Analog by Katherine Melissa Sifers a Thesis Submitted to the Faculty Of

Analog

by Katherine Melissa Sifers

AAS in Photography, January 2002, Ohio Institute of Photography and Technology BFA Photography, June 2005, Columbia College Chicago

A Thesis submitted to

The Faculty of Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Fine Arts

May 15, 2011

Thesis directed by

ii Abstract of Thesis

Analog

This thesis seeks to explain the artist’s decision to work with seventeenth-century

Dutch vanitas and memento mori still life painting as the primary influence upon her body of photographic still life. The thesis describes the connection the artist asserts between seventeenth-century Dutch culture and the contemporary American popular culture, politics and the current economic situation. The thesis also describes the artist’s interest in mysterum tremendum et fascinans and how that interest finds shape in her photographic production. The thesis delves into the artist’s relationship to object through an exploration of the opposing views of object and craft exemplified by the artist’s grandmothers.

iii Table of Contents

Abstract of Thesis...... iii

List of Figures...... v

Analog ...... 1-15

Figures...... 16-21

Bibliography...... 22-23

iv List of Figures

Figure 1 J. Falk, Untitled ...... 16

Figure 2 Katherine Sifers, Wilson and Hagman ...... 16

Figure 3 Willem Claesz Heda, Banquet Piece with Mince Pie ...... 17

Figure 4 Adriaen Coorte, Still Life with Asparagus and Red Currants ...... 17

Figure 5 Katherine Sifers, after Coorte #3...... 17

Figure 6 Willem Kalf, Still Life...... 18

Figure 7 Katherine Sifers, after Kalf #13...... 18

Figure 8 Katherine Sifers, after Heda #10...... 18

Figure 9 analog Installation view #1...... 19

Figure 10 analog Installation view #2...... 19

Figure 11 analog Installation view #3...... 20

Figure 12 analog Installation view #4...... 20

Figure 13 analog Installation view #5...... 21

Figure 14 analog Installation view #6...... 21

v Analog

For as long as I can remember I have been preoccupied with the mystery that surrounds death. When I was born, many of my great-grandparents and their siblings were still alive, but when I was around the age of five these relatives started passing away, strangely always in the spring. As a child I thought that spring was when people died and all that remained of them were their possessions. For me these objects became relics that had been touched and transformed by use and were reminders of the transience of life.

As an adult, I have made an effort to understand and come to terms with my overwhelming fear of death through exploring the work of artists, philosophers, writers, and filmmakers who deal with the subject in their own work. It was while reading Jacques

Derrida’s The Gift of Death that I first encountered the term mysterum tremendum used to describe the fear of the mystery surrounding death. I was intrigued by the term. I investigated the origin of the phrase and found that Derrida was only discussing half of the phrase mysterium tremendum et fascinans. It was originally used by Rudolph Otto to describe the simultaneous feeling of fascination and overwhelming fear that occurs when contemplating death.1 I was elated to find the very feeling I experienced described so succinctly and to find that I was not alone in the experience. This feeling looms over and touches all aspects of my life. It shapes how I live and it has influenced the choices that I made throughout my life. My ever-present awareness of this mystery has fueled my search for scholarship and art that deal with being and mortality.

1 Todd A. Gooch, The Numinous and Modernity: An Interpretation of Rudolf Otto's Philosophy of Religion, (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2000)

1 In relation to my work, the most important art historical precedent in which life and death are addressed is seventeenth-century Dutch memento mori and vanitas still life paintings. These painting address the relationship between life and death in a language of things. The first memento mori painting I encountered hangs in the Indianapolis Museum of Art. J. Falk’s Untitled (1629) follows the conventions of the genre and consists of an arrangement of two skulls, a bone, a single red rose, and a smoking oil lamp. [Fig. 1] An inscription in Latin below the painted objects reads, "All that is human is smoke, shadow, vanity and the picture of a stage.”2 My interest in this painting was not based solely on its obvious allusion to death, but also on the use of objects in the painting to communicate the concept of mortality. This painting introduced me to the idea that objects can represent meaning beyond their function or identity and convey specific intention.

Memento mori and vanitas paintings are composed of objects that have gained meaning from both organized religion and popular culture.

Religion is a major influence on how societies construct their behavior toward life, death, and mourning; however, because of the violent history of organized religion, I am not interested in making work that derives its meaning and context from religious conventions. The inability to communicate over secular and religious issues can be observed historically and presently in the relationships between the three Abrahamic religions. Derrida refers to them as “religions of the Book, the religions of the races of

Abraham,” i.e. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. 3 All three religions developed from similar roots and were shaped by ambiguous texts. Despite the inherent parallels of their

2 J. Falk, Untitled (1629), Original Latin “Omnia humana Fumus, umbra, vanitas et imaginem adhuc.” 3 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1995), 64.

