Transcript Slide 1
Reviving
Beauty
; reflections on a new aesthetics
John Baldessari 1967-8 They don’t have to buy it to have it – they can have it just by knowing it Lawrence Weiner
Stage 2
• All remaining presentations tomorrow 9.30
10.30
12.00
• All parts of the assessment must be completed to pass this part of the Module
Stage 3
• Workshops on Thursday 10.00
11.00
• Discuss and finalise research question • Review Sources
Written Assignments: Hand In
• Stage 2 - Monday 28 November • Stage 3 – Friday, 9 December • Stage 3 - New York students ONLY Friday 16 December • Sign sheet and leave in Box outside GP20
Key Readings
• Copies outside GP20 from Tuesday (oops – late this week) • Readings from previous weeks
- Hannibal Lecher shall see you in GP20 unless you return these for the use of others
• Option of copying texts on Academic Reserve
Reviving
Beauty
; reflections on a new aesthetics
John Baldessari 1967-8 They don’t have to buy it to have it – they can have it just by knowing it Lawrence Weiner
Piero Manzoni. Merda d’artista. (human excrement in tin) 1961
‘I threw the bottle rack and urinal in their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty’ Duchamp. 1917 Michelangelo Pistoletto. Venus of the Rags. 1967 Urinal. (Ready-mades) Marcel Duchamp. 1917
Vanessa Beecroft. Show. 23 April 1998. The Guggenheim. New York
Visitors to an exhibition of avant garde art….wear jeans or designer clothes, wear their hair according to the model of Beauty offered by glossy magazines, the cinema or television, in other words by the mass media. These people follow the ideals of Beauty as suggested by the world of commercial consumption, the very world that avant-garde artists have been battling against for over 50 years.
Class, gender, power, taste and consumption and finally;
a trivial and ‘relative’ value
• Paduang girls in Burma can be fitted with metal neck coils from the age of 6 • Different cultures will see and find Beauty in diverse places • If Beauty is subjective and relative, it has no absolute existence or value. It is unworthy of analysis
And so: to make beautiful art was to bring art further within the circles of power, class, commerce and consumption;
to render it ineffective as critique
Art’s purpose is intellectual and analytical, its function, social and political. Beauty trivialises and does little to contribute to this purpose And further, if beauty is a learned response, dependent on class or culture, then there is no absolute of Beauty.
Beauty remains subjective and differs infinitely. It is therefore unworthy of analysis
One evening I sat Beauty on my knees; and found her bitter, and I injured her. Arthur Rimbaud. 1873
Enter the dragon: I was drifting, daydreaming really, through the waning moments of a panel discussion on the subject of ‘What’s Happening Now’……..when I realised I was being addressed…..A lanky graduate student had risen to his knees and was soliciting my opinion as to what ‘ the issue of the nineties’ would be. Snatched from my reverie , I said ‘Beauty’…..The issue of the nineties will be
beauty
Dave Hickey. The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty. 1993
Dave Hickey. Chapter 1. Enter the Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty. 1993 The arguments these artists mount to the detraction of beauty come down to one simple gripe:
Beauty sells,
And although their complaints usually are couched in the language of academic radicalism, they do not differ greatly from my grandmother’s haut bourgeois prejudices against people ‘in trade’ who get their names in the newspaper’…..if it sells itself, it is an idolatrous commodity…..
Grant Kester. The World He Has Lost: Dave Hickey’s Beauty Treatment. 2003 Art dealers are in Hickey’s account, no different from the guy who runs the Billabong Surf Shop: bubbling over with excitement and eager to share it with any passer-by, collector or not….. Rich collectors don’t really ‘own art’ they are more like caretakers or hobbyists, but academics are another matter…..
Dave Hickey. Chapter 1. Enter the Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty. 1993 For more than four centuries, the idea of ‘making it beautiful’ has been the keystone of our cultural vernacular….the single direct route from the image to the individual without a detour through church or state……The route now detours through an alternate institution…..we are being denied any direct appeal to beauty…to sustain the jobs of the bureaucrats….The priests of the new church are not so generous. Beauty in their domain is altogether elsewhere….
Grant Kester. The World He Has Lost: Dave Hickey’s Beauty Treatment. 2003 Hickey provides the comforting assurance that all those annoying artists during the 1980’s and 90’s who raised questions about racial privilege and sexual representation, or who challenged the cozy commodification of the gallery system, were really nothing more than mean spirited whiners….
As we contemplate a return to the art world Hickey has lost , we would do well to recall that the beauty he evokes, not unlike the patriotism that surrounds us today, is something to be felt rather than questioned
Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art
Hirshhorn Museum 1999 Royal Academy 2000
Beauty and the Beast.
Crafts Council 2004
At one end of the spectrum are artists and critics who disparage beauty and aesthetics. From their standpoint, aesthetics are inevitably politicised and thereby an inappropriate avenue for artistic investigation. The opposing, equally large and committed group embrace beauty but
pose new challenges for it
.
Neal Benezra. Assistant Director for Art and Public Programmes. Hirschorn Museum, Smithsonian Institute, Washington.
Sarah James. The Ethics of Aesthetics. Art Monthly. March 05
• Referring to Isobel Armstrong: • A new poetics …means challenging the politics of the anti aesthetic by remaking its theoretical base and changing the terms of the argument
A New Aesthetics?
