Doing Ethics in Practice: SBMK Platform Meetings

Abstract

This chapter investigates a process of deliberation about the conservation of a contemporary artwork, organised in the form of two “Platform meetings” by the Dutch Foundation for the Conservation of Contemporary Art (SBMK). It argues that: 1. SBMK Platform meetings help to bridge gaps between conservation theory and practice by constituting “middle-ranging” practices of ethical deliberation; 2. this middle-ranging ethical work proceeds through a combination of various, theoretically contrasting deliberative techniques; 3. investigation of the values implicitly articulated in the deliberation process suggests that the kind of ethics at work in the practice of conservation of contemporary artworks may be fruitfully understood in terms of posthumanist care ethics. By articulating the role, dynamics and values of the Platform meetings, the chapter aims to clarify why and how such meetings can contribute to both professional conservation practice and the development of theoretical conservation ethics.

1 SBMK Platform Meetings

This chapter investigates a process of deliberation about the conservation of a contemporary artwork, organised in the form of two “Platform meetings” by the Dutch Foundation for the Conservation of Contemporary Art (SBMK).¹ SBMK is an organisation supported and financed by a great number of Dutch art museums, established in the mid-1990s. Ever since its landmark project and symposium on Modern Art: Who Cares? (1997/1999), it has become a major stimulator for the development of research in the field of contemporary art conservation in the Netherlands. Among the many types of activities undertaken by the SBMK are Platform meetings and special thematic days and research projects. Usually, Platform meetings are organised when a member of the SBMK, for instance a conservator of one of the associated museums, proposes to discuss a difficult case from the museum’s collection. The SBMK coordinator and core Platform members propose to invite experts, as well as participants from the network, like conservators from other museums with comparable works in the collection. At least two meetings are held, following a protocol rooted in the SBMK (1999) decision-making model (Table 1 and Fig. 1).²

Table 1 SBMK Platform meeting protocol. Structuur casusbespreking werkgroep Balans (SBMK June 2008); translation and references to the steps of the Decision-Making Model (DMM) by author with assistance from Lydia Beerkens

Fig 1

SBMK Decision-Making Model for the Conservation and Restoration of Modern and Contemporary Art (1999) (https://www.sbmk.nl/en/tool/decision-makingmodel)

My interest in SBMK’s practice was fuelled by two considerations.³ First, the oft-voiced concern that conservation of contemporary works of art defied existing conservation-ethical guidelines and would benefit from systematic investigation of the way conservation professionals deal with ethical dilemmas on the work floor. Secondly, the growing theoretical interest in how everyday problems and routines shape ethical awareness and commitment, articulated in the “turn to practice” or “practice theory” in philosophy and social sciences.⁴

2 Hout Auto

The object discussed in the Platform meetings that I participated in was Joost Conijn’s Hout Auto (Wood Car), which is in the collection of Central Museum Utrecht. Hout Auto is twice what the name says it is. It is a car made (partly) of wood, but it also runs on wood, that is on the gas that is produced when wood is burnt in the metal burner at the back of the car. With this car, Joost Conijn travelled around in Central and Eastern Europe in 2001 and 2002. There is a video film made of the journey, which always needs to be shown together with the car and vice versa.⁵ The car is a complete and original Citroën DS, but its original body was replaced by wood panels and it runs on a wood burning fuelling system, added by the artist. The traditional DS engine engineering determines part of the conservation problem.

Hout Auto differs from most other objects in the museum’s collections, because it is a car and has to function like a car.⁶ The main reason why it has to be able to function is that the car cannot be moved without the engine running: like all Citroën DS cars, the coachwork is lifted by a hydraulic system when the engine starts and only then the wheels will move. So the engine has to be switched on when the car is to be moved—it cannot just be pushed for instance—in and out of the transportation truck when it is on loan, and in and out of the exhibition venue. The artist wants the car to be exhibited in the lifted driving position. When the engine is turned off, wooden blocks keep the car’s body at the right height. The wood burner added by Joost Conijn is no longer used; the car still runs on the gasoline tank, which makes the car easier to operate. The car has to be driven around at least twice a year to keep the engine in proper condition. Exhaust fumes are a problem, in particular when the car leaves an enclosed space and the exhaust will flow towards the interior space, rather than the open air. A solution for the exhaust fumes is to attach a hose to the exhaust pipe that will dispose of the fumes in the outdoors. The chassis is in a problematic condition. Moreover, storage is a problem, because it is not advisable to keep inflammatory fluids in a museum depot. The car is often asked for loans, but moving it around is a risky and unpredictable affair and the receiving institution needs to be aware of what is coming.

Given this context, a main question for the SBMK platform discussions was: should future conservation of Hout Auto include its functioning as a car? Two meetings were organised, one on November 20, 2015 in the external storage rooms of the Central Museum and a second on August 30, 2016 in De Hallen,⁷ Haarlem, where Hout Auto was then exhibited. Present were: the SBMK coordinator Paulien ’t Hoen (only at the first meeting); Lydia Beerkens, SBMK board member and chair of the meetings; Marije Verduijn, head of collections, and Arthur van Mourik, conservator at the Central Museum; photographer and film maker Rob Jansen, involved in the maintenance of the Hout Auto; Danielle Laudy, collection manager of the Rabo Art Collection; Christel van Hees, head conservation and restoration at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Nicole Delissen, SBMK board member and independent museum professional, and, at the second meeting only, Susanna Koenig, head of exhibition organisation at Frans Hals Museum/De Hallen. Apart from one question at the end of the second meeting, I did not participate in the discussions. The questions I asked for the analysis of the discussions were:

• Are the Platform discussions a form of ethical deliberation?

• If the answer to the question is positive, what forms/techniques of ethical deliberation do participants in the Platform meetings use?

• How can we best understand the kind of conservation ethics articulated in these discussions?