2 foundations, there has not been strong philosophical agreement between these religions or even within their various sects. Instead these religions have a long history of cycling between uneasy peace and violence. It is difficult for me to understand how these systems created by man for coping with the mystery and the fear of death have become the major causes of structural and physical violence throughout history and into the present.

Because of this violence, it is important for me to find a method of communication that can speak to the brevity of life in a secular and spiritual manner as opposed to relying on religion. Northern Renaissance painting grew out of a tradition of depicting religious themes overtly and continued to produce objects of religious and moral contemplation but in a radically different and revolutionary form in the still life and genre scenes of the seventeenth century. Depiction of the sacred and mysterious is just part of what I believe these artists were considering while creating these paintings and I am inclined to work with still life despite my resistance to organized religion.

Prior to the seventeenth century, the painting of northern Europe focused mainly on biblical or historical motifs and was often funded by the Catholic Church or by other religious organizations. Dutch separation from the Holy Roman Empire allowed for a new pictorial relationship with faith and led to the shift away from illustrative, biblically themed works toward the depictions of everyday life that typify Dutch paintings.4

Religious tensions within the region were not resolved by the Dutch people securing freedom to practice their preferred Christian beliefs. Western Europe was occupied by both Protestants and Catholics, creating an environment of internal, structural, and

4 Norman Bryson, “Abundance” in Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting, (London, UK: Reaktion, 2001), 115-117.

3 physical violence; Holland was no exception.5 These are the secular and religious underpinnings of the environment within which vanitas and memento mori still life painting motifs developed. In the midst of the Reformation, Dutch culture wrestled with how to balance faith and spiritual views with its ever-increasing material wealth. In his essay, “Abundance,” Norman Bryson writes about the cultural change brought about by abundant access to goods: “Dutch still life painting is a dialogue between this newly affluent society and its material possessions.”6

My own relationship to objects was deeply influenced by the example of my paternal grandmother, who passed away when I was sixteen. She was poor growing up.

When she reached a point of financial security later in life, she began to accumulate objects. She was not interested in collecting ordinary items that she could purchase at the

Woolworth’s dime store or the Sears catalogue. Instead she was drawn to things with a history. She avidly collected valuable antiques. My grandparents made their livelihood through hay and cattle; during lean times the antiques could be traded or sold to supplement the family income. Her relationship with objects was dynamic; they were not just beautiful things that expressed her newfound status in the world – they were also investments. They were treasures locked away in cabinets when I was a child. My only interaction with them was through narrative. When my grandmother would pass along the history of these objects, she made clear that our family was not part of that history. They had their own history prior to their acquisition, one shaped by where they were made and who had owned them before her. That history made them valuable as commodities. She

5 Arie-Jan Gelderblom, Jan L. De. Jong, and M. Van. Vaeck, The Low Countries as a Crossroads of Religious Beliefs, (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 149. 6 Norman Bryson, “Abundance” in Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting, (London, UK: Reaktion Books LTD, 2001), 106.

4 was also drawn to objects like Victorian glass bridal baskets that she wanted to use to enrich our family traditions by collecting one for each grandchild. These baskets were meant to be presented to each of her grandchildren on their wedding day.

My understanding that objects have the potential to carry a complicated combination of personal, social and historical meaning helped to fuel my interest in still life painting and partially prompted my own still life work. However, when I first made still life photographs I embraced a more formalist approach to composition and selected objects primarily for their visual attributes and with little regard to the cultural meaning that arose from the objects. This aspect of my practice shifted as I began to explore family connections through my still lifes. The work that I made included objects that once belonged to my family members and that have since been passed to me. These objects are transformed into memento mori because they have passed through my family due to the death of loved ones. They replace those objects historically found in this type of still life. Their symbolic meaning is largely unreadable to an outside viewer because of the personal meaning represented through these family objects. Even the formal construction of these images is based on my personal relationships.

In one photograph from this series, Wilson and Hagman (2010), I explore my relationship with both of my grandmothers. [Fig. 2] Each of these women was responsible for keeping food on the table both figuratively and literally. For my maternal grandmother this was done by getting up every morning and cooking a full breakfast of eggs, bacon, biscuits, and gravy for her husband and three children. She would then spend the day working as a wood finisher in her small town’s furniture factory. When she came home at night, before preparing supper, she would work in the family’s garden

5 where the majority of the family food was grown. She kept up this daily routine until she retired at the age of sixty-three. My maternal grandmother is a crafts-woman who has spent most of her life making things with her hands. Even now as her sight fails, she still strives to bake and garden.

