Thinking Out Loud – February 2nd, 2010
Part 1 – Dave Hickey (Vernacular of Beauty)
Intention.
- Important distinction between “what it looks like” and “what it means”
- Where does intention fit in? Can beauty reside within intention?
- What is the difference between having an intention and successfully realizing one’s intention? If we are going to evaluate based on the intention, does it matter whether or not the intention was achieved?
- Is it even possible to perceive intention in a work?
- When an artist makes a work, can they discover intention after (“I want the work itself to tell me what it’s about”)?
- Some artists claim art-making “is not about intention” as an excuse for not being rigorous with their practice.
For the last time, what is beauty? Maybe our “definition” is somewhere in this brainstorm.
- Is beauty a judgement or an experience?
- Beauty as something communal, something that involves influence from others, related to received knowledge and brainwashing, etc.
- Black and white wall experiment as proof of the role of influence or suggestion on our experiences
- How does relativism come into play (we talk about beauty as this hierarchical thing)?
- Personal engagement or relationship to something as where we locate meaning; is this the closest we can get to idea of “universal beauty”?
- “Beauty is what the object and I agree on”
- Manmade beauty – and where is that in relation to what is beautiful in nature?
- How we experience or understand beauty as something that shifts with time?
- Beauty as a safe place? Beauty as power to be dangerous.
- Space between beauty and pleasure.
- Struggle or resolution of struggle as what makes something beautiful?
- Beauty about when one is authentic with one’s search. Through struggle, there is some kind of engagement with it on part of artist, which becomes beautiful to audience.
- Beauty as reception of something in a certain way. Then there is this question of is that beauty important?
- Why do we need to come to a consensus? To figure out how to use it? Do we need a consensus? What happens if we say “There is no consensus about what beauty is, but I’m still going to set out to create something beautiful”
Which leads us to …. the use of beauty.
Beauty as Functional.
- Foucault has this idea that we don’t even see the world as it is, we see it as others want us to for their purposes (for example, in the current economic climate in North America, we are encouraged to value profit over caring for ones’ neighbour)
- This raises an important for artists: “Do I know or understand enough about the world enough to even say anything? “
- “A good friend is someone who unsettles you”
- Is our job as artists still to shatter beauty with ugliness to offset all those “others” that are trying to manipulate us with beauty?
- Can we use beauty to unsettle?
- It seems unfortunate for artists to sacrifice our access to beauty (artists shouldn’t give that power up)
- Questions: “how do you let beauty back in?” “Can we ever get beauty back?”
- How might an advertiser’s intention manifest differently than an artist’s?
- Problem as an artist who needs to sell work of how we brand ourselves.
- Is what is a comfort and what is unsettling also depend on context? (i.e. are magazines and tv a comfort because they invisibly reinforce your world and what is familiar to you … and it is only when they become foreign and thus visible to you that they are unsettling?)
- When the argument becomes visible, you cannot be seduced by it as much. Intention is revealed. As we become aware of platform from which we are experiencing things, we move towards new level of criticism.
- Boiling pot of water and the frog metaphor. If boiling water is contemporary dance, how do you throw people in that pot, and get them to stay? Make it beautiful? Then beauty becomes a functional tool.
- Do we need a Vanna White (a beautiful thing directing people’s gaze to the object)? If work itself is not beautiful, isn’t that enough?
- Importance of welcoming people to engage with things they don’t have ‘expertise’ around and giving permission to people to just have experience
Criticism.
- Relational aesthetics: there is only a relationship, there is not an object around which we meet… so what do we evaluate or critique? It becomes about ethics: we evaluate based on how artist treats the people involved (not about how aesthetically pleasing it is)
- When ethics become more important than product, isn’t it better to not have people wondering about your soul, but just worrying about your appearance?
- Challenging question: maybe being under authorial rule of king is more useful than being under constant self-censorship (maybe it makes resistance more possible)
- Do I want to be judged on both my appearance and my soul?
Posts
not a philosophical discussion of beauty, therefore i found it not necessarily pertinent to contest the holes in his definitions (obviously there are holes, but does it help us to point these out, or can we benefit more by just going with it and seeing where his story takes us?). but these holes do make a discussion of his idea more difficult. what is he getting at when he says "beauty"? --the agency that causes visual pleasure in the beholder--why does he want to draw our attention to this word? it seems to do with people's attitude toward the word rather than beauty itself.
