There is a fine line between disgusting and delicious. On that claim, I ask anyone to call to mind a soft-cooked egg, a squab crouching in a pool of demi-glace, or even a turd-like truffle fresh from its nursery of decay. Julia Kristeva describes food loathing as our first experience of the abject –- that which we cannot bear to touch, smell, or even see, like the skin that forms on scalded milk, but which haunts us from its “place of banishment” beyond our tolerance. It’s only with food maturity that we can ignore the involuntary shudder and dig into a bowl of cooked Brussels sprouts or a ripe camembert. I recently heard a friend ask, “Whenever someone says ‘corned beef and cabbage,’ why do I always hear ‘corned beef and garbage’?”
Even the most elegant cuisine is separated from garbage only by time, and that might be a matter of days, hours, or minutes. Food, like all living things, has a pathos because it has a terminus. Recognizing this, seventeenth-century still-life painters generally worked in two camps: those who dressed up laden tables in glory, suppressing the nausea that subtended their spectacles of bounty, and those who confronted the viewer with the facts of life and death. For these artists, there was a further pointed truth: life depends on food’s sustenance, but it is only achieved in the slaughter and harvest of other living things. Hence Chardin’s painting of a gutted skate who looks on woefully as a cat helps itself to the fresh fish and oysters on the table, or the Italian and Dutch painters who inserted the leering heads of calves, swine, or sheep into their bountiful larder pictures. Imagine, as the surrealist Magritte did in “The Portrait,” that when we sat down to supper we had to get past the sentient eye of the creature lying mutely on the plate. In this game, not even vegetarians get a pass, for the cleverest act of all is the painter’s sly insertion of a housefly on an exquisite piece of fruit. There is trouble in the garden. All still lives of ‘living things stilled’ are reminders of death.
Here’s something else that’s a reminder of death: photography. “Secure the shadow, ere the substance fade,” ran the 19th-century photographer’s advertising slogan. Having a lifelike representation of a thing that is bound someday to expire is a comfort in the face of that fact, but the act of photographic suspension is itself a nagging reminder of the dreadful moment that will come, precisely like the moment that has just ‘passed away’ before the camera’s lens. So, in taking on content that is itself haunted by death and decay, does a photographic still life amplify the deathly metaphor? Is a photographic still life a double memento mori? The earliest photographs were usually still lives, for the good reason that exposures were too slow to record animate things, and the turbid images of Daguerre, Talbot, and Bayard have an aching melancholy. Not surprising, then, that moving forward in time and technology, photographers abandoned the still life to pursue faster and faster subjects, arriving triumphantly in the 1930s at the “decisive moment” photography exemplified by Henri Cartier-Bresson. In this modern conception, photography is a reflexive act, in which camera, mind, and eye fuse as a synthetic intelligence that acts spontaneously and intuitively in response to the shifting terms of the moment. And while photographers today have rediscovered the art of the tableau, the posed subject, and the mis-en-scène, rendered crystalline through the power of digital photography, they still customarily create supposed ‘moments.’
Emma Ressel is having none of it. More than just defying the idea of a photographic ‘moment,’ her photographs share the studious, meditative feeling of Baroque still life paintings. Even her images of rooms —places of human activity, implied by the presence of a cheery fire, disarranged chairs, or a live television —take on the timeless and uncanny quality of the unpeopled, parallel worlds that those earlier painters constructed so convincingly. Part of the kinship is found in Ressel’s attention to the formal properties of the composition. Formalism, the aesthetic theory that meaning and intelligence are invested in an artwork’s line, shape, color, volume, and composition, is a relatively new idea. Back in 1771, writing his Discourses on Art, Sir Joshua Reynolds was dismissive of the “humbler” profession of the still life painter (such was the notion that Man’s deeds were more important than Nature’s objects), but he emphasized the consequently greater importance of what we now call formal elements. “The art of colouring, and the skillful management of light and shadow, are essential requisites in his confined labors," he observed, because for the still life painter, “these pretty excellences are here essential beauties; and without this merit the artist’s work will be more short-lived than the objects of his imitation.” Ressel’s work is filled with ‘pretty excellences,’ but it is backed by a wry malevolence and a deceptive wit. In fact, the beauty of these compositions, filled with a sense of light and air and succulent color that belongs only to photography, endows them with the fascination of the Trojan Horse: it’s the gift that we happily accept on first sight, only to discover that we’ve let in something just a little bit nasty.
