Grace and Grandeur in the Face of Death
Everything in this picture is carefully arranged: In Mushroom, Vera Mercer demonstrates her prodigious staging skills. In front of a naked wall foundation in irregular hues of medium blue, she has placed wine glasses, carafes, bowls, and vases of transparent glass on an old wooden table with rounded-off corners. Arranged over these are vegetables, mushrooms, pods, and huge, curled leaves as well as an autumn bouquet of cut flowers. The “mushroom” that lends the work its title is found in the opening of a carafe that is too small for it, in other words where it obviously doesn’t belong, while two additional mushrooms are placed on an elevated glass bowl. The longer we look at Mercer’s still life, which was taken in daylight and without any additional light source, the more we surmise that not only didn’t these objects come together by chance, but that the photographer didn’t toss the ingredients straight into a pot of soup after taking the photograph, either. In this state and in this combination they would have been inedible.
For her works, Vera Mercer draws from a large number of props that she finds in her studios in Omaha and Paris, or among the retailers and hunters nearby: flowers, leaves, vegetables, fruit, eggs, fresh fish or recently killed venison, animals, some of them with fur, and some without, and some of them present only in parts, i.e. heads, paws, or claws. And always the same glasses, carafes, gravy boats, candles in old silver candlesticks, silverware—sometimes it all comes across as a bit old-fashioned, sometimes timeless. If we were asked to give a date to the photographs, most of us would probably become confused. Despite the death theme, everything seems peaceful. The animals have already been bled shortly after being killed, and some of them seem animated, as though they were still alive or were prepared specimens.
In one of the photographs, a dead turkey that has not yet been plucked lies on a wooden table, surrounded by mushrooms, lemons, and garlic—and we’re immediately reminded of the traditional American Thanksgiving dinner that millions of animals have to give up their lives for each year. Here, however, we also see, in a disturbing distortion of scale, huge open flowers that were hung behind the arrangement while the photograph was being taken. For the picture, mushrooms and fruit were placed next to the turkey, either because they just happened to be lying around the kitchen, or because of their formal qualities. The right combination is required to bring about a particular harmony, a certain tension or power in the image, the desired “drama.” And Vera Mercer orchestrates this on a miniature stage: a mantelpiece in Paris, or an antique wooden table in Omaha.
So what is she really showing us, and what is left when there’s no symbolic content to be found in her photographs? The things remain pure, to a certain extent themselves in form, shape, and function. In interviews, Mercer has said that she does not intend to add a second, metaphoric plane to her work. And indeed, the shells and horns, skulls and feathers reveal external forms and inner patterns intriguing enough to be read in a manner that goes beyond mere vanitas imagery. The dearth of symbolic content in Mercer’s imaginative visual statements leaves ample space for viewing these images.
To a certain degree, the artistic process corresponds to the preparations for a sumptuous feast with elaborate tableware. Despite this, the history of art includes a specific canon concerning the meanings of colors, plants, and other things that have been portrayed for centuries in still lifes. Like the educated classes of society, the Old Masters knew these ascribed meanings very well, of course, and they implemented them in a very deliberate way.
This is different in the case of Vera Mercer: dead animals only make a temporary appearance in her makeshift studio before they travel on to the kitchen of one of her nearby restaurants in Omaha. Through their image, the photographer preserves or invokes the animal’s lost soul. Maybe it’s this that makes the pictures so melancholic and mysterious. Growth and decay happen before our very eyes, as a biological certainty. At the same time, we can only imagine very few of these animals as food; most of us have lost the original hunting instinct over the course of our development into Homo sapiens. Few people can catch an animal today, kill it, gut and section it; a society of divided labor takes care of this for us.
Vera Mercer avoids photographing prepared meals. She only made an exception for her last book, The Boiler Room: The Restaurant and Its People, which is about a fine dining restaurant in Omaha that she opened with her husband, Mark Mercer. Yet when one compares the still lifes that make up her art work with the food photography made in documentary manner and for the book only, there is a major difference between the two, particularly in terms of the animal’s dignity, which in the latter is reduced to a profane cut of meat. On the other hand, in the still lifes, for instance with the heads of the young stags that Mercer shot in close-up in horizontal format, we can study the differences in the antlers, and hence the individuality of the animals.
Many of the plants, glasses, and animals in the pictures have a haptic quality, and consequently a sensual aspect. This was already the case when Mercer began with her unusual neo-baroque sill lifes more than a decade ago. A first survey appeared in the extensive photo book that was published in 2010 parallel to her first major solo show in her native city of Berlin. Since then, Vera Mercer has been represented by several galleries in Germany, Switzerland, and the US, and she continues to develop her kitchen still lifes, sometimes to an extreme degree. Now, the slender white candles are no longer placed in the silver candlesticks with multiple branches, but right on the table next to the fruits, flowers, and animals, and sometime they’ve burned down so far that the wick is about to collapse into the melted wax. Some candles have already been extinguished, which should not be misconstrued as a vanitas motif. Instead, it’s about an illuminating factor that’s been lost, in that the strange mixture of light in Mercer’s photographs is a key compositional tool, albeit one that is not immediately obvious. Using light, the artist modulates the still life’s various components to create a subtle atmospheric quality. In some works, a dark nocturnal mood prevails, in others a lighter, brighter one.
