Clark Conference: Conservation / Making / Art / History

This conference considers many past and present practices of maintaining, handling, reframing, and repurposing works of the past. The aim is to put those methods into dialogue with wider frames of practice and thinking. The contributors to this conference consider how conservation involves forms of artistic making, frames philosophical examinations of time, shapes inquiry into human and non-human agency, focuses ethical debates about memory and identity, and models forms of inhabitation and cohabitation.


PROGRAM
All talks will be held in the auditorium of the Manton Research Center.

FRIDAY, APRIL 17

10 AM WELCOME REMARKS
Alexander Nagel (New York University), “Introduction: Conservation as Performance”

SESSION I: FRAGMENTS & LACUNAE
Moderated by Esther Bell (Clark Art Institute)

10:30 AM Annika Svendsen Finne (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University), “Re-Paintings in Late Medieval Italy as Synchronizations of Art Creation with Art History”

11 AM Gabriela Siracusano (MATERIA: Centro de Investigación en Arte, Materia y Cultura, Buenos Aires), “Minimum Worlds: Material Poetics Between Time, Details, and Fragments”

11:30 AM CONVERSATION

SESSION II: MAKING & TEMPORALITY
Moderated by Alexander Nagel (New York University)

2 PM Sven Dupré (Utrecht University and University of Amsterdam), “Art History and the Reconstruction of Skill”

2:30 PM Murad Khan Mumtaz (Williams College), “‘Strung into Writing, Enchained into Painting’: Conservation in the Persianate Album”

3 PM BREAK

3:30 PM Fernando Domínguez Rubio (University of California, San Diego), “On Mimeographic Labor and the Arts of Creating the Same”

4 PM Erma Hermens (University of Amsterdam), “Choreographies of Technical Art History: An Interdisciplinary Approach”

4:30 PM CONVERSATION

5 PM RECEPTION

EVENING KEYNOTE: BETWEEN CONSERVATION AND ART HISTORY
Moderated by Lesley Paisley (Independent Paper Conservator)

5:30 PM Iwataro Oka (Oka Bokkodo Co., Ltd., Conservation Studio for National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties), “The Influence of Conservation Practice on the Viewing and Appreciation of Japanese Painting”

6 PM Yukio Lippit (Harvard University), “Japanese Painting: Mounting, Mediation, Transmission, Renewal”

6:30 PM CONVERSATION


SATURDAY, APRIL 18

SESSION III: MEMORY & IDENTITY
Moderated by Katarzyna Pieprzak (Williams College)

10 AM Jennifer Bajorek (Hampshire College and Smith College), “But Who Decided? Epistemes and Politics of Decay”

10:30 AM Caroline Fowler (Clark Art Institute), “Conservation’s Surfaces”

11 AM BREAK

11:30 AM Kavita Singh (School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal University, New Delhi), “Conservation and the Unmaking of Indian Art History”

12 PM CONVERSATION

SESSION IV: PERFORMANCE & ARCHIVE
Moderated by Lisa Dorin (Williams College Museum of Art)

3 PM Chương-Đài Võ (Asia Art Archive), “Southeast Asia: Performance and Art Historiography”

3:30 PM Joanna Phillips (Restaurierungszentrum der Landeshauptstadt Düsseldorf / Conservation Center of the City of Düsseldorf), “Contemporary Art as a Catalyzer of Cross-disciplinary Conservation Cultures”

4 PM CONVERSATION

4:30 PM BREAK

5 PM ARTIST TALK: Ina Archer (National Museum of African American History and Culture), “Loves Labor (Eventually) Lost”
In conversation with Noah Smalls (Williams College Museum of Art)

6 PM CLOSING RECEPTION


This event is free and open to the public. Please register in advance: https://online.clarkart.edu/Policies.aspx