It’s All Too Beautiful

Beauty has never been easy. Perhaps Andy Warhol said it best: “I always hear myself saying , ‘She’s a beauty!’ or ‘He’s a beauty!’ or ‘What a beauty!’ but I never know what I’m talking about.” Warhol recognizes the power of beauty in our lives, and dramatizes those moments of recognition with exclamation — “what a beauty!” — and yet called upon to offer an explanation, an abstraction, a theory of beauty, we have to admit it is almost impossible; we don’t know what we are talking about. In essence, this is the core of beauty-problem, and there are a number of ways to address it, admirably represented in Beauty: The Documents of Contemporary Art.

From the Ancients to the Enlightenment, there has been a great deal of talk about what counted as beauty, but everyone seemed to agree there was something to talk about. In the 20th century artists, critics, and philosophers all challenged the very existence of beauty. Marcel Duchamp’s readymade Fountain (a urinal submitted as sculpture) of 1917 marks a moment where beauty seems to exit the stage just as the grisly slaughter of WW I is coming to an end.

Many artists turned to arguably “ugly” forms, materials or subjects, and the world of rampant industrialism and consumerism seemed fueled by sheer ugliness. Critics unmasked most claims of universal beauty as mere ideology, supporting one variety or another of national interest, racial identification, blatant sexism or simply brute exploitation by the powerful. Their criticisms cannot be lightly dismissed, and every exclamation, “What a beauty!” is apt to disclose what Walter Benjamin called “a document of barbarism”.

By 1990, the critique of beauty had become fully institutionalized, rattled off as obvious commonsense even by undergraduates who had not spent very much of their lives either cultivating or contemplating it. That fact is not to be lamented, for a suspicion of beauty is vital if one hopes to have any relation to it that isn’t completely compromised, and Benjamin is quite simply telling the truth—beauty is the other side of the coin of injustice.

Though the champions of beauty had always remained, their positions were almost totally eclipsed, and there was something seemingly naïve in it, such that critics in many disciplines, scholars drawn to their object of study in fields like painting and literature for instance, had no language with which to talk about some of their most intense experiences and relationships to art without appearing to be deeply moved by records of awfully ugly—read unjust—social relations.

Book: Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty

Author: Dave Hickey

Publisher: Foundation for Advanced Critical Studies, Inc.

Publication date: 1994-03

Length: 64 pages

Format: Paperback

Image: http://images.popmatters.com/misc_art/h/hickey-invisibledragon-cove.jpg

Any consensus invites critique, and by 1990 many contrarians and a few sincerely troubled voices began to emerge, trying to recuperate the discussion of beauty. Among the contrarians, Dave Hickey was prominent, writing The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty, and an excerpt is the first selection in this anthology. Interestingly, Hickey quite simply says that when asked by an earnest student what the issue of the nineties would be, “I said, ‘Beauty,’ … a total improvisatory goof.” That momentary goof led the art critic to his book, and to some plain speaking about the rhetorical and affective powers of beauty to move us, sometimes towards justice, and sometimes not.

Hickey, in essence, tries to think beauty after the critique of the 20th century, suggesting that we have to get away from the Enlightenment idea of beauty as something majestically above the fray and see how it is mixed up with our passions and beliefs, to be suspicious of it but to remain open to it nonetheless. He provides a magnificent reading of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs as his example.

The first section of the anthology, “The Revival of Beauty”, follows more voices from the ‘90s moment, and probably most familiar to readers will be excerpts from Elaine Scarry’s slim but controversial book On Beauty and Being Just, published in 1999. Her key claims are aptly represented here. More philosophically precise than many who write on the topic, she doesn’t pull any punches, arguing as forcefully as she can that beauty might help us redeem the injustices of the world, and make our experience of the world far more pleasurable, though to do so she has to rely heavily on both Plato and Kant with little admission that their idealist positions are deeply problematic.

Book: On Beauty and Being Just

Author: Elaine Scarry

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Publication date: 2001-10

Length: 144 pages

Format: Paperback

Price: $14.95

Image: http://images.popmatters.com/misc_art/s/scarry-onbeauty-cover.png

Thinkers like Scarry and Hickey take a real risk in trying to find a language to talk about our everyday experiences with beauty, but their critics are powerful. As Alexander Alberro argues, their “recent attempts to revalidate the experience of the beautiful are, first, driven by intensely nostalgic impulses; they promote ahistorical views of the past.” None of the writers in this anthology is able to overcome the tension of these positions, but brining them together offers the reader a provoking experience, where personal sentiments and intuitions are called forth, but not celebrated so much as complicated, but crucially, without being simply dismissed.

The second section of the book is the most difficult, contains much of the best writing in the anthology, but it assumes a reader conversant with the positions or works of Kant, Duchamp, Warhol and Danto. Arguably their selection from Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is perhaps the most challenging and transformative idea here, and the precision and nuance of his thought make many of the other statements in the book look as though they had lost any gravitational force.

Adorno himself spent most of his life trying to reconcile the beautiful with a world that could produce fascism and industrialized genocide. He never gave up on beauty, but he never thought of it as easy or unproblematically redeeming. Unlike Scarry and others, Adorno demands that we account for the totalizing and ideological work of beauty in the past, but also consider that things have come to such a pass that beauty might only grasped, paradoxically, in its very absence.

He observes that beauty arises as a totalizing form that structures the particular elements of any work, be they colors, images, shapes, movements, or notes in a score: “the formal nature of beauty half triumphantly transforms itself into a kind of expression wherein the menace of domination of nature is wedded to a sense of yearning for the defeated victims of that domination. Thus this expression is one of grief about subjugation and its vanishing point, i.e., death.”

