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soisaidfine · 2 months

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Ethel Cain, Powerlines, Marcel Proust, the lesson of Chardin... 'The artistic sense discovers the strange within the ordinary, the new that lies within the old, the pure within the impure; it restores power'

lilf4iryh0e said on Ethel Cain’s Reddit: ‘Is it just me or when I look at tall powerlines I think of Ethel Cain now??’

photo @mothercain: the decommissioned bruce mansfield plant on black and white polaroid 600 (tumblr)

I feel the same way, and now I search for them in landscapes, thinking of Ethel Cain and appreciating their power and beauty through Ethel Cain's perspective.

This is one of the most beautiful gifts that artists give us: they enrich our daily lives with beauties we didn’t notice before and that we love through the lens they have cast on these things.

Marcel Proust spoke of this as ‘the lesson of Chardin,’ referring to the painter who made him appreciate ordinary things in daily life, like a messy table after a meal, in a humble interior. In the same way, powerlines were once often considered ugly, and environmentalists fought against them, wanting to hide or bury them, believing they marred the beauty of nature. And Ethel Cain reveals their beauty to us.

"Chardin enters like light, giving each thing its color, evoking from the eternal night where they were buried all the beings of still or animated nature, with the brilliance of their form so clear to the eye, yet so obscure to the mind" - Marcel Proust

ethel cain, powerline tattoo (tumblr @vacillator)

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Powerline Valley (demo) - Ethel Cain

. . .

"The artistic sense discovers the strange within the ordinary, the new that lies within the old, the pure within the impure; it restores power to worn-out words through a process contrary to the Carnot principle of sensitivity, which is the degradation by habit."

Paul Valéry, 1941, Notebooks II, Poïetics

. . .

"So many things you haven't even noticed in this street where you pass six times a day, in your room where you spend so many hours each day! - Look at the angle formed by this edge of the furniture with the plane of the window. You must capture it in its ordinariness, in the visible that is unseen, - save it, - give it what you so readily give, through imitation or the insufficiency of your sensitivity, to the slightest sublime landscape, sunset, sea storm, or to some museum piece. These are pre-made gazes. But give this poor thing, this corner, this bland hour and object - and you will be rewarded a hundredfold."

Paul Valéry, 1940, Notebooks II

. . .

Chardin's Lesson (Marcel Proust):

"Imagine a young man of modest means, with artistic tastes, sitting in the dining room at that banal and melancholy moment just after lunch has ended, when the table has not yet been fully cleared. With his mind filled with the glory of museums, cathedrals, the sea, and mountains, he looks with discomfort and boredom, with a sensation close to disgust, a feeling akin to melancholy, at a lone knife left on the half-pulled tablecloth hanging down to the floor beside the remains of a bland, bloody chop. On the sideboard, a bit of sunlight, cheerfully touching the glass of water left almost full by thirsty lips, cruelly accentuates, like an ironic laugh, the traditional banality of this unaesthetic scene. At the back of the room, the young man sees his mother, already seated at her work, calmly unwinding a skein of red wool with her daily tranquility. And behind her, perched on top of a cabinet next to a biscuit kept in reserve for a ‘special occasion,’ a fat, short cat seems to be the malevolent and unimpressive spirit of this domestic mediocrity.

The young man averts his eyes, and they fall upon the gleaming, polished silverware, then lower onto the shining andirons. More irritated by the orderliness of the room than by the disorder of the table, he envies the tasteful financiers who move only among beautiful things, in rooms where everything, down to the fireplace tongs and the door handle, is a work of art. He curses the surrounding ugliness, and ashamed of having spent a quarter of an hour not feeling shame but rather disgust and a kind of fascination, he rises and, if he cannot catch a train to Holland or Italy, goes to the Louvre to seek visions of palaces by Veronese, princes by Van Dyck, ports by Claude Lorrain, which tonight will once again be tarnished and exacerbated by his return to the familiar setting of daily scenes.

If I knew this young man, I wouldn’t dissuade him from going to the Louvre; rather, I would accompany him. But leading him to the Lacaze Gallery and the gallery of 18th-century French painters, or some other French gallery, I would stop him in front of the Chardins. And when he was dazzled by this opulent painting of what he once called mediocrity, this delightful painting of a life he found dull, this great art depicting a nature he thought was trivial, I would say to him: Are you happy? Yet what have you seen here but a well-to-do housewife showing her daughter the mistakes she made in her embroidery (The Diligent Mother), a woman carrying bread (The Provider), a kitchen interior where a living cat walks over oysters while a dead skate hangs on the wall, a sideboard already half-cleared with knives left on the tablecloth (Still Life with Fruit and Animals)? Even less, mere table or kitchen objects, not just the pretty ones like Saxon porcelain chocolate pots (Various Utensils), but those that seem to you the ugliest, a gleaming lid, pots of every shape and material (the salt shaker, the skimmer), the sights that repulse you, dead fish lying on the table (in the painting The Ray), and the sights that disgust you, half-emptied glasses and too many full glasses (Still Life with Fruit and Animals).

