by Daniel Barbiero<\/p>\n
With his still life paintings of bottles, cups, and other mundane things, Giorgio Morandi wants us to see that what we see isn\u2019t all there is that\u2019s there. The world presented in his still lifes is one in which perceptual faith \u2013 the belief in the reality of those things we encounter \u2013 is kept. At the same time, his still lifes are inspired by an intuition that perception is something that transcends mere seeing. Seeing is knowing, but even so, Morandi hints that something of what we see and know of what we see remains ungraspable for all that. Behind the thing as we perceive it there is something like a thing-in-itself, a real existent independent of us that isn\u2019t exhausted in what we perceive of it. Morandi\u2019s is a metaphysical intuition that his still lifes communicate by presenting their objects \u2013\u00a0 nondescript, everyday objects arranged on tabletops \u2013 as opaque presences whose opacity hints at something withheld from us even as we seem to grasp them.<\/p>\n
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The Still Life as a Portrait of Things-for-Us<\/p>\n
Morandi populated his still lifes mainly with the bric-a-brac of domestic life: bottles, cups, pitchers, dishes, and so forth. In doing so, he remained consistently within the tradition of still life painting. As with any still life painting, Morandi\u2019s images of these objects mimic real objects; their features as he depicts them are familiar enough from our encounters with them in real life. But this isn\u2019t real life, this is still life \u2013 a contrivance parasitical on real life.<\/p>\n
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In Morandi\u2019s still lifes as in any other still life, the human presence is always there, even in the absence of any explicit representation of a human figure. Rather, the human presence is signaled indirectly, not only through the things the still life presents to us but in the way in which they are presented: their presence is at least partly a function of the way they have been arranged. Morandi\u2019s still lifes are particularly notable for the evidence they provide of the deliberate choices and organization that went into them. The objects on the table have been carefully selected and placed, their shapes and sizes as well as their juxtapositions and abutments have been finely calibrated for the visual effects Morandi wishes to create. These choices \u2013 of things and their formal relationships \u2013 were reaffirmed and often repeated, with variations, with each still life Morandi undertook. When we consider his body of still lifes as a whole we can see that he returned to the same objects over and over again, which he composed in a series of changing, yet related, formal relationships. These things make up a kind of repertory company he cast in all of his productions, in different roles. In their sameness they are always different; in their differences, they are always the same.<\/p>\n
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Morandi\u2019s selection of the particular objects he used and his way of arranging them are an indication not only of his own formal sensibility, but of his understanding of how the world of things is the product of human intervention and invention. This again is a feature of still life in general. These things are things that were made for us; they are part of a world that is our world. What we see aren\u2019t meaningless aggregates of matter but rather things with histories that are our histories, things with functions that function for us. Take Morandi\u2019s ubiquitous bottles. They are things that suggest a number of things \u2013 states, situations, desires \u2013 particular to the way we live: the presence of a thirst they can help quench; social amity (one drinks with one\u2019s friends); the possibility of a romantic entanglement (the bottle of wine, shared with a potential partner); the reality of romantic disappointment (one drinks that bottle of wine alone); and so forth. These bottles, like the cups, dishes, pitchers, and other objects, are landmarks in a world we already understand and through which in turn we understand them.<\/p>\n
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It is this already-there understanding that we have of these objects that gives them their basic intelligibility. Their capacity to be present to us as the things they are, in other words, derives from their familiarity and their place within an always-already meaningful world. They are what they are, but they are what they are by virtue of their being for us; the world they belong to is our world, in relation to which they are the things that they are, and that we recognize. Which suggests a paradox: no still life is perfectly still; rather, it is animated by its objects\u2019 status as beings-for-us complete with their dynamic histories of having-been-for-us, even as they are present to us as static images. They disclose themselves as being-for-us each time we look at them. At the same time, as with any still life, Morandi\u2019s still lifes, including the more ostensibly realistic ones, work through a certain kind of alienation. Out of context, stripped of their functions, these objects are estranged from themselves to become images of themselves and thus not-themselves. One is tempted to say that, reduced to images, they become something less than themselves, but the truth instead may be that they become something more than themselves. They are made that way precisely by virtue of the artist\u2019s way of presenting them.<\/p>\n
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Making the Object Present<\/p>\n
