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February 17, 2004
With some understanding of the romantic sublime in Australia under our belt we can turn back to, and pick up on, our previous comments on the Stephen David Ross interview that was conducted by Rick over at Artrift.
In our previous post we were considering part six of Rick's interview which dealt with the relationship between art and beauty. In his remarks Ross distinquished between beauty and sublime: beauty was grand, fulfilling, proportionate, and complete,consummatory, fulfilling; the sublime was the unbounded, infinite, transfigurative, uncanny. Ross then goes on to give priority to beauty. He says:
"To Danto's suggestion that something can be art without being beautiful, I would say, more provocatively, there is beauty in art and nature and human life without being beautiful, without being complete, formed, and satisfying. There is beauty in downright ugly things and places. Indeed, recent art---and I hope, some recent philosophy---have shown that the two sides of beauty can be brought into a relation that is more beautiful, more generous, more disruptive, and more fulfilling than either alone. Here beauty is not one pole of a binary with the ugly or the sublime but beyond any binary, thereby calling every binary, every opposition into question."
Okay, you can have a middle ground between a duality. It was give a name here: ---the romantic sublime, or the moment of inspiration when someone sees beauty in what may have seemed a hostile landscape:
Mandy Martin,Salvator Rosa Series IV, 2002
Ross colonizes the middle ground with beauty. For him beauty becomes everything. He is quite explict on this. His conception of beauty is:
"...a beauty that displaces every boundary and separation. In this sense beauty is everywhere, everything is beautiful, everything is aesthetic, everything matters in its ways. And we may live so. And love so. It is also what I mean by ethics."
Beauty becomes infinite futue possiblities:
"What we do not know, have not yet experienced, what exceeds our expectations, is unfamiliar and strange, remains yet to come: this is beauty, is presented by art‑‑and just as frequently betrayed; it is also ethical, that to which we must answer‑‑other people, other experiences, possibilities yet to arrive; it is also political‑‑community, democracy, sociality, peace, ways of living that we do not know how to accomplish; and it is philosophical, epistemological‑‑ways of thinking, forms of truth, we have not begun to imagine."
Beauty can, and has, functioned as a form of critique that highlights the ugliness of the urban world. So ignores beyond form and opens up into the political. So beauty needs something to actualize itself. That something is ugliness.
When beauty becomes everything all tension and conflict within the artwork is lost. The Mandy Martin image is full of tension. There is beauty (colour and shape), and it is important to highlight the beauty, given all the colonial settler talk about the dead centre, this is a harsh landscape.
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