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III.6. Art of the Mind A recent Getty Museum project involves the restoration of a Roy Lichtenstein piece, reported in the Los Angeles Times in “Lichtenstein’s Three Brush Strokes gets a Brush Up.” The project is a poster-child for restoration. The artist/restorer is James DePasquale, “a longtime Lichtenstein assistant who manages the late artist’s studio in Southampton, NY.” The Getty received the sculpture in 2005 and displayed it in 2007 “after relatively minor repairs.” Since Lichtenstein’s sculpture was often repainted in his own lifetime, moralistic arguments against repainting, based on some strict and unworkable sense of the integrity of the past, hardly apply. The work, like any theater piece (a play, a musical composition), was expected to change through history : it would deteriorate; it would be restored. History is thus not something to be recovered; it is, rather, performance, and performance (the way the art work appears to the public) is part of the history or being of the artwork. Yet despite this, and despite Lichtenstein and DePasquale’s obvious awareness of these processes, the contrapuntal romantic rhetoric of the purity of origins remains, as evidenced by the Times article on this piece. A camera records DePasquale’s progress every 20 seconds. “Every last detail of the process is being documented for future reference.” We hear of perfection and completion. DePasquale had painted this sculpture in 1984: “More than 20 years later, he could describe the original process step by step. . . . Tests confirmed DePasquale’s recollections.” We don’t hear anything about the details of DePasquale’s “recollections” or the nature of these tests, since they apparently uncovered nothing of interest and only confirmed what we believe must be true. DePasquale’s language is quite different from that of the Times reporter who invokes him: “It’s really kind of fun.” Determining where one color ends Art of the Mind 175 and another begins—that is “the trickiest part.” “You know the edge is somewhere in there,” he says. “You just sense it.” The stated intentions of the restorer are completely at odds with the rhetoric and the implied assumptions of the reporter. The Times piece recognizes the fact that artworks exist in history, that they change in history, then promotes the fossilization of that history through the glorification of an act of restoration. No one questions DePasquale’s good faith. When he says the sculpture will last “a real long time,” he means “10 years easy, maybe more.” DePasquale , thus, is not involved in what museums lead their customers/clients/ supporters to believe is restoration; he is rather working within a living history and continuing it, as well as participating in the documentation of that history. This history includes his own recollections of the processes used in the past construction of the artwork, his recreation and improvement of the process, the modern technology that reproduces or confirms this process. “If he were doing the usual restoration, applying layers of color by spray instead of brush, the job would probably last longer.” DePasquale is deliberately restoring the sculpture in such a way that it will not last; perhaps his expertise may be called on again. I wonder whether DePasquale is involved in an ironic refutation of the forces that brought him there. Repaint a Lichtenstein? Why not simply rebuild it? Why even use the original materials? In the nineteenth century, viewers were accustomed to looking at wax and plaster models of original sculpture. Goethe was thrilled in Italian Journey to be able at long last to see the originals of the sculptures whose reproductions he had seen in Germany . Yet this attempt to re-make the sculpture according to the history of its creation has the paradoxical effect of denying that history. Despite DePasquale ’s efforts to insert his own history into this physical object, something he does without qualms, his own history is effaced in the description of the process. When you go to the Getty, a miserable place to view art, a marvelous place to view the living city of Los Angeles, you will confront many works of art that have been subjected to the same kind of treatment as the Lichtenstein . It is extremely difficult to find a Lichtenstein there, since every painting in the museum, it seems, has been transformed into a gleaming pseudoacrylic print; it might be Lichtenstein, it might be Dali, it might be a college dorm room. It...

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