Saisselin 1976

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Leonardo
Still-Life Paintings in a Consumer Society
Author(s): R. G. Saisselin
Source: Leonardo, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Summer, 1976), pp. 197-203
Published by: The MIT Press
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Leonardo,Vol.9, pp. 197-203.PergamonPress1976. Printedin GreatBritain
STILL-LIFEPAINTINGS IN A
CONSUMERSOCIETY
R. . Saisselin*
Abstract-The authoranalyzesthe role and characterof still-lifepaintingas exemplified
by the 'vanity'picturesof the 17th century,the autonomousstill lifes of the 18th century,
thestill lifesnonillustrativeof discourseof the19thcenturyandthePopartstilllifesdictated
by the imperativesof 20th-centuryconsumersocieties.
His mainattentionis given to an interpretationof the impacton the art of a society in
whichcommercialconsiderationsoverridethose of aesthetics. He finds that mass pro-
ductionand advertisingdeny not only art in the old sense, but also personalpossession,
originalityand taste, since these are affectedand effectedby marketresearch. Pop art
still lifeinsucha worldcanthusbecomeanironiccommentuponthedifficultiesof individual
choiceand vision.
I.
The view from my window here in Paris extends to
the littered street below where garbage cans have
not been emptied for days. This not unusual
situation results from the imperative to consume
and the dissatisfaction of those who cannot con-
sume as much as the others. The imperative has
been developed by a combined operation of words,
images, letters, signs and sounds in the form of
advertisementsdesignedto reducepassiveperceivers
to activeconsumers. This situation has had a signal
effect on the recent history or 'post history', to use
a Hegelian suggestion, of still-life painting.
Advertising may be defined as an illustration of
a philosophy based on an economic definition of
people where real, wrapped, purchasable and dis-
posable objects triumphover painters,who are also
called upon to buy now and pay later. The subject,
too, rendered attractive in its protean multiplicity,
takes revenge over moralists of old as the grinning
skull of the vanity picture is replaced by the ultra-
bright smile of bathing nymphs inviting viewers to
savour the riches and romance of this world in
which you, too, can live like a prince on the
installment plan. The hidden persuaderis the con-
viction that there is no hell, and the fable of the
bees, that moral tale of the mercantilist society,
stripped of its Christian-satiric intent and over-
tones, becomes the ruling aesthetic, in a neo-
Keynesian garb, of the world of affluence. Indeed,
accepting the reasoning of Wyndham Lewis's Time
and WesternMan, advertisement turns out to be
the romantic still-life par excellence: romantic in
its appeal to the vast and unsatisfiable desires of
*Aesthetician,Dept. of Fine Art, Universityof
Rochester,RiverCampusStation,Rochester,NY 14627,
U.S.A. (Received21 Dec., 1974.)
people, utilitarian in its effects and open-ended in
its nature, since the desires cannot be satisfied but
only replacedby new ones.
Thus, the differencein an affluentsociety between
a still-life as a work of art and a still-life as an
advertisement comes down to a question of sup-
pressing the message. The affinities between a
still-life in the Pop art style and an advertisement
are more positive than their differences, for both
have a common origin in the objectivefor publicity,
which dominates the thought and language of the
society. A digression on the relation of language
to still-life painting is thus in order.
II.
The relation between language and still-life
painting may be taken to be exemplified by four
phases: (1) the 'vanity' picture of the 17th century
(attributes, four seasons, four elements and five
senses type of still lifes), (2) the autonomous still
life of the 18th century, (3) the still lifes non-
illustrative of discourse by painters such as Manet,
Whistler and Cezanne in the 19th century and
(4) the Pop art still lifes dictated by the imperatives
of a 20th-century consumer society.
