approximately 100,000 square meters of synthetic fabric and anchored to the bottom of the lake with ropes and concrete blocks.

JB: What did it feel like walking on? 

MV: I believe Christo said it felt like walking on the back of a whale. The movement of the lake gives definitely life to the piers. Someone else said it is like walking on the water. Certainly being so close to the water gives a wonderful effect.

JB: Was it deteriorating? 

MV: When I went to visit the Christo installation, it was just a few days after the opening. The apparent condition of the fabric was fine. In areas, staining began to appear particularly at the entrance of the piers and where the fabric was covering the roads of the villages. Leaf litter and floating tree branches were depositing along the edges of the piers, but it’s something that should be expected. I did notice at the end of the day, towards the exit, in some of the steep alleyways of Sulzano village, that the fabric began to tear, particularly along the seams. That was because of the friction of the visitors attempting to climb up the hill.

Enjoy Matteo’s beautiful pictures.

Qatar cultural matters

Abu Dhabi tends to get the lion’s share of attention when it comes to museums in the Gulf due to the astonishing cultural precinct being created on Saadiyat Island (see my past blog post on the subject).

However, just across the water Qatar is seeking to culturally emulate their Gulf cousins. On the collecting front they have chosen to buy the world’s second and fourth most expensive artworks to date. (Respectively, Paul Cézanne’s "The Card Players" for c.$250 million and Pablo Picasso’s "Les Femmes d’Alger” for $179.3 million.) And they have also been using ‘starchitects’ to good effect.

So far they have an I.M. Pei designed Museum of Islamic Art, which opened in 2008 and a Jean Nouvel National Museum being built. The former is a truly beautiful building, set on a spit of reclaimed land with lush landscaping. Whilst to me the interior competes with the artefacts on display, which is always a temptation for starchitects, the overall museum experience there is a very satisfying one.

 

Museum of Islamic Art, Qatar
(Showing interior competing with display of artefacts)

Half a mile away the National Museum struggles. Designed around the concept of the desert rose, the building opening is already two years late and it looks way off completion. Beautiful as it may end up being, clearly the nature of a structure where there are no straight lines is taxing the builders, not to mention the exhibition installers, once they can get inside. But the big disappointment for me is that, whereas the Museum of Islamic Art is well positioned away from other buildings and set in gardens, the National Museum is squashed between a bridge and high rise development, an aspect that the artist’s renditions fail to include.

One other highlight of Qatar is Richard Serra’s extraordinary and, dare I say, somewhat bizarre 'East-West/West-East' installation. It takes about an hour driving west from Doha to reach and comprises of 4 vast weathered steel plates set into an obscure valley in the desert, aligned in an east west direction over 1.6km. Serra’s impetus for creating this piece is well detailed in the New Yorker.

How successful this desert installation has turned out to be is debatable. Serra had hoped that ‘people will either walk or drive to the pieces’. The former is not only impractical but in Qatar conditions, downright dangerous. And sadly, where the latter is happening it seems only for the pastime of applying graffiti. Interestingly, Serra’s hope of the weathered steel turning to a dark amber is not being realised in the desert conditions, an issue which is the subject of a technical paper at the forthcoming IIC Conference in LA in September on the conservation of contemporary art.

'East-West/West-East' by Richard Serra

(Showing weathered steel corrosion not occurring as planned)

Quite how the rapid development of all the new museums in the Gulf will play out remains to be seen, but Qatar is ensuring it plays its part.

Palmyra and clickbait

Reporting on cultural heritage impacted by conflict is never an easy matter. After the outrage of the death of Khaled al Assaad, director of antiquities at Palmyra, last September I wrote a blog to highlight the level of destruction that Isil was causing but decided in the end not to post it since it might impact on conservation work we were undertaking in the UAE and on the staff we had there.

