In recent posts, I’ve been talking about animals and other objects depicted in salt and pepper shakers as wearing various items of human clothing. This time, I’m going to look at a set that depicts a more or less human-like being who isn’t wearing quite enough clothing.
I begin with the actual shakers:
Readers who have been following this blog for some time might be reminded of an earlier set of similarly-shaped and equally mysterious shakers:
These, you may recall, turned out to be the detachable breasts of a peculiarly incomplete woman who was not completed even by them:
This time, the strange objects are not breasts–no nipples, right? But they do in fact turn out to be representations of naked body parts:
Yup, it’s some sort of gnome in the process of mooning us–a vision particularly disturbing from a certain angle:
This is a shaker set that makes me (and others I’ve shown it to) particularly curious about the answer to the question, “Why would you ever want to have a thing like this on your dining table? And also in this case, related questions, such as, “Why would you want to shake stuff that comes from buttocks–even imaginary ceramic buttocks–onto your food? On the other hand, thinking about these buttocks as what Robin Bernstein calls scriptive things, as I’ve discussed in a number of previous posts, I might have to add some further considerations to my earlier suggestion that there might be some pleasure in the imagined violence of shaking shakers that represent things like Aunt Jemima and Asiatic and Aboriginal stereotypes. What are we to make of the imaginary act scripted by these things of shaking your miniature booty?
This set, like a few others I’ve discussed in earlier posts, has magnets that keep the buttocks attached to the gnome they belong to. You can see them here:
I guess that makes them a particularly attractive set of buttocks.
Perry Nodelman 