I walked through the artist’s studio – my hands folded behind my back, as if I were walking around an exhibition – and looked at her paintings, oil on canvas. Today I would buy a painting for the first time in my life, a gift to my beloved, who lives far away. I was actually looking for a thing to serve as my substitute, on her wall.
Yes, this would be it. As stoically as possible, I inquired about the significant price difference between this painting and its cheaper neighbour.
“Don’t you see that?” asked the artist. “That one has a list.”
No, I didn’t see that. And this non-seeing touches on an important point in the theories of the relationship between man and thing.
In 1979 the impressive The Sense of Order, A study in the psychology of decorative art by the Austrian-English art historian Ernst Gombrich. Every art history book is essentially about works of art; Gombrich also wrote a lot about art and works of art, such as his magnum opus, which has sold millions of times The Story of Art from 1950. But in The Sense of Order Gombrich focused on the frame surrounding the painting. Because the very fact that we overlook the list, the fact that it is in a sense invisible, teaches us a great deal about the nature of things.
An initial analysis of things, of stuff, emphasizes their tangibility, their physical state of being, as external elements that we can allow into our lives, but which we can also discard. But it is only when we don’t see things that it becomes apparent how much they are not just loose, separate objects, but rather parts of a sophisticated system. That system is integrated into our lives, it is deeply anchored in our consciousness. It directs our expectations in specific situations (the list ‘determines’ whether something is a work of art) and it subtly tells us how to behave (think of the kind of cutlery that illustrates whether or not you are in for a fancy dinner, or the type of wallpaper that makes it clear what type of room you are in). This system is so self-evident to us that it camouflages the individual items that make up the system: the whole conceals its parts.
According to the philosopher Pierre Bourdieu, things play a crucial role in how we find our place in society from childhood. In his essay ‘The Berber House or the World reversed’ Bourdieu uses the North African Kabyle-Berber community as a case study. A Kabyle child, wrote Bourdieu, was slowly initiated into the natural order in the house (the akham), one side of the house was high as the other was lower, in that corner it was dark as it was light elsewhere, there did you find the men as the women were further down the road. Through differentiation of subtle and less subtle differences, the child learned to understand the proportions and patterns of the environment. Subsequently, according to Bourdieu, the child learned that this natural order within the home was mutatis mutandis also found outside the home, one family was ‘high’ (in status) and the other low, the men occupied a different place in society than the women.
What was true for the Kabyle is also true for us. The daily use of things constantly sharpens and refines our attunement with the environment. And the more invisible things are, the more influential the system of which they are part, the greater the imprint they leave on our lives, our lives that we tend to see as separate from the things that surround us, of ‘ materialism’. But the separation of the material and the immaterial is artificial, or even false. Every human being, however spiritual or enlightened he considers himself to be, whether a Kabyle child or a billionaire, is a materialist: we make things, things make us.
“That’s right,” I said to the artist, “the frame.” I decided to purchase the painting, including the frame that I would never overlook again.
#picture #frame #overlooked