Touching Vision 2.023: How to restore the art of living

By Hiltrud Schinzel

The book's aim is to show how art can enrich a person's life. 22 essays starting from the themes of restoration and fine arts are arranged chronologically, with the focus slowly shifting towards generality, from disciplinary demarcation to inter- and transdisciplinary openness, as dictated by the spirit of the times. The visual updating of the author's cover design from 2004 points to "updates" both unintentional and intentional, but always inevitable, firmly rooted in the human desire to outwit the transience of time. Thus, the content of an essay may be critical, some essays creep into the poetic, some into the caricatural, nothing has the claim to permanence of an abstract truth, and everything serves to deepen the pleasure of art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Release date: Mar 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9783757833206

Hiltrud Schinzel

Hiltrud Schinzel ist Restauratorin, Kunsthistorikerin und Künstlerin. Ihre Kunstmedien sind Zeichnung und Aquarell auf Papier. Ihre Forschung fokussiert Mediation von Kunst und Wissenschaft sowie Ästhetik. Ihre besondere Neigung gilt dem Beschreiben menschlicher Paradoxien.

Book preview

Touching Vision cover design 2003

Touching Vision cover design 2.023

Table of Contents

Introduction

Contemporary art and conservation theory 2004-6

Illumination by the screen IIAS 2005

Quality and Quantity – Concepts in the Visual Arts IIAS 2006

Contemporary Art, its Conservation and Neo-Liberal Structures IIAS 2007

Geriatric problems of western culture IIAS 2007

Lived Experience or Second-hand Culture? IIAS 2008

Tacit Knowing – Tacit Communicating IIAS 2010

,Info-Virus’ art and restoration: Some reflections 2012

Does the riddle exist? Drawings by S. Dan Paich IIAS 2012

Contemporary Art’s Influence on Concepts of Originality and Authenticity in Restoration-conservation 2013

The Boundaries of Ethics – Art without Boundaries 2013

The narrow escape of phantasy IIAS 2013

How conservation helps art being understood Tutu 2014

Too much is not enough IIAS 2014

Ways of Aesthetically Integrating Conservation Theory 2015

On conservation science’s topical issue to help art...2015

King Kong is too small IIAS 2015

Respect and Care - Wishes that don’t want to die IIAS 2016

Look back in Joy IIAS 2019

Why Paradise Has to Be Art 2020

Heroes 2020/2021 2021

Creativity versus Build, Destruct, Re-build IIAS 2022

Notes

Introduction:

In 2003, the compendium of essays Touching Vision, essays on restoration theory and the perception of art, VUB Press 2004, was composed. The booklet was aimed at conservators, artists, museum and exhibition staff, scientists, collectors, and anyone who appreciates art. Conservation issues as well as perceptual phenomena were described, with an emphasis on how art can enrich a person's life.

Now, two decades later, several essays have again accumulated, jostling to appear. The focus has moved somewhat in the direction of common usage, that is, from discipline-specific to opening to the inter- and transdisciplinary, just as the zeitgeist dictates. A main aim is to improve relationship between disciplines in the arts and the sciences.

Art and science, who in their beginnings were neither separated nor competitors, from the 16th century onwards shifted into different directions, which from an intentional and sometimes also ethical point of view nowadays seem to be antagonistic:

Even the greatest moral objections could not stop the desire of the scientist to proceed with scientific research. Nothing can check to examine the world and turn what is found out into practical use, which is documented today in highly developed technology.

On the other hand, art could never be prevented from registering, commenting, and criticizing culturally given facts. This includes reactions to cultural follies, aberrations, and paradoxes. The voice of art could never be stopped, not even by violence, to repeat human concerns and values in an endless ceterum censeo.

The essays show structures and problems deriving out of these givens, hoping that they may show science its own counterfeit in art’s mirror and give contemporary science to think about some of its dangerous tasks.

The final essays, written since 2020 under pandemic rules, provide conclusions regarding human qualities and are thus both transdisciplinary and transcultural. They are intended to provide food for thought as well as hope for a human society that must change its attitudes in the face of climate change and other unpredictable developments.

This unfolding of content consequently is evident in the writing style: Some content is critically shaped, some essays creep into the poetic, some of them worm their way out into the caricatural, nothing has the claim to permanence of an abstract truth, and everything is meant to deepen the joy of art.

