| |
|
Here's a compressed Saatchi Online article version of a film I recently finished work on, about beauty in art. The film was an hour long and was shown on BBC2 on 14 November 2009. (In the UK it can be accessed on BBC I-player.) For me there are certain laws by which beauty in art - this almost meaningless notion - can actually be defined. People are curious about it. They have their stock questions. Is it in the eye of the beholder? Does it change over time? In the film I try to give these questions, which tend to be whimsical, a concrete form. I believe when you do that you're more likely to come up with answers that seem grounded. (At present there is a sort of fragrant, intellectualised debate going on in art about "beauty," but I'm not remotely interested in it and this programme has nothing to do with it.) Why is a painting by Gauguin, with its rough surfaces, beautiful? Is it because the faces of the South Sea islanders he painted were beautiful? Or is it the way he does it?
I picked ten different art experiences or art events. They range in type. It might be a painting or a class of works, or not even art at all (the first thing is a bridge), but the reason for the choice was always twofold. What does this thing tell me about beauty and how does its contrast with the other objects help? In each case I offered a certain abstract principle that I thought seemed to sum up that particular experience of artistic beauty. I intended the whole list to be more or less comprehensive: beautiful art will always have a combination of these elements, with some emphasised more than others. The overall idea or proposition of the film is that beauty does have laws after all, and "freedom," which is a relatively new aspiration for art, is always ultimately rule-bound. The rules come partly from visual traditions built up over millennia, which are themselves based on what is considered beautiful generally (babies, gold, sunsets, etc), and partly from specific changes in the way society is set up. Our latest set up is a complicated form of democracy. The art that expresses this new way of being is more idea based than concerned with beauty as such. I don't think it would do any harm if a new cult of beauty started among artists. In the cult of meaning that now dominates, beauty isn't really anything. There's maybe a cult of elegance within the cult of meaning - the elegance is in the minimal means by which meaning is conveyed. (Minimalism is really the stylistic model of nowadays, whatever the content or medium.) Meaning cultists object that a concern for beauty on its own is decadent, but I think beauty in art is never on its own. Beauty never happens in a void. It's always connected to some kind of ethical or moral idea.
1. Nature
The Milau Viaduct, France
Nature's always capable of seeming to be marvellous or beautiful, always capable of inspiration. Its place in art is both timeless and always changing, because we always exist in nature but our idea of reality alters over time. With its minimal structures, the Milau viaduct communicates a peculiarly modern sense of nature. It was designed by Sir Norman Foster and built in 2004. Like a tree springing out of the ground each of those columns seems integrated with nature. As well as being in nature the bridge does something to nature: it makes you re-see it. It tells you about the hugeness and light of the Milau valley and how beyond belief the valley is. It's about conquering nature but also paying respect to nature. Any suspension bridge is pretty impressive, but this one isn't the typical thing, a Victorian heavy brick and iron object, with all its weight and mass. I picked this one because of its striking impression of weightlessness, and because in certain lights it can almost seem to disappear.
2. Simplicity
Piero's Madonna del Parto in Monterchi
A Madonna from about 1455 by Piero della Francesca - it's a model of simplicity. A tent seen head on, and within it a simple symmetrical opposition: in the centre a woman with a beautiful youthful face, simply delineated, to the sides two shapes exactly the same but reversed: angels, the colour of their clothing exactly balanced (maroon and green), the same but reversed. The haloes above are accents matching the feet below. Muted colour (the fur lined tent interior) surrounds accents of colour. All these tweaks of difference are a foil to the overall simplicity - to draw your attention to it - making you see simplicity even more. A pregnant woman in a tent, the openings furled up, as if the whole space of the tent is a womb, with the creation of life going on inside.
3. Unity
Byzantine-style wall mosaic, Monreale cathedral, Sicily
The principle behind the beauty of the mosaic pictures in Monreale Cathedral, in Sicily, which were created in the twelfth century, is unity. A lot of differences are co-ordinated so they all seem richly individual but also they're all part of one single thing. A mosaic artist puts together little bits of marble or glass deliberately unevenly but so there's a visual rightness in relation from one bit to another. It's all done by feel. Each bit stands for a decision taken about an overall visual unity. And that visual sense continues throughout the whole arrangement. Six thousand square metres of flowing visual energy: flowing towards the super-being pictured right at the top of the apse of the church, Christ Pantokrator - his little finger is a metre long - and flowing out again to everything else.
4. Transformation
50,000 years of cave art in Europe
Cave art never changed much. Something real out there, the world, is transformed into something symbolic in here, the cave. It's not that the animals were beautiful and so the cavemen naturally wanted to paint them. Painting the animals was a psychic operation by which the cavemen imbued animals with powers that they wished to absorb. They didn't look at art like we do, looking at something distanced from ourselves, finding it nice, making judgments about it, forgetting about it till we next go to an art gallery, pushing our prams round Tate Modern. When they painted they were performing something, manifesting through pictures a force they found powerful - so that they could absorb the force and control it. And the element required for this big act of magic transformation was beauty.
5. The Surroundings
Brandhorst Museum, Munich
Spatial grandiosity, sheer white, beautifully finished polished dusky blond-wood floors, the features finished to inhuman perfection, humans present but not human clutter, the feeling of an army of cleaners with PhDs in dusting. This is the contemporary art gallery experience. Many people don't expect contemporary art to be about beauty, but we're still human, and the hunger for beauty is part of being human, like the tendency to be religious. The contemporary art cult has all the voodoo mystery of religion but it lets cult members off religion's other traditional task, to provide rich all-encompassing wisdom. It comes up with mental conundrums instead. Just as religion lingers on in art after religion is no longer at the centre of social life, so beauty lingers on in contemporary art when contemporary art is perfectly fine about being ugly or nondescript or visually arbitrary - it's not in the objects (which we can take or leave) but in the beautifully designed surroundings that the human appetite for beauty is satisfied.
