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Ways of Aesthetically Integrating Conservation Theory in an Era of Neoliberal Illusions and Post-Colonial Migration

Hiltrud Schinzel
Translated by Aisha Prigann

Abstracts

This article explores the fundamental question in conservation-restoration: for whom and why do we preserve art? The motivations for conserving cultural heritage evolve over time, influenced more by sociocultural contexts than by established theories. The concept of "care" is examined as a potential approach to refocus conservation on cultural beneficiaries and their changing needs, while also considering both the material and conceptual dimensions of artworks.
The article traces the historical impact of 19th-century industrialization, which democratized access to art and transformed conservation practices, but also led to increased commodification. This commercialization altered the relationship between art, its creators, and its audience, devaluing cultural assets by reducing them to market objects.
Modern collectors, often disengaged from the deep involvement once required, have shifted the responsibility for conservation to public institutions, thereby weakening collective responsibility for preserving cultural heritage. In response to these changes, the article advocates for a reevaluation of conservation practices, emphasizing the importance of restoring an ethical and aesthetic connection with artworks. This approach would ensure that artworks are transmitted not merely as marketable objects but as living heritage, rich with cultural and social significance, in a context increasingly dominated by market logic.

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Author's notes

This text written originally 2015-2017 in German was translated by Aisha Prigann. The english version of this text first appeared in Touching Vision 2.023  How to restore the art of living, p.148, selfpublished by BoD publisher.

Full text

Introduction

1No one would argue that conservation work is purpose-driven. Even so, the question of who are we conserving art for has rarely been asked in recent times since it also implies the question of why. The reasons for conserving cultural heritage change throughout history, as is evidenced by the fact that discussions about an optimal theory of conservation-restoration and its resulting practice are ongoing. It is also clear that practical conservation efforts are guided less by existing theories and more by sociocultural circumstances. This might be because circumstances change faster than dictates. Even so, guidelines are still of great interest, not least of all because they provide a solid framework, both for responsibly carrying out our own work in uncertain times and for the profession overall, ensuring continuity in our undertakings and safeguarding our actions.

  • 1 Carlota Santabárbara Morera, “Conservation of Contemporary Art: A Challenge for the Theory of Crit (...)
  • 2 See, for example, Salvador Muñoz Viñas, “Who Is Afraid of Cesare Brandi? Personal Reflections on th (...)

2As Carlota Santabarbara very accurately describes in her article “Conservation of Contemporary Art: A Challenge for the Theory of Critical Restoration?”1 that no consensus has so far been reached on a theoretical basis for resolving the problems posed to conservators by contemporary art. In the absence of new guidelines, the old ones generally prevail, a situation that often results in a deadlock between those who insist on tradition and those who wish to explore new avenues. The Brandi debate of the past few years2 provides a clear example of this dynamic. Opposing points of view can easily reach stalemate when there is insufficient awareness of the influence exerted by factors outside of the conservation field. This essay will therefore draw attention to a few interdisciplinary contexts or rather try to examine the inherent quandaries of the discipline from a detached perspective.

  • 3 See the writings of Iwona Szmelter for some fundamental ideas on the subject.

3In doing so, the focus will be on the aforementioned why and touch on specific aspects of this complex situation. Among them is the notion of care.3 Any discussion of care inevitably leads from the artwork receiving care to the cultural beneficiaries or recipients—the people who get to appreciate the cared-for artwork—and their needs, which change over the course of history, often as a result of technological innovation. As a result, technology and engineering exert a decisive influence on cultural developments.

The Concept of Care in Conservation

4After the Second World War, the word “care” took on special connotations in Europe through the CARE packages originally sent by the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe. The medical field has recently begun to distinguish between “cure” and “care” when referring to illnesses for which there is presently no cure. Conservation-restoration also (still?) faces unresolvable cases where professionals are limited to care options, that is to say prevention and conservation treatments, rather than restoration. In contemporary Western discourse, the notion of care is also linked to feminism, seeing how the caregiver role is widely regarded as a female responsibility. In turn, present-day feminists discuss care work within the social context of low pay and poor working conditions prevalent in care-related careers. The fact that care is undervalued can be interpreted as symptomatic of a broader issue, one that extends beyond gender. Economic interests such as commerce and growth—and aggressively pushing these interests through—have always been prioritized over cultural and social needs. European postwar politics and its efforts at unification are no exception in this respect, no matter how obvious the inadequacies of this hierarchy may be.

  • 4 See Christine Kowalski, “Mehr Frauen, gut ausgebildet, aber in unsicheren Arbeitsverhältnissen— Sch (...)
  • 5 See title of the symposium and publication Modern Art: Who Cares? (1999) and Contemporary Art: Who (...)

5Even though conservators are predominantly women4 and current remuneration practices do not reflect the professional qualifications or the amount of practical and scholarly training required, the concept of care has only recently been linked to conservation.5 And yet, thinking about care can help us get closer to answering the question of who are we conserving art for?

6Understanding contemporary art can be challenging, and so the concept of care, within the context of twenty-first-century conservation practices, must not only address the material attributes of the artifact but the ideas behind it. Grasping the artistic intent or idea is significant in that it contributes to the artifact’s effect on the respective recipient, the “cultural beneficiary” mentioned earlier. Implicit in this approach is a recognition of the social function of both art and conservation, even though the ownership, or rather accessibility, of most cultural assets is often quite arbitrary. We should not underestimate how significantly the distribution of property—both past and present—has influenced the creation of many artifacts, often safeguarding them from destruction or neglect. The history of wartime plunder is also a complex matter. During the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, European society underwent a transformation, leading to the rise of the middle class, an event that played a decisive role in our modern-day understanding of culture and hence the field of conservation, too.

  • 6 Exemplified by Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades.
  • 7 I owe these references to an exchange of ideas with social and political scientist Holger Stoltenbe (...)

7One crucial aspect is the material focus which has predominated ever since, although European art already began questioning this hierarchy in the early twentieth century, often in exceedingly provocative ways.6 Here the influence of foreign cultures, with which European artists came into contact due to colonization, most certainly had an impact. But after the art market replaced the traditional system of patronal commissions, the perception of cultural assets shifted to a primarily commercial standpoint, a situation that persists to this day. In its global activities, the art market also applies commercial rules, a practice that further encourages material-based thinking. The market, or rather a market-oriented society, does not register the intrinsic value of a cultural asset. Put crudely, the market deals in art without knowing what it is dealing with. When considered from a systems theoretical perspective, the market cannot, however, be blamed for not understanding what it is dealing with. Profit and property are its only guiding principles; its code is determined by having or not having. Such alternative guiding principles as aesthetic discernment or cultural value judgments on whether something is beautiful or not beautiful, moving or repulsive are of no concern to the market.7 Many recipients of culture are consequently far less concerned with aesthetics, which is linked to ethics, than the prestige bestowed by the ownership of art. The ideal outcome, from this perspective, is to combine the influence derived from this prestige with commercial interests, as exemplified in the German postwar period by the collector Peter Ludwig. Once the commercial goal has been achieved, private collectors are often inclined to make their cultural assets available to the public, and in doing so, they usually transfer the maintenance costs to the public institutions providing people with access to the works.

8This set of circumstances overlaps quite neatly with historical developments since industrialization, but most likely coincide with earlier contexts as well, insofar as there was a connection to tools or engineering. The value of a tool was associated with care, because its usefulness to people was of primary importance, making it correspondingly valuable and expensive, because of its social and economic impact. This is why tools were repaired rather than discarded. In every culture known to me, this level of appreciation led people to see everyday objects and the tools needed to make them as animate objects with a spirit of their own. This remains a common practice in many cultures, and some semblance thereof even survives in the West, when laying the cornerstone of a building, for instance, or blessing a house. It was a way of establishing a respectful relationship with objects.

9Technological innovations generate emotional responses. As a rule, they are initially met with euphoria and unreasonably high expectations, but inevitably lead to disappointment. Through practical experience, these emotional responses eventually settle into more reasonable attitudes, although these are often linked to a dependence on the by-now familiar technology.

  • 8 Teju Cole, Every Day Is For The Thief, Nigeria 2007.