A. Vanity Pictures
In vanity pictures, as in the art of portraiture,
objects served as attributes. They could be used as
signs, they possessed associative or symbolic value
and it is through these that they could evoke a
silent poetry that could not be associated with
narrative or specifically be connected with existing
literaryforms (Figs. 1 and 2). Clearmeaningcould
be attached only when objects were specifically
used as symbols. But aside from this linguistic use,
objects possessed associative value. If, within the
general conventions of representational art, such
197

R. G. Saisselin
.,;%l'':N'at'd'~^ 'gi :I' -'
Fig. 1. Evaristo Baschenis (1607/17-1677). 'Musical
Instruments',oil. (Ambrosiana,Milan, Italy.)
as obtained since the Renaissance, the still life as
a genrerepresenteda species of painting for its own
sake, this is only relatively true in that it did not
narrate an action as could the genre of paintings
of historical events. It was 'pure'in another sense:
the images rendered by still life could hardly be
treated as well in another medium, such as drama
and dance. In this respect, recent tendencies in
literatureare not without interest; for they go some
way to illuminate what makes the difference
between a still life and another genre within the
same convention of representational art.
Gertrude Stein in Tender Buttons and other
authors tried to produce a literatureon the analogy
of nonrepresentational painting of the cubist
variety. Tender Buttons was not supposed to
specifically mean or say anything, but rather to
provide verbal patterns or a 'prose surface' analo-
gous to what cubist painters did with lines and
paint. Attention was thus displaced from meaning
to the words themselves, from statements to
patterns. As in nonrepresentational painting, the
attention is supposedly shifted from an image with
some correspondenceto a site or objects in the real
world to the painting as an object executed in a
medium governed by its own aesthetic rules. Con-
temporarywriters have also been fascinated by the
attractive power of visual as against purely verbal
means of communication; or they have been
interested in verbal means of noncommunication
and books made up of photographs, as the work
of Michel Butor with his Mobiles and the efforts of
Alain Robbe-Grillet with the cinema and of
Jirgen Becker with the novel.
These efforts leave something to be desired and
may be founded on false analogies between litera-
ture, painting and the cinema. In any case, they do
requirea new approach to reading, if that is what
one may still call the activity involving such book-
objects. It may be that readinghabits are such that
one will seek meaning in a page of print even if a
writer intended it to be looked at rather than read
and pondered. As such, a page of print may be of
more limited interest than the surface of a cubist
painting or a classical still life that also does not
specifically say anything. A book may be turned
into an art object, but, for that, it need not be
Fig. 2 Jan (III) van de Velde. 'Glass of Wine with Cut
Lemon',oil onoakpanel,31 x 24-5cm, 1649. (Oeffentliche
Kunstsammlung,Basel, Switzerland.)
meaningless, merely a work of art in its print and
binding. The closest literature may come to still
life lies in the direction of concretepoetry. Com-
pared to a complex still life and even a Chinese
calligraphy, the interest of concrete poetry may be
limited. These questions have become problem-
atical and the future of the book is questioned even
by writers.
But in the 17th century the problem of the
relation between words and an object was in a
sense settled by the unstated division of labor that
regulatedthe various activities of poets, writersand
painters. Saint-Amand, a French poet of the
period, wrote a rather long poem on the virtues
and qualities of the melon: a playful homage to its
taste, smell, weight, color and comparativequalities
with other fruits, but there is no attempt to make
a descriptive poem of it. The poet can only write
about; he cannot depict a melon, as can a painter.
Edmund Burke, the British orator, recognized
in the following century that poetry was not
strictly an imitative art, because words did not
resemble the ideas for which they stood. The
rivalry between words and objects, or to use the
language of the abbe Du Bos, an 18th-century
French critic much concerned with this question,
the rivalry between abstract signs and natural
signs, word-images and visual images, developed
preciselyin the 18th centuryin which certain poets
wrote long descriptive poems that strove to
approach a picture.
B. The 18th-CenturyAutonomousStill Life
The autonomous still life of the 18th century is
198

Still-life Paintings in a ConsumerSociety
Fig. 4. FranFoisFoisse. 'TheLibrary',oil, 23-5 x 29 5 in.
(Courtesy the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Conn.,
U.S.A.)
