Plato’s Case: Still Life, Vanitas, and Nature Morte

Tracey Eve Winton, Cambridge University

London 1997

Philosophical idealism ... was in Plato’s case ... the fear of overpowerful senses, the prudence of a
prudent Socratic. Perhaps we moderns are merely not healthy enough to be in need of Plato’s
idealism. And we are not afraid of the senses because — 

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Two concurrent exhibitions in London invite a comparison: Sensation: Young British Artists
from the Saatchi Collection, at the Royal Academy of Arts ( sponsored by Christie’s), and
Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life, at the Hayward Gallery (sponsored by BMW).

Objects of Desire: The Sustenance of Dwelling

Still life emerged as a modern painting genre in the early seventeenth century and by the turn
of this century included sculpture as a medium. It originates and defines its limits
architecturally, that is, on the near side of perspective’s picture window, in the intimate
presence of domestic space, the place of everyday life. Still life or nature morte is empirically
constituted by its subject matter. Typically, the raw foods that sustain life and the implements

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related to them in the domestic scene are presented horizontally on a table-top, the quotidian
stage of the private human drama.
Those things which appear in the still life are denoted already at a remove from nature,
conscripted into the service of human life. These are not sublime objects of love or veneration
from the tradition of art which serves and constitutes religion. Instead, their mundanity limits
the potentiality of human relations toward them, and the still life articulates and explores this
delimited mortal sphere as the repetitive theatre of subsistence.
Although its objects may be commonplace, their deliberate choice and organization identify
them as objects of desire.
The sustenance of life in the domestic space of the everyday inscribe a profane sphere
apparently at odds with transcendent capability. The substantiality of the subject matter and its
arena are thus bound up with the issue of mortality and its expression in artistic form. The
subject thus secures a portion of the ambition of mythology: the mediation or symbolic
reconciliation of the horror that life in all its wonderful forms ultimately depends on, actually
lives on, death. A death that in the framework of the painting is momentarily suspended in the
present. A present of ecstatic time, however, which redeems death by its very recurrence.
The concretization of this realization in vanitas works, particularly of the early period of still-life
painting, generates an obsession with the flow of time, mortality, the transience of all things
human, attention to decay and erosion, ruin and putrefaction and the decompositional process.
Things half-eaten, in disarray, insects and signs of blight in fruit, butchered animals, timepieces,
skulls, candles, and mirrors, are tabled as emblems with an earthly horizon alongside the erotic
continuity of nature: shells, flowers, and round vessels and artifacts.
In contrast to the eternal truths of the religious programmes of sacred art, persistent as original
truth even into the Baroque, the moral value elicited in these works derives directly from the
temporal nature and transience of human living itself. To be eternal is to be eternally renewed:
this is a foundation for sacrifice. The ephemerality of life is conceived in terms of the everyday
confrontations — in the language of quotidian existence — between a mode of living and the
destructive impulse which necessarily attends it, and sustains it by its otherness. In this sense
the show Objects of Desire is appropriately sponsored by BMW. The car is a paradigmatic
object of desire: both an everyday flirtation with transience, mobility and death, and a
domestic and intimate space of bearing extended into a frequently unfamiliar world.
In this genre the metaphor of ontological translation is poised at the very surface of
appearance. The miraculous transformation of worldly food into the dynamic energy — and
vital spirit — that nourishes, sustains, and ultimately wears out our bodies stands presented to
us in its potential state. No isolated painterly existence for the pear, the skull or the dead

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pheasant: in the still life the true ‘object of desire’ shows the situatedness of the particular
experience of these things in the activity of dwelling. Appropriated from the natural world in
which they come into being, these objects take on an instrumentalized or ‘functional’ character
— verging on sacrificial ritual — that only something decontextualized as such can display. In
one’s home which is located as a centre of encounter, it is the proximity of synaesthetic
recollection and desire that these objects apport to a sense of orientation in the world — both
spatial and temporal.

