Session 14 – Spectral Presence 3

Simon Fleury
Condition Report: Mapping the Museum(Object)Encounter

It was the Victoria and Albert museum’s first curator, Richard Redgrave who took up a pen to annotate a photograph. It was 1864 and Redgrave was tasked with assessing the condition of the Raphael Tapestry cartoons at the time of their move to the South Kensington Museum (as the V&A was then known). By inscribing directly on the surface of a photograph Redgrave created a new form of material-discursive history of the object, the first photo-based condition report. Over time the conventions Redgrave laid down in his reports, have morphed into a sophisticated means of encoding the material condition of objects. Redgrave’s reports exposed strange, intimate secrets behind the creation of some of the greatest artworks within the museum but did so by interpreting these exposures via a utilitarian approach to conservation, information, and index, a conception that stubbornly persists to this day.
This presentation sets out to counter this utilitarian understanding of knowledge production in the museum. I will show that by over-writing the object Redgrave set in motion a process of material inscription that destabilises the very same binary conceptual framework (model/copy, art/information, etc.), he sought to inscribe. Thus, enabling the practical use of a new kind of condition report, attuned to the mnemonic iterations of what becomes revealed, entangled or lost in the process of making an artwork, ‘work’.  Could these curious amalgams of text and image hold the secret to alternative museum future(s)?

Simon Fleury is a senior conservator at the Victoria and Albert Museum responsible for the conservation and care of the Museum’s photographic collection. This wide-ranging role is underpinned by a background in photography, which has included extensive commercial experience, and post-graduate study at the Royal College of Art. Simon is involved in promoting conservation centered art projects at the V&A. This has included organizing and chairing a recent roundtable discussion exploring the emerging field of ‘experimental preservation’ (featured in the publication Experimental Preservation, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Lars Muller Press, 2016). Simon’s Fleury independent practice-led research fabricates new museum(-objects) to explore and test the intimate entangling relations between artworks and their environments in the museum. This research is the basis of a Ph.D. study at Birmingham School of Art and Design (M3C AHRC). Simon is also taking part in the “New Alphabet School,” at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

Juliet Simpson
Imaging the Uncanny Memory: War and the Isenheim Altarpiece 1917–19

‘A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life, the image of his epoch.’ Thomas Mann’s evocation in 1924 of war, memory and art also distils his emblematic encounter with Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. Transported from Colmar to Munich in October 1917, exhibited between 1918-19 at the Munich Alte Pinakothek, it became the focus of an extraordinary moment of German national crisis and expiation widely imaged, projected, reported, and seen by countless visitors including Mann. This paper’s concerns are two-fold. First, to explore responses in word and image stimulated by the Altarpiece’s display and extensive photographic imaging, and their mediation of practices of ‘uncanny’ memory; queuing visitors were likened to ‘penitents’. Entwined with an acute sense of present trauma, this activates what Hans Belting terms as the borderline between image and art; devotion and distance –pivoting in 1918-19 on the Isenheim Altarpiece’s potency as an afterlife, re-staged to make present what appears absent: a medieval turbulence as a contemporary imaging and consciousness of pain.  Second is to consider how this process becomes amplified in the War’s aftermath, in particular, via its writing as an Unheimlich past in Mann’s The Magic Mountain, echoed in Marc Bloch’s invocation of a convulsive memory of power, malady and sacred ‘healing’ in his Les Rois thaumaturges: both 1924. Thus the conclusions suggest the recurrent, yet overlooked artistic figure of pre-modern memory within this constellation as pivotal to an imaginary of the unimaginable; of what is seen and unseen.

Juliet Simpson is Professor of Art History and Chair of Visual Arts and Cultural Memory, Coventry University, UK. She is an internationally recognized expert in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art and visual culture, art writing and memory, Symbolist visual and verbal cultures and modern reception of Northern Gothic and Renaissance art and memory. She has published extensively in these areas, including books on Aurier, Symbolism and the Visual Arts (1999), with Carol Adlam, Critical Exchange: Art Criticism in Russia and Western Europe (2009), and many articles on fin de siècle visual and literary cultures (recently Ferdinand Hodler’s cosmopolitanism).  Current collaborative projects include books on Primitive Renaissances (Routledge) and Gothic Modernisms (Peter Lang: forthcoming), and as guest curator
with the Finnish National Gallery-Ateneum for an international touring exhibition and publication. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, UK, and Senior Visiting Fellow at the Warburg Institute, University of London, London (2019-20). 

Leonida Kovac
Sebald’s Toute la Mémoire du Monde

In 1956 Alain Resnais opened his film-essay Toute la mémoire du monde with the statement that owing to the short-lived nature of human remembering, people tend to accumulate countless auxiliary memories. The issue of  “auxiliary memories” related to the search for one’s own identity is an ostinato theme of Sebald’s last novel Austerlitz where the titles and certain motifs articulated in three films by Resnais are appropriated in order to depict 20^th century in terms of the uncanny. It is not by chance that a Jewish boy Jacques Austerlitz, before he was sent from Prague in England by the last Kindertransport, and his mother to Theresienstadt, spent his last summer with the parents in Marienbad, where he will return many years later and become haunted by something unknown. In Sebald’s narrative tissue such reference to the Last Year at Marienbad  rhizomatically lead to 1955 Resnais’ film-essay Night and Fog, as well as to the psychoanalytic notion of the originally lost object. But, in the novel Resnais is explicitly mentioned only once, in Austerlitz remembrance of the scene from Toute la mémoire du monde which he found fantastic and monstrous. It is a matter of the footage of the interior of Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, showing the process of transportation of notes from the reading room to the storage. The performative of Sebald’s utilization of the “monstrosity” of that scene manifests itself through the narrative transversal that relates it with the procedure of erasing of historical (holocaust) memory, actually with the 1988 French president decision to erect the most modern and the biggest on the world – the new National Library building, exactly at the same place where during the WWII existed the huge storage in which Nazis dragged the robbed Jewish property.

Leonida Kovač is an art historian, theorist and curator, professor at the University of Zagreb, Academy of Fine Arts.