Lost in Thought: The Blurring of Life and Art in the Visual Realism and Superrealism

of Gustave Courbet, Duane Hanson, and Karl Ove Knausgaard

Author(s): Jenessa Kenway
Source: Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal , Vol. 102, No. 1 (2019), pp. 61-88
Published by: Penn State University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/soundings.102.1.0061

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 Lost in Thought
soundings sgnidnuos
The Blurring of Life and Art in the
Visual Realism and Superrealism of
Gustave Courbet, Duane Hanson,
and Karl Ove Knausgaard
Jenessa KENWAY, UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA
LAS VEGAS

Abstract
The blurring of life and art is at the center of Karl Ove
Knausgaard's explorations in his memoir, My Struggle, Book 1.
Like life, Knausgaard’s book is filled with boring tasks, objects,
and events, through which he sifts attempting to locate intrin-
sic significance. Rendering in hyperreal detail aestheticizing
mundane domestic moments positions him as the literary
inheritor of the visual art movements of realism and superre-
alism, alongside artists Gustave Courbet and Duane Hanson.
Superrealist art nudges us into examination of life and peers
over the edge for a glimpse of what lies beyond the nothing-
ness of the mundane.

Keywords: visual realism, superrealism, Karl Ove Knausgaard,

Duane Hanson, Gustave Courbet, Woolf, Wittgenstein, aes-
thetics, mundane, non-being

The relentless slew of boring, repetitive chores and

activities to which we brusquely attend generally merit
Soundings,
Vol. 102, No. 1, 2019 little thought. The experience of performing such tasks
Copyright © 2019
as driving, brewing tea, washing dishes, showering,
The Pennsylvania
State University, and folding laundry quite often induces a sensation of
University Park, PA
auto-pilot in which we are simultaneously aware and

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 62

controlling what we are doing and absent, our mind wandering between
soundings sgnidnuos

present activities and thoughts of other places, people, and things. Perhaps
Virginia Woolf best describes this sensation in her memoir Moments of Being,
calling it the “cotton wool” of “non-being,”1 identifying the light packing that
muffles the mundane. “A great part of every day,” she writes, “is not lived con-
sciously” as if it is “embedded in a kind of non-descript cotton-wool. . . . One
walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done; the broken vacuum
cleaner . . . washing, cooking dinner” (emphasis added) all performed and
minutes later forgotten.2 While we may not be fully aware of it, or remember
it later, a great deal of thinking, remembering, and complex mental process-
ing transpires during these banal moments of existence, blending the silvered
threads of active thought with the cotton fibers of inattentive junctures. In the
performance of mundane tasks one’s mental state is divided between the task
at hand and cerebral musings about what is to come, what happened earlier,
current strivings and failings, dinner plans, to-do lists, conversation snippets,
and so on. During these moments we occasionally step outside ourselves and
watch ourselves perform, contemplating the nature of our own thoughts.
We might wrinkle our brow or laugh involuntarily at a peculiar idea passing
through our mind. In these moments of self-reflection we inadvertently per-
form what Ludwig Wittgenstein describes as capturing “the way of thought,
which as it were flies above the world and leaves it the way it is, contemplat-
ing it from above in its flight.”3 In Wittgenstein’s description we hover above
our absorbed self, not touching, but simply observing the traffic of our mind.
While we occasionally do this ourselves, we fail to perceive these moments in
an aesthetic manner on our own. As Wittgenstein explains, “only an artist can
so represent an individual thing as to make it appear to us like a work of art.”4
It is this habitual layered self-awareness that Norwegian author Karl Ove
Knausgaard taps into in his memoir, My Struggle, Book 1. His work partici-
pates in a sustained flight of self-observation, attempting to portray moments
of self-absorption. Knausgaard puts his finger on this point of separation,
attempting to record the hum of the brain on auto-pilot, to spot, as we some-
times do, the thoughts that involuntarily pass through our minds when we
are not aware of thinking and depict the inattentive layer of consciousness
that often goes unnoticed. He attempts to bring into focus fuzzy moments of
non-being, to pin down the appearance and content of everyday thought of

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 63

average moments to gesture toward the void beyond the pale of such idling

k en way Lo st in Thou ght

thoughts. Knausgaard seeds major life events such as a marriage proposal,
a teenage crush, and the death of his father throughout the novel like pills
in a cotton-packed bottle so that they are nearly lost, overwhelmed by great
swathes of trivial details. This approach risks boring the reader and yet pro-
vides content that is perversely relatable, mimicking the typical life ratio of
periodic highlights weighed against a bulk of predominantly average days.
The mundane activities of life provide a natural stage for Knausgaard’s
work, pulling him into the artistic tradition of aestheticization of the mun-
dane. His interest in absorption also connects him with the visual arts in
which this is a commonplace theme among works that portray the mundane.
Such themes are often discussed under the label of “literary realism.” Due to
Knausgaard’s affinity with visual art and his disconnect from specific agendas
of previous works of literature in this vein, I have chosen to approach the work
of Knausgaard by focusing on the visual art lineage from realism to superre-
alism. His decision to pull from his life experience for content, combined
with his emphasis on mundane details, links him both to the movement of
realism, originating in the eighteenth century and best exemplified in the
work of Gustave Courbet, and also the superrealist sculptural works of the
1960s through 1980s, especially those of Duane Hanson. My discussion of
superrealism and Hanson demonstrates the continued trend in visual arts of
making work that turns toward life for content, a focus of Knausgaard as well.
Comparing Knausgaard with Hanson highlights visual similarities in the social
types each depict and a shared dedication, at times morbid, to documenting
the surface. Each pays attention to mundane objects and people in order to
view them aesthetically. Lastly, they both demonstrate an interest in the placid
states of mind during inattentive moments. In the work of Knausgaard and
Hanson, the “theatrical stage” of art, which creates the contextual change, is
downplayed and intentionally minimized, tamping down the elevating effect
that automatically occurs when something is made into “art.” Aligned with the
cannon of realism, yet participating like visual superrealist works in the hyper-
real amplification of mundane subject-matter, Knausgaard positions himself
as a literary inheritor of the superrealist art movement. By pausing to observe
his own thoughts, Knausgaard’s work provides a glimpse of the thought-stream
running through non-being in a way that is unavailable to us in visual works.

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 64

His efforts provide a compelling contemporary specimen of literary art giv-

soundings sgnidnuos

ing voice to mute superrealist works portraying mundane mental absorption.

