AIC's 45th Annual Meeting

This conference is a celebration of the importance of treatment and of the necessary intellectual preparation for action. In the description of the conference theme the ‘no treatment at all' option is referred to as ‘the ultimate decision'. Yet there seems to be a growing trend within the conservation profession for ‘no treatment at all' to be considered the one and only ethical choice.

There are several reasons for this trend. One of the causes concerns social and academic attitudes to working with the hands. The academic professionalization of conservation can aggravate the prejudice that intellectual skills are more desirable and laudable than manual dexterity. Most conservation treatments demand both types of skill in equal measure. Yet if time is not allowed in school and college for the development of manual ability, practical intervention tasks will not be carried out with the necessary speed and skill. This may lead to mistakes and irreversible damage to artifacts. This leads to a process of ethical drift where certain treatments are deemed unethical rather than just difficult, downright wrong rather than requiring skill and experience.

College conservation courses fill their curricula with more and more non-practical content. Specialist conservators in large institutions fill their time with administration and with short-term activities such as loans, ostensibly to reduce immediate risk. They engage with storage projects with long-term aims of preservation and risk reduction. Conservators in smaller museums cannot hope to specialize. This leads to the development of members of the conservation profession who have not learned, and do not desire, to carry out interventive treatments.

Arguments that preventive conservation is more economical and less risky than intervention seem to generate unwarranted attitudes of moral superiority that can fuel the ethical drift. This drift means that treatment options that were considered perfectly allowable become at first questionable and then unethical. This is excused as the necessary progress of a developing profession. In extreme cases the supremacy of the ‘no treatment at all 'policy could be construed as ‘depraved indifference' to the aesthetic and educational potential of individual objects.

There is a concurrent trend in the wording of codes of conduct and ethics that no longer include explicit guidance about practical intervention. The limits of intervention are blurred, yet conservators continue to act as though they were following unequivocal and universally acknowledged guidelines. Sensible elegant solutions to problems are deemed to be both sensible and elegant but ‘not what a conservator would do'.

This presentation will provide evidence of this trend and discuss the limits of arguments about the safety and economy of doing nothing. A process will be proposed that will promote discussion of the full range of options and allow the construction of explicit policies for interventive treatments. These will be locally determined and locally relevant. Any national or international body attempting to regulate conservation practice need only insist that this policy has been discussed, locally approved and made universally accessible.

The aging and discoloration of objects eventually lead to changes in their appearance and a loss in materiality and value. Active conservation treatments are meant to bring them back to some acceptable condition. However, at some point, an object is considered a “total loss” because it can no longer be treated according to accepted conservation ethics. Virtual retouching techniques have been shown to be a promising method for the non-invasive treatment of objects, allowing total-loss objects to be exhibited again, or at least to help conservators visualize treatments before making treatment decisions. With the use of corrective color lighting, at least some semblance of the original color or color balance in an object can be brought back without physically altering the object surface. Still, even with non-invasive virtual retouching, critical questions are being raised about what the acceptability of a virtually retouched appearance is. For example, various articles about the virtual treatment of five Rothko paintings at Harvard University show the diversity of opinions, ranging from the initial enthusiastic “Wow!” effect, to discussions about site-specific works, or the disturbing reflection of corrective light from a painting which produces its own light (New Yorker 2015). The Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands (RCE) is examining these issues of acceptability and perception within the framework of research on the local virtual retouching of objects, that is, where only part of the object has changed. Case studies, perception tests, and eye tracking experiments are being used to determine what people actually see in a work of art before and after treatment. In an initial set of tests, subjects with widely different backgrounds were asked to look at two works in an exhibition setting, a virtually treated portrait by Van Gogh, “The Old Arlésienne”, and an untreated mixed-media work by the contemporary Dutch artist, Ger van Elk, “Adieu”, considered to be total loss. Further, subjects were asked to look at several solutions for the active or virtual retouching of a monochrome painting by the Dutch artist, Jan Roeland. For the Van Gogh and Roeland works, they were asked to evaluate the treatments. For the Van Elk work, they were simply asked to describe what they saw. In all three cases, no introductory information was provided. The results show that while descriptions and opinions differ widely as expected, explanations for the differences cannot be simply categorized into technical exhibition conditions or personal background. In fact, in the case of the Van Gogh painting, a small but significant number of subjects including both professionals and non-professionals did not even see the changes due to the virtual treatment which they were meant to see. Such results clearly have implications for the role of virtual retouching methods in conservation, but also for traditional forms of active conservation. Further work is being carried out to determine whether virtual retouching is an acceptable method for exhibiting locally aged works of art, or more an important tool to help conservators visualize and make treatment decisions.

In recent decades, preventive conservation has become an increasingly larger and better defined part of every conservator's job. Innovations in environmental monitoring, pest management, archival materials, and overall collections care have enabled conservators to prevent damage or loss of cultural heritage more holistically, more sustainably, more economically, and on a larger scale than ever before. This growing body of knowledge has caused the field to rethink preservation, as preventive conservation action in the present can reduce the amount of interventive treatment needed in the future. This growth has been reflected internationally in both conservation-related education and membership groups. Many training programs in Europe and the U.K. now offer student specialization in preventive conservation, and at least one training program in the U.S. is planning to add it as a specialization soon. Preventive conservation sub-groups exist in the ICOM-CC, ICON, and now AIC with the recent founding of the Collections Care Network. Will we ever acknowledge and respect preventive conservation as its own independent specialty? Preventive conservation is developing as other specialties have historically; most recently, photography and electronic media grew from paper and became their own specific areas of concentration. Some practicing conservators have moved to become consultants focusing on museum environment, storage facilities, exhibition or conservation planning and surveying – yet may or may not already call themselves preventive conservators. Can one still be accepted as a conservation professional, even if they don't do hands-on treatment? At present, the AIC accepts many individuals who do not actively treat objects as conservation professionals, such as scientists, educators, and administrators. But other non-conservators share and engage in critical types of conservation activities, too. Can collection managers, registrars, art handlers, curators, and architects also be included as members of AIC so they can share in the many benefits that professional membership has to offer? Conservation has many parts that enable the whole to function, and all specializations are equally important. Treatment-based activities would not be effective without preventive-based activities, and vice-versa. It is important that conservators support one another in the common goal of preserving art and cultural heritage. This paper will discuss what should define a preventive conservator, the status of preventive conservation in AIC, and the wisdom of including preventive conservation specialization in conservation training programs.