10Industrialization ushered in the era of mass production and with it the feeling that we should care for objects diminished. Today’s throwaway culture seems to have completely abandoned the notion of care, except when it upholds the market value of an apparently lucrative high-end item. Just as people are seen as “human resources,” objects are now seen as resources that are there for the taking and are plundered. In the words of Teju Cole, “every day is for the thief”—an expression that applies not only to Nigeria.8

  • 9 See, for example, the CiNC conference of the conservation department at the Nationalmuseet, Conserv (...)

11Given the decisive significance of these historical developments for the field of conservation, it is worth exploring them a little further. Let’s begin by examining some of the sociocultural characteristics of the nineteenth century that are relevant to the twenty-first century, to the extent that they provide the basis for the writings on twentieth-century conservation theory that are available to us. The current “rediscovery” of the nineteenth century in the history and theory of conservation9 and the art market validates this approach.

Impact of Industrialization on Conservation

  • 10 Sir Charles Lock Eastlake PRA (November 17, 1793 in Plymouth–December 24, 1865 in Pisa) was an Engl (...)
  • 11 Contributions to the Literature of the Fine Arts by Sir Charles Lock Eastlake, with a memoir compil (...)
  • 12 Two examples of many: 1852 founding of the South Kensington Museum (now Victoria & Albert Museum, L (...)
  • 13 See Peter Gay, Das Zeitalter des Doktor Arthur Schnitzler, Frankfurt 2002, pp. 293f.

12In 1870, Lady Eastlake10 wrote the following in her husband’s memoirs: “The patronage which had been almost exclusively the privilege of the nobility and higher gentry, was now shared (to be subsequently almost engrossed) by a wealthy and intelligent class, chiefly enriched by commerce and trade.”11 Throughout Europe as well as in the United States, art museums opened to cater to this new clientele, salons emerged to encourage the exchange of ideas and cultivate learning, and educational institutions like art academies also flourished.12 This was true in all of the arts—music, for example, saw the rise of the concert hall—and the aim of these new institutions was to cultivate the aesthetic sensibilities of a new middle class whose wealth came from commerce and trade. These social innovations also saw the rise of other entities, such as friends or members clubs of a particular museum, orchestra, or theater company, or trade publications dedicated to culture. Certain professions—critics, museum staff, and others—evolved in response to the new needs growing out of this social transformation. The idea of “artistic taste,” as expressed in ideals of beauty and refinement, came to be seen as an essential component, not just of middle-class taste, but of middle-class morals13—which in turn undoubtedly still shapes our understanding of conservation today.

13From today’s standpoint, what could be described as a “democratization” of art’s reception and appreciation had the undeniably positive effect of generating an overall respect and emotional esteem for cultural assets, perhaps because the newly emerging middle class modelled its aesthetic sensibilities on the nobility. Hence the nineteenth-century interest in and efforts around culture seem to have had a significantly more solid ethical motivation than today. Underwriting all of these innovations was the advantageous economic situation in Europe, where industrialization and its reverberations—the even more lucrative business of colonization for instance—brought about an expansion of wealth, allowing for heretofore unseen accumulations of capital.

  • 14 For example, the Salon des Refusés in Paris 1863.

14At the same time, the invention of photography set in motion a liberation of the visual arts, now freed from the faithful reproduction of nature, bringing about significant changes in the social position of visual artists. This process would ultimately lead to artistic independence as we understand it today. The initial discussion about whether photography was an artistic medium and the current discussion about its mutant offspring—video and digital media—are born from this context. These new independent artists soon lashed out at the “banality” of the era’s public cultural institutions and opened their own self-sufficient counter-institutions, often with the help of their galleries and art dealers.14

  • 15 Art and Anarchy, 1963, chapter “Art & the Will,” p. 83: “If they found time to battle with the arti (...)
  • 16 Vogue Germany, interview 2/2015, p. 195.

15This independence, however, can also be seen in a negative light. The art historian and philosopher Edgar Wind (1900–1971) vividly describes the profound and lively relationship between, for instance, a Renaissance artist and his patron. This closeness was due to the fact that “art was as indispensable to them [the Renaissance patrons] as their daily food: they could not live without it.”15 According to Wind, having to negotiate and defend artistic choices while communicating with their patron encouraged artists to strive for greater quality in their work. Nowadays, buyers can select from a wide offering of finished artworks, inspiring a certain indifference, as pieces can be chosen much like any other kind of consumer product. If we follow this line of reasoning, the relationship between artist and spectator has shifted from an intense communication with an individual patron prior to the Industrial Revolution to the public edification of municipal institutions in the nineteenth century to a supply-dependent distribution through the market in our current cultural environment. In the view of architect Annabelle Selldorf, what determines today’s commissioning market is entertainment: “The desire to be entertained has trumped all other demands so that nothing matters but this: if architecture can’t be built as a bubble that’s going to burst, no one is interested anymore.”16

16Wind already observed how collectors who dispense with active, intellectually challenging patronage, who do not commission works or engage in discussions during their execution, deprive themselves of the chance to participate in the creation of exceptional art. This begs the question as to why today’s sponsors of the art world no longer consider a deep engagement with art, as described by Wind, as necessary for art’s survival and their own. The fact that they don’t is a sign of an underlying lack of responsibility in regard to cultural assets in general. In the twentieth century, collectors (see the aforementioned example of Peter Ludwig) happily transferred the burden of care, and the conservation-related attention that went with it, to museums—in other words, to the public. They had come to see themselves as the hunter-gatherers, or rather “hunter-collectors,” of culture more than as caretakers in a humanist tradition whose sense of responsibility extended to the protection and conservation of cultural artifacts. This might be related to the development of democracies in Europe. During the nineteenth century, in response to the aforementioned popular interest in cultural heritage, the state began assuming responsibility for the care of cultural assets and making them accessible to people through public institutions like museums. In Europe, we are currently heading in the opposite direction, rolling back many of these developments, and cultural institutions are increasingly reliant on the financial support of sponsors, which inevitably curtails their independence. This has had the unfortunate consequence of generally diminishing any sense of responsibility for the collections in favor of advertising potential through exhibition activities aimed at, among other things, a thriving tourism industry.

The Commodification of Art: A Modern Reality

  • 17 Exemplified by objects with cult status, for example, the Mona Lisa.
  • 18 German example: the Werner Spies affair in the Beltracchi scandal; by-product: overabundance of cur (...)

17During the twentieth century, the European art market evolved into what it is today, a way for collectors to advance their social standing and potentially increase their financial return through expert knowledge. The art historian Bernard Berenson played a decisive role in this historical development. Together with the English art dealer Joseph Duveen, he knew how to substantially raise the prices of European masterpieces by effectively finding a better market for them and selling them overseas. They both assisted wealthy but inexperienced US collectors in obtaining expert-certified artworks. This use of commercial connoisseurship is still standard practice in the art market today and draws on the Romantic idea of artistic genius that flourished in the nineteenth century. The gift of genius was itself seen as a kind of constant from one art movement to the next and provided a stable standard by which to measure works within an artist’s oeuvre, with certain works—as feats of perfected optimization—displaying the hallmark of accomplished genius more than others. This stable gold standard provided a permanent frame of reference,17 ensuring that the artwork could be conserved or even restored and increase in commercial value without complications. Despite the fluctuating consumer preferences of the art market, the Berenson tradition remains valid as far as old art is concerned, although sales are now mostly made through auction houses rather than dealers. Regrettably, the world of today’s professional art experts and critics is often plagued by inflationary rhetoric18 steeped in aggrandizement and promotion of product and self. Little remains of the intellectual flourishing that studious historical inquiry attained in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, and the high social status it still enjoyed in the twentieth century.

  • 19 For example, the Abstract Expressionists, especially the writings of Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhard (...)
  • 20 Edgar Wind, Art & Anarchy: The Reith Lectures 1960, Revised and Enlarged, Including Addenda, New Yo (...)

18Whereas the nineteenth century was one of European technological and territorial conquest, the twentieth century can be described as one of loss. This finds reflection in Dada and Surrealism, visual demonstrations of a deep sense of disorientation. In Europe, two world wars brought cultural developments to a halt, giving American art a chance to establish its own ideational contents19 in response to the European loss of values. After the Second World War in particular, European art sought to reinvent itself through abstraction. It is therefore evident that a scarcity of financial resources was not the only reason why the importance of “the concept” gained ground in the twentieth century, relegating the art-making material to a secondary position. In this respect Edgar Wind identified an “uncanny affinity” between pure art and the standards of mechanization.20 Regard for material and awareness of traditional craftsmanship are in persistent decline, a trend that remains relevant in the visual arts in terms of longevity and resilience— not least of all because our socioeconomic focus since the Industrial Revolution has been driven by the twin forces of rapid change and mass production. Analogies to the behavior of the stock market, to the discrepancy between real value and speculation, become hard to ignore.