In The Phenomenology of Perception<\/em> Merleau-Ponty remarks that \u201c[w]hen I see the bright green of one of C\u00e9zanne\u2019s vases, it does not make me think of pottery, it presents it to me. The pottery is there..in the particular way in which the green varies its shade.\u201d Although made in relation to C\u00e9zanne\u2019s painting, Merleau-Ponty\u2019s comment is just as applicable to Morandi\u2019s work. Given the influence C\u00e9zanne had on Morandi, this really isn\u2019t surprising.<\/p>\n \n Merleau-Ponty is right to point out that artworks like Cezanne\u2019s or Morandi\u2019s, which represent objects in the world, make those objects present. They do so by simulating for the viewer an ontic relation to the objects they represent. The ontic relation is simply the relation we have to the existents \u2013 things and other beings animate and inanimate \u2013 we encounter. It is a relation in which, as Vincent Descombes has put it, when we confront a being that happens to be there, we recognize \u201cthat there is something there.\u201d The ontic relation, in other words, is the relation through which we grasp things as being present to us. By virtue of the ontic relation we encounter these beings that happen to be as material presences projecting themselves into our field of perception; we might say that the ontic relation is the \u201cthere is\u201d of the expression \u201cthere is something here.\u201d The representational painting simulates this relation by putting before us the images of things rather than the actual things. Or rather it is the artist who puts these images before us; it is the artist, through the medium of the artwork, who simulates the ontic relation on behalf of the things whose images appear there.<\/p>\n \n Implicit in Merleau-Ponty\u2019s remark is the assumption that the vase in the painting is present only by virtue of the fact that the artist makes it present. Put another way, the object in the painting signals itself as the image of a presence to which a particular sensibility \u2013 the artist\u2019s \u2013 originally was present. The object is made present through the painter\u2019s grasp of its presence, and his or her capacity to provide an image of that presence as mediated by that grasp. The object in the still life is, in effect, mediated by a sensibility as well as by what we might be tempted to call, at a first pass, pure perception; it is in-itself for<\/em> that sensibility. Hence the image of the object in a still life represents the object as an imagined object substituted for the real object \u2013 a material thing dematerialized by the mind that grasps it and dematerializes it precisely in the act of grasping it. Morandi alludes to this in one of the few interviews he gave about his art. Speaking in 1958 to art critic Edouard Roditi, he asserted that \u201cthere is nothing more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see.\u201d This statement I believe is as good as any for summing up the sensibility that comes to expression in Morandi\u2019s art. It is a sensibility we might go so far as to characterize as properly metaphysical, since it seems to reach down into assumptions about what things are in the way they present themselves to perception. As we will see, his claim about the unreality and abstraction of what we see pertains to the seeing and not to the seen \u2013 to the grasp of the object, and not to the object itself.<\/p>\n \n Morandi expresses his sensibility in the way that he makes his objects present. He does this through two seemingly contradictory painterly strategies: by depicting them in a way that emphasizes their tangibility on the one hand, and on the other, by manipulating their formal appearances even to the point of abstraction. In many of his still lifes he presents his vases, cups, bottles, and blocks in such a way as to emphasize their three-dimensionality \u2013 their tangible thingness. Although his realism is attenuated to some degree by his deliberate neglect of surface detail, he nevertheless manages to suggest a sense of these objects\u2019 volume. Looking at them, we can without too much trouble imagine what it would be like to touch them, to feel their solidity exerting pressure on the hands that hold them. At other times, Morandi seems to want to emphasize instead the fact that the images on the canvas are just that \u2013 two-dimensional images representing three-dimensional objects. In a number of his paintings, and particularly in the later watercolors, he renders his objects as flat surfaces that approach, but never quite become, abstractions. These images, more so than the images suggesting volume and tactility, seem to advertise themselves as having been the product of a mind that grasped the objects they depict as cognitive types as well as concrete individuals.<\/p>\n \nBut rather than seeing these two modes of presentation as being opposed to each other or contradictory, I believe we should instead understand them as representing two end points on a single continuum. Most of Morandi\u2019s still lifes can be located along this continuum, with some tending more toward one end rather than the other, and to different degrees. But in all cases they express one consistent claim: that what perception gives us is something abstracted from the brute fact of the real, and that some of the brute fact of the real is withheld from our perception. The real is, in effect, an opacity. Accordingly, Morandi articulates this claim by consistently rendering his objects, whether flat or in depth, with a remarkable opacity.<\/p>\n \n Opacity and the Object<\/p>\n Whether he depicted them as full-bodied, three-dimensional masses or reduced them to flattened shapes, Morandi presented his objects\u2019 surfaces as akin to tightly knit screens meant to keep us from seeing what lay behind them. The opacity with which he presented them almost parodies the matter they are made out of: inert, inanimate, dumb. They are images of objects made into extreme signs of objecthood which reveals them to be as much images of an idea of what objects are as images of the objects themselves. Morandi\u2019s objects retain their opacity even in the late watercolors, where they threaten to melt away into the mist of abstraction. But in a sense mist is as opaque as solid matter: when it is dense enough, it stops the penetration of the gaze just as effectively as stone. With the watercolors and their semi-dissolved things no less than with the more solidly painted oils, Morandi underscored the fact that the things we see are as much grasped through the mind as through the eye; the immaterial concept and the material object are inextricably bound together in a reciprocal relationship.