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IV
The moral is straightforward and surprising: whether they date from the twentieth century or the sixteenth, the artifactual remains become, at the moment of treatment, the site of conservatorial participation rather than the object of restoration. In the case of paintings the surface is partially re-made in a diachronic collaboration between artist and conservator which issues in a changed artifact. Conservatorial treatment, then, participates in the ongoing life of the work; and if the two coalesce for a time, they should not be thought of as completely discrete categories. If in addition, as suggested above in relation to Liz Magor, the viewer also plays a role in the work of art—at the level of textual rather than documentary activity—then a notion of the work as participatory begins to emerge.
One is immediately led to reconsider traditional conceptions of the work. The usual assumption has been that the viewer plays no role in the painting but only reacts to it. Put another way, the viewer may look at it, but is not part of it. However, this common-sensical appeal to the normal experience of museum art ignores not only the specialised viewing of the conservator at the point of treatment but also the historical fact that the very question of what constitutes a work of art rests squarely within the province of the viewer, including expert viewers. Take the case of J. M. W. Turner's paintings. When he died in 1851 he left his paintings to the British nation. This led to a legal battle about which of his works were finished paintings—'finished' being the term he used in the final form of his will. An inventory taken by the Keeper of the National Gallery in 1859 states that there were 100 finished pictures, 182 unfinished and many thousands of drawings and sketches. 'The wish expressed in the will was fairly strictly observed';[14] the remainder were consigned to the vault of the National Gallery, uncatalogued, and did not appear in the first catalogue raisonné of Turner's works which appeared in 1902.
But by the end of the nineteenth century, the definition of what was considered to be a Turner painting in the full sense was changing, influenced by the new taste for Impressionism and by a nationalist desire to compare late Turner favourably against the French Impressionists. Thus influenced, in the first decade of this century over seventy Turners from the vault were formally accessioned, including such famous ones as Norham Castle, Sunrise and Interior at Petworth. What are now considered towering masterpieces were not considered by Turner or by the National Gallery in the mid-nineteenth century to be works of art suitable for exhibition. With the benefit of Impressionism, curators and the viewing public decided otherwise. With the paintings transferred to the Tate Gallery, the process of accessioning continued, until by 1944 all of his unfinished paintings and his thousands of sketches—almost whatever his hands had touched—had been accepted.
The sense in which a work of art is completed only in its viewing, and
Perspectivally, the painting was intended to be seen high, as on a church altar, and one would have had to get down on the floor of the gallery to get anything like the originally intended effect. In other words, Tintoretto factored the viewer's position into his painting; he certainly never intended it to be hung in the Queensland and Australian National Art Galleries at eye-level.[15] A painting's size in relation to the viewer's size is important; indeed, trompe l'oeil effects depend on one's physical body and its expectations about space. One's engagement with a painting, that is to say, is not only intellectual, aesthetic and emotional: it is physical as well. Knowledge of it is partly corporeal. A work of art with a still unfolding mission, it comes into being with each new viewing. This is not to say that one's standing in front of it affects the artifact, except in microscopic ways. But, as a physical object, the painting is important—is a work of art—only in so far as it allows these personal encounters to keep on happening.
The necessary distinction here is between the painting as physical object (manifesting the agencies of artist, time and conservator) and as meaningful text (the agencies of viewers). The distinction, if accepted, has notable consequences. One is the provision of an answer to the iconoclastic argument that a work of art by a master which is subsequently exposed as a forgery has not in itself changed at all. Therefore, the argument goes, the notion of authenticity is a sham, and reverence of work 'by the hand of the artist' is a plot by auctioneers to keep up the market prices. However, this argument runs together the painting's existence as artifact with its capacity to produce meaning for the viewer. The latter existence (what I am calling 'text') feeds from contexts of understanding, including historical ones, in one's engagement with the painting. These contexts are ineradicably altered by the revealing
The second consequence is that, in the case of the literary work, 'text' (defined as before) requires the reader's involvement in raising meaning from what is ink on the page (i.e. 'document'). If seen as a combination of 'document' and 'text', works of literary (or painterly) art cannot be thought of as stable, or stabilisable, things. They function only in time and are never completed unless they become entirely ignored; and they have no unchanging existential anchor—whether in the author or in the historical moment of their creation or reading. Always subject to the processes of authorial reworking and revision prior to their publication or exhibition, they enter into a different kind of process in their public life.[16]
This line of argument is about the functioning of artistic and literary works. Concentrating on art as a phenomenon in a constant state of change offers an alternative view of the literary work to the traditional one as an abstraction hovering behind the extant documents (and, as is often said, 'witnessed' by them). Granted, our pragmatic agreements and conventions create the expectation that the work exists in its own right, statically and in isolate singularity. But the evidence suggests a constant state of textual activity on the part of creators, editor-conservators and reader-viewers. All are involved in the work: this is why conservation and scholarly editing must be understood as interpretative rather than scientific or technical activities. Some of this activity results in the alteration of the documents, the artifacts, from which future readings, future textual work, will be done by readers. Editors painstakingly re-configure and re-present a documentary form of the literary work; conservators must alter, even partially destroy, the artifact itself.
This last distinction between the dealings of editors and conservators with their artifactual materials might be thought to undo the line of argument about the work as participatory. However the distinction is not quite as it first appears. In part because of the persuasiveness of the editor's textual argument and in part because of the prestige of the press, the series, even at its crassest the amount of public moneys consumed in its preparation and publication, a new critical edition tends at least temporarily to eclipse other editions of the work—just as the newly conserved artistic artifact eclipses the old. Nevertheless, the significant difference remains that the pre-existing literary documents, unlike artistic artifacts, remain available for other editors to work on. In theory, if rarely in practice, multiple critical editions of the same work could be in circulation at any one time. Even if their editors agreed in their essential aim—the establishment of the text of final authorial intention—the editions would in practice be different in many details: the determining of intention is necessarily an interpretative matter, as is the postulation of readings from lost documentary states; and the deciphering of a difficult holograph depends on experience and skill. The various editors would be aiming, as it were, to release the text of the work from the documentary detritus accumulated in successive copyings and printings over the decades or centuries, to have the previously obscured text of the author's communication emerge as clearly as possible, to make their elusive textual quarry available in a reliable form for the first time. If editing has had an allure, this surely has been it.
Thus would the 'work' be figured, in actual editorial practice, as something over and apart from the editors and their activities even if (and to some extent because) no one of the editors will have perfectly achieved his or her aim. But what might not be clear to these various like-minded editors is that, as the comparison with paintings shows, they would be not so much 'releasing' the work as—rather like the conservators, though without dire effects on the existing artifacts—participating in its ongoing life, constituting its functioning, for the time being in an influential way.
I am entertaining, then, a phenomenological view of the work. Under this approach, principled disagreements about the modes in which editorial and conservatorial interventions should take place would remain as important as ever. But the view enforces the realisation that we would be disagreeing about our conventions for understanding the work, not something inherent in it—for there is no it, as work of art, independent of our understandings. On the other side of the coin, those efforts of understanding have an obligation to deal with what the physical artifacts, the documents, mutely testify to—and the documents, as documents, persist essentially independent of our understandings. In other words, our textual and editorial activity should be linked to, and seek to understand and contextualise, prior documentary activity: oral transmission aside, that is the basis of our access to the past. Accordingly a phenomenological view would abandon any belief in the work as an ideal thing and instead acknowledge (for possible bibliographical analysis) the existence of documents from the past, what people have done with
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