Maney Publishing

Exhibiting Authenticity by David PhillipsReview by: Barbara Whitney KeyserJournal of the American Institute for Conservation, Vol. 38, No. 1, Albert Bierstadt and19th-Century American Art (Spring, 1999), pp. 87-91Published by: Maney Publishing on behalf of The American Institute for Conservation of Historic &Artistic WorksStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3179842 .

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BOOK REVIEWS 87 87

and genetic history from blood analysis-areas of reading that most of us last tackled during our student days when following general courses on the nature of materials. One of the beneficial as- pects of this book is, therefore, the breadth of its coverage. Its lack of depth could be considered a drawback. An example of this deficiency is that no references to the work of Newton on glass, glass technology, or glass deterioration occurs in the text despite the well-known volume on the subject by Newton and Davison. Brill, the other major contributor to glass studies, does get sev- eral citations, but this is a typical feature of the book as a whole. Comprehensive coverage is not easy to achieve in one volume covering scores of different materials. Therefore, the book cannot be relied upon to provide an overall view on any particular subject. Rather, its educative strength is the wide net that the author has cast, even though some potentially important things have slipped through.

The publishers are to be greatly commended for being able to produce this hardback volume of 319 pages, including 16 color figures, for an ex- tremely reasonable price of $30. It is a pity that similar conservation texts cannot be produced hardback for this kind of expense. Perhaps the publishers are anticipating a large volume of sales. In which case, let this reviewer help them in their endeavor and finish by saying that for $30 this book is excellent value for the money.

David Scott Senior Scientist Museum Research Laboratory Getty Conservation Institute 1200 Getty Center Drive Suite 700 Los Angeles, CA 90049

DAVID PHILLIPS, EXHIBITING AUTHENTICITY. Manchester: Manchester University Press/New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. 234 pages, hard- cover $59.95, ISBN O 7190 4796 X; softcover $24.95, ISBN 0 7190 4797 8.

David Phillips is a former curator who made practical decisions about the conservation and presentation of artworks; he now teaches in the museum studies program at the University of Manchester. He is writing for a broad spectrum of museum professionals and situates the activi- ty of conservation in the context of museum prac- tice. The thrust of the book, paradoxical as it may sound, is to save conservation and curatorship from the threat of absolute relativism by showing the limitations of "authenticity" as a basis for practice. The result is not only a healthy rela- tivism but also a novel way of looking at the aims of conservation in relation to curatorship.

To appreciate Phillips's contribution to the philosophy of conservation, it is important to note current trends in museum studies. Part of the post-modernist movement that swept the hu- manities in the 1980s and 1990s has undermined simple notions of "truth" in scholarship and in its extreme manifestations considers any interpre- tation of art or history as valid as any other. It also attacks museums and other cultural institu- tions as vehicles of social control and political power. (Ivan Gaskell surveys this literature in Art Bulletin 77 (December 1995), 690-5). Phillips points out that the "old" art history and conser- vation have been dominated by a sort of naive re- alism, in which good practice in attribution, con- servation, or display assumes that the experience of the museum visitor can be an "authentic" ex- perience of the artist's intentions or of the past. Unfortunately, he finds that this basis for au- thority is fragile if not spurious. Thus he seeks a sounder basis for practice between the extremes of naive realism and absolute relativism.

The book's eight chapters divide neatly into an introduction on the recent controversy about the role of museums; four chapters on the practice of

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88 BOOK REVIEWS

attribution by art historians; two chapters on conservation, which like art history, has based its standards of practice on the ideal of authenticity; and a closing chapter that presents a positive al- ternative basis for presentation of artworks in museums. There are detailed references to each

chapter, an index, and halftone plates of illus- trative cases. Phillips also includes a thematic

bibliography under the heads of "The cult of saints," "Art in specific political or market con- texts," "Traditional art historical methods," "De-

cision-making and the law," "Forgery," "Con- servation," "The psychology of perception and aesthetics," and "Representation and framing"- a remarkable array of topics to organize into a

single argument. Phillips unifies this diverse ma- terial by using a concept of "seeing" as sense data plus knowledge and expectation. He also

employs parallel metaphors of "mapping," "per- forming," and "framing" to characterize the work of art historians who identify, conserva- tors who physically intervene, and curators who

display artworks.

