Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture and Literature (review)

In Securing the Past, Paul Eggert tells us (though not in this way) that works of art cannot be like dark matter. Dark matter, though invisible, is thought to exist because observations of objects and light in the universe tell us that it must. It is an ideal construct that completes an equation. For Eggert, the artistic or literary work is by no means such a calculable unity. The subject-object relationship at the heart of Enlightenment thought overemphasizes authorial agency and cannot account for works’ readaptation over time, which obscures any notion of their connection to a coherent, originary intention.

But why go over this ground again, so often covered since the late 1960s? The answer is that while the poststructuralist critique of authorship (here Eggert cites Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida) has in many ways been a welcome intellectual development for textual editors and conservators, it has not given these practitioners a full set of theoretical tools to replace Anglo-American New Criticism’s earnest, yet misguided, quest to ferret out a coherently construed author’s original intent. Eggert says that restorers, conservators, and textual editors deal with the empirical evidence of material documents (whether buildings, paintings, or manuscripts), which must be presented to the public. Packaging reality in this way means that the agency of the conservator intervenes in the work. Accounting for this agency and the other competing agencies that are inscribed into documentary evidence over time means that theories that do away with agency altogether cannot fill the gap left by undoing outdated concepts of authorial intention. Into the breach, where the pragmatic decisions of scholarly editors and conservators are concerned, must come a new theory of the work of art. The suggestion of such a theory is the aim of Securing the Past.

Despite its lofty goal, the book stakes out its territory carefully and offers a satisfying and flexible solution to its central problem by exploring two theoretical approaches. The first is that of nineteenth-century American pragmatist C. S. Peirce’s notion of “semiosis,” the continuous process of making meaning, as a replacement for a subject-object relation he denies exists. The other is Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics, which sees subject and object as ever-changing and mutually conditioning elements. Either of these theories would, so Eggert, do away with outmoded concepts of the autonomous artwork and authorial agency and leave room for locating different agencies at different moments in artworks’ lives. It is amazing that Eggert sees these theories as two sides of the same coin given the different contexts and aims of the theorists cited. But it is clear that he is more comfortable with the Adornian dialectic. Its complex understanding of the relationship between the various groups that compete in making a work of art, architecture, or literature—including the public to whom it is presented—meshes well with the historian’s sense of the ceaseless change of documents and interpretations over time. This concept accommodates simultaneously a work’s chronology, its coproduction by producers and receivers (however muddled their agency), and its perpetual incompleteness.

That incompleteness is at the core of the intellectual leap Eggert encourages textual editors and conservators to make as they present works to readers or viewers. The conservator’s task is to make attentive members of the viewing public aware that what they see is not a transcendent ideal, though it is a work of art. It is a work, however, in the making of which readers and viewers themselves participate by their asking for meaning. In so asking, they must be made cognizant that the work is not just the object or document but a network of changing meanings, re-presentations, and physical alterations over time in relationship to one another.

The presence of an audience is crucial not only to Eggert’s pragmatic theory of the artwork but also to the aim of his book. Eggert addresses and criticizes two groups in...