Interpretive Conservation

With some trepidation I want to propose for discussion an idea that
may be heretical, Interpretive Conservation, an expression I've made
up for writings by conservators that would not discuss treatments or
preservation in any way. The goal would be to develop the
conservator's unique way of seeing objects, collections and even
intangible heritage as the basis for directly and independently
interpreting artists, cultures and historical contexts.

Obviously I'm overstating when I imply we don't already do this
individually. We always work with art historians, archaeologists etc
to help them interpret the past. The late great Cyril Smith told us
back in the 1960s how we conservators were a kind of nexus bringing
material science and social science together at the object level.
I've loved our airy early writings like those one can occasionally
find in the Technical Studies or the musings of founders like Paul
Coremans and George Stout etc. Since that earlier work we've also
had great work on parsing the meeting of preservation and
spirituality on native artifacts and recently a series of
conservation histories has forced us to examine what exactly we do.
But all in all it seems a thin product for a nexus.

It's like we realized collectively it's hard enough to just preserve
the stuff! Or as the Keck's liked to say, "preserving the past is no
easy matter." So we settled into being the analogs of the practical
engineers assisting the theoretical scientists. In a way it allowed
us to play it safe by saying we treat only the materials of
construction of art and artifacts so that interpretive specialists
can study them with confidence. Nothing wrong with continuing that
tradition. But I think doing that alone has held our field's
development back. In the academic world our neutrality can also read
as a kind of hedging, an avoidance of tough issues. When national
priorities are set for the arts and humanities our place at the
table is questioned because while we preserve it we don't use it.

Another late great engineer/archaeological collaborator Harold 'Doc'
Edgerton from MIT liked to challenge new arrivals with the question,
"What do you bring to the table?" We bring a unique way of
'addressing the artifact', of appreciating the constancy of objects
in states of transformation. This is a valuable interpretive tool
that we under-use. We are also the most comfortable at integrating
scientism into historical and cultural narratives. We even think in
terms of narratives when we construct treatment records! And of
course there's that nexus thing.

It is predicted that in the next two decades we'll see a resurgence
of the role of the natural sciences in the social sciences due to
new technologies (e.g.: routinization of DNA analysis). It could be
good timing for an invention we might call Interpretive
Conservation.

So I know this musing is a lot to chew on and comes out of nowhere
but... anyone else interested in chatting about this?

Dennis Piechota
Conservator
Fiske Center for Archaeological Research
UMass Boston
617-287-6829


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 24:40
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