General and Specific

I think that the most essential "making one of opposites" that occurs to create beauty is the blissful confusion of specificity and generalization. While Scarry argues that appreciation happens with attention to detail, and Danto might say that it is the idea of the object that gives us pleasure, I am inclined to say that it has to be the convergence of these two poles that allows for transcendence. This is Siegel's argument entirely; I am simply narrowing it to a single pair of opposites.

I believe it was John Berger who, discussing the politics of the nude female form, said that our fascination with seeing people unclothed is based in the perceived unity of the subject with all of mankind or womankind because of their shared anatomy. That universal idea of Man or Woman, combined the the specificity of the individual's personality creates an interest that we have forever found attractive. For something (or someone) to exist as both a specific and a generalization is, I think, the most profound tension. It is the struggle of material versus immaterial.

Allen McCollum's shapes are a good example of this.

Kierstin

Want the right things.

The question is, are we missing something by not talking about beauty?

On a less scholarly note, my spring break was filled with beauty. We had a cabin in the mountains, where there was still two feet of snow.

Elaine Scarry insists that talking about beauty is the way to justice. She admits that the beauty of a palm tree cannot be articulated any more so than I can articulate the sense of climbing a mountain in the perfect snow, but she claims that attention to and discussion of beauty makes us want the right things. From reading her book, I dont exactly get the feeling that she believes that beauty is synonymous with an objective truth, but it sounds like she sees it as a sort of harmony.

My articulation of the beauty I experience is never sufficient. Might it be better to leave it as experience?

Kierstin

I've spent that past year or so developing for myself (and pondering the legitimacy of) the idea that beauty has little or no relevance to art-making; rather, art-making should be about changing the way we think about art. Admittedly, much of this belief has come from slightly obsessing over the writings of Joseph Kosuth, particularly his essay entitled Art After Philosophy. While I understand that the majority of the Conceptualists' motivation came from a frustration with the emphasis on formalism that existed in the mid-twentieth century, I wonder about when art actually became about ideas at all. While Kosuth claims that Duchamp's Fountain really got the ball rolling, there is reason to believe that there was a more fundamental change that occurred much earlier.

Dave Hickey's book, The Invisible Dragon consists of of four essays about beauty's place in art history. The third chapter, Prom Night in the Flatland: On the Gender of Works of Art, focuses on the difference between Renaissance and Baroque painting; a change from feminine to masculine. Hickey's main argument is that the deep, perspectival space of Renaissance painting was inviting in that it offered an escape into another realm, while Baroque images were comparatively intimidating, in that the subjects portrayed held a much stronger presence than those of Renaissance painting. From page 47,

"In the sixteenth-century room you were the beholder -- the welcomed guest invited by Christ and the Madonna unto the remote, Arcadian potta del cielo receding beyond them. Upon enter the seventeenth-century, you became the beheld -- held in place outside the space of the painting by the authority of glance and illusion."

Hickey goes on to suggest that we haven't been all that conscious of beauty in art since then. He argues that while the Renaissance valued beauty for its own sake, it has since been transformed into a promotional device. The Baroque Counter-Reformation gave us the distrust of beauty that I am feeling now, three-hundred years later.

I have little reason to doubt that this corruption of beauty in politics is the reason for the bad taste that I have in my mouth whenever I hear anyone say that their piece was a material exploration, but I am not confident enough to say that the two necessarily have to be separated. Siegle, afterall, would probably say that they have to be merged.

Kierstin

It's hard for me to decide whether or not I believe in some sort of ultimate beauty, something that is independent and has value of its own. There is evidence supporting it. I suppose this idea is mostly based in the belief that Truth exists as something elegant and magnetic, that we encounter the least resistance when we're doing what we're supposed to. The Transcendentalists were fans of this particular view. "That Beauty is the normal state, is shown by the perpetual effort of Nature to attain it." (Emerson, Nature)

On the contrary, Elaine Scarry (On Beauty and Being Just) talks about beauty as being more like a subjective psychological state that occurs because of feelings of certainly. Attraction to any particular attribute has only to do with cultural, circumstantial influence, and changes from one person to another.

The consequence of maintaining either one of these views is that they each affect art-making and art-viewing (and life in general) in a very profound way. To say that that there in an idealized Beauty which has value in and of itself is to say that beauty is worth seriously seeking out in more than a hedonistic, self-serving way. That is to say that art is about beauty. The other view, that beauty is entirely subjective, causes us to view it as more of an accessory quality -- a device to direct attention, a means to an end rather than an end in itself.

What can I say?!

Kierstin

Tension as interest.

One thing that comes up a lot in critiques and in the instruction that my professors give is the idea that a work has to have some sort of tension to hold the viewer's interest. Much of the time, we're talking about conceptual interest -- being able to create a contradiction that the viewer is forced to process and resolve. This tension exists aesthetically as well, which Eli Siegel posits in his 1955 essay, Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites? The gist of the piece is simply that all good artwork manages to bring together two ends of a spectrum, e.g. simplicity and complexity, light and dark, depth and surface, energy and repose, etc...

This all makes sense to me. This school and the work that I've seen and the essays I've read have convinced me that this "tension" idea is true and valuable. The thing that concerns me, though is that Siegel has the guts to call this making one of opposites "beauty." It's a really daring claim. After all, isn't there some difference between interest and beauty? (I'm pretty sure that Kant addresses this difference directly, but I'm still working my way through the first few pages of the Critique.) Moreover, is beauty really all that bound up with good artwork as he makes it seem?

First things first; what is the difference between beauty and visual interest? I'm sort of afraid to make a real distinction, in that I might have to claim that beauty has some sort of ideal and I would have to start using a capital "B". I'm not yet ready to make that claim. But! Surely there is something more to beauty than the ability to make me interested in (curious of? frustrated by?) a work of art. No doubt, beauty has that same magnetic quality, but I think that beauty is something much more specific.

Even if Siegel is liberal in his use of the word, he is not necessarily wrong about tension (or the resolution of tension) and its relation to beauty. Is the ability to be two things at once the secret to making beautiful, transcendent things? I feel very conflicted in this. As I mentioned in my previous post, beauty most often feels like an illusive, thoughtless, slithering thing that comes only when we forget about everything else. This description seems to contradict the idea of tension completely. Tension, as I understand it, requires a consciousness of two or more independent parts. The first description makes beauty into something easy and restful, something to be soaked up when it is found. The second is a beauty that requires much of us; we have to engage in the push and pull that the tension creates -- the more we work, the more beauty we see.

I don't feel like I can answer these questions now.. there is entirely too much to consider. What is it that makes me want to look at a Rothko?

Kierstin

Beauty and all of its problems.

The idea of beauty has been of interest to me for a while now. Studying art and art-making has brought questions about the role of aesthetics to the forefront, and has forced me to become more aware of the reasons why am attracted or not attracted to a particular object, scene, image, or person. Moreover, it has forced me to think about the place that beauty has in the art world and in my own practice.

One particular dichotomy that has made itself evident in the way I think about art-making is that beauty seems to exist in opposition to understanding; that beauty (or the perception of beauty) is completely contingent upon a lack of self-consciousness -- a disregard for the context. Understanding, on the other hand, requires complete attention not only to the object, but also to the context and the subject. This a matter of fluid versus rigid, faith versus doubt, Dionysus versus Apollo.

Through this study of beauty, I hope to find some resolution to the conflict that I see between these two opposites. I want to be able to make work that utilizes both the fluid, subjective nature of beauty and the more rigid, objective nature of reason. I have a suspicion that beauty has something very much to do with truth, and truth is my aim in art-making.

Kierstin