Junk for Code

Beauty#2: bodies

This post picks up on an earlier one about deconstructing aesthetics.

Recently I wandered into an academic bookshop and cast my eye on various books on analytic aesthetics. I was looking for something beyond the male gaze. I reckoned the male gaze was broader than 'being a tool to transform the power of female sexuality into a malleable reflection of male desire.'

What I was looking for was not along the lines of the way women look at themselves or at each other:

Nicole Eisenman, Untitled (kisses), 1996, lipstick and gouache on magazine page

What I had in mind was something more along the lines of insights into visuality, the male gaze, nationality, hostility towards the phobic object, the permeation of rigid borderlines, the existential void and the regression to the archaic. I was trying to figure out why Australia has become more extreme in its policies toward asylum-seekers than any other Western country.

Dunno why I thought analytic aesthetics would help me here. I just did.

Many of the arid texts were concerned with beauty---I should say Beauty. I read some pages. Then some more. Then I flipped some pages.

I did not really understand what they were about. Somehow beauty made an object an artwork.Yet within the pages I discerned a theology of art and the worship of idols.

I shook my head. Maybe I'd been watching too many hours of Sky News. I didn't get it.

So okay. Let's try this.

Jan Saudek, In the Fine Art Gallery, 2001

If you saw that photo on the white walls of a prestigious art gallery would you say that you understood that it was art because it was beautiful.

Is it beautiful?

Another thought. One can argue that works of art contain some truth of their own and that the only appropriate way of dealing with them would be to enforce that truth. We can regard a work of art is a cognitive medium; there is something to be known, something to be learned from it about historical reality -- hence the task of understanding it as well as the history of its reception. The expression of private feelings of pleasure or disapproval has little to do with the truth core attributed to the work of art within the Romantic tradition.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at March 16, 2004 08:49 PM | TrackBack