I have here, my favorite Rembrandt copy yet. But I am compelled to ask, as you likely are, why the obsession with copying Rembrandt? Why the obsession with copying in general? Certainly, I learn tremendous amounts by copying these paintings, but after a certain point....I do continue learning each time I copy - even if I copy the same painting, each one reveals something new, something I could not quite grasp before. But, somehow this is not the entirety of why I do this. There's something else, something almost nameless that drives me to continue this. I think it has something to do with a search for meaning - an effort to reconstruct something integral to the human soul, which was cast aside in the post-modern era. Deconstruction has thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Let us try to give this a name.
I think the closest explanation that I have found is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges entitled Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote. It can be found in his book Labyrinths, from which I'll quote a small excerpt. He discusses the hypothetical reasoning behind the hypothetical author Menard's rewriting Don Quixote.
"There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless. A philosophical doctrine begins as a plausible description of the universe; with the passage of years it becomes a mere chapter-if not a paragraph or a name-in the history of philosophy. In literature, this eventual caducity is even more notorious. The Quixote-Menard told me-was above all, an entertaining book; now it is the occasion for patriotic toasts, grammatical insolence and obscene de luxe editions. Fame is a form of incomprehension, perhaps the worst."
He goes on to say, more solidly than I, that
"Cervantes' text and Menard's are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer. (More ambiguous, his detractors will say, but ambiguity is richness.)"
The conclusion of the story puts forth the premise that "deliberate anachronism" and "erroneous attribution" enrich the text. Because the second (the copy) has the context of the original and the added context of it's recent re-creation giving it another dimension of depth and interpretability.
So, in analogy, perhaps I am testing this theory in paint. The "deliberate anachronism" of smearing dirt and oil onto pieces of cloth in an age when I could use a multitude of different and contemporary methods, seems to hold some importance to me. The anachronism of the act, the anachronism of the subject, the anachronism of the technique - for me almost poetry, but why?
Considering this, does the copy become an artistic or philosophical statement in it's own right, or is it nothing more than mimesis?
