Conservation and material culture

I want to share my feelings concerning the just ended IIC Conference
in Istanbul.  I thought it was one of the best I've attended.  The
organization by the IIC staff was flawless and the Vista travel
people in Istanbul made everything work.  The conference setting was
first rate and the Sabanci Centre people were effective and
gracious.  The museums demonstrated a professional staff and
dedication.

I found Professor David Lowenthal's Forbes Prize Lecture to be
moving and timely, especially how he tied together the history of
conservation of art, sites and antiquities with the conservation
movement of the environment.  While he summarized the achievements
of the past 200 years or so, he did not skimp on the losses and
failures in the context of world disasters, human created and
natural.  At times it seemed his lecture could be titled, "A world
so angry it can only break itself," as he related attempts to save
buildings and artifacts in the midst of war, ethnic hatred and
destruction.

A familiar tale ran through his talk, since what we do is like the
gathering of threads long dispersed by chaos and strife.  Each of us
a generation, perhaps two lifetimes or less is separated from the
smashing of a people and the loss of a way of life.  We see today
these stories daily on the news or in our work, where a group long
established in a place is forced to flee, or sent to live like
vagabonds over land and sea in search of a once full way of living,
a life remembered in fragments that haunts us and then our children
with the fantasy of a life rich in meaning now gone.  The elegant
message David crafted placing conservation of art, cultural property
and the environment in a parallel view is consonant with our
purpose.  Without a respect for each other, a knowledge of history
and an understanding of the environment, only brutality can follow.

David's talk eloquently related the dilemma we find ourselves in as
professionals and as citizens of the world.  As the conference went
on his comments and the interaction of the Round Table "Between Home
and History" reverberated in conversation each day and evoked a
number of impressions among people I met who shared their
experiences.  To me David's talk and the general demeanor of the
discussions after, recalled  a Native American woman who told a
group of visitors I was among at another conference touring the
Smithsonian  a commonly told tale.  Like that made popular by Ruth
Benedict in her Patterns of Culture book of the "Broken Cup," this
tale explained why Native Americans fought each other and were
dissatisfied, filling their lives with disorder.  The explanation
was the loss of material culture and the common understanding of how
to make things, that since Columbus not only was the old world gone
and a new one took its place that was chaotic, but that the common
purpose was lost.  Like the "Broken Cup" story, the lack of a means
to construct a world that makes sense is lacking, but in both
stories the teller remarks that each people is given a whole cloth
of knowledge to sustain them and the world.  In one tale it is the
blanket that protects, in the other it is the cup that holds the
generations together and in each, without this unifying factor, the
frustration turns to fury and violence against others and
themselves.

In David's talk and later discussions the idea that techniques of
making things, a knowledge of how to do has been lost was common.
The connections between generations has, as Margaret Mead said in
her books and films on the "generation gap," been torn apart without
a means of bridging once naturally made bonds.  So much of what we
do is to recreate how things were done.  Often I and my colleagues
are engaged in speaking with the last person who can make a certain
tool for an obsolete process and find how it was done.

In America today we hear complaints that we no longer make things
that the world wants to buy, and that ignores the vast computer
application market and programming industry, but it does have a ring
of truth, for not only the lost skills, but the vocations that made
up whole communities of craftspeople who worked and taught how to do
things.  In 1987 I published an article in the JAIC on the history
of archaeological conservation and the application of conservation
to ethnographic collections.  A seasoned conservator chastised me
that writing articles did not make one a conservator, nor did the
reading of articles and books on conservation. This, to him, simply
confused people, distracted them from techniques and methods of the
past and the culture context of the artisans. In his mind it was the
making of objects over and over that taught one how to restore
something.  More than that, he argued that it was not important what
we did as conservators, but how we did it.  The fact that we could
restore was what affected people, that even if they were not
interested in the objects of our work, the existence of our efforts
affected them in that we tried to relearn how to make the world
whole again.  At the time I thought that made us too special and
important, but when I was informed of the Sabanci Museum's project
to teach children about the objects in museums, archaeology and the
use of artifacts in people's lives, it reminded me of another
conversation.

Some years ago when I was working on a project in Hupa, we were
asking the elders where we could take samples from the Jump Dance
ceremonial objects to test for pesticides.  These objects had been
away from this people for over 100 years in museums.  One elder told
me that they were happy, they had come home.  Thinking he meant the
Hupa were happy, I responded clumsily and he corrected me that the
objects were the ancestors come home and that we, the scientists
were the blind, lost wanderers.  Before us were his peoples'
ancestors come home in his eyes to show the way to healing their
world, but that we lived without knowing either that we once had a
way or how to find it.  Their elders wept at the sight of the
deerskin and humming bird feather objects, spoke to them softly and
sang to them what had happened since they had been home.  At that
moment I realized that we may never repair the threads to the
dismembered robes of the world's scattered peoples but in trying we
might stop the power of a world so angry that it can only break
itself.

Niccolo Caldararo
Director and Chief Conservator
Conservation Art Service


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 24:20
                Distributed: Wednesday, October 13, 2010
                       Message Id: cdl-24-20-007
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