Nature Morte: Appearance and Time

The still life is anti-historical: objects do not appear on the painted surface as events marking a
narrative; they register a sheer repetitiveness, a return of the similar, over and over, to imprint a
pattern of living habituated through identity, like theatrical properties which are never
consumed. More precisely, the consumption of these, as a link in a self-perpetuating
circulation, never neutralizes the object; on the contrary, the article’s repeated use establishes a
provisional stability. With the treatment of time as a palimpsest in layers of accumulation the
artistic treatment of the objects necessarily takes on a transhistorical character, in which
articulation or emphasis is elicited. This retrograde motion recycles the linearity of history back
into a mythical past: the tempo of life.
Albertian painting is built on access to the constative level: the picture plane is always a
window opening on to another kind of space; the vanishing point unfailingly conveys the
viewing subject, as the Spiritual Exercises convey the reading subject, to infinity. But the vanitas
knows nothing of this escape into other worlds: its purview cannot get beyond the nearest
objects. The cocoon of nearness, that ‘dark’ space of touch and creatural repetition, harbours a
force of gravity and inertia nothing can escape. The transcendental can be sensed only in the
inability to reach it, and in that conflicted agonistic relation between the constative (sacred
truth) and the performative (the inertia of things, ensnarement by things) the representation
embodies its own failure and vanitas.
For Plato, the subject matter of a work of art was pre-eminent, deriving its authority from the
memory of divine ideas, and in this idealism lay both the necessity of choosing a noble topic
and the ill-fatedness of poetic imitation, whereas Aristotle emphasized the technique and
craftsmanship in the work of art, his celebrated four technical causes founding a taxonomy of
empiricism. As he describes in the Poetics, even an ignoble subject or one denoting horror
could bring joy through the marvellous virtuosity of its imitation. The still life genre of Objects
of Desire locates itself primarily in the latter model, and despite evident technical

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impoverishment, so does the Sensation work. The difference between the two shows, however,
lies in the attitude of the artist toward the observing or participating subject.
As contemporary art work finds itself decontextualized, its situation is constructed in the choral
space between the artist who presents and the beholder who receives. The emotional response
to tragedy given in catharsis, the identification with the feelings of pity or terror achieved by
the cosmic justice system (the Classical ‘superego,’) renews its importance in the light of
Sensation whose conceptuality denies the possibility of an emotional or ecstatic transport,
disavows a response to formal imitation. If the work cannot situate or move us emotionally then
where does its intercourse with us lie? The sympathetic resonance of communication ruptures
and the art work and the visitor to the gallery face each other like ever-dissimulating and weary
antagonists: a starved lion and a terrified Christian.
The poststructuralist pression of difference inevitably concludes the historical project. The
present is rarefied into something always mnemonically incomparable to its past; it is an
evanescent moment in which mythology is prohibited by the very doubt that repetition of the
similar in the past can thicken the experience of the present. Difference from an obscure and
homogeneous background is the fundamental condition of a historiography of events, which is
constituted as linear and teleological only through irreconcilable heterogeneity of its matter —
differences between autonomous events still apparently reconcilable only through causality.
Is the law of desire in Sensation a result of formalist isolation, that is, a projection seemingly
generated within the object itself, a closed world with an internal symbolic law which generates
its own prohibitions, transgressions and desires? The physicality of the works belie their
aspiration toward an unattainable idealism.
The heftiest works in the Sensation
show are those by Damien Hirst and
Rachel Whiteread. Both artists utilize
a strategy of absence to critique the
relationship of form and content in
the cultural milieu in which they are
set. For Whiteread this takes place in
a more conventionally transparent
mode: her question might be
construed as “What happens to the
spirit of place created by form when
that form is destroyed or displaced?”
For Hirst the complexity is increased

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by inversion: “What happens to form when its spirit (aura) is absented?” But for both these
artists, operating deliberately — and strictly speaking, iconoclastically — outside the field —
Whiteread by showing ‘that which is not the art object’ and Hirst by showing ‘that object which
is not art’ in the space of the gallery, the art-object quality is created directly through the
application of techniques of craft, not by subject or idea.
The artists thus draw their own aristoteleological standards within a critical field. Nevertheless,
Whiteread’s topos of domestic intimacy in the cast negative space of Ghost is subjected by the
very form of the work itself, while Hirst’s preservative project is subjected by the use of
spectacular objects and processes which usurp both the interest and prominence of any artistic
endeavour attached to it.
Both artists are working with the shock of the dead, but the real shock for the visitor to
Sensation is the death of artistic idealism, the place of art in the world as a mediator of the
conditions of life and death, the mythographic function which constitutes culture. The irony of
the Sensation show is that in many different forms and media the work merely reproduces
death. The denial of empathy, of the possibility of communication, of reciprocity. Anti-symbolic,
the Sensation exhibition is about the absence of sensation.
Only in Hirst’s flayed cow-head and fly installation called A Thousand Years can we discern an
entomological possibility of redemption. A large glass case the size of a room is divided into

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two by a perforated glass screen. In one side is a great opaque cabinet for breeding flies. In
the other half, on the middle of the floor surface, a skinned cow’s head lies rotting; suspended
above it is an ‘insect-o-cutor’ — normally used in restaurant kitchens to zap insects out of this
world. A single live fly crawled apathetically over the holocaust of extinction: the brittle black
layer of tiny dead bodies covering the floor of the glass cabinet: the uniformity of life history
read from a distance. The title sends our thoughts back to the first millennium, 1000 A.D., a
time when the conclusion of worldly time and the day of judgement were considered to be
imminent.
The redemptive model in A Thousand Years owes nothing but its displacement to art, however;
it is a model found — usually with human disgust — in nature and moved into the space of
gallery in a confirmation of the triumph of nature over art, her final revenge. This is the model
of recirculation, the decay which follows death and which returns things to their place in the
metamorphic cycle of nature, a cycle not yet harnessed by science although often imitated in
art. Hirst’s work is engaging because out of the whole exhibition, this piece comes closest to
achieving the goals of the still-life work. In this sense it not only participates in a discourse
outside of the Saatchi-Christie’s circle, but also returns something to a four-hundred year old
genre of art. Because of this, the work situates itself within a continuous and repetitive tradition
in and through which its status as a meaningful object can be read. It is precisely because the
work is anti-perspectival that it qualifies as still life.
If the still-life painting takes as its concept the fragility and indeed vanity of mortal life, then A
Thousand Years recognizes even in its title the inscription of limited time on earth, and life’s
overcoming of its own futility by a persistence of self-recognition: ‘the impossibility of death in
the mind of someone living,’ superimposed with a Kierkegaardian psychoanalytical theory to
adduce and produce Freud’s dream — the death drive as an modern achievement of
mediaeval apocalyptic theology. For the Western world, the visible evidence of thanatos can
be the only release from the sickness unto death. Terrified by the prospect of immortality in a
post-expressionist world whose only possibility of artistic transcendence lies in suicide, to wit,
for example the death of Mark Rothko, the creative act has to be an overcoming of the self, a
self-annihilation.
The act of making thus fulfils the Nietzschean prophecy of destruction in creation. The model
of a voracious, vengeful Nature always reclaiming the order of things in order to create the new
from the ruins of the old, painting a dark vision for a culture wholly shackled to the nostalgia of
its traditions, to the truth, as it were, of its History. It is essentially because the vision is critical
only in a pessimistic way that it is possible to see that the tiger is definitively incarcerated by its
own past. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The young British artist finds himself

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obligated to kill his father, History, but doesn’t realize that he is still asleep with his mother — a
human, all-too-human, Nature. But as in classical tragedy, while the price of self-knowledge is
high or ultimate, it remains the only path toward the restoration of order. Self-knowledge allows
civilization to transcend the bestiality of life as mere repetition.

The Language of Vanitas: The Revenge of Nature

The world of the vanitas defines itself in the visibility of a local source of illumination, a local
point of view, a gnosis which begins in the limited space of the self. In the still life, natural and
domestic objects, even as nature morte, define and reproduce desire in their capacity as
objects of desire. Even for Cezanne, the miracle of inhabitation in a human world remained
intact in the haptic sense of tactility and gesture seized in his paintings. But the exhibition at
the Royal Academy pronounces a death sentence more horrible than natural death. In the
privileging of the museological language of the science of natural history over the ‘cultural’
fictions of art, the artist has forever surrendered his humanist ideals. The dehumanization of art
displaces its transcendence into objective distance as the biological metaphor of science — in
the infinitely self-defining and self-idealizing mode of natural reproduction devoid of aim.

In the Hayward, Mario Merz’ Spiral Table (1982) is a construction of glass and aluminium which
spirals lethargically around a erect centrepiece of dead branches. From the real fruit and

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vegetables on the surgically clean transparent surface wafts a sweetish odour of
decomposition. Lost in an infinity of galaxies — (Who would hear me if I cried out, amongst the
angelic orders?) — the works of nature — in production, preservation and destruction — are
conceded finally superior to the works of man. In Spiral Table some of the apples and chillies
already show visible signs of shrinkage. There is a Jackson Pollock-like sense of unnatural
arrangement in the distribution of colours, shapes and textures: butternut squashes and crinkle-
leaf cabbage, melons and red onions, brinjals and carrots, chillies and turnips. Can the
heterogeneity of the natural world be reduced to a unified field in this way, that is, at another
scale? And could this then be a metaphor for the artist’s view of history?
Is Spiral Table a simulation of the subject of a still-life? Or is its anti-optical presentation of the
real a reference beyond the actuality of the piece to some discarnate dimension? Probably, for
while the presented work is not that interesting in itself — except to the hungry — its
implications are. The topic of the cornucopia — the abundance of nature — transforms luxury
from a mediaeval ethical category into an modern aesthetic concern about the particular style
of expenditure of an overwhelming ‘natural’ surplus. The true difficulty created by this
transformation lies in the suitable appropriation of the object, the effectiveness of its enframing
in order to gain some — usually limited — control over it, if only visually, as the return of the
repressed reality of nature is increasingly perceived as a threat to human works. As man
divorces himself further from nature, he is continually redefining a battlefield of antipathy in
which nature will necessarily triumph.
Is the curatorial appropriation of the work a notion that only what is ‘real’ can effectively be an
object of desire? Man has no more power over nature; nature has triumphed technically over
humanity, even in her form as human nature, to which the ever-expanding discipline of
psychoanalysis liberally testifies.
The uncanny ‘realism’ of the vegetables and fruit purchases our immediate discomfort. Like
Sensation, the fruit in the final room of Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life depicts frankly
and catholically the revenge of nature. Its very domesticity is what makes us uneasy: Nature is
not only the spectre banished and returning in natural disasters and epidemics of a human
body at war with its own nature, but also a fundamentally irreconcilable strangeness within our
most private space, here writ large in the publicity of the gallery. And hence a blatant act of
plagiarism has taken place in the phenomenon of simulation. The speechless artist has
presented the commonest and most familiar works of nature as his own. These are
appropriated by the incisive act of vision which has been represented as a creative
achievement, also a transitional moment when the artist’s motive energy is obstructed by
phenomenal reality.

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Traditional still life painting avoids the problem of simulacra, because of the very synthetic
nature of communication involved in the creative act of interpretation and translation. With the
Spiral Table we are abandoned with the Duchampêtre sense that any manipulation, however
raw, either of the found object or of the environment, qualifies as an art work. In its ideology,
the whole of mortal life, including history itself, is transmuted into an artistic endeavour, a great
Creation, truly leaving nature morte. While this vision of life as a recreative enterprise could be
affirmative, there is an attendant risk that a world of appearances (infinitely configurable
surfaces of knowledge) might at any moment withdraw and descend into its own artifice, its
void core, leaving no ground in which to seek reality or truth of essence, even a weak truth in
local communication. To overcome this apprehension I ate one of Merz’ red chillies; the gallery
security guard said, “You can’t eat in here.”
The valuation of art itself and its role in our lives depends on a reciprocal relation of the
individual with the world whereby each can give back something to the other in a dialectic of
surplus which is tranformed into education, a weaving of interconnectedness through constant
mutual enrichment, making communication the essence of orientation. History, the true subject
of the nature morte or vanitas poses this as a problem.
The subject of history is the communication of events with one another. As Isaiah Berlin noted,
Tolstoy viewed attempts to study history as a science as evidence only of our inability to define
either ‘power’ or ‘cause’. The mystery of causality is described by fictions linking events into
coherent series, involving the idea of transferring motive action or power from one thing to
another. The deliverance of this erotic energy remains arcane to those who construe power in
terms of volition. Historical science is based on the assumption that causality is rational and
natural; the alchemy of the still life demonstrates that the convention of history is deliberate
and artificial, a craft, in fact, a fiction. This connection in essence is a gift — circulatory energy.
The fame of the modern artist is the art of ‘making history.’ In the difference between the
perspectival painting and the still life painting I appose two paradigmatic models of the
representation of time. The perspectival painting with its vanishing point on the horizon, always
at infinity, describes a trajectory which can never arrive at its goal, whereas the still-life painting
has blocked up a window of false promises of transcendence (and hence fame), and discerns
meaning in the very ordinary matter of everyday domestic life. It is not the future that holds the
secrets to living well, but the expansion of a present which is composed from its own historical
traces, from its repetitions, history’s phenomenally invisible aspects rather than its anomalies
(those things out of order, extraordinary, and therefore revolutionary.) But the problem of
history is not merely a question of the scale at which fields of events appear homogeneous or
heterogeneous:

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The further zone beyond the table’s edge must be suppressed if still life is to create its principal
spatial value: nearness. What builds this proximal space is gesture: the gestures of eating, of
laying the table, but also — in Zurbarán — the gestures which create the objects out of
formless clay and metal. The basic co-ordinates are not supplied by calibration and
mensuration, as the piazzas of Renaissance Italy or the floors of Dutch interiors supply the
standard measurements of space by means of flagstones or tiles. Rather its units are bodily
actions, specifically those of the upper body, the torso and arms. As a result, it is a space that is
full of the idea of gravity, a sort of Einsteinian field in which distance and mass intersect. The
eye not only reads for contour and volume, it weighs things: here the instruments are the
muscles of the arm and hand. And the eye also registers the textures of things as part of their
being, inseparable from their weight: the relative roughness of earthenware, the feel of a glaze,
the hardness and coolness of metal; here the sensing instruments are the fingertips.
The scale of the body is not like other scales, because sensibility is unique to it. Still life is
engaged with the difficult issue of recuperating those moments of life forgotten because their
ordinariness — their haptic physicality — consigned them to the background, accenting the
spectacular. Still life gives the self over to that ground of existence in the act of interpretation,
tossing aside the telescope of the victors who wrote history for the kaleidoscope of those who
simply survived living. Only supersensibility can make idealism feasible as a project. The task is
to find wonder and meaning in all things ordinary, conceding an equal respect and
responsibility for the regular, that is, the natural.

Symbolism: The Subject’s Access to History

Our access to history is through sensations conveyed by those subjects in those art works which
have survived their own history, through their symbolic affects, and not as conceptual and ideal:
the Law is first and always the law of desire, and its secret key is specificity.

No-one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended for you. I am now
going to shut it. — Franz Kafka, The Trial

The still life painting is a work in which historical time (in its deconstructive aspect) is
recollected rhythmically as the regenerative time of mythology, ensphering allegory back into
symbol. The power of the still life fiction is used to reveal one story from another in
replacement of a anarchic list of concatenated events. In this sense, fiction is superior to our
idea of history, for it has already internally forged the links which make it a true daughter of
memory, whereas progressive history, like physics, plays on a material causality which — as

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Tolstoy’s work suggests — is in its fundamental depths simply undifferentiated ‘world.’ Even
were the phenomenal world illusory, it is most remarkable for its recurrent and consistent
perceptible patterns of order, repetition not only in space but also in time. The purpose of
myth is to reveal that order; that of contemporary historiography is to bury it beneath a causal
and determinist materialism. Given the ancestral choice between a transcendental determinism
and an immanent one, we have inherited the latter.
What can the still life offer to psychoanalysis, the science of the domestic history of the self?
The fundamental flaw in the foundation of psychoanalytic theory is this: it is a genetic aspect of
teleological Modernist idealism. Psychoanalysis is founded on the notion of a scientific method
of improvement of the human condition through gnosis. It is thoroughly entrenched in a
medieval world view which is religious in essence — and thus articulates ‘tomorrow will be
better than today’ as a mantra in a world which nostalgically concedes the power of the past in
historicist endeavour. ‘Know thyself’ becomes empirical knowledge of the past only in order to
rationally diagnose the future, de-emphasizing human potential for change even as it privileges
this potential as humanity’s nascent moment.
Historical knowledge relies on repetition even as conquest relies on the vanquished, the kind of
repetition intended in Marx’ averral that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, and then as farce.
The ‘presencing’ of historical objects is a type of recirculation which requires deeper attention.
This is the kind of repetition of circumstance which only the still life painting can invert into an
existential affirmation, whereby the domesticity of history transcends its impenetrability. This is
done through the establishment of symbolic language as a mode of translating experience and
thus of communicating emotional content. The contextuality of symbolism is an invaluable
position from which to examine the iconographic programme of the still life in its relation to
history:

The deeper ‘layers’ of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into
darkness. ‘Lower down,’ that is to say as they approach the autonomous functional systems, they
become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body’s materiality, i.e.,
in chemical substances. The body’s carbon is simply carbon. Hence, ‘at bottom’ the psyche is simply
‘world.’ In this sense I hold Kerényi to be right when he says that in the symbol the world itself is
speaking. The more archaic and ‘deeper,’ that is the more physiological the symbol is, the more
collective and universal, the more material it is. The more abstract, differentiated and specific it is, and
the more its nature approximates to conscious uniqueness and individuality, the more it sloughs off its
universal character. Having finally attained full consciousness, it runs the risk of becoming a mere allegory
which nowhere oversteps the bounds of conscious comprehension, and is then exposed to all sorts of
rationalistic and therefore inadequate explanation. — C.G. Jung

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At the end of this century where science has allegorized history, ‘Know thyself’ translates into,
‘Know the world.’ The contemporary quest to recover mystery as a haptic or visceral
experience in order to overcome the problems of positive historiography, suggests that the gift
of the unknown might be the last detour toward salvation. In the Hayward, I gazed into Henri
Matisse’s beautifully coloured Blue Window, its very blueness a promise of something secret at
large: but there, in the roundest of blue trees, nature was already at work on the surface,
cracking the oil paint, like the glaze on an old and precious vessel no longer useful but only
beautiful. On our side of the window: Who is that bronzed divinity whose head stares back at
us? Is that great rose his heart which now grows elsewhere? The magic is still at work in and
through the medium of the sensible world.

Matisse’s Goldfish and Palette of 1914 shows an evanescent fullness of blank space. How one’s
eyes are drawn to the contemplation of those goldfish rendered in crimson and scarlet, in their
pale jar. But even here I could fix myself on nothing beyond the passion of its miraginous
chiasm, for they swim in a heavy cross of black and white, and their contemplative circular
motion stills itself to become the wounds in the side of a crucified divinity. Does Matisse’s still
life painting disclose through its own extinction his suspicion of the death of metaphor —

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where symbol remains forever concealed within the earthly hinge of the object — which will
ever be mistaken for its intended meaning?

Authority: You Can Run But You Can’t Hide.

The Socratic compulsion to ‘know thyself’ underpins the province of historical knowledge, but
psychoanalysis as a redemptive form is ever too-late. It displaces the emphasis of education
from a connection to a remedial process of reconnection: it is predicated on the factor of
original sin, of transgression as a violent mode of entry into the unconscious mind. It further
establishes the position, today tenable only with great self-effacement, that the will is not
triumphant, that man is not ‘master in his own house’ — in radical conflict with the scientific
ideal in post-theological values. Only by seeking out the strangeness within the self, an
uncanny strangeness resident in obliterated corners of oneself and unresponsive to rational
anatomization, can wholeness be attained. In this struggle the methodologies of post-
structuralist thought and phenomenological hermeneutics differ only in degree, and not in
kind.
In the oracular triad of exhortations, ‘know thyself’ has been sequestered from ‘thou art’ and
‘nothing to excess.’ The Delphic philosophical edifice is constructed through a dialectical
process in which communication is the sine qua non of civilized life. A fundamental
misunderstanding of the aims of psychoanalysis gives to the solitude of the alienated modern
an alibi to communicate only with itself, which at best consists of a monologue of messages
sent by the dreamer to the real world, and at worst ends in a chasm in which the self’s relations
with the real world are severed: existence through a two-way mirror. The still life reminds us:
things are as they appear.
The difficulty in accepting the majority of the Sensation works as legitimate communications,
not to mention ‘authentic,’ is not merely a question of subject matter or craft but a lack of
conscience: the innate incompleteness of their process of thought. Critical art works necessarily
must be self-critical to include themselves in the world, and the finality of death as a topic
prescribes a closure of the circle not apparent in the conceptual framework of these pieces. A
fundamental intellectual laziness underlies the lack of rigour in much of the Sensation work. The
criticism within these pieces is analytical only, an incision into the body of the problem of art in
order to find order, which remains vacant, a rhetorical question where it should be a riddle. For
a riddle’s cosmogonic form already implies an answer in the asking of the question, a synthetic
answer which redemptively overcomes the structure of the riddle itself.
In order for criticism not to end in sterility, in apathy and resignation, and ultimately mere
simulation, it is necessary that a germ of resuscitation be maintained even in the process of

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death and decay. For it is even in the notion of death itself that this can happen, as long as
death is not denied its own currency, as it is in Damien Hirst’s work The Physical Impossibility of
Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991. This is an assemblage of a dead tiger shark, 5%
formaldehyde solution, glass and steel, measuring 213 x 518 x 213 cm. The shark floats in its
aquarium tank, its skin patently corrupt and putrid despite its chemical preservation.

In this world beyond death that is staged, everything is like life, its exact image. But it is imperceptibly
separated by a thin black layer, the lining [la doublure]. — Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth

The shark is dead: long live the shark. It is not dead in the natural sense. It is dead in the same
way that the objects displayed in a still life painting are dead, as nature morte. Taken out of its
natal or natural context, but not yet returned to the cycle of death and rebirth in nature, the
shark can persist only as a formal object.
In his aquaria in the Royal Academy, Hirst has reified the glass picture plane of perspectival
space, but blocked our prospective vision. There is no probability of a physical engagement, a
sensible knowledge, in the exclusiveness of the work. We are granted no access to its
kinaesthetic spatial reality, because even if the shark is revived in imagination, its physical

Plato’s Case: Still Life, Vanitas, and Nature Morte Winton Page 14 of 19
constraints are all too proximate. Due to the nature of its breathing apparatus, the shark is an
animal which must keep moving forward or else die. Is post-perspectival art a dead shark?
The erotic nature of life exists in the recirculation of vital energy, and things removed from that
circuit perish in relation to the living. The real interest of this nature morte would be not after its
denatured ‘natural’ death, but after its death as a unmoved and unmoving ‘work of art.’ The
Saatchi artworks are not labours of subsistence; they are a schema of excess as abjection. So
the question the works should demand of themselves is, when the economy of circulation is
revived outside of the restrictions of the gallery zone and commodity market, what happens to
the formaldehyde-soaked carcass of a tiger shark on the London municipal garbage heap?
Toward the artists involved then I turn analogically the same question.

Sensation: Ghosts and the Physical Impossibility of Death

CHARLES SAATCHI began collecting art in the early 1970s and has since built up one of the
largest collections of contemporary art in the world. In 1985 Saatchi founded his own private
museum, the Saatchi gallery, located in a vast space once used as a paint factory in St. John’s
Wood. [...] The gallery also inaugurated an ongoing series of shows focusing on young British
artists, of whom Charles Saatchi has since become the single most important patron.
Leaving aside the ironies of Saatchi’s patronage — the obsolescence of paint factories, for
example — we must turn to see how Saatchi has analogically constituted himself as an artist in
and through the methodologies of his entourage. The commodification of art in terms of
international economic markets has made the work of art itself into something parenthesized
by its exchange-value, an exchange-value moreover unrelated to its — ultimately indiscernible
— relative use-value. But this mysterious use-value is itself reconstituted by the economy of
exchange, in the artist himself. By denoting culture — alluding to it through its absence from a
viewpoint which is compulsively external — rather than recreating it, the work refers to the final
ineffability of cultural works.
The title of the show, Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, contains a
clue to what is really taking place in the space of the gallery. In fact, it is not art works which are
on exhibition here, but Young British Artists from Charles Saatchi’s collection. The art works, like
Rachel Whiteread’s house and bathtub, are now only standing in for the absent artists
themselves. A photographic reprise of their last supper.
Many of the artists in ‘Sensation’ question the Modernist notion of authorship and authenticity
in their work.

Plato’s Case: Still Life, Vanitas, and Nature Morte Winton Page 15 of 19
Despite the manifest statement, I find no work in the Sensation collection which does not
display an authorial name and date, and some of the works are further biographic. But under
the circumstances, what are these artists’ names doing here? Like Damien Hirst’s dead shark
and his aggregation of fish isolated in formaldehyde solution, the artist is collected by the
patron, Charles Saatchi: packaged, preserved, and set on display, names weeping loudly for
the voiceless works. Engagement with the world is impossible on either the near or the far side
of the picture plane; only autobiological psychoanalysis remains. The tragedy of this show is
that it reduces the artist to the subject of the work, reductio ad absurdum bringing a close to
the Expressionist project. This is most explicit in the work by Marc Quinn entitled Self, a self-
portrait bust created from eight pints of the artist’s own blood, frozen into shape. Commodified
I am dead; long live Charles Saatchi. The whole exhibition is his vanitas.
Is it a historicist nostalgia for the Modern
condition that makes art-production still cling
perspectivally to a constant craving for the
new: a French Revolution in every bathtub,
an Oedipal miscarriage of justice in every
family portrait? The obscenity of the object,
and the resulting pornographic and guilty
gaze of the viewer, results in an undermining
of the aim of art which is a characterization of
the purpose of life. Art whose intention has
been deliberately obstructed from within by
its own rules cannot become a
communicative medium, but can only result
in unspecifically denoting its own inability to
communicate — a most uneconomical and
fruitless mechanism.
The circulation of the art work in the
international market differs from the energy which circulates things in the world as a constant
process of renewal in becoming. The art market’s commerce is as if from above; it is historical,
perspectival. In the world of things in erotic transformation the metamorphosis of energy can
never be controlled by an act of will: it can only be given at an unspecified moment when the
object reveals itself as a gift. On the other hand, the commerce of a non-communicative art
obstructed by volition must necessarily look to the models of war:

Plato’s Case: Still Life, Vanitas, and Nature Morte Winton Page 16 of 19
Stranger against stranger, at every level a violence without language is demonstrated in the
human body as it is depicted in the Sensation show. Fragmented, mutilated, perverted,
disconnected, out of scale, incomplete, anonymous, violated, humiliated, and dead: the body
is exiled from mythology and tyrannized by history. Could it be that in Sensation we have
become willing victims of this war, accepting psychoanalytic dictum in what Nietzsche termed a
slave-morality, (rather than an aspiration to self-mastery,) a programme recalling all the
mortification of religion without any of its advantages? A governmentally authorized ‘culture of
differences’ inscribes all of us as victims of the destructive colonizing embrace, not primarily of
chauvinism, nor master-race, but the international style of late twentieth century capitalism —
a obdurate interpretation of human nature, man-made without inspiration, emptied of
redemptive potential.
Saatchi, by an process analogous to that of the artists in his collection, on their terms has
become an artist himself through displaying them — his little human interjections into history
— at that preservation of British art and culture, the Royal Academy. In that sense, the works on
display also confirm the desire of their sponsor, Christie’s, that contemporary art be historically
created and constituted by the flow of capital, and that within that flow the creative — and
even recreative and self-creative — human being is necessarily reproduced as a manipulable
commodity like any other object, like a post-Byzantine divinity reduced to a pantomime. Where
can the viewer be located in this ungrounded continuum, and what role if any is left to this
observing subject? Is his task to resurrender the totality which the artist has failed to convey?
The act of interpretation becomes sublimated or supra-sensible; it is not in the real-world
surfaces of appearance, but invisibly, inside the rotting belly of dead things, that the work’s
meaning waits like Schroedinger’s cat.
Earlier still lifes could close down that accelerated fluidity of infinite exchange — an exchange
without ethical parameters — delaying the deferral of meaning in the observer’s visceral
response to the representations of the objects in the articulated field. On this threshold, before
this blank wall, the reciprocity between the viewer and the artist’s work results in a mutual
corroboration of human creativity and the subtleties of dwelling, in a present in which the
rhythmic background of history surfaces like layers of tinctured oil paint, individually reflecting
the light and collectively intensifying the hue. What a different attitude toward technique and
sensibility can thicken the recording moment of delay in the object’s circulation:

What engages him [Zurbarán] is the sense of touch and the action of hands upon matter. [...] Every vessel
records and dramatises the history of its manufacture. [...] These are forms which passing from one set of
hands, carefully direct the hands of those who will later touch and lift them. — Norman Bryson, Looking
at the Overlooked

Plato’s Case: Still Life, Vanitas, and Nature Morte Winton Page 17 of 19
Sensation is, in contrast to the still life, a show of lifeless things which yet survive, suspended
with neither programme nor provisional direction — sense. Objects which cannot diffuse
through their surfaces lie enframed, parenthesized, decontextualized in search of an internal
logic, one that does not rely on relation to the external world. This is a formal logic, an art in
which the artist is obligated neurotically to repeat only what appears to oppress him. Is this
echo at a loss for possible words, blinded by the end of perspective, a blocked axis which is no
longer a window to the future, yet neither a mirror to the past? The human body is at war
against its traces of memory, against its sensual nature. Saatchi’s artists themselves have
deemed impossible a transcendence of the world, the artist, or the subject matter. Their
narcissism becomes a psychoanalysis of the dead.
Art derives all of its means from nature; it is a sparrow who can fly higher than the eagle only if
it is perched on the eagle’s back. In his evolutionary theory of biology, Charles Darwin used a
revolutionary idea of history — as a history of exceptions — to confuse the philosophical issue
as to whether nature is a model of critical or uncritical reproduction, and consigned to this
disenchanted reproductive force the power to overthrow art. Traces of memory in nature are
not the same as the construction of memory in culture. The resulting fruitlessness in art, our
sphere of communication with the world in which we live, has left us solipsistically stranded on
a fragile planet in an insignificant galaxy, in an universe which science fiction alleges to be as
hostile as science alleges it to be infinite, inhospitable, and without meaning. Art continues to
model our loss: we have been seduced and abandoned.
Communication is a gift over which no individual holds power: to this the tortured body attests
through muteness and through suffering. In losing the possibility of a dimension of
transcendence over the natural world, the potential for the work of art to describe or propose
possible worlds, alternative models whose modes of vision are visionary, other, or ideal,
fictional in the most sublime sense, is also lost.
History’s perspectivity can fashion idealism, but to live in the present one must learn to
relinquish historicism’s fear of the unknown. To remain idealistic would require a constant
dialectical process in which the subject at every moment reassesses and reconstructs his values
and ideals in a rhythm of engaged sensibility and detached reflection, delaying at every
threshold to reorient himself before projecting through it. The still life painting exists in this
receptive moment of delay; it is the threshold itself.
We need idealism: it is part of our humanity, but we cannot afford it on Plato’s terms. A
persistent insensibility to the gifts of the phenomenal world which immediately enfolds us has
deprived us of that luxury, an insensibility reinforced by the decadent conceptual aspect of art

Plato’s Case: Still Life, Vanitas, and Nature Morte Winton Page 18 of 19
apparent in the Sensation show. Patron, artists, visitors, critics: all of us are idlers in the garden
of knowledge. In a shackled world of representation without ethical ideals we are yet forced
into a position where a ensnarement in sheer relativism arrests any possibility for the authentic
act, for critical judgement, for the avowal of life. For pain is as much an affirmation as wonder.
Senselessness is not.

Notes
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science. New York: Vintage 1974 p. 333

2 Hayward brochure, Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life

3 Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting. London: Reaktion
1995, p. 120

4 Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Duino Elegies” in Rilke, London: Everyman’s Library 1996 p. 165
5 Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting. London: Reaktion
1995, p. 71-2

6 Franz Kafka, The Trial. New York: Schocken 1964 p. 215

7 C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton: Bollingen 1980 p. 173

8 Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel. p. 85
9 “In the last ten years, most of the Toronto artists who were ostracized by the gallery scene
turned to working in still life.” (Conversation with David Groff, Toronto.)

10 Royal Academy of Arts brochure, Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection

11 Royal Academy of Arts brochure, Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection

12 Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting. London: Reaktion
p. 71

Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

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