Home > Notes from the Underground
I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Friday, December 12, 2008
It comes as something of a relief to discover that I disagree with this rather pious piece on authenticity by Denis Dutton:"A forged painting, for example, will not be inauthentic in every respect: a Han van Meegeren forgery of a Vermeer is at one and the same time both a fake Vermeer and an authentic van Meegeren, just as a counterfeit bill may be both a fraudulent token of legal tender but at the same time a genuine piece of paper. The way the authentic/inauthentic distinction sorts out is thus context-dependent to a high degree. Mozart played on a modern grand piano might be termed inauthentic, as opposed to being played on an eighteenth-century forte-piano, even though the notes played are authentically Mozart's. A performance of Shakespeare that is at pains to recreate Elizabethan production practices, values, and accents would be to that extent authentic, but may still be inauthentic with respect to the fact that it uses actresses for the female parts instead of boys, as would have been the case on Shakespeare’s stage. Authenticity of presentation is relevant not only to performing arts. Modern museums, for example, have been criticized for presenting old master paintings in strong lighting conditions which reveal detail, but at the same time give an overall effect that is at odds with how works would have been enjoyed in domestic spaces by their original audiences; cleaning, revarnishing, and strong illumination arguably amount to inauthentic presentation. Religious sculptures created for altars have been said to be inauthentically displayed when presented in a bare space of a modern art gallery....There may be Roman sculptures, copies of older Greek originals, which are in some respects aesthetically better than their older prototypes, as there may be copies by Rembrandt of other Dutch artists that are aesthetically more pleasing than the originals...
With a painting, therefore, there normally exists an original, nominally authentic object that can be identified as 'the' original; nothing corresponds to this in music. Even a composer’s own performance of an instrumental score — say, Rachmaninoff playing his piano concertos — cannot fully constrain the interpretive choices of other performers or define for ever 'the' authentic performance... Bach's keyboard writing includes interweaved musical voices which, under the hands of a skilled pianist such as Glenn Gould, can often be revealed more clearly on a modern concert grand than on a harpsichord.
This explains why aesthetic theories that hold that works of art are just aesthetically appealing objects — to be enjoyed without regard to any notion of their origins — are unsatisfactory. If works of art appealed only to our formal or decorative aesthetic sense, there would indeed be little point in establishing their human contexts by tracing their development, or even in distinguishing them from similarly appealing natural objects — flowers or seashells. But works of art of all societies express and embody both cultural beliefs general to a people and personal character and feeling specific to an individual. Moreover, this fact accounts for a large part, though not all, of our interest in works of art. To deny this would be implicitly to endorse precisely the concept of the eighteenth-century curiosity cabinet, in which Assyrian shards, tropical seashells, a piece of Olmec jade, geodes, netsuke, an Attic oil lamp, bird of paradise feathers, and a Maori patu might lay side by side in indifferent splendour. The propriety of the curiosity cabinet approach to art has been rejected in contemporary thought in favour of a desire to establish provenance and cultural meaning precisely because intra- and inter-cultural relationships among artworks help to constitute their meaning and identity."
It generally seems to me that inauthenticity could possibly be construed as a political or moral issue. I'm not convinced it represents an aesethetic issue, except perhaps as an obstacle to what Shklovsky called ostranenie or defamiliarisation. One might need to understand the historical or biographical context of an artwork in order to fully comprehend it. Nonetheless, contrast is as valid a mode as analysis and museums and galleries descended from the wunderkammer still exist.
To begin with obvious example of art galleries, the question that leaps immediately to mind is that of how works removed from that space become denuded of meaning, as with Duchamp's urinal; remove it from an art gallery and it becomes simply that. The art gallery becomes a place where normal mechanisms of perception are suspended and artistic authenticity becomes situational. The walls of galleries across the world are hung with fakes that are only discernible through the most precise forms of forensic analysis and which will be otherwise all but opaque. At its simplest level, people routinely hang their walls with mass produced replicas of artworks that presumably impart some small fragment of the original. The authenticity of van Meegeren's paintings or Reinhold Vasters's metalwork is of less interest than their merits. It's difficult not to recall Sickert's response to an art collector wishing to determine whether the Sicket painting he had bought was genuine or not. The response was 'No. But none the worse for that.'
In music, the score may not suffice to give an authentic notion of the work; the most obvious example is Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. This is commonly performed with Ravel's orchestration but no such arrangement was supplied by Mussorgsky himself. The result is that hundreds of arrangements exist, from the likes of Stokowski and Toscanini, all of them using widely divergent forms of instrumentation. It's certainly true that the use of period instruments may enable a greater appreciation of Bach and Handel; but I'm afraid I still prefer Stokowski's orchestral of the Toccata and Fugue to more authentic versions. Popular music presents a slightly different question, given that it does produce 'definitive' recordings; nonetheless there are more than enough cover versions in existence to compensate for that.