Fig. 3. FranCoisDesportes(1661-1743). 'Nature morte',
oil, 98 x 92 cm. (Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris.)
more difficultto analyze(Figs. 3 and 4). This phase
is marked by a certain imbalance in favor of the
written and spoken word. Discourse was then a
powerful instrument. Philosophical prose, didactic
and descriptive poetry, treatises, satires and critic-
ism were considered better instruments for pro-
voking thought and political changesthan paintings
and toward the end of the century paintings often
cameto beconsideredasadjunctstothewrittenword.
But there was another important problem as
concerns the relationship between discourse and
painting. It is the unstated assumption of what
can be called the interchangeabilityof the various
artistic expressions of the time, because each of
them was regarded as one form of a universal
expressive or imitative language. What this means
for still life and its relation to language is implied
in certain aspects of Diderot's Salons. Thus, dis-
cussing Chardin in the Salon of 1765, he writes:
'Choose a site, dispose on this site the objects in
the manner I shall indicate, and you may be sure
you shall have seen his pictures'. Passing from the
written description of a Chardin to its mental
image is supposedly possible because both the
written description and the painting describedhave
that essentialquality of communicationin common,
an image. What is forgotten is that a painting is a
painting, not a literarydescriptionor even a mental
image. It made sense in the 18th century because
of the assumption of the universality of communi-
cation and reason, the supposition of a universal
language of mankind that varied in time and place
but progressed historically and psychologically
from sounds, gestures, dance, music, poetry, to
prose ever more refined, to ultimately find its
clearest and most reliable expression in the form
of mathematics. Painting, like poetry and music,
was but one form of expression or imitation and,
therefore, communication in a general movement
toward higher forms. Thus, Hegel deduced that
philosophy would eventually replace the arts. This
may well be true, though it may also be a
philosophical-literary prejudice to think so. The
forms of expression and of imitation may be
discontinuousdespitemulti-mediaexperimentation.
In any case, the prestige of painting at the end of
the 18th century owed much to the notion that its
primaryfunction was to illustrate thought.
C. Still Lifes Nonillustrativeof Discourse
The thirdphase of the relation between language
and still-lifepainting came from the realizationthat
painting did not have to illustrate thought as
discourse (Figs. 5 and 6). This phase must be
understood in terms of the differencesrather than
the similarities between the various means of
expression of the arts. The essence of the problem
was wittily put by the French poet Mallarme in a
conversation with Degas who, dining one day at
BertheMorisot's, complainedof the difficultiesthat
he had in writing a sonnet: 'What a job,' he cried,
'I've lost a whole day on a damned sonnet without
advancing a step . . . And yet it is not for lack of
ideas . . . I'm filled with them . . . I've too
many . . .' To which Mallarme answered softly:
'But Degas, one does not write verses with ideas,
but with words.' The results of this aesthetic are
far-reaching in all the arts. Some of Mallarme's
more hermeticpoems are in a sense verbal objects:
the value is put on words, sounds, musicality,
rather than verbal images, that survive, but in a
suggestive rather than clear manner. The poems
take distance from discourse as in nonrepresenta-
tional painting where the image is sacrificed to
paint, lines, forms and texture. Thus the poem
comes to be regarded as a species of verbal ikon.
As Archibald McLeish would later put it: 'A poem
should not mean but be'. As seen with the work
of Manet, a parallel development and realization
199

R. G. Saisselin
.
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.
_
Fig. 5. GeorgesBraque. 'Plums,Pears, Nuts and Knife',
oil, 9 x 28-75in., 1926. (ThePhillipsCollection,Washing-
ington, D.C.)
Fig. 6. GiorgioMorandi. 'Still Life', oil, 14 i x 18-} in.,
1955. (The PhillipsCollection, Washington,D.C.)
was underway in painting that would reach its
apogee with the work of Cezanne and the cubists.
The writings of GertrudeStein and concrete poems
may also derive from what can be described as a
nostalgia for nonverbal art.