Again, this book is dedicated to all helpers. Here I am glad to mention IIAS colleagues too numerous to line up, who since 1998 by transdisciplinary exchange stimulated trans-professional thinking. All artists and institutions that generously gave printing permission are thanked here heartily. I also must underline thank to my translators Lance Anderson and Aisha Prigann as well as those readers of Touching Vision 2004, who are my grandchild generation. Their comments on the essays were not only very illuminating, but they also gave me energy and courage. All these interchanges were and are an unexpected joy, unforeseeable happy experiences. Equal pleasure provided the helpers that made me stumble and reflect, disguised as music, image, dance, word and book, separate as well as in the topical all-in-one format of multimedia. Thus, despite all problems and multifold challenges, this book may show that contemporary art (of living) stays an exciting gift of nature.

Hiltrud Schinzel 2023

To show what can be expected and facilitate choice, abstracts and keywords are functioning as introduction at the beginning of most of the essays. The same quotes can be found in different contexts. They were associated differently, related to the particular time frame when they had influence on me. The ring binder format was chosen in the hope of offering the reader a few recipes for both work and life, as with a cookbook. Whether after that is cooked or could be cooked, is another chapter.

Some texts published only in German are not included in this volume. Translators are named at the end of the respective essay.

Contemporary art and conservation theory 2004-6

Abstract

I The present situation

Examples:

1. Mass-media-art and reproducibility: Mass-media technology makes the updating of ever-changing techniques necessary. Generally, content and meaning of mass-media-artworks last longer than their material. Restorers should preserve both historical material and content, therefore the restorer’s and mass-media-artist’s concept of authenticity differ.

2. Ephemeral art: performances etc. have to be archived. Critical analyses of different documentation methods necessary for general use must be given.

II Status of conservation today

III Updating conservation theory

Examples:

1. Reflecting concepts of time: The relation of material and content, which both partly stay permanent, partly undergo changes on their way through history, becomes topical during conservation treatments. Due to self-critical reflections in the humanities and by artists many scientists have lost the belief that historical facts can be grasped objectively.

2. Updating the dual system aesthetics – history

3. The digital dilemma: Virtually designed images might be an aid if differences of sensual perception between virtual images and factual works are respected.

4. Reviewing vocabulary: Contrasting ,materialized realities’ to ,virtual realities’ will provide a critical view in how far the traditional meaning of terms can be applied to contemporary art.

IV Conclusion

I. The present situation

Conservation’s technical and theoretical problems with contemporary art demonstrate that we lack an up-to-date conservation theory covering theoretical problems and answering practical questions. These problems are complex, as contemporary art trends are very diverse and the contents of some seem to contradict those of others or even themselves.

The complexity of contemporary art can be shown by the fact that:

1. anything can be art (unlimited expansion of art material started with ready-mades like bottle dryer (201 3) and fountain by Duchamp, first exhibited in New York in 1917)

2. different arts like music, literature and the visual arts mix (starting with the Fluxus-movement in the 60ties and having been amply spread up till now – recent example the work of Laurie Anderson)

3. deconstructive self-reflection is taking place in the visual arts, i.e. art and philosophy, sociology etc. mix (critics of institutions like the museum – e.g. Marcel Broodthaers and the gallery – e.g. Michael Asher; critics of society – e.g. Josef Beuys etc.)

4. new media adapt compositional and other characteristics typical for traditional art (staged photography – e.g. Cindy Sherman, conceptual photography – e.g. Gilbert & George, etc.)

5. traditional media adapt compositional and other elements invented and/or made possible by new media (f.i. the influences of all new media on painting).

6. Quotations from different artists in different media mix (e.g. student’s works at ,Rundgang’ 2004, Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts). Copying, a long-standing habit, is spreading in all media, the ,reviews’ usually showing less skill than the works being imitated.

Apart from the material problems which are the consequence of these constellations, this complex mixing, mangling and consequently dissolving of categories makes is impossible to distinguish high quality art from epigones and kitsch.

We have to admit that contemporary art gives an up to date, sometimes not very flattering, view of reality including restoration. The ever-growing complexity of our world does not spare this profession and therefore the analysis of contemporary art will probably help us to illuminate the sources of those problems and contribute to their solving.

Examples:

1. Massmedia-art and reproducibility

A. The given facts

A lot of contemporary artists want to address a mass public. This is done by using mass media instrumentation, like for instance the technologies of advertisement and information and communication media. Most of those relatively new media are attached to photography like its moving picture 'relatives’ film, TV or video. In all mass media art traditional craftsman’s skill is not present, it is substituted, respectively replaced by the medium’s technology. All have problems of short material duration due to material or technological instability (an example is video) and/or speedy development (an example is digital technology). This is generally linked with easy reproducibility. All have in common an ever-growing technical complexity.