In the following I will argue that: 1. SBMK Platform meetings help to bridge gaps between conservation theory and practice by constituting “middle-ranging” practices of ethical deliberation; 2. this middle-ranging ethical work proceeds through a combination of various, theoretically contrasting deliberative techniques; 3. investigation of the values implicitly articulated in the deliberation process suggests that the kind of ethics at work in the practice of conservation of contemporary artworks may be fruitfully understood in terms of posthumanist care ethics.

3 The Platform Meetings as a Form of Ethical Deliberation

The meetings roughly followed the SBMK protocol. Most time in the meetings was taken up by the explanation of the specific characteristics of the case and the technical and procedural complexities involved in handling Hout Auto, which might lead to the question of the extent to which the discussions were indeed “ethical.” The term “ethics” was referred to only once: in response to the question whether the future maintenance of Hout Auto was or was not taken into account with the acquisition, the answer was “well, this brings us to ethics…,” accompanied with laughter. This mentioning of ethics could also be because of my presence: I had explained shortly before that I was interested as a researcher in how in SBMK meetings ethics was being done in practice. It struck me, however, that there was actually much ethics implied in the various technical and procedural details, as continuously the car’s physical integrity or “well-being” was at stake, and this had to be balanced against interests of other actors or objects, such as the other objects in the museum depot or the safety of the public. Moreover, a contrast emerged between the proper condition of Hout Auto as a car and its status of an artwork, which added an ethical dimension to the technical details as well.

An example of such implied ethicality can be found in the following conversation about the fact that the car should be exhibited on driving height and how to do this without relying on the hydraulic system, which only works with the engine turned on:

Marije::

What Joost [Conijn] told me on the telephone, he said you could screw off this sphere [part of the hydraulic system, RvdV] and put a [wooden] stick in [the system] … Rob: Never do this! What happens, this stick takes up all the oil, and the stick will start rotting at a certain point.

Marije::

So if you put it “on height,” you do not use the hydraulic system any more but you put it on height by default. Rob: Yes. The disadvantage is you can no longer put it in a higher position, you either have to put it in the highest position or you have to take with you all different sizes of sticks. What I do myself, I have a DS in my garage which doesn’t ride [anymore], and then I fetch a broomstick, which I saw into different sizes … Lydia: Then you stick them in the spheres. Rob: Yes, you first have to lift the car, then you put the sticks in, then you screw the spring sphere onto it and you leave it sit in that position. And then it will not bounce anymore. Paulien: So you say: never do this, but you actually do it yourself. Rob: Well, it is a car I use for its parts, [after which] it will go to the scrapyard. That is not what you should do with an artwork.

The conversation highlights the close connection of technical with ethical considerations: a specific potential solution, putting sticks in the hydraulic system to keep the car on height, has a particular disadvantage, namely that the sticks will rot, which is acceptable in one specific case, namely when a car is used for its parts, but never in another, namely when a car is an artwork.

In this close connection between technical and ethical deliberation, conservation typically resembles clinical medicine. Like reasoning about clinical cases in medicine, the deliberation aiming at conservation decisions could be called a form of “practical wisdom” or phronesis (van de Vall 1999). It has been argued (Waring 2000) that clinical medicine is not an example of phronesis because considering it as such (as for instance Jonson and Toulmin (1988) have done) would conflate technical practice with morality, which is (at least in Aristoteles’ use of the term phronesis) always concerned with an exercise of virtue. Virtuous actions are their own, unconditional ends: acting well is done for its own sake, whereas actions performed in medical practice have a goal which is different from the action itself: health. This argument presupposes that one can exercise technical skills and knowledge in a purely instrumental way, which might be the case when both the end (for instance: “health”) and the way to reach that end are known and undisputed. However, both in medical practice and in conservation, this is often not the case. What the equivalent of “health” would be for the Hout Auto in its specific life stage is a topic of debate, and therefore a deliberation about which technical solutions are morally acceptable or not demands more than purely technical insight: the sense of what is morally appropriate to “do with an artwork.” Conversely, morally “acting well” in conservation involves acting knowingly with an eye to the possible consequences of an intervention, like the expectation that a wooden stick will rot when taking up oil.⁸

Another distinction that this snippet of conversation questions is that between ethics and morality. Wildes (2000) distinguishes between morality and ethics in terms of first and second order discourse:

Morality is the level of first order discourse in which we live and make moral decisions. Morality is the moral world that we simply assume and take for granted in our everyday life. Ethics is the level of second order discourse which steps back from our everyday assumptions and practices to examine the basic assumptions about the moral world, such as why we regard consequences or duty as the definitive mark of morality. This second order discourse is not only the realm of philosophers or ethicists. Conflicts, at the level of morality, often lead people to this second level discussion. (Wildes 2000, p. 3, quoted in Wildes 2007, pp. 47-48 (n))

Boenink (2013) makes a comparable distinction, but diversifies “doing ethics” to include a range of deliberative activities:

Whereas morality is the set of norms and values current in a certain community, ethics is the reflection on morality. Such reflection is not limited to ethicists with a specific academic training; most human beings engage in it from time to time. Moreover […] doing ethics is not identical with passing judgment on the moral desirability of an act or a way of doing. It encompasses a broad set of activities, including recognising and interpreting the values at stake in a specific situation, imagining how the meaning of these values might shift because of the changes of the situation at hand, imagining alternatives for action as well as the consequences of these actions for the stakeholders involved. (Boenink 2013, p. 59)