  • 21 Article by Nina Quabeck about the working process of the Scheidemann conservation studio in New Yor (...)

19Contemporary art is often as ephemeral as the material environment of our era: conditions, shifting at warp speed, must be adapted to constant change, even in a statu nascendi. Given the global nature of the art market, this can only be done through transdisciplinary actions. Complicating matters further is the fact that many people have to relocate frequently, a direct consequence of globalization and the overall restructuring of work into a string of projects of varying lengths. In addition, the duration of projects is financially oriented, and hence shorter, adding to the appeal of a faster and therefore often one-sided working process.21

20In fact, the academic project-contingent migration already began in the twentieth century. The pressure to constantly adapt to change has resulted in a general sense of disorientation, of feeling lost, not only among people forced to move from job to job and other nomads (regardless of whether they migrate out of concern for their safety or to find work), but also among consumers lost in a steady stream of ever-changing products. Art is capable of expressing these conditions very well. It, too, is shaped by material transience and sudden shifts in reception and appreciation, notably reflected in the wide palette of artistic offerings in terms of styles and media, market values, and turnover.

21Contemporary artists who operate on a global level draw on a wide spectrum of media, actions, and intentions in their work, and the question of how these should be treated is becoming increasingly problematic. In light of this, conservators have come to recognize that traditional theoretical approaches that seem self-evident to Europeans may not only fail to solve certain problems, but may even generate conflict. Only recently has this led to an awareness that the commercially oriented considerations which grew out of the aforementioned nineteenth-century European tradition cannot be applied to foreign cultural contexts without careful deliberation, and even their application in our own globalized era is quite limited.

22The problems with how to treat process-based art also reveal the pitfalls of static professional models. This becomes especially clear when considering the challenges of systematic procedures—documentation, for instance—which are only effective in traditional Western art, or rather this is the only field where they can be adapted to an ever-changing information landscape. A one-sided or rigid theory therefore fails to satisfy the present-day conditions of a mercurial and process-conscious life. Underlying the demands on conservation is a deeply human desire to find a foundation within our own culture and to engage on an intellectual and emotional level with other cultures. The idea of things being conservable presupposes, however, stability, a notion that stands in contradiction to the swiftly changing circumstances of modern-day life and its value systems.

The Necessity of Trandisciplinarity

  • 22 Paradoxically, the destruction of cultural assets perpetrated by Islamic State (IS) is influenced b (...)

23Observing the changing preferences of the market, it becomes apparent that the reception of art is bound to its own time, even when looking back on past artifacts, not unlike the habitually self-referential world of fashion. Hence we must reflect on our own foundations and, if necessary, adapt traditional modes of thinking to a new frame of mind. Considering the complexity of this task, the need for inter- and transdisciplinary approaches is self-evident. For cultural assets to have their effect, in accordance with today’s flexible and nomadic labor conditions and their analogous migratory movements, it is important that we build a global intercultural understanding in a way that does not diminish the respect for the specific attributes of each individual culture. Here it is worth noting that the museological and material-oriented approach, customary in Europe since the nineteenth century, hasn’t always been the most respectful.22

  • 23 Wind 1968 (see note 21), lecture 6 “Art and the Will,” p.84: “Even the state has become a timid pat (...)

24A critical examination of the underlying reasons for previous migrations, and of historical expansion policies, as exemplified, for instance, by the colonial ambitions of the nineteenth century, could be invaluable for our present-day understanding of conservation-restoration. The impact on people in the nineteenth century of technologically driven changes in living conditions and social structures was likely as momentous as the shift toward a globally digital world is on our lives today. At any rate, these transformations could, as Edgar Wind describes, trigger a response of fear.23 He refers to Schiller’s letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in which the latter describes, as early as the 1790s and after the sobering experience of the French Revolution, the disintegration and fragmentation of the modern individual. Schiller vividly shows how:

  • 24 Letter V (English translation of Schiller from On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Reginald S (...)
  • 25 Letter VI.

25The fear of loss stifles even the burning impulses towards improvement, and the maxim of passive obedience passes for the supreme wisdom of life.24 […] the growing divide between the classes, the separation of reason and sentiment—all of this tore the inner bond of human nature apart […]. It was culture itself that inflicted this wound upon modern humanity. The intuitive and the speculative understanding took up hostile attitudes upon their respective fields [until] the lifeless letter [today we might say “digital information”] takes the place of the living understanding, and a practiced memory is a surer guide than genius and feeling.25

  • 26 Letter II.

26In an earlier letter, Schiller writes: “Utility is the great idol of the age, to which all powers must do service and all talents swear allegiance. In these clumsy scales the spiritual service of Art has no weight; deprived of all encouragement, she flees from the noisy mart of our century.”26 These dispiriting words have lost none of their relevance today.

Impact of Languages on theories

  • 27 Famously epitomized by the cleaning controversy of the 1960s caused by Helmut Ruheman’s varnish rem (...)

27It would therefore seem to be a legitimate assumption that an understanding of de facto current social and political structures would allow us to adapt a “classic” conservation theory to meet today’s “flexible and dynamic” social needs and make it easily comprehensible and possibly feasible in the long term. Devising an entirely new theory seems implausible given the fact that historical developments cannot be ignored when building a theory. The basic concept of conservation was and still is a constant process of synthesizing or finding a better balance between here and there, one and the other, then and now, even if there were,27 and probably always will be, dialectical situations.

  • 28 For example, a general lack of non-English technical literature in the book Contemporary Conservati (...)

28The dialectics of conservation have been “concealed” in recent years, for one because English became the dominant language at international bodies like ICOM and others, after the political fault lines between East and West softened and Western Europe opened up to its Eastern neighbours. As a regrettable consequence, non-English scholarly and technical literature, although not ignored completely, often receives scant attention.28 Yet it is a particularly interesting fact that the link between neoliberalism and conservation in the postwar period was most prominently addressed in the Western European German-speaking world. Obviously the student protests and hippie movement also had an influence, but their impact on conservation was not as direct as the media hype would have one believe.

29Paolo Cadorin (Venice–Basel) and Heinz Althöfer (Düsseldorf), for example, were the founding fathers of the ICOM-CC working groups Modern Art and Theory and History of Conservation. During the 1972 ICOM conference in Madrid, most of the speakers in both groups were focused on the subject of conserving twentieth-century art. This included a famous talk by Wolfgang Hahn, who was not only the head of conservation at the future Sammlung Ludwig, but himself an important collector of contemporary art at the time and an adviser to Peter Ludwig in his collecting activities, which extended beyond what was then the border between Eastern and Western Europe. The annual Wolfgang Hahn Prize awarded by the Museum Ludwig honors his influential legacy to this day.

30From the moment he joined the Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, Heinz Althöfer was in close contact with the likes of Bertold Beitz and Gabriele Henkel, industrialists reaping the benefits of North Rhine-Westphalia’s then-booming economy and avid supporters of culture. These ties gave the Restaurierungszentrum Düsseldorf—Schenkung Henkel its independence, while the first German project for the conservation of modern and contemporary art owed its launch in 1978 to Althöfer’s contacts at the sponsors of the Stiftung Volkswagenwerk.

  • 29 The infamous cleaning of large-scale paintings by Margaret M. Watherston, The Cleaning of Color Fie (...)
  • 30 Especially noteworthy in this context is how Althöfer engaged with Hans Jonas’s philosophy of respo (...)

31Indicative of West-German conservators of postwar modern art was how they followed the US sponsorship model, as befitting the political circumstances, but they diverged from their American colleagues on one important point: In contrast to the naive view of conservation being the refreshing of appearance,29 prevalent in the US at the time, West-German conservators also tried to tackle the problems of twentieth-century art conservation from a theoretical perspective30 and to systematically work through them.

  • 31 His archive (artemak) of the techniques and art-making materials of contemporary artists was founde (...)
  • 32 First publication of a systematic survey and mathematical evaluation of data on modern art and the (...)
  • 33 For example, Monika Wagner’s research with a more art-historical focus in Das Material der Kunst: E (...)

