"The language of the vanitas was first conceived in mid-17th century Holland against a backdrop of economic and social turmoil. In 1636, at the peak of the tulip mania Dutch and European merchants traded rare tulip bulbs for astronomical prices culminating in the first European-wide speculative bubble, which when it collapsed on the 3rd of February 1637, created political chaos across Northern Europe. Into this economic void Dutch Vanitas painting was born, a symbolic reminder of the transience of earthly pleasures and the permanence of death.

Developed in part from the memento mori artworks of the late Medieval period, alongside Dutch still-life painting from the 16th century, the traditional Vanitas work represents a strange hybrid, a hiatus in the development of Western art from the 20th century. Objects of incredible skill and beauty, Vanitas paintings were also considered by their contemporaries to be important works of spiritual contemplation that reflected on the fragility of human existence and the inevitable passing of time. The Latin word vanitas has two different applications as does its English cognate ‘vanity’. The original Latin adjective vanus means both ‘empty’ and ‘frivolous’ and the Vanitas paintings of the 16th century were meant to serve as a constant reminder that however privileged you may be in this life, humility was the key to your entry into the next.

In our post-postmodernist world, where art remains one of the last bastions of the unknown, as honoured site of retrospection that questions what we are and the inherent contradictions of our existence, the language of the vanitas has new and added significance. The starting point for the current exhibition Vanitas: The Transience of Earthly Pleasures was a trip to the Musee Maillol in Paris in early 2010 and the exhibition C’est La Vie! Vanites de Pompei a Damien Hirst. On show was a collection of work, from the Roman period to the present day, all themed around the symbolism of the skull. In itself a key vanitas symbol, the skull motif is but one of many symbolic signifiers of the vanitas, which include emblematic nature of flowers, the hourglass, candles, mirrors and insects, even the metaphoric significance of shadows, to name but a few.

In the 21st century contemporary art world, any of these vanitas related themes are enjoying a new revival, considered and explored by artists as viable pathways towards self-introspection. The imperative of art in our modern age is to provide new opportunities that help us navigate the world around us and deal with the stresses and strains of modern living. Anxieties relating to the impermanence of being and existential angst, identity crisis and sexuality are all contained within our modern contemporary art discourse. With the ruins of the grand modernist experiment behind us many contemporary artists are now reaching out to the past for create a fresh take on the present. We believe that the artists featured in Vanitas: The Transience of Earthly Pleasures are at the vanguard of this on-going process."

 

Joe La Placa and Mark Sanders

Curators Vanitas: The Transience of Earthly Pleasures

 

 

 

 

"It is in this kind of elegantly atmospheric, historic residence that curators Joe La Placa and Mark Sanders brilliantly set Vanitas: The Transience of Earthly Pleasures. The exhibition took place in autumn 2010 in the legendary 33 Portland Place, London a massive residency built in 1775 by master Regency-style architect Robert Adam."

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"It is into this thoroughly non-neutral and un-Modern space – whose shadowy interiors, dramatic staircase, majestically carved fireplaces, lofty decorated ceilings, and creaking solid-oak floorboards (under which one of the artworks, Kate MccGwire’s cascade of shining feathers title Slick), produce what Poe described for his ideal home as ‘a tranquil but magical radiance’ – that some twenty-five artists were invited for this exhibition to examine the contemporary possibilities of the vanitas genre."

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"The symbolic message was clear: our time on Earth is fleeting, the pursuit of wealth futile in the face of death, and life as fragile as the vanitas’ sparkling painted glass goblet hovering precariously on the table’s edge. Or was its moral message really so clear? After all, for all the vanitas’ moralistic preaching about letting go of Earthy pleasures, the artworks themselves are so magnificently painted and gorgeous that they contradict their own message. The vanitas is not just a picture of desirable objects, but a highly desirable object in its own right produced for the aesthetic pleasures of a wealthy mercantile class. How can we resist the temptation of the Earthly things in the artwork when we can barely escape the seduction of the vanitas artwork itself?