In terms of both Wildes’ and Boenink’s definitions, what the participants in the Platform meetings did was without doubt a form of doing ethics: stepping back from the everyday working procedures “to examine the basic assumptions about the moral world” (Wildes 2007, pp. 47–48 (n)). What I noticed, however, is that this examination is often very implicit and only seldom takes the shape of a discussion of these assumptions as such. This is partly because of the form these deliberations take, as I will explain Sect. 4, which is only seldom an explicit application of principles. What I would like to question, moreover, is that Platform participants were doing ethics during the Platform meetings only. The opposition suggested by Wildes and Boenink is one between a taken-for-granted morality of daily life routines and the critical ethical reflection that is made possible by a stepping aside from these routines—a stepping aside solicited for instance by a situation of moral conflict. I do not question the affordances of a separate deliberative situation as provided by the Platform meetings. These meetings work so well because they allow participants to detect similarities and differences between the case at hand and other cases and as such allow for the development of “middle-range” theories operating in “the space between the theoretical imagination and the richly empirical textures of lived experience” (Wyatt and Balmer 2007, p. 622).⁹ What the participants’ stories revealed, however, is that critical reflection and ethical deliberation are at the heart of their daily work and permeate work-floor routines, even if it is not always made explicit verbally. The opposition between a taken-for-granted morality and critical ethical questioning flounders, because the problems encountered in the handling of contemporary artworks are so often unprecedented (how often do conservators have to drive around in their artworks?). In other words, there is very little that can be taken for granted. This is why I would like to point to the continuity, rather than the distinction, between the moral and the ethical: not only are ethical reflection and deliberation implicitly at work in everyday practice; more explicit and specialized deliberations about ethical dilemmas are steeped in the supposedly merely instrumental practical and technical considerations of conservation work. The Platform meetings act as middle-ranging instances, active mediators between general considerations and individual problems, allowing for a more explicit and systematic articulation and confrontation of values at stake in practice, without becoming a full-fledged, theoretical meta-discourse that reflects on these values for their own sake.

4 Techniques of Deliberation

In discussions on moral reasoning¹⁰ in bioethics various forms and styles of deliberation have been discerned, often placed in critical opposition to each other. Claims about the adequacy or inadequacy of such forms and styles can be normative (this is how moral reasoning should proceed) or descriptive (this is how moral reasoning does in fact proceed), or a combination of both. My aim here is not to decide what is right or wrong,¹¹ but to compile a list of deliberative techniques, not only in order to articulate how the discussion in the Platform meetings evolved, but also to be able to recognise moral reasoning in forms that are not at prime facie recognisable as “morality” or “ethics.”

An “applied ethics” approach to moral reasoning that is particularly dominant in ethical committees sees moral reasoning as a form of deductive reasoning from, as well as specification of, general ethical principles that themselves are rationally determined. Examples of such principles are (in the case of bioethics): promoting autonomy (to respect individual freedom); pursuing non-maleficence (to do no harm); beneficence (to do good) and justice (to be fair) (in The Belmont Report of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research (Hoffmeister 1994, p. 1155));¹² or the respect of human dignity, the best interest of the child, the non-commoditization of the human body and its corollaries, and the gratuity and anonymity of donation of human organs and products (in the case of the French National Ethics Advisory Committee (Spranzi 2013, p. 93)). The challenge is to specify these general principles in such a way that they adequately cover to the peculiarities of individual cases.

For comparable principles for conservation ethics we can look at the guidelines stipulated in Article 5, 6, 8 and 9 of ECCO’s 2002 Ethical Code,¹³ for instance Article 5: “The conservator-restorer shall respect the aesthetic, historic and spiritual significance and the physical integrity of the cultural heritage entrusted to her/his care.” This requirement might be challenged by Article 6: “The conservator-restorer, in collaboration with other professional colleagues involved with cultural heritage, shall take into account the requirements of its social use while preserving the cultural heritage.” There are many forms of social use that may damage an object’s physical integrity, and the question is how to match the requirements of its social use with its preservation, which remains the overriding aim. Article 8 outlines the requirement of minimal intervention: “The conservator-restorer should take into account all aspects of preventive conservation before carrying out physical work on the cultural heritage and should limit the treatment to only that which is necessary.” Whereas Article 9 points to the reversibility of treatment: “The conservator-restorer shall strive to use only products, materials and procedures, which, according to the current level of knowledge, will not harm the cultural heritage, the environment or people. The action itself and the materials used should not interfere, if at all possible, with any future examination, treatment or analysis. They should also be compatible with the materials of the cultural heritage and be as easily and completely reversible as possible.”

Where the applied ethics approach starts from general, rational reflection on values and principles and subsequently applies them “top down” to individual cases, a contrasting approach, moral casuistry, starts from the specificities of individual cases, and reasons “bottom up” to find applicable general rules with the help of comparison and reasoning by analogy:

Faced with a moral quandary or decision the casuist will reflect on the nonmoral and moral features of the case at hand and compare these features to a paradigm case, one where there is stable social consensus about the right course of action. General ethical norms emerge from families of cases to guide moral reasoning over new or more ambiguous cases. Trained reflection on the features of new cases may then lead us to adjust, refine, or better specify the general norms via the mechanism of a reflective equilibrium, seeking the appropriate balance between general moral norms and concrete cases or decisions [… .]. (Kelley 2007, p. 65)

Casuists claim that casuistry comes more closely to moral deliberation in everyday practice than an “applied ethics” approach. For conservation ethics this has been argued as well (van de Vall 1999, 2015; Wharton 2018).

Critics of moral casuistry contend that moral deliberation in practice cannot do without general rules, guidelines or principles and can be best understood as a back and forth between individual case and general principles (Arras 1991); or in terms of the creation and adaptation of values, which are more practice-bound and flexible than norms or principles (Spranzi 2013); and that rather than by explicit comparison with paradigm cases and reasoning by analogy, moral deliberation proceeds by a more implicit comparison with anecdotal evidence and storytelling about like cases (Braunack-Mayer 2001; cf. Hoffmeister 1994); or that the balancing of pros and cons of conflicting values in particular cases leads to better decision-making (DeMarco and Ford 2006). Casuistry, moreover, is seen as producing conformity to existing norms and confirm the ethical status quo as it would not able to address issues that require ways of thinking beyond those provided by the analogical reasoning of casuistry (Hoffmeister 1994, p. 1160). It would not account for the normativity of morality “because it claims only to be elucidating the values and principles that are immanent in cases or in the social and cultural traditions within these cases are compared.” (Hoffmeister 1994, p. 1159)

In Sect. 5 of this chapter I will return to these last two criticisms, as I will agree that casuistry is primarily a method or a procedure and therefore does not help to guide reflections on the particular content or relative importance of values referred to in case comparisons. In the following section I will analyse the discussions in the Platform meeting to identify the kind of deliberative techniques employed, sometimes in combination: the application of general principles; storytelling; case comparison by analogical reasoning and case comparison by storytelling; and balancing. Rather than seeing them, and the ethical approaches they are connected to, as excluding each other, I consider them to be complementary, each of them contributing to a fuller and more detailed articulation of the dilemmas at stake.