Examining the work of Knausgaard, therefore, allows us to assess superreal-
ism’s function within literature.
The theme of consciousness and the commonplace is encountered in lit-
erature in the work of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Anaïs Nin,
and Emile Zola—all writers who attempted to penetrate the physiognomic
surface and access the simmering current of absorptive thought beneath.
Knausgaard’s work is inspired by these earlier works, especially Proust, and his
work can be viewed, in some ways, as continuing this literary tradition. These
earlier works, and arguably that of Knausgaard as well, engage in a project
of “aesthetic autobiography” as defined by Suzanne Nalbantian.5 However,
Knausgaard’s work is not interested in the limitations of Victorian literature
to which his modernist predecessors were responding nor is his outward real-
ity refracted through stream of consciousness. Instead, Knausgaard’s aesthetic
aligns more closely with that of “near documentary”6 that attempts to portray
moments, persons, and, as with Knausgaard, interior thoughts as well—an art
of artlessness. Therefore, the term of visual realism, rather than literary real-
ism, better assists us in making sense of the highly visual project of Knausgaard
and what it seeks to accomplish. Comparing Knausgaard to works of visual art
brings the visual strategies present in his work to the foreground. Due to the
immediacy and primacy of sight, any work of literature that strives to capture
mundane experiences is also, at some level, about the visuals that compose it.
The cognitive experience of moments of nonbeing, during which we
happen to observe our thoughts and actions, is intimately connected with
the aesthetic experience of perceiving art. Observation of mundane acts and
works of art alike entail thoughtful assimilation and digestion of minute details
and qualities. This cognitive similarity translates into the ability to perceive an
aesthetic experience within mundane occurrences which, ultimately, throws
into question the distinction between life and art. The use of the mundane
within art elevates commonplace experiences in which the change of context
results in a fundamental shift in our understanding. Devoting equal attention
to mundane acts of cleaning, cooking, and eating as to observing a work of art
blurs the distinction—a distinction that has been increasingly blurred ever
since the subject matter entered artistic depiction in the first century CE in

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 65

the form of murals depicting fruit, baskets, pitchers, platters of fish, and loaves

k en way Lo st in Thou ght

of bread.7 Food on the table moves from a position of consumption to visual
admiration. From Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting of The Peasant Wedding
in 1568 to Robert Rauschenberg’s 1955 paint-soaked, unmade Bed, artists have
pulled the material of life inexorably into art. Initially, it may seem superreal-
ism is the culminating coup de grace completing the long transformation of
life into art, and it is possible to view it in this way. As the barrier grows still
more thin, there is, however, as I shall discuss, another way of conceiving this
transformation of art into life. Interrogating the mundane within art theory is
what defines the limits of what we perceive as art. Literature can reconceive
the mundane as art within life. This blurring of life and art is at the center of
Knausgaard’s explorations. In the inversion of life and art, art becomes subor-
dinated to life.

The Disinterested Intellectual and the Turn Toward Life

The observation of figures suspended in absorption in the visual arts first
gained prominence in the eighteenth century. Moments of heightened men-
tal absorption while preforming mundane tasks are characterized by a cer-
tain negligence an, “oubli de soi or self-forgetting” as Michael Fried defines
in his seminal book, Absorption and Theatricality. In this state the individ-
ual is “oblivious to their appearance and surroundings.”8 Fried explains that
visual representations of this state of being are a common occurrence in
eighteenth-century French paintings of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Jean-
Baptiste Greuze, Gustave Courbet, to name a few. These works consist of
images of people reading, playing cards, blowing bubbles, or lost in thought.
Visually projecting unawareness of being observed, these works satisfy Fried’s
argument that absorption is fundamentally “antitheatrical” and aim to provide
a glimpse of genuine life. Yet perversely, as Fried acknowledges, because all
works of art are created with the expectation a viewer will look at them, they are
inherently artificial. Fried expounds on this idea by turning to Wittgenstein’s
thought experiment in which Wittgenstein relates the “uncanny and won-
derful” experience of catching someone “who thinks himself unobserved
engaged in some quite simple everyday activity.”9 The figure of the thought
experiments is “walking up and down, lighting a cigarette” on a theater

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 66

stage: “Suddenly we are observing a human being from the outside in a way
soundings sgnidnuos

that ordinarily we can never observe ourselves,” Wittgenstein observes adding,

“But then we do see this every day & it makes not the slightest impression on
us! True enough, but we do not see it from that point of view.”10 Ultimately,
the attempt to catch a glimpse of the mundane act of absorption, therefore, is
paradoxical for we fail to appreciate it unless the artist pulls it out for display.
At the very moment this is done, though, we risk losing the very authenticity of
that which we sought to observe. Likewise, the moment we catch our thoughts
wandering we risk impressing active thought upon the unconscious stream.
This makes the project of Knausgaard a nuanced act alternating between
detachment and self-awareness. Depicting mundane absorption is an inher-
ently problematic endeavor. Wittgenstein’s point of putting the everyday on
the stage is what allows us to see the everyday with a refreshed perspective and
this is what art that takes the commonplace as its subject strives to accomplish.
Early realist paintings set the precedent and tone for visual representations
mining the mundane. Later artists will continue this tradition, ultimately, far
exceeding their predecessors in the appearance of the reality achieved.
Rejecting classical subject matter such as frolicking nymphs, satyrs, and
goddesses that populated the work of academic painters so out of step with
ordinary life and the French working class, Courbet instead controversially
portrayed everyday people in mundane contexts absorbed in acts of work or
leisure. Art critic Linda Nochlin explains, “Courbet was accused of painting
objects just as one might encounter them, without any compositional linkage,
and of reducing art to the indiscriminate reproduction of the first subject to
come along.”11 Declining to use “compositional linkage” suggests that Courbet
painted the subject with no attempt to re-situate the person or object into a
more pleasing visual arrangement, which hints at the earlier idea of “near doc-
umentation.” His painting The Wheat Sifters of two female workers situated
atop a pile of grain spilling out over a tarp demonstrates his rejection of classi-
cal elegance and contrived arrangement—the general mess of their profession
further accentuated by the numerous bowls and spoons scattered about them
along with a sleeping cat and young boy snooping in the adjacent tarare.12
The absorptive state of the figures is also an example of Fried’s assertion that
Courbet’s art is antitheatrical. The viewer’s position behind the lead sifter who
is absorbed in the performance and observation of her mundane task means

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 67

that both viewer and subject are directed toward the disarray of life. While

k en way Lo st in Thou ght

the subject matter of the work is commonplace labor, as Fried notes there
is an inherently creative act embedded within the task; the particles of grain
cascading upon the white tarp invoke the painterly act of mark-making upon
a canvas, drawing a clear parallel between mundane and artistic labor.13 In
this way, Courbet affirms that the creative process of art, like life, is messy and
laborious and emphasizes the similarly absorbed state of mind shared across
manual labor, making art, and viewing art. Rather than elevating it, Courbet
situates creative labor on par with other typical forms of manual labor.
The objective, as Nochlin goes on to say, is to stress that “the ordinariness
of the artistic statement, or even its ugliness, is precisely the result of trying
to get at how things actually are in a specific time and place, rather than how
they might or should be.”14 The struggle of getting at how things are logically
leads to ordinary and, at times, unattractive material, involving the working,
resting, eating, and sleeping that comprises the bulk of human existence. The
attempt to portray visually how things are begins the work that Wittgenstein
defines as “getting at how we look at things.”
The effort in Courbet’s work to represent without interference, which
increases still more in the work of Knausgaard and Hanson that I will discuss
later, aligns with Wittgenstein’s definition of philosophy. He writes “perspicu-
ous representation is of fundamental significance for us. It earmarks the form
of account we give, the way we look at things. . . . Philosophy may in no way
interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it”
(emphasis added).15 Describing or identifying “the way” we look at things is
a first step toward evaluating “that way” of looking and, thus, conferring sig-
nificance upon it, even if that significance is simply acknowledgment. This
brings to mind Fried’s allusion to a secular spirituality present in paintings of
absorption, what he calls a “‘positive mental, or indeed, spiritual state” that
has been referred to as “mindedness.”16 Rather than a distraction from more
important ideas (e.g., eighteenth-century thoughts of a Christian life) reading,
card playing, or just musing while working may instead be productive chan-
nels for thought that, as Fried remarks, “we have yet to fathom.”17 This concept
applied to the mundane may then reclaim it for a higher purpose.
There are numerous creative parallels between this discussion of the work
of Courbet and Knausgaard’s novel.18 Nochlin’s critical commentary about