The need to have a personal role in creating her domestic environment was vastly different for my paternal grandmother. She was the major provider and managed the household in two very different ways during her lifetime. The first began in the 1950s when she was a newly divorced mother of two young children working as a waitress in a small town diner. The second began in an almost fairytale manner when she married my step-grandfather, one of the town’s wealthiest men, and began managing all of the financial aspects of his farm and hay-hauling business.

Because of their occupations and lifestyles these women had very different relationships with the objects that inhabited their daily lives. My maternal grandmother’s relationship with objects was shaped by her role in the furniture factory, adding the last layer of beauty and protection to wood furniture. There seemed to always be something wonderful to eat in her kitchen that she had made from scratch. Her own home was sparsely decorated and seemed to revolve around a large round table that sat in the kitchen. The contrast in my paternal grandmother’s house was extreme. There the walls were covered with all types of clocks that constantly reminded me of time. Her family home was a place that housed and protected valuable objects; the family lived amongst those objects. At the center of her house a small pink glass chandelier hung above a wooden table. Smaller objects were packed into large antique cherry wood china cabinets and those cabinets occupied most of the space. Moving through the house required

6 negotiating between one valuable fragile thing and another. It was clear that these objects were the privileged occupants of the space and people living in the house were their guests. These possessions were my parental grandmother’s sign that she had risen into a new economic class, one where she did not have to make things by hand and had the means to secure her family’s future.

In building tabletop still life constructions to photograph, I am, in part, continuing a conversation with these women and building a connection to their tables. I am negotiating between one grandmother’s physical relationship to table as craft and the other’s connection to table as possession. For my maternal grandmother, the table was a receptacle of her own energy; my paternal grandmother viewed the table as another’s energy invested and thereby transformed into a commodity that could be sold, purchased, or saved. Object for my maternal grandmother was an investment of self and for my paternal grandmother it was the repository of other. In constructing the composition of a photograph that refers to this history, I selected objects that are both representative of these women and the relationship that I would have liked to have had with them: a hand- made glass pedestal bowl filled with eggs, heirloom tomatoes, squash, the bottom of a mass-produced vase filled with a bouquet wrapped in a common paper towel; and, finally, a yellow and red apple situated between the vase and the bowl.

I found fulfillment in making these images, but there was something so sacred about working with these family inheritances that I felt inhibited by the objects and unable to fully reconcile all of my ideas. I wanted more flexibility to address the current cultural and political tensions I observe within my family and this country in addition to my interest in mortality. This need for more accessible symbols drove me to seek a fuller

7 understanding of how seventeenth-century Dutch still life functioned and how the objects were read by a contemporary viewer of the period.

There are parallels between both of my grandmothers’ relationships with object and how the Dutch seventeenth century culture related to object. Both of my grandmothers and the Dutch middle class transitioned from a state of poverty into financial security where they could afford to have a surplus. I believe that the still life paintings of the seventeenth-century Netherlands were made in a similar cultural paradigm to ours. The work addressed both the religious and secular turbulence of the period. While that historical moment is not a perfect analog to our contemporary position, there is much that is similar. During the seventeenth century, Holland became a superpower that was protected by its powerful navy, fueled by its large colonial holdings, and funded by its successful trade economy. Understanding its history at that moment gives historical context to many of the issues that we are facing as a country due to our history of economic and military strength.

I make still life photographs to be the starting point for a conversation that can take place outside of the contentious political enviroment that I observe within my own family and across the country as a whole. I do not deny the value of healthy debate, but currently there is a degree of polarization that is unlike anything I have experienced in my lifetime. There is no longer a space for conversation between differing points of view over contested issues. Constructive debate has been replaced by heated argument with lines being drawn in conjunction with political or religious affiliation that is often compounded by the conflation of both political and religious ideas. The United States is currently in a period where differing political, theological, and philosophical views

8 engender internal structural violence and even limited physical violence. However, most of the physical violence sparked by differing views occurs outside of our borders in the wars in which we are engaged. The Dutch seventeenth century painters lived during a period of both physical and structural violence and developed a mode of working that reframed their religious, political, and material concerns in a manner that allowed them to confront philosophical and theological topics without resorting to the loaded motifs supported by the Catholic Church.

