Eric Bourdon - Blog
William Vicats buying a luxury pepper pot

Zoom on the painting

William Vicats buying a luxury
Nepalese cement pepper pot at a good price
(Full title)

Original acrylic painting on linen canvas
Artwork size : 28.74 x 23.62” / 73 x 60 cm

© Online art gallery of painter Eric Bourdon
Lille, France, 2020

     The context of the presentation of William Vicats’ luxury Nepalese cement pepper pot affects the perception of the buying process of any pepper pot. In this regard, it is the paradigm of the pepper pot as a part of visual arts and art marketing that creates a series of consequential problems !…

     Whether William Vicats buys it or not, even at a good price, any luxury Nepalese cement pepper pot, as well as any other object presented in a contemporary museum context, is liked more, bought more often in contemporary art shops, and also rated more phenomenologically valuable than when presented in the sterile laboratory context to a consciousness that is reluctant to the psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious.

     Raymond Williams, for his part, argues that there is no unique and or individual aesthetic object which can be extrapolated from the art world, but rather that there is a continuum of cultural forms and experience of which ordinary speech and experiences may signal as art.

William Aspdin (1815-1864)
English inventor of modern artificial “Portland cement”
Also widely known as
“an incorrigible liar and swindler”

     This takes us far beyond the simple conception of William Vicats’ luxury Nepalese cement pepper pot as an object in relation to other objects or a piece of equipment. It is rather a “place”, far larger than Nepal itself, or even the Himalayas, a pure clearing of Being and, in this sense, no-thing.

     We can of course retaliate in the face of this nothingness and flee in fear toward objects (and see and use the cement pepper pot as a simple table utensil), but fear is still founded in the experience of who we are as uniquely “there” precisely as an ability-to-be. The subject is still and will always be key in the interaction with the aesthetic object.

Raymond Farmer (9 yrs. old) and his pet racoon
(Freeport, Ohio, USA. Date unknown)

     The luxury Nepalese cement pepper pot serves therefore primarily as a price-less vehicle for the projection of William Vicats’ individual identity into the world of objects, as well as being the irruptive source of much of what is uncanny in modern life. Also, art is used to memorialize individuated biographies in a manner that allows persons to imagine that they are part of something greater than themselves.

   William Vicats achetant une poivrière de luxe