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 68

Courbet is easily transposed to Knausgaard as we find in his work that “ordi-

soundings sgnidnuos

nariness . . . or even . . . ugliness” is also one of his central points. Knausgaard

shares in Courbet’s struggle to “get at how things are” and the need to turn
toward unappealing, banal material. Both writer and artist connect creative
labor to the drudgery of manual labor and the messiness of life. Courbet and
Knausgaard each question philosophical traditions that place art on a pedestal
and turn it into something sacred, fragile, and separate from life.
While Knausgaard’s style has more in common with the hyperrealism of
later artists, early on in his memoir he establishes himself within the canon
of realism. Knausgaard’s first portrait of the father is reminiscent of Courbet’s
Stone Breakers,19 placing the parental figure in the “vegetable plot” of the
author’s childhood home and “lunging at a boulder with a sledgehammer.”
Knausgaard further describes “the hollow” as “only a few meters deep, the
black soil he has dug up and is standing on together with the dense clump
of rowan trees growing beyond the fence behind him cause the twilight to
deepen. As he straightens up and turns to me, his face is almost completely
shrouded in darkness.”20 Face, landscape, and action are therefore grasped as
a singular whole. The lumping together of boulder-breaking and father in this
segment also brings to mind the outraged remarks of an eighteenth-century
critic, cited by Nochlin, who complained Courbet “makes his stones as import-
ant as his stone breakers.”21 Likewise, Knausgaard’s trivial “stones” share equal
importance with his principle protagonist and the landscape. Knausgaard
spends a great deal of time railing against the trivial “stones” of domesticity
and in doing so increases their importance. He expresses his frustration with
the seemingly inconsequential aspects of life and tries to find the “solitude” he
needs to satisfy his stated goal of “writing something exceptional,” but instead
finds himself overwhelmed by the “superior force” of caring and cleaning up
after his children.22 We find similar circumstances in the casual untidiness of
Courbet’s Portrait of P.-J. Proudhon of 1865,23 which depicts the distracted phi-
losopher, in rumpled clothing, sitting with books and papers and turned away
from his two daughters at play, Madame Proudhon’s absence indicated by a
basket of mending on a nearby chair. Within this scene, as in Knausgaard, we
find the disinterest of the intellectual in domesticity, yet also the performance,
albeit reluctantly, of domestic duties for Proudhon’s supervision of the two
girls is through his physical proximity alone as his mind is clearly elsewhere.

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 69

The portrait of Proudhon is similar yet pales in comparison to the hectic por-

k en way Lo st in Thou ght

trait Knausgaard provides of himself and his children absorbed in the chaos
of morning preparations for the day, sans maternal assistance. Mentally dis-
tracted like Proudhon, Knausgaard is eager to shuttle his two daughters off to
daycare to allow him to return to his intellectual pursuits:

It is a question of getting through the morning, the three hours of dia-

pers that have to be changed, clothes that have to be put on, breakfast
that has to be served, faces that have to be washed, hair that has to be
combed and pinned up, teeth that have to be brushed, squabbles that
have to be averted, rompers and boots that have to be wriggled into,
before I, with the collapsible double stroller, in one hand and nudg-
ing the two small girls forward with the other, step into the elevator,
which as often as not resounds to the noise of shoving and shouting
on its descent, and into the hall, where I ease them into the stroller,
put on their hats and mittens . . . and deliver them to the nursery ten
minutes later, whereupon I have the next five hours for writing until
the mandatory routines for the children resume (emphasis added).24

Comparatively, Courbet’s portrait of the burdens of fatherhood on the intel-

lectual is idealistic next to this exhausting itemized representation. While
Proudhon sits lost in intellectual reverie, two well-behaved daughters at play
nearby, Knausgaard is entirely occupied with grooming, dressing, feeding,
scolding and transporting two small girls and does not have the luxury of
musing. But, of course, this portrait of Knausgaard and his two daughters is
created after the fact, when they are not around, meaning the content of his
intellectual labor has been given over to thoughts of the two girls. Even during
his “five hours” of reprieve the two daughters are mentally still present, the
recollections of the chaos of caring for them hindering his ability to mentally
transition to other thoughts.
The seeming peaceful equilibrium represented between work and family
found in the portrait of Proudhon is something Knausgaard claims to long
for but cannot seem to achieve: “Time is slipping away from me, running
through my fingers like sand while I . . . do what? Clean floors, wash clothes,
make dinner, wash up, go shopping, play with the children in play areas, bring

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 70

them home, undress them, bathe them, . . . tidy up. . . . It is a struggle.”25

soundings sgnidnuos

Knausgaard’s dilemma resonates with the question embedded within the pen-
sive gaze of Proudhon as he sits on the front porch steps and is a question
Knausgaard identifies as “the question of meaning.” Why “isn’t it enough?”
he wonders.26 Why is the “meaning [his children] produce insufficient to ful-
fill a whole life”?27 To find the answer, Knausgaard like Courbet turns to the
unembellished jumble of life for answers. Submitting to the “chaos” of life,
Knausgaard embraces the reality “of three hours of diapers,” “paying bills,”
and “howling” children, along with rest of his assorted life experiences, as a
source for content. By grafting his writing onto his life, Knausgaard exhibits
the same disinterest of Courbet in art for the sake of art and instead turns
his art upon life. Unpacking the pill bottle metaphor mentioned above,
Knausgaard examines the cotton to see what it consists of, seeking to uncover
latent meaning behind the chores of life. Even if they are not meaningful in
some way in and of themselves, his approach makes us recognize that the way
we look at them, our attitude toward them, reveals something about ourselves.
It is Knausgaard’s excessive documentation of mundane details that ultimately
move him beyond realism and connects him to the hyper-realism of the super-
realist art movement.

Superrealism and Similarities Between Knausgaard and Hanson

Critics in the 1960s and 1970s originally referred to superrealism works as “new
realism” as they endeavored to account for the more visually “real” quality, far
exceeding previous works of realism.28 Grappling with the super “real” sculp-
tural works, before settling upon “hyper-realism,” critic Joseph Masheck writes
“with an ostensibly styleless and baldly descriptive art upon us, we seem uncer-
tain how to apply the term realism.”29 Figurative sculptures by Duane Hanson
made of life-cast polyester and fiber glass have polychromed figures, luminous
skin, and hair and features so convincing one almost expects to catch them
in a breath30. “Pygmalion is back in business,” critic Kim Levin commented
regarding the works, referring to the Greek myth in which a sculptor’s cre-
ation came to life.31 To Masheck, superrealist works seem “designed to frus-
trate criticism,” because “hyper-realist sculptures couldn’t care less whether
we find them bad art or not even art at all.”32 Masheck’s dilemma resonates

