Conservation challenges - 25 years and counting

25 years ago today marks the day that I founded International Conservation Services (ICS).  Well, not quite, in that it was originally called Campbell Conservation before morphing into ICS in 1991.  Back in 1986 a wonderful man called Chick Campbell, who owned and ran the Campbell Group, was prepared to back my hunch that there was an opportunity in the Australian market for a multi-disciplinary conservation company, and the rest, as they say folks, is history.

As I write this, I am in London in the midst of a Council meeting of the International Institute for Conservation, of which I am one of the Vice Presidents.  And it is proving a useful time to reflect both on running a private conservation business over the past 25 years, as well as the challenges of responding to the current key issues in conservation – but more on the latter in a future post.

On the face of it, the journey at ICS has been about how to keep a commercial conservation operation viable.  There have been times when this has been challenging, for all sorts of reasons.  However, one of the enduring challenges has been the conflict between the passion to conserve, and the reality of commercial existence.  Fundamentally, as conservators, we are in this profession to conserve  objects.  And most of us are passionate about that.  Yes, we know that we need to earn a living to survive, but making money doesn’t drive us the way caring for objects does.  The journey at ICS has therefore been about focusing that critical passion we all have for this extraordinarily privileged position we so often find ourselves in, so that our business can at least operate sustainably. 

It has also been about providing an opportunity for more than 100 conservators to develop their skills, ply their profession, and indulge their passion, whilst conserving (we estimate) some 40,000 artworks and objects in that time, thus ensuring their stories can continue to be told to future generations.

What I realise that these 25 years have not been about is a series of ethical dilemmas. The decision not to get involved, for instance, in treating a painting from which a client wanted to remove an unloved sister, or a rare textile which a client wanted to cut up into cushions, has never been hard.  Happily, these have been very rare occurrences. 

Instead, the decisions on how to treat an object have often been technically taxing, but as a result, frequently exhilarating.  I think particularly of Tasmania's Hamilton Inn Sofa, which took us on a fascinating journey to ensure the treatment both respected its history and reflected its uniqueness as a decorative arts object.

So now for the next 25 years, folks! I purposely did not name the company Bickersteth Conservation (not sure that has much of a ring to it anyway!) as I wanted to ensure that what we collectively built could live on past individual careers.  No sign of the passion dulling on my part, but planning for the future will be one of the challenges for the next 25 years.

Julian Bickersteth

Managing Director

internationalconservationservices

Contemporary Art and Conservation Ethics

A useful book has hit the materials conservation literature shelf – not a very large shelf at present, reflecting to my mind the relative paucity of thinking around the philosophy and practice of materials conservation. Entitled Conservation: Principles, Dilemmas and Uncomfortable Truths, (edited by Alison Richmond and Alison Bracker; Butterworth-Heinemann 2009) it has largely grown out of discussions generated within the Victoria and Albert Museum’s conservation department. It includes an excellent chapter by our own Marcelle Scott of the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation, comparing the very different history and approach taken to the conservation of indigenous cultural material in Australia with that in New Zealand (to the detriment in her view of the former).

It also includes an outstanding chapter from Jonathan Ashley-Smith (former head of conservation at the V&A) entitled ‘ The Basics of Conservation ethics’. It should be a must-read for all conservators. Jonathan always writes well, if quirkily – his short bio gives an indication of this: “Jonathan first wrote about conservation ethics in 1982 when he was young and his views were rigid and idealistic. He is now older.” His premise is that there is not one set of ethics that fits all conservation decisions and that we should tolerate diversity.

But it is the chapters on the ethical considerations around the conservation of contemporary art that particularly caught my attention. What DO you do when trying to ensure the long term preservation of an artwork when it is made out of, wait for it, film, video, photography, self-lubricating plastic, Vaseline and salt (Matthew Barney or parts of a Jeep Cherokee, peanuts, bottle caps, balsa wood, mai tai umbrellas and aspirin (Sarah Sze)? The answer seems to be to establish a different time horizon, i.e. where conservation normally tries to preserve things in perpetuity, the lifespan for such contemporary artworks might be more like ten years.

I was reminded of the conservation dilemmas around the Anish Kapoor molten wax artwork I saw last year at the Royal Academy in London. Kapoor has just won the gig for a 115 metre high major sculpture outside the new London Olympics stadium. Interestingly he pipped Andy Goldsworthy to the post, and Goldsworthy is featured in this book for a clay installation he undertook in 2007 called White Walls, as an example of an anethical installation. Anethical? I think they mean beyond ethics by which to guide the conservation i.e. neither ethical nor not ethical. Doesn’t help me as a word, I must say, but what I love about it is the story.

Goldsworthy conceived of the idea of plastering a large room with c 8,500 kg of wet porcelain clay, the idea being that the room would 'deinstall' itself, as the clay dried and cracked and gradually delaminated from the wall. The clay would then be recycled and reinstalled in future incarnations, thus linking the successive installations and the memory of each activity. What actually happened is that a process expected to take some weeks started immediately and was almost complete in five days. With it the clay also stripped off five and half years of paint layers, revealing traces of previous installations by other artists. Not only did this create a quite different form of art work, but the large lumps of clay falling with a dull thud became a shocking but compelling piece of kinetic art in themselves.

Now there is a conservation challenge.