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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
Aesthetic philosophers, theorizing literary critics and editors, and reflective commentators on the restoration of paintings, buildings, and monuments have repeatedly shown that the concept of the work is anything but self-evident. The present essay examines major attempts to conceptualize this problematic area since the 1930s, before proposing a solution based on the semiotics of C. S. Peirce and Theodor Adorno's negative dialectics that will help clarify thinking when practices of preservation and conservation are being determined. The language and thinking come ultimately from scholarly editorial activity; the working assumption is that, with suitable adjustments for the medium, it will apply to other historically orientated forms of cultural conservation.
INTRODUCTION
I should choose my writing to be judged as a chiselled block, unconnected with my hand entirely. (Virginia Woolf, 1908/1975, p. 325) A theory of the work does not exist, and the empirical task of those who naively undertake the editing of works often suffers in the absence of such a theory. (Michel Foucault, 1969/1986, p. 104)
Work: only four letters, satisfyingly brief, apparently simple. In English the verb and the noun are the same, so that the concept of the work retains its direct connection to the hand of its maker. The concept loses it in most other European languages: so we have German Werk (as opposed to Arbeit), French oeuvre (vs travail), Italian opera (vs lavoro), Spanish obra (vs trabajo), Russian proizvedenie (vs rabota), and so on. Getting a grip on the concept is notoriously difficult in whatever language; and, by and large, editors and conservators who want to get things done avoid taking the trouble. Yet, if the nature of the work undergoing expert treatment during cultural heritage conservation or scholarly editing is assumed to be self-evident, then the danger looms that practitioners will, despite the best of intentions, misrepresent works or just flounder about with self-contradicting solutions when faced with difficult cases.
Aesthetic philosophers, theorizing literary critics and editors, and reflective commentators on the restoration of paintings, buildings, and monuments have repeatedly shown that the concept is anything but self-evident. The present essay examines some attempts to conceptualize this problematic area since the 1930s, before proposing a solution that will, it is hoped, help clarify thinking when practices of preservation and conservation are being determined. The solution on offer is unavoidably provisional in that it reflects the background of the author. The language and thinking employed here come ultimately from scholarly editorial activity; the working assumption is that, with suitable adjustments for the medium, it will apply to other historically orientated forms of cultural conservation. (1)
The first step is to characterize what can loosely be called the traditional understanding. Whether the work in question is allographic (as in the case of a literary work, where any copy is an instance of it) or autographic (as in the case of a painting, where the physical object is identical with it), we have traditionally come to the question of the work with a series of assumptions: that the work is in some sense objective, standing over and apart from its maker and its perceivers and that, conversely, its histories of making and reception stand over and apart from its essential nature as a work; that the work has the potential to persist over time; and that it has an identity that sustains true descriptions of it (for example, that the Iliad is in hexameter). Performance-works, it has long been recognized, raise their own problems of definition because of the gap between script and performance (for example, Is an unsung song that exists only in written form truly a song?). But other seeming paradoxes such as, If the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre, where is Hamlet?, are readily dealt with by the allographic/autographic distinction. (2) This was the general understanding into the late 1960s when some memorable accounts of the literary work were put forward.
The granting of objectivity to the work placed conservation, editing, and interpretation in a position essentially external to it. The argument of the present essay is that this 1960s position was and is basically wrong; that the post-structuralist strands of thought that succeeded this position got it wrong but in another way; and that, counter-intuitively, preservation, conservation, and interpretation are always and unavoidably intrinsic to the work. Fundamental philosophical positions undergird each of these arguments. They are examined here in turn. A solution is proposed and then applied to the problematics of historic building conservation. But, first, some examples of art conservation that expose the inadequacy of the traditional understanding and that beg the questions that this essay seeks to answer will be briefly described.
WORKS IN DISTRESS
In 2005, with the publication of its fourth volume of A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, the Rembrandt Research Project, which had commenced in 1968, was only one volume away from completing its verification of the authenticity of the many hundreds of paintings that have been claimed as authorial by successive catalogers since the late nineteenth century. Numbers have been radically trimmed from the most optimistic claims, some very significant de-attributions have been made, and other paintings queried. Historical information, extensive scientific testing, and connoisseurship have brought us as close as possible to knowing what exactly Rembrandt's oeuvre is made up of.
July 2006 was the cause for further celebration: the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of Rembrandt. Numerous public events marked the occasion in Holland, including important exhibitions of his recently restored paintings. In the Mauritshuis art museum in The Hague, for instance, several thoroughly restored Rembrandts were proudly on show, together with reports on, and a video of, the cleaning processes that the paintings had undergone. This sort of exhibit makes for a different kind of response to the traditional one of simple admiration. We are learning to see paintings differently. This has been happening with Rembrandt in a concerted way since the late 1980s through a series of exhibitions around the world that have been curated with scholarly care and extensive research. We are regularly invited to absorb and thus to naturalize the conservatorial gaze.