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 71

with the reaction of some critics to Knausgaard’s work. “It is peculiarly diffi-

k en way Lo st in Thou ght

cult to get a grip on what makes the book so compelling,” writes book critic
Hari Kunzru, “because much of it appears painfully banal. It is boring, in the
way life is boring, and somehow, almost perversely, that is a surprising thing
to see on the page.”33 But, at bottom, concludes Masheck in words that apply
to Knausgaard’s work as well, “no matter how ‘real’” superrealist works are,
they are “still art and, hence, somehow different from the reality of life.”34 This
distancing between the super real re-creation of reality and reality itself corre-
sponds with the natural cognitive distancing that occurs between individual
consciousness and the apprehension of life experience. Like realism before
it, superrealist works examine the undistorted, unembellished forms of life.
This dynamic accounts for the “more direct access to the world” accorded
superrealism by Masheck. He writes, “[i]n true realism, art is released from its
limit as a mere analogue to reality and is permitted to regain continuity with
the live concerns of mankind.”35 In the context of realism, I take “live con-
cerns” to mean the day-to-day concerns and activities of a lived existence. As
Knausgaard illuminates, discussion of higher order philosophical and political
concerns must inevitably give way to the ordinary “needs of the moment . . .
trump[ing] promises of the future.”36 He demonstrates this with a poignant
childhood memory of his inability to conserve a glass of milk till the end of
the meal, requiring copious sips to swallow the disliked sardine sandwich,
emphasizing purpose over pleasure. This resonates with the day-to-day strug-
gle of driving to work, paying bills, sitting in traffic, cooking dinner, washing
up, vacuuming, attending children’s school plays or soccer matches, the “live
concerns” of just getting through the day consuming all our time, very little
left for leisurely reflection or enjoyment. By approximating reality as closely
as possible, artists such as Hanson and Knausgaard attempt to penetrate and
peel back the cotton veil of the mundane and offer a sustained, detailed view
that is unavailable to us in any other way. Our own sporadic outsider moments
are brief intermittent flickers. Lit up and put on Wittgenstein’s “uncanny and
wonderful” stage, they allow us to confront and question the mundane cotton
of life in a way we generally reserve for peak life moments.
While there are other superrealist artists that resonate with the work
of Knausgaard, Duane Hanson’s work in particular shares a special affinity
with it.37 The two share an obsession with crafting meticulous records of

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 72

ordinary lived experience and each strives to minimize the gap separating life
soundings sgnidnuos

and art. Hanson’s work has been displayed on busy streets and in airports,
and Knausgaard features visual art moments within ordinary settings. In
experiencing their art, our vision slides disturbingly easily back and forth
between life and record. For Hanson, explains critic Kirk Varnedoe, “the
figure must seem to embody life.” “Whole ensembles of personal clothing,”
he continues, are acquired to “incorporate the model’s identities into the
final figure.”38 Using clothing worn by the actual model adds the essence of
personal choice, sweat, and fabric stretch, lending an otherwise unobtainable
authenticity. Socks slipping, trousers taut with stride, stained shirts, rumpled
blouses—each bespeak the kinetic energy of arrested motion—of life paused.
Hanson captures a cast of familiar unidealized “middle or lower-class people”
in the midst of “blue collar service jobs, small business and diner eating,”
all of them “neither grotesque nor picturesque.”39 These are ordinary people
with ordinary jobs: a construction worker at lunch, janitors, athletes, elderly
shoppers, obese tourists in clashing patterns. Their act of simply existing offers
sufficient cause for distilling their likeness.
The figures of both Knausgaard and Hanson inspire uncanny revulsion
and morbid fascination. In his novel, the image of Knausgaard’s father sitting
dead in a chair in the living room occurs several times. “He died in the chair
in the room next door, it’s still there40” remarks Knausgaard during a telephone
conversation. This correlates directly with Hanson’s sculpture Man in Chair
with Beer.41 While not identical, the figure has a compelling visual compan-
ionship with Knausgaard’s description of his alcoholic father’s final years and
moment of death. He writes, “Dad, now fat and bloated, with an enormous
gut drank nonstop. . . . he was fat as a barrel, and even though his skin was
still tanned it had a kind of matte tone, there was a matte membrane cover-
ing him, and with all the hair on his face and head and his messy clothes he
looked like some kind of wild man.”42 The swarthy, ill-kempt figure in stained
white T-shirt of Hanson fluctuates between drunken stupor and death. The
position of sitting, presumably watching television, hovers over the narrow
gap between life and death, a fact Knausgaard comments upon: “That Dad
had been here only three days ago was hard to believe. That he had the same
view three days ago, walked around the same house . . . thought his thoughts
only three days ago was hard to grasp.”43 The essence of life permeates the site

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of death to such an extent that, for a time, the protagonist perceives him as

k en way Lo st in Thou ght

inhabiting both states of being.
Likewise, in Hanson’s sculpture Self-portrait with Model, one easily
deposits Knausgaard’s brooding grandmother sitting, as she had when we left
her a few hours before, at the kitchen table:44

In front of her was a cup of coffee, an ashtray and a plate full of

crumbs from the rolls she had eaten. . . . Something happened to
her, and it was not old age that had her in its grip, nor illness, it was
something else. Her detachment had nothing to do with the gentle
other-worldliness or contentedness of old people, her detachment
was . . . hard and lean.45

We identify in this description of the grandmother’s detachment the same

vacant facial expression of the Hanson sculpture. There is a sense that
Knausgaard’s grandmother and the sculpture of the woman seated at the diner
table with a liquefied fudge sundae are undergoing an involuntary separa-
tion from life. Both are figures who are habitually overlooked and in that act
stripped of purpose and cast adrift in the sea of invisible mundane individuals.
The grandmother, benumbed by the routine passage of years, the habitual
disappointments of life (such as marriage to the wrong brother and the col-
lapse of her son into alcoholism), has gradually withdrawn into herself, slip-
ping into auto-pilot mode. Her routine intonation (“life’s a pitch, as the old
woman said. She couldn’t pronounce her ‘b’s”) has become a perverse mantra
summing up her life; the pre-recorded phrase is inserted repeatedly as if to
attempt to fill a blank space of an existence perceived as increasingly point-
less.46 Like pulling the string on a wind-up doll, she utters the phrase, interior
lights flicker, but this is then followed by silence. As Knausgaard writes, “she
withdrew into herself as she had done so many times . . . she sat with her
arms crossed, staring into the distance.”47 Lost in thought, the grandmother’s
body rests, like a sculptural shell, at a table in a state of blank detachment.
Similarly, the elderly woman who sits across from the figure of Hanson in the
self-portrait absentmindedly thumbs the pages of her magazine in a state of
listless detached contemplation, her partially consumed ice cream melting
unheeded. The figure of Hanson thoughtfully regards her just as Knausgaard

