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let us now see in what manner time operates on the colours themselves; in order to discover if any changes in them can give a picture more union and harmony than has been in the power of a skilful Master, with all his rules of art, to do. When colours change at all, it must be somewhat in the manner following, for as they are made some of metal, some of earth, some of stone, and others of more perishable materials, time cannot operate on them otherwise than as by daily experience we find it doth, which is, that one changes darker, another lighter, one quite to a different colour, whilst another, as ultramarine, will keep its natural brightness. . . . Therefore how is it possible that such different materials, ever variously changing . . . should accidentally coincide with the artist's intention.[8]

Compare this with a more recent statement by John Brealey:

You must be aware, for instance, that the contrast between the lights and darks has often been parodied by time because the darks have darkened but the lights have not changed to the same extent and so the distance between them has become a grotesque caricature of their original relationship. The half tones where all the subtlety of expression lies, have become closer to the lights than to the shadows. . . . If you are going to do the right thing by the artist, you have to consider how, through the removal of oxidised layers of varnish, it is possible to bring back some semblance of the picture's original cohesion.[9]

Both Hogarth and Brealey defer to the artist's intention, yet both recognise that its recuperation is likely to be impossible.

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

crucial moments in its history it is, as it were, partially rewritten—re-published in a revised form—by its editor-conservators. Whatever approach is adopted the fundamental artifact is changed, taking on new meanings.

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:

When Time and Mrs Tiber was purchased, we all knew—the curator, the conservators and myself—that it was unstable and subject to slow deterioration. In fact, death, decay, and entropy constitute both the physical and intellectual content of the work—the form being several dozen canning jars filled with various vegetable substances [placed in an old-fashioned kitchen dresser]. These provisions had been put up by a West Coast homesteader in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and it was my intention to honour and preserve the evidence of Mrs. Tiber's rescue of the crop of 1948.[11]

Magor says she thinks of 'the life of a work as correlated to my own' (p. 11), but the Gallery (or 'museum', as those in the trade prefer to call them) had longer-term ideas. So when in 1987 three jars were found to contain botulism she suggested that she simply replace them, and she was fortified by the fact that the three had not been among those put up by Mrs Tiber but ones which she had originally prepared herself so that the dresser's shelves would be completely filled. This time she got assistance from an experienced hand at preserves, Mrs Coburn. Another of her works, Dorothy: A Resemblance (1980-81), in the same gallery, consists of four tables, each covered with small objects cast in lead: bottles, pears, slices of bread, books, small loaves, etc. Each object had been cast in moulds which she had made herself, but in rather primitive circumstances: the pears had been produced from one mould, the loaves from another, and so on. Trouble started when light fingers made off with some of the temptingly pocket-sized items on the tables. The Gallery contracted another artist to make new moulds from remaining examples on the table and so to cast replacements. However the replacements turned out to be not exactly the same as the objects the moulds were made from because

of the superior equipment and technique which the contractor made use of. Magor's chagrin is evident: 'In spite of the fact that it is a piece made up of many parts, it was [originally] forged as a whole, and any replacement is unable to be part of that moment' (p. 10).

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.