Rubens on Sustainability

(Kermess pictures: collections.louvre.fr)

(10.11.2022) This picture (in the Louvre) is unusual. It does show the usual ›Rubens action‹ – usually stacked into one narrow frame –, but here the usual ›Rubens action‹, vital, muscular and fleshy human activity, is confronted with a wider space. Human action is being relativized by a wider space, by a hilly landscape that seems, on some level, to represent a boundary, a frontier seemingly intimidating human activity to exploit that space (and be it simply for a rural kermess). And still, the people depicted seem to dance on that boundary and towards that boundary.

We see two sides of Rubens here, the vital Rubens, the embodiment of human vitality, and we see the landscape painter. And then there is another Rubens here, a Rubens that seems to think on the relation of human vitality – in view of nature and spaces. In view of nature, relativizing and, perhaps, restraining, human vitality. And Rubens is best, at least in my view, if he is restraining his own vitality, in the service of something that is more, than mere vital bodily activity.

The picture seems to depict a small corner of the world. But still a variety of human behaviour and experiences can be studied: consumption, of course (and also consumption beyond measure). Flirting. But also jealousy. And particularly interesting are the people dancing. Because the impetus of dance, of people, collectively dancing can be seen as a collective dynamic that leads individual people to moving according to that collective movement. The dancers seem not to be keen to leave the one small corner of the world which they are obviously inhabiting. But they are dancing, in view of the fields, the hills, the sceneries of peasant’s life. Villages, perhaps a town somewhere are vaguely perceptible, and urban space can be imagined. But the kermess takes place in one small corner of the world, away from urban life; a life that, certainly, has to be confronted in the next winter, when supplies have to be bought, and wood, for heating, will be sold to the city. But for the moment, the one small corner of the world does seem to be rather self-sufficient. At least for the moment.

In our days urban farming has become fashionable, and it is easy to imagine Bruegel as a critical observer of such phenomena. Local products are to be preferred, according to the ideals of sustainability. And one imaginary, idealized ideal might be self-sufficient rural life, perhaps as idealized as Rubens was capable of depicting it in his Farm at Laken. This pictures shows the iconography of sustainability as it is marketed today by eco-supermarkets, as well as it might show the utopia which we will recognize as a tech-free utopia, and not as an ecotopia, which would be a world not without tech, but as self-sufficient as possible, free of conflicts about ressources (due to general affluence of everything people may wish for).

The Kermess does not show the ideal. It shows the wishes of people as they are, and as they often remain unfulfilled. And the vision of a more urban life might be the ideal of some of the people here, perhaps anxious to one day leave the small corner of the world. By dancing towards something people later will be calling ›progress‹. While the ideal, today, seems rather to be a self-sufficient, more modest progress, or, in other words, in the jargon of sustainability: ›qualitative growth‹ and ›steady-state-economics‹. Might the people in Rubens have an awareness of the dialectics of progress? Perhaps, but perhaps not the people in the Farm at Laken. These rather seem to be happy in self-sufficient affluence. The people in the Kermess seem to be more realistically drawn people, which might not be living in self-sufficient freedom, but seem to face alternatives: between being disappointed, and not being disappointed, between looking for new horizons, and staying where they are. What these people perhaps are not aware of is that, in the distant future, one will think about also about ›rebuilding‹, ›restoration‹, even ›renaturalization‹. Perhaps the drinker is aware of it. Because the Kermess rather, not the Farm at Laken, looks at consumption, as well as at overconsumption. It does ask for the right measure, the right moment, the right opportunity. While the Farm at Laken exactly avoids to raise such question: by showing the one eternal perfect moment – when all seems to be looking just fine.

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