An example is photography, photography is a technical ,gesture’ to produce aesthetic phenomena, based on science. It is true, insofar as it is science, good inasmuch as the camera functions well and beautiful, insofar media that distribute photos, permit the photos to model the experiences of the spectators.’¹

After its invention photography was regarded as a documentary medium, able to free art from replicating tasks. Portraiture for instance was and still is for the most part taken over by photography. Yet soon photography was also used as a medium by artists and even now there are still arguments against their products being ,real art’². Today photography has been split up according to certain criteria in e.g. documentary, political and artistic photography.

In the last decades photographic technique has speedily developed. Photos now can be digitalized. The consequence of this fact is that not only photos of real objects can easily be worked on after having been taken, but also photos of non-existent things can be constructed by assembling different, even contrasting, elements. As regards the question whether photography is art or not, in this technology creative experimenting is easier than on analogous photographs. The constructed photo is not based on one photographic negative depicting factual reality; therefore the documentary value of a traditional photo does not exist. Under these aspects the digital medium has more affinity with traditional artistic media and concepts. The conservation problem is easy reproducibility and manipulation, e.g., by using the web, which makes it difficult to define any digitally designed image as authentic.

In contrast to this, ,documentary photography’ bears the character of a document and, in this sense, is used as an artistic medium too. Well-known examples are the photos of industrial monuments by Bernd and Hilla Becher. They consist of series of black and white photos of equal size. All objects photographed resemble one another and are taken from a nearly identical point of view and under similar conditions of light³. The concept of this art seems to be that of an archivist, the photos are presented in a methodically sorted out way, which means they are hung according to form, function and the time the monuments were built. Yet the installation environment is that of an artwork. This kind of art-photography cannot easily be distinguished from photographic material with a solely documentary aim and function. According to Martina Dobbe⁴ the Bechers started to approach with their photographic concept domains like industrial archaeology, history of architecture and sociology, but had more success in the context of art exhibition.

These two kinds of artistic photography are paradigms of the wide range of artistic intentions concerning new media. In video art, film etc. we notice the same complexity. Generally, one may remark that, the more a technical medium invites to manipulate, the easier it can be understood as an artistic medium in the traditional sense, yet at the same time it also is just right for advertising.

In the case of technical media beauty, according to Flusser, has not the same meaning as for traditional art. It has to be evaluated according to the medium’s concept and in how far it wants to influence the spectator⁵. It has to be examined whether this general statement on technical media is (equally or just partly) correct for their artistic use, respectively if and how far their artistic use differs from that of traditional art. Interesting in this context is a statement of the Italian video-artist Fabrizio Plessi, who combines natural materials like wood and stone with video: ,The medium is one thing, the message another⁶’. In my opinion this is true. The artistic use of new media is not different from that of traditional ones. For the artist the medium was and is a vehicle for expression, notwithstanding that new technical media tempt us to overestimate their importance, because of their overwhelming presence and different use in advertisement and communication.

B Consequences for conservation

Often the aim of an artist is to profit from new technologies as much as possible. Some also may intend to apostrophize the short liveness of our time. Consequently, in both cases artists do not care that their works will be short-lived. Because of their continuous updating, contemporary technologies are in temporary limited supply. Therefore, even substituting the whole work is often not regarded as problematic by artists.

Still from an historical, that means a conservation point of view, these technically produced artworks are of the same cultural importance as works with traditional, more stable technologies. Furthermore, the artistic contents and meanings of such works usually are far less short living than their media, materials, and technology⁷.

Consequently, art museums collecting and exhibiting such artworks have to face new problems. From an exhibitory point of view technique must be updated very often, from an historical, collecting and storing point of view ideally neither material nor technique should be changed⁸.

Installation of such artworks for exhibition according to the artist’s concept is more dependent on thorough documentation than traditional art. But the storage of the ,authentic thought’ behind medium, material and technology needs a lot of documentary support as well. The problems reproducibility contains always lead back to the question, how originality and authenticity⁹, last but not least the artist’s copyright, can be defined and their (usually first) temporal context can be preserved.

2. So-called Ephemeral Art

A. The given facts

Many art products like installations or performances have no material permanence. The short-term process, event or exhibition is the one and only issue. Here too the aim in most cases is communication, addressing an audience as large as possible, including people not used to conventional art surroundings. Therefore, such art often takes place in other locations than the traditional museum and/or gallery. On the one hand short-term art is antagonistic to traditional conservation/restoration aims, on the other hand problems connected with such artistic intentions cannot be solved with traditional conservation methods.

