Conserving Active Matter: Activating Conservation? Review of Conserving Active Matter, edited by Peter N. Miller and Soon Kai Poh (Bard Graduate Centre, 2022, distributed by the University of Chicago Press)

Hölling, Hanna Barbara (2023). Conserving Active Matter: Activating Conservation? Review of Conserving Active Matter, edited by Peter N. Miller and Soon Kai Poh (Bard Graduate Centre, 2022, distributed by the University of Chicago Press) Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 86(3), pp. 426-432. De Gruyter 10.1515/zkg-2023-3008

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“..We have to conserve because conservation is innate to human nature. We’re pack rats. We pile things up. We collect. We save. We hoard. Why do we do this? Because we’ve learned that we need to save in order to survive. We store up food and clothing and other goods to survive physically. We store up skills and habits and memories to survive socially,” contended the cultural geographer and heritage scholar David Lowenthal in his Harvard Baxter lecture in 2014. He subsequently countered, “… nothing survives forever, the notion of keeping anything forever is a counter-productive delusion. We need instead to focus on how things change over their finite life-spans.” I was fortunate to share a few moments with the late Lowenthal in his London apartment, when he, his wife and I mused over dinner about the notions of permanence and change. His books, like his thoughts, resonated with me again and again while I was reading Conserving Active Matter, a considerable volume edited by Peter Miller and Soon Kai Poh within the Bard Graduate Center’s Cultural Histories of the Material World series.

Item Type:	Journal Article (Review Article)
Division/Institute:	Bern Academy of the Arts Bern Academy of the Arts > Institute Materiality in Art and Culture Bern Academy of the Arts > Institute Materiality in Art and Culture > Contemporary Art and Media
Name:	Hölling, Hanna Barbara0000-0002-3063-4405
Subjects:	A General Works > AM Museums (General). Collectors and collecting (General) A General Works > AZ History of Scholarship The Humanities N Fine Arts > N Visual arts (General) For photography, see TR N Fine Arts > NX Arts in general T Technology > TT Handicrafts Arts and crafts
ISSN:	2569-1619
Publisher:	De Gruyter
Language:	English
Submitter:	Hanna Barbara Hölling
Date Deposited:	06 Sep 2023 09:27
Last Modified:	23 Oct 2023 15:13
Publisher DOI:	10.1515/zkg-2023-3008
Uncontrolled Keywords:	conservation, matter, philosophy, culture
ARBOR DOI:	10.24451/arbor.19824
URI:	https://arbor.bfh.ch/id/eprint/19824