32In this respect, the early data collections of Erich Gantzert-Castrillo31 and the Düsseldorfer Restaurierungszentrum32 provided a model for subsequent scholarship and conservation practice.33 These postwar pioneers of West German conservation contributed to creating a public awareness of the importance of artistic intent as expressed through material and medium. The reasons for this were often banal, such as the scandal surrounding the cleaning of Beuys’s bathtub which, once scrubbed clean, was mistakenly used to wash glasses during an event. What is interesting from a historical standpoint is that most of the art’s recipients, blinded by rapid economic growth, did not grasp the overt references in the work of postwar artists calling for a cultural rebirth after the war. This can be seen in the many similar “misunderstandings” that occurred at the time, even among curators. In such cases, conservators, with their knowledge of materials, were often needed and sought out as advisers in legal matters.

  • 34 1925–1988, university professor from 1965.
  • 35 One practical outcome of these efforts was Imdahl’s acceptance of the author as a doctoral student (...)
  • 36 Serra married one of Imdahl’s doctoral students, Clara Weyergraf.

33In art history, only one German expert on art theory represented analogous tendencies during the postwar period: Max Imdahl,34 the first renowned expert in the field who actively engaged with contemporary art. At the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, he carried out in-depth studies of, among other things, American Abstract Expressionism. Althöfer sought him out, because as someone with a PhD in art history, he was heavily invested in establishing a university degree in art conservation, which he was ultimately unable to see through on an administrative level.35 Imdahl was also in close and regular contact with artists and galleries, such as galerie m in Bochum, one of the first to represent American artists like Richard Serra36 in Europe. Both Max Imdahl and Heinz Althöfer exerted a significant influence on the intellectual development of West German gallerists at the time (such as Schmela of Düsseldorf or Berswordt-Wallrabe of Bochum).

34These insights into West German “postwar conservation” show how worthwhile it is to include social economics and political science when conducting research into current conservation-theoretical questions. After all, the situation we face today not only depends on past socio-political circumstances but those of the present as well. Even a rebirth is inescapably bound to its own history. As a profession, conservation clearly benefitted from the postwar economic boom in what was then West Germany, but this did not translate, in any official capacity, into the social recognition it deserved, given the education and training required—a recognition it was more likely to receive in East Germany. The lack of a firmly established administrative foundation and its accompanying legal protections means the profession has been especially hard hit by the general dismantling of education and culture in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

Towards a Reevaluation of Conservation Practices

  • 37 For instance, the technical description and treatment of material.
  • 38 M. Posner, M.K. Rothbart, B.E. Sheese, and J. Kieras, How Arts Training Influences Cognition, Unive (...)

35Many conservators would like to see a deliberate expansion of how the profession is presently conceived, extending beyond the current market-oriented conservation of material toward communication—in Schiller’s words, an “aesthetic education,” which in today’s context could be called an aesthetic communication between cultures operating on a global level. The unfamiliar, unknown, foreign, and incomprehensible residing within a cultural asset can be grasped in a material sense, understood as an idea, but is often too complex for a verbal interpretation alone. Conservation is uniquely positioned to provide a visual and sensuous explanation, employing the tools of knowledge communication37 at its disposal to transmit cultural understanding. After all, neurological studies show that learning through art exerts a positive influence on our intellectual capacity.38

36In the past, politics revolved around clearly identifiable figures, but when this gave way to democratic collectives, the possibility of directing praise or criticism at the individual responsible for cultural decision-making was lost. Both the democratically elected representatives of political parties and the multinationals behind the lobbyists are elusive, almost impossible to apprehend and be held accountable. On the one hand, this is due to the fact that areas of responsibility are decentralized to respond to rapidly changing circumstances, and on the other, to the fact of the anonymity accorded by large corporations. Accountability is equally elusive in professions dedicated to cultural communication. They, too, are populated with career “nomads” who have to move from one project to the next, a situation that seems at odds with the idea of sustainable, long-term care of cultural heritage.

37We find parallel developments in the area of production techniques: as far as artifacts are concerned, it means that the technical aspects of production are no longer dependent on craftsmanship, and products are therefore no longer assessed on the basis of physical human skills. Also of great significance is how global migrations from rural to urban settings—which could be described as breeding grounds for environmental and social problems—have eroded our ties to local traditions. In short, the communication between “archaic” cultural customs and new technocratic living conditions has all but broken down in every sphere of life; they face each other, equally unprepared to contend with the other. While information technology and trade might be bringing our global village closer together, we remain mentally disconnected, alienated in our understanding of one another.

38We can draw parallels between the development of the middle class in the nineteenth century and the global nomads of today. Achieving the social and cultural integration of this “new class” (to borrow a term from Lady Eastlake) of the twenty-first century will require globally effective innovation in each respective local educational system. In this context, the most important task of modern-day conservation is intercultural communication, even if this hasn’t been politically recognized (yet). If we are to accomplish this task, however, we must first recognize and acknowledge the reasons for the sense of disorientation that prevails within our own and other cultures and address this in a transdisciplinary manner. Here is another area where conservation can make a significant contribution as long as the appropriate funding and mutual professional respect are in place to guarantee this broad-ranging approach. The clues as to how to bring this about lie in examining the evolution of art in relation to the aforementioned points.

39The unsatisfactory sociocultural conditions of our time become especially clear in art. Whereas in the past, art was meant to inform and communicate between the patron or donor and the target group, in the era of the independent artist, its role is increasingly polarized, with indifferent decoration on one side, and at times unsparing social critique on the other. Both of these goals share a common trait, namely a lack of respect for material attributes: little regard is given to the craft component of traditional production and its values, as reflected in how obscure they have become to most. New materials and media change their attributes too quickly to ever evolve beyond experimental applications. As a result, the artworks and cultural artifacts display an instability consistent with the instability of our sociocultural conditions. The global resurgence of fundamentalist tendencies can thus be seen as a symptom of a fear-riddled hysteria, with brutal kitsch as the visual signature of its spread. Worth considering in this context is an interesting aspect of dementia. At certain stages of the disease, people experience exaggerated emotional states trigged by fear, and one way of alleviating them is through memory. If we wish to save our age from producing cultural artifacts of forgetting and loss, we must bring greater stability to our memory studies, an area where conservation can make invaluable contributions. Chief among the tasks would be to “restore” an understanding of emotional cultural values and develop an awareness of their role as stabilizing agents. The legitimacy of the discipline of conservation can only be guaranteed if cultural assets are seen as more than material objects of commercial value.

  • 39 Briefly summarized and explained by Ernst Bacher in Riegel 1995 (see note 2).
  • 40 Alois Riegl, “Der moderne Denkmalkultus,” in Alois Riegl Gesammelte Aufsätze, Vienna 1996, p. 177
  • 41 Ibid., p. 150.
  • 42 Alois Riegl, “Die Stimmung als Inhalt der modernen Kunst,” p. 35 (published in English as “Mood As (...)

40Alois Riegl’s value system, with its categories of “memory values” and “present-day values,”39 continues to provide us, or rather provides us once again with references to do so. His thoughts on mood (Stimmung) are especially valuable in terms of global communication and understanding: “The normative […] seems incompatible with the arbitrary subjectivity of the modern craving for mood [the age of the Stimmungsmensch].”40 Riegl (1858–1905) observed “an emancipation of the individual” that began at the end of the eighteenth century, a societal shift that, “from the late nineteenth century onwards, gradually set out to replace […] the foundations of classical education with ones of a very different nature, at least in a number of highly cultured European nations.” This shift is marked by “a characteristically relentless pursuit of understanding every physical and mental experience not in its objective essence […] but in its subjective appearance; in other words, in the effect it has […] on the subject.”41 Elsewhere he goes on to say: “It is true that mood has generally constituted the final goal of all recent art since the end of the Renaissance. […] At the center of [modern] artistic production is no longer the human being, but rather the whole breadth of nature, in whose midst the artist moves.”42

41Today, contemporary urban art forms like graffiti are among the most typical representatives of this mood-effect (Stimmungswirkung). Graffiti has managed to grow from a subculture to a global urban phenomenon, constituting, in a Rieglian sense, a modern form of worldwide folk art, from and for the person on the street. When comparing international “informational exhibitions” such as the Venice Biennale of 2013 and 2015 with spontaneous street art, we see how a critique of current failings in refugee policy, climate indifference, the treatment of species, et cetera are dominant themes in both presentation formats. And yet in the respective “mood value” (Stimmungswert) of each “presentation site,” the discrepancy is enormous.

