Having fallen from an erstwhile Platonic height, and having been washed clean of its bourgeois stigma, beauty happens to be one of the more precious contingencies that an artist can possess. It can be pressed forward as a carrier of meaning (Kant’s category of pulchritudo adhaerens) or sucked back to nothing for the sake of the purely conceptual.
on the show in Chatham, Ontario/Canada:
BROWSING BEAUTY
Schooling
In the olden days of fifteen to thirty years ago it was ideologically suspect if you went around talking about “beauty” or linking it to postmodern art as Sigi Torinus and Andrea Sunder-Plassmann do in this exhibit. That's how it was in the 1980s, when the two were completing high school studies and entering on their respective art degree programs in West Germany. Though Kant and Schiller were bound to show up on reading lists, the topic of beauty was “completely taboo,” Torinus recalls.
I remember the times she talks about, and the culture wars that swept over me during my own university days in Windsor (Ontario) and Ann Arbor (Michigan). Deconstruction and postmodernism were the big buzzwords in literary academia and in art departments. If you were young and hip to music, you listened to Prince and Talking Heads, or, more obscurely, but with true subcultural credentials, to bands like The Cramps, Bad Brains, or Crass. Everybody I knew was anti-Reagan and anti-Thatcher. Nuclear disarmament and the Sandinistas were big issues among my activist friends. After the Neoexpressionist bubble died out (I recollect Robert Hughes lecturing at the Detroit Institute of Arts, impaling the Neos with barb after barb, well before their market value began declining), the ‘80s became, in the student art scenes that I frequented, a Robert Mapplethorpe & Cindy Sherman or a Hans Haacke & Fastwürms decade—it all depended on whether your politics were sex-and-gender driven or some eleventh-hour Cold War version of counter-cultural Marxism.
But the question of beauty seemed to stick around too. Although kept at bay by the prevailing artspeak, it could gain an audience if it put up a disguise, something abject and scandalous like the numinous lucency that bathes Serrano’s urine-immersed crucifix. My first apostasy from the beauty taboo was unintentional and unsought. It occurred in 1988 in two interlocking phases, the first in Padua, in the Arena Chapel, and the second in Windsor, in a basement cubbyhole where I was pounding away on an already antiquated Texas Instruments computer. I hesitated to type "beauty” or "beautiful," feeling that these might be read as unrigorous, self-mystifying bluff-words, but there was no other way to express what Giotto’s fresco cycle, and the sheer gorgeousness of the ceiling’s star-spangled vault, did to us (I was there with Janie, herself an art student; the experience was heightened by the fact that we walked in with little anticipation of what we might see and found ourselves alone with the frescos for a good fifteen minutes). It was that plush holy blue that did it. It wasn’t abject but out-and-out sublime, a rapturous jouissance of the eye, just as Kristeva describes it. The only other time an artwork worked the same sudden magic on me, also involved blue under unexpected circumstances. It happened a few years later in Munich, undergoing my first exposure to an artist I hadn’t paid much attention to til then—James Turrell.
Torinus and Sunder-Plassmann read Kant and Schiller during their studies, but that was as far as the aesthetics component of their education went. What doesn’t surprise me is that these are a couple of German names dating from the period of Romanticism. For numerous reasons that I’ll get to later, at the time of their studies beauty had been in retreat for almost two hundred years, its rise and fall associated with the highs and lows of German culture. But what went on in the ‘80s went beyond Germany. It had a still-living history behind, the passage of a few revolutionary decades. The questions of how art should be understood and how it should function were steadily, openly politicized ever since the ‘60s, with the emphasis falling on the landmark year of 1968. It hardly surprises that Torinus and Sunder-Plassmann found themselves having to subsist on the tiniest rations of a thinned-out Romantic gruel. When a revolutionary myth keeps hanging on, how can ideals like ‘beauty’ withstand a politicized agenda for art? The mood of those decades was toward a self-conscious, vanguard-style (i.e. Leninist in spirit) politics that took it as axiomatic that any existing “system,” or “establishment,” was systemically flawed and culturally biased in favour of—get ready for it—Caucasian bourgeois capitalist males (need I insert other identity labels here—‘heterosexual,’ ‘Protestant’?)
In art schools this meant that beauty was repudiated as an aesthetic standard and that the very category of the aesthetic was subject to a kind of practical censorship in the making of art. But this whole expose-and-attack strategy was, as I’ll argue momentarily, a culminating stage in a long line of twists and turns within the history of modern aesthetics. As the ‘80s loomed into view, the politicization was driven by “structural feminists” (the term is Obama’s, from the memoir Dreams from my Father) and post-colonialists. Their exponents taught young artists to make works that were ideologically virtuous, asserting, as I’ve implied, anti-Western, anti-capitalist identities rooted in gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, or religion. (Interestingly, if you study the history of swearing and cursing, these same identifiers are the most meaningful sources of insult.)
Together, the two schools of criticism (feminism and post-colonialism, whose respective ancestries lie in psychoanalysis and Marxism) undoubtedly advanced cultural studies. But in laying the foundations for cultural studies they had to lay waste to what used to be called—often uncritically—the humanities. And they had to undertake a strategic manipulation of what René Girard has called the “scapegoat mechanism.” One of their legacies has thus been the routine demonization of those who happened to be “white,” and “male,” and “dead” (DWM). This doctrinaire accusation seems to have descended, as if by apostolic succession, from an earlier Marxist demonization of “the bourgeois subject.” Feminism and post-colonialism have also given us politically correct curatorial policies and entire institutions dedicated to multicultural didacticism. This isn’t necessarily or always ‘bad.’ The corrective measures were much needed. One of the institutions, that has taken a leading role in public re-education, is the Brooklyn Museum in New York. I visited there in August 2009, pleased and chagrined (I hate being preached at, even sweetly) as I walked through an extensive Yinka Shonibare exhibit (ravishing, but least pleasing), a Sufi-Islamic historical survey (informative, intent on avoiding the unpleasantries in this history, but more pleasing), and the permanent Judy Chicago “Dinner Party” installation (just plain terrific).
Is it ironic that Torinus and Sunder-Plassmann, two globally positioned women artists whose schooling was at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste at Braunschweig (Torinus) and the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin (Sunder-Plassmann), are taking steps toward reversing a thirty-year trend against beauty and aesthetic pleasure in art? I don’t think so. It’s something that was bound to happen after some in the West woke up from the mad rush to extirpate any sense of the sacred or spiritual in culture. Going East or going native, looking for new sources of sustenance in Jung or Buddhism, in shamanism or Carlos Castaneda, were ways of recovering this dimension. They worked for a lot of people, and still do, including leading-edge artists. We have many examples of this linkage of art with alternative spiritualities during the Cold War years: the Abstract Expressionists, the Beats, Joseph Beuys, George Harrison, etc. Some critics, some of whom are not doctrinaire Marxists, Post-colonialists, or feminists, and some who quasi-are, have also awakened to the fallout of the beauty taboo, seeing it as a sign of deeper malaise in which art, spiritual identity, and the West’s post-Enlightenment values are all tortuously wrapped up together.
Speaking recently in Rome, at a Vatican-hosted symposium no less, Roger Scruton pointed out that “since beauty reminds us of the sacred—and is even a special form of it—beauty must also be desecrated.” Scruton was, of course, repudiating the beauty-haters, the whole historical run of militant anti-aestheticists. Their long, twentieth century march into the institutions has, he thinks, demoralized artists and been bad for the West and its sense of cultural identity. Scruton isn’t liked by the current curatorial or critical establishment. He doesn’t find favour with the likes of Okwui Enwezor or Dave Beech, but if we take him in limited doses he does inspire a rethinking of entrenched orthodoxies. One of these rethinks concerns the century-long moratorium on beauty. The other concerns ‘the West’. With the latter, one of the most pleasant discoveries is that there’s less centrism at work than one would expect. Unlike the person who readily says “I’m Jewish,” or “I’m Muslim,” or “I’m gay,” or “I’m Filipino,” there’s no essentialist identity politics, no claim to civil rights or national belonging, involved in the statement “I’m Western.”
Writing in 1985, Suzi Gablik, published a well-known polemic that asked—and answered in the affirmative—Has Modernism Failed? The fall of beauty began when F.T. Marinetti made a show of rejecting his own Symbolist past and produced the first manifesto of a movement for which he, in 1909, was the sole member: Futurism. If art history’s version of postmodernism wants truly to dispossess itself of metanarratives, its biggest challenge will be to try saying farewell to the Futurist idea. This is Gablik’s point and it’s worthy of consideration. Futurism may have celebrated militarism, but it also set up a trajectory that glorified many of modernism’s core approaches: revolutionary urbanism, the cult of technology and machine aesthetics, multiple-media arts, spectacle, vanguard subcultures. The list could go on. The first step was to demolish Victorian and classical beauty standards. This, Marinetti decided, required insults and histrionics. You! Beauty! Go away and die quietly on the fossil-pile of bourgeois values. Yet there was still the acknowledgment that beauty and spirituality maintain an essential connection, evidenced in Marinetti’s contrast between the roaring hood of a racing car and the Nike of Samothrace. Nike, the victory goddess, wasn’t going to be destroyed, not even rhetorically, but her power re-appropriated for the purposes of a masculinist avant-garde cult. The Old Masters, meanwhile, were more roughly treated. Here Marinetti’s battle was purely Oedipal. They belong, he mocked, on the museological scrap-heap where idle sentimentalists and cheap theosophists can go searching for art’s quasi-religious consolations.
Browsing
We’re now in 2010, exactly one hundred and one years since Marinetti’s manifesto proclaimed a new kind of future for art and beauty, not to mention for war and urbanism. As artists, Torinus and Sunder-Plassmann came of age at a time when hybrid media, already a vanguard staple with the Fluxus movement, was about to go all-out digital in the dawning computer era. This puts them at a four- or five-generation remove from the Futurists and early modernists. But while they—the modernists—were a liminal vanguard dedicated to destroying classical conceptions of beauty and deconstructing its semiotic architecture, history has deposited Torinus and Sunder-Plassmann well to the other side of the great Futurist divide. Those old conceptions of beauty, as old as Plato and as young as Kant, were already moribund by the early twentieth century, which is why the whole range of modernist attacks, ushered in as publicity stunt by Marinetti, were redundantly obsessive and remind me of the slogan (some say it was made up by a Beatnik poet) that sells Raid insecticide: “kills bugs dead.”
The classical doctrine of beauty was premised on an analog aesthetic that lasted more than two thousand years. It ruled the intellectual landscape from Plato to Kant. It began dying out at some point between the rise of photography (the hand gets taken out of the process of creating an artwork, the eye is left as a sort of perfected registering device) and the rise of computer imaging (images of the world are synthesized as a collection of information bits; everything is networked). The metaphysic behind the Western discourse of beauty, sometimes identified as classical aesthetics, was best encapsulated in the Christian Neoplatonism of Augustine: “. . . the beauty which flows through men’s minds into their skilful hands comes from that Beauty which is above their souls and for which they sigh all day and night” (Confessions). It was this conception that died a modernist death between the two technological signposts that mark off the history of art since Romanticism: photography and computers, or mechanics and chemistry vs. digitization and electronics. And yet there’s no denying that the human soul keeps sighing day or night, even in a would-be body without organs.
During a 2003 exhibition opening at the Lebel School of Visual Arts in Windsor, where she teaches, Torinus occupied a chair near ceiling level while a lively, good-sized crowd mingled beneath. With her blond hair falling forward, her meditation seemed to me to be hesychastic. She was an anchorite above the fray, her inwardness a counterpoint to the flux and reflux of bodies and voices at her feet. The last decades of the second millennium and the first year or two of the new one (before jihadi attacks on New York and Washington brought history—and “God”—back from the dead) saw postmodern theory indulge Matrix/Avatar-style fantasies of having our consciousness downloaded into computers or our bodies discarded and our brains pickled in lab vats. But these extreme dualistic fantasies, which are but postmodern reinscriptions of Cartesian skepticism and the Platonic cave allegory, haven’t killed off our spiritual thirst or dammed up the drive for beauty. “Browsing Beauty” indicates that our postmodern information technologies can be conceptually retrofitted to give us a new means of aesthetic transport and anagogic travel. They open up new frontiers of the techno-beautiful and new infinities in the concept of the aesthetic.
In the middle of the 1990s, after picking up on Leonard Koren’s Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Torinus and Sunder-Plassmann began cyber-grazing their way through a largely untouched landscape. There was a hell of a good universe next door, virtual and actual, so why not pioneer out into it and get the audience to meet you half way? They designed and then repeated (and redesigned) “Browsing Beauty” for diverse cultural locales, mixing their own meditations on beauty with the social and intellectual atmospherics of host sites spread out across the globe. A sense of intimacy and inwardness prevailed in Sydney (1997). San Francisco (1997) was riding a dotcom bubble and the exhibit was alive with pleasure and uplift. In Moscow (1998), where the Soviet Union was retreating into the rear-view, the mood was vexed with nostalgia. Finally, the two Berlin shows (1998 and ’99), which took place in the aftermath of a toppled wall and at the tail end of the country’s unification struggle, were dominated by questions of identity.
“Browsing Beauty” has now taken up residence in Southern and Southwestern Ontario, a region of migratory bird and butterfly routes running North-South along the length of the Americas. It came for a stop-over to the Thames Art Gallery in Chatham, Ontario, in the Fall of 2009. With three weather balloons, differently sized, suspended a few inches above the ground, and filling out the lower level of the gallery’s airy interior, it soothed me into a contemplation of celestial metonymies. In a semi-darkened environment subtly perfused by the smell of latex (noticeable if you were alone with the work), video and slide projectors flowed streams of dissociated imagery onto walls and spheres. A video loop of a jellyfish moving along in swells and contractions carried over from the previous exhibits. To this were added locally sourced images and audience statements on beauty—some sugary, others anodyne, others profoundly trivial (like mine) or prankishly down-to-earth.
I immediately associated the spheres with planetary worlds, not planets themselves but their imaginary zones, the wonders we glimpse within their rounded horizons or observe in their caves and sea chambers. The etherealized lighting, a technical necessity, invited me to free-associate with a few pet metonymies of mine: Galileo, almost a synaesthetic name for me since it connotes roundness, and his title Sidereus Nuncius, which means “Starry Messenger” and connotes visions of Hermes setting out for interstellar missions. I also enjoyed watching other visitors stop and take up a posture in reaction to the images playing across the space, while disembodied voices read out mathematical formulas for beauty. As I stood there observing, and marked the pace of my own breathing, and tried—unsuccessfully—to smell the latex, I heard the formulas being read and a few things jumped to mind.
First, that beauty always seems to smell of theology and that’s why there are revolutionary modernists who despise it. (In Book III of Paradise Lost, when God the Father speaks in the celestial court, Milton writes that “ambrosial fragrance filled/ All heaven” [lines 135-6].) Second, that beauty isn’t only a fragrance—the rose without thorns—but a measure, a question of millimeters and inches. It’s a matter of ratios and proportions, distances between eyes, nose, and lips, length of legs, firmness and shape of buttocks or breasts. And third, that beauty is consciousness in a state of praise toward nature (I paraphrase from Peter Schjeldahl). “Death is the mother of beauty,” said Wallace Stevens, which means that consciousness, in its moment of wordless praise, has to linger with the realization that it can’t grasp anything, that it’s nothing but a net with which to catch the wind. Beauty in a minor key consists of transient little glories: sitting at window in our warm Ontario homes, with the autumn rains upon us, we look up from our work desk and see the oak boughs coated with evening gold during a season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.
“Browsing Beauty” isn’t about waxing precious over the magnificence of nature, which always staggers us with its inexhaustible genius for design and self-recovery. Nor is it about reinstating a new cult of art and bringing back a taste for sweet-smelling profundities. But these were a few of the associations it called to mind. I looked at the balloons lit up with images and thought of the revolutionary modernist despisers for whom beauty is pure bourgeois fraud. Before leaving the show, I went up into the mezzanine to look down at the balloons and had a chuckle. I saw a fraud materialize in my mind’s eye: Velázquez’s Immacolata resting on top of an ethereal translucent orb (luna) through which we a line of earthly mountains. Wasn’t this proof that the despisers were right? This little vision was the consequence of an idle browse through the lumber room of my past aesthetic attachments, the product of too much art history teaching and too much gallery hopping across Europe’s old collections.
Disembargoing
Until critical theory was taken over by French linguists and structuralists, psychoanalysts and feminists, in wave after wave through the twentieth century, Germany was the intellectual epicentre of Europe. In a period of about two hundred years, aesthetics was procreated and nurtured, and then finally liquidated, within an august tradition of German philosophy: a tradition that began with Baumgarten, resurrecting the term aistehtikos to talk about a unique type of sensory cognition (cognitionis sensitivae) and its attached psychological states; that then continued in Kant’s celebrated third critique, whose dry analytic was yet so fruitful that it grandparented Clive Bell’s “significant form,” Greenberg’s polemics of “flatness,” and Lyotard’s reinscription of the sublime as the postmodern “unpresentable.”
After Kant, some sixty years of aesthetic theorizing about beauty and psychological states were dissolved in the work of Hegel. His lectures on the “philosophy of art” started by asserting that “man-made” beauty was “higher” than natural beauty, and then proceeded to historicize the metaphysics of the beautiful by introducing conceptual meaning and intellectual self-consciousness into the fabric of art. The term “philosophy of art,” so much richer in intellectual scope, was meant to go beyond the domain of aesthetics, which was properly restricted to sensory matters and their attached sentiments. “Now if in fact the beautiful is to be understood in its essence and its Concept,” Hegel stated, “this is possible only through the conceptual thinking whereby the logico-metaphysical nature of the Idea in general as well as the particular Idea of the beautiful, enters conscious reflection.”
The best way to grasp Hegel’s point here is to remember that history plays an all-important role in mediating the relationship of the universal to the particular. Beauty isn’t an ethereal Neoplatonic abstraction that’s only partially encountered on earth, where we see all things through a glass darkly. Beauty, says Hegel, is like the course of thought. It’s contingent and real, and as with all real things—including our mental contents, the theories we work with—its contexts are historical: time-, person-, place- and object-specific. Beauty may seem to trail tattered clouds of theological glory, but its substance is definably concrete, whether this substance is investigated mathematically (ratios and proportion), phenomenologically (subjective existential encounter), or culturally (differing beauty discourses in different social and historical circumstances).
The conceptual intellect plays a huge role in Hegel’s theory of beauty. His philosophy drew a distinction between “art” and “aesthetics.” Henceforth, art was to bear the heaviest conceptual burdens, giving sensuous body to the most abstruse concerns of philosophy or the most profound needs of religion. Geist (i.e. the Idea italicized in the quote above) is what drove art forward through history; beauty was metabolized by the great march of the Idea. These Hegelian principles would have far-reaching effects that are still with us today, for we’re unable to conceive of modern art, which is nothing if not historically conscious of its own radicalism, as not being intrinsically theoretical. About a century after Hegel, Heidegger emerged as the heavyweight name in German philosophy. He observed the “happening of truth” in a van Gogh painting of a pair of peasant shoes and further minimized the role that aesthetic sensations play in one’s phenomenological encounter with an artwork.
I tell this little tale, and pause it right here, with Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” essay, a work composed out of lectures delivered during the mid-1930s, for all the obvious reasons. Or rather, for the one big reason: what happened in the ‘30s and ‘40s in Germany, which ended up souring the appetite for beauty in post-war European art and intellectual life. It’s not difficult to understand why Torinus and Sunder-Plassmann would have been discouraged from consorting with beauty as they pursued their art studies in Braunschweig and Berlin. National Socialism developed a remarkably potent aesthetic style of its own, and the Nazis, as we know, went further yet, beyond spectacular rallies and disconcertingly smart sartorial styles (modish and sado-masochistically chic). They made beauty into a eugenic fetish. They dreamt of engineering a brave new Aryan überspecies.
In postmodern theory, “beauty” became a contaminated term, a concept with the wrong kind of cultural ancestry behind it: German philosophy, Christian Neoplatonism, academic and totalitarian kitsch. In other words, the whole andro-Eurocentric thing. The Nazi generation made every German artist, whether born in the heimat or the diaspora, conscious of collective guilt. This had broad cultural consequences. The beautiful was a perilous cause to uphold. It was seen as outmoded, a reactionary siren-song idea that didn’t dare show its face in artistic practice. Try showing me a ‘beautiful’ object or image and I’ll stop you dead in your tracks with a few choice quotations from Hitler’s speech at Entartete Kunst or a Guernica-sized blow-up of corpses piled like withered saplings in one of the death camps. The Nazis, says Torinus, “completely froze the idea.” Their triumph of the Teutonic will “destroyed any free discourse about beauty.”
On the nicer side of things, French intellectuals were already embargoing beauty around the beginning of the twentieth century, just as modernism was being born in Matisse and Picasso’s ateliers. The century began with a semiotic revolution in which the analytic of the sign superseded the criterion of mimesis. Over the course of some fifty or sixty years, as Nazism rose and fell, and May 1968 loomed into view, the old classical category of “form,” which had carried through since Kant, would be pulverized by talk of signifiers, intertexts, and information. By the 1980s and ‘90s talk of aesthetics wasn’t on the radar anymore. Aesthetics was a DWM, a hoary old holy man from the distant past, absconded into deep occultation. It’s hard to pinpoint all the reasons for the decline of the aesthetic and the premature burial of beauty. I’ve mentioned the conceptual turn introduced by Hegel, the eclipse of “form” by the new vocabularies of structuralism and post-structuralism, and the swagger of fascist style. But one could also add the emergence of photography and course of avant-garde art between the revolutions of 1848 and the Great War of 1914-1918.
Why mention all this? Why go through all these names and references? Whole textbook histories compressed into a few phrases. The simple reason is to show that what we now think of as classical aesthetics (Baumgarten, Kant) suffered periodic and protracted defeats both in theory and practice, onward from the high tide of Romanticism (Hegel) to the first appearance of Realism (Courbet, 1848, etc.). “Browsing Beauty” was never conceived as a counter-thrust to this history of defeats. The exhibit was never meant to be an intervention in a debate. But that doesn’t prevent it from posing an argument after its own fashion. “Browsing Beauty” isn’t being shuttled from biennial to biennial, but it does travel globally and it asks for a rethink of the some of the oldest aesthetic questions. It tries to reconnect a lifeline between art and beauty. That’s its objective achievement—it’s what we experience in the secular sanctum of the exhibition space. Behind the pleasures being afforded, Torinus and Sunder-Plassmann do make a tacit theoretical claim: that aesthetics remains endemic to the ontology of art; that aesthetics holds a central place in the problematic of “what” or “when” or “where” is art? Where to locate the aesthetic, or to decide whether or how much of it need be there in any meaningful way within a work, is a central issue ever since Hegel, and it’s tacitly raised by “Browsing Beauty.”
The same question is explicitly worried over by Arthur Danto too, the most Hegelian of current art critics. For Danto, as he works out his own narrative of modernism and postmodernism, aesthetics takes a back seat to concept and discursive meaning. But to invoke “art” as a designation for something is to invoke the aesthetic as a necessary degree of meaning and to identify sensory delight as a meaningful aspect of that ‘something’. This holds even in works where aesthetics is restricted to near zero-degree of meaning and where conceptualism is the whole or chief delight of the work. One of the chief lessons in the history of Western art and aesthetics—from Plato to postmodernism—is that beauty can be pressed forward as a carrier of meaning (Kant’s category of pulchritudo adhaerens) or sucked back to nothing for the sake of the purely conceptual. And further, once you accept the premise that all discussions about art start with the unspoken assumption of a primary binary—beauty vs. ugliness—then you can break that binary down all along the line, plunging from sublimation toward desublimation at whatever velocity you want, inviting the anti-beautiful, the grotesque, the tastelessly vulgar into “art.” You can even finally get to a point of extreme reduction, where the aesthetic has been ideologically silenced or negated, dismantled as a semantic vehicle, which is how most of the twentieth century proceeded.
Beauty is a paradigmatic case of the aesthetic, but it’s not the whole of aesthetics. What “Browsing Beauty” proves for me is that there’s a substantive connection, but not a collapse of difference, between art (a post-Hegelian category) and aesthetics (a pre-Hegelian absolute). Despite the policing of the academies and the elites, the range of aesthetics has always been plural, as wide as that which counts as “art” these days. Aesthetics is a question of varied pleasures and sensations, some captured by the category of beauty in nature or in art, others expressed through an appreciation for the ugly and the slummy, the decayed and dilapidated, or just the opposite: the clean and hard-edged, the syntheticum, engineered in the laboratory of techno-science, with no hint of human handling.
Baumgarten and Kant gave the bourgeois public the right to its own aesthetic liberty. Sensory impressions could be freely enjoyed, with no constraint by the protocols of academic taste. Since then, all the battles for the advancement of “art” have been won and lost over the body of the aesthetic. All art must be made beautiful according to Greco-Roman models. Is this true? No, of course not. Romanticism proved it false. A roaring motorcar is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace? Painting is authentic and qualitatively good when it seeks after its own essence in flatness? All art must go beauty-neutral and confront us with the deadpan quixoticism of the ready-made?
The story went on, down to the point where the aesthetic was hounded out of the art schools and art became the advancement of politics by other means. But now, with “Browsing Beauty,” Torinus and Sunder-Plassmann come along and propose that beauty can be invited back into the art game without endangering all the other ways that art generates its meanings. What I see in this exhibit is not the return of the repressed or the revenge of the vanquished. Nothing of the kind, in fact. What they propose is that aesthetic joy and communion isn’t a bad thing to hold onto once in a while, amidst the din of ongoing wars and ideological clashes, whether in the art world or in global politics. Having fallen from an erstwhile Platonic height, having been washed clean of its bourgeois stigma, having been politicized, parodied and mocked, beauty still lives on and happens to be one of the more precious contingencies that an artist can possess.
Lorenzo Buj