The Conservator's Gaze and the Nature of the Work

Aesthetic philosophers, theorizing literary critics and editors, and reflective commentators on the restoration of paintings, buildings, and monuments have repeatedly shown that the concept of the work is anything but self-evident. The present essay examines major attempts to conceptualize this problematic area since the 1930s, before proposing a solution based on the semiotics of C. S. Peirce and Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics that will help clarify thinking when practices of preservation and conservation are being determined. The language and thinking come ultimately from scholarly editorial activity; the working assumption is that, with suitable adjustments for the medium, it will apply to other historically orientated forms of cultural conservation. Introduction I should choose my writing to be judged as a chiselled block, unconnected with my hand entirely. (Virginia Woolf, 1908/1975, p. 325) A theory of the work does not exist, and the empirical task of those who naively undertake the editing of works often suffers in the absence of such a theory. (Michel Foucault, 1969/1986, p. 104) Work: only four letters, satisfyingly brief, apparently simple. In English the verb and the noun are the same, so that the concept of the work retains its direct connection to the hand of its maker. The concept loses it in most other European languages: so we have German Werk (as opposed to Arbeit), French oeuvre (vs travail), Italian opera (vs lavoro), Spanish obra (vs trabajo), Russian proizvedenie (vs rabota), and so on. Getting a grip on the The Conservator’s Gaze and the Nature of the Work