… What is shown is art itself, as something which in the presence of an everyday world aways grows impatient; it is not content to be subservient to that prior world, and seeks autonomy and escape. And though what is painted remains humble and commonplace, in its state of restlessness and self-assertion, there is only one place rhopography can go — megalography.
This is from the second chapter of Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting by Norman Bryson (1990):
… The whole principle of story-telling is jeopardized or paralysed by the hearer’s objection: ‘so what?’ But still life loves the ‘so what?’
… still life pitches itself a level of material existence where nothing exceptional occurs: there is wholescale eviction of the Event. At this level of routine existence, centred on food and eating, uniqueness of personality becomes an irrelevance.
… Perhaps one may draw on the distinction made by Charles Sterling between ‘megalography’ and ‘rhopography.’ Megalography is the depiction of those things in the world which are great — the legends of the gods, the battles of heroes, the crises of history. Rhopography (from rhopos, trivial objects, small wares, trifles) is the depiction of those things which lack importance, the unassuming material base of life that ‘importance’ constantly overlooks. The categories of megalography and rhopography are intertwined. The concept of importance can arise only by separating itself from what it declares to be trivial and insignificant; ‘importance’ generates ‘waste,’ what is sometimes called the preterite, that which is excluded or passed over. Still life takes on the exploration of what ‘importance’ tramples underfoot. It attends to the world ignored by the human impulse to create greatness.
Cotán, Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber… The process can be followed in either a ‘descending’ or ‘ascending’ scale. From one point of view, the worldly scale of importance is deliberately assaulted by plunging attention downwards, forcing the eye to discover in the trivial base of life intensities and subtleties which are normally ascribed to things of great worth; this is the descending movement, involving a humiliation of attention and of the self. From another point of view, the result is that what is valueless becomes priceless: by detaining attention in this humble milieu, by imprisoning the eye in this dungeon-like space, attention itself gains the power to transfigure the commonplace, and it is rewarded by being given objects in which it may find a fascination commensurate with its own discovered strengths.
… The enemy is a mode of seeing which thinks it knows in advance what is worth looking at and what is not: against that, the image presents the constant surprise of things seen for the first time. Sight is taken back to a vernal stage before it learned how to scotomize the visual field, how to screen out the unimportant and not see, but scan.
Zurbarán, Lemons, Oranges, Cup and Rose… The rhopography of Cotán and Zurbarán has a radical edge to it that wants noting to do with the megalograhic, with art as a form of grandeur, or magniloquence, but in the Caravaggio still life [Basket of Fruit, shown] the interest lies exactly in the power of art — and of this artist — to raise an intrinsically humble branch of painting to the level of the heroic. The impersonal demonstration of the power of art shades here into a form of aggrandisement unthinkable to Cotán and Zurbarán. Caravaggio wants hyperbole, not bathos; by means of unaided technical skill he is able to turn dross into gold. It is of no consequence if, in the process, the reality of the still life as part of an actual world is sacrificed, and indeed that sacrifice is necessary if painting is to move from representation to presentation, from a stage of transcribing reality to a stage where the image seems more radiant, more engaging, and in every way superior to the original — which the painting can dispense with.
Caravaggio, Basket of FruitStill life’s potential for isolating a purely aesthetic space is undoubtedly one of the factors which made the genre so central to the development of modernism. The Still Life with Apples by Cézanne (1839-1906), for example,makes no attempt to refer its arrangement of fruit; bowl an table to any aspect of a recognisable meal, or scene within a house. On the contrary, it aims to remove itself from function altogether: the fruit are disposed with no rationale except that of forming a compositional armature for the painting.
… The method of construction is slow, as though there were a pause for reflection between each stroke of the brush, and this suggests the continuous and unwavering exercise of compositional judgment. Each move is the outcome of previous moves, and anticipates those which follow: Cézanne’s hundredth stroke takes into account the previous ninety-nine, and prepares the way for the next to come. Each stroke is saturated with self-reflexive attention, so that what is presented in the end is not the objects but the consciousness that builds their (re)presentation. In a very limited sense this is theatrical painting: every stroke that makes up the scene turns away from any reality which the scene might have in independence from the activities of painting and of viewing, and towards the spectator (first Cézanne, then us). But where the word ‘theatricality’ suggests a pursuit of dramatic effect and sudden impact, here the theatrical relation of viewer to scene is subsumed in the slow grave concentration of building the painting stroke by stroke out of nothing. [ … ] the removal of the reality principle is necessary if the painting is to display in the purest form the unbroken series of aesthetic judgments by which it is constituted.
Cézanne, Still Life with Apples… What is shown is art itself, as something which in the presence of an everyday world aways grows impatient; it is not content to be subservient to that prior world, and seeks autonomy and escape. And though what is painted remains humble and commonplace, in its state of restlessness and self-assertion, there is only one place rhopography can go — megalography.
… In its quality of attention, still life possessed a delicate and ambiguous instrument. Its whole project forces the subject, both painter and viewer, to attend closely to the preterite objects in the world which, exactly because they are so familiar, elude normal attention. Since still life needs to look at the overlooked, it has to bring into view objects which perception normally screens out. The difficulty is that by bringing into consciousness and into visibility things that perception normally overlooks, the visual field can come to appear radically unfamiliar and estranged. Consider again Cotán’s Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber. The attention invested in its objects certainly brings forth their reticent visibility, and the beauty or extraordinariness it finds there could hardly have a location more mundane (one can think of the cantarero as an early kind of refrigerator). But precisely because the location is so ordinary, the quality of attention brought to bear on the objects stands quite outside normal experience and the normal domestic round. Defamiliarisation confers on these things a dramatic objecthood, but the intensity of the perception at work makes for such an excess of brilliance and focus that the image and its objects seem not quite of this world. … The objects depicted by Cotán belong less to the cocoon of nearness than to a kind of eerie outer space (Charles Sterling said of the quince and cabbage that they ‘turn and glow like planets in a boundless night’).
… Chardin’s solution to the problem of defamiliarisation is to cultivate a studied informality of attention, which looks at nothing in particular. He shows no sign of wanting to tighten up the loose world of the interiors he presents. On the contrary, his own intervention is unassuming, and seems so ordinary as to relax rather than heighten attention. Often still life composition involves a staging of the scene before the viewer, a spectacular interval or proscenium frame between the scene and the spectator.
… [Chardin] works hard to remove the feeling of a proscenic barrier or of spectacular distance between the viewer and what is seen. He seems to want not to disturb the world or to re-organize it before the spectator, as though to do so would be to keep the viewer at arm’s length and to push the viewer out from the scene, when what is valued is exactly the way the scene welcomes the viewer in without ceremony, to take things just as they are found.
… What secures the ease of the eye’s movements, and its license to blur the scene before it, is Chardin’s acute understanding of the nature of tactile space. … What binds the space is gesture, the habitual movements of taking a lid from a cup and laying it down — exactly where is not an issue — and of lifting and pouring from the pitcher.
…Chardin allows a certain casualness and inattention to loosen his paintings and give them air. Tasks are not rushed: they succeed one another in a gentle rhythm of co-operation between hand and eye, in a low-plane reality of quiet duties and small satisfactions.
Chardin, Basket of Plums [click for larger]… Chardin’s work assumes that the way the eye naturally sees its world needs no reproof or enhancement, and in this its feeling for human equality is evident as much in the way sight is presented, as in the themes of human fellowship and interaction which still life is able to express through the symbols of food.
My post from the first chapter of Bryson’s book is here.
-Julie
Coloring 