Like those Dutch painters, I seek a method for creating work that does not announce its political or religious agenda because I do not want viewers to simply dismiss my work as propaganda. I want to create work that elicits discussion among people despite their political or religious affiliations. I think this work can be made through still life because it employs a language of objects and communicates meaning ascribed through implication, popular culture, and personal interaction. I want to create work that is quietly subversive.

I am working to create a balance in my current still life tables between the elements that are at work in Dutch vanitas painting, an understanding of the current political landscape, and a dialogue about the transience of life. I suggest that we as a society should reevaluate our relationship with objects and begin to see worth in the individual objects as well as the function they perform. In my lifetime I cannot remember a moment when there has been real scarcity in this country. However, the rising costs of energy, housing, and food are indicators that make me think that there is enormous change on the horizon for our country. When the Netherlands faced a period of economic, political, and spiritual change, it was reflected in their still lifes and their language of object. The Dutch arrived at that

9 moment of new prosperity and found they had to reevaluate their relationship to possessions.7 It seems to me that we are in a similar moment and our relationship to objects will reflect understanding that these now common items and goods are going to become scarce. The objects that are the focus of this series are three of the most iconic and ubiquitous objects in Dutch vanitas painting: tulips, lemons, and salt. I am pairing these things with what I judge to be contemporary analogs: oil, chocolate, and plastic.

One of the primary symbols for the transience of life and the futility of attachment to earthly objects was the tulip, a flower originally native to the Middle East and Turkey.8 I am pairing the tulip with oil in my photographs because petroleum controls our economy, drives our foreign policy, and affects our daily lives in a manner similar to the Dutch experience with tulips. As a country, much of our current national identity was formed through access to cheap oil. If we have reached the end of easily affordable oil, there will be massive changes in almost every facet of our daily lives. In the photographs that I am making, the object that I used to represent oil are plastic bottles of motor oil because of the iconic form of these bottles; few other things come in a bottle this shape.

The lemon was a representation for the Dutch seventeenth-century viewer of both the bitter and sweet of life.9 The contemporary analog that I am using is chocolate because of the similar symbolic meaning chocolate currently holds in popular culture.

Chocolate is an imported commodity and there is a growing awareness about the hardship that impacts the areas from which chocolate originates. The misery and war impacting the

7 Ibid. 117-119. 8 Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: an Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, (New York: Knopf, 1987), 351. 9 Eddy De Jongh, and Michael Hoyle, Questions of Meaning Theme and Motif in Dutch Seventeenth-century Painting, (Leiden: Primavera Pers, 2000), 21.

10 cocoa growing regions is causing the price of chocolate to soar. The response of most manufactures to this increase in cost has not only been to raise the price of their product and reduce the amount of cocoa, but also to increase the amount of air in their products. I use many forms of chocolate in my compositions from pure cocoa powder to more processed goods that are much further removed from the purest forms of the commodity.

I chose various grades of cocoa powder, chocolate that resembles gold bars and coins, as well as something extremely processed: a Hostess brand cupcake.

In Dutch seventeenth-century still life, salt represents eternal life. However, salt was also a valuable commodity and, therefore, a symbol of great wealth. 10 Salt was a critical product in many methods of preserving of foodstuffs, and for the Dutch to maintain their dominance in the movement of products around the world they had to secure a constant supply of salt. Salt was originally a domestically produced commodity for the Dutch. However, the process of extracting salt from the shoreline gradually started to undermine the structural integrity of the coast and the dyke system. 11 South America and the Caribbean became the major suppliers of salt for the Dutch. Because of such a critical need for salt, at times the commodity was more valuable than gold. In still life paintings salt is almost always present, normally resting on an elaborate three-legged silver or gold saltcellar.12 I used plastic as an analog for salt because, among other applications, plastic is employed to package foodstuffs and to keep them fresh. There is a growing consumer awareness of the negative impact of plastic on the enviroment and our

10 Ibid. 138. 11 Julie Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age, (New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 2007), 163. 12 Jochen Sander, The Magic of Things: Still-life Painting, 1500-1800, (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2008), 69.

11 health. In the still life table that I constructed about plastic I specifically chose plastic grocery bags, plastic berry packaging and plastic salt containers– items whose sole purpose is packaging and which are commonly discarded after use.

I was influenced by my encounters with Dutch still life painting as well as by my academic research. My interaction with Willem Claesz Heda’s Banquet Piece with Mince

Pie has developed into an ongoing relationship. [Fig. 3] I frequently went to look at this painting, seeking meditation, solace, grounding, and direction. As a result of this relationship, I made the decision to work in direct conversation with three still life paintings that I am most drawn to at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Each painter’s method for resolving their still life paintings was distinctive to them despite working with similar motifs within the same historical period. I am not attempting to transcribe these paintings; I am responding to what I find are the most important elements in each work as they relate to the concerns in my own art making practice.