It was interesting that general principles, like the traditional conservation guidelines mentioned above, did pop up in the discussion, but in a way that rather stretched their meanings. The guideline that the integrity of the work should be respected was present throughout the discussion. But it was, in particular in the second meeting, connected to the work’s current biographical stage (although not consistently): yes, driving the car had been an essential part of Hout Auto functioning as a work of art, but was so no longer in this phase of the artwork’s career; perhaps it could become relevant again in the future. In between the two SBMK meetings two of the participants attended a conference on kinetic art, which proved very enlightening for their understanding of Hout Auto (conferences also do lot of middle-ranging work). This conference solidified an insight that already was present in the first meeting: that you cannot expect the same things of an artwork in all its life-stages.¹⁴ Here a comparison was helpful:

Lydia: When do you put in a new engine and when do you let it go? The idea of a work of art “in retirement” comes from the Tinguely Museum; some works have been retired; they may be presented without moving; for other works a movie is made to be shown next to the non-moving work; there are all kinds of forms in between still living and being written off.

The question of what exactly constitutes the work’s identity and whether this identity might change when a work is “retired” was the most telling example of “recognising and interpreting the values at stake in a specific situation, imagining how the meaning of these values might shift because of the changes of the situation at hand” (Boenink 2013, p. 59). This did not, however, entail an explicit mentioning of the value of the work’s physical integrity and significance or the principle of respecting it.

The guideline of minimal intervention came up at the end of the second meeting, but more as an attitude than as a principle. When I asked why no one in the meeting pleaded for taking out the engine altogether, the answer referred to the professional reticence of conservators and their preference for step-by-step changes. The guideline of the reversibility of treatments appeared as well, but in the guise of keeping options open for the future: maybe in a hundred years it might be desirable that Hout Auto could drive again and would that be possible? This indicates that these guidelines are very much alive, but not in the form of general principles that are explicitly referred to and subsequently specified in their application to a particular problem, but rather as incorporated in a professional ethos, a disposition or “spirit” in which members of the conservation community work, to use a term from care ethics—an ethos that will thoroughly form their perception of the possibilities and constraints of a situation, but cannot a priori determine what is the best way to proceed.¹⁵ It was also interesting that there was a lot of storytelling in the discussions. This confirms a conclusion drawn by Braunack-Mayer (2001), who interviewed fifteen general practitioners about how they dealt with ethical problems and analysed the forms of moral reasoning they used for their answers. One of her conclusions is that GPs use a case-by-case approach, grounded in the telling of stories and anecdotes derived from their experiences. She distinguishes three ways in which stories function: as purely descriptive accounts to illustrate the nature of their work; and as “moral trumps,” either in a deontological fashion, illustrating a moral maxim or rule-of-the thumb, or in a consequentialist fashion to focus on outcomes.

The GPs tended to use their stories as trumps on moral talk, in other words, to provide empirical authorization for why things should be done in certain ways […]. Their moral trumps worked in two ways: in deontological fashion to illustrate a maxim or rule-of-thumb or in consequentialist fashion to focus on outcomes. […] a small group of stories […] were descriptive, told to illustrate the nature of work in general practice. (Braunack-Mayer 2001, p. 76).

Likewise, some stories in the Platform meetings were mainly descriptive, in that they served to highlight the special character of Hout Auto, like the story about what happened in the context of an exhibition in Assen:

Marije: What also happened is that we were called by the police. The ambassador of Israel would visit this room and the secret service had examined the car and found it far too suspicious; they thought that perhaps all kinds of bombs were hidden in the tank. If that would certainly be possible, it was not the case of course. They asked us whether we could fully account for it, and, yes, even though the car was always in a secure setting, someone could have sneaked in at some unguarded moment … yet finally they felt assured and decided not to cut it open.

Other stories served as a “moral trump”; these were often not about Hout Auto itself but about comparable cases, the “trump” supposedly also being applicable to Hout Auto. Generally speaking, deliberation was informed by comparison: often featuring stories or anecdotes of experiences with real objects like DS old-timers, but also marked by a more speculative use of fictional cases, which cannot be called a story. Such fictional speculations went like: what if we treated Hout Auto as if it were a bronze sculpture? DS old-timers and bronze sculptures featured as extremes of a continuum of objects, while all kinds of other objects between these extremes passed in review: design objects with motors, such as hair dryers, lamps, other car-like artworks, kinetic artworks or pianos. Some of these comparisons were embedded in stories, others were not. During the introduction round for instance, Rabo Art collection manager Danielle Laudy explained why she was interested in the case, by telling how they work with artworks containing engines, which led to a comparison of how such works function in corporate collections and in museums. This comparison did not contain a story or anecdote but rather a more generalizing account:

Danielle: This work [a lightwork by Rob Birza] is continuous, there is a bar at the back in the auditorium, and when there is an event this lightwork is turned on and is moving. Because it is on often, it needs a lot of attention and small repairs, [such as] bulbs that have to be replaced, which is a returning cost factor […]. Lydia: Most important for you is that a corporate collection exhibits most of its works almost permanently, whereas a museum will keep many of its works in long-term storage until they are exhibited. In a corporate collection the works are permanently in use. Danielle: Yes, yes. Rob: Which means that there is much more wear and tear. Lydia: Yes, unless you take it into account and have a regular overhaul.

