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to performance art. One cannot help suspecting that there is in painting, in
architecture, in sculpture, in objects in general, a sort of stubborn persistence that
makes the association of a place, an original and some aura impossible to separate.
Let us first notice, however, that the difference between performance arts
and the others is not as radical as it seems: a painting
has always to be reproduced, that
is, it is always a re-production of itself even when it appears to stay exactly the
same in the same place. Or, rather, no painting remains the same in the same
place without some reproduction. For paintings, too, existence precedes essence.
To have a continuing substance they need to be able to subsist. This requirement
is well known by curators all over the world: a painting has to be reframed, dusted,
sometimes restored, relit, and it has to be represented in different rooms with
different accompanying pictures, on different walls, inserted in different narratives,
with different catalogues, and with changes in its insurance value and price. So,
even though a painting might never be loaned, surviving inside the same
institutional setting without undergoing any heavy restoration, it has a career all
the same; to subsist and be visible again, it needs to be taken care of. The best
proof is that if you don't, it will soon be accumulating dust in a basement, be sold
for nothing, or will be cut into pieces and irremediably lost. Such is the
justification for all the restorations: if you don't do something, time will eat up that
painting as certainly as the building in which it is housed will decay, or as surely as
the institutions supposed to take care of it will start decomposing. If in doubt about
this, imagine your precious works of art housed in the Kabul National Museum….
For a work of art to survive, it requires an ecology just as complex as one needed
to maintain the natural character of a natural park.
4
If the necessity of reproduction is accepted, then we might be able to
convince the reader that the really interesting question is not so much to
differentiate the original from the facsimiles, but to be able to tell apart the good
reproduction from the bad one. If the Ambassadors has been irreversibly erased, it is
not out of negligence, but, on the contrary, because of an excessive zeal in
"reproducing" it. What the curators did was to confuse the obvious general feature
of all works of art —to survive they have to be somehow reproduced— with the
narrow notion of reproduction provided by photographic posters while ignoring many other ways
for a painting to be reproduced. For instance, they could have had a perfect
facsimile registering all its surface effects in 3-D and restored the copy instead of
the work itself. If they had done this they could have invited several art historians
with different views to suggest different ways of restoring the copy and produced
an exhibition of the results. Their crime is not to have offered a reproduction of
the Holbein instead of the Holbein itself to the visitors of the National Gallery —
"the Ambassadors" remains behind all the successive restorations much like King
Lear does over each of its replays, granting or withdrawing its auratic dimension at
will depending on the merit of each instance— but to have so limited the range of
reproduction techniques that they have chosen one of the most barren one: the
photograph—as if a painting were not a thick material but some ethereal design
that could be lifted out of its materiality and downloaded into any reproduction
4
Western, David. In the Dust of Kilimandjaro . New York: Shearwater/Island Press,
1997.
108- Adam’s Veronese –Switching codes
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without any loss of substance. Actually, a terribly revealing documentary shows
the culprits restoring the Holbein by using as their model photographs
of the original
and subjectively deciding what was original, what had decayed, what had been
added, and imagining the painting as a series of discrete layers that can be added
or removed at will—a process that resembles plastic surgery more than an open
forensic investigation.
Thus, what is so extraordinary in comparing the fate of the Ambassadors
with that of the
Nozze is not that they both rely on reproduction —this is a
necessity of existence— but that the first relies on a notion of reproduction that
makes the original disappear for ever while the second adds originality to the
original version by offering it new dimensions without jeopardizing the penultimate
version — without ever touching it, thanks to the delicate processes used to record
it.
But, one might ask, how could any originality be added? One obvious
answer is: by bringing the new version to its original location. The cognitive
dissonance undergone by the visitor in the Mona Lisa room comes in part from the
fact that in Palladio's refectory every single detail of the Nozze has a meaning
entirely lost and wasted in the awkward situation provided for the version n-1 in
Paris. In other words, originality does not come to a work of art in bulk; it is rather
made of different components, each of which can be inter-related to produce a
complex whole. New processes of reproduction allow us to see these elements and
their inter-relationship in new ways. To be at the place for which it had been
conceived in each and every detail is certainly one aspect—one element— in what
we mean by an original. Well, on that ground, there is no question that it is the
facsimile of the Nozze that is now original and that it is the version in Le Louvre
that has lost at least this comparative advantage.
We should not however be too mystical about the notion of an "original
location" in the case of the Veronese since the very refectory in which the
facsimile has been housed is itself a reconstruction. If you look at photographs
taken in 1950, you will notice that the original floor was gone and another had
been installed at the height of the windows. The top was a theatre and the
basement a wood workshop— the whole space had been altered. It was rebuilt in
the 50's, but the plaster and floor were wrong and the boisserie that surrounded
the room and added the finishing touches to the proportion of the room was
missing. In its stripped down state, it looked more like a high protestant space that
almost seemed to laugh at the absence of Veronese's counter reformation flourish.
But now the effect of the facsimile is such that there are rumors that the return of
the painting has triggered a plan for a new restoration that will retrospectively
return the space to its former glory. A facsimile of a heavily restored original, now
in a new location, was causing new elements to be added to an original in its
original location that is in part a facsimile of itself. Originality once seemed so
simple…
The same is certainly true of availability. What angered the visitor so much
in Le Louvre was that she could not actually scan visually the
Nozze without
bumping into Mona Lisa addicts. The Veronese is so full of incident and detail that
it cannot be seen without time to contemplate its meaning, implications and the