At 11:39 AM 4/1/98 -0500, Barry Dressel wrote:

>You're in kind of a broad and slippery area there aren't you,  Amy? I mean,
>you have any number of living history sites that are primarily using repros
>and props. You have places like mine where underwater ferrous objects are
>exhibited via epoxy castings from concretions, and in many art museums there
>was formerly a practice of exhibiting castings of classical
>statuary--museums had departments to make them and meet the demand. Are you
>planning to catalogue the uses, or are you trying  to narrow it down to a
>specific aspect?

Another issue to consider is that when viewed from the proper perspective,
one person's reproduction is another's real object.  For example, Roman
sculpture often was made in direct imitation of Greek originals; manuscript
illumination, icons, mosaic are among media commonly used to reproduce or
preserve the likenesses of "original" works of art, but in these media is
also invested with the quality of "real". Indeed, when viewed historically,
the very process of art, even of Western art, is one of reproducing (with
variation), something original in such a way so that the observer (the
educated observer) realizes the source of the underlying model in the copy
or variant.

Further, in our age, when the manufacture of simulacra and reproductions
has become commonplace, the owners of such objects do not think of them
simply as mere reproductions, but rather as "real" reproductions. The
ceramic plate reproduced from an Islamic original, once situated in
someone's home, no longer refers only to its model tucked away in some
distant vitrine, but rather, as far as anyone is concerned, only to itself.

The other question to consider is the meaning of the word "real." By this
I've taken the questioner to mean "original."  It is quite obvious, I
think, that "reproductions," whatever their aesthetic status may be, are,
ipso facto, also real. The word "real" therefore should be taken as a
"loaded" word, incorporating within it an attitude toward the function and
nature of the mimetic process.

Since "reproductions" are obviously "real," and since the person who used
the word "real" obviously intended to mean something like "inauthentic" (or
is it "unauthentic"), I can only imagine that the word "real" is a code for
an attitude of selection that divides the tangible or material world into
two categories: the "real" and is polar opposite, the "unreal."

We can follow this argument if "unreal" is accepted as standing for a class
of objects that masquerade as things that they are not, that is, fraudulent
objects that pretend to be something other than themselves. But clearly,
reproductions (for the most part), ask only to be understood as surrogates.
As surrogates they speak as a genre of created objects pertinent to the
times that made them, not exclusively to the time from which their models
derive. When we look at Roman sculpture in imitation of Greek "originals"
we are aware that we are looking at a phenomena as presented through Roman
eyes.

When writing about the use of "real vs. reproduction" in museum exhibits,
therefore, the writer should be aware that the question is not simply one
of the ethics of substitution, but about the significance of substituting
one object for another.

Robert Baron
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