Accepting Loss: A Conversation with Prof. Fernando Dominguez Rubio

Accepting Loss: A Conversation with Prof. Fernando Dominguez Rubio

Fernando Domínguez Rubio’s groundbreaking book, "Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum," has profoundly influenced my perspective as a conservator. As happened when reading Salvador Muñoz Viñas “Contemporary Theory of Conservation” twenty years ago, I couldn’t put this book down as my mind exploded with new ideas. That is why I was very excited to attend today’s FAIC IDEA Changemakers Series - Conversation with Prof. Fernando Dominguez Rubio.

The initial spark for Still Life came from research into the preservation challenges for Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, which pushed against conventional ideas of conservation. Looking closely at museums, Professor Rubio came to realize that they were in fact a “machine”, where the exhibition is perceived by most as the beginning of the story but it is, in reality, the end of a long road. A museum is a complex articulation of ecologies where conservation plays a crucial part. 

Rubio proposes that the concept - started in the 1850s with the establishment of the Western idea of museum as an institution - is an endeavor in loss disavowal, as if it could be denied, proposing a space where loss has been domesticated through attempts at stopping change and time with incredibly costly mechanisms of environmental control, maintenance and repair. What is the cost of this disavowal? Can we afford it in today’s social and environmental reality? This model is in fact unsustainable. So what is the way forward? Museums must rethink their mission as one of loss acceptance for a future that responds to current demands. Conservation can reframe and reconceptualize the museum. 

I wondered if conservators can learn and accept this notion of loss? Does this erase the role of a conservator? How do we reframe our Code of Ethics around this acceptance of change? Rubio challenges this idea as he posits that conservators are, in fact, shepherds of loss. In his work for Still Life, Professor Rubio approached conservation as a practice from an ethnographic perspective, observing its agents in their daily tasks. He understood that what conservators are doing all the time is accepting loss, as the very practice of conservation is to deal with its manifestations. However, the discourse that the museum has imposed on conservators is to deny that acceptance, partly due to a misconception that conservation work is mainly technical. Conservators become unwitting manual metaphysicians, trying to give the museum machine its desire for immutable objects. Conservators, then, become part of a mechanism of valuation and authenticity, preserving the artifacts of how a culture describes and conceptualizes itself. There is no jump that has to be taken by conservators to engage with all these questions of acceptance of loss: they are already part of our work.

Rubio thinks of conservation as part of several specialties of what he termed mimeographic labor: workers that aim at keeping things unchanged, like conservators, engineers, cleaners, registrars, security guards. In the book he tried to make this mimeographic labor (that the museum machine wants to keep invisible in its attempt to suspend time) visible.

Another aspect of the discussion centered around aesthetic justice and how it intersects with conservation. It is conservation that establishes the very infrastructural standards, such as strict environmental parameters, that are arguments against repatriation or travel of objects to places unable to achieve them (typically in the Global South). The infrastructure of care that conservation is part of silently supports inequalities. Changes as apparently small as relaxing climatic requirements become acts towards inclusivity.

Conservation as a profession has had to justify its existence in the museum for a long time. Hierarchical structures where the conservator has less agency than the curator (and typically a lower wage) have constrained conservators the small space museums have allotted for them. There is an inherent sense of fragility in the conservation field. Justifying conservation’s value through science was a part of an effort in maintaining relevance. It is rare to find theoretical publications by conservators reflecting on their practice. Rubio warns that conservators have passively accepted the confined technical space that has been carved for them, in part due to their training that is mostly technical, as well as precarity of time and means. They are not engaging with discussions with other specialties nor trying to reconceptualize conservation as a voice that should have a seat at the table.

One area that is challenging conservation practice is nontraditional work such as digital media, performance art or oral history. In those cases conservators are preserving a concept, or in the case of digital media, migrating files as a form of preservation. At that frontier you cannot separate technical questions from ethical. There is an upcoming needed shift being brought about by the objects themselves. This new world, this new shift will happen incrementally and rely on new combinations of knowledge. New generations of curators are much more attuned to the work of conservators because they know they will need their knowledge and ask a different type of question from years ago. This will shift the playing field.

I hope we can indeed reimagine the role of conservation in shaping the narratives of our cultural heritage and that more of us discuss theoretical concepts. One of the colleagues that I have followed with great admiration for more than a decade has been Sanchita Balachandran, who’s work I can’t recommend enough.