BACKING UP THE VIRTUAL BAYEUX TAPESTRIES:
FACSIMILES AS ATTACHMENT DISORDERS, OR TURNING OVER THE OTHER SIDE OF THE UNDERNEATH[1]
Richard Burt
The higher the level of a work, the more it remains translatable, even if its meaning is touched upon only fleetingly. This, of course, applies only to originals. Translations, in contrast, prove to be untranslatable not because of any inherent difficulty but because of the looseness with which meaning attaches to them (Walter Benjamin 1996, 262).
If, as Meyer Shapiro (1968) suggests, the signatory is the owner, or, an important nuance, the wearer of the shoes, it might be said that the half-open circle of the lace calls for a reattachment: of the painting to the signature (to the sharpness, the pointure that pierces the canvas), of the shoes to their owner, or even of Vincent to van Gogh; in short, a complement, a general reattachment as truth in painting? No more detachment: the shoes are no longer attached-to-van-Gogh; they are Vincent himself, who is undetachable from himself. They do not even figure one of his parts but his whole presence gathered, pulled tight, contracted into itself, with itself, in proximity with itself: a parousia (Jacques Derrida 1987, 279 & 369).
Severing Attachments, a case study
Consider two different kinds of ‘exhibitions’ of related objects concerning the Bayeux Tapestry: the objects, all of them replicas, derive from the same historical moment but have since been detached from each other. The first, in February 2009, displayed online photographs of two conservators restoring one of two faded hand-coloured photographs of Charles Stothard’s 1816-18[M1] earlier drawings of the Bayeux Tapestry; the photographs were taken in 1872 by Joseph Cundall on behalf of the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum, Pl.RB.1).[2]
The second exhibition, organised by Michael Lewis for the British Museum, displayed an exact replica (made by Chantel James, Bayeux Broderie) of one of at least two pieces of the Tapestry that Stothard removed and took back to England; his wife, Eliza, was later blamed for the theft, but was cleared in 1913 and then re-cleared in 2008.[3] Additionally, the British Museum exhibited one of the two (known) casts Stothard made of parts of the Tapestry, which were produced by pouring melted wax directly on to the fabric, which was then peeled off to make a plaster cast(Lewis 2007); the cast in the British Museum shows two images of William and a vivid portrait of the moustached Harold.
Aside from the polite scandal of a theft and accusations twice parried, the story of the proliferation of the Bayeux Tapestry that inheres to these objects is fairly prosaic. Not much to divert us from the thing itself -- the original whose forms here are merely multiplied. Such multiplication or doubling and redoubling happens all the time. Before discussing these two independently organised exhibitions, one a museum installation and the other exclusively online, it is important to explain why it is necessary to pause over these facsimiles, one a replica of a replica of a replica (the photograph is a photograph of the original that was then modified and then coloured), another a replica of a fragment, and the last a plaster cast made from a wax replica.
The author finds it particularly interesting to understand the relationship between the redoubling of the Tapestry by a drawing that is photographed (twice) before being hand tinted and then digitally photographed during its restoration, on the one hand, and the doublings of the Tapestry in the form of displaying a replica one of two detached fragments and the displaying of one of two plaster casts. Following Walter Benjamin’s (1996, 253-63) figure of translation as always a failed fragmentation of what was already a fragment, the author asks: What is the status of these second-, third-, or fourth-order replicas that litter the passage of the Bayeux-Thing into various media?[4] What magnitude of attachment disorder beckons here? A series of allied questions about the narratives attached both to these exhibitions and to the storage of the Tapestry follow from the way these replicas are modelled here[M2]. Why, in the retelling of the Stothard story, do the two fragments become one? How are objects and replicas being related in this narrative that tends to anthropomorphize the object? Are the fragments of the real Tapestry personal mementos? How and where did Stothard store them, and does his storage unit constitute a materialized memory qua momento (as memento) device? How is the one surviving fragment (removed by Stothard) stored now in Bayeux? What is to be done with this fragment that cannot be reattached to the Tapestry because it had already been repaired by the time the fragments were returned in 1872?
P/Arting
This essay responds to these questions by considering the Bayeux Tapestry as a material object that may be configured differently depending on how it is viewed, given the training (in different fields of study) of those who study it, and its passing into discourse over time. This essay may therefore be regarded as a prolegomenon to any future study of the Bayeux Tapestry as a virtual object of interpretation. In this sense, it follows a trend in art history in which what were once considered ancillary research tools used to let auctioneers and buyers know exactly what they own have penetrated more and more deeply into criticism itself, even in some cases replacing criticism based on style altogether.[M3] The more ‘scientific’ art criticism has become, the more fetishistic it has become.[5] Fetishism emerges in metaphysical terms as a focus on physical siding, a putatively ‘nitty gritty’ kind of microscientific research that sorts out who painted what in a given collaboration or over painting and a rematching and reattaching of missing parts or panels complete with marriage and divorce metaphors.[6] In Michel de Montaigne’s (1957) spirit of the ‘essay’, this discussion raises new questions, not attempt to answer old ones that might better be answered by others.
