Video

Artful History: A Restoration Comedy

Jason Simon

1988, 30:00 minutes, colour, English

TAPECODE 100.01

"Like the museums that often produce them, educational art documentaries tend to eclipse history by subjecting the concrete and particular art object to an idea of its authentic condition: its condition prior to consumption, prior to exchange - prior, then, even to production. In both the physical and discursive presentation of art, history is often reduced to no more than the natural time from which the object must be protected.
"In Artful History: A Restoration Comedy the little discussed field of art restoration and conservation is presented as the literal site of this eclipse of history. The art objects reproduced in the film are disfigured and deformed more by 'restoration' than by hundreds of years. But the film makers subject these objects to another, testual, fracture, presenting them as determined variously by an idealized voice-over, a class conscious art fabricator (Dion himself), and the interests of dealers, collectors, and restoration studios. The history erased by restoration is reintroduced by the film as the social relations in which this erasure occurs. Artful History transforms the remains of history's eclipse into the scene of its return."

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