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The precariousness of things

Contribution and context: This chapter appeared in the first interdisciplinary collection to address a scurrilous and enigmatic collection of caricatures—the so-called ‘book of arses’—produced in secret over many years by the Saint-Aubin brothers, and now held at Waddesdon Manor. Taws’ essay argues that the Livre de Caricatures is a particularly self-aware reflection on the precarious relations between people and things, and that the ways in which these relations are presented make possible new ways of thinking about the agency of caricature. The book is accompanied by a website containing annotated reproductions of all the images contained in the Livre.

Research imperatives and process: Considering the Livre in its totality, Taws isolates a tendency to represent objects in moments of crisis: toppling, falling, coming undone, or balanced in perilous formations. These overloaded arrangements, he suggests, are united by their condition of precariousness, and by their reference to an inconstant, ambiguous state of being in the world. Drawing on recent ‘thing theory’ and examining the relationship between bodies and objects in the images, Taws considers them alongside contemporary still-life painting, the representation of knowledge in the Encyclopédie, and eighteenth-century commercial imagery. In conclusion, he suggests that tentative connections may be drawn between the secret images in the Livre and a seemingly distinct episode in the history of this genre: the explosion of caricature in revolutionary France.