Mary keeps her 19th-century antique Haviland Limoges teacup on a built-in shelf in her living room. It is nestled next to a photo of her and her friend and a row of books on philosophy and social theory. The teacup is gold-trimmed with a garland of pink flowers in the middle. After turning it over at an antique store and seeing the prestigious “Goût de Ville” stamped on the bottom, she rushed to buy it. It was marked with authenticity and so too acts as a seal attesting to her connoisseurial acumen for nice things. Mary takes pride in curating her domestic space. It is the expression of her inner self, her interior, like a Gesamtkunstwerk of her inner life. Traces of Mary are imprinted on the objects that she so lovingly arranged throughout her home, and their configuration leaves clues to both the intended and unintended narratives of Mary’s life. As viewers of Mary’s domestic space, we are detectives to her interiority.




Objects like Mary's tell stories. This is not a radical claim. Then why is it that the genre of still life continues to get the bum’s rush when it comes to academic, curatorial, or artistic concern? Aside from some recent scholarship on modern still life, there remains a dearth of scholarly attention to the genre. Still life’s status as the lowest rung on the hierarchy of genres, first foisted on it by the academicians of the seventeenth-century Académie de peinture et de sculpture, remains steadfast despite the virtual dissolution of the Beaux Arts system. These early academicians deemed still life to be unworthy of serious consideration, both because of its form and its content. Still life's very raison d'être, its absence of any subject, was also, in their eyes, its terminal defect. Members of the academy saw the goal of painting to be to elevate one's intellectual faculties towards higher ideals. They saw the human form, when depicted in historical or religious narrative, as the apogee of artistic expression and thus essential to a good painting. Still life, on the other hand, is none of this. It is not based in narrative (at least conventionally speaking), and it depicts no human forms (again, at least conventionally speaking). It focuses instead on objects away from the human presence, albeit at times evoking it. And so these academicians deemed still life as either empty decoration or pure formalism, a self-indulgent extravagance on the part of the artist. Nonetheless, still life’s position as an outsider provides it with a distinctive perspective on the relationship between art, artist, viewer, and society. Perhaps it is not the genre’s narrative capabilities that are in question, but, rather, which kinds of, or whose, stories they tell.




The grand narratives that play out on the stage of history are performed by great figures, epic landscapes, and monumental structures. But the stories told of the everyday are the ones glistening from the pearl handle of a butter knife or those ingrained in the pine of an IKEA drop-leaf tabletop. They are the stories that are told after you get up from a meal or when you tidy up before guests arrive. They are the ones we perform daily as part of the ritual we call habitus. Still life is the genre of the domestic, the counterpart to the public sphere where our grander histories play out. It must also be noted that the domestic is the realm of the feminine, not of the productive male, but of the reproductive female. It is the realm that reproduces us, nourishes us, and where we come after a long day's work to unwind and to replenish our selfhood. And thus, it is deemed either too personal to interrogate or too lowly to examine.




These prejudices, however, have not stopped artists from making still lifes nor viewers from consuming them. I would therefore like to explore this devalued yet wide-ranging genre one painting at a time—looking at the various ways artists have told narratives of subjecthood via the absence of any subject, through chosen objects and their selective arrangements. The fictional character of Mary comes alive through just a short description of only a few objects she possesses. Knowing nothing else about her, a name becomes a person. The coded messages of Mary's domestic adornment are just as telling as her imagined public performance of self. Without the former, we are left with an incomplete picture—a partial tableau vivant of a fragmented scene. A detective doesn’t stop after surveying a suspect’s social media feed. They weave together the most intimate of clues from the pristine shine of the Limoges teacup next to the dust-covered books or the lattice residue of bubbly foam caked onto the side of a glass containing a remnant of beer. As much as we are our closest held beliefs, we are also the makeup of our material engagement. It's time to take a closer look.