In November 2010 a research trip took place to the Cast Galleries at London’s V & A. Collaborative Space founders Hannah and Jeni were joined by artist Orly Orbach. After a discussion around Ghiberti’s Gates housed in the museum all three went on to create individual responses to the day.
Hannah developed an artist’s book containing pencil drawings and typewritten text (from Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’).
I was struck by the frailty and lack of grandiose posturing in the copy. These were neither the plaster of the Grand Tour tradition, or painstakingly replicated painted doubles, instead here were bowed and shunting sheets of tin. Misplaced in rooms of cool, grey monoliths and towering crosses. Unimaginable feats and times, great constructions, the oppressive sense of scale lingers in the mind, dizzying. Renaissance tin plate is easy to ignore in these surroundings.
Sitting here, I am spoken to less by Italy, and more of that London workshop which was surely not far from here, now idle. The replica, in being all too real, too fallible in its nature as duplicate, focuses the mind on its physical nature: the imperfections, its existence as pale shadow, a reminder of ‘the thing’ but never its own.
The essence – a half-life of a memory, an idea. Dissipating, weakening, yet also spreading.
Can a shadow begin its own story?
