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.

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.

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.

British Museum conservation

The new British Museum conservation labs have been the talk of the profession since they opened late last year, so I was pleased to have a tour of them with Dr Anna Buelow, the acting head of conservation, two weeks ago.  

The raw data is that the BM has built a new £135 million facility known as the World Conservation and Exhibition Centre, which brings together all their conservation labs into one building over 18,000 square metres along with the Museum's exhibition operations and a new exhibition space.

A full description can be found in the latest News in Conservation, the free publication of IIC, so I will not dwell on the detail, but rather pick up my takeaways from the visit:

• First and foremost is the flexibility that has been achieved. It seems to have become a key buzz word in the planning process, and it has resulted in spaces that can be almost infinitely reconfigured to suit the requirements of the objects being worked on. This is helped by almost all staff (some 80 at present) hot desking, thus ensuring it is easy for staff to relocate to another space that may suit the treatment better.
• Alongside this flexibility is the benefits that have come from bringing all the disciplines under one roof, and encouraging cross disciplinary use of spaces. Thus, textiles and paper now share a wet space, which is not only more efficient but ensures the two sections work closely together in their planning. This process of cross disciplinary collaboration is further aided by a central break out area with comfy chairs, where for the first time in living memory all the departments can get together socially. 
• And just as this brings about efficiencies of operations, so also ease of access has been massively increased. Previously any large objects had to be brought into the labs through the exhibition halls, thus meaning it had to be undertaken out of hours. Now with dedicated loading dock access (including the largest truck lift in Europe), all this movement can take place during normal hours.
• Finally, what particularly struck me is that the labs are not full of sparkling new state of the art equipment, not that they don't present very smartly. The money has been spent more subtly on flexible furniture (see above) and quality finishes, such as beautiful polished concrete floors in the sculpture labs with much of the tried and tested equipment brought from the old labs.

Well done to the BM - Seven years of planning has produced a model to us all on how to develop a conservation facility for current times.

Conservation according to IIC

So a second week of international conservation conferences has just concluded with the IIC (International Institute for the Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works) 2014 Biennial Congress in Hong Kong wrapping up on Friday. And the first thing to comment on is that two solid weeks of conferencing has in the end gone in a flash and not been as exhausting as I thought it would be, helped by the very different nature of ICOM-CC and IIC conferences and the different locations (Melbourne and Hong Kong). I noted that 24 conservators from  around the world attended both.

450 conservators attended IIC with, by my reckoning, about 50% of them Chinese speaking. That meant for a quality of dialogue I have never been exposed to in terms of exploring east vs west approaches to conservation (and for some occasional word mis-conversions by the translators, the best of which unfortunately cannot be repeated online!).

Takeaways for me from the papers were:

• the extent of the cross over between craft skills and conservation in Chinese conservation projects.
• the extraordinary richness of early Chinese textiles (11th Century and earlier) excavated from Tang, Han and Ming dynasty tombs and the challenges of their conservation.
• the challenges of climate change in subtropical climates, where mould and increasing pest activity are requiring greater vigilance in collection care.

A great social program with receptions organised every night at respectively the Museum of Coastal Defence, the Heritage Museum, the British Consulate and the Asia Society. The highlight was the conference dinner on the Jumbo Floating Restaurant complete with a dotting the eyes on the lion ceremony and face mask magicians. Like all good conferences, the receptions are a key part of the show, as not only do conservators like to drink (in moderation of course), but it is where invariably I find the most useful networking is achieved.

However, the big news for IIC coming out of the conference was twofold. Firstly, we managed through a panel session to get agreement on the Environmental Guidelines we had drafted at the ICOM-CC conference. These have now been formally declared as a joint IIC / ICOM-CC position on environmental conditions and without a doubt moves us forward in this complex area. The next stage is to build on this declaration to provide more specific details.

Secondly, and somewhat unexpectedly, IIC ended up signing a MOU with the Palace Museum in Beijing to cooperate on a range of initiatives including a training program. How this came about was that the Director of the Palace Museum, Dr Jixiang Shan, was invited to give the Forbes Prize lecture, which is the Congress' equivalent of the key note address.  So impressed was Dr Shan by IIC and the congress that he delayed his flight back to Beijing to work through with us how such a relationship would work.

Although it is very early days, fundamentally this means that the good will and professional exchange that has been established with our South East Asian colleagues over the last week now has a mechanism by which this can be built upon.

Genuinely exciting times for conservation!

Conservation according to ICOM-CC

I'm in the midst of a busy fortnight of conferencing, having just completed a week in Melbourne at the ICOM-CC Triennial Conference and am now heading to Hong Kong for a further week at the IIC Biennial Conference. The (conference) stars of these two international conservation organisations only align every 6 years for obvious reasons, and for the first time the governing bodies of each have tried to bring them into the same part of the world and to run them in successive weeks. Whether that really works I shall tell you in a week's time!

