Conservation, Elizabeth Ellsworth and our praxic Identity

[Dennis Piechota]

Years ago a mentor and colleague stopped treating objects in order to administer​ other conservators at a major lab. I asked him, naively, why he would stop doing bench treatments. He said, "Dennis there are only so many times one can get excited about treating bronze disease." That is probably the only observation of his that I have rejected.

When one leaves the bench one leaves a very special condition of our work life. As Elizabeth Ellsworth* has pointed out the act of learning destroys one's identity as it rebuilds a new one. With each new assessment and treatment we challenge what we know and then reconstruct that knowledge. Our identities, certainly our work identities and often I suspect much more than that, are tied to our knowledge and our performance. Bench conservators constantly engage in challenging that identity whenever they return to the same type of artifact they treated successfully in the past and question that treatment, its method and its outcome.

Instead of dismissing this as a kind of hand-ringing characteristic of our field we might flip it from that negative to an essential positive trait of the profession. We might call it our 'praxic identity'- the special condition of conservators-who-must-act to constantly challenge and remake themselves for the sake of cultural preservation.

*Ellsworth, E. (2004)  Places of Learning Routledge, NY.

Dennis

Dennis Piechota

Archaeological Conservator

Fiske Center for Archaeological Research
UMass Boston
Office: 617-287-6829

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