However, at least Palmyra is now recaptured, and it's good to share a few links on what is happening. Firstly it appears that despite the images of destruction beamed around the world, the broader archaeological site has been largely spared, with the site’s majestic amphitheater, rows of columns and other iconic ruins, whilst laced with explosives by Isis, ultimately spared.

As an interesting adjunct to my concerns about publishing my blog earlier in the year, there is a great article in The Art Newspaper by Jason Felch and Bastein Varoutsikos on how we should respond to the images of destruction of cultural heritage. Their principal point is that the images of destruction are 'clickbait' that play into Isil's hands every time we repost them. "It is Isil’s ability to marry ancient iconoclasm with modern clickbait that has spread their appetite for destruction so far and fast. And it is our fascination with sharing their snuff films on social media that make us complicit in their crimes."

More broadly, the latest bimonthly News in Conservation published by IIC (International Institute for Conservation) is dedicated to the issue of the destruction and illegal trafficking of cultural heritage. It provides a great overview of the issues and the wide spread nature of this ill, from Timbuktu to Croatia, from Syria to Israel and Egypt.

As Peter Stone, the author of one of the articles and current head of UNESCO's Blue Shield program told me in January, the thing that changed interest in the UK in what Isis was destroying (and the will to do something about it) was their destruction of places that were so famous that even the blinkered public school educated British bureaucrats had heard of them.

To that end, Boris Johnson's Facebook posting on Palmyra and the desperate tragedy that is now Syria, along with the broader European refugee crisis, is worth reading. 

Palmyra may be safe for the time being, but we must not forget that the UN reckons nearly 300 important Syrian sites have been destroyed, badly damaged or looted since 2011, including 24 completely wiped out.

Big Boys at Te Papa 2

As a supplement to my last blog post 'Big Boys at Te Papa' on the Museum's 'Gallipoli: The scale of our war' exhibition and my comment about the reported NZ casualty numbers, interesting research has just been published, which confirms that the real rate is about half what had been stated (see the Te Papa blog for more details). 

I had certainly come to a view that the casualty rate of 93% would have been emblazoned on the minds and psyche of every New Zealander if it were true. But what it has thrown up is that there were in fact casualty rates of this level in the First War. The Newfoundland Regiment went over the top at Beaumont-Hamel in the Battle of the Somme, on that fateful day of July 1st 1916, where 30,000 men were killed or wounded before breakfast and 60,000 by the end of the day. The Regiment went into action 753 strong and only 68 answered the roll call the next day, a casualty rate of 91%.

The effect of such a loss on the local community must have been cataclysmic.

Big Boys at Te Papa

I’ve been lucky enough to see quite a few WWI commemorative exhibitions around the world in the last couple of years, but none as powerful as Te Papa’s 'Gallipoli: The Scale of Our War' exhibition in Wellington.

Designed and built at a reputed cost of over $8 million by NZ film wunderkind and Weta Workshop founder, Richard Taylor, the set and prop designer behind the Lord of the Rings epic. This is a hybrid between a film set and a museum exhibition. The immediate reason I loved it is the stunning 5 times life-size figures that dominate the space in every way. They are masterful creations, the detailing simply awesome using every tool in the film set maker’s kit. 

But what I found most refreshing was the approach to the narrative. Instead of objects neatly labelled in showcases with storyboards on adjacent walls, every available wall space is plastered with text and photos in a highly accessible and readable way. You don’t need to work through all of it, as there are lots of individual stories, but at the same time a continuity of narrative, based around the real stories of the over-size figures, holds it all together and draws you on. One bloke survives a death sentence at a court martial (for falling asleep on duty) only to turn up later in the exhibition being killed in action four days afterwards.

Why did I find it more emotional than others I have seen? It’s very personal, it only tells the Gallipoli story from landing to evacuation, and it brings home better than any of the other exhibitions the devastating impact of the War on so many families in such a small country.