Chapter 1, "The cult of saints and the cult of

art," notes the parallels between canonizing saints and controlling relics in sacred collections and canonizing works of art in museums. Both church and museum represent values outside the mundane world of economic, social, and po- litical interaction, but in practice cannot remain uninfluenced by these factors. Phillips's point is that the justification of museum practice by "au-

thenticity" only masks problems that lend them- selves to explanation by political analysis and burdens good practice with paradoxical mean-

ings. Chapter 2 sets out the "connoisseurs' para-

dox": connoisseurs make attributions in order to

identify objects that provide an experience of a kind that no others can elicit (such as the aes- thetic experience that can only be evoked by looking at a genuine work by, say, Raphael or

Rembrandt). However, the identification de-

pends on properties that play only a minor role

in evoking the experience (such as layer struc- ture in a cross section or documents in the his-

torical record). He then invokes the dual nature of "seeing" to ask, "Is it the object (appearance of the artwork) or experience (knowledge about the artwork) that is being evaluated?" Phillips then gives a brief history of connoisseurship, noting the differences in qualities of paintings that have been valued through history, as well as historical hanging practices that encouraged comparisons between what were formerly con- sidered the "excellencies" of paintings.

Chapter 3, "Evidence," considers the prob- lems of weighting the relative importance of vi-

sual/stylistic, historical/documentary, and sci-

entific/analytical kinds of evidence, which are all necessary in attribution. The principal illus- trative case is the Rembrandt Project, which was forced to abandon a simple three-category judg- ment (definitely Rembrandt, definitely not Rem- brandt, and "problematic") in favor of a wide

spectrum of degrees of authorship. The notion of "authentic" Rembrandt dissolves into a range of relative probabilities and mixed cases. Chap- ter 4, "Verdicts," continues the theme that attri- butions are never certain because there is sel- dom sufficient evidence in ambiguous cases to resolve the question. Here Phillips looks at par- allel processes involved in making legal judg- ments and statistical methods of assessing groups of "clues" to establish probabilities of ac- curate judgment in open-ended situations. Fi-

nally, in Chapter 5, "The judges in the dock,"

Phillips critically examines the entire attribution

process. While its purpose ostensibly is to endow works of art with transcendental properties above and outside of market values, the prestige imparted by pronouncements that certain works are "authentic" cannot help increasing their mar- ket value. Furthermore, museum displays of works of modern artists inestimably increase their monetary worth. Finally, curators are shop- pers in the art market. In effect, the "map" of at- tributions cannot help making art-as post-mod- ernists would put it-a "coded classification of social and political power." However, Phillips concludes that, even so, the work of attribution has value as an increasingly accurate and de-

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BOOK REVIEWS 89 89

tailed "map of the production of artifacts" as long as we remember that it cannot help being selective and conditioned by our values. The metaphor of "mapping" is apt because a map re- sembles terrain enough to orient a traveler, and a map can always be made more accurate and more detailed; but no one mistakes the map for the terrain.

The next two chapters are directly relevant to conservators. Chapter 6, "Conservation and condition," develops the idea that conservation, like attribution, is based on unexamined as- sumptions that mask the reality that there is more to conservation than fastidious technical good practice. Paralleling the connoisseurs' par- adox is the conservators' paradox: the values of "original condition" are often irreconcilable with respect for the effects of the "hand of time" on artworks. Phillips attempted to define "authen- ticity" for conservators as a balance of these two factors, but in choosing a state in which a dam- aged work is to be presented, how do we avoid either "restoring" the work to a near-forgery or exhibiting it in a state that bears little resem- blance to its original appearance? Phillips's point may not be new to conservators educated in Eu- ropean traditions, but in English-speaking coun- tries there has been a reluctance to admit that in- terventive (treatment) conservation not only is not, but cannot be just a matter of technical good practice. Rather, it requires interpretative deci- sions that impose values of our present on works of the past. Therefore, the naive realist view that we present works "authentically" or choose a treatment "objectively" is impossible in prac- tice. The chapter ends with another key question: If we cannot choose a state or condition of the work without making interpretative judge- ments, thereby undermining the idea that we can appeal to "authenticity" to ground our deci- sions, do we have any basis for making treat- ment choices?

