This piece was originally published on the website RateYourMusic.com. The site only offers the ability to review music and film, but since all my work was already there and I had found friends and a very small audience there I decided to carry on posting my written work there.
There's a joke in Homestuck where John creates what is described as a "perfectly generic object" and the object itself ends up being a bright green cube with rounded corners. I always found it funny that the MORE generic something gets, it actually starts to stand out again, so the way to design something perfectly anonymous is to give it just a little bit of character. "Generic" is a ubiquitous word of lazy criticism in online discussion, up there with "pretentious" as a word that is annoying both when it is misused and when it is used correctly. Recently someone tried to tell me that the Bay Transformers films of all things are generic. Bay's style is incredibly pedantic and idiosyncratic—whatever criticisms of it there are, that it is "generic" is not one, because there's always a subtlety to the truly nondescript.
Giorgio Morandi's still lives portray familiar objects about as lacking in material character as an object possibly could. Looking at them is like seeing a photograph of something unrecognisable and not knowing how large it is, except here the photograph is of recognisable things. We ought to know everything about them, but they project such vagueness that we can’t be sure. They seem like perfect encapsulations of the “form” of household objects before those things assert themselves in reality and are given life by actual light bouncing off their surfaces. John Berger wrote a lovely piece on Morandi that used a characterisation of a uniquely Italian light as the lens through which to examine his work, but he also called Morandi a metaphysician which to me calls to mind a realm without light at all. The first time I read about Plato's forms it was explained by way of a building that partook of the form of whiteness. In different lighting conditions the whiteness of the building would be variable—its whiteness is imperfect. Apparently the metaphysical realm does not really involve light, which only has the task of producing the confusion of shading and visual subjectivity that we experience. If Morandi is a metaphysician then the subjects of his paintings exist only as extensions of matter in space. That we're seeing the things at all is down to some trick of his, that he can visually render something that shouldn’t be visible, as though through an electron microscope.
When I last went to the Tate gallery (more than a year ago at least) I wrote a note of the paintings I liked and wanted to look into further but I can't for the life of me remember which Morandi Still Life I actually saw there. They're all just called Still Life. I think it was probably one of the earlier paintings because it consisted of only household objects, while some of the later ones have some rather peculiar looking pastel cuboids in them which don't look like anything that has ever existed in our reality. Conventional wisdom suggests that Morandi's strength is in how he strips these objects of any identification, which makes them universal and personal in how they might quietly populate our own cupboards. When the painter uses that style to render these otherworldly blocks though this is not the achieved effect at all. The objects stop being recognisable and intrude upon the image as something else. I suspect that reading this without looking at the paintings would suggest that I think these things are creepy, but looking at the paintings themselves I think it's impossible to characterise them that way. The pastel cuboids are friendly and soft, but beyond that impossible to anthropomorphise. Apparently, the suggestion of amnesia and impersonality can be spun as a kind of kindness.