42Aspects pertaining to the assessment of art, as determined by Riegl, have receded into the background of theoretical considerations, perhaps because process-based art forms are “untouchable” and often literally beyond the grasp of general understanding and conservation concerns. This might also be due to the wartime propaganda function assigned to certain European art and the tendency toward abstraction that informed art-making during the period after the Second World War.

  • 43 In “Movement to Another Place: Cultural Expressions on Migration as Source of Reflection Contributi (...)
  • 44 Wind 1968 (see note 21), p. 50.
  • 45 Michael Köhlmeier, Zwei Herren am Strand, 2014 (published in English as Two Gentlemen on the Beach, (...)

43As Slobodan Dan Paich43 accurately observed, at a certain point abstraction loses the connection to its source and becomes mere reduction. When it does so, art runs the risk of turning into a cliché, with truisms in place of thought. Edgar Winds’s reflections confirm this thesis: according to him communicating knowledge through art can be classified as a form of “flight” or rather “artistic weakness,” because it “substitutes intellect for imagination.” This is true in the case of many contemporary artworks: an overwhelming amount of information exhausts itself in superficial critique and sentimental condemnation. On the other hand, Wind also considers “flight from knowledge” in art a weakness, because “it assumes that the artist’s imagination has not sufficient vigor to respond actively to the pressure of thought.”44 This is reflected in the repetition of contemporary abstract currents whose intent is limited to the purely decorative and makes no intellectual demands on the spectator. Both weaknesses confront the conservator with the same problem: whether to consciously or unconsciously underscore or gloss over the flaw in question. In Michael Köhlmeier’s novel Two Gentlemen on the Beach, the English Prime Minister Winston Churchill, unknown as a painter to most, makes an interesting assertion in this regard when he remarks to his private secretary William Knott: “It takes a good deal of courage to paint a faithful figurative picture! Abstraction is mere cowardice, it is the artist falling to his knees before transience, it is the recognition of the senselessness in the eternal flow of cause and effect.”45

  • 46 See artist writings, for example Gerhard Richter, Texte 1961 bis 2007, Cologne 2008.

44What speaks for there being a sea change under way in art—usually a sign of a general realignment of thinking—is the narrative nature of much contemporary art and a global trend toward storytelling. The abstract tendencies of the twentieth century no longer seem to satisfy the social needs of the present and were likely born, at least in part, from the hope that a fresh ideological start would offer a way of overcoming traumatic experiences.46 Stories are more “fluid” than abstractions and concepts. One only need think of fables and fairy-tales to see that they have always been adapted to their respective time and place. Furthermore, stories offer the possibility of integrating contemporary components and eliminating once-popular but now-dated elements or adapting them to speak of the present day—actions which are not available in reductive systems like abstraction. Although exhibition venues and the art market still celebrate living postwar artists, the trend toward narrative works is indicative of “young” art.

45In contrast to the art of the nineteenth century, these new art narratives often appear patchwork-like, much like modern life itself. Through the combination of word-image-sound, multimediality can create far more impactful “mood impressions” (Stimmungseindrücke) than a single medium. Understanding this artistic constellation from a conservation perspective often demands inter- and transdisciplinary approaches. Here the potential of digitalization is enormous as far as the exchange and communication of information are concerned.

46One pitfall of multimediality is the possible descent into chaos and kitsch in the absence of meaning, or rather if the mediums are not successfully balanced and, as such, fail to clearly communicate their content. Perhaps it is a sign of the times that the “emptying of meaning through the quantity of information mediums” is a feature of many contemporary artworks. Certainly this is one reason why curation seems necessary, because when multimediality, an amassing of objects, and so forth, presents too much information, the effect is not all that different from overly reduced abstraction with too little information: both can be filled with equally arbitrary contents. There are palpable parallels between what is shown in contemporary exhibitions and the impasse of nineteenth-century academization.

47These artistic shortcomings confront conservators with increasingly difficult tasks: clearly the quantitative nature of production is devouring the qualitative notion of care, and the manner in which abstract works emptied of meaning are susceptible to ageing constitutes an unresolvable problem. After all, we wouldn’t want to equate signs of ageing with sentimentality, as is done in the case of Mondrian. And yet this bipolarity in the arts is a stark reflection of the general inadequacies of contemporary culture, namely the imbalance, pervasive in all areas, between what is meaningful and what is meaningless.

  • 47 On his website www.ryosart.de the artist explains his objective as follows: “I want to speak to peo (...)

48In painting, an example of new narrative art is the work of Japanese artist Ryo Kato. In terms of material techniques, his pictures are traditional. They derive their content from elements of contemporary life, assembled and contemplated on the canvas. Formally they often allude to a youthful colloquial language like graffiti, full of visual references with hard, strongly contoured corners and edges. The colors are very bright, energetic, even aggressive, with the occasional humorous touch. The titles refer to current issues; the production process is meditative, according to the artist. By combining traditional painting and production techniques with contemporary form and content, these works have greater chances of material survival than many artistic creations of the past 100 years, representing a trend toward stability47 that is very promising, not only for the field of conservation. On the whole, Western artists are notably the least skilled when it comes to traditional techniques.

  • 48 Examples of this type of cultural understanding can be found in Japan, for instance, ikebana, sado (...)

49The possibility of combining tradition and contemporaneity may come more naturally to Asian cultures, paradoxically, perhaps, because the fixation on the original material is not as strong. When the content is too firmly embedded in the material, it can lead to an over-exaltation of the latter, a material fetishization, so to speak, leaving the material a substitute for content. Several cultures still perceive artifacts as so imbued with life that a material substitution does not result in any loss of content. In an inversion of Western thought, the content is so stable that it does not require the original material to be experienced respectfully. This means the material can be substituted or updated48 without losing content, as is common practice in many cultures. That being said, the continuity of a traditional artifact’s functional life is only made possible by a conscious sensibility for material characteristics, because these are linked to cultural content and values.

  • 49 Köhlmeier 2014/2016 (see note 46).

50The efforts of many twentieth-century Western artists to free the idea from its material shackles have not succeeded in respecting cultural traditions. This is unsurprising given the fact that in many places any semblance of cultural continuity was disrupted by two world wars, as corroborated by Churchill’s insight: “Theory always plays catch up. In art just as in politics.”49 Dada and Surrealism reveal the profound sense of disorientation in the wake of the First World War. Political events rendered the ideals of Constructivism, Bauhaus, and De Stijl obsolete. The gestural-kinetic styles after the Second World War, like Art Informel and ZERO, display both temperamental outbursts of frustration and the desire to forget by embracing the new, characterized by the frequent use of white in the choice of palette. When considering all of these art movements, it becomes clear that after the world wars much of Europe lost its sense of cultural continuity and, with it, the possibility of transcending the material, a situation that is still true today.

  • 50 The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Age (...)
  • 51 Mutiny Amid Repression: Russian Soldiers in the Revolution of 1905-1906,
  • 52 Arno Gruen, Wider den Terrorismus, Stuttgart 2015.
  • 53 Quoted in “Eine unlustige Komödie,” Vogue Germany, 2/2015 p. 179.
  • 54 Ibid., p. 178.
  • 55 Elias Bierdel and Maximilian Lakitsch, “Aggressiver Humanismus. Von der Unfähigkeit der Demokratie, (...)

51Historians like Norman Cohn, in his reflections on the Middle Ages,50 John Bushnell on the period 1905–1906,51 and psychologists like Arno Gruen who study current trends in terrorism52 have shown how cultural discontinuity and the resulting disorientation have always had catastrophic consequences. After two world wars, it is therefore only logical that materiality would have acquired an alarming dominance over humanity in modern-day Europe. A statement by Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu, in reference to his film Birdman, illustrates this: “All of us are more than aware that art has practically become a real-estate business, with a lot of people manipulating the market. It’s a shame, but it’s been that way for a long time.”53 He comes to the conclusion that “identity is a huge mess today, because we have no idea who we are anymore.”54 More active forms of criticism also exist—presented, for example, in Germany in the magazine Ciciero including the actions of the Center for Political Beauty. Their representatives see themselves as the “most innovative incubators of political action art,” and the Centerstands for an expanded form of theater: art needs to hurt, irritate, put up resistance.” The result is a conceptual alliance: “aggressive humanism.”55 Such an overtly political conception of art is constrained by its moralizing foundation and hence questionable, but it does clearly indicate the human inadequacies of our current democratic practice.