In view of this aesthetic based on the differences
between means of expression rather than the
language of images, a still life, for example, need
not be an accurate representation of an apple or
the representationof an idea of an apple; it may be
merelyindicated or suggested. The change of status
of works of art effected by Manet, Mallarme,
Whistler and others is in effect a rejection of the
18th-century'simage-as-language view of art; the
discursive, narrative, representational, imitative
elementceased to be a primaryconsideration. Thus
the classical still life had had its day; for it rested
on a far less subjective view of the arts. But, of
course, the object remained and, indeed, it may be
argued that the 18th-century's view of art-as-
communication would also make a most flashy
return, bringing in its wake a renewed use of
still life.
D. Still Life in a ConsumerSociety
In much of today's world, indeed already in that
of Mallarme and Whistler, the object has become
ever-present-an ubiquitous reality. Primarilyit is
a consumer item and, if the object itself is not
always visible, its image is as a photograph, poster
or a verbal description. It is the combination of
this mass of consumer goods, images and words
that marks the fourth stage in the relation between
still life and language and it is inseparablefrom the
techniques of advertising. The rapport between
image and discourse is closer to the symbolic use
of objects in 'vanity' than to 'autonomous' still
lifes. The image is now used as and turns into a
sign of communication with arbitrarysignificance.
However, the use of images to sell a product is
anything but new and still-life painting was
potentially advertisingfrom the moment that it was
secularized. If much secular (that is, non-vanity)
still-life painting escaped this fate in the past, it is
because society was not wholly governed by com-
mercial considerations. But in the period of
mercantilism,images were sometimes used as signs
of certain activities. Thus Michel de Bouillon's
still life of silverwareis not a 'pure' still life but a
goldsmith's sign (Fig. 7). But is it an advertise-
ment in the usual sense of the term? One may call
it a pre-literaryadvertisement:the objects are used
as in attribute pictures but one cannot say that
they induce the viewer to consume. It merely
indicatesan activityand the product of that activity.
The modern advertisementis far more insistent for
it is meant to move viewers to make a purchase.
The power of communication of an artisan's sign
is less heightened than that of moder advertising,
which has recourse to words and to almost any
technique that has been devised.
m.
As advertisement or Pop art, anonymous or
signed, collective or individual, single or in series,
the still life today owes its formal qualities and its
appearanceto shop windows, subway posters, bill-
boards and glossy magazines. Like Impressionism,
the former indoor art of still-life painting has
become very much subject to the outdoors, though
it may be used inside shops, supermarkets,trans-
port stations and books. As Pop art, the contem-
porary still life may decorate an ultra-modern
clinically shiny living room.
Whereverpeople go they will be called upon to
serve the consumer society and be exposed to
objects real or represented. It is thus no wonder
Fig. 7. Michelde Bouillon. 'Goldsmith'sSign',oil, 80 x 90
cm, 1707. (Mus6edes Arts D6coratifs,Paris.)
200

that such a society is in a period of vast production
of still lifes in various media. It is now possible
to purchase for about US$10.00 large still lifes of
cheeses or fruits (up to 50 x 100 cm color photo-
graphs) for the purpose of decorating a kitchen.
They are often plasticized for better conservation
and may be wiped like the kitchen walls. In the
same shop one may also purchase a Pop art
painting of sausages richly ladened with mustard
that, given a sense of humor and a low modern
living room, will do well behind an international
style couch.
The buffets, served tables, rustic luncheons of
the classical still life have turned into advertise-
ments; or, on a more serious level, the richly laden
tables of the Flemish school, replacedby the super-
market, find an echo in the work of, for example,
Richard Estes (Fig. 8). Peter Blake's 'Toy Shop'
combines a similar vision of the world of plenty
with the modern technique of incorporating a real
object, such as a door. Thus, the contemporary
still life uses a variety of techniques: collage,
assemblage, photography and representational
painting. The flatness and lack of the silent poetry
of classical still lifes, often due to the chiaroscuro
of an enclosed space, in short the commerciallook,
finds echoes in Pop art still lifes painted mainly in
the new acrylics. Wayne Thiebaud's 'Ladies'
Shoes', delicate of touch, fine in execution, unites
that old medium, oil paint, with the directness of
statement of an advertisement, or, perhaps more
true to fact, an assortment of shoes on a shelf in
a shoe store [cf. Leonardo 2, 65 (1969)]. Gerald
Murphy's 'Razor' (Fig. 9), with its flat pattern,
simplicity, may be said to reflect the printed page,
traditional medium for a message, or, more simply,
a poster.
