4. A fictitious
art
Malraux embodied in his own life how a written culture
could be enriched by an image culture. He was one of the
greatest writers of his time and in his illustrated books
on art he took advantage, as few others, of the new
culture of the graphic image. Besides, in an admirable
decision he changed the appearance of French monuments.
The façades of buildings in Paris were cleaned and
what people saw was wonderfully transformed. He uncovered
what had been hidden.
The history of art for the last hundred years is
the history of what can be photographed. (28)
The imaginary Museum consists, in effect, of "mass
reproductions" of works of art, in all forms and formats.
But not only of this. Due to its peculiar dynamics
reproduction in turn generates novel actions and
attitudes with respect to the work of art. Malraux was
aware of this paradox, of this feedback between
reproduction and artistic creation.
At the same time that photography offered artists a
profusion of masterpieces, the artist's attitude to a
work of art underwent a change. (15)
In effect, the photograph was then a poor relative to
an engraving. While the latter was used almost
exclusively for acknowledged masterpieces, the photograph
helped to popularize less important or forgotten works of
art. But the constant progress and perfection of the
tremendous photographic accumulation produced an
unplanned fundamental change in artistic conception as
such. Art was looked at in a different way. Specifically,
photography made the most diverse objects equal, creating
new families, suggesting new relationships and shared
styles.
A photograph in black and white relates the objects
it represents wherever there is a connection. A tapestry,
a miniature, a picture, a sculpture and a medieval
vitraux, all very different objects, become related when
reproduced on the same page. They have lost their color,
their material (sculpture some of its volume), their
dimensions. They have lost specificity to their common
style. (18)
What happens when color, material, volume and even
dimensions are lost? A reproduction devoid of those
essential attributes certainly cannot be like the
original. It is a different work. But thanks to this loss
it also gains something. And this is the secret of magic
transmutation. It finds, says Malraux, its "style," in a
very real sense it finds synchrony with other works that
seemed unrelated to it. Malraux thus broaches complex
subjects that today are in the domain of general
linguistics. He restates the language proper to
photographic reproduction, he alerts us to a syntaxis
that exclusively addresses the relations between images,
that abstracts their original sense. Van Gogh wrote to
his brother Théo "we cannot do otherwise than make
our pictures speak "(6). We should now, perhaps, build a
new "grammar of style" to also be able to express
ourselves in the field of graphic art reproductions.
One of the principal themes is the effect in
reproduction of the altered scale of the work of art. So
much so that fearing falsifications, many museums forbid
a copy in the real size of the original. But this is a
subject for lengthy analysis. The visual sciences teach
us precisely the consequences of a loss of size constancy
(and of color and shape). Malraux dared to pose this from
the point of view of art.
The development of reproduction also acts more
subtly. In an album, in an art book, objects are mostly
reproduced in a similar format. In fact, a stone Buddha
twenty meters high is no more than four times as large as
a Tanagra figurine... Scale is lost. (18)
This is very important. In ordinary life, for example,
when we see a car in the distance we still recognize it
as such and it does not suddenly become to us a miniature
or a toy car. Up to a certain distance the visual object
"keeps" its size because our brain has developed
mechanisms to preserve the scale of objects within
certain limits. When we exceed those limits the result is
a brutal and sudden alteration of our field of
perception. When we lose scale there really occurs a
"visual catastrophe." This happens to us, for example,
when we fly up in an airplane or climb a very tall
building. Up to a certain height we recognize buildings,
trees and cars as familiar objects but over that limit,
suddenly, the whole panorama becomes a miniature. We have
"changed scale." The original size-preserving mechanisms
no longer operate. Something similar occurs with
photographic reproductions: it is possible to change, at
will, the scale of objects. This manipulation of scale
has very interesting consequences. In a certain sense the
original artwork is enriched. It provides a new vision.
For example,
The art of the steppes was a subject for
specialists, but when the bronze or gold plaques are
shown on the same page above a roman bas-relief, they
become bas-reliefs as well. Photographic reproduction
frees them from the servitude of belonging to a minor
art. (20)
To show this, Malraux presents on the same page and in
the same size a first century Western Siberia depiction
of an animal fight and the famous twelfth century
bas-relief in the Autun Cathedral showing Eve bending to
pick the apple off the forbidden tree. The confrontation
between a simple mythological scene in the steppes and a
powerful evocation of Genesis, the first small in size,
the second a large horizontal stone relief, is
suggestive. The imaginary Museum is the ideal place to
establish these unexpected relations, where style
transcends form and matter. It has given place, says
Malraux, to "fictitious art." The consequences of a
simple photographic amplification or reduction are
incalculable and sometimes open up new styles in art.
When the scale of a work of art is "falsified," niches of
new meaning may be discovered.
