Reflections

The Emergent Life of Objects

‘Toad Lof’, 2024, Oil on Canvas

‘Fox Balloon’, 2024, Digital Photograph

Kwakiutl Copper, Courtesy of Bard College

I tend to paint still lives almost as if they were portraits; I situate a single object centered in the composition and light it in a clear way.  The objects often are ‘facing’ me, the painter.  If the subject is a dustpan my view is perpendicular to the face of it, and the same goes for the windows I have painted.  I can’t say I began this habit intentionally, I can say I wanted to understand what I was looking at, to shine a light on it and mine information from it. 

Portraiture often asks the viewer to consider the life of the subject; clothes and accessories give us historical context and might let us know the subject’s occupation, social status and sense of style.  If the subject is nude, we look for meaning in their expression and gesture, has something just happened to them? Are they doing something regular, are they aware that they are being made into a portrait? Some of these questions apply to my subjects, for example a window dressed with curtains which might tell us if it comes from a wealthy family.  The window might be covered in cardboard, which tells us it is useless, jobless. A cucumber might be sliced into pieces, telling us it has given itself to larger projects (a sandwich). If my painting features nude objects, a viewer would have to look at the gesture; is the object leaning lackadaisically? Is it where it is ‘supposed’ to be? The subjects of my staged still lives, I think, know that they are being painted because they are plucked from their environment and placed in front of me.  An interior would be the opposite, objects going about their daily lives unaware they are being painted. Whenever I am painting an object, I am only with it for a short period of time, whatever its context.  Below I look at the texts ‘The Gift’ and ‘Spacecraft’ to understand the objects’ life outside of modelling.

‘Portrait of a Post’, 2024, Digital Photograph

In the opening chapters of “The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property” Lewis Hyde argues that the gift giving practice causes the actual gifts to increase in value.  Their circulation endows them with a higher value in a reverse mechanics of the capitalist market principles of abundance and scarcity.  The gift, Hyde explains, is in a sense ‘alive’ because it does not have a fixed monetary value such as two pounds fifty, and gains value as it ages; “The distinction -alive/inert- is not always useful, in fact, because even when a gift is not alive it is treated as if it were, and whatever we treat as living begins to take on life”(Hyde, 1983, p. 25). As the title of the book suggests, property is alive because it is erotic, or shared between people. In an example Hyde provides, the Kwakiutl tribes of northwest America would gift copper pendants to each other at potlatches.  In return blankets, pelts, oils and other items would be given.  The pendants would accumulate a history of what was given in return, and these histories were often recounted at potlatches. In the spirit of the potlatch, the most recent return value would be given along with an additional ‘gift’ amount, i.e. a few hundred blankets. As the pendants circulated they would grow in value. This value, however, was not just measured by what was returned.  The current owner of a pendant would sometimes break it into pieces, a respected act of non-ownership.  The copper pieces would be sewn back together and the next time it was given as a gift the return would be much larger(Hyde, 1983).  The face of the pendant would display its history, and would be revered because of this.

This inherited value is related to painting in a few different ways.  The first is that, as an observational painter, I am always looking for how an object might have been broken, the way the Kwatkiutl’s copper pendants were. An object might not literally be ‘broken’ but simply made inconsistent from its mould by the hands it has passed through. A worn down step or window frame painted over by numerous tenants are two examples of objects that are no longer in the shape the manufacturer intended. The painter is able to draw value out of these blemishes. A loaf of bread loses value as soon as it is cut open, but to a painter the inside of the bread provides new colour and tone.  The ‘portrait’ of the bread also becomes new, the bread is prepared for use, and its gesture reads differently.  The painter instinctually finds value in the ‘cracks’ of their subject that can only be found through the type of observation that a painter practices. The painting as an object can be viewed as the repaired copper pendant; the artist sees the subject and wants to put it together in a composition to be passed on to the viewer or owner of the painting, in this way participating in the gift giving cycle by giving more than they receive. 

The second way that value is inherited in painting is the value the painter receives.  In the second half of “The Gift” Hyde relates his anthropological study to the practice of art in general: “An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot have this gift except, perhaps, by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves that ‘begging bowl’ to which the gift is drawn.”(Hyde, 1983, p. 143)

How does a painter create this “begging bowl”? To whom does the painter court? A perfect example is Euan Uglow, who spent endless hours measuring a stalk of broccoli until it began to rot, studied a toothbrush for days, and worked on a single painting for years(The Art Digger, 2021).  Uglow is courting his subjects, but also the practice of painting.  He spends his time devoted to understanding his subjects, but his paintings are not valuable because they are perfectly rendered, there is some other value between the measurements and labour.  He places his ‘begging bowl’ at the feet of this practice and some surplus value is given, the painting is worth more than the sum of the measurements he took and the time he spent. I think this is what Rilke means when, in his poem ‘Ninth Duino Elegy’ he says we are here

“But to say them, you must understand,

oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves”(Rilke, 1922)

The ‘Things’ being “house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window”; ordinary ‘Things’ we pass by everyday.  Rilke has capitalised ‘Things’, because they are alive, they grow and accumulate and break just like we do.  These objects are alive because they pass through our hands and carry a surplus value that we as artists are able to give them. It goes both ways; as artists, our “begging bowl” is filled by our relationship with the object, and the object is given autonomy by its circulation in the gift cycle.

It is important to mention that an object might not be a vase or loaf of bread that one can hold in one’s hand.  It could be an idea, a landscape or anything that might pass from one person to another.  I started to think about objects in this more general sense after reading Timothy Morton’s ‘All Art is Ecological’ and ‘Spacecraft’ (the second is a book in his series ‘Object Lessons’, each book focusing on a different object).  A painting is an object, but so are the brushstrokes, the composition and the feeling of completion. Morton is a proponent of a school of thought called ‘Object Oriented Ontology’ or ‘OOO’, which considers objects as autonomous beings and endeavors to understand how they exist.  Morton summarizes:

“OOO tells you that if a thing exists, it exists in such a way that nothing, not even that thing itself, can fully grasp, access, affect or otherwise influence it.”(Morton, 2022, p. 11)

Following this line of thought, when we paint an object, we really can think of it like a portrait, the painting is just a new object representing the subject of the painting, and the object lives on in its own right.  We have shared a conversation with the object.  The same way you might tell your friend an idea and he remains the same friend, but with a new idea, we pass along this object with our own ideas embedded.  The object is autonomous and gives something to us as well, it gives us an idea, the gift artists often refer to as ‘inspiration’. 

The second chapter in Morton’s ‘Spacecraft’, titled ‘Garbage’ discusses the idea of a dirty spacecraft (drawing from the example of Star Wars’ Millennium Falcon):

“The dirty spacecraft isn’t just an indicator that it came from a past we can’t access, quite thrilling above and beyond the realist aesthetic, the “gritty” realism as we like to say. The dirty spaceship lets you know that there could be an unpredictable future.”(Morton, 2022, p. 34)

This insight sheds new light on the broken copper pendants of the Kwakiutl; the pendants carry the past and the future with them.  They are more valuable because they are broken, used up.  The broken object is a vessel that contains the past and the possibility of a future, the way the Millennium Falcon might carry us into any number of futures.  Morton compares the dirty spacecraft to the spotless spaceships of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and other sci-fi movies, which represent a static, even authoritarian future. The broken object, the sidelined object, the garbage, all contain a value as they relate to us; they are ‘dirty’ because we have used them. The blemishes of an object tell us that it might not have just one use in the future, it has a spectrum of possible futures, something like having choice. The Kwakiutl impulse to break the pendant emphasizes an important aspect of gift giving; we have to use the gift for it to be a gift, otherwise it is currency, or a possession left to die in storage, and it will have only one possible future.

Brixton Bike Depot, 2024, Digital Photograph

Objects on their own of course are not alive in that they do not self-replicate and do not change their environment if left alone, but we do not have to look at objects as isolated.  In fact, as painters we can’t do this.  We have to consider the light that hits them, the ‘cracks’ in them and, most importantly, our own relation to them. Similarly, we cannot think of individual atoms as alive and we cannot apply the theories of evolution or social structure to them.  If we are thinking on the scale of humans, we have to course-grain our picture and ignore atoms in favour of cells, organs, and other objects which we call life.  There are different rules at different scales; there are not many biologists using particle physics to understand why snakes evolved.  This idea is called emergence and it is somewhat of a frontier in the scientific community as there is not a unanimous procedure outlined to tell us when it is happening .  For my purposes, I think it is enough to understand that what I am painting is part of a whole, and I have to consider the whole as alive, where the part might just be an object.

Rather than a course-graining of space, I think that the life of an object emerges from a course-graining of time.  The ‘whole’ is an objects past and future, the ‘part’ is the day I spend painting it. The copper pendants of the Kwakiutl became alive as they passed from hand to hand, and collected a history.  The Millennium Falcon is alive because it is dirty, it has also collected a history, and represents a future. More than a life lived, however, these objects represent the hands they have passed through. As Hyde puts it:

“When gifts circulate within a group, their commerce leaves a series of interconnected relationships in its wake, and a kind of decentralized cohesiveness emerges”(Hyde, 1983, p. xiv)

Painting is one more relationship, this time between the object itself and the painter. Our “begging bowl” is filled (if we are lucky) by observing the object, and the object inherits a new chapter in its life.

Wilson Road Light Bulb, 2024, Digital Photograph

‘Neighbor’s Window’, 2024, Digital Photograph