Understanding Still Life Paintings
Certain associations we make with places, music, and even everyday objects can intersect with solastalgia when considering our current climate crisis; the memories we have now may one day exist only as memories of a pre-climate change world. The reality that our earth is changing before our eyes calls for a reexamination of consumer culture, and one way to do so is through a consideration of the expressive power found in the centuries-long genre of still life art.
We live in a world of things. A certain "fixation on objects of ultilty, consumption, and display" (Brown 55) is deeply embedded in American capitalist culture that promotes the consumption and accumulation of objects, many of which we do not necessarily need to survive but instead fulfill a different emotional purpose. As Amitai Etzioni puts it, consumerism is "the obsession with acquistion that has become the organizing principle of American life." Oftentimes, we see still life art represented in advertisements for these objects – or, in other words, manufactured goods. Consider the following Coca Cola ad.
The advertisement on the left shows a simple soda bottle against a red background, extracted from the rest of the world and presented in front of you. As one of the world's most ubiquitous brands, Coca Cola invokes vintage print advertisements as a nostalgic marketing tactic, aimed at appealing to our memories and realigning it with their company. They hope that when you go to the grocery store, you put a six pack of their product in your shopping cart to take home with you. It is also interesting to note that this vintage ad evokes a time when beverages typically were packaged in glass bottles, which are much easier to recycle when compared to their plastic counterparts.
Now consider the next image. The bottle looks almost foreign; it floats as a piece of trash in a body of water, completely removed from industrialized society and placed in the middle of nature. The reusable glass bottle portrayed in the previous advertisement has been replaced with toxic plastic packaging that is difficult to recycle. CNBC reports that only 30% of plastic bottles are recycled, and of that percentage, “just one-fifth is processed to create fresh plastic bottles for use in food and beverage” (Wong). This statistic indicates that the energy and resources put into creating the objects we consume on a daily basis, for the most part, are not repurposed and instead contribute to an enormous amount of waste. When a soda bottle is removed from a grocery store, taken out of its six pack container, and isolated in a body of water, it can be viewed from an entirely new lens. Taking an object out of its localized context and considering the implications of our global reliance on single-use plastics, one singular Coke bottle becomes much more significant.
The tremendous quantity of plastics as well as other forms of pollution in our oceans are contributing to drastic changes in the environment. The Washington Post projects that there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish by 2050. Similarly, CBS projects that oceanic fish in their entirety are likely to become extinct two years earlier than that in 2048. While quantity, quality, and variety of consumer goods are considered positive from a business-consumer standpoint, the environmental impacts of these attitudes are alarming. Godwin Earle’s painting Sea Bass may appear inconsequential at first in its portrayal of a fish as it is about to be prepared, complete with lemons and cooking pot in the background. The bass, not quite dead yet not quite alive, is sprawled carelessly across what appears to be a kitchen surface. Its eerie, corpse-like appearance adds a level of strangeness to the piece that speaks to larger themes of water pollution and overfishing. Suddenly, Earl’s painting adopts more meaning beyond a mere image of a dead sea bass on a table. Perhaps this fish was caught in the ocean, where it likely consumed thousands of microplastics throughout its lifetime due to pollution. Those same microplastics would then be transferred from the fish to whomever is about to eat it.
Still life images serve as a bridge between the representation of objects and the consumption of them. When looking at a still life painting, one might be inclined to argue “it’s just an apple!” or “it’s just a jug of water!”. Yet what is captivating about still life paintings is their aesthetic function—their existence as pure color and form. There is something captivating and alluring about a simple object that is extracted from the rest of the world, isolated, and displayed. As Brown describes, “Witnessing the expressiveness of the experienced thing may depend on seeing it extracted from the world, but that world remains the source of its vitality” (71). The context behind a certain image influences how we may interpret that image. The emotional and physical ties we bind to objects are represented through still life art in terms of their greater function.
If you consider the implications that hide behind the simplicity of a single object, still life paintings can be viewed and appreciated new ways. Perhaps we should ground our understandings of still life within the context of American tendencies to “monumentaliz[e] the objects themselves … as both objects and icons” (Brown 67), which in turn allows to view our own consumer habits through a more critical lens. A piece of artwork that may have seemed straightforward in its representation of everyday items then becomes a way to look at the scale to which we consume and dispose of manufactured goods. Consumerism is leading to drastic and potentially lethal changes in our atmosphere, our oceans, and the very land we live on. A profound sense of solastalgia arises when we consider what our earth will look like in the years ahead. In dealing with the monumental pressures of climate change, still life art can be a tool that forces us to look at the way we treat our resources, with the hope that we implement environmentally conscious consumption habits into our daily lives.
Works Consulted:
—Brown, Bill. “Object Cultures and the Life of Things.” The Art of American Still Life : Audubon to Warhol, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2015, pp. 52–74.
—Etzioni, Amitai. “The Crisis of American Consumerism.” HuffPost, HuffPost, 7 Dec. 2017.
—Kaplan, Sarah. “By 2050, There Will Be More Plastic than Fish in the World's Oceans, Study Says.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 20 Jan. 2016.
—“Salt-Water Fish Extinction Seen By 2048.” CBS News, CBS Interactive, 4 Nov. 2006, .
—Treat, Jason, and Ryan Williams. “We Depend On Plastic. Now, We're Drowning in It.” National Geographic, 16 May 2018.
—Wong, Vanessa. “Almost No Plastic Bottles Get Recycled Into New Water Bottles.” CNBC, CNBC, 24 Apr. 2017.