NOTES
- M Roland-Michel, Chardin, trans. E McCarthy, London & New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996, pp 264–267.
- E and J de Goncourt, French Eighteenth-Century Painters, trans. R Ironside, Oxford: Phaidon Press, 2nd Edition, 1981.
- M Proust, By Way of Sainte-Beuve, trans. S Townsend Warner, London: Chatto and Windus, 1958, pp 242–251.
- M Bal, The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually, trans. A Milne, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997, pp 31–68.
- YA Bois, JC Bonne, C Bonnefoi, H Damisch and JC Lebensztein, ‘The Skate”, Critique, no 315–316, August-September, 1973, pp 679–683.
- There are a number of terms here—eating, sacrifice, sensation, meat and flesh—that are difficult to determine or give a coherent form to. They are challenging terms to use not only because they are defined by their status on the edge of representation but also because they have been used in different ways by different authors. Eating is one concept that has been variously used, redefined and problematised, by Bataille, Deleuze, and Derrida.
- Deleuze describes meat in similar terms in his study of Francis Bacon.
- “Meat is not dead flesh; it retains all the sufferings and assumes all the colours of living flesh. It manifests such convulsive pain and vulnerability, but also such delightful invention, colour and acrobatics. Bacon does not say, ‘Pity the beasts’, but rather that every man who suffers is a piece of meat. Meat is the common zone of man and beast, their zone of indiscernability… What revolutionary person in art, politics, religion, or elsewhere, has not felt that extreme moment when he or she was nothing but a beast, and became responsible, not for the calves who died, but before the calves who died?”: G Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. DW Smith, unpublished, p 21.
- G Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. R Hurley, New York: Zone Books, 1992, p 40.
- “An animal exists for itself and in order to be a thing it must be dead or domesticated. Thus the eaten animal can only be posited as an object provided it is eaten dead. Indeed it is fully a thing only in a roasted, grilled, or boiled form.”: G Bataille, Theory of Religion, p 39.
- Much of Chardin's oeuvre could be characterised by this descent into the private, chaotic and bodily territories of the bourgeois household. Not just images of utensils, meat and vegetables, but servants locked into menial and repetitive tasks, bloodied chopping blocks, and images of children in moments of discipline or education.
- According to Diderot in 1765: “…this painting which is known as a genre painting, should be the reserve of old men or those who are born old. It requires study and patience. No eloquence; little genius, hardly any poetry; much technique and truth, and that is all…I will say just one thing to you about Chardin, it is this; choose his setting, place the objects into this setting as I will show you, and rest assured you will have seen his paintings.” M Roland—Michel Chardin, pp 264–265.
- M Roland-Michel, Chardin, 1996, p 264.
- In the most ordinary sense, the creation of an aesthetic taste assumes that the meal itself must be deferred, lost or even sacrificed to its contemplation. Even a fine wine or meal demands that we pause for a moment's reflection before we swallow; savoring the sensation as we defer bodily satisfaction. We are used to understanding still lifes within a culture of eating, as if they are an unproblematic extension of the habits of the table. And yet as every artist knows, these meals are never eaten. Our taste for nourishment, which dissolves and assimilates the object, must be deferred to give autonomy to a fragment of perception, a trace of sensation or a representation. In this sense we could say that the disinterested appetite of an art consumer at least presupposes us holding back from food.
- G Bataille, Theory of Religion.
- “The thing—only the thing—is what sacrifice means to destroy in the victim. Sacrifice destroys an object's real ties of subordination; it draws the victim out of the world of utility and restores it to unintelligible caprice.”: G Bataille, Theory of Religion, p 43.
- J Derrida, ‘“Eating Well’, Or the Calculation of the Subject”, trans. p Connor and A Ronell, Points…, Elisabeth Webber (ed), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, pp 255–287.
- J Derrida and P Thevenin, The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, trans. MA Caws, Cambridge & London: The MIT Press, 1998, pp 59–175.
- The subjectile is the material support to the artwork, but this should not be understood as the purely physical components (such as wood and paper) or those elements that are often conceived of as physical or “real” (such as line and colour). The material support is also the conventions, languages, patterns and so on that constitute the world in which the artwork functions. “Material” here is not distinct from mental or conceptual elements.
- Deleuze and Guattari express this same situation in slightly different terms. They write; “…sensation refers only to its material: it is the percept or affect of the material itself, the smile of oil, the gesture of fired clay, the thrust of metal, the crouch of Romanesque stone, and the ascent of Gothic stone. The material is so different in each case… that it is difficult to say where in fact the material ends and the sensation begins… the plane of the material ascends irresistibly and invades the plane of composition of the sensations themselves to the point of being part of them or indiscernible from them…”: G Deleuze and F Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. H Tomlinson and G Burchell, London: Verso, 1994, p 166.
- J Derrida and P Thevenin, The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, pp 64–65.
- J Derrida and p Thevenin, The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, p 67.