Conservators, Creativity, and Control

ABSTRACTThis article explores the role of conservators and focusses on their creative agency in the preservation of cultural heritage. It argues that conservators constitute a 'recursive public' who collectively make the field both highly collaborative and highly modifiable. The author then sets out how conservators engage in a form of 'ontological constructivism' where they use their creative agencies in adversarial, anexact, and generative processes and act as 'art-developers' to commit to the next version of a work. Drawing parallels with software development, the author proposes that conservation should be seen as a form of version control that creates time-stamped 'versions of record' that persist until the next cycle of care. To emphasise the lack of finality in any artwork the author produces a series of 'endgames' to illustrate the ontologically open-ended nature of cultural heritage. The article suggests that in exploring the distributed nature of creative agency through the lens of version control, conservation can provide greater understanding into the real conditions of art and cultural production and how they continue to evolve over time. This then helps disrupt conventional notions of authorship and allows conservation to contribute to a more inclusive understanding of art and culture in our institutions.KEYWORDS: Allographicautographiccreativityart-developerrecursive publicversion control AcknowledgementsMany thanks go to Prof. Dr. Carolin Bohlmann, Head of Department, and Almut Schilling, Lecturer, Dept. of Conser- vation and Restoration of Modern and Contemporary Art, Arts Academy of Vienna, who invited me to give an online talk in December 2021 as part of their series BEST AVAILABLE COPY II from which this article has been developed. My heartfelt thanks also go to conservator Hohi Ikeda whose valuable input helped shape the final version of this article.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Others have written about the evolution of artworks and the creative roles of conservators and restorers. The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer's indirect retort to Cesare Brandi – somewhat prescient of Groys a decade later (Groys Citation1996, 160) – was that 'even the restorer or the preserver of ancient monuments remains an artist of his time' (Gadamer Citation2005, 150) and various synthetic arguments have been propounded by authors such as Cosgrove (Cosgrove Citation1994), McLean (McLean Citation1995), and Muñoz Viñas (Muñoz Viñas Citation2005). More recently the invisibility of conservators has been taken up by authors including Dusan Barock et al. (Citation2019), Miller (2021a), and Finn (Citation2021).2 A good working definition of what the author means by ontological constructivism is derived from the work of Barad (although she prefers the term 'agential realism'): that things are not discovered but constructed and configured in the coming together of agencies (both human and nonhuman) that together perform differential activities to manifest a particular materially engaged world (Barad Citation2007, 91).3 The notion of 'endgame' is expanded from its use in an earlier book chapter (Kemp Citation2022) and owes something to endgame studies in chess and the minimax rule in game theory. It also alludes to Samuel Beckett's eponymous 1957 play in which he frustrates the possibility of any meaningful closure.4 The idea of the characteristics of a cultural heritage item as being either definitive ('constant') or changeable (in 'flux') has been variously explored in research around authenticity as well as in the conservation of objects, performance, and time-based works of art (e.g. Castriota Citation2018; Fiske Citation2009; Gordon and Hermens Citation2013; Laurenson Citation2006; Lawson, Finbow, and Marçal Citation2017; Lowenthal Citation1995; Stigter Citation2016; van Saaze Citation2013).