More recently, Vera Mercer also began working with panoramic image formats, which require the computer to produce the overall compositions she has in mind. The meter-long picture banners are made in the form of exhibition prints for huge walls in mansions and other unusual exhibition locations, or are works commissioned for restaurants. The artist makes no hierarchical difference between the contexts of presentation; moreover, she remains open to a variety of different forms. For many years now, she has been transferring the documentary authenticity of the original photograph by means of a second working step into an artificial artistic construct; in a process consisting of several parts, the digital imaging programs replace the darkroom. This entails adding together several photographs each of which shows only a partial aspect of the large-scale live arrangements in front of her camera, resulting in a large, seamless image banner. Despite this, a high degree of representational realism remains, albeit altered and enhanced. Mercer operates with gigantic files, which are necessary to articulate the meter-long images in the highest degree of optical precision possible. The colors of her ink-jet printer replace the chemical baths in the darkroom. Today, Mercer uses analogue and digital processes in parallel manner, while she scans the analogue images too, of course, in order to rework them to give them the intensive, at times deliberately reduced coloration so characteristic for the artist.
Another example of this is the picture in which Vera Mercer has arranged a cow’s skull with a tongue hanging lightly out of its mouth and placed an arrangement of cut flowers behind it in such a way that it looks as though they were coming out of its nostrils or forming a halo around the animal’s head. This leads us to a major art historical theme: the bullfight, repeatedly depicted by artists from Goya to Picasso as a ritualized battle between human civilization and brute strength. The bravely fighting bulls are paid respect in the arena, but are then conquered and killed. Vera Mercer has not created a portrait of a fighting animal after the Corrida, but rather shows us the beauty and peace of death in general. At the same time, she paraphrases an earlier image of hers, Pig from 2006. The swine, or more precisely its blanched, hairless head, looks out at us mischievously, despite the missing, brutally cut-out eyes, while the cow’s head, photographed seven years later, also in Omaha, stares up at the ceiling from its glass eyes. Mercer turned the pig’s head somewhat to face the viewer, while she laid the cow’s head with its thick brown fur and bloody cut side on the wooden table. The white napkin beneath the massive head is stained with blood on one of its corners. Mercer presents us with a sweet death in a sea of flowers. Despite the intense coloration, we are reminded of the black and white body stagings of her American colleague Joel-Peter Witkin, who also, however, integrated human cadavers, occasionally headless, into his macabre, horrifying interiors. Vera Mercer does not seek to shock in this way, quite the contrary.
She often leaves the antique wine glasses empty, as placeholders for the upper middle class and for sensual pleasures. They are occasionally filled, and refer to the person absent in the picture, the drinker and connoisseur, as well as to the photographer herself, in whose domestic environment the picture was taken. This is why flowers and their petals enter the picture so frequently—they are pretty much everywhere in the apartment, and so they are automatically appropriated as a graceful or high-contrast accompaniment. Mercer’s apartments in the US and France are her stages, and the things in them are arranged as though on a stage. This frames a reference to the dance training of the young Vera, in the mid-1950s, when her name was still Mertz. In the 1930s, her father was a well-known Berlin stage designer, but then left the former capital with his family. She says he was the biggest influence on her photographic work. And indeed, regarded in this context, her arrangements resemble stage design models, while at the same time they are a showcase for life. On a miniature stage such as this, every existence comes to a standstill, but is felt intensively.
In some of the pictures, the external form is very different from the natural size, which can sometimes seem grotesque or threatening. This shifting of dimensions is another confusing optical trick used in stage design. In her works, Vera Mercer creates a strange, highly individual world in which art historical influences are evident. This already begins with the oldest existing images of humankind; in the caves of the South of France and Northern Spain, our early ancestors left behind stylized likenesses of animals that they hunted, killed, and consumed. Many thousands of years later, the theme developed further in mimetically precise kitchen still lifes and hunting pieces. Thus, with her still lifes, Vera Mercer stands in a fairly long tradition.
After she takes the photographs and finishes the digital imaging, Mercer prints her motifs in three different sizes. The picture’s effect changes with each format, as it’s crucial to the reception whether or not things are represented in their original size, smaller, or larger, which makes them seem more abstract, more like an image. When the turkey, grapes, or vase of flowers are shown life-size, the motif has a more immediate effect, like a window looking onto another room.
More recently, Vera Mercer occasionally connects the two important work groups of portrait and still life, and places a person at the table where she has staged a nature morte; she presented some works from this artistic crossover in her publication Vera Mercer: Particular Portraits in 2014. Despite the dead or doomed animals in the images, she expands her idea art historically in the direction of tableau vivant. Group images such as these also belong to the stage repertoire as the conclusion of a movement sequence and might have left an early mark on the artist, who was a dancer at the time.
In her work, Vera Mercer is always in search of the essence of things. She does not, however, charge the individual motifs of the arrangements with meaning, as has been done repeatedly throughout the history of the still life, i.e. in the memento mori. Instead, in her late-baroque or late-Surrealist still lifes, she shows and combines pairs that are opposite in terms of form and content in a deeply meaningful way: light and shadow, life and death, tradition and modernism, culture and nature, realism and illusionism, beauty and terror. It’s remarkable for an artist to succeed with an intensity as strong as this, and Vera Mercer creates an overwhelming visual world that can seduce—or disturb us.
Matthias Harder
BOOK
Life
Vera Mercer
Editors: Matthias Harder
Format: 30 x 26 cm
Features: 96 pages, 45 color images, hardcover
Language: English / German
ISBN: 978-3-95476-113-5
€39.90 / $60.00 / £37.50
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