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observes his grandmother during kitchen table conversations. In their depic-

soundings sgnidnuos

tion of ordinary, overlooked people, both Hanson and Knausgaard identify

within the mundane a blind spot in the eye of humanity.
In addition to their use of a similar cast of figures, Hanson and Knausgaard
share in their dedication to rigorous documentation of mundane surfaces, a
fact other critics have recognized. “To satisfy only his own intense . . . desire
to be faithful to the idea of the character at hand,” writes Varnedoe, Hanson
“puts painstaking labor into whole areas of skin and hair that will never be
seen (for they will lie beneath layers of clothing).”48 Hanson “lavished a great
deal of attention” upon the surface of the skin, writes critic Robert Hobbs,
for “the skin is a record of human existence. . . . It records the life a person
has lived.”49 Discussing Hanson’s sculpture Security Guard, Hobbs comments
how the skin “is an accumulated memory of collisions, poor diet, little exer-
cise, and lack of exposure to sunlight.”50 Hanson patiently duplicates the signs
of aging, sagging jowls, dry skin, traces of old scars, and liver spots, treating
the skin like a manuscript to be copied. This act is in direct conflict with the
inclinations of a society preoccupied with removing and erasing these same
signs and responding to them with rejection and disgust. Lavishing attention
upon flawed surfaces, therefore, suggests a reverence for the storied physical
experiences encoded upon the skin. “Unlike wax figures that appear amaz-
ingly real at an intermediate distance,” continues Hobbs, “Hanson’s figures
become most real when inspected closely.”51
In the same way Hanson’s sculptures increase in reality upon close exam-
ination, Knausgaard’s exacting level of detail likewise invites close scrutiny.
Hermione Hoby writes, “throughout, innumerable quotidian tasks are ren-
dered as meticulously and exhaustively as autopsies.”52 As Hanson does with
the surface of skin, Knausgaard documents the surface of place and the mass
of thoughts that pile atop it with intense detail. Following the passing of his
alcoholic father, the house of Knausgaard’s grandmother has fallen into squa-
lor and disrepair. The task of cleaning it in preparation for the wake falls upon
Knausgaard and his brother, and he meticulously describes this process in
several passages.
Domestic labor functions like a washboard upon which Knausgaard vig-
orously scrubs his thoughts. With a “bottle of green soap and a bottle of Jif
scouring cream” he tackles the bannister’s “stair-rods” covered in “all sorts

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of filth . . . disintegrated leaves, pebbles, dried-up insects, old spiderwebs . . .

k en way Lo st in Thou ght

in some places almost completely black, here and there sticky.”53 Having
recorded the condition of the railing, he then describes how he “sprayed the
Jif, wrung the cloth and scrubbed every centimeter thoroughly. Once a sec-
tion was clean and had regained something of its old, dark, golden color I
dunked another cloth in Klorin and kept scrubbing.” While engaged in the
monotonous task, stimulated by the “smell of Klorin,” his mind wanders back
to the “1970’s” and his childhood memory of the “cupboard under the kitchen
sink where the detergents were kept.”54 Little effort is required by the reader to
invoke this cupboard, as many have a personal connection in both present and
past with just such a cupboard, so we readily supply our own images alongside
Knausgaard’s. He applies detail with intention to correspond with the natural
tides of the mind:

Jif didn’t exist then. Ajax washing powder did though, in a cardboard
container, red, white and blue. . . . It was a green soap. Klorin did
too. . . . There was also a brand called OMO. And there was a packet
of washing powder with a picture of a child holding the identical
packet, and on that, of course, there was a picture of the same boy
holding the same packet, and so on, and so on. . . . I often racked my
brains over mise en abyme, which in principle of course was end-
less and also existed elsewhere, such as in the bathroom mirror by
holding a mirror behind your head so that the images of the mirrors
were projected to and fro while going farther and farther back and
becoming smaller and smaller as far as the eye could see. But what
happened behind what the eye could see? Did the images carry on
getting smaller and smaller?55

This passage addresses the texture of the moment and memory. Engaged in
the task, Knausgaard watches himself scrub and polish for a few moments. As
is natural with laborious mindless tasks, it is not long before mental auto-pilot
kicks in and his mind wanders and, dutifully, he records the thoughts that
wander in, crafting a heightened reality to capture the unedited progression of
his thoughts and making connections prompted by what is in front of him. He
flies above, as Wittgenstein suggests, capturing the ways of his thoughts. The

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random remembered detail of a particular soap label surfaces for no particular

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reason articulating the inexplicably capricious nature of memory. Out of the

repetition of scrubbing and the smell of soap, within a dim recollection of a
cleaning label, he lands upon the complexity of mise en abyme (a technique
in which an image contains a smaller copy of itself recurring in a seemingly
infinite sequence). In so doing he creates his own instance of mise en abyme
by nesting memories of cleaning powders within the present act of cleaning.
Performing housework tasks—which have a tendency to feel never-ending—
he contemplates the puzzle of infinite images. Here, and in many other pas-
sages, the mundane platform is central to developing the ensuing aesthetic
intrigue. The task complete, he pauses to admire “the gleam” returning to
the “varnish . . . although there was still a scattering of dark dirt stains.”56 Like
the skin of Hanson’s figures, Knaussgaard meticulously records the blemishes
in the skin of reality. Not only are imperfections noteworthy, but the banal
beauty of the everyday is also of immense interest to Knausgaard.
Knausgaard not only makes a point of aestheticizing mundane moments
and actions, he, on occasion, directly articulates his intentions to locate an
aesthetic experience within the mundane. Noticing a construction crane near
his grandmother’s house, for instance, he remarks on the beauty of this com-
monplace piece of building equipment: “There were few things I found more
beautiful than cranes, the skeletal nature of their construction, the steel wires
running along the top and bottom . . . the way heavy objects dangled when
being slowly transported through the air, the sky that formed a backdrop to
this mechanical provisorium.”57 He perceives silhouetted “objects dangl[ing]”
against the “backdrop” of the sky as a spontaneous landscape painting. He
describes the crane with the attentive reverence of a work of sculpture.
Presenting readymade objects as works of art is a well-established practice
within the art world—the critical difference here is this readymade has not
been transformed through recontextualization. Placed upon the pedestal
within the museum the mundane object is forcibly pulled up to be recon-
ceived as art. Skipping this step entirely, Knausgaard receives the crane as art,
no contextual alteration required. All that is required is the ability to perceive
an aesthetic quality distinct from its functionality.
Hanson shares in this sentiment of perceiving in life readymade art.
His sculptures, presented without pedestal, are placed on equal footing with

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visitors, which instantly diminishes the separation between art and viewer.

k en way Lo st in Thou ght

Frequently, Hanson’s works have been presented outside the bounds of
museum walls in airports, cafeterias, and shopping districts, making the only
difference between viewer and sculpture the presence of a spiritus animus
within the former. Viewers gazing upon such extremely life-like works are
actively forced to question the distinction between themselves and what they
are looking at, pondering what exactly is it that makes one of them art?
Both artists also apply the same level of observation given to place and
objects to food. Knausgaard cooks and eats with the comportment of a painter.
Cooking dinner, he observes the food colors (“pink, light-green, white, dark-
green, golden-brown”) of a meal of salmon, green beans, and potatoes.58 On
another occasion, he makes a meal and proclaims it “a little sculpture . . . it’s
called Beer and Rissole in the Garden.” Drolly translating his impromptu title
into French, “Or des boulettes et da la bierre dans le jardin,”59 he links his
meal with the long history of French paintings of la nature morte depicting
arrangements of food and meals as art. Knausgaard’s “little sculpture” probes
the difference between art and life. Before brush was ever put to canvas, the
images portrayed in still life paintings were actual food on the table, mundane
objects deemed worthy of capturing for posterity. It has now become common-
place to attend the mundane fare of our meal tables with aesthetic apprecia-
tion with thousands snapping photos of their comestible creations and posting
them online. Does “beer and rissole” become art the moment we conceive of
it as such? Like Knausgaard, the diner tables of Hanson are populated with
Ketchup bottles, coffee cups, half-eaten sundaes, chips, and Coca Cola—
all objects which, if lifted away from the sculpture, would quickly resume
regular meal functions. The barrier separating life and art, that Hanson and
Knausgaard expose, is thin and transient.
Not only does Knausgaard contemplate food on the table, but those gath-
ering around it also become part of the composition. Inane details of cooking
and sitting down at the table with his brother Yngve and family are recounted
moment by moment:

