Műemlék-helyreállítások tegnap, ma, holnap (A 27. Egri Nyári Egyetem előadásai 1997 Eger, 1997)

Előadások - Herb STOVEL: Authenticity, as it he Nara Document and as relates to the restoration of historic monuments

conservational practice by western people. They were somehow afraid, that people, who had been educated on the basis of the Venice Charter, would look at the conservation in Japan and say it is not good: because they were afraid that westerners would not take the time to understand the Japanese cultural context, within which their conservation decisions were being made. In 1992 1 was Secretary General of ICOMOS and Japan came to me and said: „what do we do about this problem?" ICOMOS, has the responsibility to evaluate nominations to the World Heritage List, and therefore it plays a strong role in this discussion. So my answer, ICOMOS's answer at the time was: „Well, when we have a problem in ICOMOS, we organise a symphosium, we organise a meeting, we organise a discussion and we compare points of view." But we decided, we had an opportunity to discuss not just the Japanese problem, but to discuss the problem of authenticity and its perceptions in all different cultures, in all nonwestern cultures. We also had an opportunity to discuss authenticity for other than monuments, to ask, what do these mean for e. g. for cultural landscapes, for historic cities. And so these discussions began with the purpose of trying to expand the conservation debate globally and in terms of the range of expressions of heritage. We hoped to create a new framework, a new global framework for discussing conservation issues. That discussion lead at least six-seven international meetings in Norway, in Italy, in Japan, in Chech Republic (in Chesky Krumlov), in Saint Antonio in the US, and in South America and these debates still continue. I have brought the results of some of these meetings with me to give you a chance to see the range of these viewpoints from Chesky Krumlov, from Bergen in Norway, from Nara in Japan and I am pleased to share these with you. Now I think also there is a last reason why is this current focus on authenticity. It is, because there has always been in the conservation field a continuing search for new ways to look at the principles we use and to try to find those universal ideas that bind us together in a common cause to pcrsuc common objectives. The Venice Charter, although it is criticized by many people, was an example of an istrument of consensus at its time of creation which bound the conservation world together within a single idea. And in ICOMOS and in the conservation world as times have changed and as circumstances have changed we have continued to say: „are there other universal ideas, universal principles that we have somehow to find that will help us with our work?" And the Nara discussion was really reflective of an effort to try another level of universal understanding, of shared understanding of shared cultures involved in conservation activity. I want simply to go through some of the various ways in which the authenticity debate has developed and evoked and to show you not just how many contradictions, but how many completely different prospectives have been adopted by those having been involved in the debate. There are many prospectives, but I will simply illustrate five, or six which were fairly popular in these meetings. There are quite a number of people who look at this debate with some cinicizm and say: „everything is authentic, everything is real, I am real, you are real, this is real, so what are we discussing?" This viewpoint often comes from archeologists who are trained to analize evidences of culture, material culture and to give equal rate to evrything they find. For an archeologist everything had documentary value, everything tells a story and therefore everything is authentic for their purposes. I am not going to say these are right or wrong. I am simply going to show the different prospectives which exist. There is a great number of opinions or articles which has been written, which try to go back to the origins of the use of the word authenticity" in history and in language. And sticking at this point to European languages, to European traditions, here it is very clear that the word has changed over times. We see, authenticity has been used in the early Middle Ages as a word, that has something to do with authority. The commands that came from someone bearing authority were authentic, because they bore the authority of that person. In some way in the late Middle Ages the word was passed to focus more directly on the question of