The beautiful for Adorno is a profound state of moving tensions, as the conflicting force of the overall form and the unruly characters of individual elements wrestle for identity. Yet in the modern world defined by genocide and the prospect of nuclear annihilation, modern artists cannot simply rehearse the pleasing, totalizing forms of the past. “For the sake of the beautiful, there cannot be a beautiful anymore” he writes, concluding that “what can appear only negatively defines dissolution,” and so the desire for a form that would order the unruly without crushing their identity is deferred into works that gesture at emptiness or silence, and so the existential plays of Samuel Beckett, with their immobilized characters and stunted dialogue conjuring up a negative beauty that is beyond ideological corruption.

Adorno is, perhaps, a standout in this book because his thought emerges from his training as a composer. Approaching beauty through music emphasizes the changing, evanescent, fleeting character of it. Part of the problem with Beauty: The Documents of Contemporary Art as an anthology is a relentless focus on painting, with photography and conceptual art playing supporting roles. Drama and poetry appear almost not at all, and similarly overlooked are the statements of performance artists, choreographers, filmmakers, and most any art that doesn’t comfortably sit still in a museum gallery.

Outside the Gallery

(partial) Marcel Duchamp, Portrait de joueurs d’echecs. (1911)

Outside the Gallery

Certainly beauty isn’t the preserve of a single art form that might be hung on a wall — artists of sound and movement realize this.

Martha Graham’s statements about beauty and practice in dance might have made for a productive tension against Duchamp’s readymades (both rely on gestures were we to think of the activity of Duchamp), rather than Arthur Danto thinking through Warhol. Debates about Duchamp and Warhol certainly dominate the institutional criticism of the century, and so those unfamiliar with this will feel the weight of their work and learn the outlines of a long-running conversation, but one feels a certain claustrophobia here. Certainly beauty isn’t the preserve of a single art form, and its force in our lives happens, thankfully, more often than not outside the confines of a gallery—arguably artists of sound and movement are perhaps more sympathetic to this.

The third section of the anthology, “Positions”, provides a wide range of statements and interviews from both critics and artists, many of them provoking and resonant without being completely worked out. The artists here bring an openness and affirmation that almost no critic could aspire to.

Book: Aesthetic Theory (Theory and History of Literature Series)

Editor: Theodor Adorno, Robert Hullot-Kentor

Publisher: University of Minnesota Press

Publication date: 1998-12

Length: 448 pages

Format: Paperback

Price: $27.50

Image: http://images.popmatters.com/misc_art/a/adorno-aestheory-cover.png

The painter Agnes Martin can say, contra Adorno and other modernists, “I don’t respect their negative art, I think it’s illustration. I consider exaltation to be the theme of art and life.” Though one must remember that her works are almost all paintings of the most austere grids ever put on canvas, a kind of silent art that one imagines Adorno had in mind in his theory of a negative beauty. Rather than try to make sense of these as movements in a larger argument, I think they are better read as a series of aphorisms or observations that create fantastic moments for reflection or insight.

For instance, painter John Currin says, “you can’t preserve the violence and freshness of your ignorance.” Painter Gerhard Richter notes, “letting a thing come, rather than creating it — no assertions, constructions, formulations, inventions, ideologies — in order to gain access to all that is genuine, richer, more alive: to what is beyond my understanding.” And here we see something of the problem.

For artists and critics who cultivate beauty, the practice is one of sensibility and sensation, risk and development—they live beauty from a profoundly affective and totally subjective vantage. To the theorist of beauty, this won’t do. Editor Dave Beech hopes the anthology might chart a way out of this: “The result is not the rejection of beauty or the death of taste but the need to learn to love beauty without the kind of social endorsement or cultural authority that it once enjoyed and wielded. What would that be like?”

The question is intriguing, but none of the selections here really make that synthesis. If it is possible, it is left for the readers themselves to undertake it, something that these theorists who have devoted their lives to the problem seem unable or unwilling to do. Moreover, emerging aesthetic theory is coming from an entirely different line of thinking not at all represented in this book, evolutionary science.

Book: Chaos, Territory Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth

Author: Elizabeth Grosz

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Publication date: 2008-05

Length: 136 pages

Format: Hardcover

Price: $22.50

Image: http://images.popmatters.com/misc_art/g/grosz-chaosart-cover.jpg

Such recent work in just the past year includes intriguing theories of narrative art and evolution by Brian Boyd, and affect, art and sexual difference in Elizabeth Grosz’s Chaos, Territory Art. These new Darwinian perspectives make the institutional and critical debates of the t20th century feel suddenly like moments of something truly past, and again it suggest this anthology is really a kind of bookend to a period of art and ideas that have passed.

Beauty is the latest addition to The Documents of Contemporary Art series brought out by Whitechapel Gallery and the MIT press. Other titles in the series include Appropriation, The Everyday, The Cinematic, The Archive and more. Each installment is an anthology of the major critical statements and debates animating contemporary art, though the emphasis on the contemporary is perhaps misleading since each volume seems to frame issues that begin with 20th century modernism and arguably end with our networked world.

The series is lively, eclectic, and mercifully brief. The disciplined editors heroically condense issues and arguments that overstuff library shelves into less than 250 pages. Reading any one volume in the series is a map to the major artists, critics, triumphs, and anxieties of art in the long 20th century.

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