This is apt to come at some cost to our preconceptions. X-radiographs on display at the Mauritshuis showed for instance that, in the famous Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632), the corpse being dissected (based on an executed criminal whose right hand had earlier been cut off for some other malfeasance) acquired a well-proportioned hand even though Rembrandt had originally painted him in his non-entire condition. It is not a botched job by some later perfecter. It is authorial. (3)
We are not used to thinking of paintings as having previous versions or of their colors as changing over the decades by different amounts; yet they do, and conservators find ways of rebalancing the paintings to approximate their (fancied) original state. This same painting had previously been restored in 1951 when an eighteenth-century addition was deliberately obscured. The addition was a numbered list of the names of the doctors watching the dissection; it was placed in a drawing held by one of them, and corresponding numbers were added next to each portrait. The restoration of 1997-98 partially removed the obscuring medium so that now the information is just legible.
Sometimes restoration is justified by rhetorical appeal to the mastery of the artist (or alternatively to the aesthetic values of the painting as an object: the two are not the same thing but are often elided). Sometimes the ground of appeal is the painting's historical witness: here, the fact of the interpretation being felt desirable in the eighteenth century and its taking the form it did. This restoration wants to have it both ways: to be, now with a wonderful new clarity, of Rembrandt but also (with a little less clarity) of the eighteenth century. It appeals to two different standards of textual authority (as a scholarly editor would put it) simultaneously. What is it, then, that we are seeing? What effect does such intervention have upon our notion of the work? The following example of a very famous, recent restoration will help answer the question.
Pinin Brambilla Barcilon's restoration of The Last Supper of Leonardo da Vinci, completed in 1999, was based on an informed historical awareness of the earlier and botched attempts of her predecessors and on a comprehensive regime of photographic and scientific testing of the surface and subsurface, as well as upon access to Leonardo's own accounts of the painting. His use of a dry rather than fresco technique left the painting vulnerable to the absorption of water, and deterioration was noted as early as 1517. Since then, numerous restorations have been attempted. Barcilon's removing of the earlier overpaintings, her revealing of the remaining Leonardo fragments, and her undetailed and removable completion in watercolor of the painting around the fragments, was an immensely painstaking task of some twenty years. Its progress was regularly reported in newspaper stories often syndicated around the world, and usually celebrated as a heroic endeavor on behalf of Western cultural heritage. The Last Supper is an autographic work. It needed restoration and received it: so, apparently, no philosophical problem there.
Until, that is, Martin Kemp (1990) argued at a conference in 1990 that, far from being the natural and inevitable response, Barcilon's method of restoration, like all restorations, involved critical interpretation:
I am not someone who believes that the artist's intentions are either imponderable or irrelevant to the historian who wishes to understand the work and, by extension, to any spectator who wishes to enrich the potential of their viewing. In Leonardo's case we are fortunate in possessing a large body of notes to help us identify his "intentions"--in the most obvious sense of this term.... [But any] artist's intentions, and most especially during the deeply pondered and protracted execution of a work like the "Last Supper", will be a complex and shifting compound of conscious and unconscious aspirations, adjustments, redefinitions, acts of chance and evasions. It is unlikely that there was ever a stable set of transparently accessible intentions.... Any programme of restoration of a badly damaged and extensively repaired artefact which aims to reinstate some measure of the original experience has to make an implicit choice as to which of the artist's intentions or groups of intentions and which of the various spectators' criteria are to be satisfied. (p. 18)
Our "conception of what is essential in a work of art," Kemp concludes, "determines what demands we make on visual images" (p. 20). In this case, earlier readings of The Last Supper as a history painting had determined efforts to restore it as such. Barcilon's scientific gaze, by contrast, privileged the authorial fragment.
Compare Kemp's conclusion to a startling reflection made in 1995 on another form of cultural preservation. Alois Pichler participated in the international text-encoding community's efforts during the 1990s to find satisfactory methods of transcribing manuscript and print documents and of marking them up for electronic storage. The change in medium means that mark-up is unavoidably interpretative. "Our aim in transcription," Pichler reasoned, "is not to represent as correctly as possible the originals, but rather to prepare from the original text another text so as to serve as accurately as possible certain interests in the text." And he added: "what we are going to represent, and how, is determined by our research interests ... and not by a text which exists independently and which we are going to depict" (1995, p. 690). In 1997 Allen Renear, a prominent member of the same community, objected to what he called this antirealist view of text, but his arguments seem finally to rest on the unproblematized notion that texts are or must be objective realities that encoders would do well to represent truthfully (Renear, 1997, pp. 117-124). (4)
Here is another case, a personal one. I began editing the Lawrence and Mollie Skinner novel set in Australia The Boy in the Bush for the Cambridge Works of D. H. Lawrence series in 1983. By 1988 it had become clear to me that my experience of this work, now that I had nearly finished editing it, was highly unusual. Radical immersion in the waters of authorial textuality is disorienting, especially to one's preconceptions about what works are. In a paper at the 1989 Modern...
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