Reproduction has made art fictitious (as happens
with the novel where reality serves fiction) when it
systematically falsifies the scale of objects and
presents the figures on oriental seals and coins as if
figures on columns, and amulets as statues. Furthermore,
the unfinished execution resulting from the small size of
the object becomes in the amplified photograph a large
style, one with a modern accent. (22)
No one can doubt the value of photographic
reproduction for the detailed study of a work of art.
Moreover, it is frequently the only available means to
fill in gaps in our historical knowledge. Many times
large works have disappeared and we only have the
testimony of the smaller ones. The style of these last
makes us infer that of the major artworks when we use our
imagination on the amplified photographs of the smaller
surviving specimens. This is what Malraux has to say,
Sometimes reproductions of minor artworks suggest
certain grand styles that have disappeared, or that were
possible. The number of great works of art prior to
Christianity that have come down to us is insignificant
compared with the number that have been lost.
(22)
In summary, the imaginary Museum of reproductions
incites us to provoke the metamorphosis of the original
object, it invites us to discover and exhibit as a
novelty that which was implicit in the art work but not
apparent to the naked eye.
The photo album isolates both to metamorphose
(through enlargement) and for discovery (when it isolates
a landscape in a Limbourg
miniature) and so changes it into new art or for
exhibition. (25)
It sometimes allows us to better expose the artistic
quality of a particular work of art.
An art album on Oceania (7) in making us familiar
with 200 sculptures reveals the quality of some of them.
Familiarity with a large number of works of a same style
determines the masterpieces of that style, because it
forces us to understand the particular meaning of the
style. (17)
We come here to an issue of high educational value.
For some time now the museums of the world summon
multitudes with their famous "retrospective shows," which
serve to appreciate a large number of original works
usually dispersed or inaccessible. The imaginary Museum
is eminently suited to this; as it is a "bespoke museum"
as well as a "portable museum" with an infinite number of
works of interest to us. Just as a musician can leaf
through a score and enjoy the music without hearing it,
in the same way a visitor to the imaginary Museum can
visualize a reproduced artwork without actually seeing
the original. In a luminous metaphor Paul Claudel used to
say "close your eyes and you will see."
The musician and his score and the art lover and his
reproduction "reconstruct" sound and visual images. In
this capacity to reconstruct lies, precisely, one of the
greatest contributions of the virtual Museum. We are
dealing with a reconstruction that goes far beyond the
photographic images of the imaginary Museum. Let us see
some examples. There are few things as attractive as
turning a Greek statue around on its pedestal. Some
museums permit this, by nature the act of the sculptor in
his studio or, in the case of an antique bowl, of the
potter at his wheel. But it is not the usual thing.
However, digital technology allows manipulating the art
object without any risk. There are programs or
applications that allow rotating
a solid body in virtual space, including the shadings of
dark and light. Many virtual Museums also offer the
possibility of moving about, of walking through the rooms
and contemplating the works of art one by one. New York's
Frick
Collection is one. Nothing is more appropriate to
Malraux's imaginary museum than this leisurely visit.
But we can go even further in virtual space. As an
implicit corollary of the theory of fictitious art, there
are actually some virtual museums that have no existence
in the real world! In digital jargon they are called web
only museums. These totally fictive museums have the
peculiarity of inviting the visitor to a place that only
exists on the web, although in the case of Montevideo's
virtual Museum the designers have invented a
photomontage of a virtual building in a very well known
park of that Uruguayan city. In these "only virtual
museums" the visitor enters the simulated building, sees
the billboards, decides what exhibition to see, climbs
the stairs and contemplates art hung on virtual walls. An
interesting exhibition of the Uruguayan painter Pedro
Figari is shown in a virtual salon in the Montevideo
virtual museum. And this poses an interesting question
that duplicates the one on fictitious art. These works by
Figari are reproductions of his original paintings, but
they could well be mere "digital reconstructions" of
perhaps non-existent works, hung on non-existent walls.
Digital art will keep the matter permanently open to
discussion. It is a new challenge which the digital
culture brings to art and other fields.
Art forgeries are a problem central to modern museums,
and can also become troublesome in virtual space. Malraux
devotes several pages to the analysis of art forgeries
and a detailed discussion of the work of Van Meegeren,
the Vermeer forger. This celebrated forger presumed to
rival Vermeer as an artist; he did not think of himself
as an imitator but as a competitor, and that was his
strange defense at his famous forgery trial, but his case
was unusual. In general "the traditional forger (as
Malraux says) does not try to compete with genius, he
tries at most to imitate the manner or, in the case of
anonymous artists, the style."(369). We shall surely see
many varieties of fictive art in this new digital
culture, from pure forgery at one extreme, to the
creation of art objects of impossible execution in real
life but feasible in the world of digital
make-believe.