But why indeed should artists still bother
imitatingin a world of plenty, shortcuts and mass
production? Since objects in themselves can be
contemplated aesthetically as they are, since
window dressing itself is an art of arranging still
lifes, why not simply exhibit objects as they are?
If a urinal can be a work of sculpture,then almost
Fig. 8. RichardEstes. 'TheCandyStore',syntheticpolymer
and oil, 47-75 x 68-75 in., 1969. (Whitney Museum of
American Art, New York. Gift of the Friends of the
WhitneyMuseum.)
Fig. 9. GeraldMurphy. 'Razor', oil, 32 x 36 in., 1922.
(Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. Foundation for the Arts
Collection.Giftof Mr.GeraldMurphy.)
any object can serve as a still life. The motif of the
hanging object on a trompe l'oeil wooden panel
needno longerbe painfullyexecuted. It is necessary
only to choose the objectsand to photograph them;
thus, one has a still-life photograph, such as was
produced already in the 19th century by, among
others, Adolph Braun.
But indeed, why bother photographing objects
at all? Jim Dine hangs '32 Colorful Tools' on a
board fixed to a canvas, resulting in something
that evidently borders on an easel painting. These
tools will not hang in the tool shed, where they
might not be still lifes; they have been selected to
figure as works of art and they may enter a living
room or a museum. But objects to be still lifes
need not be hung, photographed or merelyselected
and disposed on some surface. The contemporary
artist Pavlos makes a species of still lifes out of
paper sheets cut into the shape of traditional still-
life objects. He encases the cuttings in Plexiglas,
so that they gain the qualities of sculpture in the
round and yet with a traditional and delicate
quality. Significantly,Pavlos's still lifes are cut out
of advertisement paper. Pictorial art, thus, lies
not so much in the skill of representation as in a
selection within the possibilities of the mass-
produced world of objects in the post-Hegelian
world.
IV.
It may be said that with Pop art and other recent
styles of still life, the commercial world penetrates
the interior of what was once a private world.
From the 17th through the 19th century the
patrician interior had been devised to stress the
separation of public and private worlds. Still lifes
found a place within a private universe, even more
intimate than a private gallery. Toward the end of
the 19th century it is unlikely that even an aesthete
would have introduced a poster into his salon; but
201

R. G, Saisselili
today in the U.S.A., with the blurring of the
distinctions between the commercial and the non-
commercial, posters as well as Pop art still lifes
have their privileged place in homes. Such items
as colorful tools hanging in a living room or a
museum pose fascinating problems for aesthet-
icians.
Consider soup cans contained in boxes for ship-
ment. Some boxes contain cans full of soup and
others, with a remarkable likeness, contain cans
without soup; the former sell at the regularmarket
price, but the latter cost much more. Thus art
maintains itself in the midst of a consumer society,
despite Hegel's prediction of the end of art. The
surface appearance, beauty and rarity of an object
no longer play an important aesthetic role. The
differencesbetween the categories of objects lie in
negative qualities: absence of content, absence of
utility, absence of soup. The similarity of art
objects and commercial objects would seem to
indicate a shift from aesthetic to commercial value,
but only partially, for the aesthetic has merely
changed its nature from a positive admiration of
beauty to the negative aesthetics of nihilism. Art,
however,still retainsits power to confer distinction:
the owner of non-soup boxes distinguishes himself
from the millions who can afford only to have
boxes of cans with soup in them.