If all of this now seems beautiful to you, it is because Chardin found it beautiful to paint. And he found it beautiful to paint because he found it beautiful to see. The pleasure you take from his painting of a room where people sew, a pantry, a kitchen, a sideboard is the same pleasure he took in seeing a sideboard, a kitchen, a pantry, a room where people sew—captured in passing, extracted from the moment, deepened, eternalized. These two pleasures are so inseparable that if he could not stop at the first and wanted to give himself and others the second, you will not be able to stop at the second and will inevitably return to the first. You already experienced this pleasure unconsciously, the pleasure that comes from the sight of humble life and still life; otherwise, it would not have risen in your heart when Chardin, with his imperative and brilliant language, came to call it forth. Your awareness was too inert to reach it. It had to wait for Chardin to awaken it in you and elevate it to your consciousness. Then you recognized it and tasted it for the first time. If, when looking at a Chardin, you can say to yourself: this is intimate, comfortable, as alive as a kitchen, then when you walk through a kitchen, you will say: this is as beautiful as a Chardin. Chardin was merely a man who took pleasure in his dining room, among fruits and glasses, but a man of a keener awareness, whose intense pleasure overflowed into rich brushstrokes and eternal colors. You will become a Chardin, perhaps less great, great to the extent that you love him, to the extent that you become him again, but for whom, as for him, metals and stoneware will come to life, and fruits will speak.

Seeing that he shares with you the secrets he has learned from them, they will no longer hesitate to reveal these secrets to you as well. Still life will become, above all, living nature. Like life itself, it will always have something new to say to you, some charm to shine forth, some mystery to reveal; the everyday life will enchant you, if for a few days you have listened to its painting as a lesson; and by understanding life through his painting, you will have gained the beauty of life.

In these rooms where you see nothing but the image of others' banality and the reflection of your own boredom, Chardin enters like light, giving each thing its color, evoking from the eternal night where they were buried all the beings of still or animated nature, with the brilliance of their form so clear to the eye, yet so obscure to the mind. Like the awakened Princess, each is brought back to life, regains its colors, begins to converse with you, to live, to endure. On this sideboard, where everything from the stiff folds of the half-pulled tablecloth to the knife lying sideways with its blade protruding, everything bears the memory of the servants' haste, everything bears witness to the guests' gluttony. The compote dish, still as glorious and already as stripped as an autumn orchard, is crowned at the top with plump peaches, pink as cherubs, inaccessible and smiling like immortals. A dog that lifts its head cannot reach them, making them more desirable for being vainly desired. His eye savors them, catching on the down of their skin, moistened by it, the sweetness of their flavor. Transparent like daylight and as desirable as springs, glasses in which a few sips of sweet wine laze as if at the bottom of a throat, sit next to glasses almost empty, like emblems of quenched thirst beside emblems of burning thirst. Tilted like a wilted corolla, one glass is half-tipped over; the beauty of its posture reveals the spindle of its stem, the delicacy of its joints, the transparency of its glass, the nobility of its flare. Half-cracked, now independent of the needs of men it will no longer serve, it finds in its useless grace the nobility of a Venetian carafe.

Light as pearly cups and fresh as the seawater they offer us, oysters lie on the tablecloth like fragile and charming symbols on the altar of gluttony.

In a pail, fresh water spills onto the floor, still pushed by the quick foot that hastily disturbed it. A knife hastily hidden there, marking the urgency of indulgence, lifts the golden slices of lemons that seem placed there by the hand of gluttony, completing the apparatus of voluptuousness. Now come to the kitchen, whose entrance is sternly guarded by the tribe of vessels of all sizes, capable and faithful servants, a laborious and beautiful race. On the table, the active knives, which go straight to the point, rest in a threatening yet harmless idleness. But above you, a strange monster, still fresh like the sea where it swam, a skate is hanging, its sight blending the desire for indulgence with the curious charm of the calm or storms of the sea, of which it was the formidable witness, evoking memories of the Jardin des Plantes through a restaurant’s taste. It is opened up, and you can admire the beauty of its delicate and vast architecture, tinged with red blood, blue nerves, and white muscles, like the nave of a polychrome cathedral. Beside it, in the abandonment of their death, fish are twisted into a stiff and desperate curve, lying flat on their bellies, their eyes bulging. Then a cat, adding the mysterious life of its more knowing and conscious forms to this aquarium, its eyes fixed on the skate, slowly maneuvers the velvet of its paws over the oysters, revealing at once the caution of its nature, the greed of its palate, and the boldness of its enterprise. The eye, which loves to play with the other senses and to reconstruct, with the help of a few colors, not just a whole past but a whole future, already feels the coolness of the oysters that will wet the cat’s paws, and one can already hear, at the moment when the precarious pile of these fragile shells collapses under the weight of the cat, the small crack of their breaking and the thunder of their fall."

Marcel Proust, Rembrandt and Chardin, 1895

. . .

Marcel Proust: Elstir’s Lesson.

In his novel, Marcel Proust revisits the elements of his article on Chardin. But this time the painter is named Elstir (a character invented by Marcel Proust). And this painter teaches the narrator to find beauty in things that the narrator previously did not notice or did not like:

"I now willingly stayed at the table while it was being cleared, and if it wasn’t a moment when the young girls of the little group might come by, I no longer looked solely towards the sea. Since I had seen them in Elstir’s watercolors, I sought to rediscover in reality what I loved as something poetic: the interrupted gesture of knives still askew, the rounded bulge of a disheveled napkin where the sun intersperses a piece of yellow velvet, the half-empty glass that thus better shows the noble flare of its shapes and, at the bottom of its translucent glass, a remnant of dark yet sparkling wine, the shifting of volumes, the transformation of liquids by lighting, the alteration of plums passing from green to blue and from blue to gold in the already half-stripped compote dish, the movement of old chairs that twice a day come to sit around the tablecloth, set on the table like an altar where the feasts of indulgence are celebrated, and on which, at the bottom of oysters, a few drops of lustral water remain like in small stone fonts; I tried to find beauty where I had never imagined it could be, in the most ordinary things, in the deep life of ‘still lifes.’"

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

Jean Siméon Chardin (1699-1779)

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