The coffee pot light was on. The extractor hood hummed, the eggs
bubbled and spat . . . Radio blared out the traffic news jingle . . . Kari
Anne [Ygnve’s wife] shuttled back and forth between the table and

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 78

cupboards, setting the table. . . . Ygnve slipped the spatula under the
soundings sgnidnuos

eggs and transferred them, one by one, onto a broad dish, put it on
the table, beside the bread basket, fetched the pot of coffee, and filled
three cups. . . . I generally drank tea at breakfast and had since I was
fourteen, but I didn’t have the heart to point this out.60

The mundane fanfare of table setting and serving food to a guest who is
also a family member, captures the loosely formal, semi-awkward vibrations
of Knausgaard’s family breakfast. The outwardly solicitous response of accept-
ing the coffee as well as Knausgaard’s privately critical and semi-ungrateful
thoughts renders an ordinary breakfast experience filtered through his interior
perception. He draws out the experience still further including “scour[ing]
the table for salt, but there was none to be found,” followed by the mundane
dialogue requesting “Any salt?” responded to with a clipped “here” by Ygnve’s
wife.61 No detail is deemed too small to include.
It is precisely the inconsequential details of universally familiar exchanges,
such as asking for salt, discussion of sports, and his niece Ylva’s request to sit
by her uncle, that make this breakfast at once recognizable yet specific to
the individuals involved. His description of eggs reveals and observes another
superrealist quality. He writes:

Flipping open the little plastic cap watching the tiny grains sink into
the yellow yolk, barely puncturing the surface, as the butter melted
and seeped into the bread. . . . The fried egg-white was crispy under-
neath, large brownish-black pieces crunched between palate and
tongue as I chewed. . . . I bit into the yolk and it ran, yellow and
lukewarm, into my mouth.62

Knausgaard uses the buildup of insignificant details as a platform to indulge

in an equally detailed still-life of consuming fried eggs. Reference to palate,
tongue and mouth establishes overt self-observation of the mundane act of
eating, bringing to the forefront the fleeting sensory pleasures of eating that
are usually forgotten in the space of the same moment in which they achieve
notice. Observed in rich surface detail, the level of detail surpassing in super-
realist fashion the typical level of observation bestowed upon cooked yellow

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orbs and toast, this plate of eggs becomes acutely real. As we pause to look at

k en way Lo st in Thou ght

Knausgaard’s breakfast table and eggs, we see the toast and eggs of countless
yestermorns. The result is a tableaux vivant of a specific yet generic breakfast
we can see, hear, and taste. The heightened experience of this breakfast from
food to family members applies the superrealist detail of a Hanson sculpture
but also does what a sculpture never could. It provides the hyper-real con-
sciousness behind the scene as Knausgaard attempts to record the myriad of
details he notices and the thoughts traveling through his mind, resulting in a
nearly too real meal. Deprived of the mist of typical inattention afforded the
mundane, and being confronted with the thoughts and details we all have but
cannot possibly take note of every time, makes the breakfast almost strange
and foreign for the reader.
It is during solitary nonmoments of thinking that the concerns of
Knausgaard and Hanson are most alike. For instance, during a mundane
morning in his office, Knausgaard happens to glance at the floor and for
seemingly no particular reason proceeds to describe it: “It was parquet and
relatively new, the reddish-brown tone at odds with the flat’s otherwise fin-
de-siècle style. I noticed that the knots and grain, perhaps two meters from
the chair where I was sitting formed an image of Christ wearing a crown of
thorns.”63 Observations such as this offer an example of the unfocused think-
ing, of oubli de soi (self-forgetting). Procrastinating, daydreaming, spacing-out,
like a cat we reflexively knit our mental claws upon the fabric of our surround-
ings. Knausgaard records the idling purr of the mind. In these moments of
thinking about nothing we absently pluck upon the thread of our life running
from past to present.
Moments lost in thought are also a central characteristic of the figures of
Hanson. He continues the theme of absorption and wandering internal reverie
that marked the work of Courbet and other French realist painters. Portraying
ordinary people engaged in ordinary activities and tasks, Hanson avoids the
more fleeting states of laughter, smiling, and affectionate interpersonal com-
munication, viewing them according to Varnedoe as “secondary, temporary
adjuncts to the more fundamental human conditions of passive self-enclosure
and isolation.”64 “As opposed to extraordinary revelation,” Varnedoe continues,
Hanson “wants to depict states of indeterminate duration, when the ephem-
eral or eccentric fades in the face of the habitual, and the characteristic truths

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 80

stand more clearly exposed.”65 Like particles settling in a glass of water, the
soundings sgnidnuos

undiluted essence of the individual reveals itself in the unagitated state of

neutral calm.
Fried classifies works like those of Hanson as literalist due to the theatrical
quality that incorporates the beholder into the work. This would seem to pre-
clude Hanson from being considered absorptive.66 The beholder is included
by being placed on equal footing and sharing physical space and proportion-
ate size with the work, yet Hanson’s sculptures also convey the attitude of oubli
de soi Fried defines, which ignores the beholder. This creates an enclosed
cerebral space within the work that is oblivious to the beholder’s presence. Just
as we find in paintings by Courbet or Chardin, Hanson’s figures stare off, or
down at the floor, or forward with blank expression, with the air of mental pre-
occupation that comes with thoughts that are engaged elsewhere. I argue that
the absorbed state of the figures makes Hanson’s work antitheatrical and thus
better aligned with Fried’s discussions of absorption in eighteenth-century
paintings rather than Fried’s literalist argument in “Art and Objecthood.”67
There is no denying Hanson’s work also participates in the discussion of
objecthood and the “condition of non-art,”68 insisting on being what it is,
which is something it shares in common with Knausgaard whose work like-
wise asserts a condition of non-art. However, the absorbed facial expressions
of Hanson’s figures resist definitive placement within the category of purely
literal art. Hanson’s sculptures perform the role of the young man smoking
in Wittgenstein’s thought experiment and the eighteenth-century paintings
ignoring their viewer, both of which inadvertently step into the theater of the
ordinary. The only thing separating the viewer from Hanson’s sculptures is the
translucent membrane of distracted thought.
Although Hanson and Knausgaard share many qualities, however,
they are not identical. Encountering the bulk of life’s mundane tasks and
moments we quite often find ourselves engaged in solitary thought staring
blankly into the recesses of our own mind. Highpoints of ecstasy, pleasure,
and happiness are the exception, not the norm. The attempt to pin down the
essence of existence falls upon the inattentive wool-carding of idling minds.
Eating lunch, scanning the horizon, reading, waiting with luggage, the fig-
ures of Hanson are locked in the contemplative indeterminacy of mundane
moments. Inscrutable, the precise thoughts of Hanson’s figures are forever

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 81

denied us. Knausgaard begins to fill this superrealist gap, gathering the wool of

k en way Lo st in Thou ght

his thoughts and attempting to locate a thread of continuity running through
the fabric of thought.
Consider again Knausgaard’s contemplation of the seemingly random
face-knot in the floor. In the act of staring at it, Knausgaard suddenly makes
a connection recalling a distant memory of discovering a face shaped in the
foamy sea of a news broadcast he watched as a child: “I suddenly remembered
something . . . deep in my childhood, a similar image on the water in a news
item about a missing fishing vessel . . . the remarkable thing was not that the
face should be visible here [in the floor’s surface], nor that I had once seen a
face in the sea in the mid 1970’s, the remarkable thing was that I had forgot-
ten it and now remembered.”69 During a moment of non-being, two dispa-
rate details, spread across time, are suddenly drawn together and pulled tight
revealing a glimpse of the whole of being woven over the course of a life. The
face in the floor links with the face in the sea revealing a cord of continuity
in which the present draws upon the past to depict the curious interconnect-
edness of memories and the quirky functionality of the mind. The “minded-
ness” of absorption relies on the slow churn of the unconscious above which
active thought hovers, in stand-by mode, ready to pluck relevant flotsam that
surfaces. During these moments of unconscious thought the unfettered brain
interlaces past and present, playing with loose memory strands until the per-
ceptive individual gliding over the top snaps them up upon resuming con-
scious control.