The contrast with the situation that obtained in
the mercantilist and physiocratic economies of the
18th century is illuminating. Then the class of
consumers was very small and privileged, whereas
the class of producers was the generality of man-
kind maintaining itself on a bare subsistence level
and producing the net product enjoyed by the
consumersas luxuries.Thence, the specialcharacter
of goods of the mercantilist world in the form of
rare,valuable and beautiful objects. The possession
of such goods was deemed worthy of being
depicted, for the still life acted as a species of
indirect portrait of a possessor. The indirect
portrait of a person offered by Pop art still lifes is
perhaps that of a spiritualpoverty compensated by
investment acumen. Disinterested contemplation,
evidently made possible by comfortable and at
times immense wealth, is transformed into inter-
ested and differentiating purchasing. Those who
need boxes of filled soup cans will have them and
those who need art will have boxes of empty ones.
V.
Many objects have become overfamiliar and
insistently present; thence, the phenomenon of the
surrealisticobject, the found objectand the unusual
object being elevated to the status of an aesthetic
object, which is quite independent of any picture
of it. It is, of course, the depiction of cans of soup
or of fried eggs that renders Pop art still lifes
somewhat ironical. At the same time an objectifi-
cation of an object has been effected:ways of seeing
are affected not only by aesthetic considerations
but also by economic factors; for in a capitalist
society, economics is not subordinate to non-
economic values, it is the overridingaesthetic. The
familiar and in a sense personal items of old-the
copper kettles of Chardin, the mugs of Harnett,
the pewter of Claes and the beautiful musical
instruments of Baschenis-have become rare and
prizedand displacedby ubiquitous consumeritems.
Objects cease to be at a distance, bathed in an
atmosphere of humility, familiarity or luxury in a
home designed for other intimate activities such as
reading, dining in the company of friends or even
praying.
Consumer objects press upon one. They are not
presented, they are exposed; they are not so much
there for their own sakes, as in the autonomous
classical still life, but rather as aspects of applied
economics. An object is a sign and this quality of
being a sign within the vast number of consumer
objects and consumer acts points to one of the
salientfeaturesof Pop artstill lifes-their immateri-
ality. They no longer possess the visual and tactile
values of the object represented,or even, thinking
of Cezanne and Morandi, of the autonomy of the
art of painting in oils. The apples of color photo-
graphy, the objects in acrylic, may have the form
that they represent, but somehow the techniques
available and used today are such that I find that
there is a denaturalizationof the object, something
flat, flashy and unfeeling about acrylic. What is
presented is not appealing,not appetizing;it is not
prized,it is not loved, it is not enviable, it is exposed
for purchase.
A consumer society, as the novelist Mary
McCarthy pointed out years ago in an analysis of
the U.S.A., is not materialist at all, because
materials are not prized. The victuals presentedto
view either in reality or in Pop art still lifes are not
invitations to touch, taste and enjoy, but merely
to consume. To be sure, there are areas of resist-
ance in which the supermarketand its wrappings
have not yet gained a victory and, when one
wanders down the rue de Buci in Paris or down
streets in other old cities still not fully 'developed',
one begins to understandearly Flemish still lifes of
served tables, butchers' shops and the hanging
game of 18th-centuryFrance. Therewas something
about these still lifes that even today succeed in
prompting Proustian involuntary memory in front
of a van Beyeren ham, a recall of pre-cellophane
days.
The luxury item of old supposed a scarcity
economy. Gold was associated with a universal
standard of value, in part because it was also
beautiful. Thus, a luxury item was not considered
a consumer item. In a consumer society, an item
fits into a general way of life that is made up of
consumer relations in which everythingfrom sex to
knowledge, sentiments to culture, automobiles and
furniture,fit into a series and take on the aspect of
a consumer sign. Humans are defined in new
terms and the objects with which they surround
themselves no longer define their stations in life,
but theirpurchasingpower and their manipulations
202

of the signs of the consumer society, whose values
are wholly arbitrary, since they may be changed
easily as new consumer needs are invented.
