The Explicit Material: On the Intersections of Conservation, Art History and Human Sciences

Ever since conservation emerged as a profession profoundly preoccupied with the nature of artworks, interest in the media and materials’ physical constitution has gradually moved to the center of art theoretical and historical discourse. As it became a scientifically grounded and intellectually substantiated field towards the second half of the twentieth century, conservation gained the ability to provide connoisseurship with hard facts about the materiality of the artefactual world. The ‘material turn’ of the past decades, which designated a deep preoccupation with materiality, reinforced interests in conservation’s scholarship across a range of disciplines within the humanities. Most importantly, however, conservation has begun emancipating itself from its somewhat subordinate role in relation to other disciplines by contributing to greater knowledge about both objects and the cultures that produced them.