Chapter 7, "Conservation and intention," continues this analysis of the elusiveness of "au- thenticity." Phillips first notes that the very fact that site-specific works have been placed in mu-

seums violates their makers' intent. In addition, works are often so altered by natural ageing, neglect, and vandalism-and above all by pre- vious campaigns of restoration-that the artists' intent cannot be retrieved. Finally, the mental world of the original maker is often not available to us.

Having shown that "authenticity" cannot serve as a basis for treatment choice, he never- theless seeks to have responsible practice from the opposite view-that all physical states of the object are irretrievable moments in its life, all ever-changing and all equally valuable. It is here that Phillips presents an arresting and novel con- tribution to these problems. Hitherto, museum professionals have assumed that there is a sim- ple relationship among the physical characteris- tics of works of art, their appearance to an ob- server, and their meaning. Phillips develops this point by returning to the dual nature of percep- tion as sense data plus knowledge. He argues that the link of physical characteristics (or con- dition) of the work is only weakly connected to meaning, which is socially defined and part of the "knowledge about" side of perception. How- ever, the link between physical characteristics and appearance is strong and it is here that con- servators can study and preserve the ways in which artworks achieve their visual effective- ness. These include historical concerns with pic- torial effects, such as distribution of light and shade, linearity, and coloring.

Phillips supports this position by proposing that meaningful response to artworks is a com- bination of perceptual factors that are more or less "hardwired" into our nervous systems and culturally-defined significance that varies in space and time. The former is apprehensible cross-culturally-including past epochs of our own culture. The latter may only be recoverable by scholarship and study. Phillips concludes that "Physical contrivances of perception are not the site of fixed intention, but do serve as the focus for changing meanings" (173). Unfortunately, it is just these "contrivances" (such as tonal bal- ance) that are often changed by natural ageing

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90 BOOK REVIEWS

and deliberate interventions. We must remember that when treatment is being considered, there are three alternatives: preserve the "perceptual contrivances" as they are, retrieve or recover them if they have altered, or change them. In addition, we must consider whether these de- vices are recoverable (that is, known by scholar-

ship and physically available), disputed (as in debates about artist-applied "patina"), or ir-

recoverably destroyed and/or unknown (as many early Italian panels). Perceptual devices in artworks, he concludes, provide a more useful focus for choosing an intervention than "inten- tion." Again, as with attribution, we should

begin to think of a range of possibilities for the

appropriate "re-presentation" of artworks.

Phillips then likens the work of the conservator to the interpreter of period music, in which a score written down by a composer can be real- ized in sound in a variety of ways, hence his

metaphor of "performing" for intervention in the physical substance of artworks. On this view, the conservator embraces the interpretative as-

pects of treatment and joins the art historian as one of the "qualified persons" who defines the social life of artworks in the present.

In the final chapter, "Curators and Authen-

ticity," Phillips addresses the question, "If mu- seum experience cannot be literally 'authentic,' what kind of experience should it be?" The

strength of museums, as opposed to theme parks and other ersatz cultural experiences, is the pres- ence of real artworks and the historical reality of their production. Phillips adds that we should not forget that the third unique reality of the museum is the museum itself, the way it repre- sents its collections, and its visitors. Here he ar-

gues that a fitting metaphor for what the muse- um does is "framing" its contents and the

experience of its visitors. As a frame, the muse- um is indeed unavoidably selective and fosters or channels certain kinds of awareness. Howev-

er, he concludes, it can do so in a healthy, self-

conscious way that steers between the usual

poles of "conventional taxonomy" and "aggres- sive innovation." Instead of presenting an

opaque wall of dogmatism and authority, it can make its visitors aware that it truly does offer an oasis of special values apart from ordinary ex-

perience. The foregoing exposition of Phillips's argu-

ment has been detailed to indicate its richness. Much of the importance of Exhibiting Authentic-

ity for conservators is its relating the role of the conservator to those of the art historian and cu- rator and thereby moving conservation past its

stereotyped image as a narrow specialty in the museum professions. Some may fear that it weakens the conservator's position by pointing out the relativities and imponderables of our

