Still life - on the move
Posted: 10 May 2010 | By: Patricia Anderson - Editor
Our May issue has a particular focus on the art of still life - and it is by no means confined to painting. Alexander Seton, for example, has carved teddy bears and collapsed soccer balls from Carrara marble. This honours a tradition which goes back thousands of years and found some its most profound expressions in Greek and Roman statuary, but at the same time he is playing with what we know of the objects he releases from stone and what we know about his material - with skill and wit.
A New Zealand counterpart, Joe Sheehan, has done something not dissimilar with jade - or greenstone, as the New Zealand varieties of this stone are known. His carving of a now defunct offering from our culture - the cassette tape - in translucent jade restores, after a fashion, its life. Jade is extremely tough, obliging the artisan to grind away at it, rather than carve it, so this material has its own particular challenge, one which the cultures of China from Neolithic times onwards understood perfectly.
aAR also looks at the intricately composed photographs of Robyn Stacey, who has trained her lens on the collections of Elizabeth Bay House, and the astonishing carnival of animals behaving like humans in the canvases of Kate Bergin. We also feature the crisp theatrical compositions of David Eastwood and Thornton Walker's lyrical gouaches with floating bowls. Each one of these artists has made still life the central element of their current practice.
Still life has a long history. Some observers like to say that convincing three-dimensional representation, which created the illusion of realism or naturalism on a flat surface using the principles of mathematical perspective, didn't make an appearance till the late Mediaeval period, when the likes of Giotto and Masaccio created people who were lifelike and convincing. Yet the Romans clearly had the skills to create still life in their frescoes. Take, for example, a frequently reproduced fresco of peaches and a robust clear glass jug with water in it from Herculaneum (c.AD 50). Its three-dimensional credentials may be a little shaky, but it demonstrates that there was a precedent for what became an overriding concern of many painters in the northern European lands in the seventeenth century.
And yet, as the hierarchy of the arts solidified, still life trailed well down the list after the loftier subjects of history and mythology (which meant the escapades of the Greek gods and goddesses or biblical themes) and landscape and portraiture. This did not deter (among others) Chardin, Giorgio Morandi (whose bottles huddle together like siblings in a sepia photograph) or Adriaen Coorte. Each of these painters created canvases where everyday objects are infused with some mystery - some sense of the unique - without us necessarily being able to identify what makes them so.
Spanish and Dutch painters specialised in a variety of painting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, depicting rotting fruit, snail trails, broken vessels, gutted fish and decomposing skulls. Such images belonged to a particular variety of still-life painting called memento mori (be mindful of death), which reminds us that everything now alive will soon be dead, and thus not to be too sentimental about nature, whose plan is always to recycle us on the compost heap.
Finally, there is a case to be made for the British artist and showman Damien Hirst, with his menagerie of animals floating in their own tanks of formaldehyde, being less of an iconoclastic contemporary practitioner than an artist belonging to two longstanding and venerable traditions: the preserver-embalmer and the creator of the 'still life'. There is little to separate Hirst's shark in a tank from the legendary display of racehorse Phar Lap's heart; not in its method of display, and not in its notoriety. Thus, some of the most interesting still life today, we might conclude, is right under our noses in local museums - as much as our art galleries.