<\/p>\n \n Morandi\u2019s concern to convey a sense of his objects\u2019 opacity was a key part of his painterly practice. Many of the objects he selected for his still lifes were opaque to begin with \u2013 cups and pitchers made of ceramic, for example, or some kind of similar material. In other cases he contrived to make things that weren\u2019t originally opaque nevertheless appear opaque through his subsequent interventions and\/or formal choices. He might paint their surfaces with a dull white or grey paint, deliberately neglecting to dust them, or group them into closely-packed masses. The opacity of his objects is not a matter of, or only of, a metaphorical condition attaching to their status as inanimate things whose mode of existence is inert and self-coincident, but rather is the literal product of human praxis<\/em>, in relation to which their opacity is a quality that has been foregrounded as a matter of choice. What we might think of as their native opacity is enhanced by virtue of Morandi\u2019s intentional activity, thanks to which their physical surfaces, in being submerged into an aggregate mass or having been painted over or left to acquire a coating of dust, have also been figuratively occluded.<\/p>\n \n The Strangeness of the Familiar<\/p>\n If Morandi\u2019s still lifes represent their objects as opacities it is because the objects we encounter in the world, for which these images serve as proxies, are themselves opacities. Opacity is their salient feature to the extent that they signal their presence to the apprehending sensibility as not being the apprehending sensibility itself. As being something other.<\/p>\n \n This last point is important because it tells us something about how these beings that happen to be, are. For, no matter how well integrated into our lives they may be, they retain a certain strangeness \u2014 an essential alienness \u2013 by virtue of their not being us and therefore not sharing the defining qualities through which we as beings are structured as the beings we are. These qualities are: sentience heightened by self-awareness; agency; and temporality. They have none of these qualities, which makes it difficult for us, in our being defined by sentience and self-awareness, agency, and temporality, to imagine what it is like to be a being that lacks them. In fact, just to frame the question in terms of what it is like to be them is to allow our own way of being in the world to head us off in the wrong direction, since to ask the question of what it is like to be a non-sentient, inanimate, inert object is to assume that it is like something to be them. Only a being with a subjective dimension could ask such a question. When in fact strictly speaking it is like nothing to be them: because they have no subjective dimension, they have no experience of the world: they have no something that there is to be like. Which is why they strike us mysterious and evasive of our grasp. If they seem to hold a secret, it is not because there is a secret \u2013 an inanimate object is incapable of formulating let alone holding a secret \u2013 but because their inanimacy and self-coincident inertness is so utterly alien to the kind of dynamic, subjective, and meaning-dwelling beings we are. This points to another way in which objects are more than their appearance, and that is through the meaning they hold for us \u2013 they mean more than they seem. It isn\u2019t by virtue of any fictional inner life that they derive their meaning, but rather through the fact of ours. Meaning is a result of the transaction we enter into with them: what\u2019s given through perception is taken as something that has acquired value through the needs and concerns we project onto it.<\/p>\n \n In sum, when Morandi told Roditi that matter has no intrinsic meaning of its own and that the objective world as we see and understand it isn\u2019t necessarily how it really exists, I think he was expressing an intuition about the strangeness of objects and their radically different structure of being, which he tried to show by depicting them as literally opaque. If Morandi\u2019s manner of presenting his objects \u2013 of making them present \u2013 was done with an eye toward more effectively projecting their otherness into the field of the observer, then we can make sense of the seemingly contradictory ways in which his objects engage the viewer. They both absorb and reflect the viewer\u2019s gaze and imagined touch \u2013 absorbing them by the fact of their being present to the observer and thereby soliciting his or her engagement through the eye and the mind; and reflecting them back by virtue of their impenetrable surfaces. By encountering the images Morandi puts before him or her, I believe the viewer is meant to know, in a primarily inarticulate, unthought-out way, him- or herself to be other than the objects presented on the canvas, while at the same time absorbing the meaning always-already given to them as things that are of interest to or concern for the people who have integrated them into the human world of which they are a part. In this reciprocal relationship of absorption and reflection we intuit that the object is something-for-us while being not-us; that we can\u2019t square the circle and grasp what is in-itself but only approachable in terms of what it is for-us. Morandi\u2019s objects\u2019 opacity, their advertised resistance to our knowing them as they are in themselves, is a reminder that, as Merleau-Ponty argued in The<\/em> Phenomenology of Perception<\/em>, the world of objects is something we can only apprehend as in-itself-for-us. And yet at the same time, the object\u2019s resistance is an indication of its reality. It gives us a stubborn affirmation of what Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible<\/em> called our \u201cperceptual faith.