ReplyDeletehis straw-man is that beauty is "the corruption of the market" because it distracts the viewer away from the "meaning" of art, and "forces" artists to appeal to beauty (how it looks) over meaning (what it means). his suggestion is rather that beauty is a tool and makes an implicit statement through its use--that what is being represented (the content) is beautiful, or at least, good. the current institutional climate wants artists to refrain from using beauty because that subverts the institutions' power to declare the meaning of the work--or so his argument goes. using beauty is a direct appeal to the viewer, a directness that he suggests is no longer welcome.
the example with mapplethorpe is clear: mapplethorpe presented images that our society would consider bad taste (at least) or immoral (more often). but because he [m.] presented these images in a beautiful manner, the images tell the viewer that this is something they should look at and consider. and hickey's contention is, that because mapplethorpe didn't present his "corrupt" content in a neutral or even negative manner, he challenged the authority of the academic institution to relate the meaning of works.
the idea of beauty as a tool that appeals directly to the viewer rather than relying on a body of knowledge represented by an institution? maybe this is the meaning of the title: "vernacular" as an adverb of beauty, meaning something like "beauty's domestic and functional ability", rather than my first reading of it, which was something like "the common word for beauty". this is a fun idea, and i like the potential for a discussion of how beauty can be reclaimed as a tool rather than a necessity (which from the notes, it seems people were having). what else does the article suggest?
ReplyDeletefirst of all, i like beauty. i cannot, therefore, find myself severely engaged with hickey's argument, because it pre-supposes a community that looks at 'beauty' as a bad word. for sure this community may have existed in the 90's, and perhaps now as well, but personally, i have no gripe with art that is beautiful. as fivel pointed out, it's not clear what hickey means, precisely, by beauty; let's keep it imprecise.
ReplyDeletei get cranky when big corporations with big money make really beautiful art with talented artists to make even more money. for example the well-known, highly successful sony commercial of bouncy balls in San Francisco (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_51UcmBbBY) really pisses me off. i think this instinct is perhaps what hickey is pointing towards. we get cranky because someone is making a lot of money by showing on TV some beautiful vacuous piece of art/advertising. well, i'll stay cranky, for better or for worse, but not because the spot is beautiful.
parenthetically, i prefer buster keaton running down a hill chased by paper maché boulders (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZSTM3knaao).
how can beauty be reclaimed as a tool rather than a necessity? first of all, i think that publicity and campaigns never stopped using beauty as a tool. so who has to reclaim it? contemporary artists? apparently they aren't interested in reclaiming beauty as a tool nor as a necessity. here it seems to me that the challenge is in repositioning 'beauty' as a positive, or at least useful, word in the contemporary discourse/judgement of art.
if contemporary artists want to prioritize meaning (content) over beauty (form) then we can understand beauty as a tool appropriated by the artist in the name of meaning to communicate that meaning. this seems silly to me. i am reminded of our last discussion regarding an emancipated spectator/artist. if the artist has something to say or accomplish, she should find the way to say it most effectively, even if it has to be beautiful and seductive. if she just wants to make something that means something but has no visual appeal, she should content herself in being misunderstood and marginalized and look forward to posthumous fame. if, finally, the artist has a true impulse to create something, let her create it with passion and conviction without a self-conscious concern for the snobby criticism of a self-absorbed contemporary art world and the acceptance of institutions.
ReplyDeletei get frustrated with contemporary dance because it is not accessible. mostly because it is expensive and performed in venues that most people wouldn't think of entering. but also because people think they can't understand it. i am interested in creating a circus as a venue for contemporary dance. the idea is that the circus is accessible, it is popular. you get people to come to the circus, seduce them with some good beautiful pleasurable spectacle, and then hit them with the heavy abstract experimental contemporary dance. hopefully they'll be see engrossed in the world of aesthetic beauty that they will swallow the medicine.
i also like art that isn't beautiful. but i don't think i'm alone. i think ugly cruel distorted sadistic or masochistic art is just as seductive as beautiful aesthetic art. think about cheap porn and horror movies. personally i prefer beautiful ugly art, like 'The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover,' which presents ugly violent content in a highly aestheticized and beautiful way.