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mary" 34 . With the camera obscura, the visual media had already made an attack on the
original; J Baltrusaitis reminds us that in the 18th century, Claude's Mirror, as it was
known, reflected nature as if painted by the landscape painter Claude Lorrain. "The mirror
image of nature was preferred to the original by far" 35 , just as for a long time, people
favoured the literary description over the photo-realistic image. A good example is a commentary
on Stackelberg's archaeological publication, Der Apollotempel zu Bassae in Arkadien
(1826). Here, the term 'description' keeps oscillating between image and literature:
Since he knew how to render the charms of the vivid marble figures in his sketchbook
with so much artistic sense and confidence, he went with equal artistic sense about
the description of the magnificent impression he had taken away from the solemn place
and from the halls of this sacred space. He [...] reproduces, as it were, the lost work of
art before our very eyes from the few bits and ruins that remain 36
- and thus an imagecreating approach of an archaeological imagination that is linked
to drawing techniques.
The Museum as a Place for the Original
Immanuel Kant's concept of the setting of the image, the parergon (which was taken up
by Derrida), points to the framework of the museum and the picture plane as vehicles for
the event called the original. "Whether public museum, official salon, world exhibition or
private collection: what partly constitutes the exhibition space has always been the continuous
area on the wall - a wall that was more and more exclusively oriented towards
the presentation of art" 37 and identifies the function of the museum: "to exclude everything
else and to constitute through this exclusion what we mean by the term art." 38 It is
precisely this area that is now being dislocated onto the site of the video monitor which
no longer appears on the walls of the museum, but itself forms a museum space - different
"frames of inscription" 39 And indeed the electronic monitor continues what Benjamin
diagnosed for photography: that both in the technological and the museum sense of the
exhibition, the exhibition value will push back the cult value in the reproduction medium.
Perhaps originality is not situated in the original but in its museum context. Does the museum
generate the original?
The subject of originality which includes the notions of authenticity, original and
origin, is the common discursive practice of the museum, the historian, and the producer
of art. And throughout the entire 19th century, all these institutions were united in
their aim to find the mark, the guarantee, the authentication of the original. 40
The museum and media condition for the original, then, is precisely the fact that
the artefact cannot be touched by writing as a meta- and control datum: With video, is it
auratic images that become storable, or just emanations of the memoire volontaire With
the pictorial media, a third entity comes between conscious and unconscious memory,
the technological in-between, literally a medium.
The ideal of modernist and functionalist museums was the ahistoric space, the neutral
dispositive, the white cube 41 , a sublime place where time is no more, that enshrined
an exhibition aesthetics beyond the urban context. But, a museum is no mythic place, no
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