52Global trade and information exchange might loosen cultural differences between nations, continents, and political convictions, but they still denote separate poles, and finding a balance between them is necessary, not only in the line of art conservation. When a society reduces its culture to mere commodities with entertainment value, it has serious consequences for the notion of care. The meaning of any artifact becomes limited to the market value of its material, in the process demoting the social status of professions in the cultural arena, a reality reflected in today’s European job market. In such a situation, a theoretical foundation or an ethical basis for conservation practice is no longer needed. Similar to what we have already observed among experts, connoisseurs, and cultural critics, conservators will also see their profession reduced to a mere promotional role: preserving the material aesthetic of a sellable product.

53On the other hand, new trends in our perception of products—such as recycling or the sharing economy—are starting to compete with the market principles of buying new and chucking the old. There is an affinity between these new approaches and the care principle that underlies conservation practice and goals.

54The cultivation of an aesthetic sensibility—the incentive behind nineteenth-century cultural pursuits—was linked to social relations via commerce and an intellectual educational exchange in which the idea of care, in relation to culture, played a significant role. This was reflected in the public support of the scientific study of history and culture, a flourishing field that reached its intellectual heights at the time and saw the development of systematic, widely accepted scientific methods. Leading figures in the German-speaking world included Wilhelm von Humboldt and, in the arts, Jakob Burckardt and Gottfried Semper. As a rule, education leads to understanding and consequently to a greater openness toward foreigners and strangers. For this reason, it would provide an invaluable complement to the purely economic orientation of modern-day globalization.

55The value of mood (Stimmungswert), as described by Alois Riegl, acquired a negative connotation as a result of its supposed affinity to Second World War propaganda, although this corresponds neither to Riegl’s intentions nor the value he describes. If we set these associations aside, his words have a decidedly contemporary ring in relation to urban subcultures:

  • 56 Loc. cit., p. 144.

56The people’s sense of appreciation for the immense mood-effect [Stimmungswirkung] their monuments could convey has been awakened and grows day by day. […] Even a clash of dissenting opinions […] must be welcomed, because precisely in this awakened desire for everyone to opine on the monument cult, we find the surest sign that this cult is […] in the making, the very thing which would provide the vibrant and confident conservation of monuments with the support it needs: a feeling that everyone can share in.56

  • 57 Letter VIII, 7, Über die Ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, 1793 (published in English as On the A (...)
  • 58 Letter IV.
  • 59 “The business spirit, confined in a monotonous circle of objects, and inside these still further re (...)
  • 60 See, for example, Arno Gruen 2015.

57Here Riegl coincides with Schiller and/or was perhaps influenced by him, because the latter observed that “the way to the head must lie through the heart.”57 In this context, it is worth considering what Schiller said about the importance of art for the convivial exchange of ideas and the idealistic connection he drew between education and art. I believe his essay On the Aesthetic Education of Man can still impart some fundamental ideas about the effect that art has on us. Schiller considers the aesthetic as the only means of overcoming the internal conflict of human nature, because “Reason indeed demands unity, but Nature demands multiplicity, and both systems of legislation lay claim to Man’s obedience.”58 What makes Schiller relevant to our time is his critical examination—indirect but apparent throughout—of the French Revolution, and of how the division of labor and specialization59 lead to human alienation. Modern-day Europe is once again witnessing pre-revolutionary phenomena in the form of growing protests, local and global online petitions, demonstrations, strikes, terrorist acts, to name but a few.60 For this reason, I would like to highlight as succinctly as possible the points Schiller makes that resonate with the goals of conservation.

  • 61 Letter XI.
  • 62 Ibid.

58From a formal standpoint, Schiller’s treatise consists of letters offering moral-philosophical, anthropological, and historical-philosophical reflections. What is interesting from a conservation perspective is Schiller’s definition of the human being as: “something that endures and something that perpetually alters. The enduring it [the abstraction] calls his person, the changing his condition.”61 Time is therefore of particular importance to him: “‘Time is the condition of all becoming, is an identical proposition, for it merely asserts that the result is the condition of something resulting.”62 This insight could be described as the tragic guiding principle of conservation, because it implies irreversibility.

  • 63 Klaus Disselbeck, Geschmack und Kunst, eine systemtheoretische Untersuchung zu Schillers Briefen “Ü (...)

59In the second of his twenty-seven letters, Schiller opens with a critique of his own time when he writes, “Utility is the great idol of the age.” The following passages are excerpts from Geschmack und Kunst, the 2013 study of Schiller by Klaus Disselbeck,63 who I believe summarizes the letters in a way that is well suited to our modern understanding:

  • 64 According to Disselbeck, this thesis is based on Fichte’s transcendental theory of the imagination.

60Schiller defines beauty anew, not as a beauty based on experience, but one which is revealed as a necessary condition of humanity. Kant had described competition as “unsocial sociability” and how the development of the sciences and arts derived from the mutual need to remain competitive. Schiller, on the other hand, sees the aesthetic experience as tertium iungens, insofar as it is a mood which encompasses the entirety of humankind (XXII,1) […] and brings the two opposing tendencies of feeling and thinking together (XVIII, 2).64 According to Schiller, the indifference of beauty unites this duality (XVIII, 4), because beauty does not produce an individual result, neither for the intellect nor for the will (XXI, 4). He called this oscillating in-between state being “at play” [Spiel].

61Culture is tasked with cultivating the capacity to feel and the capacity to reason, and the impulse to play can harmonize the two. In actuality, people never attain this condition fully, because they either lack harmony [scientific knowledge] or energy [impulses]. Between the two lies the aesthetic condition, where passivity and activity, feeling and thought melt into each other.

  • 65 See current findings in psychology, for example, Arno Gruen, Dem Leben Entfremdet: Warum wir wieder (...)

62In Letter XVII, Schiller puts forth a thesis that seems astonishingly relevant to our time. Beauty, he suggests, can restore harmony in the tense person as much as it can energize the relaxed person. It transforms these respective unbalanced and therefore constrained conditions into an absolute, aesthetic condition in which a person becomes one with their nature, whole and complete in themselves.65 Only in this state can freedom be experienced. Most of the time human individuals have a one-sided tendency or dependence, compelled by either feelings or concepts. Letter XVII goes on to describe how beauty guides the sensuous person to form and thought, whereas the intellectual person is brought back to matter, returned to the world of the senses.

  • 66 Disselbeck 2013 (see note 64), pp. 23–24.

63Beauty is therefore a link between the dual conditions of natural impulses and reason, as well as a catalyst for attaining an aesthetic culture. Not bound to any individual purpose, beauty doesn’t find truths or perform duties, but does help the individual to dignity [my italics], the only path to the greatest good of all, personal freedom (XXI). The closest possible approximation to this ideal condition can be achieved through the effect of true art, whose “qualitative assessment” is determined by its liberating effect, that is to say whether it allows the recipient to reach the aesthetic condition (XXII).
An aesthetic condition is hardly possible if physical hardship robs a person of all invigoration or if material overabundance releases them from all personal effort (XXVI).
66

  • 67 “A people who do not preserve their memory are a people who have forfeited their history.” Wole Soy (...)

64Here Schiller describes precisely the profound socioeconomic contrasts of our time and their negative impact. Conservation cannot change socio-political circumstances. But it can attempt to assist artworks in the effect they emit, so that an intercultural or even social approximation between their recipients would be possible. For this to occur, conservators must develop an awareness of existing sociocultural conditions and their historical background67 and let these inform their work to ensure the cultural effect of art as described by Schiller.

  • 68 See Klaus Disselbeck 2013, himself a proponent of a sociological approach, pp. 15f: “Based on his a (...)

65Achieving social approximation through the creative exchange of ideas (Schiller calls this “the conviviality befitting humankind” in the “art of the reciprocal communication of ideas” [Letter XXVII, 10]) is certainly very relevant today, especially in the field of conservation, if we consider such an approximation in a Schillerian sense as an anthropologically informed innovation68 with respect to intercultural understanding. Such a premise would allow us to develop updated, globally effective methods for the relatively young academic discipline of art conservation.