profession. However, Phillips refrains from per- petuating the unhelpful, if not destructive, po- larization of "scientific" versus "humanistic" schools of conservation. He does not attack the

professional competence of conservators or the value of science in examination and treatment. Rather, he articulates the needs for judgement and scholarship in conservation that many con- servators have already quietly acknowledged. Most exciting, he opens up a potentially rich in-

terdisciplinary area of research that would con- nect technical studies with historical and philo- sophical scholarship in the history of visual culture. The history of the perceptual devices used in art and the ways these were understood and valued in various artistic traditions is an underworked topic in art history and one that conservators have barely tapped. One fruitful

example, now that a wide variety of varnishes are available to the conservator, is the twin real- ization that there is no single varnish that is suit- able for every application and that choice of an

appropriate varnish depends largely on the func- tion of the surface of a painting. Historical art

theory of pictorial devices such as perspective, color theory, and chiaroscuro can also be exam- ined in terms of their implications for cleaning and compensation. In summary, Phillips re- frames the deep structure of activities that con-

servators perform every day in a way that points toward an enlarged role for conservators-a role that would make us equal partners with curators

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BOOK REVIEWS 91 91

in interpreting the artworks under our common care.

Dr. Barbara Whitney Keyser Art Conservation Program Department of Art Queen's University Kingston, Ontario K7L 3N6

CAROL BROWN, FIONA MACALISTER, AND MARGOT WRIGHT, EDS., CONSERVATION IN ANCIENT EGYPTIAN COLLECTIONS. London: Archetype Publications, 1995. 184 pages, paperback, ?17.50 ($26). Available from the United Kingdom Institute for Conservation, Archaeology Section, and International Acade- mic Projects, Fitzroy Sq., London WIP 605. ISBN 1873132 808

In 1988, the archeology section of the United Kingdom Institute for Conservation held a con- ference on the conservation of ancient Egyptian materials. That small volume of conference pro- ceedings proved to be an important and well- used reference tool for a growing number of con- servators who were faced with the treatment of such artifacts. These conservators adapted treat- ment techniques from related disciplines as var- ied as ethnographic and architectural conserva- tion, refining them for use on ancient materials. As soon as this area had been presented as a focal point, interest grew dramatically and the second conference on the subject became a ne- cessity.

The papers presented at the July 1995 confer- ence span a range of subjects--from textiles, car- tonnage, and papyrus, to polychromed wood, human remains, ceramics, faience, pigments, stone, and metalwork. In addition, the papers in- clude information on more general topics such as gallery installations and collections care. The volume represents authors from England, France, the United States, and Egypt. Some of the authors work with Egyptian materials within the context of a much larger and more varied col-

lection. Others work exclusively with the exam- ination and treatment of antiquities from Egypt, both in situ and in the museum. It is somewhat surprising that with the exception of H. Jaeschke's contribution on the treatment of stone on site, and possible causes of deterioration of the sphinx presented by Nakhla and Hubacek, site work is underrepresented-both in the ex- cavation and recording documentation of new finds, and the difficulties in protecting antiqui- ties in their original environment. This subject perhaps forms the basis for an additional con- ference.

The order in which the papers is presented seems somewhat random. It might have been appropriate to group the general papers togeth- er, followed by technical studies, and then treat- ment-oriented papers according to the materials involved. The book is well designed and pleas- ing to leaf through. However, in well-used copies, the pages tend to come loose from their bindings.

Ginsicke's contribution on the management of the Egyptian collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is the broadest in scope for this publication, encompassing the history of one of the most well-known collections of Egyptian an- tiquities in the United States today. It describes some of the problems inherent in housing very large collections in older buildings, and some of the museum's attempts to solve difficult stor- age and exhibition problems. These include the use of microclimate technologies, as well as pro- grams developed for collections sharing with other institutions. Pearlstein focuses on the chal- lenges inherent in preparing more than 500 ob- jects for display in new gallery space, and the preparation of safe enclosures for these objects. She also vividly describes the type of extremely complicated treatment history that many exca- vated objects have, which in itself mirrors the progress of conservation technology and tech- nique. Conservators of ancient Egyptian arti- facts frequently find themselves evaluating and treating the effects of previous treatments be- fore they can approach the problems presented

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