Still Life | ScienceGate

Kerstin Thomas revaluates the famous dispute between Martin Heidegger, Meyer Schapiro, and Jacques Derrida, concerning a painting of shoes by Vincent Van Gogh. The starting point for this dispute was the description and analysis of things and artworks developed in his essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art”. In discussing Heidegger’s account, the art historian Meyer Schapiro’s main point of critique concerned Heidegger’s claim that the artwork reveals the truth of equipment in depicting shoes of a peasant woman and thereby showing her world. Schapiro sees a striking paradox in Heidegger’s claim for truth, based on a specific object in a specific artwork while at the same time following a rather metaphysical idea of the artwork. Kerstin Thomas proposes an interpretation, which exceeds the common confrontation of philosophy versus art history by focussing on the respective notion of facticity at stake in the theoretical accounts of both thinkers. Schapiro accuses Heidegger of a lack of concreteness, which he sees as the basis for every truth claim on objects. Thomas understands Schapiro’s objections as motivated by this demand for a facticity, which not only includes the work of art, but also investigator in his concrete historical perspective. Truth claims under such conditions of facticity are always relative to historical knowledge, and open to critical intervention and therefore necessarily contingent. Following Thomas, Schapiro’s critique shows that despite his intention of giving the work of art back its autonomy, Heidegger could be accused of achieving quite the opposite: through the abstraction of the concrete, the factual, and the given to the type, he actually sets the self and the realm of knowledge of the creator as absolute and not the object of his knowledge. Instead, she argues for a revaluation of Schapiro’s position with recognition of the arbitrariness of the artwork, by introducing the notion of factuality as formulated by Quentin Meillassoux. Understood as exchange between artist and object in its concrete material quality as well as with the beholder, the truth of painting could only be shown as radically contingent. Thomas argues that the critical intervention of Derrida who discusses both positions anew is exactly motivated by a recognition of the contingent character of object, artwork and interpretation. His deconstructive analysis can be understood as recognition of the dynamic character of things and hence this could be shown with Meillassoux to be exactly its character of facticity – or factuality.

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Tobacco’s Appeal to the Senses and the Early Modern Smoker’s Still Life

10.31338/2657-6015ik.29.4 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 123-150

Author(s):

Julia Saviello

Keyword(s):

Still Life ◽

Sense Data ◽

Complex Image ◽

Starting Point ◽

Depth Analysis ◽

Tobacco Pipes ◽

Five Senses ◽

The Senses ◽

Cut Tobacco ◽

Selection Of

Smell and taste – of the five senses these are the two most strongly stimulated by smoking tobacco. The article presents an in-depth analysis of the reflection of both these forms of sensory perception in textual and visual sources concerning the early consumption of the herb. In a first step, tobacco’s changing reception, first as medicine and then as stimulant, is traced through the years of its increasing distribution in Europe, starting in the middle of the 16th century. As this overview reveals, at that time the still little known substance gave rise to new forms of sense perception. Following recent studies on smell and gustation, which have stressed the need to take into account the interactions between these senses, the article probes the manifold stimulation of the senses by tobacco with reference to allegorical representations and genre scenes addressing the five senses. The smoking of tobacco was thematized in both of these art forms as a means of visualizing either smell or taste. Yet, these depictions show no indication of any deliberate engagement with the exchange of sense data between mouth and nose. The question posed at the end of this paper is whether this holds true also for early smoker’s still lifes. In the so-called toebakjes or rookertjes, a subgenre of stilllife painting that, like tobacco, was still a novelty at the beginning of the 17th century, various smoking paraphernalia – such as rolled or cut tobacco, pipes and tins – are arrayed with various kinds of foods and drinks. Finally, the article addresses a selection of such smoker’s still lifes, using the toebakje by Pieter Claesz., probably the first of its kind, as a starting point and the work by Georg Flegel as a comparative example. Through their selection of objects, both offer a complex image of how tobacco engages different senses.

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Still Life & Other Stories

10.31979/etd.e6jy-zsj5 ◽

2013 ◽

Author(s):

Amanda Catherine Moore

Keyword(s):

Still Life

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الطبيعة الصامتة في التصوير المصري المعاصر (Still Life in Egyptian Contemporary Painting)

SSRN Electronic Journal ◽

10.2139/ssrn.3401454 ◽

2005 ◽

Author(s):

Hala Ibrahim Mohamed Elsaed

Keyword(s):

Still Life ◽

Contemporary Painting

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James Joyce: Portrait and Still Life

Arion ◽

10.2307/arion.24.1.0087 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 24 (1) ◽

pp. 87

Author(s):

Marianne McDonald

Keyword(s):

James Joyce ◽

Still Life

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The Afterlife of Art and Objects

10.1093/oso/9780190873875.003.0006 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

James Tweedie

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Historical Narratives ◽

Still Life ◽

Art Cinema ◽

Spanish Baroque ◽

Late Twentieth ◽

Moving Pictures ◽

Tableau Vivant ◽

The Relationship ◽

Late Twentieth Century

Like the tableau vivant, the cinematic still life experienced a stunning revival and reinvention in the late twentieth century. In contrast to the stereotypically postmodern overload of images, the still life in film initiates a moment of repose and contemplation within a medium more often defined by the forward rush of moving pictures. It also involves a profound meditation on the relationship between images and objects consistent with practices as diverse as the Spanish baroque still life and the Surrealist variation on the genre. With the work of Terence Davies and Alain Cavalier’s Thérèse (1986) as its primary touchstones, this chapter situates this renewed interest in the cinematic still life within the context of both the late twentieth-century cinema of painters and a socially oriented art cinema that focuses on marginal people and overlooked objects rather than the hegemonic historical narratives also undergoing a revival at the time.

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