Which brings me to my one gripe. The final storyboard identifies the NZ casualty rate as 93% of those who landed were killed or wounded. An asterix beside the number leads to a footnote along the lines of ‘still to be verified'. I was so struck by that astonishing number that I went hunting. Two minutes on the web led me to the 1919 official history, 'The New Zealanders at Gallipoli', in which British General Sir Ian Hamilton wrote that a total of 8556 New Zealanders landed on the peninsula – of whom 7447 were killed or wounded, a casualty rate of 87% (not 93% but still staggeringly high). A minute more and I was at the official NZ Government’s WWI centenary site where David Green, Historian at the Ministry for Culture & Heritage, explains that through erroneous counting the real New Zealand casualty rate was 53%, similar to that of the Australians whom they fought alongside.

I’ve raised this with Te Papa and they have advised that research is still being undertaken, and they hope to have the final number clarified shortly. But don’t let that stop you visiting a great exhibition. 

Conserving the Contemporary

Conservators from around the world will be gathering in September in LA at the biannual IIC (International Institute for Conservation) congress. IIC congresses always have a theme and this year it is Contemporary Art with the catchy title of 'Saving the Now: Crossing Boundaries to Conserve Contemporary Works'. As the Congress will also be run in association with INCCA (International Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art) it promises to at least address if not resolve a few of the major issues that conservators of contemporary art grapple with.

Conservation of contemporary art doesn’t sound like a main stream subject, so it was good to see it addressed in a recent New Yorker article by Tom Lerner, entitled 'The Custodians: How the Whitney is transforming the art of museum conservation'. Ostensibly about the Whitney’s new conservation space and its head conservator Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, the reflective and perceptive article cuts to the heart of the debate by:

1. Questioning why something that is contemporary needs conservation 
2. Demonstrating the challenges that the complexities of the materials and methods of fabrication of contemporary art create for conservators, and 
3. Showing how conservation is in Lerner’s words "deeply curatorial, as conservators choose which aspects of a work are presented and how"

He comes to the latter conclusion through observing Mancusi-Ungaro at work, during which he discusses:

• The problem of materials. Where medieval and Renaissance painters had intimate knowledge of their pigments and what would last, post war artists went to the hardware store not the art-supply shop for their paint, using mass produced materials never intended to last. And that’s only the paint, i.e. before considering the plastics, rubber, poor quality paper etc. used with it.
• The issue of replication in art. Mancusi-Ungaro heads a replication committee at the Whitney which includes curators, archivists and a lawyer which determines how a work of art (or part of it) should be replicated when it cannot be restored in the traditional way. Examples might be a motor or lights on a kinetic sculpture or a digital tape for an audio installation.
• Non-traditional methods of conservation. Lerner cites Mancusi-Ungaro’s work on Rothko’s Harvard murals where the original colour had faded right out beyond repair. She developed a series of coloured light projections which when thrown on the canvases retuned the works to their original colours – though, as Lerner questions, is this conservation or a multi media installation?

Luckily, Mancusi-Ungaro is giving the Forbes Prize lecture at the IIC Congress in LA, so we should hear more on this challenging issue then.

Protest Art – The Conservation Perspective

Our favourite non-artist Banksy (i.e. his real identity is unknown) has been busy again with his satirical art, this time painting in his distinctive stencil style a Les Mis themed image on a wall near the French Embassy in London criticising the use of teargas in the ‘Jungle’ refugee camp in Calais. Whilst widely reported (see this article in the Guardian and this one in the Metro) the story and images in the Daily Mail report interested me most as a conservator.

Banksy’s images are always vulnerable to being graffitied, overpainted or destroyed as they are invariably:

a)       Protest art

b)       Painted on unprepared and often temporary surfaces

Sometimes that destruction is inadvertent - As described in this Sydney Morning Herald article, Melbourne’s city street cleaners did a fine job painting over one, and this in a city renowned for its street art!

More often it is an active process by the authorities being satirised to remove it. In the London instance the artwork came with a QR code which linked to a tear gas attack in the Calais refugee camp on 5^th January, one which presumably the French Government were not over-keen to have publicised, hence their quiet word to their British counterparts to cover it up ASAP. 

