In my hotel in Chefchouen, Morocco a few days ago, the lady of the house
was house-cleaning, and wished to also clean an oil painting decorating
one of the walls. To accomplish this she first placed a mat on the floor,
then took down the painting, lay it on the mat, and mopped it vigorously,
inside and out, rinsing thoroughly with a hose.
Last year
in a restaurant in Djenne, Mali the young man assigned to clean the place
went so far as to scrub a poster on the wall, unframed and printed on paper,
with a soapy sponge, as the proprieter looked on approvingly and gave a
few pointers.
All this put
me in mind of some of the outstanding examples of maintenance of historically
important art I've witnessed in my travels. Probably the most disturbing
was the so-called restoration going on inside one of the rooms of the Royal
Palace in Pnom Penh, Cambodia which I was for some reason still permitted
to enter. The four walls of the large room in question had been delicately
painted over their whole surfaces, about a hundred years ago as I recall,
with detailed war scenes from Cambodia's history. As I appreciatively examined
the first wall I was appalled to note that when the ceiling had been recently
painted white [covering who-knows-what] no attempt had been made to protect
the wall paintings, which were liberally splattered and dribbled upon.
The reason for this lack of care became apparent when I came to the second
wall, to the middle of which the restoration had at this point proceeded.
[It was being handled by some academic institution of an Eastern European
country - Poland? Bulgaria?] - Rather than cleaning the painting or trying
to fill in those parts of the old walls whose paint had faded or crumbled
away, the restorers were obliterating the delicate historic work and painting
an entirely new scene, with fewer and larger figures, much cruder in detail,
color, and general workmanship, but - based on the same historic battles!In
essence they were destroying a fine, historic, and unique work of art and
replacing it with an inferior knock-off. This was definitely under the
auspices of some reputable-sounding institution, possibly affiliated with
UNESCO, and is presumably being passed off today as what it destroyed.
Similarly,
in the compound of pyramids and Olmec [?] ruins just outside Oaxaca, Mexico
I happened to notice a campesino painting inside one of the small chambers
sunken into the earth which sometimes have ancient paintings which unfortunately
have shown a tendency to decay rapidly once their chambers have been opened
to the air. This fellow, who by the looks of him did not have the academic
pretensions of the workers in Pnom Penh, was cheerily painting over one
of these thousand-year-old fading murals with a few tins of what looked
like house paint. As in Pnom Penh no effort was made to follow the contours
or duplicate the figures, much less the delicacy of worksmanship of the
original; he was painting a new painting in an approximation of the Mayan/Olmec
style. Noticing me watching he rather officiously informed me that I should
go as the area was closed for renovations.
It is an open
question how much of the past is not what it used to be.
shmoetry
Surrealism
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