66Furthermore, this would not only uphold the inevitable connection to commerce in the form of a factual and metaphorical “exchange of goods,” but also make an invaluable contribution to attaining the kind of mental stability all cultures in a globalizing world so urgently need.

67If we apply Schiller’s ideas to the field of conservation-restoration, we must acknowledge that the resources developed so far to aid the decision-making process may indeed be useful, but fail to do the complexity of the task justice. They have brought about a situation, in the educational system and elsewhere, in which the planning phase has acquired greater importance than the actual execution, that is to say the possibility of proving theory through practice, which should be a given, is rarely granted. Hence the method comes to resemble stock-market speculation, where hope alone often predetermines the outcome. But when dealing with an actually existing object, which cultural assets happen to be, it is impossible to describe every material characteristic in precise detail—especially when the material is associated with an unknown history, as is often the case—or to predict how every material will react and what its appearance will be after treatment. In light of this and the aforementioned social conditions, I believe it is more important to individually and narratively document our own reflections and motivations during the practical working process.

68At this point I would like to quote my doctoral supervisor, Max Imdahl: “In principle, the question of whether something is art or not art is completely secondary. What matters most is whether it moves me or not.”69 As part of their working process, conservators can and should describe their emotional response to the artwork—how it moves them—and use this to explain their actions rather than focusing exclusively on material-based descriptions. According to Imdahl, artworks possess an immense capacity to transmit an experience, so they generate a more intense and lasting emotional response than other experiences. The artwork thereby acquires greater permanence and preserves its intensity to a greater extent than other sensations. This particular meaning of art should be restored as a cultural priority. Only then can conservation achieve its professional independence or rather (re)gain the respect for its activities, now ceded to external interests.

Conclusion: Restoring Art as Living Heritage

  • 70 Unfortunately, Arnon Grünberg’s popular factum is as true in conservation as elsewhere: “People who (...)

69Having to articulate the formal, media, and material-technical conditions responsible for triggering this emotional response forces conservators to critically examine their own activity. The visual-verbal apprehension of the relationship between our intent and the real problems and effects that arise during our work are far more likely to contribute to a conscious expansion of our own experience than relying on prescribed, artificial constructs70 that release us from any personal reflection. Moreover, we will no longer be able to hold a method responsible for our decisions, and this sense of personal responsibility will also make us more tolerant toward other cultural circumstances. We could call this an aesthetic education in self-learning and personal responsibility—in short, professional independence. This would facilitate interdisciplinary co-operation, or more accurately, make it possible in the first place.

  • 71 Viktor Frankl, Trotzdem Ja zum Leben Sagen, Munich 1988.

70We live in a world where our reality is retouched, creating an illusion that, in Europe, spoils us, but also puts us under pressure: the illusory perfectionism generated by the media and advertising has resulted in a dehumanizing egocentricity that we must urgently do away with, but whose disappearance we fear. In the words of Viktor Frankl: “Suffering belongs to life and yet we have the freedom to decide what we make of it.”71

71Nothing is lost, but everything changes, clearly at an ever-increasing pace. Many artworks aim to make us aware of this fact. Dieter Roth’s process art already provided an exceedingly smell-intensive example of this in the 1960s. Contemporary process-based art runs the risk of ephemerality, and most artists are well aware of this fact. Although their work has slim chances of material survival, they still manage to communicate their intent. In terms of physical ageing, artifacts do so at a varying pace depending on the technique and choice of material. Sometimes the cultural content and function of the artifact survive modification, sometimes they don’t, and sometimes modification gives them a new lease on life, as evidenced in today’s postmodern currents. These are circumstances that conservators cannot change. In light of these limitations on our work, we must acknowledge that reversibility is not the only idea that has proven illusory. Now conservation and prevention are being put to the test as well: insofar as no one knows what the future holds, preventive measures are a shot in the dark, and conservation operates, strictly speaking, on the assumption that existence can be safeguarded, but unfortunately this, too, is an illusion. What therefore distinguishes conservation and restoration is merely a matter of degrees, because in truth everything we do is a form of restoration. But what restoration can in fact do, and has always done, is to awaken awareness. When they have wanted to, conservators, more so than anyone else, have been able to preserve a cultural awareness of artifacts, their past and changed contexts and functions. To this day, the ethics of conservation-restoration are still about visualizing changes in the cultural consciousness, often with the intention of shining a critical light on present transformations.

72I could like to close with a quote that expresses the longing we encounter in all of the arts and which unites their many manifestations regardless of time and place. These words were spoken by Haruki Murakami in Barcelona in 2011:

  • 72 Haruki Murakami, Acceptance Speech, Catalonia International Prize 2011, “As an Unrealistic Dreamer” (...)

73I think it would be fantastic if all of us […] could be “unrealistic dreamers” and create an open “spiritual community” that transcends borders and cultures. I think that would be a good starting point for regeneration, after all the different disasters and the terribly tragic terrorist attacks that we have experienced in recent years. We cannot be afraid of dreaming. We should not let ourselves be trapped by the disaster dogs that present themselves with the names “efficiency” and “convenience.” We need to be “unrealistic dreamers” that move forward with a resolute step. Humans die and disappear. But humanity lives on. It is something that is inherited indefinitely. But above all else, we have to believe in the power of humanity.72

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Notes

1 Carlota Santabárbara Morera, “Conservation of Contemporary Art: A Challenge for the Theory of Critic[al] Restoration?”, Institución Fernando el Católico, URL: https://ifc.dpz.es/recursos/publicaciones/35/83/20conservation.pdf

2 See, for example, Salvador Muñoz Viñas, “Who Is Afraid of Cesare Brandi? Personal Reflections on the Teoria del Restauro,” in CeROART 2015 (Tribute to Roger Marijnissen), URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ceroart/4653

3 See the writings of Iwona Szmelter for some fundamental ideas on the subject.

4 See Christine Kowalski, “Mehr Frauen, gut ausgebildet, aber in unsicheren Arbeitsverhältnissen— Schlechte Aussichten für das Berufsfeld der Restaurierung?” in Restauratoren Handbuch 2014–2015, Munich 2014.

5 See title of the symposium and publication Modern Art: Who Cares? (1999) and Contemporary Art: Who Cares? (2010), both Amsterdam.

6 Exemplified by Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades.

7 I owe these references to an exchange of ideas with social and political scientist Holger Stoltenberg-Lerche.

8 Teju Cole, Every Day Is For The Thief, Nigeria 2007.

9 See, for example, the CiNC conference of the conservation department at the Nationalmuseet, Conservation in the Nineteenth Century, May 2013, or URL: http://ceroart.revues.org/2314: La restauration des oeuvres d’art en Europe entre 1789 et 1815: pratiques, transferts, enjeux. Actes du colloque international tenu à l’Université de Genève en octobre 2010, sous la direction de Noémie Étienne.

10 Sir Charles Lock Eastlake PRA (November 17, 1793 in Plymouth–December 24, 1865 in Pisa) was an English painter, art scholar, and the first director of the National Gallery London.

11 Contributions to the Literature of the Fine Arts by Sir Charles Lock Eastlake, with a memoir compiled by Lady Eastlake, London 1870, p. 147.

12 Two examples of many: 1852 founding of the South Kensington Museum (now Victoria & Albert Museum, London), 1863 founding of the k.k. Österreichisches Museum für Kunst und Industrie (now Museum für angewandte Kunst, Vienna), where Alois Riegl was head of the textile collection from 1885 to 1894.

13 See Peter Gay, Das Zeitalter des Doktor Arthur Schnitzler, Frankfurt 2002, pp. 293f.

14 For example, the Salon des Refusés in Paris 1863.

15 Art and Anarchy, 1963, chapter “Art & the Will,” p. 83: “If they found time to battle with the artists and bend them to their will, it was because art was as indispensable to them as their daily food: they could not live without it.”

16 Vogue Germany, interview 2/2015, p. 195.

17 Exemplified by objects with cult status, for example, the Mona Lisa.

18 German example: the Werner Spies affair in the Beltracchi scandal; by-product: overabundance of curatorial projects.

19 For example, the Abstract Expressionists, especially the writings of Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt.

20 Edgar Wind, Art & Anarchy: The Reith Lectures 1960, Revised and Enlarged, Including Addenda, New York (1960) 1968, p. 85.

