Restoring
Dignity

In a sense, although I did not seek it out as the culmination of an artistic career, I was interested in what it meant for many graduates to work as restorers. In connection with this, I gave a lecture at UMPRUM (Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague) in the context of the "Feminism in Art" cycle. By the coincidence of these circumstances, I looked at the AVU graduates' experience through the prism of feminism, and I found what was, for me, a very surprising and supportive structure of how to perceive restoration in relation to dignity and, consequently, in relation to subordinating one’s essence to patriarchal cultural heritage. To accept restoration work as a source of income was, and is, a very common way to remain in the art sphere, if there is no other opportunity to support oneself with activities associated with one’s own free creation. I wrote the essay for this lecture as the essence of the 50 interviews made for this study.

In the 1970s and 1980s it was common for AVU graduates in art to could earn money as restorers. Painters restored historical paintings, sculptors restored statues. These historical artworks were owned by the state, and the work was performed throughout the Czech Republic. The Union of Fine Artists, whose committee was prosaically headquartered in the Manes Gallery building, assigned work to fine arts artists and did not require any justification. It seems that the practical skills of artists were thus deliberately used to employ art school graduates in some way. On the one hand, this made it possible for them to earn a living, on the other hand, the intensity of work over a period of a few months completely pulled them from their own context, especially if it was necessary to relocate somewhere for the duration of the work.

This seemingly related field controlled, paralyzed and pacified many potential artists. As a restorer, a person could apply all practical technological skills, which, however, made it necessary to suppress their own personality and invention. One graduate who alternates periods of restoration work and working on her own works in life, describes it like this:

It is therefore obvious that if it is necessary to suppress something within yourself repeatedly for a long time, it will affect your self-confidence. Restoration is a very passive service to the cultural heritage, and in general, it paralyzes an otherwise free-minded spirit. From a feminist point of view, this institutional subjection of only some qualities of a person, and demanding complete submission, has insidious consequences.

I am interested in how to break down the phenomenon of restoring dignity to make it comprehensible.

I perceive it on several levels as a theme that is personal, artistic, craft-oriented and social.

On a personal level, it is basically about the treatment of psychological injury, as a method of healing, which aims to rehabilitate a person with a healthy sense of self-confidence. A graduate of free art leaves a school with an extremely individualistic approach to creation, making that person vulnerable if there is no interest in his or her work. Working as a restorer dampens this individualism and leads to transformation into the position of more of a guild artist, as we know these from the past. This involves switching to another type of existence as an artist. For some, this position is liberating, and sufficient, while for others it is constricting with the feeling of resignation. This opens another theme, which is: Resignation through restoration.

What I would therefore like to highlight is the positive effect on a person who, after graduating in fine art, begins working as a full-fledged restorer (working on restorations). This relates both to the title of this chapter – “Restoration of Dignity”, and the phenomenon of the so-called “Second Act”.

Of the 50 graduated artists surveyed and visited by me, there are four who view their change of career as fundamentally a success, and a very good resolution. Since it was not apparent whether it would be possible to make a living with fine art in their “post-school” period, and whether it made sense to even try, if offers for exhibitions and acquisitions were not coming in, the opportunity to restore presented itself as an interesting new discipline that carried with it a certain prestige.

Graduates thus simultaneously worked on the rehabilitation of their personalities, which had been somewhat broken by a sense of failure in the art world. Whether they strongly felt the need to suppress their own creativity and entirely subordinate themselves to the work being restored (a frequent phenomenon, though only for women), or whether they reflected on the fact that the art they were restoring was usually never created by women, while women were usually the ones performing the restoration (a fact considered by just one respondent), then the fact that they were viewed as experts and received commensurate pay gave them a feeling of being special. Here is where I see the reason why many of them stuck with restoring and thus achieved a level of respect in the environment in which they moved. 

In later generations, when graduates worked as film set designers, graphic designers or art teachers, this second profession no longer carried such weight, and did not have that kind of effect and influence on their personal feeling of dignity. 