An important movement in this context is ,Fluxus’ – the term was introduced in 1961 – insofar, as it on the one hand refers to modern avantgarde movements like futurism and the readymade, and on the other ,intermedia’ are integrated like visual poetry, poetic images, musical actions and happenings. Prominent representatives are Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell, Robert Fillou, Ben Vautier etc. Pointing the way for subsequent art movements was their borderline existence not only between music, literature and the visual arts but also between art, science and philosophy. Yet not all Fluxus works were already intended to be ephemeral.

Important as stimulus for reflection in conservation/restoration are performances – so-called participation art – where the viewer’s acting is necessary for the development of the artwork, respectively the artistic idea. They are in a way close to restoration which (re)animates an artwork too. Here again Duchamp is a forerunner by inventing his ,ready-made malheureux’, where the blowing wind is an active participant, ,censuring’ a book. There are numerous followers, yet the counterpart in most times is the viewer of an exhibition or the passer-by in the street. Often the artistic aim is critique of society (Hans Haacke and others), much criticism is apostrophizing the urban context (e.g., Andreas Siekmanns Park Fictions, a project in which artists, inhabitants and institutions of St. Pauli in Hamburg worked together for a couple of years). This kind of art may raise the conservator’s consciousness of him/herself being a contemporary co-operator of artistic endeavours. His/her activity influences not only the artwork itself, but also its perception and, in consequence, the meaning of art in today’s society.

One topical kind of ephemeral art may be seen in so-called ,net-art’. To ,research the computer from inwards and reflect the web’ (Dirk Paesmans, net.art artist)¹⁰ is one aim, another is interaction with other web users and intercultural communication. Continuous integrating and adapting web material of various participants contradicts any ,conservative’ thought of authenticity and permanence.

Still this kind of use of new media directed at peaceful understanding fits perfectly, even paradigmatically into artistic aims, in fact not only those of the visual arts. Their creative anonymity goes well together with the fact, that materially ,provable’ sensation is missing in the digital media. Because of this lack they are more distanced.

It might well be that such constellations with an alternative mind-matter concept will become characteristic more and more in a future development of civilization, made conscious by the arts¹¹. Therefore, restorers have to take notice of and reflect on such borderline cases with a view to conservation’s theoretical basics.

B Consequences for conservation

The conservation treatment of this kind of art does not include the problem of reproducibility, but even ,worse’, that of the mere existence of the work. It may be questioned whether these works fall under the conservator’s responsibility at all, because here much traditional responsibility of art museums and conservators is neither existent nor asked for.

On the other hand, documentation is getting much more important and often from a historical point of view has to replace the matter of the original. The documentary substitutes’ of the artwork, the historical archival material, needs care for its survival too. Here information is lacking whether and how far conservation is responsible for such fragmentary, that means only documentary, relicts of artworks. Commonly accepted methods, how to treat them from an historical as well as an ethical point of view, have yet to be developed. Critical analyses of different documentation media are lacking too.

Yet art too has been attracted by archival work already for a long time. Consequently, in contemporary terminology this kind of art is called ,Archive’ and has to be conserved. Prominent examples are André Breton’s ,mur de l’atelier’, 1922 – 1966, the collection of the artist containing 200 objects (e.g., artworks, natural objects, found pieces and objects of ethnic and magic art mounted on the wall behind the desk of the artist); Duchamps Boîte-en-valise (1935-41), a miniature museum in the form of a suitcase; Marcel Broodthaers Musée d’Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles, Section XIXe Siècle (1972); the ,Spurensicherung’ work of Christian Boltanski and recently also works by artists using the net like George LeGrady etc.

As can be easily seen from these examples, numerous different kinds of analysis and (self)reflection in the arts may lead to confusion concerning the term art and what it implies. Flusser again, paradigmatical for many others, asks, ,whether everything has to be regarded as digital appearance... We are no longer subjects of an objective given world, but projections of alternative worlds. We have grown up. We know that we dream.... We no longer make a difference between truth and appearance, between science and art’¹².

These statements have to be viewed critically from a restoration perspective, that emphasizes the materiality of the item, a point of view which in the opinion of Flusser is outdated, because both virtual and material realities can be reduced to smallest entities. The consequence of it all is documented in his statement ,art is better than truth’¹³, which of course is a tempting thought, but - is it true? And are these terms comparable at all? Perhaps documentation of our culture seems to be so urgent for many because they assume the loss of its factual background. Another cause is the data-hunting of contemporary information society.

II. Status of conservation today

As traditional methods often cannot be used and terms linked to conservation/restoration no longer bear their original meaning, uneasiness concerning ethical conservation treatment of contemporary art is spreading and spilling over into traditional conservation concerns. For international communication and collaboration apt technique is available, yet data exchange has but limited practical consequences due to the fact that we lack exact definitions of decisive terms and their adaptation to up to date conditions and problems. Facing the digital subject-object confusion already mentioned, this is no wonder.

Today a lot of historical research is done in conservation in order to collect data of the development of its topics like materials, technologies, scientific research and also historical data of time-bound ideals of conservation¹⁴. This corresponds to the importance given to documentation by artists as well as to the amount of documentation necessary and visible in conservation treatment of contemporary art.

Such data are the basis of an academic subject. Their collection is typical for such a subject in an early state of scientific self-awareness and self-consciousness. It is not chance but coincidence, due to the ruling Zeitgeist, that art itself is very occupied too with scientific topics today. Still the approaches of art to various scientific topics or technologies are selective, subjective and adapt scientific methods not properly or not at all, whereas conservation must try to act as distanced as possible and has to use various scientific methods very accurately at least in research.

In my opinion conservation today has reached a development, ready to mutate into and be appreciated as a very complex synthetic science, which is dependent on research and results of numerous other sciences. It is leaving its historical cocoon in which the restorer was regarded as craftsman and/or artist, notwithstanding that technical skill and empathy for art and culture are preconditions for conservation practice. An optimal outcome of these changes is vital for the profession’s future, last but not least in view of the globalization of education. Necessary for an academic professional basis will be research on up-to-date professional theory.

III. Updating conservation theory

Apart from the texts of Cesare Brandi, not yet available in all languages, who do not touch on the problems of contemporary art and whose theories cannot be adapted to them as far as I know, we lack a systematic collection of data related to basic reflections¹⁵ and an international exchange as well as cooperation on such conservation concerns.

The problems with contemporary art as described above could build a framework insofar as they directly lead to and even caricature problems, which cannot be solved without general theoretical, ethical and philosophical considerations preceding conservation practice.

Examples:

1. Reflecting concepts of time in conservation

This topic concerns the relation of material and content in an artwork, i.e. the mind and matter problem. Both partly keep stable, partly undergo changes in time. The constant as well as the changing material and textual components of the artwork come to the fore and are made conscious by artwork’s adaption to the contemporary viewer during conservation treatments. Conservation resembles the actual summing up of the artwork’s material state as well as of its contents at the moment of restoration implementation. In this context the conserved artwork may be defined as a collage of materialized historical time¹⁶.

While ,summarizing’ the restorer is forced to select, which remnants of time he/she chooses to conserve and to what degree this should be done. For this selection he/she needs the help of the scientist and the historian. This selection and its skillful carrying out is still or again regarded as an artist’s job by some restorers, because it may seem – and also be – very subjective. This assumption may be the result of the fact that there is a trend in contemporary art to tackle scientific problems too. Yet in conservation an unbalanced selection is not artistic but just arbitrary. Better than to return to an historically outdated arbitrariness would be to keep to some commonly acceptable guidelines.

2. Updating the dual system aesthetics – history

Since Cesare Brandi’s research started dominating conservation theory, an historical or aesthetic view of the object is apostrophized dialectically and the question, which one has priority¹⁷ has remained a subject for discussion. Still such controversies could be balanced, and guidelines updated by reflecting how traditional conservation rules could be adapted to problems of contemporary art. On the one hand Brandi’s concept of aesthetics¹⁸ is difficult to apply to many modern works, like performances, concept art and works like Ready-mades, where material authenticity is no longer given due to the fact, that they are manufactured by others. On the other hand, even science has lost the belief that historical facts and concepts can be grasped objectively, due to self-critical reflections in the humanities and by artists. ,ln science the concept of truth is in a crisis¹⁹’. Especially artworks which self-critically reflect terms like ,aesthetics’ and ,history’ could widen our consciousness for basics for a topical restoration theory.

Institutions accompanying art, which are the principal working place and/or customer of the restorer, are critically reflected by artists from the 80ties of the 20th century on in a sociological and historical manner²⁰. Beginnings are works criticizing the museum. Here the criticism is an analysis of the place’s function and has its roots in works of modernist’s avantgarde like the ready-mades and other Dada productions etc. Studying this criticism could help to understand new conservation tasks concerning contemporary art.

Brandis