Restoration of the Mundane

Recording mundane actions of an idling brain serves to conjoin the two
halves—physical and intangible—of the mundane, accounting for and aes-
theticizing mundanity in its entirety. From one perspective this can be seen
as the totalizing exploitation of life for artistic purposes. There is another per-
spective, however, from which superrealism can be viewed as an attempt to
restore the inherent significance of people and objects appropriated by art.
In her 1964 article, “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag complains of the
refusal of critics to leave works alone, citing the dangers of interpretation: “By
reducing the work of art to the content and then interpreting that, one tames

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the work of art. Interpretations makes the work manageable, comfortable.”70

soundings sgnidnuos

Once boiled down through interpretation, even the most controversial art can
be rendered quite approachable, provided with handles for gripping it so to
speak. Knausgaard shares Sontag’s concern over the over-intellectualizing and
resultant taming of art. He laments, “the situation we have arrived at now
whereby the props of art no longer have any significance, [and] all the empha-
sis is placed on what the art expresses, in other words, not what it is but what
it thinks. . . . Everything has become intellect, even our bodies, they aren’t
bodies anymore, but ideas of bodies.”71 He decries the conceptual Saran Wrap
that neatly packages and labels the parts of life.
Sontag’s suggestion to leave art alone seems impossible to implement as
looking at art objects is naturally followed by acts of thinking, comparison,
and interpretation. Sontag is not suggesting a halt to artistic contemplation,
however, but rather an end to intellectually buffering art. Rather than dull-
ing down the edge of art with protective interpretive coating, the solution,
both Knausgaard and Sontag find, is to sharpen the edge still further with
hyper realistic art that is so close to life that we must turn toward life to make
sense of it. Sontag corroborates this notion stating, “the aim of all commen-
tary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own
­experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should
be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what
it means” (emphasis added).72
Providing art that fulfills Sontag’s demands, Knausgaard’s work strives
to transcend intellectualizing and simply be “what it is.” His work embodies
what Fried explains is literalist art’s preoccupation with “objecthood,”73 in
which objects resist art status and insist upon their preexisting object iden-
tity, forcing every attempt to approach them critically into an endless con-
ceptual loop. Knausgaard insists that the “situation we have arrived at” is
one “whereby the props of art no longer have any meaning, all emphasis is
placed on what the art expresses . . . not what it is but what it thinks, what
ideas it carries.”74 He takes the “unmade bed” of art he complains of and
wheels it out of the museum. Regardless of the lofty ideals we may bring to
bear, explains French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, “gestures and objects
will be ‘there’ before being ‘something’. . . and they will still be there after-
ward, hard, unalterable, externally present, mocking their own meaning.”75

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 83

Significations we pin upon gestures and objects are tried on like a coat and

k en way Lo st in Thou ght

just as easily shrugged off. The action of scrubbing a bannister or sitting at
a diner table are already thick with unquantified substance, which is why
we intuitively respond and have the urge to explain the meaning of the
seemingly meaningless, as if, perhaps, some hidden cosmic explanation lies
within.
As the work of Courbet and Hanson show, documenting “ordinariness,”
even “ugliness,” is the point, the means to get at how things are. As Nochlin
notes, “it is exactly this sort of accuracy of ‘meaningless’ detail that is essen-
tial to realism for this is what nails its productions down so firmly to a specific
time and a specific place and anchors realist works in a concrete rather than
an ideal or a poetic reality.”76 Realism supposes intrinsic significance, an
intrinsic beauty, within ordinariness. Distillation of apparent dross reveals
surprising intrinsic substance. For lying just beyond the periphery of the
most ordinary postures of life lies the inverse—death. The “cotton wool” of
nonbeing is the outer rim before crossing over into true nothingness. “The
most acute records of life,” remarks Varnedoe, “are often intimately con-
nected with the threat of death.”77 Drinking coffee in his office, looking out
the window, Knausgaard muses, “I saw life; I thought about death.”78 Like
the sepulchral effigies lying in cemeteries capturing the living image of a
deceased, the work of Hanson and Knausgaard perform the role of vivid
memento mori.
The superrealism of Knausgaard and Hanson redirects our attention
through art toward life, urging close examination of the people and things
around us, and ourselves. In doing so, these works recall the realism of
Courbet and the dangers of art straying too far from life, but also (as do all
superrealism works) expand beyond it, breaking boundaries and raising the
level of realism to still greater heights. We move from the absorbed super-
realist figures of Hanson and pass through to a second stage in the writings
of Knausgaard—observation of the way of thoughts within the mind. The
musings of the mundane idling brain attached to chores and reverie com-
pletes the circle of superrealism, supplying the final link and expanding the
circumference still farther. The knife-edge of superrealism forces us to actively
look for the barrier separating life and art, which ultimately causes us to look
longer and harder at the composition of each. As Wittgenstein asserts, the

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 84

disinterested observation of the artist leaves these actions and thoughts the
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way they are, without ­revising or ­correcting them; if there are any changes
to be made it is up to us to make decisions and act on them within our own
lived experience. The application of ­mindedness to the mundane within
Knausgaard demonstrates fruitful results. Tapping into the innate layer of
meditative ­self-­awareness, Knausgaard’s work packs the doldrums of life with
rich content that competes with so-called main events. Superrealism in liter-
ature thus offers new prospects with no set limitations—its success is entirely
dependent upon the voyeuristic patience of readers.

Jenessa Kenway, a doctoral candidate at the University of Nevada Las Vegas

(UNLV), examines connections between art and literature, including visual
language and ekphrasis, to explore how visual aesthetics influence and illus-
trate literary meaning. Her dissertation focus deals with visual art and trans-
atlantic feminist literature from the eighteenth century to contemporary
works. Her essay “The Visual Genealogy of Margaret Fuller” was presented
at the Society for the Study of American Women Writers conference this past
November. She holds a master’s degree in fine art and her discussions of Las
Vegas art are published in KNPR’s Desert Companion. She teaches courses in
composition and world literature for UNLV.

