30TH

Senior Scientist Shin Maekawa tests instrumentations for an environmental monitoring
system to be installed in a historic house museum. Photo: Scott S. Warren, for the GCI.
historic materials. Within that project, an additional investigation
was proposed to estimate the impact of an inert atmosphere
(nitrogen) on biological agents, including microorganisms and insects
commonly found in anthropological remains. This deinfestation
system requiring different equipment and tools—designed,
tested, and disseminated by the GCI’s Shin Maekawa—has been
used widely in the last quarter century and is currently part of preventive
conservation strategies in Spain and some Latin American
cultural heritage institutions.
The number of visiting scientists and other scholars at GCI
Science over the last thirty years is considerable. In the last ten years
alone there have been approximately sixty-five science “visitors,”
from nearly as many institutions, who spent from two weeks to more
than a year enriching their research experiences. The graduate interns
in science, selected for a year, have numbered around forty since
2000—about half the number the entire Institute supported during
the same period (the Getty as a whole has hosted over 650 interns).
Dissemination sometimes took unexpected turns. For instance,
GCI Science funded a symposium for the Materials Research Society,
“Materials Issues in Art and Archaeology,” every two years for a
decade, on the premise that conservation research would profit by
exposure to materials science not only through GCI conference participation
but more so with the GCI as an active “mover and shaker.”
integration and expansion
By the mid-twentieth century, conservation research had settled
into a focused discipline, examining unique deterioration conditions
like waterlogged wood or finding a heretofore unknown pigment
or corrosion product. The tools were simple and methods
time-consuming. Scientists used pencils and paper or, later, simple
calculators—not the gigahertz-wielding computers anyone can
use now. Acquiring technical skills was massively labor-intensive
and isolating, so once you mastered a technique, you kept right on
using it. Studying more than a single object was a trade-off among
time, availability, and the effort to learn a new technique. As imaging
tools and analytical instruments became common and easier
to operate, a major portion of a collection could be surveyed, and
sample preparation could be automated.
In the late 1980s GCI research was a mixture of external and
internal research, but a further subdivision also existed. One laboratory,
originally headed by David Scott, followed the paradigm of the
rest of the conservation field, carrying out studies on single or small
sets of objects of the Getty Museum. The remainder of the science
staff was not bound to any particular collection. The focus for this
latter group could be the Lintels of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,
the Dead Sea Scrolls, environmental controls in tropical climates, or
the effect of building structure and ventilation on energy conservation
or air pollution. But slowly both subdivisions began influencing
each other. Those without a collection to study found themselves
intrigued by the Museum’s collections, and those previously focused
only on the Museum’s objects began to roam more widely. There
was a concomitant switch from sponsored external research to
collaborative partnerships. After 2000 these trends accelerated, and
the entire GCI Science department began acting more collectively.
toward the future
Once, a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant seemed an
improbable dream, not only to the GCI but to the entire profession.
Attitudes changed, and in 2010 the NSF created SCIART—
Chemistry and Materials Research at the Interface between
Science and Art. By 2015 the GCI has been the recipient of, or
coinvestigator in, five NSF grants, starting with the purchase of
Raman spectroscopy, the use of an Artax micro-XRF for elemental
mapping, and the development of a new air pollution sensing
system based on the model of the function of the human nose. 2
The 1984 GCI model of independently contracted and inhouse
research has evolved to match a twenty-first-century style of
research. Where once in-house staff, single objects, limited techniques,
and individual collections characterized work, we now favor
projects with many collaborators, the widest possible selection of
techniques and methodologies, artifacts from varied institutions and
locations, and shared staffing with unique expertise and skill sets.
Although most GCI science utilizes these qualities, four current
GCI projects exemplify this approach. Modern and Contemporary
Art Research, Researching Florentine Workshop Practice,
Managing Collection Environments, and the collaboration with
the Disney Animation Research Library all examine large collections
of materials on multiple levels, use diverse expertise and
scientific techniques, and combine their chemistry and physics to
resolve complex or seemingly insoluble problems.
Conservation research has moved from the solitary activity
of a few scientists using simple tools to a worldwide enterprise
with a vast array of tools and volumes of automated data routinely
deposited to the cloud. The GCI and its many colleagues are
poised to shoulder this responsibility for the future.
James Druzik is a GCI senior scientist.
1. Alison Heritage, Cecilia Anuzet, Erika Andersson, and Catherine Antomarchi,
“The ICCROM Forum on Conservation Science 2013: A Collaborative Partnership
for Strategic Thinking,” in ICOM-CC Seventeenth Triennial Conference Preprints,
Melbourne, 15–19 September 2014, edited by J. Bridgland (Paris: International
Council of Museums, 2014).
2. Principal Investigator: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
14 FALL 2015 | 30TH ANNIVERSARY