The dilemmas of conservation and restoration are usually discussed in terms of great works of art that have either been allowed to decay, prompting accusations of criminal neglect, or else laboriously restored, occasioning charges of criminal damage. But the same issues can also present themselves in everyday life. Old clothes for example – clothes we have been wearing for years, or cast-offs from parents or friends, or purchases from car-boot sales or charity shops: do we want to turn the cuffs and restore the nap and refresh the colours to make them look shop-new, or would we prefer to leave them as they are, a little more ragged at every outing, but bearing honest testimony to the scenes they have witnessed and the places they have been? And what about thinning hair or roughened voices, stretch-marks, lopsided smiles or chipped, yellowing teeth: are they to be prized as trophies from our voyages round life’s extremities, or discretely concealed as unseemly intimations of decrepitude and imminent collapse?
The same questions arise with buildings. You only have to look at photographs of towns and cities a hundred years ago to lament the haste with which perfectly serviceable old shops, houses and apartment blocks, or entire streets and neighbourhoods, have been knocked down to make way for brash modern structures which, to our eyes at least, have aged very badly indeed. Consider too the removal of wainscoting, fireplaces or glazing bars, the installation of heating radiators or indoor toilets, the prodigal kitchen extensions and loft and basement conversions that characterize the houses where most of us spend the private and domestic parts of our lives.
Long before the housing bonanzas of the twentieth century, the problem was articulated by the utopian socialist William Morris, who founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1877, with active support from the utopian Tory John Ruskin. The argument of the Society can be summed up in Morris’s phrase, ‘anti-scrape.’ Buildings, for Morris, were like people or animals or plants, and it was in their nature to grow feeble and bowed and crotchety with age. Damage, injury, corrosion and decay should be avoided if possible, but if repairs became necessary they should take the form of minimal protection rather than active restoration – what Morris called ‘daily care,’ aimed at patching and mending with ‘no pretence of other art.’ 1 If the walls of old buildings in Oxford are pitted and crumbly with age, or the stone steps worn down with use, then that is part of their charm and their dignity, and a zealous mason who scraped away the work of time and laid on a veneer of fresh-cut stone would be perpetrating a kind of insult if not a blasphemy. Restoration, for the anti-scrape party, was destruction and desecration by stealth.
Architecture, as Ruskin had written nearly thirty years before, is an art of memory: a building is not just an object of present experience but a memorial and a monument, a relic of the past and a communication to the future. Old age is the test of a good building, and there is, he said, ‘an actual beauty in the marks of it:’2 architecture, for Ruskin, possesses a ‘light, and colour, and preciousness’ that become manifest only in a ‘golden stain of time.’3
Do not let us talk then of restoration. The thing is a Lie from beginning to end… . The principle of modern times … is to neglect buildings first, and restore them afterwards. Take proper care of your monuments, and you will not need to restore them… Watch an old building with anxious care; guard it as best you may … bind it together with iron when it loosens; stay it with timber when it declines; do not care about the unsightliness of the aid: better a crutch than a lost limb; and do this tenderly, and gently, and continually, and many a generation will still be born and pass away beneath its shadow. Its evil day must come at last; but let it come declaredly and openly, and let no dishonouring and false substitute deprive it of the funeral offices of memory.4
Looking back on these words in 1880, Ruskin declared them ‘more wasted’5 than anything else he ever wrote; and even if you resist his piteous sentimentality, you may find it impossible not to sympathize with his feeling that buildings can have a venerable life of their own, or even a personality – that they will flourish when granted the freedom to be their own idiosyncratic selves, and that when the time comes it may be better to let them die with dignity than turning them into ghastly simulacra of their former glories, or death masks or mummified corpses in an architectural mausoleum.
It is easy enough to contemplate the mortality of ordinary houses, however lovely: we accept that at some point they will come to the end of their useful life and be reduced to rubble; but even then we might be comforted to know that a few specimens of a typical two-up two-down cottage, a Victorian villa, or a suburban front room have been frozen in time and reconstituted inside a local museum. And when it comes to unique public structures like the Radcliffe Camera or Rouen Cathedral – beautiful in themselves, and invested with love and significance over many generations – it is hard not to feel that they ought to be preserved at any cost, and in their original setting, as long as civilization survives. The church restorations that angered Ruskin and Morris may have involved fudges or even lies, but they possess their attractions too, and twenty-first century cities are looking better than they might thanks to the fad for refurbishing old buildings, however artificially, rather than knocking them down and starting again.
The anti-scrape faction had a good point when they denounced the practices that threatened to turn living buildings into deathly waxworks; but once the possibilities of patch-and-mend have been exhausted, the option of thorough restoration will start to look more attractive. Any building that is blessed with some kind of world-historical singularity has a certain claim on our care, and none of us would want to be the one to call in the wrecking-ball, even if we risked putting ourselves on the wrong side of the Morris–Ruskin line. Anti-scrape purism will begin to look like pig-headed self-indulgence if it means depriving future generations of objects they might regard as a legitimate inheritance.