Beauty beyond subjectivity and pleasure; the complexity of an idea Relational Aesthetics
Hairy Vessel. M Medbo 2004 Some people think my work is frightening and disgusting like something from a nightmare, but it has beauty too. Marten Medbo. 2004
Beauty beyond subjectivity and pleasure; the complexity of an idea Beauty, it is said, is subjective…and that is the end of the matter. The argument seems to be that if we cannot hold up even one object and say ‘This is indisputably beautiful’ then it is begging the question to ask what the feeling it inspires may be……….the discovery of what common denominator belongs to every object which inspires us with a sense of beauty What I am concerned with is not the objective qualities of the beautiful, but rather the dynamics of the event of beauty, the perception of beauty, that is the mental state which issues in the feeling that a thing is beautiful James Kirwan. Beauty
‘Terrible Beauties’
loss, grief and death……..Beauty that is bound up with the arousal of discomfiting emotions….whether an aversion such as disgust might find some quarter in beautiful art… …..aesthetic pleasure is better understood as a kind of affective absorption and that the language of the emotions provides more illumination than the language of sensation… Caroline Korsmeyer. Terrible Beauties. In: Keiran, M. Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. 2005
We had found in the War that Goethe, Schiller and Beauty added up to killing and bloodshed and murder.
Richard Huelsenbeck c1916 Maya Lin. Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial Washington D.C. 1982
One way to note the emergence of the beautiful out of the merely pretty is in terms of the intensification of the experience. Emotions can intensify experience without colliding with some notional ‘opposite’ which is the case with pleasure and pain Can all emotions be transformed by art into a positive aesthetic encounter, perhaps amounting even to beauty? Certainly fear can, and grief and sorrow, and melancholy…..
Ibid. Carolyn Korsmeyer
Emotions …are sometimes set aside as merely sentimental engagement. But some of them…..pity, terror and dread…are recognised for their own aesthetic weight and the understanding they afford. Insight often demands that one face truths that one would rather were otherwise….. C Korsmeyer
And I then thought of the role beauty plays in the way we respond to death – associating the dead with flowers, reading poetry, listening to the deceased’s favourite music… (if) consolation means mitigating the bitter truth……..It is not difficult to see what has happened to beauty in contemporary art. It is not art’s business to console. If beauty is perceived as consolatory, then it is morally inconsistent with the indignation appropriate to an accusatory art The time of day may not be appropriate either for philosophy or for art……Kant may just be right that interest and beauty are incompatible. Interest and art may be compatible, but it is not easy to see that this is something the Age of Indignation can accept…
Danto
Beauty and the Beast. Crafts Council. 2004
‘There is only one kind of ugliness which cannot be presented in conformity with nature without obliterating all aesthetic liking and hence artistic beauty:
that ugliness which arouses disgust’ Kant
I like to show the unexpected and the sensational, to arouse wonder and amazement. Some people think my work is frightening and disgusting like something from a nightmare, but it has beauty too.
Marten Medbo. 2004
Monica Forster. Mix Vase. 2002 Ingegerd Raman. A Drop of Clear Water
I feel uncomfortable and frustrated until I get it absolutely right. If it’s half a millimetre out, it seems like two millimetres to me Ingegard Raman
‘The underworld is much more eclectic and unpredictable than Heaven, a playground for dreams, storytelling and flights of fancy’ Mia E Goransson Per Sundberg
A reconciliation of aesthetics and socially transformative art?
• How do you reconcile an interest in the sensuous and emotive qualities of painting sculpture etc. and the social and political purposes and potential of art?
• How do you reconcile the demands of the market with political activism?
• Are these relevant questions. Is one actually opposed to the other?
• Do we need a completely new understanding of the role of beauty and a redefinition of aesthetics
Symptomatic of the search for an alternative aesthetics?
Today this history seems to have taken a new turn. After the area of relations between Humankind and the deity, and then between humankind and the object, artistic practice is now focused
upon the sphere of inter human relations
Meetings, encounters, events, various types of collaboration between people, games, festivals and places of conviviality….
Nicholas Bourriaud
Where are the aesthetics?
• In the idea of art as lived experience – Dewey • In the relationship between ‘the perceiver and the perceived’ • ‘The possibility of a relational art, (an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context’)… • ..system of intensive encounters’
Relational Aesthetics:
Suzanne Lacy?
‘ When Jens Haaning broadcasts funny stories in Turkish through a loud speaker in a Copenhagen square (Turkish Jokes 1994) he produces in that split second a micro community, one made up of immigrants brought together by collective laughter, which upsets their exile situation’
Francis Alys. When faith moves mountains. 11 April 2002. Ventanilla. Peru. With the help of hundreds of people and shovels, we created a social allegory. This story is not validated by any physical trace or addition to the landscape – a response to turmoil, poverty and instability following the collapse of the Fujimori dictatorship..
A new aesthetics?
• The work of art presents a social
interstice
..(a) term used by Karl Marx to describe trading commodities that elude the capitalist economic context by being removed from the law of profit • This ‘arena’ of exchange must be judged on the basis of aesthetic criteria ..by analysing the coherence of its form and the symbolic value of the world it suggests to us • This inter-human game goes beyond the context of what is called ‘art’ by commodity