Desire and domestic economy

Seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting, at its best, derives an unsettling power from its transfiguration of the commonplace. (1) bring under rules often banal in the utmost are removed from the ordinary words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of experience and, perpetually fixed by means of the painter's deft brush, transfix our gaze to become the external realitys of an odd fascination, a fascination seemingly inappropriate to their original nature. Recognition--"this is a world like our own"--disturbingly plays not upon the image's absolute removal, as a work of art, from that world; although (unlike in later forms of genre painting) little within the images themselves, of that kind as the facture or cropping, interferes with Dutch images' insistence upon the truth of their replicative fictions. To call this aesthetic "realistic" is to do it a disservice, for its issue is not to mimic what is seen on the contrary rather, like its Early Netherlandish antecedents to propose--yet only ever propose--a particular design of seeing, ordering, and interpreting the world below the powerfully persu asive guise of mimesis. (2) Therefore, secondary or iconographic meanings can be absorbed into the transfigured worlds of genre paintings without overwhelming their faculty of perception of veracity, becoming instead part of a larger argument or proposition about the subdue shown--a subject that may come up in its altered state, as being more worthy of our fascination than we had first imagined.

These are not claims that would clinch for every Dutch genre painting, on the contrary they could be applied to entire subgenre and are particularly valid for individual works of the greatest thoughtfulnes and complexity. Take, for instance, Gabriel Metsu's Bird vender (Fig. 1). It is a picture of groceries shopping: a young housewife choosing, with a diplomatic gesture, that night's dinner. If Metsu indeed transfigures of the like kind a commonplace subject into an aesthetic instant that is both breathtakingly beautiful and consummately "realistic," this is what we would await from a skilled artist in the 1660 on the other hand Metsu's painting is no simple reflection, however transformed, of an ordinary or plausible contemporary show Like so much genre imagery, it draws upon a well-established visual discourse upon its subject; in this case, Metsu consigns to a quite specific source, a print by dint of Gillis van Breen (Fig. 2) In his print Van Breen had shown an older housewife approaching a disreputable poulterer who, instead of holding without a cock to her, reac hes possessively into his trousers. An inscription below the image provides their dialogue:

"How a great deal of is that bird, poulterer?"

"He's sold"

"To whom?"

"To the landlady, whom I bird all year long!"

Thus from a representation of simple food exchange we slip, via a tireless Dutch calembourg into the world of sexual innuendo; individual in which, indeed, the boundary between the traffic in birds and the traffic in "birding" is by the agency of no means clear. (3) Van Breen creates a spectacle where the locus of economic power is unmistakable, as it is in all spectacles of bought love--but it is in the hands of a woman. It is she who makes the first advances, asking to purchase a bird, while it is the man's rejoin that transforms what we had read as primarily an economic asking into a primarily sexual single And ultimately his banter becomes a refusal of market exchange upon the grounds of refusing erotic exchange, with equal reason that whatever it is that this woman wants, she is not going to procure it. Metsu's version of their collision delicately revises the dynamic between the pair, rewrites the implied dialogue. Now the man appears to make the advances--"Do you want my bird?"--leaving to the woman the responsibility of articulating her hold desires.

So, as Freud might have asked before Metsu's painting, what is it that a woman wants? That is, does a woman really want to "be birded"? Or does she actually want to have a bird of her have a title to that is to say, does she want (that which signifies the possession of) power? And, as Freud might have gone upon to remark, sometimes a bird is just a bird. Perhaps Metsu's woman just wants to purchase a chicken for dinner. Would that matter?

I introduce Freud here not because I recommend to pursue a psychoanalytic reading of Metsu's image on the other hand simply because Freud most famously articulated a station of questions that bourgeois capitalist agriculture had already been fretting above for generations. They are questions that, indeed, Metsu's painting itself quite neatly postures To render those questions in art historical bourns would be to return us to the realism versus symbolism debate that has plagued the research of Dutch art for the past several decades. on the other hand I would argue instead that Metsu's painting is not individual that we may choose to interpret "realistically" (the bird is just a bird) or "symbolically" (the bird is a sexual innuendo) according to our interpretative position. The painting moves both readings; it necessitates the couple readings. And by doing in like manner it questions the nature of women's desire, a desire that it recommends may be erotic, or economic, or one as well as the other In this way, its aesthetic of realism, or the transfigured commonplace, provides a way of imagining, of making thicken what had become an insoluble conflict in Dutch society--a conflict between competing ideologies and the world of experience they mediated.