In an essay written in the last months of his life, the Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham suggested that when people die, their bodies should be chemically preserved as permanent monuments to their own past existence. He looked forward to a future in which these embalmed corpses – ‘Auto-Icons’ as he called them – would be displayed in public buildings, providing unimpeachable likenesses of the departed at very low cost (no artists’ fees payable), and in accordance with the best democratic principles (‘every man would be his own monument,’ 6 as he put it).
Bentham’s notion of the Auto-Icon deserves to be extended to cover any objects that are removed from ordinary cycles of maturation and decay in order to become permanent representatives of their former transient selves – including, notably, the contents of museums and historical libraries and galleries. To consign an object to a museum is to designate it as an Auto-Icon, and thus to generate a series of painful dilemmas over access and preservation: there is after all no point in keeping your collections immaculate if you do not let anyone consult them, but you cannot do that without exposing them to conditions that are liable to damage them and curtail their lease on life. But an anti-scrape policy is not an option: you cannot banish restoration as a lie, and embrace decay and dilapidation in the name of honesty and truth, since the whole point of taking objects from somewhere else and putting them in museums is to shield them from the ordinary attrition of old age.
Hence the repeated resort to the criterion of the ‘original state:’ objects in museums should be maintained in their original state, or if necessary restored to it, since that is what they are there for. The principle is not a bad one, but not especially helpful either – partly because of certain well-rehearsed theoretical difficulties about the nature of authentic originality, 7 but mainly because of pressing practical problems in knowing what the object would have been like at any given stage in its career, and deciding when it would have been most fully and originally itself (you cannot assume that things are always at their best when brand-new). William Morris noted that those who profess to restore a building to its pristine condition inevitably operate within the perspective of their own time: they perpetrate oversights and insensitivities that will not bother most of their contemporaries though they will become painfully obvious to later generations.8 The restoration of St Alban’s Cathedral, for example, appeared impeccably gothic when it was carried out in the 1860s, but to later eyes it looks deeply Victorian; and touched-up paintings from the Italian renaissance are liable to look as if they issued from the studios of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
The problem of obsolescence and restoration in museums has an analogue in the field of translation. The language of a classic original text – the words of Tolstoy, Shakespeare or Cervantes for example – will come to seem archaic as time goes by, and perhaps challenging or awe-inspiring too, but they will hardly stand in need of updating: readers of Russian, English or Spanish will be prepared to grapple with the difficulties of their ancient classics and on the whole they will be well rewarded for their pains. The language of a translation, however, will soon grow obsolete, and new translations will become necessary: original texts do not grow old as those that translate them grow old.
But the burdens of responsibility that weigh on translators are negligible compared with those imposed on the conservators, curators and restorers. Translators, like editors, deal with texts rather than physical objects, let alone icons or Auto-Icons; their materials are sequences of symbols that can be copied over and over again without any loss of significance – and they can do their worst with them without putting the original at risk in any way; whereas retouching a painting or replacing a sculpture’s lost hands may endanger its very quality as a uniquely precious work of art.
Technology helps: mechanical reproduction of paintings and sculpture means that the originals can be left exactly as they were, as immaculate as Auto-Icons can be, offering the smallest possible offence to the most fanatical fetishists of original works of art. Digitally engineered doubles can be dismantled, altered and restored in as many styles and tastes as we like, just as literary texts are translated and retranslated, and each new version will win a welcome as long as it reveals something new, and refrains from laying claim to absolute authenticity. It is often said that every act of translation, however faithful, is an act of betrayal as well, and the same applies to the conservation and restoration of works of art; but if there is something sombre about it, there is also some humble comfort in the reflection that everything we try will fail in some way, and nothing can ever be perfect.
Notes
- William Morris, “Manifesto of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings on its Foundation in 1877,” William Morris: Artist Writer Socialist, ed. May Morris, vol. 1 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1936) 113.
- John Ruskin, “The Lamp of Memory,” The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849): The Works of John Ruskin, eds. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, vol. 8, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903): 221–247, 235.
- Ruskin, p. 234.
- Ruskin, p. 234.
- Ruskin, p. 245n.
- Jeremy Bentham, Auto-Icon; or, Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living: A fragment (London: Privately Published, 1842) 3–4.
- See for example William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” Sewanee Review 54 (1946): 468–488, revised and reprinted in his The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1954):3–18. Roland Barthes, “La mort de l’auteur (1968),” translated by Stephen Heath and Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text (London: Fontana, 1977) 142–148.
- ‘Those who make the changes wrought in our day under the name of Restoration, while professing to bring back a building to the best time of its history, have no guide but each his own individual whim to point out to them what is admirable and what contemptible.’ Morris, p. 110.
