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III
Here is Hogarth on the problem of change in the life of a painting:
The unavoidable conclusion is that total cleaning of a painting usually cannot restore the painting as it left the artist's hands even when it is completely intact. All it can do is reveal the present state of the paint beneath the grime. Thus, rightly to appreciate as viewers what we see in front of us at the art gallery, we have to recognise the agency of time in the life of artistic works and to appreciate the limitations which the passage of time imposes on the 'editing' of paintings. The viewer needs to know whether the painting has been totally cleaned, partially cleaned (this is where 'the surface of the original paint is not revealed, but remains covered by a thin layer of varnish' [Hedley, p. 163]), or, thirdly, nuance-cleaned (where differential amounts of cleaning are done in order to 'restore the relationship of values that, it is believed, would have existed in the original' [Hedley, p. 164]). Obviously both partial and nuance cleaning involve critical and aesthetic choices. Partial cleaning seeks to maintain the harmonising function of the first thin yellow layer of varnish and acknowledges its cultural function as a signifier of 'the age, the antique character' of the artifact (Hedley, p. 163). Nuance cleaning stresses the recovery—although it is, unavoidably, the renewed creation—of balance and unity in the painting.
Gerry Hedley, whose paper I have been quoting, stresses that where the original painting has undergone significant change (and scarcely any painting survives a century without physical damage) the artist's intention will not be recoverable in full. The best that can be done by the conservator, he argues, is the institution of 'newfound relativities to that intention and to time' (p. 164). The artist's agency was indispensable; but, as far as the work is concerned, that is not the end of the matter. The 'mortal body' of the painting, as one conservator calls it,[10] is always in a state of physical change; and at
If artists are still alive when their work deteriorates then they may, like Benjamin West, act as their own conservators. Taking on this role creates new twists in the definition of the artistic work akin to those created for the literary work by the writer's returning for revision when, some years after publication, a second edition is called for. Take the case of Liz Magor, a well known artist-sculptor in Toronto who acknowledges the influence on her of Walter Benjamin's essay, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'. For Magor and many other artists in the 1970s the phenomenon of mechanical reproducibility tended to undermine commitment to the individual creation of the unique art-object in favour of transformation of preexisting cultural artifacts. Hence her description of one of her works, Time and Mrs Tiber (1976), which the National Gallery of Canada purchased in 1977:
Magor's problem is the problem of all conservation, just as the problem of the author's revision is the problem of all editing: the later activity (assuming its presence is established) is unable to be part of the original moment, whether or not undertaken by the same person. Hershel Parker has demonstrated the problems for editors who would attempt to conjoin in a single reading text the results of radically separate acts of composition or revision; and many of us must have questioned the wisdom, even as they marvelled at the execution, of editions such as the Clarendon Tess of the D'Urbervilles which incorporates into the manuscript base-text some revisions made by Hardy more than twenty years after his original writing.[12]
This raises the question of textual authority: the right of the author to go on controlling the work's meanings. Editors have traditionally respected the author's right to do that. And the Canadian Art Gallery, in consulting Liz Magor about conservation, was doing much the same thing. But in both cases we are likely to confuse documentary ownership with textual authority. Having sold her pieces—her physical documents, as one may say—Magor no longer owned them. That is uncontentious, but one can go further: although she thinks of the life of her work as correlated to her own, its life goes on predominantly in the viewing and thinking of other people, including the Gallery's conservators. Over these readings—these 'textual' activities—she has little control and no authority. Magor's statements of her intentions and the contexts of those intentions in her life and other work will and should influence those textual activities: but only as part of viewers' efforts to understand and contextualise and conserve. Whether she should have the right to reconfigure or replace aspects of the physical artifacts is moot: she is acting as a conservator rather than artist if she does so.
The original moment cannot be recalled, as Claes Oldenburg also found when he replaced the pickle on top of his four-and-a-half feet Giant Hamburger of 1962. The piece is made of sailcloth, foam rubber and newspaper; the original pickle had been destroyed, but Oldenburg had offered to replace it for exhibition in 1967 in Ottawa. He made it in New York, and flew up with it to Ottawa, using it as a comfortable headrest on the way. When it was inspected at the Gallery, the paintwork was found to be significantly different to the original and more characteristic of his recent 1967 work than his earlier technique.[13] Both examples show that the personal and historical locatedness of a work is unavoidable and unreproducible even in works which, in their apparent mechanical reproducibility, embody their creator's rejection of the notion of the unique and inspired work of art.
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