But I can report on the conservation world according to ICOM-CC or to give its full title, International Council for Museums Committee for Conservation. 650 conservators met in Melbourne with what appeared to be a good spread from around the world, except for Asia, which I hope will be rectified in Hong Kong. The format of ICOM-CC conferences is based around working groups (covering everything from paintings and metals to preventive conservation and education). So, after initial formalities, the week quickly broke up into concurrent sessions of the working groups.

What therefore works wonderfully for me as a self proclaimed generalist (though many years ago I do remember I was a furniture conservator) is the opportunity to graze across working groups, cherry picking issues of interest to me, whilst also trying to ensure I am broadly up to date with what the various conservation disciplines are engaged in.

My highlights were:

• Two separate papers on Mark Rothko's Untitled (black on maroon) 1958. This was the story of how a painting famously graffiti tagged at the Tate in 2010 was conserved. The first paper was about the analysis of the graffiti paint and the damage it caused, a tour de force in technical examination and research, and the second about its physical removal, a tour de force in patience, not least because the conservator had a time lapse camera on her throughout the nine months that treatment took. 
• The story of how English Heritage in the face of massive financial and staff cutbacks delivered a new archaeological and architectural elements store that has transformed the quality of storage and access, for about a third of the original budget. A classic example of how necessity can breed innovative thinking.

My broader takeaways were:

• Our understanding of the cause and effects of mould and dust on objects is getting deeper.
• Research into contemporary artists' methodologies continues to be a vital tool in informing treatments.
• Assessing and prioritising the conservation needs of collections has now a number of practical and tested models.

Get hold of the conference preprints if you can, as they contain a vast amount of information on where conservation research and treatment in all their forms are at.

What I can also report is that we made some solid progress in advancing the environmental guidelines for museums debate, through a workshop the day before the conference and a plenary session during the conference. At the former I facilitated a series of discussions between Australian conservators and museum directors, and at the latter we developed a draft position statement on this complex issue. That statement now goes forward to the IIC conference for further debate, the aim being to establish a joint ICOM-CC / IIC position. I will blog further on the details at the end of next week.

Until then, it's Hong Kong here we come.

Monuments Men

It is not often that a conservator appears in a movie – we are one of those professions that tend to operate under the radar, hidden away in the back of museums. But when we do hit the limelight we like to do it in style, so it is great to see a conservator playing a lead role in the recently released Monuments Men, played by none other than George Clooney.

George plays the central character of George Stout (called Frank Stokes in the film) who was a key player in the Monuments Men, or to give them their full title, the Monuments, Fine Art and Archives (MFA&A) section. Set up by the Allied Forces in World War II, they were entrusted with the mission of locating and protecting works taken by the Nazi Regime. The film is based on the book of the same name by Robert Edsel, and tells their remarkable story, based around a simple job description: to save as much of the culture of Europe as they could during combat.

 

Stout packing Michelangelo's Madonna of Bruges in the mines at Altaussee, Austria, July 1945

There are many angles that could be followed off the back of the story, from Hitler’s grand plans for the museum to outdo all other museums, the FuhrerMuseum in his birthplace, Linz, Austria to the recent discovery of 1378 looted works of art in the Munich home of Cornelius Gurlitt.

However, warming to our theme, let us return to George Stout and the conservation component of the Monuments Men story. Stout studied art history at Harvard and was then drawn to the Fogg Museum (part of Harvard) for its unique approach of applying science to the study and preservation of art, at a time when art restoration was the preserve of art historian or artists. In 1928, the Fogg director, Edward W. Forbes established the Fogg’s Department for Technical Studies and named Stout as the museum’s first conservator. In 1932 they launched 'Technical Studies in the Field of the Fine Arts', the first journal dedicated to conservation related research. Partnering with the chemist John Gettens, Stout then went on to produce 'Paintings Materials, A Short Encyclopaedia', which remains today a standard reference for conservators.

As the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941 increased fears that the war would reach America, Stout began work on a ‘cultural first aid’ manual for  the armed forces called 'Notes on Safeguarding and Conserving Cultural Material in the Field'. So he was an obvious choice to be one of the first to join the Monuments Men when it was formed in 1942. After the war he continued to have a distinguished career, becoming director of the Worcester Art Museum and the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum in Boston. More importantly, as a result of his Monuments Men experience and his appreciation of how international conservation professionals can work so well together, he was the driving force and one of the founding members of the International Institute for the Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (IIC) of which I am privileged to be currently Vice President.

Enjoy the film, but do also read the book as it tells an astonishing story about some truly passionate men who in the end saved some 2.5 million items including 468,000 works of art.

