Authors

Irina Sandomirskaja¹;  ¹ Sodertorn University, Sweden

Discussion

What happens to an artefact’s identity and memory in the labyrinth of restoration’s multiple temporalities: the “then” of the original intent, the “now” of the intent of preservation, the “in-between” of the object’s material decay, and the ”ever after” of the imperishable value of the masterpiece? In the Soviet context, the maze in question acquires a couple of additional dimensions of the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist ideological, economic, disciplinary, and other dogmas. As a mode of appropriation of time, restoration is a labyrinth of historical doctrines, connoisseurship, aesthetic valorization, and empirical material study. In Soviet conditions, especially under the Bolsheviks and during the Stalin years, hidden in the material world of the Soviet museum storage, it also served as an umbrella for the future Soviet museum system and politics, and under the eyes of political censorship, as a peculiar substitute for the forbidden discourses of history, aesthetics, and economics. Since 1991, the Soviet school of restoration has given way and adapted partly to the art market, partly to the international criteria of scientific conservation. The crucial difference between the two apparently similar modes of preservation – restoration and conservation --will be discussed, but also the commonality between them. Both represent modes of the material production of history and a temporality of a manipulable and reversible time; hence, each implies a specific politic. Whether historical or political, restoration is not reactional or conservative: while preserving things, it produces qualitatively new objects. Even when restoration maintains its purpose in purifying, and thus eternalizing, the origins and meaning in the artefact – instead, because of its groundedness in the materiality of the “old thing”, restoration proliferates the object both in its histories and futures. I will provide a couple of examples to illustrate the point.