INCCA Talk: Fernando Dominguez Rubio in conversation with Pip Laurenson

INCCA is launching an exciting new activity: INCCA talks.

INCCA talks is a series of conversations and panels exploring current issues in contemporary art conservation and related fields. They include book talks where authors will discuss their recently published books.

Our first INCCA talk will be delivered in collaboration with the Andrew W. Mellon funded research initiative Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in the Museum . It will take place on Tuesday May 4th (8 am PDT / 4 pm BST) and will feature Fernando Dominguez Rubio in conversation with Pip Laurenson about his new book Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum. This wide-ranging examination of the art museum identifies conservation as mimeographic labour, namely creative labour focussed on keeping things the same. Dominguez Rubio also explores the environmental impact of maintaining museum conditions for the display and storage of art; describing the art museums of the Global North as some of the most unsustainable buildings on earth.

Watch the recording of this talk HERE (with closed captions) 

About Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum:

How do you keep the cracks in Starry Night from spreading? How do you prevent artworks made of hugs or candies from disappearing? How do you render a fading photograph eternal—or should you attempt it at all? These are some of the questions that conservators, curators, registrars, and exhibition designers dealing with contemporary art face on a daily basis. In Still Life, Fernando Domínguez Rubio delves into one of the most important museums of the world, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, to explore the day-to-day dilemmas that museum workers face when the immortal artworks that we see in the exhibition room reveal themselves to be slowly unfolding disasters.

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo51203276.html

Image credits: 

Culture Declares Emergency launch in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall © Culture Declares Emergency. 

Photo: Ackroyd & Harvey 2019