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If you put water into a
cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle.
You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot.
-Bruce Lee
At first
glance, or perhaps from a distance, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s Boy Blowing Soap Bubbles (1733-34)
(1.) could appear to depict any number of actions- writing, drawing,
playing a musical instrument- which involve a specific state of
absorbed-distractedness, that is, a state of mind at once intent, and yet
buoyant, fixated yet free, unberthed. Early on we sense the action or task might
be one of exteriorization, of ‘interiority’ materialised- the mind directed via
the hand to a surface, to a sound, to an object, to an idea.
However
the painting depicts a boy- of so-far indeterminate age and social standing – engaged
in blowing a bubble via a long wooden straw from a nearby glass of soapsuds. He
is leaning not on a table, as it may at first have seemed, but on a window
ledge- probably, judging by the leaves that hang nearby and his downward gaze,
on at least the first or second floor, rather than on ground level. And so we
already have a sense of gravity, of weight and levity, the stock in trade of a
painter engaged with still-life (as Chardin was). Indeed the painting is filled
with things which can spill, things that hang, that blow in the breeze, that
can topple or dip or float.
A second
figure- another, younger, boy- peeps up from the ledge, watching the bubble blower.
Depictions
of children idly absorbed in blowing bubbles (and the accompanying homily that
their childish innocence is just as fragile and ephemeral) are common in Dutch
genre painting of the previous century. Chardin, however, adds to, enriches and
complicates this subject- as he does in similar genre scenes of daydreaming
servants or children building houses of cards- firstly by creating a series of
formal-metaphorical connections between the various elements of his
composition, and secondly by creating a relationship of absorption between
himself, the viewer and the figure depicted. In short, he composes with
attention- directing it and creating loops of consciousness between viewer,
subject and painting.
Chardin
paints pictures of children at play with objects (a house of balanced cards
(2.), a flighty feathered shuttle cock (4.), a spinning top (3.), the
ephemeral bubble) which in turn play with objects’ potential for movement,
collapse, for transitory moments of wonder; wonder at matter, at its physics
and rules and games, its behaviours. As his figures age, so their absorptions
require less novel triggers (a woman caught up in the steam rising from her tea
(5.), the actions of stirring and pouring) or he suspends them in a moment of
daydreaming while engaged in menial tasks, their minds having wandered off to
exit the frame altogether, objectless and untethered completely (6. and 7.).
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| 2. |
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| 3. |
In the
pictures of children however, part of the consciousness is siphoned off to
inhabit the object, to be absorbed into it. The seat of the mind’s awareness
has travelled out of the body and into a small vessel: the bubble, the spinning
top, the painting itself. It is not so much that they have consciously ‘projected’
themselves, but rather that the object very much holds their consciousness, even if for a brief moment. There has
been a total momentary exchange or submission from the conscious mind in the
environment to a temporary complete focus within an object and how it happens
to be performing. This exchange- depicted in the painting- is mirrored in the
viewer’s absorption in the illusionistic performance of the painting itself. The
viewer inhabits the picture, can feel the different states and transformations
of matter, can feel the expulsion of the soapy water from the straw, the effect
of breath on the seemingly solid liquid.
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| 5. |
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| 6. |
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| 7. |
As much
as the consciousness of the boy seems to have entered the bubble, the bubble
could also be seen as a kind of silent utterance. He leans on the ledge, on the
‘frame’, at the very limit of the framed space but projecting out of it via the
bubble, which effectively becomes a kind of speech balloon. We are reminded of
Poussin’s ‘profession of mute things’ or W.H. Auden calling the room where he
wrote ‘the place where silence becomes objects’. (There are also connotations
of conjuring, spell-casting, as well as a more scientific sense of
experimentation and testing, with the bubble a kind of chemist’s spherical
beaker.)
The curve
on the side of the boy’s head, and again in the parting of his hair, echos the contour
of the bubble – reinforcing the transference from one sphere to the other. It
is as if Chardin is painting the mysterious unknowable thoughts of others
(perhaps the problems of communication also), or the mysterious and precarious
existence of consciousness itself- as represented by the miraculous orb of the
bubble, an object also, like the painting, formed from the alchemical influence
of consciousness where it acts upon a material. And of course, the ledge (like
a frame) bridges the gap between picture and viewer, between painted and real
world- the projection is not just from child to bubble, the viewer is
implicitly involved in blowing their own bubbles at and in this painting.