Adriaen Coorte’s Still Life with Asparagus and Red Currants inspired the composition built around the combination of tulips and oil. [Fig. 4] Coorte’s painting reads as a close up view of a small selection of objects. This framing device was not employed by many painters of the period. In my still life table after Coorte, I am emulating his close proximity to the subject as well as limiting the number of objects in my still life. [Fig. 5]

In Willem Kalf’s painting, Still Life, a cloth, a bowl, a lemon, and a tall glass vessel rest on the corner of a table. [Fig. 6] The key elements that I was drawn to in

Kalf’s painting are the repetition of particular types of objects and the fluid orchestration of those objects on the table. The delicate, high-lipped bowl imported from China was the

12 object that I was most interested in.13 I was drawn to the ridiculously impractical form of this bowl, which appears filled with lemons and surrounded by a piece of drapery in many of Kalf’s compositions. In my response to Kalf, a similar bowl occupies a prominent space in my composition. [Fig. 7]

The third still life that I constructed was a response to my memory of Willem

Claesz Heda’s Banquet Piece with Mince Pie, which is no longer on view at the National

Gallery of Art. Heda’s table had become such a touchstone to me that no longer having access to it was disturbing. Of the three painters that I was closely looking at, it is Heda who most dramatically represented the repercussions of a moment just passed through his portrayal of the objects on the table. Heda depicted what remains in the moment after the breakfast meal has finished and the candle has been snuffed. His tables were set with many individual objects arranged to imply the very recent departure of people. Each contributes to a greater whole – if just one item were taken away, the entire composition would be thrown out of balance. In my response to Heda, I present a contemporary preparation of a meal with plastic bags strewn across one table and half eaten fruit and other remnants of the meal on the other. [Fig. 8]

The photographs that I am making in dialogue with these paintings are produced with a large format view camera on four-by-five-inch color transparency film. The result of this process is a large transparent, color positive of the image that is best viewed with light passing through it from behind. This situation allows me to display the original transparency without needing to take the additional step of producing a color print from a negative. This keeps the connection between the actual view of the still life and the

13 Julie Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age, (New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 2007), 122-124.

13 captured image at only one degree of separation. However, displaying the original transparency lit from behind means the image remains at the relatively small size of four by five inches. The optimal viewing of these images is at a scale that allows the objects in the photographs to be as close to actual size as possible, typically at least thirty-two by forty inches. I resolve this issue by using overhead projectors to display the transparencies. The exhibited work exists as projected image-light-and the film-object.

This dual relationship of the image displayed as both object and projected light refers directly to the concepts inherent in vanitas and memento mori, the profane, earthly object, and the sacred, spiritual light. Because of the nature of the projector the image is somewhat degraded and the viewer is compelled to look back to the transparency, the actual object, for more clarity. I hope to create a space where a tension is produced in the relationship between these two states of the image, one solid and the other ephemeral, prompting the viewer to shift her or his attention between the tangible and the insubstantial and to consider the profane and the mysterious.

I choose to work with vanitas and memento mori because it is a long established motif for communicating a reminder to the viewer of the impermanence of life and the futility of excessive consumption in the material world. I am drawn to the still life motif for its ability to express these complex ideas through the use of common objects communicating meaning assigned to them both by popular culture and by personal association. I work within these established ideas to create images that are both an investigation and a critique of our use of objects and to suggest that our society’s interaction with these objects could shift to a more contemplative relationship. My goal is

14 to create works that oscillate between a meditation on the mysterum tremendum et fascinans and a celebration of the absolute wonder of life.

15 Figures

(Figure 1) J. Falk, Untitled, 1629

(Figure 2) Katherine Sifers, Wilson, and Hagman

16 (Figure 3) Willem Claesz Heda, Banquet Piece with Mince Pie

(Figure 4) Adriaen Coorte, Still Life with Asparagus and Red Currants

(Figure 5) Katherine Sifers, after Coorte #3

17 (Figure 6) Willem Kalf, Still Life

(Figure 7) Katherine Sifers, after Kalf #13

(Figure 8) Katherine Sifers, after Heda #10

18 MFA Thesis Exhibition Installation Images

Analog Smith Hall of Art, The George Washington University April 11, 2011 - April 22, 2011

(Figure 9)

(Figure 10)

19 (Figure 11)

(Figure 12)

20 (Figure 13)

(Figure 14)

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