Other comparisons were indeed more story-like. In the kind of moral trump stories, sometimes the trump was consequential, as when the possibility was discussed whether it would be possible to take the engine out and put another one in later:

Rob: Well I know this [car] restorer, a DS builder; he lives in France now but he used to live in Ouderkerk aan de Amstel for a long time and I have had conversations with him because every Thursday night we would meet there with all kinds of people from the DS world to tinker with these cars and so on. We had a discussion once because there is so much [that will break down]. When I put in a new dynamo, a week later something else will break down in that car and then there is the high voltage again … Arthur: Everything works upon everything. Rob: Because everything wears out on everything in a classic car. And everybody said, hey, you are right! It is like that because I had this and those garagistes know this all too well, and they don’t mind changing something because they know the car will be back after a few weeks with another problem, so they will have a new job again […] So if you think we take out the engine and put it back after a hundred years and then it will drive again, you’re bound to have to do one repair job after another.

In this account, Hout Auto was compared with old-timers to explain the similarities between them: what goes for an old DS also goes for Hout Auto. Other stories were meant to highlight differences between Hout Auto as an artwork and other old-timers, like in the following part of the earlier quoted story about the broomsticks, in which the moral trump was deontological:

What I do myself, I have a DS in my garage which doesn’t ride. I fetch a broomstick, which I saw into different sizes … Lydia: Then you stick them in the spheres. Rob: Yes, you first have to lift the car, then you put the sticks in, then you screw the spring sphere onto it and you leave it sit in that position. And then it will not bounce anymore. Paulien: So you say: never do this, but you actually do it yourself. Rob: Well, it is a car I use for its parts, after which it will go to the scrapyard. That is not what you should do with an artwork.

Some stories finally articulated the hybrid nature of Hout Auto:

Arthur: Here we see 2007 Boijmans … Paulien: That is Joost himself. Arthur: You see that plastic was wrapped around the car … Paulien: When again did you buy it? Arthur and Marije: 2003. Arthur: The last time … It has also been to Ahoy in Rotterdam for two days, and the last time in 2014 to Assen; here it is placed in the exhibition room and here it was covered because the lux was too high. Paulien: Because the lux was too high, this is terrific. Arthur: Yes, because you don't want the wood to discolour …

Here the situation was seen as rather paradoxical: like an old-timer, Hout Auto has to be driven around in full daylight, but in the exhibition space it is heavily protected against that same light, because it is not an ordinary old-timer but a work of art.

The Platform discussions partly confirm another conclusion by Braunack-Mayer about moral deliberations of GPs: that although their stories represent “a form of homespun casuistry,” this form “underplays one of the central elements of casuistic reasoning—the paradigm case,” when understood in the strict sense of being “public cases with a long history of debate, discussion and correction” (Braunack-Mayer 2001, p. 73). General practitioners never alluded to publicly debated cases, but only to cases from their own practice. The same was true for the participants of the Platform discussions. However, in the deliberation, Hout Auto was consistently compared with two kinds of objects—old-timers and bronze sculptures—that in a general sense might fit Albert R. Jonsen’s stipulation of presenting unambiguous maxims:

A case in which the circumstances were clear, the relevant maxim unambiguous and the rebuttals weak, in the minds of almost any observer. The claim that this action is wrong (or right) is widely persuasive. There is little need to present arguments for the rightness (or wrongness) of the case and it is very hard to argue against its rightness (wrongness). (Quoted in Braunack-Mayer, op. cit. 73.)

Throughout the discussion balancing of values and options took place—which is not surprising as balancing is at the heart of the decision-making model (and the core members of the Platform meetings were formerly called the “Balans” (balance) group). DeMarco and Ford define balancing as

a metaphor for the attempt to determine the relative importance of conflicting values in particular cases or classes of cases in order to come to a conclusion mainly about moral obligations. Balancing may be intuitive or deliberative, or a hybrid of the two. In intuitive balancing, reasons are not offered to support the decision that one value is of greater importance than another involved in a particular conflict. Deliberative balancing provides reasons for believing that one value has greater importance than another. (DeMarco and Ford 2006, pp. 490–491)

In the Platform discussion, balancing was less about conflicting values than about the relative possibilities and risks of conflicting options for conservation, which implicitly referred to background values such as the work’s authenticity and manageability within the collection. What aspects of Hout Auto were most important in the current situation and how would it be possible to safeguard the most important aspects, but leave open the possibility to maintain other aspects too?

Christel: So in terms of care and maintenance you should go back to the question: why do you actually have this? And then you could also decide that it should be able to drive once in a while to render visible the essence of the work as such, if that’s what it is. Marije: It has never been the idea to show the car driving while it was in the collection. The car has become a stage prop. It has become a sculpture illustrating the story told in the film. That is how it has always been part of the collection. Christel: If that is the case, things are far easier; then we can say that we simply removed its function, its functionality. But then I would advocate doing it in such a way that eventually it can drive again. Paulien: You can always bring this function back, isn’t it? Rob: To let it run on gas? Paulien: Or on wood! Rob: Yes.

According to DeMarco and Ford, the practice of balancing “is attentive to the fact that the issues involved in many cases form a potential continuum. For example, risk can involve any percent, harm avoided can vary from the almost inconsequential to death, and a parent’s reasons may vary from simple convenience to deeply held religious conviction supported by extensive involvement in a religion” (DeMarco and Ford 2006, p. 491). This continuum-character of moral deliberation became very apparent after the crucial step made in the first meeting that driving was no longer an essential part of the Hout Auto as a work of art, but only served its transportation. From then on the discussion was no longer about how best to keep up the engine or what loan protocols to write, but: how to move the car when it no longer drives and: what to do with the engine, its fluids, and how to store it? The option most seriously discussed was to treat it as a very heavy sculpture and design a custom-made platform on wheels for its transportation. This actually opened the opportunity to formulate comparisons with pianos or bronze sculptures.

