Still Life; or, the Return to Things—What Things?

Abstract

Here we seek to respond to the renewed interest that still life enjoys today: to draw out its symptomatic value, which would make still life the point of determination, within art history’s discourse, of the broader return to things now unfolding across diverse fields—from philosophy to anthropology. To return to things would thus mean to return to the object. Yet it is precisely by refusing to let the concept of the thing collapse into the indeterminacy of an object that still life may be reimagined anew—once we attend to its profoundly domestic dimension, where “house” signifies less a building than possession, one’s own place, one’s domain, one’s home. In this way, still life is restored to its appropriative vocation, against the descriptive logics that so often provide its theoretical frame. It is a way of displacing the discourse of objectification and the discourses of “scientific observation” in favour of another, far more ancient perspective: that of domestic economy. Conceived as the regulation of one’s own goods, the ordering of the things of the household, domestic economy would then offer, in a sense, the theoretical formula for what seems to take place in the anthropological depths of still life: a pictorial art of tidying, arranging, disposing—an entire art of the home.