Such projections
of consciousness- from boy to bubble, from viewer to boy, from viewer to
Chardin, from Chardin to viewer, from Chardin to painting, from Chardin to boy,
and so on- are all the more reinforced by the presence of the second (younger?)
child. The difference between this painting as a work of art and the many Dutch
genre scenes with children blowing bubbles, or the Millais Pear’s Soap painting (10.) or even Manet’s direct
recapitulation of the Chardin (8.), is this very specific inclusion of the
2nd figure, whose gaze falls not on the bubble but on the blower’s hand-
caught surely in a glance or a movement of the eyes that has taken in the
dipping of the straw, and which will progress to the bubble, perhaps as it
floats above the window ledge (we can feel his elastic gaze when we look at
other parts of the picture, only a slight upward motion of his eyes will take
in the blower’s face, his concentration/absorption), and again these actions
mirror that of the viewer of the painting and of the act of painting itself.
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| 8. |
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| 9. |
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| 10. |
The
younger child seems as much mesmerized by the action of the blower as by the
bubble, and the bubble is as much a metaphor for the conjuring trick of the
painting itself as it is a metaphor for the loss of innocence.
This is frequently the case in Chardin’s
depictions of the objects of his figure’s absorption- the delicate balance of
illusion, of harmonious forms in supporting relation to one another, mirrored
in the balancing cards or the wobbling spinning top (its motion in turn
conjured by the opposing angle of the quill in relation to the vertical stripes
on the wall), or the steam from the teacup becoming a flurry of marks,
dissipating against the surface of a wall. Here the image is reinforced by the
boy’s pose- hunched as if over a drawing or a pastel, his concentration on
maintaining the fleeting object, keeping it afloat. Previous depictions of the
subject show the blower’s gaze looking upward at a rising bubble, but Chardin (reportedly
often fatigued by the sheer effort of making his paintings) instead
concentrates on the tension of making: the illusionary sphere is getting bigger
and bigger, the illusion he is spinning getting grander and thus at risk of
collapse, every move is a gamble, the bubble easily burst. Comparison with the
Manet is helpful- Manet, as one could expect, is much more brash, extrovert,
his boy is more like the young army flautist (9.), the brushwork more
bravura- if Chardin’s boy is hunched over a drawing then Manet’s stands at an
easel for a more ‘official’ portrait of the artist confidently dashing a
picture off. It is an emptier painting for it.
Chardin’s
bubble itself- created from light, reflection- could also seem to represent not
only consciousness and painting generally, but also the genre of still life
specifically: it is still life condensed, a kind of transparent apple, glass,
etc., a thing of spheres and reflections and highlights, a kind of platonic
‘essential form’ of still life.
Indeed,
Chardin’s approach is always that of someone deeply engaged in still life. The
most obvious visual rhyme is between the bubble and the glass of soapy water,
the two straws leaning practically parallel. Chardin gently puns on the ‘blown’
nature of the glass and the bubble, hardness and softness, heaviness and
lightness, fluid and fixed, and the various temporariness-es of human
artefacts.
To the
left, vine leaves hit the straw as if connected to it- they have highlights in
close proximity- and the leaves themselves are painterly, sketchy flourishes,
as if painted by it, highlighting the brush/straw/tool/instrument connections.
The straw shares colour with the twisted branches and again straightness and
solidness vs. crookedness and amorphousness, natural and synthetic are set
against one another. Examples of this kind of play are countless- see the
mirror image sweeps of hair and shirt and ear at the shoulder; his curled
side-locks, white collar and ruddy earlobe mirroring in an opposite curl the
brown jacket, ruddy lining and white of his exposed shirt, the crinkles and
folds reminding us that we are just as temporarily ‘dressed’ in our suits of
skin and fluids; and again, the hair ribbon which shoots like glossy splayed
leaves out of the continued line of the boy’s straw as the cluster of leaves
did from the straw in the glass.
The best
still lives deal with the relative solidities and states of matter, and map and
navigate the way these intersect with our lives – or rather the way we
orientate our lives around these states of matter and the complex relationships
between objects, their uses, their statuses, whether abject or coveted,
utilitarian or decorative – and without easy, cliched recourse to skulls or candles
to invest them with moral or metaphorical profundity.
To
return to the ‘narrative’ of the painting, again there is more besides the
bubble to reinvest and extend the tired metaphor of youthful innocence. For example, what, exactly, is happening
below the window ledge, out of the frame? Is he blowing the bubble at someone, for someone – or eavesdropping?
