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Dedicated to Emergency Supplies

(Picture: Paebi)

(17.2.2023) An emergency supply is not to be confused with a strategic reserve. The latter is meant to keep a society going for a while. But an emergency supply is meant to sustain an individual or a family for a while. And there are various kinds of emergency supplies. I am particularly interested in the kind of the ›marvellous‹ and the ›unseen‹ emergency supply, apart form being interested in the motiv of the emergency supply in art. Our rational civilization is not lacking wonders. In fact it is full of wonders, and this perspective might also give this notes, despite its subject matter, a somwhat optimistic note.

One) What is an Emergency Supply

When Robinson Crusoe went back to his ship numerous times, after the shipwreck, after a while, and after taking to land whatever he could take to land, he arrived at the individual crates, the individual crates once owned by his fellow-sailors. And he opened them.
To realize what the individual emergency supplies of his comrades had been. The individual supplies, not the model emergency supplies that, in an affluent society, the goverment advises you to keep. No, the individual liquor, the particular bitters that an individual with a particular sensitive stomach might need, or the particular shirt that an individual, particularly sensitive to sunburn, might need. And Robinson Crusoe also got hold of these supplies.
But the novel not only teaches us something as to the individual emergency supplies of individuals – it also teaches us something about the rather ›marvellous‹ emergency supply. And this is for example the grain that had been used to feed the chickens aboard (they did not survive the shipwreck), a something that, suddenly, turned into being an emergency supply, to start an agriculture on a deserted island, that, among other things, could sustain Robinson Crusoe for 28 years.
And there is something else, which also might be called an ›emergency supply›, an unknown one, an unseen one: and such supply turned out to be the skills that Robinson Crusoe had once amassed, in his childhood and youth, simply or mostly by observing. For example by observing the basket weavers in his home town. And these skills amassed without any awareness that they, one day, might be helpful to survive, now turned into being productive and useful. Since a situation had changed. And since an individual had to adapt to change.
And if Robinson Crusoe, as a novel, could be discussed as being a or even the novel of self-subsistence and sustainability, on some level it also reminds us that the literature of sustainability is or could be seen as being opposed to a literature of ›seize the day‹ (the famous carpe diem of Horace, from Horace to Dead Poet’s Society). And this is important to know, since affluent societies probably produce or enhance ›seize the day‹ mentalities rather than producing and enhancing ›wise foresight‹ mentalities (that could be seen as being embodied by ›strategic reserves‹), and so also political philosophies come in, that might discuss the question of whose responsibility it might be to care about a future and to possibly secure it.
These are a lot of questions and all are, in some way or other, related to the motif of the emergency supply.

Two) The Emergency Supply in Art

For this section I have deliberately chosen not to include any images, because this is about mental images, about the imaginary images of emergency supplies. Picasso has them, the Picasso who painted tomato plants and parts of ovens or radiators during World War II, but occasionally, during these years, as if going back to mental supplies once available also in reality, he depicted goods, that during these years, must have been seen as luxury goods: sea food for example, or Chinese lanterns, perhaps reminding of more cheerful and more youthful days – before the war.
But if thinking of the motiv of emergency supplies in art, I am thinking mostly of Giorgio Morandi. Morandi has these various goods stacked very densely at times, as if showing: this is what we got, and this is what it needs to keep us alive for a while. And opposed to such images he has goods playfully arranged and presented as if these goods were characters, and this subtle shifting from handling objects as necessities to handling objects as aesthetic objects, meant to be played with, this shifting alone might tell us much about what an emergency supply is, and about what images might tell us about situations that have changed, and about the change as to the status of objects in affluenc societies or in societies in crisis and even at war.
And such supplies might also and even exist on a level of form and artistic formulas. Since given an artist might feel empty and outpowered, such artist might exactly go back to the basic formulas, even the most basic geometric shapes perhaps, to start working from there. Again. After, possibly, a situation, perhaps a personal situation, perhaps the situation in society at large, had been changing. Forcing him or her to adapt and to start anew, in view of very different circumstances (and also to study such phenomena one might just look in to Picasso).
The history of the still life might be the place to look for the motiv of the emergency supply in art, and vice versa one might perceive the history of the still life as the genre that renders and discusses affluence as well as paucity and teaches about the ways humans in the past have dealt with circumstance. It is a genre that might be seen in new and fresh ways today, just because also affluent Western societies do face change and, to some degree, are forced to adapt.

Three) The Emergency Supply in Affluent Societies

The shock of the new, in 2022, a shock that, on some level, also affluent Western societies had to endure, is also associated with the motif of the emergency supply. And perhaps the emergency supply is the embodiment of that shock, of being confronted with possible shortages, of energy for example, like (in our lifetime) never before.
One reaction of individuals might have been to build, to stack emergency supplies in view of possible shortages, perhaps even in somewhat hysterical reaction to change (but city governments, also in Switzerland, had advised to provide for supplies that could sustain households for a while). And then, after a while, after having stacked supplies (somewhat hysterically), individuals might have realized that actual shortages might be less likely (at least in this winter), resulting with individuals – perhaps – consuming their individual emergency supplies.
For this we show no images either, but it is possible to imagine such scenes, since an awareness is growing, also in affluent society, an awareness that tells us now, and more insistingly, that food is not to be wasted.

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