Formal accident: wear and damage

I suppose I am not alone in feeling that something is lost when a great painting is restored. Yes, now we can see what the original viewers saw, or at least the restorers’ idea of what that was. And that is valuable. But we have lost a bit of what we normally see in an old object. The feeling of age is part of the feeling of something old, yet we have made the painting as new as it can be. Often we do value old things to some degree just because they are old and really seem old. We may value the language of Shakespeare in part for its very out-of-dateness, for example; someone who loves it wouldn’t want to modernize it, to cleanse it of its crust of time in order to make the underlying plays more directly apprehensible. Does extra visual difficulty, a screen between the painted image and us that the artist had nothing to do with, that crept in later, actually add something? Yes, I think it does. It adds realism. It doesn’t let us pretend that the picture was made yesterday. And it adds pleasure. Age has a feeling, and we may simply like that feeling. Visible age as a sign of actual age: this is rarer in photography and very much something to be valued if we want to really feel the pastness of what is documented in a photo. Even the oldest photograph is not that old in art-historical time, but snapshots tend to live hard lives. It’s really only popular photography and especially snapshots in which the apparent physical age of an object can often telegraph the rough date of the event we are looking at. I am thinking of wear as an organic accretion of micro-insult over a long period of time—as opposed to damage, a coarse, sudden trauma that could have been inflicted a few minutes ago. Wear would speak more to age, damage to neglect (which has its own feeling). But in practice the distinction can be unclear. In the case of this photo I suppose the surface problems help us feel the passage of time (it can’t be that great—perhaps thirty-five years). But the feeling of neglect is stronger. In rare cases wear or damage can do more than add atmosphere; they can seem to intervene sharply in the meaning of an image. Here the overall feeling of neglect creates a couple of subtle visual jokes that make the picture interesting. The disordered surface chimes with (or reinforces) the notable disorder of the scene. And perhaps (we may think at some level) the man has closed his eyes to it all, or allowed it to happen.

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