The vanitas is a genre filled with such contradictions, and not just in the literal contrast between the gaping skull and the furs or silver coins heaped on the canvas like a goth-inspired window display. When contemporary artists bring together signs of life with those of death, such as Alastair Mackie’s tree branch comprised of matchsticks (Shapeshifter, 2010), an artwork perpetually on the verge – literally – of going up in smoke, they connect directly with the fleeting, contradictory spirit of the age-old vanitas. Also referencing the 17th century original is a markedly high level of labour-intensiveness, exemplified in Jodie Carey’s Untitled (Vanitas), 2010, a two-meter-high, lace-,chiffon- and bone-encrusted flowering pedestal, a whirl of dusty lusciousness and declining femininity which might suggest Miss Havisham’s withering wedding cake. As Svetlana Alpers has written, the vanitas painting’s similar extreme labour-intensivity was prized because it reflected the artist’s unwavering dedication to his craft, his admission of no short-cuts in executing an artistic vision. For example, Alpers writes, the premise of Willem Kalf’s 1662 vanitas masterpiece Still-Life with Nautilus Cup was to produce opulent objects such as a Persian rug, facon de Venise glassware, a Ming bowl – finer than any weaver, glassmaker or ceramicist could actually manufacture. The painted copies are paradoxically of greater material and aesthetic value than their original, and consequently the painter’s work was hailed as the greatest of all object-making occupations. In this sense, the vanitas then as now is a potent reminder of the unique and immense value of art-making among all human endeavours."

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"The recent works on view update the vanitas’ reflection on death in combination with any number of influences emerging from the interfering three centuries, whether 19th century gothic sentiments borrowed from Poe and his generation, or 1980s heavy metal iconography, or Romanticisim, horror movies, Disneyesque gaiety, even pre-vanitas ‘triumph of death’ scenes from the Middle Ages. Such unorthodox cross-historical references are presented in any number of media, from tratditional materials such as bronze (Jake and Dinos Chapman), porcelain (Bertozzi and Cassoni), and oil on canvas (Aaron van Erp), or utterly unexpected materials from dead animals (Noble and Webster), to porn magazines (Tom Gallant), to rubber tyres (Wim Delvoye). Despite the array of unpredictably varied media and surfaces – perhaps akin to the many contrasting objects on display in the 17th century still-lifes – what remains in contemporary vanitas-inspired art is the ambiguous messaging about death, at once feared and teased, as well as an exquisite attention to detail and a spiritual relationship with the past.

Just as the curators chose a distinctively un-Modern space for ‘Vanitas: The Transience of Earthly Pleasures’, the artworks on exhibit can be seen as stating their defiant refusal of many Modern-era ideas and values in art-making. The lavishness, excess, and extreme craftsmanship in these contemporary works all point to this distinctly counter-Modern love for the exquisitely made. You will not find in this exhibition readymades, computer-based work, text pieces, and the like. Here as then the vanitas was not just about the decay of earthly things, but also about consecrating value to those rare and magnificent, handcrafted creations which succeeded in transcending the banal and ordinary. Expect therefore in these works to be seduced, engrossed and sensually assaulted."

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"Of all elements within the 17th century vanitas other than the skull, the shadow represented a unique part of the picture; the rest of the vanitas’ objects could be touched or smelled, but shadows could only be seen. These painted shadows reinforced a sense of the evanescence of human life, and contained a handy Biblical affiliation too: ‘For we are but of yesterday, and know nothing, because our days upon earth are like a shadow’ (Job, 8:9)."

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"Signs of transition and instability have always been a hallmark of vanitas; importantly, this exhibition graced the lavish space of 33 Portland Place for just a brief five days during the 2010 frieze art fair, and became itself a rapidly passing delight. In many of the artworks therein we discover similarly heightened sense of instability – not just the traditional vanitas’ savouring of quiet decay, but a far more dramatic and explosive transformation."

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"The flower held an especially potent presence in the vanitas; the shortness of its bloom made for easy metaphor regarding life’s fleetingness – a symbolism enhanced by its Biblical connections: (‘Man that is born of woman is of a few days: he comes forth like a flower and he is cut down’, Job 14, 1-2). Its symbolic meaning turned literal in the wake of the mid 17th-century Dutch tulip craze, which eventually crashed, depleting great fortunes and dramatizing the free market’s terrifying unpredictability alongside the folly of human desire. Each flower held special symbolic significance; tulips became a symbol of human foolishness, not surprisingly, although earlier they had signified fine taste and grace. Bertozzi and Casoni’s Vasco con Mazzo di Fiori (Vase with a Bouquet of Flowers) (2010), with its variety of porcelain blooms, also recalls in its detailed handiwork the opportunity provided by the vanitas for 17-century flower painters to exhibit their in-depth botanical erudition, demonstrating the artist to be a unique figure of multi-disciplinary knowledge, not just a mere painter."

 

 

ALL VISUAL ARTS. (2011).Vanitas: The Transience of Earthly Pleasures. All Visual Arts: London.