If he is
spying down on the world below (probably from his room, or perhaps the soapsuds
are from a scullery where the boy idles his time, bringing a wider sociological
world into play) he is probably spying on adult affairs (between lovers?),
baffled by their complex behavioural codes and systems. There might be the hint
of eroticism (perhaps off-stage) in the swelling bubble, the lolling, listless
late noon atmosphere (which recalls something of Balthus’s dreamy, troubling
pictures of nascent adolescent sexuality and self-absorption).
If the
blower- who may have only one eye open, and maybe even an arch eyebrow cocked-
is focused on events on the ground, how then is this to be reconciled with his
absorption in the bubble? There is a slight sideways glance in his left eye- is
there a moment depicted here when the ‘simple pleasures of childhood’ (or even
the more existential stirrings of adolescence) are faced with the distractions
of an indomitable forward flow into adulthood? Has he been distracted, his
head, metaphorically, ‘turned’? And is the smaller child simultaneously a kind
of stand-in for his younger self in a daisy chain of age and absorption– stuck
behind a ledge he can’t see over, the older blower leaning not with nonchalance
or boredom but tiptoeing to reach over (and is the hand on the ledge therefore
a steadying hand?), to see directly below whatever mysterious thing which for
us remains so.
Perhaps
the blower is on the edge of adolescence – the perfect sphere that will be
released should he hold his nerve, maintain enough but not too much control, a
conciliatory note of eloquence against the mumbling, stumbling awkwardness that
may already be upon him. And that, a metaphor for the conciliatory note of
eloquence art strikes against the angles and awkwardness of life for us all. Maybe.
*
A couple of extra things.
Purely free-associating, I’ve always seen an echo of the
Chardin bubble picture within William Nicholson’s The First Communion (1907).
It depicts a rite of passage: one’s introduction to ‘adult’
structures, formalities and cultural practices, but also one’s introduction to
abstract ideas, to symbolism and metaphor (the wine and the blood,
transubstantiation, the cultural transformations of matter etc.). It’s a child’s
sense of the world and its rules of play developing, and it’s there in the
skewed shadows, as if the world’s been slightly re-angled, the slight breeze,
the precarious ‘stick’ holding the picture up; the mysterious windows, like
vacated rooms as stages in one’s development, or rooms yet to be occupied (one’s
future).
The gauzy sphere (a fishnet? Bringing notions of encapsulation, porous-solid surfaces, cells etc. into play, as well as the idea of a child's stick and hoop cast aside for a world of tools and work),
stick/pipe, the window ledges, the high shadow might all be superficial similarities
between the two compositions- but perhaps these sets of shapes and images point
towards similar things. Perhaps it comes down to the basic (primal?) image of a
stick and a circle – ‘I am here’...
In any case, the
Chardin helps to explore the mystery of the Nicholson (a haunting painting I’ve
found very little commentary on, though I believe it is one of the few
reproductions in Marguerite Steen’s 1943 biography).
I’m also reminded of a frequent subject of Merlin James’s-
based I think on a Caius Gabriel Cibber sculpture in the V&A- a man with a bagpipe,
puffing away while his dog lolls at his feet.
Again there are superficial similarities between the bubble
blower and the piper- its an image from roughly the same sort of late 17th
early 18th century as the Chardin (with instrument blowing), a consciously
‘of the past’ image, emblematic in that sense- yet it also fits within this ‘Genre
painting’ genre.
Again the ‘player’ takes on the condition of what he is playing,
he becomes the action- the piper is bubbly and amorphous (relative to the
background and the more angular segments of the dog)- there’s a sense of exteriorizing,
generating, snake charmer conjuring. As with the Chardin there’s a sense of circularity,
looping, as the very air the piper is breathing in is controlled and converted,
exhaled as music (with the pipes becoming a kind of secondary lung, an
extension of oneself, as with all tools).
There’s the sense of pleasing oneself, playing/painting for the
pleasure of it.
It also brings to mind the kind of internal-rebreathing of
forms, subjects and ‘standards’ of the artform’s history, which is of high importance
within James’s work- what Geoff Dyer referred to in Jazz as the ‘circular
breathing’ of the tradition.
Note: Throughout I refer specifically to the version of the painting in the
Metropolitan Museum, New York. Three versions of the painting are known and
there may have been some lost to history. The other two versions I would argue are
very slightly less compelling for various reasons – one with roughly the same
format as the Met version is less cropped and condensed, it spills less from
the fame, and has no creeping vines or honeysuckle. The other has been
significantly altered by hands other than Chardin’s with a stitched on expanded
portrait format and perfunctory vines added- the greenery in the Met’s version
is believed to be by Chardin, and interacts more inventively with the wider
composition than in these later additions.