A flash-lit, nighttime view of the ground at our feet presents itself initially as a dense weave of color and texture, composed in a palette of blacks and purples. Two centers of color compete for the eye: a tight constellation of saturated pinks at the upper corner of the frame, and a diffuse daub of yellowish brown, centered at the lower edge. The pink is easy to identify against the black background as a spray of oleander straining toward the limits of the frame, and we begin to see that the dark ground beneath it is covered with fallen blossoms. As our view descends from the looming flower toward the source of illumination at our feet, we begin to make out a circle of downy feathers, and, at their center, a broken egg, yolk leaching into the dirt. What sneaking brute has left us with this crime scene of the murder of mother and child? Who leaves behind these avian remains? Look closely and you may notice a small squad of snails engaged in the cleanup operation.
Remains figure prominently in Ressel’s work, whether it’s crumbs existentially stranded on a tacky vinyl tablecloth, printed with a blinding pattern of lemons, or an image of a kitchen floor littered with smashed grapes, olives, broken eggs, crusts of bread—a modern version of the ancient Roman mosaics of unswept floors. Another work presents a bit of surrealistic theater, in which a surprisingly ardent heap of spilled spaghetti seems intent upon crossing the floor to reunite with some lost strands that call out from a nearby fork. Olives, strewn about like cannonballs on a battlefield, bear mute witness to the heroic effort. One of the more elaborate compositions—perhaps a late reply to Chardin’s encounter of the skate and the cat—features an opulent arrangement of vine tomatoes, a dish of unidentifiable brown liquid, some dried mushrooms, a crust of wine-soaked bread, a molding cantaloupe (or is it a cheese?) nestled in its shroud of cling wrap, and, occupying the place where a silver ewer would sit in a Dutch Golden Age painting, a plastic compost bin. All take their pre-ordained places in a sunny spot out the backdoor of an anonymous residence, into which a tabby disappears by way of a cat door. They all draw together in a composition that flashes with two sides of a coin: the repugnant associations of slop, sweepings, and cats’ anuses, and the harmonious beauty of a corner of the world in perfect balance.
In Ressel’s sleight-of-hand, these abject objects are never morose, because they’re marbled through with the absurdist’s revolt against the seriousness of art, death, and even haute cuisine, which has achieved the status of the sacrament in the 21st century. She even gives us a foil for her ruinous remains in a view of the shop window of a fine bakery. There we are meant to stand and salivate over pastries that are probably too good for people like us, but the sight of these elaborate cakes and pastries is obscured by the overly excited arabesque of the shop’s window sign, breaking the spell. From the arrogant bakery window, we need only move to the deadpan view of a far less exalted dessert table to see the arc of Ressel’s teasing of perfection. In this hermetic interior, there is only the ersatz fanciness of a frozen, Vienna-style cake, laid out like a miniature coffin on a table draped with a crumpled tablecloth, embroidered with sprays of daisies. Shiny cutlery and highly glazed plates cast a few drifts of reflected light against the wall, mimicking the random geometry of wrinkles and creases in the table linen. It takes a moment to recognize the form of a partly smoked cigar placed innocuously on a dessert plate at the corner of the table, which has been quietly masquerading as another foodstuff—chocolate, perhaps, or more peculiarly, a sausage? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but everything here, including the palette—a symphony in beige—suggests a waiting room in Purgatory where someone will have to answer for their crimes against la bonne pâtisserie. And it’s hard to look away.
Laurie Dahlberg
Professor of Art History, Bard College