Vienna and Conferences

Spending eight days conferencing in Vienna, as I did earlier this month, sounds like a tough gig, but heh someone's got to attend these conferences or they won't happen. In this instance it was the bi annual Congress of IIC, the International Institute for the Conservation of Historic and Artistic works. I'm a bit of a groupie for these get togethers of conservators from around the world, this being my fourth one. I am also Vice President of IIC.
So what did I bring back from a week in this World Heritage city? As always at IIC conferences, a realisation of the wealth of conservation work which is going on in highly specialised areas all over the world. Conservation papers ranged from treatment of tin relief on thirteenth century Cypriot wall paintings to decorative paint on seventeenth century Flemish harpsichords, wall paintings in Tutankhamen's tomb, crystal torcheres in Hawaii and Le Corbusier kitchens.

Stand out moments for me were Kasi Albert from Artlab Australia tackling the difficult issue of what to do about rivets used in old ceramic repairs, Heather Tetley on the challenges of in situ historic carpet repairs in an aptly tilted paper "Underfoot and Overlooked", and Sarah Staniforth from the National Trust on 'Use it or Lose it", discussing the need to make the National Trust collections accessible, and accept that some damage may occur in the process.

Along the way I could not resist slipping out to explore the extraordinary diversity of Vienna's cultural collections from the fabulous KunstHistoriche Museum to the Albertina. Stand outs for me were:

- the collections of the Natural History Museum, which pays limited lipservice to modern interpretative methodologies and lives by the depth of its collections presented with minimal interpretation in beautiful mahogany showcases in stunningly decorated rooms

- the new Klimt exhibition at the Belvedere which employs a series of apt dual language quotes in English and German written high on the wall of each gallery thus avoiding a cram of people trying to catch up with storyboards

The next IIC Congress will be in Hong Kong in September 2014. As in the same month ICOM's Committee for Conservation will be meeting in Melbourne, it promises to be a big year for conservation conferences.

Archaeology and climate change

IIC (the International Institute for Conservation) has been pushing the line that climate change will effect collections just as much as buildings for some time. I helped organize their first dialogue on the issue at the IIC Congress in London in 2008 (Climate Change and Museum Collections), most memorable to me as the occasion when Nicholas Serota of the Tate pronounced that he expected visitors to have to wear overcoats in the Tate in winter as they no longer would be keeping the Tate toasty just for visitor comfort.

Three weeks ago IIC ran another dialogue in conjunction with University College, London looking at the issue of preservation of archaeology in a time of climate change. It was facilitated by Dr May Cassar, Professor of Sustainable Heritage at UCL, and a guru in this area. The two dialogue respondents were Andrew Curry, an archaeological journalist and Wouter Gheyle, a practising archaeologist.

A range of sites were discussed by the two of them where rising seal levels and changing weather patterns are threatening insitu archaeology, including:

• Pinnacle Point in South Africa, one of the earliest settlements of modern humans
• Gorham’s Cave in Gibraltar, containing 120,000 years of human history and the last traces of Neanderthal presence in Europe
• Santa Rosa Island in California where 16,000 year old middens are being washed away
• Dead Man’s Bay in Greenland where 3,000 year old excavated houses are being lost through coastal erosion
• Skara Brae in the Orkney Islands, containing 5,000 year old underground preserved houses and contents
• The Altai Mountains on the Mongolia/Russia border where the melting of the permafrost is thawing frozen 2,400 year old Scythian tombs

You get the picture, and this is of course incremental, whereas Hurricane Katrina in 2005 washed away an estimated 1000 archaeological sites in one fell swoop.

Following the presentations by Curry and Gheyle there was an opportunity for open dialogue, and there was the inevitable question as to whether global warming is anything new in the history of the planet. As Curry responded there have always been natural weather changes that happen over thousands of years. But what we are seeing now is much faster and more destructive, and therein lies the problem. Weather patterns are becoming more extreme and unfamiliar. Some moderately hot places are becoming deserts and others where moderate rain used to fall, are now experiencing torrential rain and flooding.

As Australia experiences a wet, wet summer with extensive and damaging flooding, the climate change deniers are claiming they are right and there is no global warming evident in this part of the world. In reality it is precisely because the planet is warming up that we are getting these extreme weather patterns.

It’s an issue that is effecting us all, like it or not, and we in the conservation world need to start prioritising what we can save.

Check out the dialogue online.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

IIC and Istanbul (2)

A week in Istanbul for the IIC Congress really provided little more opportunity than to soak up the flavour of the place. There is so much to do and see there, and one gets the feeling that it is an increasingly confident place economically ( though still fragile politically I understand) . One American friend commented that where new furniture in the US used to say Made in China it now says Made in Turkey.


