HeadTalk 4

    Re-informing Beauty and the Aesthetic

The notes are in two parts and are a bit bi-polar as Part 1 is upbeat about how 'beauty' and the 'aesthetic' can open new space for thinking about doing art, but Part 2 is how we got here and titled as a parody of tragedy, the fall of Beauty and the Aesthetic. We think this bit of history is worth a look at as it gives a context for the now of the two concepts we are unpacking in Part 1. Why not put the 2nd part first then? Because, well, it seemed boring.......

The shape of the notes will signpost some different ways of seeing both concepts (beauty and aesthetic) and converge (in part 1) towards how these terms might be relevant or not in contemporary art practice. This final part of the notes also puts forward one way of moving forward with these terms and so is a clear coconut for bashing (its nice to have something to aim at....).

ps – these are notes and so aesthetically dysfunctional but hopefully beautifully suggestive. Single quote marks depict the unstable status or meaning of a word or phrase. 'Contemporary' refers to art that is regarded as edge rather than high street or a bit more pompously, art working in a relevant art world, historical context.

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Notes – Part 1

Contemporary art practice is plural and democratised. The days of a unified and universal credo of the doing of art, sliced by status according to what degree of affinity your practice had with a universal ideal of Beauty and the Aesthetic, have long gone (see Part 2 for more, how and why :-))

Even so, lately the terms 'beauty' and 'aesthetic' are beginning to resonate around the contemporary art scene.

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The artist Mark McGowan recently reenacted the death of Jean Charles de Menezes who was shot by anti-terrorist police. Actors were used to represent the event by wearing cardboard boxes over their heads with head images of the police, Menezes and others. When asked by a television journalist why he used the boxes, McGowan, without any pretension, said they were aesthetic and beautiful.

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A commentary on an image by the artist Francis Alÿs (reproduced in Forum magazine) “The artist Francis Alÿs offers this hopeful statement in a recent work, 'Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can be poetic'; the image shows him walking through an Israeli checkpoint trailing yellow paint from a punctured can: a beautiful act of transgression. In Host 6 On Beauty, part of a contribution (Sheffield Pavillion) to the Venice Biennale 2007

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The local artist, Anna Francis, used the tag line 'there is beauty in the city' for a project acting across the two cities of Stoke-on-Trent and Bristol, looking at the impact of art and culture activity on our cities. ‘The Year of Finding Spaces In the City for Art.’ 2008. The tag line was put on objects and also small flyers for a constructed distribution around both cities.

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The artist Sean Scully, two times Turner Prize nominee, on beauty:

“ Beauty is not beautiful, it is tragic. Beauty stands alone. It doesn't collaborate with the 'what already is', 'the status quo,' as does decorative and the ornamental whose purpose is to 'lift' what already is. Beauty never collaborates: it separates itself. It stands in opposition. As an example of the difference between art and life. As an example of what is lost in life, and of our failure to make a beautiful world. This is the tragedy of beauty in art. It is exiled”

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The Chapman Brothers:

“Jake Chapman says for them there is a 'convulsive beauty' in the violent

image, and they are wedded to the Surrealists' avant-garde belief that such

shocks and jolts can wake us from the dream-state of a commodity culture

by, as Jake puts it, 'shocking the viewer from the edifice of comfort'. Chris

Turner in the Tate Magazine Issue 8 Autumn 2006

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Thinking about the concepts

If an aesthetic is a construction of our senses and beauty a recognition of how those constructions can affect us, then is it time to re-articulate a recognition of this experience in our practice?

The debunking of hierarchies in art and the emptying out of the privileged content of 'beauty' and 'aesthetic' (see part 2) leaves open a space for redefining these concepts ...

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Problems

1. The history of the terms (part 2) brings out how they are tied up with ideas of what art is about.

A consensus is that art is whatever designated by a 'recognised' artist. The artist is now an active agent across private and public spaces of all kinds, rather than being confined to a special and limited network of accessibility (the museum and gallery system).

In turn this has elevated the 'responsibility' of the artist to their social function and so 'ethics' becomes a relevant performer in thinking and practice.

Does 'ethics' replace 'aesthetics' (and 'beauty')?

Or, as with relational aesthetics (see part 2), can the two co-exist, interact? :

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2. The question then is where does the 'aesthetic' come in as a criterion of art that works as art as well as being something else (like 'ethical') or because of it, when art practice is plural across materials and strategies?

