Naslov
On advantages of conservation history for life

Autori
Špikić, Marko

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, pp prezentacija, stručni

Skup
Heritage in Transformation. Heritage Protection in the 21st Century - Problems, Challenges, Predictions

Mjesto i datum
Varšava, Poljska, 22.06.2015. - 23.06.2015

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Predavanje

Vrsta recenzije
Nije recenziran

Ključne riječi
conservation; conservation history; perception of the past

Sažetak
Fifty years since its foundation in Venice and Warsaw, International Council on Monuments and Sites ICOMOS is celebrating, analysing and questioning its founding documents. Along with enthusiasm, pride, concern and nostalgia, there are also questions on usefulness, historicity and anachronism of the Venice Charter and messages from the meetings that preceded and followed the mid-1960s initiatives. ICOMOS wasn’t built in a day. Nor is it a result of the few heroic, genius inventors that revised the pre-war conservation movement and tried to shape its post-war trends. It should be seen instead as a fruit of a slowly evolving and intermittent history of ideas that has its roots deep in nineteenth-century debates concerning the problem of an ethically acceptable shape of the past. History of conservation is a genre that has its beginnings in theoretical texts on conservation from at least Quatremère de Quincy’s times, where individual solutions from the past served as secundum comparationis to newly encountered conservation problems. The birth of such a history can be traced in theoretical texts by Viollet-le-Duc, Boito, Riegl, Dvořák and Giovannoni, extending to the post-war generation which started to historicise the modern discipline. Thanks to the works by Paul Léon, Carlo Ceschi, Jukka Jokilehto and Miles Glendinning, who created a historical narrative of national, continental and global history of conservation, the genre became vital and applicable. So what can, or should, we learn from these histories, or from this rather new historiographic genre? Could it be considered a magistra vitae, a source of inspiration, or the warning on disadvantages of certain professional and social experiments dealing with the image and semantics of cultural heritage? Hayden White writes, the more we know about the past, the harder it is to generalize about it. Consequently, the more we know about the rich conservation history, the harder it is to disavow its previous achievements. This paper, therefore, discusses the role, importance, or irrelevance of historical knowledge to the conservation and social phenomena in Europe after 1989. The questions discussed encompass: can history of conservation help us to solve our current ethical and methodological concerns? Should this history be relevant to social issues, that is, to the problems of tolerant public perception of different pasts? Should this history be seen as a fait accompli, a closed system of values inherited from the past, by analogy to the image of monuments and sites that we protect from change and development? What is it that we invent in conservation today and what is already known under some older category?

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Znanost o umjetnosti

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