The Plaster Casts of the Glasgow School of Art: Damage, Conservation and Reproduction

While by no means unique amongst art and design institutions in terms of possessing and using plaster casts for pedagogical reasons, The Glasgow School of Art’s collection can be viewed through a particularly resonant lens in terms of damage, conservation and reproduction. In 2014, the School’s Mackintosh Building was damaged by fire, and a selection of the plaster casts held there underwent extensive conservation conducted by Graciela Ainsworth, a campaign positioned within a large-scale Recovery Project led by GSA Archives & Collections. In this presentation, we will look at two case studies – the Luca della Robbia Cantoria panels, and the central figure of the Laocoön – examining how, in the academic remit also, their conservation conferred additional layers of meaning, and indeed of value, in terms of aura and patina. In the final part of the presentation, we will discuss the further object biography of the Laocoön cast by introducing the AHRC-funded project led by the School of Simulation & Visualisation (GSA) and ISO Design that reproduces it in virtual and augmented reality. In fact, in the aftermath of the second fire of 2018, this reproduction of a reproduction helps to make distinctive value of damage and loss, as well as serving to narrate the important conservational implications