The irony is that the British authorities claimed they were rushing to cover it up to preserve it, the same argument the French authorities had taken with murals Banksy had painted in the refugee camp itself. Which is where the Daily Mail images are interesting, because it is clear both from the article and the images that the first way they attempted to preserve it was by ripping it to shreds with a crowbar, not a method which comes readily to mind in my toolkit of preservation processes.

The next question then is from a conservation point of view - what part of the artwork should be conserved? To my mind the crowbar damage is now part of its story, namely how the artwork was responded to, but the view could be put that this is damage that needs repairing.

Luckily I can report that this and other Protest Art issues will be the subject of a major dialogue at the forthcoming IIC Congress in LA in September 2016 entitled “Umbrellas, Gas Masks, and Post-it-Notes: Considering the historic and conservation challenges of objects created for social protest”. The dialogue will be in the form of a discussion between those who create the art and their intent for it, and those who promote it, collect it and protect it. As the blurb for the dialogue states:

“Historic events of the past years have highlighted art as a creative means of social expression to current events as well as an impactful tool used during social protests. Whether to express solidarity, such as Je Suis Charlie, or to promote political freedom for the activists in Hong Kong, disobedient art has found its presence in the world of artistic expression. The impact of disobedient art on cultural perspectives has been tremendous and the historical significance of using art to inspire and promote these events is gaining in popularity.”

There will be lots to discuss. Make it to LA if you can.

Seen any missing sculptures?

It is a truism often cited that the period of 30 - 50 years after creation is the time when any artwork or building is most at risk of being destroyed. It has lost the novelty of being new and fallen out of fashion but has not yet entered into that hallowed world of being anointed with heritage status. Great art and buildings tend to transcend this dangerous period, but that leaves an awful lot of our artistic and architectural output which is vulnerable. Some of this of course deserves a quick and timely departure, whether due to poor design or materials that would never last. 

So it is not surprising to read that Historic England, formerly part of English Heritage, have complied a list of lost, stolen, sold or destroyed public art works made anywhere between the Second World War and the 1980s. Some we know about, such as the Henry Moore bronze Reclining Figure stolen from the Henry Moore Foundation's estate in 2005 worth £3m, which was melted down and sold for £1,500 as scrap metal. 

Some are the victims of political correctness. Countless figures of Lenin have been dismembered since Glasnost. And closer to home, Sydney is the beneficiary of a fine seated figure of Queen Victoria, which had been removed for political reasons from Leinster House in Dublin during the Troubles and, after languishing in a council depot in Dublin for many years, was transported to Sydney to take pride of place outside the refurbished Queen Victoria Building in the 1980s. A similar discussion is going on right now about the figure of Cecil Rhodes on Oriel College, Oxford. A current Rhodes scholar no less (talk about biting the hand that feeds you) is leading the campaign to have his statue removed on the basis that Rhodes was responsible for genocide.

Queen Victoria Statue, Queen Victoria Building, Sydney

Some have only just survived, Mary Kayser's 'Dragonfly' in Canberra being a case in point. Created in 1989 (so it doesn’t even reach 30 years before it was disdained), it was deteriorating badly, obscured behind trees and about to be destroyed. The ACT Government commendably decided it was worthy of saving, and we were commissioned to restore and relocate it to a prime site on Lake Burley Griffin.

Mary Kayser's 'Dragonfly' - Obscured behind trees

Mary Kayser's 'Dragonfly' - Restored and relocated

But then of course if you want to avoid the angst as an artist of having your creation destroyed you can do what Bert Flugelman did and bury the art work in the first place so no one can get to it. As part of an arts festival in Canberra in 1975, Bert participated by burying his artwork made of six polished aluminium tetrahedrons, remarking that if he explained why he was putting the piece underground “the whole point would be lost”.

Now there’s both an artistic statement and a pretty foolproof way of ensuring your legacy survives!