|
Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
This article explores historical, political, and professional paradoxes that underlie efforts to preserve cultural heritage. These paradoxes are illustrated through five case studies: the discovery of the Nag Hammadi bindings, approaches to the preservation of Auschwitz, the Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad, the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, and the creation of a protective structure for the Hamar Cathedral ruins. Although it is not possible to preserve everything, it is suggested that the shift from the traditional custodial model of caring for collections to one with greater community input may lead to new preservation strategies--and to new ways of defining preservation. Through our attempts to preserve under highly complex circumstances and equally complex issues, our standard notions of what constitutes preservation come into question, and some aspects of preservation remain paradoxical.
BACKGROUND
When professionals write about the role of cultural institutions, notions such as these are common: "Museums create, manage and preserve varied information about their collections" (White, 2004, p. 9), and, "Art museums are--and traditionally have been--about conserving, curating and exhibiting works in permanent collections and about presenting special exhibitions" (Hamma, 2004, p. 11). (1) There are countless other statements in which preservation is mentioned as one of the two or three most important responsibilities of museums, archives, libraries, and historical societies.
But just what is preservation? Definitions have varied. Before the mid-twentieth century, preservation referred to collecting. The very act of acquiring materials and placing them in an institution constituted preservation. When individual items received physical treatment, that was considered restoration. Restoration of works of art was originally practiced by artists and craftsmen. Later, the term conservation denoted a more scientific approach to treatment. Several American graduate programs in conservation were established after World War II, and conservation became a profession. Conservators focused not only on the treatment of individual objects, but on the external hazards facing collections, such as the environment and disaster mitigation. But by the 1980s, preservation--an umbrella term for the aggregate care of collections--had become a distinct profession. Thus, originally conservation dealt with individual items and with whole collections. (Preservation, conservation, and restoration are used somewhat differently in the moving image archives and historic preservation fields as a perusal of such journals as History News, Future Anterior, and The Moving Image demonstrates. Those differences are beyond the scope of this article.)
There are conceptual differences among archives, libraries, and museums that effect approaches to and definitions of preservation (Cloonan & Sanett, 2002, p. 74). For example, archivists tend to think more in terms of preserving records "for some period of time" (Pearce-Moses, 2005) because as records managers they must comply with the legal obligation to protect records. Also, institutions may have retention schedules that allow for or mandate deaccession after a certain prescribed time. So "preservation" is not always viewed as a permanent activity for some kinds of documents in some institutions. The preservation of archives and records is defined foremost by the nature and function of the records themselves, and not by the physical location where the records reside.
Items owned by museums and libraries are preserved simply because they are in the custody of those institutions. Historically, the assumption has been that once these institutions acquired materials, they would be preserved permanently. (Although some libraries engage in periodic collections weeding. (2)) In museums the concept of ownership is central. Provenance research is undertaken when an item is acquired, and ownership information appears on every caption that is displayed with an artwork; for example, gift of, promised gift of, bequest of, purchased from, etc. Issues of ownership are brought to light when there are controversies. One example is when museums are accused of possessing stolen art. However, there are other examples, such as when museums assume temporary custody of works of art, such as, Pablo Picasso's Guernica, which was held by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) from 1938 until 1981 when it was returned to Spain after the death of Franco.
The point I am trying to make is this: museums and libraries are custodians of objects, and in that role preservation is a primary responsibility. These institutions are also storehouses in which only a small percentage of items are displayed (in the case of museums) or checked out (in the case of libraries).
Two phenomena have disrupted the "custodial storehouse" model. The first is access. In libraries, books have become increasingly more accessible since the American librarian, John Cotton Dana (1856-1929), first advocated opening the stacks to users in the late nineteenth century. In Dana's view libraries were not simply storehouses of treasures but community centers. By opening the stacks, he aimed to make libraries more democratic by allowing users to select their own books. From open stacks to online catalog records, to Web-based resources, today information is generally more freely available, though the access is often not to the information itself, but to where the information can be gotten. For analog materials, the "custodial storehouse" model is disrupted, as I have said, because of increased access. But such "disruption" is not to be construed as bad. In fact, it is exactly what libraries exist for. Items must be stored specifically to facilitate access. The storing function is permanent in that between periods of use, items are returned to the...
|
