1. The changing significance of the work of art in the museum
2. The museum, temple to the arts and sciences
6. The art of the fragment
7. The memory of the classical ideal
6. The art of the fragment
All reconstruction presupposes a previous dispersion of the whole and its parts. Museums have always taken pains to conserve those pieces, either in their archeology or antiquities collections. The last decades saw the emergence, as well, of a strong esthetic trend giving importance to those fragments which, by the magic of the museum, became works of art.
The fragment is also instructive in the school of fictitious art. Does not the Victory of Samothrace suggest a Greek style besides the real one? Khmer statuary has multiplied admirable heads on conventional bodies; isolated Khmer heads are the glory of the Guimet Museum. St. John the Baptist on the portal of Rheims Cathedral is far from matching the genius of his isolated visage. The fragment given pride of place because of what it represents and carefully lighted becomes a far from modest reproduction in the imaginary museum. (23)
Reproduction, in effect, has the virtue of enhancing at will an aspect, a facet, an artist, a brushstroke, a spot of color. Without the intervention of technique the fragment would be lost in the anonymous ensemble of orphaned remains. But we must admit that an important tendency has already begun.
Classical esthetics went from the fragment to the whole, our own travels from the whole to the fragment and finds in reproduction incomparable assistance. (25)
The imaginary museum offers, in fact, the possibility of playing with the pieces of the puzzle, with the art elements that our imagination wants to scrutinize. It is by definition a "non-invasive" painless intervention, which does not even touch the object. It preserves the original. But we can go further. With the help of the new digital techniques everything can be atomized, reduced to a minimal symbolic expression, to a string of 1 and 0 which the computer infallibly interprets. The last fragment of the virtual museum is the bit, the unit of information. We have changed the Universe. In this new digital world forms, colors and volumes take on a new corporeal entity. They are generated step-by-step, transformed by geometrical operations and given out to the whole world via the internet. Malraux never imagined the potential of his idea about the value of the fragment in art reproduction. The time he lived in limited him to a difficult photographic reconstruction. Today, however, we can enrich his intuition in multiple ways. In the first place, digital reproduction makes possible replacing lost materials, the handle of a Greek amphora, the border of a medieval tapestry, the broken nose on a statue. It also helps us to recover the original color of a painting and continue an arabesque eroded by time. On the computer screen we pass unobstructed from the whole to the fragment and from the fragment to the whole.
What is it that prompts us to recover these fragments, those tracks left by the past? It is not only the passion for domination over things nor the celebration of a prodigious technology. As Malraux insinuates, it is something much deeper, we want to keep on living!
Our sensibility for the mutilated statue, for the bronze from archeological excavations is revealing. We collect neither the indistinct bas-relief nor the rust of time; it is not the presence of death which holds us, it is survival. (631)
In the imaginary museum fragments are kept and restored. In the virtual museum they acquire new life, one which perhaps they never actually had. We are forcing destiny. What is this Herculean struggle with history that continues incessantly throughout time? It is clear to Malraux that,
Mutilation is the sign of combat, time has suddenly made its appearance, time that is part of the art of the past, which is both its substance and the threatening darkness emerging from the fracture, the place where chaos and subjection unite. All the museums in the world have as symbol Hercules's mutilated torso. Hercules's new adversary, the last incarnation of destiny, is history. (633)
Figure 3
The history of mankind is implacable and many masterpieces where not only destroyed but never saw the light of day, or remained unfinished or never left the sketching table. But now digital technology facilitates their birth in the virtual museum. They can appear from the abyss that destroyed them before birth. In fact, today it is possible to artificially recreate works that never were more than a sketch or a blueprint. Thanks to the new digital technologies it is possible "to see the invisible," in the words of Takehiko Nagakura, one of the leaders of MIT's Project Unbuilt.(8) His research team has reconstructed in virtual space "architecture never built" of great artists such as Palladio, Le Corbusier, Vladimir Tatlin and Alvaar Alto. The results are spectacular and in some way the answer to Malraux's concern with "showing" great architectural works in his imaginary museum. Now we can go beyond a scale model of a monument and visualize it in full detail in virtual space, even see its fictional placement in the city. We can, finally, thanks to the virtual museum, make visits, climb towers and tour the salons of an architectural masterpiece that never existed but that some genius did imagine and blueprint. The poetic spirit that animates all reconstruction is excited at these possibilities. "What would St. Petersburg be like if those four hundred meters of rusty iron were imposed on the neo-classical city on a winter day?" wonders Nagakura referring to the digital reconstruction of Tatlin's gigantic tower. The technological answer is that virtual images show in obsessive detail even the rust on old iron beams and the footprints on the snow!