By the same token, the playing of Shakespeare's plays in the round might offer an insight into their original production, especially if performed with period dress and all male casts. Nonetheless, many modern plays prove to lend themselves rather well to such a format, even if they were never written for it. More generally, Shakespeare wrote at a time when writers still commonly did what the Ancient Greeks had done; write interpretations of mythical and historical narratives that were the common property of all. If Harold Bloom's theory that all writing is based on misreading and rewriting holds, then Chatterton's medieval poems, Walpole's 'Italian story,' Macpherson's Ossian poems or William Henry Ireland's Vortigern seem slightly different to being simple fakes. What Umberto Eco calls "the force of falsity" makes inaccurate ideas influential, tranforming flawed understanding into a creative misprision, as with Coleridge's admiration of Chatterton.
To take another example, a wooden Japanese temple must typically have its building materials renewed once every thirty years. The 'ancient' buildings in a city like Kyoto have in reality been regularly recreated and renewed. The same applies to many 'restored' buildings in the West, where it is dubious whether much of the original is left. To take an obvious example, Dresden's Frauenkirche is built on precise plans to recreate the destroyed original, even down to incorporating much of the original stone (blackened even before the firestorm, it gives the building a rather odd patchwork effect when contrasted with the new stone). Walking around the interior, I found myself wondering how authentic the bright pastel colours were. It is, in Eco's formulation, hyperreal. To elaborate on this point, I rather like this piece by Lisa Jardine in response to the Cutty Sark fire:"Still, it could, we were reassured, have been much worse. Because of the restoration in progress, half of the ship's timbers had been taken away for treatment. The three 100-foot masts, their sails and rigging, had been removed at the beginning of the project and sent to Chatham's Historic Dockyard for storage. The prow, anchor and ship's wheel, and the complete contents of the below-decks galley and workshops, were also safe, as was the distinctive figurehead... Whatever happens now - and surely the restoration efforts will be redoubled, and the desperately needed extra funding forthcoming - the resulting ship will now conclusively be a replica, simply not the original. But then, wasn't she that already? The masts, everything on deck, many of the deck planks, and the fittings, were remade from scratch the last time the ship was rescued from destruction (by decay and neglect) in the 1950s. The masts, sails and rigging were once again restored, and pieces of the fabric replaced, as part of the celebrations for the Millennium...
In Japan, where wooden buildings have always been terribly vulnerable to the ravages of earthquake and fire, the idea that something is in effect a replica does not carry the same stigma of the inauthentic... Osaka Castle was completed around 1590 by the great military ruler of Osaka, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and is today part of a proud heritage for the residents of Osaka and Japan... Yet this beloved historical landmark is entirely a reproduction. Razed to the ground for the first time in 1615, ravaged by an explosion and fire in 1665, burned to the ground again when it was captured in 1868, heavily bombed in 1945, Osaka Castle was completely rebuilt as a concrete structure in 1932, and its exterior restored to its present splendour in the late 1990s. As our guide book boasted: "There remains no single piece of stone wall from the Toyotomi period."
Later in our trip we took a bus from Kyoto to Kiyomizu-dera (the Clear Water Temple), which like the Cutty Sark and Maritime Greenwich, is a Unesco-designated World Heritage Site. The origins of Kiyomizu-dera can be traced back to 798 AD, when a priest from nearby Nara was instructed by a vision to construct a Buddhist shrine there on an existing Shinto sacred site... Yet here again, the present buildings are nowhere near as old as the history of the shrine suggests. Some of them date from the 17th Century, others have been substantially restored in the 1980s. This last restoration included repainting the exterior of the soaring three-storey pagoda to its original bright reddish-orange. Once again, this causes the Japanese no hint of anxiety - our guide book informed us proudly that "the main temple has been destroyed and rebuilt many times in its centuries of history".
In Europe, by contrast, we have a tendency to disparage or overlook the history of objects which have failed to last, or survive only as replicas, reproductions or recreations. Holbein's paintings, produced for the court of King Henry VIII in the early decades of the 16th Century, receive an enormous amount of attention from art historians and the public alike - as the numbers attending the Holbein in England exhibition at Tate Britain at the end of last year confirmed.
King Henry himself, however, was far less interested in panel paintings than in his fabulous collection of 5,000 tapestries - more time-consuming and expensive to make, more valuable and highly coveted by other European royals, and much more impressive when hung. His tapestries, however, failed to survive the damp English climate - unlike Philip II's fabulous collection of 16th Century woven wall hangings, still in the Prado in Madrid. So tapestries are, on the whole, neglected in discussions of Tudor court culture.
The original Greek version of this philosophical problem of identity and persistence, known as "the ship of Theseus" is particularly apposite here. In his Life of Theseus, Plutarch tells us that the Athenians preserved and revered the ship in which Theseus returned from Crete, after he had rescued Ariadne from the Minotaur. Over time, however, they assiduously replaced rotten planks with new timber, until every plank of the ship had eventually been replaced. So is this still Theseus's ship?"Labels: Authenticity Hyperreality
posted by Richard 7:36 pm