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3. Can an understanding of the 'body' as a pre-cultural sensory intellingence, as well as culturally shaped, be also a relevant dynamic in thinking about the 'aesthetic' and 'beauty'? Eg. If any collection of diverse people/cultures is in a place that explodes in flame they will all share the same reaction, run for it [and probably making screaming noises culturally modulated]...

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4. If art is displaced from any specific form (such as the material object) but can attach itself to any of these, then any art can be reframed as an event with no ideological bar on whether it exists in the 'private' or 'public' world. So does a reconfigured 'aesthetic' and 'beauty' cross over the distinction between art and life?

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5. If art and life overlap without distinction until a distinction is made (as in 'this is an art work'), then that distinction is an intervention in the existing state of things, a "..redistribution of the sensible." (Ranciere) Why make that 'redistribution' and is the effect (political) and affect (bodies) of that intervention where 'ethics' meets the 'aesthetic' and sometimes 'beauty'?

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6.Is the difference between 'art' as a redistributive moment of our senses, as against other natural and political redistributions, the way in which it is done as a direct address to how we evaluatively feel or sense the ethical/political or anything else.

(eg. Having actors with cardboard boxes on their heads revisiting the

shooting of an innocent man rather than or as well as writing to your MP)

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7.Would the quality of this sensory cognitive redistribution, be the degree and or complexity of the disruption of the existing 'sensible', around a pivot of the private/public, personal/interpersonal, ethical/political, functional/play of individuals.

One Configuration

If we go along with some of the above, then would a way of rethinking 'aesthetic' and 'beauty' be as descriptors of sensory cognitive features that are not 'in' anything, but are the 'experience' of the art event , unique to its construction and not privileging materials, ideologies or forms of life (from the laugh to the cry of any experience) while being subject to and mediating their action?

A way of visualising an art event that disrupts, has radical effect and affect, or is in this new sense an aesthetic event offering beauty, might be as falling or being pushed in the water in the middle of a river. The water is the sensory/cultural surround that you are meeting in a new and unexpected way. There is the shock and disorientation felt through your body and the sensory/cognitive recovery as you negotiate this new territory.

Is this a relevant way of rethinking the terms in our practice or what is missing?

The idea and explanation of 'sensory cognitive' was sparked specifically from one piece of writing about the terms 'aesthetic' and 'beauty' and the reference and link follows to end part 1 of the notes:

Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered

Susan Buck-Morss

October, Vol. 62. (Autumn, 1992), pp. 3-41.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/2235789/-Susan-BuckMorss-Aesthetics-and-Anaesthetics-Walter-Benjamins-Artwork-Essay-Reconsidered-Susan-BuckMorss-October-Vol-62-Autumn-1992-pp-

End of part 1

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Notes Part 2

The original sense of the term aesthetic: Aisthitikos Ancient Greek “perceptive by feeling” and Aisthisis : sensory experience of perception

Beauty: Middle English beaute, from Old French biaute, from Vulgar Latin *bellit?s, from Latin bellus, pretty

How 'beauty' and the 'aesthetic' came to a Tragic End

1

“The artist is before all things an artist; what animates him is the

sentiment of the beautiful; what he wishes to make pass into the

soul of the spectator is the same sentiment that fills his own. He

confided himself to the virtue of beauty; he fortifies it with all

the power, all the charm of the ideal; it must then do its own work;

the artist has done his when he has procured for some noble souls

the exquisite sentiment of beauty. This pure and disinterested

sentiment is a noble ally of the moral and religious sentiments; it

awakens, preserves, and develops them. So art, which is founded on

this sentiment, which is inspired by it, which expands it, is in its

turn an independent power. It is naturally associated with all that

ennobles the soul, with morals and religion; but it springs only

from itself.

The True, the Beautiful, and the Good, by the French philosopher Victor Cousin: 1853

The quote shows the way art and beauty held hands in pointing the way to an idea of morality and the right kind of 'good life' enabling the experience of beauty in nature or the social world as a 'disinterested' subject, informed by a 'civilised' setting. In reality,there isn't much disagreement now that this was an ideology of a Western European cultural and political elite, at the height of its powers in ruling over life-destroying factory systems and the colonising of other countries, driven by a belief in its superior values and shot through with race,gender and religious dysfunctions. This was a culture with a 'historic destiny' to rule the world.

