The bizarre and the beautiful
Pleasure is futile but death is certain in art and life
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The beginning of my breakfast sketch starts with the end: an empty plate with leftover crumbs, knives and spoons in the sink, the streaks of thick yoghurt stubbornly clinging onto my glass bowl, coffee stains on the lips, pen on paper… The scene isn’t absurd enough; but an untouched breakfast is rarely interesting. It's mundane – everything is set on the table ready to rot and be exhausted. The butter will melt and spoil, the apple will brown, the jam will mould, and the toast and coffee will go cold unless art preserves it. Even then, it isn’t so; nothing is permanent.
I often think of the remains of my breakfast as ‘memento mori’, that cheerful Latin concept of an object that reminds one of the inevitability of one’s death, but to be fair it is everywhere around me. Flowers are decaying in two vases on either side of me as I write this, a reminder of time passing by. Only a skull is missing. In the vanitas paintings, skulls and extinguished candles were painted alongside fruits and silver, wine and books, to remind us that as life can go on, it can also stop. Pleasure is futile but death is certain. Bizarre and beautiful are two sides of the same coin.
Skulls weren’t the only way to portray brevity. In ‘Still Life with Game Fowl’ (one of many artworks with similar titles painted by many different artists), Spanish artist Juan Sánchez Cotán weaves this interplay between life and death, light and shadow, symmetry and disorder. This is the weird and the wonderful, also seen in ‘Still Life with Game Birds’ by Herman van Vollenhoven where six game birds are dead and frozen in time, where the brushstrokes are vivid and rich and the chiaroscuro is intense. In what could be considered a worthy precursor to the ‘Spider-Man pointing meme’ Cornelis Mahu’s ‘Still Life with Game Birds’ details another cluster of dead (but vivid) game birds interspersed with glass and ceramic ware – there is the detail of textures dead and lifeless, and both bounty and loss.
When I first came across this style of still lifes, many years ago, I was struck by their strangeness (which I guess is the point) but also equally moved by it. My friend and collaborator (for chlorophyll and other stuff) Annie Wallentine, who writes so skillfully about art and culture, told me about the existence of Victorian mourning tokens that are relics of time, culture, and grief: “Darkly beautiful, definitely bizarre – photography of dead children/infants soon after the invention of the medium because people wanted to memorialise them.” This includes “extremely elaborate hair jewellery” that found popularity in the 16th century where plaits of hair were placed in earrings, lockets, and rings that were also inscribed with the initials of the dead. More bizarre, are hair wreaths that Wallentine informed me about: hair as talisman but also inevitability makes sense as hair is already dead and isn’t transitory, unlike the human body, and is also a tangible reminder of what one has lost.
As repulsive as it can be, there is intimacy, intricacy, and beauty in this.
In photographer Irving Penn’s work, an ephemerality lives on in the blocks of frozen food that he shot for Vogue in 1977 for an article on chilled soups. The photograph, titled ‘Frozen Foods with String Beans’, features blocks of frozen blueberries, raspberries, corn, asparagus, string beans, melons (or peaches), and peas all stacked onto each other and arranged into towers against a minimal white background that lets the colours speak for themselves. Beyond food, I find these swathes of colour to be reminiscent of Rothko’s colour field compositions that evoke a sense of boundlessness – there is, beyond colour, a world of “basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom…” that he alluded to often. These blocks of colour have confounded people for years, prompting them to question if there is any artistic value or skill to his work. But even the idea of order can be blurred around the edges. Like Rothko, Penn’s work feels immortal, transcending even if only for a minute. ‘Frozen Foods’ seems to have been photographed just when the blocks have started to thaw; it feels more spiritual than apriori, and ephemeral still. Like food, like emotions.
When I first discovered Rothko, I didn’t get the big deal either. Someone I was dating at the time told me that they could “paint it, easily”. Abstract art has that effect on some of us – it is boundary-defying, amorphous but composed in a fever dreamlike candy cloud state (see Louise Bourgeois), and urgent and exaggerated, which are all aspects that make it seem more attainable than it is. It’s opposite to what we’ve been taught as art in early school years about colouring within the lines and being as realistic as possible. Reality isn’t all that sobering sometimes.
In Japanese photographer Michiko Kon’s work, the same reality seems absurd and misplaced. Her ‘Apron of Sardines’, a photograph of an apron composed entirely of fish and cloth (surrounding what appears to be a picture of the Virgin Mary) is unsettling for an everyday item of clothing. An apron is supposed to protect the cook from food stains and is usually worn to maintain a standard of hygiene in restaurants, so wearing an apron made of fish is illogical. Her ‘Hat of Yellowtails’ is similarly composed and her work borrows so much from the Surrealism of the 40s. Even as her work includes insects, flowers, and fruits, fish plays a signature role in her oeuvre, perhaps as a nod to the culture around her but also because of their “proximity of life and death”. Fish are never still, even in the apron they seem to be in mid-movement; in French, the term for ‘still life’ is nature morte, the image is of ‘dead nature’.
There is this continuous ambiguousness to her work – are the scales of the fish supposed to represent our skins on the apron? Are we supposed to be exhilarated or disgusted? Should we eat the fish or wear it? Kon’s work reminds me of reels where mundane objects are carved out of vegetables – shoes hollowed out from purple aubergines and green courgettes. And I’m always wondering what the purpose of this is? I mean the courgette shoe will rot (or cook, because it’s always held over an open fire). Maybe there is no real motivation here beyond fascination with the weird and the beautiful, a tension between reality and fantasy (whether it’s vegetable objects or a jaunty little zebra made out of severed fish heads and bodies and roses), and the knowledge of food (or everything else) being fleeting. A cheerful memento mori.