Historically stained glass conservation has used paper documentation. But, the level of complexity in working on monumental windows, as well as our increased team size led Nzilani to develop a real-time digital documentation system using iPads.

Our upgraded documentation system includes using an in-house customized app on iPads to document our work onsite (translated instantaneously to the studio team via the internet). Base documents are then updated and used as reference throughout the treatment process, and eventually become our final treatment books with less reformatting than before. All information gathered and updated throughout the project is easily translated into final formatting software to create a finished and polished treatment document with much more detail and quality than before… and in less time.

Treatment of artworks and artifacts forms the core of a conservator’s responsibilities, but accompanying every modern-day treatment is some form of documentation. Documentation informs future decisions affecting the artwork in aspects such as its significance and meaning, insurance and provenance, and of course, exhibition and treatment. Moreover, as some recent cases involving contemporary art have shown, documentation can itself constitute treatment. Therefore, as one of the key tenets of modern conservation ethics, the practice of documenting artworks and their treatment shares the importance, if not the limelight, of benchwork. This paper looks at common methods of documentation with a critical and practical eye, using a treatment case study to assess their efficacy in transmitting information accurately across time, institutions, and people. The treatment, recently conducted at the Art Institute of Chicago for its newly opened medieval and Renaissance galleries (March 2017), is the comprehensive removal of overpaint from a quattrocento polychrome relief--begun, interrupted, and ultimately completed three decades later by a different conservator (the author). The documentation of treatment, also spanning three decades, provides fertile ground for harvesting tips and fodder for thought. The heart of the paper is divided in three sections. First, specific features of the old documentation that proved helpful to the recent phase of treatment will be identified. On the other hand, its unintended consequences, ways in which it primed the author’s treatment decisions and led to misunderstanding, will also be discussed. Second, the paper describes ways in which the author sought to document difficult treatment decisions as well as major changes in the artwork during treatment. Simple solutions to common problems afflicting conservators of all specializations are offered. These include creating a “contact sheet” for quick reference to an overwhelming number of digital photographs, maximizing comparative content on visuals documenting change, and adding a few atypical but helpful sections to a written report. Finally, the paper explores the qualitative difference between formal documentation--usually in the form of reports written upon completion of treatment and finessed diagrams--and informal documentation such as hand-written notes, lab notebooks, and sketches. The conclusion is that informal modes and methods are vital to an accurate portrayal of the complexity and subjectivity of our conservation treatments.

This paper will describe a method of integrating multiple imaging techniques into a single, interactive, digital document, utilizing recent developments in data science and interactive visualization. This has led to a precise, flexible, and user-friendly documentation methodology, resulting in the integration of documentation into the conservation process itself. Allowing the conservator to annotate these digital documents during treatment provides an opportunity for optimal insight and transparency.

This method was initially developed for the conservation of the Hartog Plate, the first known object of European origin on the continent of Australia. Not only is the Plate a fascinating object in terms of material complexity, it is a document of singular importance to Australia and exploration history. To commemorate the 400th anniversary of its placement, an extensive documentation and conservation project has been carried out. In conjunction with the material stability of the object, a primary aim of the project has been to develop a methodology with which to give insight to conservators, researchers, and the general public regarding the Plate's material history, its current condition, and contemporary conservation practice.

The fragmented surface is severely corroded, and the layers of tin oxide—which contain the famous inscription—are delaminating. The greatest conservation challenge was the removal of past restorations, which were distracting from the object's readability and potentially harming the material itself. While the stabilization of the object and the removal of all unoriginal material were the main conservation goals, the documentation and presentation of its material history, condition, and conservation were imperative considering its importance as a historical document. Various complementary visualization techniques, such as x-radiography, UV-light photography, microscopy, and comprehensive 3D structured light and CT scans were implemented to gain a better understanding of aspects such as geometry, adhesion, material degradation processes, and crack propagation in the bulk. 

Given the numerous imaging data sources used in the investigation, a single self-consistent model of the Plate needed to be assembled with minimal imaging artifacts. Registering the data in this way ensures that any point in the Plate can be queried, containing all of the signals from all of the imaging modalities. With this data, statistical analyses and multimodal visualizations can help to reveal interesting or anomalous areas of the Plate for further study and documentation. All of the fused datasets for the Plate are stored in a multi-resolution format that allows for fast data retrieval. This enables real-time interactive visualization through a web-based visualization engine, providing direct access to the data via tablets and laptop computers for material analysis, treatment, and the presentation of findings. In addition, all details of the current on-screen view are encoded in the URL, enabling easy bookmarking, sharing of complex annotations, and linking relevant documents. The technologies and tools applied to the documentation and conservation of the Hartog Plate serves as an excellent example of what is already possible and the direction further developments can take.