The title of this book references the fact that restoration work opens many questions relating to the integrity of the personality of someone who studied fine art. On the one hand it is viewed positively and on the other as a concession, or compromise, or even the result of a painful resignation. The artist in question then works concurrently on the repair and recreation of a whole when working on a historic artwork, but along with this, he or she continuously demolishes and reconstructs his or her feeling of dignity. As one graduate described in an interview: 

As an example of how I attempted to open this subject, I would like to describe in more detail one part of the research exhibition Vůbec mně nezajímaly výstavy/I Haven’t Been Interested in Exhibitions at All. I assumed that it would not be appropriate to ask questions that would be overly suggestive in the interviews with the graduates, which might attest what is already an established opinion. Therefore, I did not directly ask about the influence of one’s original education and direction – the influence of an artist’s education on working as a restorer, but I did want to induce a situation in which I could potentially bring unarticulated feelings to the surface. I asked four women and five men to take me directly to a site where they were restoring a work. All of them viewed themselves as full-fledged restorers. Their own personal artistic ambitions had been sublimated. Up to that time, I’d only had one interview with each of them in accordance with the BNIM rules at a location they themselves designated. In one case, this was in a functioning restoration studio, otherwise it was usually a living room, and in two cases a room furnished as an occasional studio. This means that there was an easel with an already finished painting on it, more as an aesthetic accessory. At that time, I had requested to visit a site where I knew the person in question was in the process of restoring.

I suggested that they could choose the specific restoration work we would visit themselves. Three male artists eventually agreed to the proposal. The places we visited were in one case a small chapel, a studio in which we had a lunette in front of us – a canvas on a frame, taken from a house, and the recently discovered Chapel of St. Wenceslas, which the artist in question had entirely restored years ago.

Upon arriving at the sites, I would request, without any kind of preamble, if they could put themselves into the situation of when they had been actively restoring the specific work, and for a while just “pantomime” their work process. I’d already had the previous experience that just talking about something compared to actually doing something, and thereby evoking memories through movement and the body’s own memory, are two markedly differing approaches. 

One of the artists I approached found my request laughable, but in the end agreed to try it. Another one I asked to do it started several times, but kept slipping into just talking and using his hands to illustrate what he was talking about. It seemed that he primarily wanted to communicate information on what the work entailed. But I requested that he work as he had originally, to reproduce the scene, being as faithful to how it had been at the time as possible. The final participant in this performance found it very difficult to begin, while only imagining using the tools and implements. In the beginning, we had to spend some time to establish the specific situations. I asked therefore, what tools he used, and where he has these tools prepared. We both imagined this. He spread out around himself on the side tables the canvas stretching pliers canvas, blind frame rivet pliers, a swatch of painter’s canvas, scissors, water-based paints, a rag, a sponge, various brushes, etc. Once everything had been prepared in our joint imagining, he could begin working.

I myself had no idea at the start how the situation would develop, having no previous experience with this approach. I was attracted by the idea of injecting something tentative, unexplored, playful, artistic into what was otherwise a rigid, professional activity. We were, you see, shooting a video together. In two cases I would say that this experience had a strong effect on the artist himself, and it was not necessary for me to defend my plan in any way. It was clearly an emotionally powerful moment. Besides the fact that the artists in question were proud of their restoration work, here and now they were experiencing a situation similar to how it was before, but different after all. This difference was the artistic component, the fact that I asked them for cooperation aimed at creating a work of art. I was interested in finding out how they would act, to what extent they would be able to call up within themselves that what makes them exceptional, makes them the ones capable of working with imagination and absurdity, to try something in the first camera take that they had not rehearsed beforehand. That is, all the things they could not take the liberty of doing as restorers. 

With one of the artists I engaged with, I got the feeling that he had a “no time to play around” attitude, that he considered this specific restoration work so important that there was no room for anything other than a strictly professional approach. It is also true that he was the only one able to articulate his thinking and considerations, and at the same time, he is, even today, a highly-respected restorer of architectural monuments, fully pursuing his second career. 

An audio recording in headphones. The fundamental motif of the audio-text is the consideration: with the passage of time and subjection to outside pressures, many graduates of the fine art studio gradually became restorers – what effect did restoring have on their ambition to build a stable position and achieve recognition for themselves as fine artists. The recording is as follows: