Hand In

Friday 21 December

2.00pm

Outside CCS Office, GP20

Re-scheduling

• Session for students new to Gray’s/CCS this year (Direct Entry)

• Tuesday 27 November

• 11.00pm

• SA46

Reviving Beauty: the limits and the liminal

In the present historical mood of disenchantment one can make less and less sense out of the formalist’s notion of

timeless beauty. Darker time-bound models of beauty have become

prominent…

Susan Sontag. On Photography. 1971

Ansel Adams Picket Fence 1936

Edward Weston

Nude Charis Arms and Legs 1934

‘the formalist’s notion of timeless beauty’ Sontag

Classical beauty, absolutes and dualism

• Perfect form

• Perfect body

• Natural form

Ever less is the beautiful achieved in a particular purified

form: beauty is shifted to the dynamic totality of the work

Adorno

C Sartwell.

‘ There is great beauty in clarity, rationality and simplicity though such clarity is in part a fleeing from or negation of life…..If you look at organisms such as we are – all messy guts and bristling hair, messy sex and improbable dreams – we seem to be anything but clear and simple. ‘

Six Names of Beauty. ‘To Kalon’ Chap. 4. p.87

Ugliness is a relative concept, it may only be understood in relation

to another concept. This other concept is that of Beauty…. If there were no Beauty there would be no

ugliness

Rosenkranz K. The Aesthetic Inferno in: Eco, U. On Ugliness. p.135

Beauty and the Beast. Crafts Council. 2004

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

‘The underworld is much more eclectic and unpredictable than Heaven, a playground for dreams, storytelling and

flights of fancy’

Mia E Goransson Per Sundberg

Terror itself peers out of the eyes of beauty as the coercion that emanates from form…The

affinity of all beauty with death has its nexus in the idea of pure form that art imposes on the

diversity of the living and that it extinguished in it’

‘On the categories of the ugly, the beautiful and technique’ Adorno, T. Aesthetic Theory. p.68 (1970)

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 RamanIngegerd Raman. A Drop of Clear Water

Monica Forster. Mix Vase. 2002

‘The inferno is not only ethical and religious, it is also aesthetic. We are steeped in evil and in sin, but also in

ugliness. The terror of the formless and or deformity, of vulgarity and atrocity surrounds us ….It is into this

inferno of Beauty that we wish to descend’

Karl RosenkrantzThe Aesthetic Inferno

1852

‘Beauty will be convulsive ….or it will not be at all’ Andre Breton

Max Ernst. Anatomy of a Bride. 1921 Dorothea Tanning. Children’s Games 1942

Leonor Fini. At the ends of the earth.

1949

‘prepare the grandiose spectacle of cataclysm. fiery inferno, and decomposition…of the grotesque and the contradictory: Life.

Tristan Tzara

Dada Manifesto

1918

Dave Hickey –’transgressive beauty’

‘the agency that causes visual pleasure in the beholder – by

showing us something of which we may not approve in such a way that we cannot resist it’

If aesthetics were nothing but a systematic catalogue of whatever is

called beautiful it would give no idea of the life that transpires in the concept of

beauty

Adorno p. 66

Nan Goldin. Trixie… 1979

Nan Goldin. Jimmy Paulette…. 1991

The good, the bad and the ugly

• War

• The cruel

• The evil

• The dead

• Poverty, suffering

• Disease.

• The disgusting

Izima Kaoru. Kojima Hijiri wears Yohji Yamamoto. 1999

‘the beautiful leads us towards death without our awareness’

Ferguson F. In: Shaw P, The Sublime, p.62

‘Artistic beauty is a beautiful representation of a thing…..Even though they are evils, the Furies, diseases, war’s devastation, and so on can be very beautifully described’

Immanuel Kant

The Representation of Ugliness

Critique of Judgement 1, 2, 48, 1790

Arnold Bocklin. The Plague. 1898

‘the ugliness that repels us in nature exists but it becomes acceptable and even pleasurable in the art that expresses and shows ‘beautifully’ the ugliness of Ugliness’

Umberto Eco

On Beauty

Chapter V p.133

‘Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs’

Susan Sontag

‘Notwithstanding the declared aims of ….often harsh photography to reveal truth not beauty, photography still beautifies….its aptitude for

discovering beauty in the humble, the inane, the decrepit. At the very least . The real has a pathos. And that pathos is beauty’

Susan Sontag On Photography. p 102 1971

Tom Stoddart

Romanian Institution

1990

Sebastiao Salgado.

A child being weighed.

1985

George Rodger

Bergen Belsen

1945

Susan Meiselas. Cuesta del Piombo. 1978

Immanuel Kant

The Critique of Judgement

1, 2, 48 1790

‘Only one kind of ugliness can be represented in conformity with nature without destroying all aesthetic pleasure: namely that which arouses disgust….we reject it violently’

‘Core disgust’

• ‘Foods, body products and sex….situations in which “the normal exterior envelope of the body” is breached or altered’

• A. C. Danto on Jonathan Haight’s study into the American experience of disgust: in The Abuse of Beauty. P.54

Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection. Julia Kristeva. 1982

‘when the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of the milk – harmless , thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring – I experience a gagging sensation and still farther down, spasms in the stomach…nausea makes me baulk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it

‘the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything, it is no longer I who expel, ‘I’ is expelled”

J Kristeva. 1982

‘Foods, body products and sex….situations in which “the normal exterior envelope of the body” is breached or altered’

Nan Goldin. Giles in his hospital bed. Paris. 1993

‘Foods, body products and sex….situations in which “the normal exterior envelope of the body” is breached or

altered’

‘Foods, body products and sex….situations in which “the normal exterior envelope of the body” is breached or altered’

Nan Goldin. Cookie and Millie in the Girl’s room. 1979

‘Foods, body products and sex….situations in which

“the normal exterior envelope of the body” is

breached or altered’

Nan Goldin. Kana on the phone. Tokyo. 1994

Beauty, pleasure and pain

“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; ..

When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience. The cause of this I shall endeavour to investigate hereafter. “

Edmund Burke. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of ourIdeas of the Sublime and Beautiful. 1757

J M W Turner. Avalanche in the Grisons.

other affecting arts, …..are often capable of grafting a delight on wretchedness, misery, and death itself. It is a common observation, that objects which in the reality would shock, are in tragical, and such like representations, the source of a very high species of pleasure.

E Burke. 1957

Caspar David Friedrich. Monk by the Sea. c1809

‘The ideas of eternity and infinity are among the most affecting we have and yet perhaps there is nothing of which we really understand so little’

E. Burke. 1757

‘the sublime “dwells on large objects, and terrible”…linked …to the intense sensations of terror, pain and awe, the focus of the beautiful, by contrast, is on “small ones and pleasing” and appeals mainly to the domestic affections of love, tenderness

and pity’

Shaw quoting Burke. In: P. Shaw. The Sublime. p.57

The beautiful is concerned with the “form of an object”, with that which

is bounded and can thus be distinguished clearly and

coherently… the sublime is “to be found in a formless object”…

Shaw quoting Kant. In P. Shaw. The Sublime. p. 78

Barnett Newman. Vir Heroicus Sublimis. C1951 c. 8 x 17ft

‘Here and now there is this painting, rather than nothing, and that’s what is sublime’

‘We are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings’

Sugimoto invites viewers to consider the sea and the sky in the way that in the way that ancient peoples might have seen them. He is interrogating

reality and the notion that each person’s reality is personal.

Hiroshi Sugimoto. N Atlantic Ocean. Cape Breton Island. 1996

J.F. Lyotard. Analytic of the Sublime 1994

(postmodern art) ‘denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of taste…(it) searches for new

presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable’

Gustave Metzger. Historic Photographs: To crawl into. Anschluss, Vienna 1938. 1996-8