The two ‘exhibitions’ raise larger questions regarding the importance of using facsimiles that have become detached from their originals to study those originals. What can the Victoria and Albert Museum and British Museum exhibitions tell us about the print, electronic and digital reproductions of the Bayeux Tapestry; exhibitions of what we take to be real things and their replicas? How might the attachment of originals to their installations and replications be understood? To what extent do replicas serve as ‘back ups’, sources of evidence to allow conservators to restore previously ‘restored’ and replicated objects such as the Bayeux Tapestry to their original state; the replicas are hence part of a support system? To what extent does the replication of the Bayeux Tapestry make even the material object into a projection screen, one of an endless proliferation of virtual Bayeux Tapestries on to which scholars project differing accounts of its genesis while drawing on a replica like Stothard’s, as if it were identical to the Bayeux Tapestry as it was when Stothard drew it, as if his drawing were the thing itself, not just a snapshot of it? Is there a relation between Stothard’s commission (with permission) to draw the Bayeux Tapestry and his ‘theft’ of two parts of it? Was it that Stothard just couldn’t wait for the museum shop to open selling reproductions of fragments? Sadly, exact replicas of the fragment are not for sale in the Bayeux museum shop? The author would love to buy one, perhaps stamped ‘made in Bayeux’ to authentic its provenance.
Night at the British Museum
Considered as a physical object of Anglo-Saxon, Norman, or Anglo-French, material culture, the Bayeux Tapestry inscribes a metaphysical excess in the gap, a virtualization between the nine sections of the Tapestry, on the one hand, and the sheet of linen on which they were mounted, on the other.[7] ‘Virtualization’ does not mean the ersatz replacement, the look-alike that is ‘virtually’ identical to the original Bayeux Tapestry and that can stand in when needed like an actor’s understudy, but the process of assembling and attaching it that may leave material impressions of the sort one finds in Books of Hours and other illuminated manuscripts, but that go unnoticed.[8] The Tapestry’s linen backing sheet serves several functions, including support for exhibit, protection when it was rolled up for storage, and possibly its reproduction and replacement in case of its destruction. Even the surviving piece Stothard cut from the Tapestry may be regarded as backups: is it any wonder that the surviving scrap of fabric is shield-shaped?[9]
Coming Unglued
The virtualisation of the Bayeux Tapestry, then, is also its pluralisation. The physical space between the Tapestry and its backing becomes metaphysical, in other words, in that it transforms the Tapestry from what is regularly referred to as a unique object into a double object subject to uncanny spectralising or dematerialising effects that conjure up discursive treatments that are part of the very problem they wish to cure.[10] Thus, it should come as no surprise that Stothard took (at least) two pieces of the Tapestry or that he made plaster casts (now two objects; the British Museum cast consists of three casts put together). The object’s proliferation always seems to come in twos, such that even the ‘back up’ has a ‘back up’, the replica always already paired up with its identical twin.[11]
There is no Bayeux Tapestry, then, but only an always already virtualised Bayeux Tapestries (forgive the deliberate grammatical error) that present a highly interesting example of what Bruno Latour (2004, 238-9) calls the ‘gathering’ of things that transforms material objects from matters of fact into matters of concern.[12] ‘A thing’ Latour (2004, 233) writes, ‘is, an object out there and, in another sense, an issue very much in there, at any rate, a gathering... The same word thing designates matters of fact and matters of concern’. A spectacularly huge ‘number of things’, he (2004, 235) observes, ‘have to participate in the gathering of an object’. It may be that the thing as a gathering, however sturdy, cannot fully fuse together an object’s interiority and exteriority, nor can a gathering endure forever, precisely because attachments are not necessarily secured.
In this sense, the transformation of objects into things is a form of translation, not only because, as any schoolchild knows, something gets lost, but, more crucially, because meaning only partially adheres to the thing. As Walter Benjamin (1996, 73-105) comments ‘translations...prove to be untranslatable not because of any inherent difficulty but because of the looseness with which meaning attaches to them’. It is reasonable to infer that this looseness of attachment arises from what Benjamin (1996, 105) calls ‘virtual [virtuelle] translation’ of ‘the interlinear version of the Scriptures” that he says "is the prototype or ideal of all translations’. For to some degree, ‘all great writings, but above all the Holy Scriptures, contain their virtual translation ‘between the lines’, or in the case of the Tapestry, between the sheets.[13] When considered as a form of translation, the virtualisation of the Bayeux Tapestries is thus also its estrangement: its fleetingly and loosely attached meanings and materials give it the status of an untranslatable foreign text, as the apparently endless attempts to domesticate the Tapestry by finding its closest material analogy testify, cathedrals, Byzantine textiles, medieval manuscripts, and Torah Scrolls, being some of the most recently suggested.[14] The gap within the Bayeux Tapestry works as a kind of coagulating but not congealing blood that is hidden in a never-to-be-revealed wound, detaching unending material and discursive descriptions and interpretations to reattach the object to the ‘back ups’ from which it has been internally and permanently severed. What Georges Didi-Huberman (2008, 71-9 & 115-39) calls the ‘impression’ or print left by casting, covering, or stamping an early modern cloth, coins, paintings, and death masks, was regarded as both a political and a theological aura, an invisible after-burn left by a face or hand power as much secular as sacred.