The social types who could be dimly perceived
by means of the attribute function of objects in
classical still lifes no longer obtain. Classical still
lifes indirectly portrayed a variety of social types:
affluent merchant, collector, warrior, priest,
philosopher, painter, poet, architect, musician,
even the figure of death, the humble country or
town dweller as well as the courtly prince. The
representativetype of a consumer society may well
be the junk man who, along with the producer and
consumer, might fit into a new Pop trinity.
It is as if in the consumer society the junk man
had replacedthe skull of the old vanity picture; for
he may be thought of as symbolic of the vanity of
human consumption. Anti-artistic, anti-hero, anti-
curator, anti-entrepreneur, the junk man has
become a most necessaryperson. But his existence
and constant presence implies a radical change in
relation between the producer and the consumer
such as it obtained in the period of the classical
still life. Then the ties that united the producer of
a still life and its purchaser, and which might be
used to symbolize wider relations, implied care for
beauty, pride of craftsmanship, stability, patience
and the exchange of stable values, whereas in a
consumer society purely economic relations are
presided over by an aesthetic of action (selling and
buying) whose point of perfection is reached when
nothing is sold for something.
VI.
These economic-social considerations of a con-
sumer society are not out of place in an essay on
still life; one begins with pictures of objects at rest
within tell-tale interiors that define a certain view
of human pride of possession and of human
activities and vanities, to end with considerations
on a world of objects in which the depicted Pop art
still life is but one very expensive consumer item
among masses of others also presenting an indirect
picture of the human condition. The proliferation
of antique and bric-a-brac shops has created a
still-life environment with consumer, surrealistic
and vanity overtones. But these shops and the
junk yards too, are the source of more art, an art
born of bric-a-bracand of junk. The materials of
old-silver, gold, marble, fine wood, oil paint and
lead pencils-yield to plastics, acrylics and com-
posites of various junk. Artists, as is well known,
use the materials of their own time and in a world
of continuous junkification and discards still-life
painters tend to become a species of surrealist,
dadaist or satirist, because the objects at their
disposal are mass-produced, impersonal, packaged
and marketed so widely and efficiently that repre-
sented as isolated objects or selected as a series to
be represented as a work of art they take on the
aspect of unwonted objects, not privileged, but
amusing.
In the age of the classical still life, the few
isolated objects chosen by painters became privi-
leged, made worthy of attention, raised to the level
of beauty, by art and also by the use of frames.
But now frames are broken by the very mass of
objects produced as mass production turns into
the anti-art enterprise, which explains why even
anti-artistsproducing anti-artend up by producing
art objects, in spite of themselves; for collectors
and critics know that it is imagination that makes
for art, not always intentions. Mass production
denies not only art in the old sense, but also
personal possession, originality and taste, since
these are affected and effected by market research.
A still life in such a world can thus become an
ironic comment upon the difficulties of individual
choice and vision. It is significant that still-life
painting in its classic phase appeared at the end of
the Renaissance, that is, along with the develop-
ment of individualthought, the personalconscience
of Protestantism,individual contemplative thinkers
and it may also be that its history as the representa-
tion of individual objects, with personality, senti-
ment and beauty, corresponds to the history of
portraiture that also had a beginning, middle
and end.
In a world of mass-produced objects and
discards, the Pop art still life is a telling image. In
its thin and functional frame, when there is one, on
canvas or board, in oil, acrylic or some other new
and quick-drying medium, with its new, plastic,
shiny, commercial feel, as image or assemblage, as
individual item or environment, may one not
behold the truth of the claims of the consumer
society? The objects have lost their savor and
personality:
between the object
and the desire,
between the desire
and the touch,
stretchesthe cellophane.
In the U.S.A., I live in a world of abstractions.
Paper money replaced gold and silver long ago;
credit cards replace paper money; wealth itself has
become abstract and in some areas problematical.
The now-world is the no-world of the discard and
the junk man is the shepherd of the hollow men.
203

Saisselin 1976

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Saisselin 1976