Bibliographic Imaginaries

Alain Resnais, Toute la mémoire du monde (1956; 20 minute film about the Bibliothèque nationale): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0RVSZ_yDjs

• end of film: "And now the book marches on toward an imaginary boundary more significant in its life than passing through the looking glass. It’s no longer the same book. Before, it was part of a universal, abstract, indifferent memory where all books were equal and together basked in attention as tenderly distant as that shown by God to men. Here it’s been picked out, preferred over others. Here it’s indispensable to its reader, torn from its galaxy to feed these paper-crunching pseudo-insects, irreparably different from true insects in that each is bound to its own distinct concern. Astrophysics, physiology, theology, taxonomy, philology, cosmology, mechanics, logic, poetics, technology. Here we glimpse a future in which all mysteries are solved…when this and other universes offer up their keys to us. And this will come about simply because these readers, each working on his slice of universal memory, will have laid the fragments of a single secret end to end. Perhaps a secret bearing the beautiful name of 'happiness'."

Andre Malfaux, "The Museum Without Walls," first part of The Voices of Silence

• museums force a metamorphosis of the art object; strip subject and context, force the object to consort with other works possibly unrelated in subject
• space of museum privileges pictures and statues, portable
• before reproductive technologies, the amount of art that any given person saw was very small; today, with reproduction tech, a "a 'Museum without Walls' is coming into being" (16)
• angle of photography can bring out something a work that the sculptor only hinted at (21); can also bring groups that are not related into an appearance of affinity -- "such different objects as a miniature, a piece of tapestry, a statue and a medieval stained-glass window, when reproduced on the same page, may seem members of the same family" (21); also loss of relative proportions
• reproduction has created "fictitious" arts "by systematically falsifying the scale" -- similar to what fiction does to reality
  • "In the realm of what I have called fictitious arts, the fragment is king." (24) -- this fragmentation brings about a metamorphosis that places certain works "in the company of the Elect" (27)
  • "Classical aesthetic proceeded from the part to the whole; ours, often proceeding from the whole to the fragment, finds a precious ally in photographic reproduction." (30)
• tapestry loses texture through reproduction -- seen on same plane as painting
• genius expressed through reproduction; not "works" of art but "moments" (46)
  • "thanks to the rather specious unity imposed by photographic reproduction on a multiplicity of objects, ranging from the statue to the bas-relief, from bas-reliefs to seal impressions, and from these to the plaques of the nomads, a "Babylonian style" seems to emerge as a real entity, not a mere classification -- as something resembling, rather, the life-story of a great creator." (46)
  • "Alongside the museum a new field of art experience, vaster than any so far known (and standing in the same relation to the art museum as does the reading of a play to its performance, or hearing a phonograph record to a concert audition) is now, thanks to reproduction, being opened up." (46)
• transformations of color; loss of color on greek sculpture, loss of color in reproductions -- shapes opinions; even statues with surviving painting have a patina
• "Our feeling for a work of art is rarely independent of the place it occupies in art history. This historic sense, a by-product of our place in time and conditioned by the here-and-now, has transformed our artistic heritage (which would be no less transformed were we to relinquish it)." (52)
• color expresses the "poetry" in art
• "It is not research-work that led to the understanding of El Greco; it is modern art. Each genius that breaks with the past deflects, as it were, the whole range of earlier forms." (68)