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2

As we know, the Modernist shift and the breakup of the perspective view, fractured this consensus mirrored in art. The focus turned away from a social obligation of the artist to enhance our lives (morality or ethics of art?) to an individual chase of 'truth' in the experience of beauty (cult of the individual?). The aesthetics of 'taste' turns to the dynamics of 'form'.

Three strands of practice then disrupted this ideal of truth through 'form'and began a dis-assembly of 'beauty' and 'aesthetic' as relevant terms for artists.

i) The first world war and its unremitting rationally organised waste of life led to a rejection of beauty and aesthetics in either of its guises ( as 'morality' or 'form')as an illusion of Western 'civilisation'. The Dadaist celebration of non-sense in image and performance led this counter critique.

ii) The fracture of the Modernist shift from the classical image opened up space also for rethinking the term 'art' itself and a new strand of practice began to focus on symbolic statements reconfiguring the art object.'Beauty' and 'aesthetic' are de-centred or displaced. Duchamp is the iconic figure. The first collision/collaboration of art and philosophy? Or the first art as philosophy?.

iii) The birth of psychoanalytic theory de-stabilised the idea that Western culture was a product of a self-aware reason. Beauty and the aesthetic began to try out different clothes (Surrealism).

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3

The modernist model of truth through 'form', with its idea of beauty and the aesthetic being 'in' the object and 'in' the individual 'genius'of the artist stayed on top institutionally and ideologically, reaching a high point with the Abstract Expressionists.

Art practice is now centred on the art object and its categories of material process. The art critic is the priest of the rites of 'form' and its hierarchies, with painting and sculpture being the inner sanctum of the 'truth' activity of art with the 'aesthetic' and 'beauty' being a ritualised theory of the material offerings that resulted.

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4

The dismantling of this purist structure paralleled the cultural/political liberation movements of the third quarter of the 20th Century and was the final nail in the coffin for the “grand narratives” (Lyotard)of the West, including art and its ideological baggage at that point.

The old notions of 'Beauty'and 'aesthetic' are now debunked in at least 3 ways that exchanged with each other:

a. The return of the 'ethical' with Situationist and Neo-Dada art, not to offer the vision of a unified view of the moral 'civilised' society, inspired by the beauty and aesthetic of its reflections in art, but as a desire to engage with life,and social life, as lived.

Beauty or aesthetic in art rejected in neo-Dada performance or reverted back to nature in chancifying 'form',e.g.,John Cage's 4'33”?.

b. The re-emergence of art as philosophy, Conceptual art,where the idea is the point, the doing only the signage. Beauty or aesthetic as incidental?

c. The power of the sign and image reproduced indefinitely on spectacular scales through new technologies. The old idea of beauty and aesthetic in art, attached to an original created object is replaced by the anonymous replication of the sensuous image, sound or object commodity, . Beauty and aesthetic off the shelf? Maybe foreseen by Oscar Wilde:

"The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible," hence his conclusion: "One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art." Oscar Wilde, "Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young," in Strangeness and Beauty: An Anthology of Aesthetic Criticism 1840-1910. Vol 2, eds. Eric Warner and Graham Hough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983/1894), pp. 156-157.

Or “colonising” (Habermas)our sense world?

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5

Where Are We Now?

The three strands of Neo Dada/Situationist,Conceptual and the Spectacular, together with a democratised material process lineage, have diversified across each other with plural practices that have at least three main features which present new space for rethinking 'beauty' and 'aesthetic' in contemporary art practice.

i) The 'ethical' in art given ideological voice with “Relational Aesthetics” Borriaud 1998, with the driving ethic as “learning to inhabit the world in a better way” and art as made in social rather than private symbolic spaces. The aesthetic and beauty situated in social intervention?

ii) Engaging with the Spectacular. The Brit Art movement (Damien Hirst et al) took the interlacing of conceptual with a small c and art object into the Marketplace as a competing 'brand'(spectacular art or performance)at the luxury end of the market. Relocating the construction of beauty and its aesthetic in the technology of the commodity?

iii) Material process art, now emptied of privileged status and its ideologies, redefining the sensory conjunction of the art object with its personal, social and political setting through conceptual strategies. Beauty and aesthetic returned to the sensory intelligence of the body as a now open interface between the private and public space of the individual?

End of Part 2

End of Notes

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