On the restitution of fragments

Cut

Mark Waugh

The extract of this essay is read here by an AI generated voice.

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An aporia or borrowed incision into fabric begins to take shape or rather become an apparition.

Cut or coupe as they say in France when the Directer decides they have seen enough. An establishing shot might travel in an open space, in memory of what was described by Gilles Deleuze in his reflections on Cinema. Or an infinite zoom into a white sheet.

Anyway enough…

.Cut

The open space is a crowded museum. We are looking for details to locate us.

A fabrication of labels imagined for that audience of one required to bring the work to life; a clue read on a mobile device and played back as an audio supplement. A guest, customer or viewer of a type yet to be specified looks at something which is almost nothing. A whitish square of 1 inch diameter; a minimal relic.

An item that needs some context to generate an attention dividend; an elementary kind of label or device for curatorial communication between the object and the subject. Sometimes there is little difference between a vitrine and a coffin.

According to the head of the Schleswig-Holstein State Archives, Prof Dr Rainer Hering, "This glass plate containing the fabric remnants of the Bayeux Tapestry is Nazi-looted artefacts, which will of course be returned to the rightful owner. After numerous discussions and emails with German and French authorities, the way is now clear for its return to the Bayeux Museum.” ( The strange story of the Nazi obsession with this legendary artefact still isn't over. David Musgrove is content director of the HistoryExtra.com) Fragments introduced as if…or just like a footnote to the discussions via email and through other undisclosed channels through which; speech like this might occur.

The question of restitution has begun or was started by others, previously to this archival discovery. We place this concept of restitution and the quandary of what might be restored within an opening prelude described as a suspended aporia. Who accepts such restitutions?

Where is the fragment or looted culture going?

What is achieved in that transport?

We can start answering our rhetorical questions, returning to the artefacts of contemporary culture, invisible actors and past ministers screaming about losing their marbles etc. You know what I mean when I say the frame is taken for granted. We have heard already it is to be returned and displayed in Germany alongside an entire replication of the Bayeux Tapestry.

The public will be invited to look at the simulation of the ancient embroidery; to reflect on the representation of history, warfare and those displaced into those infamous stitches. There is a difference between the reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate and the presentation of the Bayeux Tapestry. Let's not delude ourselves when this fragment is retuned as almost certainly it will be; its return will be a gesture, it will not be repatriated across that border that currently divides the fragment from its origin. It will remain forever apart. But more of the processions and possessions of history will follow.

Displayed in a vitrine or mounted like a negative of Kazimir Malevich’s Black Sqaure. An invitation ‘choreographed’ as they say of exhibition design; so the viewer can stare into a singularity. In the contemporary museum and gallery the subject is seldom present to that singularity but is instead distracted, cajoled to self archive a look or the act of looking and being seen and even contemplation. Media supplements can be ingested sonically through an earpiece: playbacks like the guide that moves audiences around the Museum of Bayeux, employed to state in a low fi format, what the artist meant to achieve in that revolutionary painting.

The Tate perhaps the quintessential arbiter of an objective record declares; “In his 1927 book The Non-Objective World, the artist reflected: ‘In the year 1913, trying desperately to free art from the dead weight of the real world, I took refuge in the form of the square.’ We cannot stop there as more intriguing to us is that ludicrously; as if…. we had orchestrated or manipulated his notes; it was perhaps also merely a fragment as; “the square did first make an appearance in 1913, as the design for a stage curtain in the futurist opera Victory over the Sun.”

No not that Sun, not the red top arbitrator of bigotry and abuse. If we had a curatorial choice —- free from concerns of our sponsors —- we might perversely choose to exhibit a painting that samples the mood of that work such as; Gillian Carnegie’s Black Square (2008) not the earlier Untitled (1998), the more popular paintings of her derrière. We find it useful to remind ourselves and that audience of one, our corruptions of meaning and flesh are everywhere and decades old for example Marlene Dumas, The Artwork as Misunderstanding, 1991 despairs that; ‘There is a crisis with regard to Representation. They are looking for Meaning as if it was a thing. As if it was a girl, required to take her panties off as if she would want to do so, as soon as the true interpreter comes along. As if there was something to take off.’

Continue reading here

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Newly Rediscovered, a Missing Fragment of the Bayeux Tapestry Is Returning to France.

A missing fragment of the Bayeux Tapestry was discovered in the state archives of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany’s northernmost state, more than 80 years after Nazi researchers stole it from occupied France during World War II.

The find came from the collection of Karl Schlabow, a renowned textile archaeologist who worked with an SS-organized group of academics and scientists to study Germanic heritage and dredge up support for racist pseudoscientific theories, reports Stuttgarter Zeitung’s Markus Brauer.

Under the command of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, the Ahnenerbe group commissioned Schlabow and other scientists to travel to occupied France and study the Bayeux Tapestry in 1941. At some point, a member of the group apparently removed a small section of the underside of the tapestry and brought it back to Germany, where it remained hidden for decades.

The 230-foot-long tapestry—which is, in fact, an embroidered cloth from the 11th century that was probably intended to decorate a local cathedral—is an iconic part of France’s cultural heritage, as well as a UNESCO Memory of the World object.

In colorful detail, the Bayeux Tapestry depicts the epic story of how William, Duke of Normandy, better known as William the Conqueror, became king of England in 1066.

The tale begins in 1064, with Edward the Confessor, the dying king of England, instructing his brother-in-law Harold Godwinson to travel to Normandy to offer the throne to William, a distant cousin, according to the Bayeux Tapestry Museum, which houses the artwork.

Upon Edward’s death in early 1066, Harold crowned himself king instead, leading William to cross the English Channel and fight to reclaim his throne.

All of this drama is captured in the embroidery, including Edward’s conversation with Harold, the wind guiding the sails on William’s ships toward England and the appearance of Halley’s Comet above the battlefield. On England’s shores, the tapestry shows horses, dogs and men engaged in brutal combat. The bottom of the tapestry is littered with casualties.

But the story ends abruptly with the English fleeing William and his conquerors after the Battle of Hastings in October 1066. William’s coronation as William I of England is absent, with the whereabouts of the panels depicting this moment unknown, writes Tim Brinkhof for Artnet. Experts believe the tapestry is missing between eight and ten feet of fabric.

For centuries, the remaining 230 feet of the tapestry have resided in Bayeux, a town of some 12,000 residents in Normandy, France.

The embroidered fabric has only left town twice since its creation in the 11th century. For a few months during the winter of 1803 to 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte showed the tapestry at the Napoleon Museum, as the Louvre was briefly known during the French emperor’s reign. He hoped to curry support for a proposed invasion of England.

During World War II, France’s Nazi occupiers moved the tapestry to the inland Sarthe region in 1941, then back to the Louvre in 1944 to insulate it from the Allied invasion of Normandy.

It was during this period of Nazi interest in the tapestry that a member of the Ahnenerbe removed a small section from its underside and brought it back to Germany.

While it is not part of the coronation scene—which has been missing since long before World War II—the Schlabow fragment is still a valuable piece of France’s history.

German authorities are working to repatriate the stolen section back to France later this year, just in time for the start of the Bayeux Tapestry’s next chapter.

“In terms of economic and cultural influence, this is the most complex and ambitious project … ever undertaken by the Town of Bayeux,” says Mayor Patrick Gomont in a statement, citing the roughly $40 million price tag for the renovation and preservation efforts.

With the stolen Schlabow fragment returned to its rightful context, the tattered tapestry will be one piece closer to completion.

Eli Wizevich - Smithsonian Magazine

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/newly-rediscovered-missing-fragment-bayeux-tapestry-returning-to-france-180986205/