Conservators, Creativity, and Control

Abstract

This article explores the role of conservators and focusses on their creative agency in the preservation of cultural heritage. It argues that conservators constitute a ‘recursive public’ who collectively make the field both highly collaborative and highly modifiable. The author then sets out how conservators engage in a form of ‘ontological constructivism’ where they use their creative agencies in adversarial, anexact, and generative processes and act as ‘art-developers’ to commit to the next version of a work. Drawing parallels with software development, the author proposes that conservation should be seen as a form of version control that creates time-stamped ‘versions of record’ that persist until the next cycle of care. To emphasise the lack of finality in any artwork the author produces a series of ‘endgames’ to illustrate the ontologically open-ended nature of cultural heritage. The article suggests that in exploring the distributed nature of creative agency through the lens of version control, conservation can provide greater understanding into the real conditions of art and cultural production and how they continue to evolve over time. This then helps disrupt conventional notions of authorship and allows conservation to contribute to a more inclusive understanding of art and culture in our institutions.