21 Article by Nina Quabeck about the working process of the Scheidemann conservation studio in New York, URL: http://www.number32.de/worldwide/feldforschung-einer-restauratorin-hinter-den-kulissen-der-contemporary-conservation-ltd.html

22 Paradoxically, the destruction of cultural assets perpetrated by Islamic State (IS) is influenced by Western, material-oriented notions of value. Destroying the material, so the thinking goes, eliminates the idea itself.

23 Wind 1968 (see note 21), lecture 6 “Art and the Will,” p.84: “Even the state has become a timid patron […] leaving the artist far too much to himself.”

24 Letter V (English translation of Schiller from On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Reginald Snell, Mineola/New York 2004).

25 Letter VI.

26 Letter II.

27 Famously epitomized by the cleaning controversy of the 1960s caused by Helmut Ruheman’s varnish removal.

28 For example, a general lack of non-English technical literature in the book Contemporary Conservation Theory by Munoz-Vinas, Oxford 2005, a frequently cited reference work.

29 The infamous cleaning of large-scale paintings by Margaret M. Watherston, The Cleaning of Color Field Paintings, Houston 1974.

30 Especially noteworthy in this context is how Althöfer engaged with Hans Jonas’s philosophy of responsibility in his writings (Das Prinzip Verantwortung: Versuch einer Ethik für die technologische Zivilisation, Frankfurt 1979).

31 His archive (artemak) of the techniques and art-making materials of contemporary artists was founded in 1972 and first published in book form in 1979.

32 First publication of a systematic survey and mathematical evaluation of data on modern art and the beginning of a series of experiments and tests in Restaurierung moderner Malerei, Heinz Althöfer, Hiltrud Schinzel, and Silke Rehbein, Munich 1985.

33 For example, Monika Wagner’s research with a more art-historical focus in Das Material der Kunst: Eine andere Geschichte der Moderne, Munich 2001.

34 1925–1988, university professor from 1965.

35 One practical outcome of these efforts was Imdahl’s acceptance of the author as a doctoral student after she had completed a master class in conservation and technology at the Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna. Prior to her first talk at ICOM-CC 1972 in Madrid, he gave her invaluable advice: Although the listener may not understand everything, this does not diminish the quality of the lecture, because the value of a text rests on how it is put into words.

36 Serra married one of Imdahl’s doctoral students, Clara Weyergraf.

37 For instance, the technical description and treatment of material.

38 M. Posner, M.K. Rothbart, B.E. Sheese, and J. Kieras, How Arts Training Influences Cognition, University of Oregon, pub. The Dana Foundation, New York 2008.

39 Briefly summarized and explained by Ernst Bacher in Riegel 1995 (see note 2).

40 Alois Riegl, “Der moderne Denkmalkultus,” in Alois Riegl Gesammelte Aufsätze, Vienna 1996, p. 177

41 Ibid., p. 150.

42 Alois Riegl, “Die Stimmung als Inhalt der modernen Kunst,” p. 35 (published in English as “Mood As the Content of Modern Art,” trans. Lucia Allais and Andrei Pop, in Grey Room 80, 2020, pp. 35–36, URL: https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00301 [accessed 14.01.22]).

43 In “Movement to Another Place: Cultural Expressions on Migration as Source of Reflection Contributing to Special Theory,” in Culture e Studi del Sociale, vol. 2, no. 2 (2017), p. 1.

44 Wind 1968 (see note 21), p. 50.

45 Michael Köhlmeier, Zwei Herren am Strand, 2014 (published in English as Two Gentlemen on the Beach, trans. Ruth Martin, London 2016).

46 See artist writings, for example Gerhard Richter, Texte 1961 bis 2007, Cologne 2008.

47 On his website www.ryosart.de the artist explains his objective as follows: “I want to speak to people directly through my art and raise awareness about the connections between humans, nature, the economy, consumption, war, and religion. I want to move people, encourage them to think, to inspire an action, or at least a reaction, with reference to a more conscientious treatment of our shared resources. I hope that my art can contribute to this.”

48 Examples of this type of cultural understanding can be found in Japan, for instance, ikebana, sado (tea ceremony), kendo (Japanese fencing), judo, etc. Seeing artifacts as functional is still prevalent in other cultures as well: icons, for instance, are often treated as useful everyday objects, even today.

49 Köhlmeier 2014/2016 (see note 46).

50 The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, 1957 (first published in German as Das Ringen um das tausendjährige Reich, trans. Eduard Thorsch, Bern 1961).

51 Mutiny Amid Repression: Russian Soldiers in the Revolution of 1905-1906,

Indiana 1985.

52 Arno Gruen, Wider den Terrorismus, Stuttgart 2015.

53 Quoted in “Eine unlustige Komödie,” Vogue Germany, 2/2015 p. 179.

54 Ibid., p. 178.

55 Elias Bierdel and Maximilian Lakitsch, “Aggressiver Humanismus. Von der Unfähigkeit der Demokratie, große Menschenrechtler hervorzubringen,” in idem, Wege aus der Krise. Ideen und Konzepte für Morgen, Vienna/Münster 2013, URL: https://medium.com/@politicalbeauty/aggressiver-humanismus-3d091f8732a3

56 Loc. cit., p. 144.

57 Letter VIII, 7, Über die Ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, 1793 (published in English as On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Reginald Snell, Mineola/ New York 2004).

58 Letter IV.

59 “The business spirit, confined in a monotonous circle of objects, and inside these still further restricted by formulas, was forced to see the freedom of the whole snatched from under its eyes, and at the same time to become impoverished in its own sphere” and “the man of business has very often a narrow heart, because his imagination, confined within the monotonous circle of his profession, cannot expand to unfamiliar modes of representation” (VI, 10).

60 See, for example, Arno Gruen 2015.

61 Letter XI.

62 Ibid.

63 Klaus Disselbeck, Geschmack und Kunst, eine systemtheoretische Untersuchung zu Schillers Briefen “Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen,” Berlin 2013.

64 According to Disselbeck, this thesis is based on Fichte’s transcendental theory of the imagination.

65 See current findings in psychology, for example, Arno Gruen, Dem Leben Entfremdet: Warum wir wieder lernen müssen zu empfinden, Stuttgart 2013.

66 Disselbeck 2013 (see note 64), pp. 23–24.

67 “A people who do not preserve their memory are a people who have forfeited their history.” Wole Soyinka in The Burden of Memory, The Muses of Forgiveness, Oxford 1999, p. 58.

68 See Klaus Disselbeck 2013, himself a proponent of a sociological approach, pp. 15f: “Based on his anthropological interpretation of society, Schiller can only imagine a transition from a physical to a moral society if the members of that society negotiate nature and freedom within their person ‘so as to create a third character, which […] might pave the way for a transition from the realm of mere force to the rule of law.’”

69 Interview with Max Imdahl, URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uncZgDRC7EQ

70 Unfortunately, Arnon Grünberg’s popular factum is as true in conservation as elsewhere: “People who actually know something stay silent, and those who don’t, inundate you with advice.”

71 Viktor Frankl, Trotzdem Ja zum Leben Sagen, Munich 1988.

72 Haruki Murakami, Acceptance Speech, Catalonia International Prize 2011, “As an Unrealistic Dreamer”, URL: https://www.academia.edu/1030490/_As_an_Unrealistic_Dreamer_An_English_Translation_to_Haruki_Murakamis_Acceptance_Speech_6_10_2011

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References

Electronic reference

Hiltrud Schinzel, Ways of Aesthetically Integrating Conservation Theory in an Era of Neoliberal Illusions and Post-Colonial MigrationCeROArt [Online], 13 | 2024, Online since 29 October 2024, connection on 09 July 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ceroart/8457; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/12ld7

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About the author

Hiltrud Schinzel

Hiltrud Schinzel is restorer (Magister Artium, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria), art historian (PhD, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany) and artist. In the field of conservation she specialized on contemporary art and restoration theory. She was curator at Municipal Museum of Bochum, project leader of Restaurierung Moderner Malerei at Restoration Centre Düsseldorf, researcher and lecturer at Gent University and Gent Academy of Fine Arts. As associate Professor and Dr.H.C. of IIAS she coordinates the Symposium on Advances in Art and Science since 2003. Main publication : Touching Vision – Essays on Restoration Theory and the Perception of Art, VUB University Press, Brussels, 2004 and 2008. hiltrud.schinzel@t-online.de

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