\u201d<\/p>\n \n The Leap of Perceptual Faith<\/p>\n Perceptual faith is the pre-reflective belief in the reality of the perceived world \u2013 a belief, intuitively felt rather than explicitly entertained, that the object we perceive is a real entity in a real world, independent of us and our perception of it. This I believe is the underlying meaning of the opacity of Morandi\u2019s objects. Looking at his still lifes, there is no doubt that these things we are seeing are being presented to us as ontological strangers. His images of things convey the brute fact that there is a world that transcends me as perceiver and that I in turn transcend in the act of perceiving it. That they present objects from daily life conveys in addition that this world is meaningful, that they and I derive meaning from our participation in it. At the same time, thanks to Morandi\u2019s particular way of presenting them, their ontological status \u2013 the being of what kind of beings they are \u2013 is clearly signaled as being other-than-us. These beings that happen to be are<\/em>, over and above \u2013 or better, under and beneath \u2013 whatever meanings they have for us.<\/p>\n \n I believe this explains something curious about certain of Morandi\u2019s still lifes. In a number of them, particularly the late watercolors, Morandi comes up against the border of abstraction. His objects appear to be on the verge of dissolving into pure form. But it is a border he never crosses over. He always manages to stay within the bounds of the perceptual, even as his objects threaten to dematerialize. He keeps the perceptual faith, we might say. In her monograph on the artist, Karen Wilkin is right to say that this refusal of pure abstraction is the result of choice rather than of cowardice. Morandi\u2019s project was bound up with exploring the implications and ramifications of perceptual faith rather than in renouncing it.<\/p>\n \n At the same time, as we have seen, Morandi\u2019s affirmation of the perceptual doesn\u2019t entail a denial of the conceptual and affective factors underwriting the perceptual. Rather, his still lifes acknowledge the constitutive role that human consciousness and affect play in an object\u2019s being-in-itself-for-us. In giving us these things as he does, he chooses to place his emphasis on the for-us<\/em>, even as the other half of the equation \u2013 the \u201cbeing-in-itself\u201d half \u2013 is implied. His message is that perception isn\u2019t a matter of the passive reception of sense data but instead includes a cognitive dimension through which the thing is grasped as the thing it is, in addition to an affective dimension through which the thing is grasped as mattering to us (or not). These dimensions \u2013 the invisible dimensions \u2013 illuminate the visible dimension and are inseparable moments within it. They underscore, rather than undermine, perceptual faith.<\/p>\n \n Morandi\u2019s stubborn hold onto the perceptual given as the point of reference for his artistic praxis<\/em> concedes that the reality we see is real \u2013 it reaffirms the basic tent of perceptual faith. These objects he makes present are independent entities, separated from us by the transparent barrier of perception. His presencing of those objects through the filter of his aesthetic and \u2013 I don\u2019t think it\u2019s too much to say \u2013 his metaphysical vision, reminds us that these things are given to us as the things they are because of their place within our world and the consequent meanings, both conceptual and affective, that attach to them. And yet to encounter them through the mind and emotion as well as through the eye or hand is still to encounter them, it is still to run up against their essential opacity in relation to us. Our perceptual relation to them may be complicated by our mental, emotional, and practical entanglements with them, but that is how they make themselves present to us and how ultimately they assert their independence from us. What Morandi seems to want to point out is that because of this entanglement, the naive perceptual faith we have in them is just that, a faith, and like any faith, requires a leap.<\/p>\n \n References:<\/p>\n \n Vincent Descombes, The Barometer of Modern Reason: On the Philosophy of Current Events<\/em>, tr. Stephen Adam Schwartz (New York: Oxford U Press, 1993). Quote is from p. 112.<\/p>\n \n Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception<\/em>, tr. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962). Quote about C\u00e9zanne\u2019s painting is on p. 330.<\/p>\n \n Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible<\/em>, tr. Alphonso Lingus, ed. Claude Lefort (Evanston, IL: Northwestern U Press, 1968).<\/p>\n \n Edouard Roditi, Dialogues: Conversations with European Artists at Mid-Century<\/em> (San Francisco: Bedford Arts, 1989). Quote is on p. 107.<\/p>\n \n Karen Wilkin, Giorgio Morandi<\/em> (New York: Rizzoli, 1997).<\/p>\n \n [Note: This essay expands on points originally introduced in \u201cNothing Can Be More Abstract, More Unreal, Than What We Actually See,\u201d which appeared in March 2024 issue of After the Art<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Daniel Barbiero With his still life paintings of bottles, cups, and other mundane things, Giorgio Morandi wants us to see that what we see isn\u2019t all there is that\u2019s there. The world presented in his still lifes is one in which perceptual faith \u2013 the belief in the reality of those things we encounter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1730,77],"tags":[1768,1728,1123,1767],"class_list":["post-15588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-egophobia-83","category-english","tag-daniel-barbiero","tag-egophobia-83","tag-english","tag-giorgio-morandi"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DakB-43q","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15588"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15589,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15588\/revisions\/15589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}