September 24, 2004
S.D.Ross Interview#10-B
This painting is by Freddy Timms. It is called Joolabun--- Dog Dreaming. It represents an aspect of the east Kimberley country near the man made Lake Argyle and the Ord River:
It is very beautiful is it not?
Can we apply that aesthetic category to these kind of paintings?
I do.
Is it right to do so?
Yes. Works such as these are a part of the art institution and they are enframed by that institution as art--as innovative high art. They are seen to be at the cutting edge of landscape art in Australia:
This screenprint is by Jack Britten.
It is called PURNULULU ---- BUNGLE BUNGLES.
These are a famous mountain range in the Kimberleys.
This is still largely inaccessible country. It is what many Australians would call wilderness.
Works such as these can be considered a gift from the art of indigenous people to white Australians. The gift their art offer us helps us to understand our country better.
This post picks up from a much earlier post. That post was my comments on part 10 of the excellent interview of Stephen David Ross conducted by Rick Vasser over at Artrift. The interview was entitled The Gift as Art.
Now some of Stephen's comments in part 10 of the interview about beauty had puzzled me. They read:
"Beauty appears at once as the apotheosis of the limit, the superlative of superlatives, and as beyond measure, beyond superlatives and achievements. And if that were not enough, through time other terms came to resonate with beauty to express its transcendences‑‑the sublime, horrific, traumatic."
I had puzzled about the beyond bit and the phrase ' through time other terms coming to resonate with beauty to express its transcendences'. The phrase is complex, and as I was in Canberra at the time working very long hours in federal Parliament at the time, I just couldn't get my head around aesthetics. So I never really finished the post--despite some comments by Derek Allen; nor did I continue with my commentary on the Rick Visser's interview with Stephen David Ross.
What I had got as far as accepting an ethical component to art in which the expression of things is also a calling us to respond to them, to care for them and to cherish them. The desert paintings of Malcolm Jagamarr can be interpreted within this perspective:
Malcolm Jagamarr, "Ngapa", 1998
And there things stood. Around late July I received an email from Stephen David Ross. This read:
'Dear Gary.
I just picked up your commentary and critique on my interview with Rick Visser. I'm quite taken with your comments and illustrations. I thought I might reach out and thank you for your comments but also begin a conversation.
So far as I can tell, you end critically, insisting that beauty requires an opposite, in ugliness. Another opposition is with the sublime, which I think you were going to introduce.
Yet the point of The Gift of Beauty is that we must think of art, must think aesthetically, of what goes beyond all binary opposites. Beauty in Diotima's speech is beyond opposition, and does not have to be interpreted in terms of timeless ideals. Gifts and giving, beauty and the sublime, heterogeneity, all are gestures toward something beyond oppositions that art evokes--though it is not alone, and I include poetry as well as painting, certainly music in Nietzsche's terms.
I don't deny that the beautiful bears a binary meaning. I deny that that is its only meaning, and that art (and language, life, experience) can be understood solely in binary terms. Beauty has always had a nonbinary meaning as well. That is what takes it, and us, and art (as a predominant and recurrent example) elsewhere.
Giving--in the sense of not having, dispossession--is the critical term in this account. As Lewis Hyde says, art keeps giving, which means that what it offers (beauty, the sublime, ugliness, transfiguration) cannot be pinned down and owned.
Just a few thoughts in response to your eloquent blogging.
Best
Stephen'
I did not respond to the email. I was troubled that I had not. I always wanted to do so. And to pick up commenting on the interview from where I had left off.
What I had done after the post was to briefly explore the category of the sublime.
I basically agreed with Stephen's understanding of this aesthetic category as the horrific and traumatic. I had connected the sublime with the work of Mandy Martin.
In those posts I gave the sublime a romantic interpretation associated with the turbulent chaos of mountain behind mountain, rolled in confusion; dark rocky crags that impede ones way; Alpine precipices etc. The romantic sublime referred to awe-inspiring works of nature, such as the cataract, avalanches, volcanoes, black jungles full of wild beasts and earthquakes. It was linked to the appalling or the horrible that threatened to overwhelm human beings.
I then refered to the work of Mandy Martin.
Mandy Martin, Salvator Rosa Series I, 1998
I did so because she had explored the way the colonial settlers in Australia had put new content into the category of the sublime as the awesome power of nature. This changed the European romantics sublime as dark and gloomy, as expressed in Salvator Rosa to an Australian one that is lighter and much more light filled.
The Australian sublime as a historical aesthetic category makes sense of the harshness of the landscape; a menace of nothingness that threatens death. The sublime refers to the endless desert, the white heat and death by thirst that can kill us. What would such an Australian sublime look like? I explored that here My suggestion is this.
Philip Hunter,Day Plains, 2002, Oil on Canvas
Does Hunter's painting take us beyond ninary opposites though mixing up, or an intermingling of beauty and the sublime? This images is an expression of the beauty of the Wimmera landscape, as well as the horrific (the summer heat and lack of water) and the traumatic (the failed farms). Does this represent transendence? Does it open up the difference that was denied and squashed by the binary of beauty and ugliness or beauty and the sublime.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at September 24, 2004 04:18 PM | TrackBack