Art History Forensics and The Duh Vinci Code
Conservators and art historians engaged in art forensics tend to exceed the positivistic purposes of providing back-up for (re)attachment (re)order in the forms of hard data about the artefact, its restoration, and sometimes its repatriation, inadvertently turning themselves into forgers or novelists of knowledge: by attaching and reattaching the object to its backing, or to the reverse side of a work of art, considered as an empirical material object, conservators and curators end up reproducing the gap discussed above, rather than closing it and so sometimes create what look very much like works of art in their own right even if unacknowledged as such.[15] Additionally, positivist art historians and museum curators are haunted by a parallel proliferation of fantasies that show up across a broad spectrum of canonical European art works, fantasies about undrawings beneath paintings, hidden drawings behind paintings, paintings painted over paintings, and so on, all amounting to what might be call ‘Da Vinci Code’ effects.[16] Self-identified, positivist, philological criticism of the Bayeux Tapestry is a case study of lost and lost, or lost again and again, rather than lost and found, a case of endless serialisation of missing objects and missed sightings rather than a genetic narrative with a beginning and end, allowing for a before-and-after comparison of original and its restoration or its replication.[17] It is only to be expected that the discovery that there are nine, not eight sections of the Tapestry will produce speculation that the last section is ‘missing three to five feet’ (even though all the extant lengths are different sizes, and they generally get shorter) and that this speculation will soon be followed by the concession that ‘it is always possible…that major errors were made’ and hence nothing is missing at all; it may be easily predicted that a succession of sentences beginning ‘we know’ will lead to the dead-end conclusion ‘again, we will never know’ (Bloch 2006, 80 & 93).[18]
Seeing Double? Call Back Up
The small gap with major implications between the Tapestry and its backing derails positivist attempts to reduce the hunt for the Tapestry’s genesis to an archaeological dig, treating the Tapestry as metaphorical remains located in layers of sedimentation in order to fit it neatly into a linear chronology that defines genetic criticism.[19] The material object known as the Bayeux Tapestry resembles the impossible space and looping temporality of a Moebius strip: backing the nine sections of the Bayeux Tapestry on linen to help exhibit the whole[M4] creates, as numerous examples testify, a desire in the viewer to ‘back up’, as it were, and see its reverse side.[20] Even the Nazis photographed the front and back sides of the Tapestry (Lemagnen 2004, 51-9). Reproductions in books and a CD-ROM of parts of the backside were made possible when the entire backside was photographed in 1982 (Pl.RB.2-4).[21]
A similar and even more remarkable fascination is found in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exclusively online ‘exhibition’ of the two backings of the 1873 photograph, one textile and the other paper. Several photographs of the conservation show the reverse side of the photograph after the textile backing was removed, and, in one case, of a conservator’s hand holding a razor blade to scrape part of the paper (Pl.RB.5).[22]
In attaching the Bayeux Tapestry to a linen backing sheet, the backside of the Tapestry and its facsimiles go missing, thereby calling up a desire to find the fragment and restore the whole. Consequently, in a classic, fetishistic manner, fragments of the missing reverse side regularly show up, much like the photographs of the textile backing of the Tapestry[M5] and the replica of the fragment stolen by Stothard. This desire is not only to find the missing fragment, but involves turning the Bayeux Tapestry over to see, to borrow the title of Jane Arden’s 1972 experimental film, ‘the other side of the underneath’, to under-see, as it were, what cannot be seen rather than to oversee what can be seen.
Here, in brief, is a definition of the ‘attachment disorder’ produced by the Bayeux Tapestry’s virtualisations: the prosaic desire to see “what lies beneath” [M6]the material object, to cite the title of Robert Zemeckis’s (2000) supernatural thriller, leads quite predictably to the poetic, perhaps mad, desire to see the unseeable (not to be confused with the invisible in that the invisible may become visible but the unseeable may never be seen), or via double vision become a doubly visionary spectator. Viewing the backside of the Tapestry (or looking at x-ray photographs of layers of oil paintings such as Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa; the painting was lifted off its boards for x-raying) typically involves the literal detachment of the work from its backing as much as its reattachment, in order to back it up more securely, resulting in the dispersal of replicas and images as much as in their unification and collection in a holding cell.[23] What goes missing can never be found, since what is produced is not something that existed but a fantasy about something that once may have existed but which can never be verified. What lies beneath the work of art waiting to be revealed is not necessarily the truth but possibly a mix of truth and deception that goes from just below the surface all the way to the bottom.[24]