Peiresc writes about conserving a crocodile skin that had spent time in the sea after a shipwreck, and of cleaning the corrosion off ancient coins. As a younger scholar, he spent time in the artisanal workshops of Paris studying contemporary artisanal methods for fabricating ancient materials—the practice of today’s conservators long avant la lettre. The antiquarian foundation of modern conservation practice seemed self-evident to me when I launched Cultures of Conservation in 2012. What I didn’t appreciate at the start is how rethinking the history of conservation both belonged to, and was enriched by, the history of those cultural sciences. The research project “Conserving Active Matter” produced a report which was presented to the wider public in the form of an exhibition.

One of the public programs we organized for the exhibition was a series of conversations with MacArthur Fellows who were artists, humanists, social scientists and natural scientists trying to situate conservation on the broadest possible canvas. Asked to deliver the E.H. Gombrich Lectures at the Warburg Institute in London in summer 2023, I used the opportunity to present my thoughts about the way a re-think of conservation such as we had done at BGC could, in turn, help us rethink broader taxonomic issues of the human sciences.

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Conserving Active Matter: the exhibition.

“Peiresc in the Parisian Jewel House,” Knowledge and Discernment in the Early Modern Arts, eds. Sven Dupré, Christine Göttler. London-New York: Routledge, 2017, 213-35

Conserving Active Matter. With Soon Kai Poh. Cultural Histories of the Material World 9. Bard Graduate Center, 2022

What is Conservation? BGC X-Books, 2023

On Conservation as a Human Science. Ernst Gombrich Lectures. Princeton University Press 2024