Notes

1. Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1985),
70–71.
2. Ibid., 70.
3. Wittgenstein philosophy features prominently in Michael Fried’s discussion of
the everyday and of artist Jeff Wall. His discussion of Wittgenstein inspired my
thoughts here, and both are vital components in moving critical analysis of the
presence of the mundane in literature forward. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture
and Value, ed. G. H. Von Wright, trans. by Peter Winch (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1977), 6–7e; Michael Fried, “Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein and the
Everyday,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 3 (Spring 2007): 505–6.
4. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 4e.
5. Suzanne Nalbantian, Aesthetic Autobigraphy: From Life to Art in Marcel Proust,
James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Anaïs Nin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994),
49–55.
6. Michael Fried cites an interview with photographer Jeff Wall offering an expla-
nation of what he means by “near documentary”: “Although the pictures with

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 85

figures are done with the collaboration of the people who appear in them, I want

k en way Lo st in Thou ght

them to feel as if they easily could be documentary photographs. In some way
they claim to be a plausible account of, or a report on, what the events depicted
are like, or were like, when they passed without being photographed.” Fried, “Jeff
Wall, Wittgenstein and the Everyday,” 505–6. The original interview appeared
in “Jeff Wall: New Work” (press release, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York,
20 Sept.–2 Nov. 2002), n.p.
7. Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 17.
8. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholding in the Age of
Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 13.
9. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 7e
10. Ibid., 7e.
11. Linda Nochlin, “Realism Now,” in Super Realism: A Critical Anthology, ed. by
Gregory Battcock (New York: A Dutton Paperback, 1975 (orig. 1971)), 111–25.
12. Gusatve Courbet, The Wheat Sifters, 1854–1855, WikiArt: Visual Art Encyclopedia,
www.wikiart.org 17 Oct. 2012., https://www.wikiart.org/en/gustave-courbet/the-
wheat-sifters-1855-1. (A tarare is a machine used during grain winnowing that
looks like a wooden cabinet.)
13. Michael Fried, Courbet’s Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 152.
14. Nochlin, “Realism Now,” 120–21.
15. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Anscombe (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1958), 49e. Wittgenstein’s claim that philosophy leaves everything as it
is, forms an integral part of Fried’s argument in his discussion of theme of absorp-
tion found in Wall’s work and the attempt to record life without modifying it
in his article “Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein and the Everyday,” 495–526. Wittgenstein’s
concept is also used by others including Stanley Cavell’s “The World as Things:
Collecting Thoughts on Collecting,” in Rendezvous: Masterpieces from the Centre
Georges Pompidou and the Guggenheim Museums (New York: Guggenheim
Museum, 1998). Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the everyday in connection with
visual arts makes it a near necessity for any writing broaching this topic.
16. Fried, “Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein and the Everyday,” 498.
17. Ibid., 498.
18. It should be noted that the similarities under discussion here only pertain to
subject matter and specific concepts at play in the work and not the politics of
Knausgaard or the socio-political agenda of Courbet.
19. Gustave Courbet, The Stone Breakers, 1849, WikiArt: Visual Art Encyclopedia,
www.wikiart.org, accessed 4 June 2018, https://www.wikiart.org/en/gustave-courbet/
the-stone-breakers-1849.
20. Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book 1, trans. Don Bartlett (New York: Farrar,
2009), 8.
21. Nochlin, “Realism Now,” 120.
22. Knausgaard, My Struggle, 32.
23. Gustave Courbet, Portrait of P.-J. Proudhon, 1865, Commons Wikimedia.org,
10 Feb. 2014., https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Proudhon-children.jpg.

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 86

24. Knausgaard, My Struggle, 32.

soundings sgnidnuos

25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 35.
27. Ibid., 36.
28. In Super Realism: A Critical Anthology (New York: A Dutton Paperback, 1975),
the introduction by Gregory Battcock and many of the essays included discuss
the evolution and significance of the term realism and new realism. Battcock
lists out the litany of new labels “invented to refer to the new realist style that has
emerged since 1970,” selecting Super Realism for the title of his anthology as it
“aptly describes the hyper-realistic quality of so many of the art works produced.”
Even in this decision, the struggle to define new realism is evident in the use of
the descriptor hyper to qualify super.
29. Joseph Masheck, “Verist Sculpture: Hanson and De Andrea,” in Super Realism, 188.
30. “Duane Hanson,” Saatchi Gallery.com, accessed 4 June 2018, https://www.­
saatchigallery.com/artists/duane_hanson.htm.
31. Kim Levin, “The Ersatz Object,” in Super Realism: A Critical Anthology, ed.
Gregory Battcock (New York: A Dutton Paperback, 1975 (originally 1973), 96–110.
32. Masheck, “Verist Sculpture,” 190.
33. Hari Kunzru, “Karl Ove Knausgaard: The Latest Literary Sensation,” Guardian,
7 March 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/07/karl-ove-knausg
aard-my-struggle-hari-kunzru.
34. Masheck, “Verist Sculpture,” 188.
35. Ibid., 211.
36. Knausgaard, My Struggle, 19.
37. Other art that presents additional opportunities for comparison with Knausgaard
are the somewhat surrealistic works of Jeff Wall and the large-scale superrealistic
sculptures of Ron Mueck. The life-size scale of Hanson’s sculptures, however,
are more in sync with the sensibility of Knausgaard. Fried provides an excellent
examination of Wall in “Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein, and the Everyday.”
38. Kirk Varnedoe, Duane Hanson (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1985), 18–21.
39. Varnedoe, Duane Hanson, 11.
40. Knausgaard, My Struggle, 384.
41. Duane Hanson, Man in Chair with Beer, 1973. Yale University Art Gallery, artgallery.
yale.edu, accessed 4 June, 2018. https://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/63937.
42. Knausgaard, My Struggle, 241.
43. Ibid., 382.
44. Duane Hanson, Self Portrait with Model, 1979. Artnet.com, Accessed 4 June, 2018.
http://www.artnet.com/artists/duane-hanson/self-portrait-with-model-uptown-
location-a-F2zLzCqfEX60Qv3RYg7wBg2.
45. Knausgaard, My Struggle, 425–26.
46. Ibid., 396.
47. Ibid., 395.
48. Varnedoe, Duane Hanson, 18.
49. Robert Carleton Hobbs, Duane Hanson—The New Objectivity (Tallahassee:
Florida State University Gallery and Museum, 1991), 22.

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 87

50. Ibid., 22.

k en way Lo st in Thou ght

51. Ibid., 22.
52. Hermione Hoby, “Karl Ove Knausgaard: Norway’s Proust and a Life Laid Painfully
Bare,” Guardian.com, March 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/
2014/mar/01/karl-ove-knausgaard-norway-proust-profile.
53. Knausgaard, My Struggle, 360.
54. Ibid., 360.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid., 362.
57. Ibid., 363.
58. Ibid., 376.
59. Ibid., 346.
60. Ibid., 261.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., 261–62.
63. Ibid., 190.
64. Varnedoe, Duane Hanson, 20.
65. Ibid.
66. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Art and Objecthood (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1998), 155.
67. Ibid., 148–72.
68. Ibid., 152.
69. Knausgaard, My Struggle, 190.
70. Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays
(New York: The Noonday Press, 1966), 5.
71. Knausgaard, My Struggle, 225.
72. Sontag. “Against Interpretation,” 14.
73. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 152.
74. Knausgaard, My Struggle, 225.
75. Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, trans. Richard Howard
(New York: Grove Press, 1965), 21.
76. Nochlin, “Realism Now,” 122.
77. Varnedoe, Duane Hanson, 8.
78. Knausgaard, My Struggle, 195.

Works Cited

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Diderot. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
———. Art and Objecthood. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
———. Courbet’s Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

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———. “Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein and the Everyday.” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 3 (Spring
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———. Philosophical Investigation. Translated by Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1958.
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