It was therefore particularly opportune that we had a key note address delivered (admittedly by video) by Turkish Nobel prize laureate for literature Orhan Pamuk. I must admit to not having heard of him but am busy making amends by reading his wonderfully complex Name of the Rose type book called ‘ My Name is Red’. Pamuk is probably most famous for his autobiographical Istanbul: Memories and the City in which he sees the melancholy longing of hüzün as the hidden key to Istanbul. Hüzün is a Turkish word whose Arabic root (it appears five times in the Koran) denotes a feeling of deep spiritual loss but also a hopeful way of looking at life, “a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating.” Pamuk saw in his childhood hüzün manifested by the slow collapse of the once powerful Ottoman empire hanging like a pall over the city and its citizens. Written in 2004, his book reveals how far the city has moved in the last 6 years, and Pamuk’s address to the Congress was all about how in the new confidence that city now shows, there is real danger that the past will be wiped out.

And his key note address was contextually perfect for the Congress as it allowed delegates to get in the space for a number of papers on how fragile is this ancient part of the world especially when assailed by the joint forces of development and tourism. High profile sites whether they be the Pyramids, Petra or the Acropolis will always attract international attention and therefore the support and funding of such bodies as the World Monuments Fund, the Getty etc, but these are but a few of the thousands of heritage sites around the Eastern Mediterranean that need protection and conservation.

We heard about the high profile sites, whether it was control of biodeterioration on the monuments of the Acropolis, or conserving twelfth century illuminated manuscripts at St Catherine’s Monastery, Mt Sinai, a project initiated by no less than the Prince of Wales! But we also heard about many less famous sites, such as entertainment rooms in rich Syrian merchants’ houses of the 17th and 18th century, known as Damascene rooms which display a particularly fine form of painted wood panelling. One of these rooms has now been re-constructed at the Met in New York and another known as the Ottoman Room in the Museum of Islamic Arts in Kula Lumpur. And to set these in context, we also heard from one of the few professional conservators working in Syria about his work trying to conserve the remaining 200 or so rooms that survive in Damascus – a fascinating and ultimately complimentary series of papers.

IIC Congresses are for my part a confirmation of why I work in this fascinating and complex field. Unlike the equivalent conferences run every three years by the Committee for Conservation of ICOM, which are based around a series of working group meetings, these Congresses are not so much about coming away with detailed information on how to tackle one’s next conservation project. They are about a reaffirmation that the conservation sector’s strength lies in our ability to learn from the experiences of other specialists outside our chosen field. Thus we deepen our conservation knowledge, and are able to apply this broad view to the benefit of our next project. We shall meet again in Helsinki in two years hence.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Istanbul and IIC

I’m blogging from Istanbul, where I am spending a week at the IIC ( International Institute for the Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works – to give it its full title) biannual conference, of which I am Vice-President. Apart from being in a city that I have always wanted to visit, ever since I studied Aghia Sophia during an Early Christian Art component at university, it is proving to be a most stimulating time in terms of the spread of countries represented.


I am told there are 44 different nationalities at the conference, and for the first time as a conservator I find myself rubbing shoulders in the lunch queue with conservators from Syria, Jordan, Bulgaria, Oman, Qatar, and of course Turkey, along with the usual Western European and North American suspects. The result is an extraordinarily rich dialogue around conservation issues, and encouragingly a very clear common ground about what we are doing, and why we are doing it. The fundamental difference is that we in Western countries are operating in a legislative framework where cultural heritage is genuinely protected, whereas many conservators in this region are lone voices, without any serious government support.

Our opening speaker was Professor David Lowenthal from University College London, who it should be said turned up looking considerably the worse for wear, having had an altercation with a truck three days before. When you are 87 that’s not such a good idea, but having had the taxi in which I came into town from the airport mow down an old lady and her shopping in front of me (luckily she got up again, but I don’t think the shopping did) I could understand where he was coming from. However despite injuries this erudite man gave us a powerful jolt as to why we are doing what we do as conservators.

The author of ‘The Past is a Foreign Country’ , Lowenthal believes strongly in the need for us to embrace the broader conservation debates. His challenge to us as conservators was therefore to enter into dialogue with those around us. He sited how conservators have traditionally been separated from curators, through conservators considering the latter to be scientifically ignorant ( not sure this is the reality). And more strongly he urged us to see care of the wider environment, i.e. environmental conservation, as being critical to cultural conservation. The relationship between the two is vital, he said, especially in terms of the environment’s ability to provide context for culture. We must see posterity as our prime duty as conservators, not worrying about how we do something but why we do it.

Challenging stuff, particularly when delivered in this eastern Mediterranean cradle of civilisation. I will set it in the context of the wider conference proceedings in my next blog.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices