Chance Meetings of Umbrellas with Sewing-Machines: Some Reflections on the Object, the Table

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Torsten Weimarck

Still Life Symposium

Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

3.4. 1995

CHANCE MEETINGS OF UMBRELLAS WITH SEWING-MACHINES: SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE OBJECT, THE TABLE,

AND THE TABLEAU IN 20TH CENTURY ART.

This paper was written before I saw the objects of this splendid exhibition in real life, so to speak, butI have been asked to address some aspects of the interest in the object and in the site where it is often encountered, the table, as evidenced in 20th century art. There are some very illuminative examples of this in the exhibition, for instance the works by George Segal and Charles Ray. The encounter referred to in the title of my paper goes back to the French poet Comte de Lautréamont’s famous simile in Les Chants de Maldoror from 1869. Here he describes an unexpected aesthetic experience arising from the chance encounter of two everyday objects:

”beau…comme le rencontre fortuite sur une table de dissection d’une machine à coudre et d’un paraplui.”

That is:

”beautiful…as the chance meeting upon a dissection table of a sewing-machine with an umbrella.”

There are a couple of reasons for my choosing this image as my starting-point. Since the turn of the century this obscurely suggestive simile has been used—more or less out of context—as a symbol of artistic modernity and avant-gardism, often with little concern for the meaning of the poetic image. Its effect seems to consist in the disturbing spark which is ignited when one imagines how two completely different objects—the umbrella and the sewing-machine—come into this attracting, magnetic contact. This is not ordinary symbolic language, it is a poetry of (or with) objects, where the things themselves —and not the words— are the actors. It is the things in all their material tangibility that are the significant elements. It is not a question of a literary or symbolic meeting; what takes place in the simile happens in the same way as in reality, in a metaphoric model of reality. The strange thing is that it eventually proves to be similar to reality; indeed, even identical with it.

To recover or to give a new shape to reality, to—in other words—create reality, appears to be the task of every generation of artists. Doing so not only with the help of symbols, images and shapes, but with the objects themselves with their deep roots in other epistemological and existential contexts than those that prevail now, has been an important component of the avant-gardism of the 20th century.

This exhibition offers varying and plentiful material for a study of the important role that the object plays in contemporary art. This can be seen as a continuation of the classic tradition of the still life, where the objects are drawn from nature, that is to say the way they look in real life. But there is also a difference in kind, since the artists have discovered that they do not have to make a detour via the depicted object; they can use the object as it is, ready made. Here a world is staged where the objects appear to be re-animated, by impulses and factors of a social or psychological character, sometimes even by will. It is an artificial world which at first may seem like a playful and ironic parallel to reality, but which, if we take a closer look, cannot be distinguished from reality. This is just how reality must be.

The object—as distinguished from the traditional sculpture— is often described as something taken from everyday life, but removed from its normal framework and given an aesthetic dimension. To that extent object art is still based on a classically academic reductionist aesthetics, which it certainly denies often enough by declaring itself to be an anti-art. It would appear, then, that the object can be included in the system of art theory if we do not regard the actual mechanical producing or reproducing as that which constitutes art, but rather stress the epistemological and experiential aspects of the work of art or the aesthetic object.

As for the ontological pre-history of the object it is possible to encounter types of objects not only in modern art but also in the ancient world on that level of reality where the aesthetic, profane object is constituted and where it is separated from the sacred or the magic. In this context the object might be seen as a thing which is temporarily removed from its usual framework and separated from the cosmic context in which all things and living beings have their place. A fetish or an ancestral image might be considered an object in this sense of the word during the period up to its consecration, that is to say while it is being commissioned, produced by the artisan, inspected and approved by the customer. The purpose of this object-like state is to demonstrate the artisan’s skill to the watchful customer, who, consciously or unconsciously, adopts an aesthetic point of view, that is to say he observes and evaluates the shape and the texture of the product. Seen with the perpetually aestethizing eyes of our time, such a temporarily profane object would not appear to be a part of the universal whole but rather a thing, a thing among more and more things.

The specific characteristics of the object have developed against the background of a long tradition of differentiating and distinguishing with sometimes varying purposes. There were for instance the Wunderkammern, the collections of curious artefacts and natural-history specimens, and the things depicted in the classic still life. However, between the years 1880 and 1915 it was apparently established on a more specific level of reality. - Look at Cézanne, Picasso and Braque, Matisse, Vlaminck, etc, and observe this profound break with an old tradition of depictions.

The genesis of the object—even in its more anti-traditional and oppositional forms—can be associated with the differentiation and reification manifesting itself during the 19th century in a general and far-reaching scientific ideology which had its roots in the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century. It was a matter of an objectification based on scientific definitions of the things observed. A profane, factual, objective and positivistic philosophy developed. In the field of art it found expression in realism, even naturalism, using both casts and photographs. Various techniques for reproducing pictures, sculptures and articles for everyday use were invented.

It is against this background (and at the same time as a far-reaching romantic protest against it) that we should see Rodin (according to Rosalind Krauss, among others) and, in the field of painting, Cézanne (according to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for instance) and their striving after embodying the work of art in an object or an actual mass in an actual space, that is in an actual rooom. One might wonder why, during the turn of the century, artists took a special interest in objects possessing this incontrovertible density, this absolute facticity, which seems to be present in the works of for instance these artists. The object art of the 20th century is in many ways the consequence of these experiments and these needs.

The modern—profane—correspondence to consecration can be said to be staged when a thing moves in the opposite direction and is turned into an object. This can happen when a thing is taken out of its accustomed sphere, whether religious, functional, commercial —or perhaps even institutionally artistic—and instead starts to be seen in the same amused and astonished way as that in which Duchamp regarded his bicycle wheel assemblage or ready-mades such as the bottle rack and the shovel. Since he had not made the objects himself his interest was directed at the conceptual dimensions of his own act of perception.

By means of Duchamp’s transformation of these slightly manipulated utility goods into objects, they seem to lose–or, better, be liberated from— their ability to be something other than themselves, to transcend themselves. The object is, at least for a moment, transformed into matter, mass, form and colour, in that it is taken out of use, removed from the intentions of the producer and the user. The old life of the object has been discontinued.

It is strange to see how this reification of the object gradually seems to lead to a new point of departure for the relation between man and his surroundings. It appears to be charged with meaning, a thing to concentrate on and meditate on, and hence also an object for projection. But now it is not only a matter of how the thing looks (or in the case of articles for everyday use, of their technical construction and their form), now it is a matter of physical authority, a profane undeniable presence and weight. Its fluid, amorphous and processual meaning is created in an all-embracing encounter between its own matter and the surrounding world. It is no longer tied to a specific technical function (in the case of an article for everyday use) or to the “meaning,” “mind,” or “story” of the individual creator, which in the traditional narrative sculpture could be read through a material which was regarded as being quasi-transparent. Instead it is the creating experience of the perceiver which produces the sense of presence and the more or less temporary meaning of the object, and hence also the meaning of the observer's own reality.

The reality of the object connects it with that of the observer as an image in the original, elementary sense of the word: a close relative, indeed a twin of the observer, according to an old etymology, contested but beautiful and memorable. This means that the object of our knowledge and experience cannot be the “sense” or the “meaning” of a sculpture, but rather the totality of image and object which is realized by the observer’s experiences, traditions, and dreams. Thus it must to a certain extent be changeable, fluid, tied to the locus, the occasion, the individual, and the context. And so I want to stress that which is nominalistic, not translatable, and not repeatable, the primacy of living and perceiving, at the expense of the calculable function and that which can be handed over.

However, most objects have a kind of conceptual basis, a history of function and purpose of a social and psychological kind which cannot be disregarded and which strikes a more or less specific chord in the observing subject. The sewing-machine’s chance meeting with the umbrella in Lautréamont has probably often been seen as above all a provoking image of absurdity in relation to a more rational world-view, rather than as a specific encounter. And perhaps we have not asked ourselves why he chose precisely these objects. At the same time it is obvious that the simile refers to a certainly complicated, but after all what must be regarded as an amorous meeting between a male and a female principle, a significant confrontation or union with its origin in depth psychology.

In Au-delà de la peinture (1936) Max Ernst speaks of Lautréamont’s suggestive simile as a verbal counterpart of the collage or the assemblage, “this alchemy of the visual image”, as he calls it. He goes on:

”I am tempted to see in collage the exploitation of the chance meeting of two distant realities on an unfamiliar plane, or, to use a shorter term, the culture of systematic displacement and its effects.”

In a draft he states that this is a matter of:

”the exploiting of the fortuitous encounter upon a non-suitable plane of two mutually distant realities (this being a paraphrase and generalization of the celebrated Lautréamont quotation, “Beautiful as the chance meeting upon a dissecting table of a sewing-machine with an umbrella”) or, to use a more handy expression, the cultivation of the effects of a systematic putting out of place…”

Max Ernst rather seems to stress the importance of bringing about some kind of confusion with the alchemical method of the collage, the importance of the “systematic putting out of place.” That is, things are moved and mixed, taken out of their usual contexts to become part of new constellations and thus reveal new connections, even a new universe. In the matter of words, images, and things object art makes use of chance as an epistemological method which is more important than the commando philosophy of rational thinking. The point of departure is the fundamental discontent with the prevailing monopoly on truth and reality.

After possibly accepting that important and evident poetic connections between everyday objects can be created, or that there may be characteristic psychological or symbolical connections between them, then one might observe with a shiver that there are actually not only poetical but also historical connnections between the umbrella and the sewing-machine. It is even possible that Lautréamont himself might have known of these through his absent-minded, dreamy leafing through illustrated magazines such as Magasinpittoresque, these being important sources of his poetic images. That in fact sewing-machines were used to make umbrellas as early as the 1850s is easy to forget. Or is it a case of reality imitating poetry? Obviously Man Ray was aware of this!

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Lautréamont speaks not only of the sewing-machine and the umbrella, but also of the place for their fortuitous meeting. This is stated in a manner which is as matter-of-fact as it is concrete: a dissection table. What kind of poetic logic might lie behind his choice of such a special and macabre object as a dissection table?

Of course one can only guess, but the dissection and observation table dates back to the early days of classic natural science and was in fact a revolutionary image-producing and knowledge-producing machine. The anatomical dissection table took over the construction and the function of the old academic lectern. In both cases objects were placed there to be read; in the old days the texts of the authorities, later the natural object. The dissection and observation table turned into a reproduction-machine, as was particularly evident when it was placed in a dissecting-theater. The classical dissecting-theater was built like a steeply sloping amphi-theatre. It looked like a telescope–a gigantic instrument for producing scientific knowledge. The table with its horizontal surface, which often could be raised or lowered or slanted in order to improve the sharpness of the image and the illumination of the object as if in a microscope, forms together with the vertical line of gravitation the basis of the system of co-ordinates with whose help the objects could be observed and described in a theoretical, analytical-geometrical universe, where the old body-related metaphors had been dissolved.

The dissection table on which the natural object is placed is not only the basis of the discourse of the lancet, but also of the investigating and interpreting eye. They both divide the object in accordance with a specific code. This table is also to be found as the basis of other types of observation, for instance the table or stage upon which artists placed the physical object of their pictures in order to be able to study its extension and position when it was dematerialized and transformed into a two-dimensional surface of signs in a pictorially calculated space. This is how it is described by for instance Leon Battista Alberti and Piero della Francesca in their theories of perspective from the first half of the 15th century, theories which were later systematized and disseminated by above all Dürer. There are some displays in the exhibition which have a bearing on this. Alberti speaks of the picture and depicting as a virtual cross-section through the visual pyramid which emates from the observing eye. It is an unbloody and incorporeal, visual section which brings forth the observed body as a geometrical projection, in fact as a construction for the sake ofvisual aid, created by the surfaces of the visual pyramid. In ancient times the body had been regarded as being unlimited, merging with its surroundings, while the anatomical, visual body is produced, even projected by the illuminating light of rational knowledge. Its cool beams penetrate and fill that which is dark and hidden, separating the body from its surroundings, separating one body from the others. Thus the theory of perspective appears to be the epistemological counterpart of anatomy; the former concentrates on the outward extension of the body and its relation to the surrounding space, the other makes a section not only through the visual pyramid but also through the physical, natural body, so that its depth and dark interior pushes up to the surface light.

In classic natural science the table top is designated as a tabula anatomica, an anatomical table. But tabula anatomica also means an anatomical picture or tableau, and it seems to be in the nature of the table top to transform the objects which are placed on top of it into pictures, tableaus. This is for instance true of a human body, which by being placed on the table is transformed into an anatomical atlas, a strange, self-demonstrating map of itself, a picture, that is. The body loses its tangible, physical mass and its instantaneous changeability, it is dematerialized and turned into a plastic picture, a physiological message. Correspondingly, an object is often seen exclusively in terms of its technical and practical function. In modernist art it is perhaps transformed into pure form. In all these cases it is a matter of a carefully calculated functional reductionism.