Enough Pentelic marble

In the early 19th century, the so-called Elgin marbles, once part of the facade of the Parthenon, were gathered as debris from the Acropolis in Athens and sent to England, where they were eventually “deposited” in the British Museum. Greece contends that this removal was unauthorized and has demanded their return. To potentially facilitate their repatriation, a group called the Institute for Digital Archaeology has created 3D scans of the marbles (as detailed here) to allow them to be refabricated from stone quarried from Mount Pentelicus, where the marble for the originals was obtained.

An article from the Telegraph quotes the institute’s director, Roger Michel, who explains:

We have enough Pentelic marble pledged to make a complete set of Marbles. When people return to the galleries in a few years time they will have exactly the same visual experience as they had in the old days, because our Pentelic copies will be visually indistinguishable from the originals.

But what is the value of having “exactly the same visual experience” while presumably having a less exact form of some other kind of experience? Can visual experience even be isolated in this way, as though there were a form of pure looking independent of the sense-making that situates raw perception? Who can shut down the conceptualizing part of their mind and still take in the unsynthesized manifold?

The implication is that these stone fragments have been preserved at the British Museum because they are intrinsically compelling as visual objects and not because they testify to Britain’s once extensive imperial ambitions and establish a direct connection between London and the symbolic cradle of “Western civilization.” Given enough “Pentelic marble” — which, as Michel explains, requires special authorization from the Greek government to be used outside of Greece — the material integrity and compositional character of the rubble can be duplicated and preserved, and museum goers in England can continue to feast their eyes on these abstractly meaningful forms.

Let’s suppose that no one could tell the 3D copies of the Parthenon marbles from the originals — not even the most expert archeologists of the digital or nondigital variety. There would be no way to visually experience the fact that whereas the original marbles are historical objects made thousands of years ago by ancient artisans with analog sculpting tools and techniques, the copies are transcriptions of digital information, given physical form by “high-speed drills and jets of water” that “can replicate the actions of a human sculptor but in a fraction of the time it would take to do it by hand with a chisel.” That difference would be effaced, would become undocumentable by the object in and of itself — it becomes unavailable even in fantasy to believe that an object alone could manifest its aura. Or one could say that, as Walter Benjamin wrote of Atget’s photography, that the 3D scans betoken “the emancipation of object from aura.”

The physical form of the object too becomes less relevant: The object need not exist materially because the 3D scan has demonstrated that it is nothing but information. The same digital information could be used to generate the object inside a virtual reality headset — a technology for forcibly isolating visual from other forms of experience. Or you could just put the scan data on a thumb drive and have your own copy of the Elgin marbles without having to spark an international diplomatic crisis.

But would the aim of these replicas really be to emphasize the ancient marbles’ reproducibility, their theoretical ubiquity? Are you supposed to be able to feel the missing aura when looking at the copies, even if you can no longer interpret anything about the objects as evidence for that aura? Or are you supposed to be troubled when you recognize that you hadn’t even noticed that the aura has gone? That you could be untroubled by fake patina? Is it too perversely dialectical to wonder whether the 3D photographs of the marbles preserve the aura by destroying it, and vice versa?

Here would be the customary place to quote Benjamin on “aura”:

What is aura, actually? A strange web of space and time: the unique appearance of a distance, no matter how close it may be. While at rest on a summer’s noon, to trace a range of mountains on the horizon, or a branch that throws its shadow on the observer, until the moment or the hour becomes part of their appearance — this is what it means to breathe the aura of those mountains, that branch.

Now, “to bring things closer” to us, or rather to the masses, is just as passionate an inclination in our day as the overcoming of whatever is unique in every situation by means of its reproduction. Every day the need to possess the object, from the closest proximity, in a picture — or rather a copy — becomes more imperative. And the difference between the copy, which illustrated papers and newsreels keep in readiness, and the original picture is unmistakable. Uniqueness and duration are as intimately intertwined in the latter as are transience and reproducibility in the former. The peeling away of the object’s shell, the destruction of the aura, is the signature of a perception whose sense for all that is the same in the world has grown to the point where even the singular, the unique, is divested of its uniqueness — by means of its reproduction.

“Aura” is what commodities lack; scanning the marbles makes them into commodities. Benjamin says the difference between objects with aura and commodities without it is “unmistakable,” but the premise behind the Institute for Digital Archaeology seems to be that this is no longer the case. Scanning rather than peeling the object’s shell has put that unmistakability up in the air. The person who sees only commodities everywhere may not even realize it, nor may they be able to gauge their (spiritual) “proximity” to objects. The point of mechanical reproduction is no longer a “diminution that helps people to achieve a degree of mastery over works of art,” as Benjamin surmised, but to maintain a certain irreducible distance, to sustain awe. The copy itself is promised its own aura through its sheer implausible fidelity.

Michel, according to the Telegraph’s report, “argues that his copies would be better than the originals, with missing noses, amputated toes and mislaid fingers restored. Some of the sculptures could also be returned to their original appearance, painted in what may appear to modern eyes to be garish colors.” Such speculative reconstructions would be reminiscent of “Gods in Color,” a touring exhibition of “experimental color reconstructions” of antique statuary made by archeologists Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann, and “Chroma,” a recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York that adopted the Brinkmanns’ “cutting-edge scientific methods.”

But it is also very different from making exact copies of broken statuary. I didn’t really think about how outlandish Michel’s proposal was to make “copies that are accurate to within fractions of a millimeter” of fragments of rock until I was at the Met recently, looking at damaged ancient relics, thinking about the meticulous effort that would have to go into replicating such objects’ singular histories of contingency and decay, capturing exactly how they had become eroded and broken. The ravages of time would be evacuated and reduced to a surface-level effect, a simulation eternally new in its ersatz oldness.

I was staring at this head of Augustus — not nearly as old as the marbles from the Acropolis — looking up at the underside of its missing chin, and the uninterpretable craters and ridges where a nose used to be, and the mottled, rust- colored stains on the forehead and the right cheek and the surface of one of its vacant eyes, and wondered about what I was trying to see in it. I tried to will myself into a gestalt inversion, seeing the broken nose as the finished surface and the chiseled stone as the anomalous residue, a kind of entropic falsification of the real condition of rock, but the little snarling curl of a surviving nostril kept undoing me. If Michel’s 3D scanners could restore that nose, the nostril would be gone, lost in the restored detail and robbed of its stubborn poignancy. But if the scanners reproduced the pocked and pitted surface of the damage, the museum itself would disappear.