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| Willem Kalf Still Life with Nautilus Cup 1662 |
Abundance
and Lack
In his essay Abundance in the volume Looking
at the Overlooked, Norman Bryson considers the ostentatious pronk still life pieces of Willem Kalf,
one of the most well-known proponents of the Dutch still life tradition. His
sumptuously laden tables are crammed with exotic foods and costly treasures,
all rendered in superb detail. The extreme opulence of the paintings, both in
their depiction and construction seems to border on the polemical. However, in
discussing such works, Bryson suggests that whilst seeming to exemplify wealth,
the meticulous painting of luxurious objects actually creates a diminuition of
meaning – nothing can be added to the value of such objects, and so Kalf’s
masterful rendering of them ultimately creates a lack:
If these objects are already masterpieces, why should they be repeated
in a second masterpiece? The duplication of elaborative work begins to point to
a process that is as endless as it is without reason; the replica indicates a
deficiency in the original object that will not be remedied by the supplement,
but contaminates it and so to speak hollows it out. (Bryson, 1990, p.126)
Richness increases until it reaches a
critical mass; the wealth of the object coupled with the wealth of the
meticulous painting results, Bryson suggests, in symbolic emptiness. He seems
to be regarding Kalf’s work as examples of simulacra – signs that, for
semioticians like Jean Baudrillard, are cut off from reference to original
meaning, and refer only to other signs.
Simulacra
In Symbolic
Exchange and Death Baudrillard discusses this effect of the transition from
the era of the obligatory sign (that which has a universal reading and a
hierarchical order) to that of the counterfeit. The counterfeit sign, by
contrast with its obligatory predecessor, is multiple, unrelated to any sort of
original sign and free-floating. Such signs have an appearance of meaning, but
can never convey what they portend:
The modern sign dreams of its predecessor, and would dearly love to
rediscover an obligation in its reference to the real. This designatory bond,
however, is only a simulacrum of symbolic obligation, producing nothing more
than neutral values which are exchanged one for the other in an objective
world. (Baudrillard, 1993, p.51)
Baudrillard’s ‘modern sign’ is one that has
become detached from its original referent and instead refers to the referent of an earlier chain of
signification, a sort of semiotic paper trail that leads only to a regression
of clues. This could be thought of in terms of Charles Sanders Peirce’s idea of
‘unlimited semiosis’. In this process, an object (o) forms a referent (r) that
is received by the subject as an interpretant (i). This interpretant can then
become in turn the referent for a new chain of signification, and so on, open to
endless continuation.
As noted above in the example of Nigel
Cooke’s paintings, the effect of this could be translated as irony – an
inability to access meaning on any original or actual level.
Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson discuss in a
related way how the order of signs is open to a multiplicity of readings when
applied to Art History. Here, the artwork as sign is anything but a static
object with a clear and unchanging framework of meaning:
Derrida, in particular, insisted that the meaning of any particular sign
could not be located in a signified fixed by the internal operations of a
synchronic system; rather, meaning arose exactly from the movement from one
sign or signifier to the next, in a perpetuum mobile where there could be found
neither a starting point for semiosis, nor a concluding moment in which
semiosis terminated and the meanings of signs fully ‘arrive’. (Bal & Bryson
in Preziosi, ed. 1998, p.247)
Seen in this way, the reception and
interpretation of a sign is a fragile and shifting thing, which fundamentally
involves the subject in the process of communication. Its meaning is not fixed
and static, just as the history of signs of which it is a part is not closed to change. Each new employment
of a motif alters the entire fabric of the tradition, thus the contemporary
example changes the reading of that from antiquity. When this view is applied
to artworks, it presents us with a model of an ongoing dialogue, the focus of
which is constantly evolving, whilst continually referring to past moments.
The skull as a motif in art is arguably
ancient, and it appears to have always evoked ideas of the vanitas or memento mori.
But for Derrida each moment of art
takes such devices and make of them something new, something which
relates specifically to that particular time and culture, as well as referring
(if obliquely) to meanings associated with other ages. As Arthur C. Danto
argues, the function and definition of an artwork is something which holds a
mirror up to a culture, to reveal characteristics not normally perceived by
those inhabiting it[1].
Similarly, to apply Baudrillard’s idea of the
counterfeit sign, the skull motif central to For the Love of God cannot, in its contemporary context, function
as a signifier of any genuine ideas of vanitas
or mortality in a traditional sense. It can only invoke them in name or
appearance – they are bypassed ironically.
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