Lydia: Look, when you say it will go on loan for over a year and you in fact decided already that this is a bronze sculpture measuring some 1.80 metre by 5 metres and [weighing] some 1200 kilos, you can come up with a perfectly fitting position, one which does not only support it at particular points but serves as a comprehensive support, so as to prevent it from sagging, and—just like a piano—with wheels you can fold out and [make it] electronically manoeuvrable so you can ride it carefully in and out, and once you set it up [in its permanent position], you fold the last pieces inward so that optically it sits in its lifted position. In this way, you have it on display.

However, the objection was made that the car’s entire underside had to be renewed, for otherwise the car will not be able to rest on its display place. And wouldn’t that be a bridge too far in terms of tampering with a work of art?

Rob: But this plate will touch the car at particular points. And the bottom of the car is awfully bad. The chassis of the bottom is, uh, Swiss cheese. Lydia: What do you need to improve it? It is a matter of doing new welding underneath once, and then it will be fine, am I right? Rob: Yes and probably also the bars alongside … Lydia: yes, so what will it cost if I bring the car to you? Rob: Well, I won’t do it myself; I still have two cars myself that need repairing, well what will it be, 7000 [euros] … Lydia: For 7000 you have an underside and I suppose that you have a very fancy electronically manoeuvrable platform construction with wheels in and out … Rob: This last option is a good plan, that other plan, well then you have to deal with an artwork that the artist has made—we just talked about a bronze sculpture but suppose that the sculpture is a bit too thin and you want to make something underneath and it appears that the sculpture is too weak and you make another sculpture—it comes down to making another car. That’s no longer the work of art made by Joost.

But if the engine would not need to function any longer, why keep it in the car? And just keep the gas tank? Or go back to the artist’s version with the wood burner?

Nicole: I would say that you should keep the engine; just to have as much as possible of the original object. So that when, for whatever reason, a movement would arise [at some point], that you want to be able to go back to that wooden stove; that this is possible then. Paulien: You can see under the hood that it has worked. [various voices] Yes. Lydia: That is also the case with design objects that have everything still within as well, even if with the hair dryer or toaster of the ’60s you could take out the engine if you only put it in the case. Danielle: But what do you do with the jerrycan then? That wasn’t in it originally. Marije: That is how it is bought, that is what Conijn put inside. Lydia: Tinkered inside. Paulien: It is very much Joost Conijn, to put in an engine and that then it works; that is very much his style. Nicole: I can imagine that you really document this with him, also retrospectively: what was his reason to go for this gasoline story at the time?

5 Towards an Ethics of Care

Taken together, the application of principles, case comparison, storytelling and balancing allow for a rich array of considerations and concerns to be articulated and taken into account. But they merely constitute procedures or techniques for deliberation; they do not help us to decide which values are more important than others and why. I’ve tried to discover what were important values for the platform members. I venture the conclusion that although more traditionally acknowledged values like the work’s integrity—with the concomitant guidelines of its protection through minimal intervention and reversibility—do play an important role, they do so more as ingredients of an attitude or ethos than as explicit rules; they have become part of a more complex web of values and concerns that are highly situation-dependent, include emotional attachments and human relations involved in the process of working with the object, as well as an attachment to the object itself.

Compared with the logic of the decision-making model, where the starting point is identifying discrepancies between current and the original condition and meaning, the deliberations were more focused on identifying possible identities for Hout Auto, and placing them in biographical stages and contexts of practice. Where the decision making model proceeds by weighing the pros and cons of various conservation options, the deliberations seemed more engaged with weighing the pros and cons of various scenarios for desirable futures, considering these futures in terms of the practices needed to sustain them, each practice encompassing specific networks of objects, activities, people, tools, skills, understandings and emotions.¹⁶ Against the scenario of prolonging the current practice in which the car itself drives into and out of the exhibition space, a scenario was proposed in which the car would be transported on a movable platform, either with the engine still in the car or with the engine removed altogether. Each scenario required a different constellation of equipment, skills and people. Where the current scenario included for instance Rob’s coming over to drive the car, trucks for the car’s transport, hoses for the exhaust fumes and wooden blocks to exhibit it on the right height, for the alternative scenario mention was made of a movable platform with wheels folding in and out, trucks large enough to contain the car in its upward driving position, mechanical height adjustors to keep the car on height, auto-movers, and drivers with the strength to steer the car the last few meters without power steering or brakes.

The original object was an important consideration, but the deliberations changed after the acknowledgement that driving was perhaps essential in an earlier stage but was no longer part of the functioning of Hout Auto as a work of art; the car had become a prop or illustration for the film. Yet, it was also striking, that the second identity of the work, Hout Auto as a darling of DS old-timer enthusiasts, kept coming up in the discussion, if in terms of a possible future that shouldn’t be excluded.

Rob: I can imagine that in twenty years another car organisation comes around, saying: now we are going to let all cars that are artworks worldwide drive again one way or another on a circuit… . Lydia: Panamarenko. Rob: And then that wouldn’t be possible with this car. Arthur: It would if we do it in such a way that it can drive again. Rob: Yes and, as you say, with everything new inside … In this sense it is important that that is possible again. Paulien: And then we will call you [laughter].

But the movement from one scenario to another was not so easily made. It was not only a rational decision, and one of the reasons for this was that maintaining the “old” Hout Auto required an array of practices and people, which had a more than instrumental dimension, or even an emotional one. The head of collections actually remarked that she found it a very big step to take leave of the Hout Auto’s identity as a car because it seemed a terribly cold thing to do; it also implied taking leave of the technician’s regularly coming over to drive the car and all the energy and carefulness going into its maintenance.

Marije::

No, I find I was very much along the line that we already have shared, but I found it a very big step or what, and I notice that I find it comfortable to notice that you all share in the direction …

Lydia::

The big step is to realize that it doesn’t function anymore.

Marije::

That has a terrible coldness to it. And that you [Rob] come twice each year that is also just … Paulien: You’ll just come twice a year [laughter]. Here I am, it’s in the contract!

Marije::

But I was also very much yes, and you know, and it is no longer original and nobody ever sees it, so you experience it as a sculpture with a film … So well I found it a very big step, as you know, I mean how much energy and carefulness and I don’t know what, that for me was also a reason to hear how you think about this more broadly. It assures me that all of you do not find it so very strange to follow this idea.

Similar emotional dimensions came up about other aspects of the maintenance practice as well: the adventure of driving around, the excitement of the public looking at the car driving. But also the anxiety and annoyance about the risks and unpredictability of its transport.

Arthur: I find it [the car] an unreliable thing; it is a laborious object to work with for loans, we carry responsibility for the whole … [Other voices, mixed: ] It is also full of risks: the car may explode, burn down … Arthur: It is quite a happening, the parties who take part in the loan should know that. It must be very clear to them what they are dealing with. Every time it is quite labour intensive to make that clear. Paulien: A happening it remains, that is the nice thing; you keep the happening. [Various voices:] Sure enough, but it becomes less risky. Rob: If you talk about a happening that is the driving and that the engine runs and there is a lot of smoke coming out and crowds of people in the streets – in Nantes it was gigantic: the whole street was packed and in Ahoy Hall we had the Shell marathon, which was also big, with many from the public running alongside the car … Paulien: What you indicate as the happening is, as far as the public is concerned, that it drives. Arthur: Yes, but Rob that is nice what you say but that is exactly, that part exactly is like a boy’s adventure book, but I also find that difficult … It is my task to ensure control and that part feels a bit difficult.

The loan to Museum De Hallen provided a good opportunity to go through all the movements of transporting Hout Auto again. Getting it into the museum was a problem, as a pillar barred the entrance through the front doors on the ground floor. An alternative was to move it in through a window, but in that case the windowsill had to be replaced and the municipality’s property department did not approve the replacement. The next option was to lift the car and move it in through large windows at the front side on the first floor, as had been done before with large works by Joseph Beuys and Thomas Hirschhorn; only now a temporary wall impeded its passage, which could not be removed as it was needed for the exhibition. So finally the car was put in a container and hoisted to the level of a smaller window in the building’s sidewall; the car had to drive over a bridge connecting the container with the museum room. Rob made a film of the whole, very precarious procedure.¹⁷

Susanna::

We did have the problem that the axle¹⁸ started to scrape the floor when it came in.

Rob::

When driving in, yes, that happened because there was a small bridge […].

Arthur::

The engine is in the front so the weight goes to the nose.

Rob::

Because in the front there is a heavy part, but there is one at the back as well; and at a certain moment the whole thing started to tilt over, you see in the film that at a certain point the container started to lean over backwards. And I was in the car and couldn’t get out because those doors at the side couldn’t open; that was a very suspenseful moment.

The whole operation took a lot of preliminary research, consultation and collaboration. An important factor in getting the loan to succeed was the determination and experience of the responsible curator and the trust between the loan giver and the loan taker.

Susanna: This has been very laborious and at one point I thought: I just want this car to come; this was just a matter of honour that it should succeed. We did cancel it one time because we didn’t see any possibility, due to the building, to move it inside. A lot of measuring was needed; Arthur came by another time to look at everything again … The Hout Auto is yours, you wanted it as much to succeed as we did. Arthur: Yes. Susanna: That made it very pleasant; if you have a loan giver who seems hesitant … Marije: I think it was also your experience; you had already managed to get in more big objects here; if you had just started out, you probably would not have dared to do it.

Finances played a role and permissions; access and safety were issues, as the window looked onto a shopping street where other trucks would be loading and unloading in the morning and people would be shopping later on. The safety of the public was another reason not to let the car drive:

Arthur: A reason for not driving it is this: when people see it, they run to look at it and see what happens, and they want to touch the car; but if there is an accident there is the issue of insurance. Is the Frans Hals Museum accountable or the Central Museum? […] During the loan in Assen, I noticed there were visitors who didn’t know what happened and when they see the car they think let’s go there and have a look underneath it. This gives rise to situations in which you don’t know what people will do and what the car will do.

The proposition I would like to make is, rather than understanding conservation ethics in practice as primarily geared to protecting works, to see it as an ethics of care for the mutual flourishing of the work and its surrounding ecosystem. Again, the comparison of conservation ethics with bioethics is fruitful. In their work on synthetic biology, Rabinow and Bennett (2009) explain that in the 1970s the predominant form of bioethics was focused on protection; it was designed to prevent abuse of vulnerable subjects by medical researchers. For example, in the Tuskegee experiments, in which patients with latent syphilis were not given proper treatment,

bioethical equipment was designed to protect human subjects of research, understood as autonomous persons. Hence its protocols and principles were limited to establishing and enforcing moral bright lines indicating which areas of scientific research were forbidden. (2009, p. 218)

Protection is still an important issue, but has become part of a more comprehensive approach principally concerned with “the care of others, the world, things and ourselves. Such care is pursued through practices, relationships, and experiences that contribute to and constitute a flourishing existence” (Ibid).

This new bioethical emphasis on flourishing has a parallel in recent theory of contemporary art conservation, where for instance notions of artworks’ unfolding (Laurenson 2016) or becoming (Castriota 2019) have been proposed. The distinction between the two types of ethics is not further elaborated by Rabinow and Bennett (2012). However, care ethics is nowadays a thriving field, both as a specialisation within ethics—the branch of ethics concerned with a specific aspect of human activities and attitudes—and an approach to ethics in general (Gardiner 2009; Brouwer and van Tuinen 2019). Taken in this latter sense, care ethics tends to distance itself from both the utilitarian type of ethics that considers moral good in terms of the greatest happiness of the greatest number and the Kantian (deontological) type of ethics that is oriented to the rational determination of the rights and obligations of individuals. Because in this alternative sense life is conceived as ontologically relational, care is seen as a natural inclination of human (and in posthumanist strands also non-human) beings, rather than as something that an inherently isolated and egoistic individual needs to be forced to do through considerations of self-interest or duty. In the words of Tronto and Fisher:

On the most general level, we suggest that caring be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web. (Quoted in Tronto 1993, p. 103)

Central concepts of care ethics are responsibility, trust, commitment and attentiveness, rather than justice, rights, duties or obligations. Care ethics can be directed to both private and public life and institutions, but tends to start from the former—or to question the distinction. It is often close to strands of virtue ethics, communitarianism and feminism; it frames moral situations as specific situated, and practice-related.

Care is perhaps best thought of as a practice. The notion of a practice is complex: it is an alternative to conceiving of care as a principle or an emotion. To call care a practice implies that it involves both thought and action, that thought and action are interrelated, and that they are directed toward some end. The activity, and its end, set the boundaries as to what appears reasonable within the framework of the practice. (Tronto, op. cit., p. 108)

This focus on practice is very important. Joan Tronto particularly emphasized that the ethics of care does not only include that a need for care is recognised and a responsibility assigned; that care is given and how it is given and whether and how it is received are just as important aspects of care-ethical consideration. Initially Tronto (1993) distinguished four aspects of care, each with its concomitant value:

• Caring about, noticing the need to care in the first place, which requires attentiveness.

• Taking care of, assuming responsibility for care, which requires responsibility.

• Care-giving, the actual work of care, which requires competence.

• Care-receiving, the response of that which is cared for, which requires responsiveness.

In 2013 she added a fifth aspect:

• Caring with, aligning care with democratic commitments to justice, equality, and freedom for all, which requires plurality, communication, trust and respect, solidarity. (Tronto 2013, p. 23; 35)

Although this fifth aspect ultimately addresses care on the level of society as a whole, which may not always be an explicit issue in individual conservation cases, the fact that she sees care as a conglomerate of nested practices allows us to use the relevant values for discussing the relational dimensions of care also on a more restricted level.

Tronto stresses that the phases of the care process must fit together into a whole; hence I found it interesting to note that in the Platform discussions they were always intermingled. The discussions identified Hout Auto’s needs for care in a very detailed way; based on the participants’ long experience of care giving—to the work and to similar objects—its responses could be recognised and predicted. In a care approach to ethics, the mixing of ethical and technical considerations, as I discussed in the first section of this chapter, does not detract from the ethical nature of the deliberation. Quite the opposite: experience with the technical aspects is included in the values of competence of care-giving and responsiveness of care-receiving. Finally, the relational aspects of care came up in the conversation when the long-lasting relationship between the museum and Rob in his role of technical expert, or the trust Arthur and Marije had in Susanna’s experience during the loan arrangements with De Hallen, were mentioned: ultimately these factors were perhaps even more important than the technical details.

In this case, however, the principal care receiver was an object, not a human being. In this context, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017), taking Tronto’s (1993) work as a starting point, extended the notion of care to a “more than human only” matter, to cover both techno-scientific assemblages and nature-cultures.¹⁹ In Puig de la Bellacasa’s posthumanist ethics, the work of caring implies a material engagement with a world that touches as much as it is touched and therefore transforms the caregiver; the emotional attachments participants formed over time with Hout Auto and its maintenance, both positive and negative, are examples of such mutual transformation. The way she conceives of a non-normative, situated ethicality or ethos guiding caregivers, rather than in terms of pre-existing rules or guidelines, is also fruitful for the appreciation of the tentative, open-ended attitude of the deliberations, which mirrored the unprecedented aspect of the ethical questions at stake. She tries to formulate ethics in a way that avoids normative stances but still recognizes obligations—not as moral principles but as intensities and gradations of ethicality: “Ethical obligations of care have a contingent necessity that emerges from material and affective constraints [of a specific situation] rather than moral orders” (op. cit., p. 152). It is ethos that grounds ethical principles rather than following them (ibid., p. 127), in a process of world-making that creates new possibilities and constraints when it responds to existing ones. “Practices create a relational ethos with a world, a process through which material constraints are co-created […]. In turn, constraints recreate relational, situated possibilities and impossibilities” (Ibid., p. 153). In other words: a new scenario for Hout Auto, designed to respond to the constraints of the current problematic situation, will create new care-giving practices, new webs of care, new constellations of equipment, skills and people. This will in turn create new possibilities for the unfolding of the work and, without doubt, new constraints and problems.

As a practice in its own right, we could conclude that the specific role of the SBMK Platform meetings could be phrased in terms of their contribution to the aspect of caring with: in creating a culture of plurality, communication, trust and respect, and solidarity. This makes the middle-ranging work of the SBMK Platform meetings more than procedural. Although they work with a specific protocol, the Decision-Making Model, their impact is more pervasive. They set the stage for an open discussion in an atmosphere of respect, trust and solidarity in which all aspects of care can be addressed from a plurality of perspectives. The analysis of the Platform deliberations has shown that the meetings proceed through a variety of forms of moral deliberation, which facilitates the articulation of a broad range of concerns: not only technical and ethical dilemmas come to the fore, but also emotional ones. General ethical guidelines and principles are not absent in the moral reasoning surrounding the care for the work, neither on the work floor nor in the middle-range deliberations developed in the meetings, but take the form of incorporated professional attitudes, an ethos giving a general direction to rather than imposing specific ways of dealing with the work. The variety of deliberative techniques enables the mapping of the complex relational web that Hout Auto is part of and the alterations it will go through within a changed practice of care-giving. It is by enabling the articulation of a wide range of considerations that the SBMK fosters an ethos of attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness, respect and trust that supports the continued flourishing of works of contemporary art.