6. Animation
Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel Ceiling, Vatican, Rome
How can man get back to paradise? That's pretty much the story of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling, which he painted over a period of about four years, between 1508 and 1512. But in terms of beauty, the thing I think still makes an impact when you take away everything you can look up in books is the amazing, distorted animation of what you're seeing. The animation of tremendous knees, frowns, foreheads, hair that is like the turbulent sea, a constant twisting, writhing, muscular movement. It was a new kind of physical form in art, deformed - but not so its horrible. But not reassuring either - it was jarring for the culture of the Renaissance - and it's just as hair-raising for us.
7. Surprise
Magritte, 'The Reckless Sleeper'
Beauty in art always has to have an element of surprise. In this picture, which Magritte painted in the 1920s, Surrealism's heyday, objects appear in a man's dreams. They're only signs for objects. But then, he's only a sign for a man. Blimey, philosophy - where do you begin? Where do you end? Surprises in art are bad where they're shallow. When they're good it's because they tell you something true. Because Magritte is so baffling about meaning you're constantly returned to the one thing he doesn't seem to be interested in at all, which is beauty, and you're forced to recognise how serious about it he is. We think we're in the realm of wacky ideas but instead we're confronted by a subtle formal arrangement. Beauty is a surprise here. With those six sign-like objects he beautifully interweaves grey-blues and grey-yellows. With the contour of that strange grey blob he finds a beautiful echo of the blob-shaped, simplified red blanket above.
8. Pattern
Mosaic detail Bardo Museum, Tunis
Late Roman mosaics from North Africa bring home the persistence of pattern in any experience of visual art at any period. Mosaic (in the past, not so much in the present where it is mostly a hobby form) is basically painting. We don't have many paintings from antiquity in museums today but we have plenty of mosaics because this material survives better than painting. Mosaics at this time (the first few centuries AD) are particularly impressive and rich, because of a positive combination of economics and politics. A lot of stuff is being produced, there's a lot of ambition to the work. A mosaic is always patterned simply because of the modular nature of the medium. As soon as you put a few mosaic squares together a pattern forms. In this case we're looking at winged love gods ("erotes"), a detail from a much larger mosaic illustrating the life-giving powers of the ocean. The creatures here are arranged in a grid-like structure. Not a precise geometric form but a kind of suggestion of geometry. Everything is slightly different but there's an even pulse throughout. The intervals between objects are as lively as the objects themselves: we see a sort of patterned emptiness (so it's not really empty at all). In the religious idea-system of the time the ocean equals one aspect of nature's mighty benevolence. So in art we're offered nature in a pattern or structure because nature is patterned and structured in the first place.
9. Selection
Robert Rauschenberg, 'Charlene'
This is from 1954. Rauschenberg was in his early 20s. He's a beatnik in New York. It's made of bits and pieces that were just lying around that he's picked up. Red wood, red paint, red fabric, a gauze umbrella some parts of which he's painted red - he counters that dominant red note with accents of green, white and yellow. As a painting it has as much beauty as anything in medieval art or Renaissance art. But it's not the same beauty because it isn't answering the same society's understanding of reality. We don't have the same sense of hierarchy. We don't all necessarily have God. We're more open-minded about the difference between the random and the important. How does any artist operate? An artist is always confronted by everything. To make this confusion into something he or she has to select, to find relationships that have a spring and a tension. With the result here, we want to look, because we're mesmerized by the impression of energy - that's what is making the thing look beautiful. Junk isn't the principle. Selection is. Junk lying around doesn't have that energy. It's the particular junk he's selected and put into combinations that leads to an experience of beauty.
10. Spontaneity
Paul Gauguin, Arearea (also know as Joyeousness)
Gauguin's picture, which he finished in 1892, about ten years before he died, is not a pre-camera snapshot of a South Sea island paradise. It's an idealization. He made it up. And what went into it was a series of decisions about colour and materials. Each one is a jump. Partly into the unknown, partly not - he has his experience of his own past work and of art by other people that he's looked at to go on. But a certain positive element of the unknown is the issue here. The strength of the painting, its originality, is not exotic subject matter but the boldness of Gauguin's approach, the spontaneity of his moves. He doesn't just fill in shapes. He doesn't get inspired colour combinations from a colour - matching chart. He improvises colour-shapes and the relationships between them, and that improvisatory mode is the basis of the personality of the painting. This personality is different to what we usually mean by the word. For example, the woman in the painting is a cartoon more or less. She's not really of much interest. But the painting as a whole is intense: she's a schematic element within that. That tension of harmonized and contrasted colour balances is both powerful and delicate. At the time it seemed jarring to Gauguin's audience. It didn't seem like art at all. But we've come to see this kind of colour as a way of making beauty in art and we appreciate Gauguin for that. So it's the beauty of the painting as a whole that makes the woman beautiful and not the other way around.
Matthew Collings
|
| |
)
Matthew Collings is an artist and writer. His film "What Is Beauty?" was on BBC2 on 14 November 2009. He is currently working on a major series about the Renaissance, also for BBC2. Later this month he can be seen in the BBC TV series "School of Saatchi." Next February his collaborative paintings - done with Emma Biggs - are at the Fine Art Society, Bond Street, London. To watch Matthew Collings's Channel 4 TV series, 'This Is Modern Art', click here. |
| |
| Published on 20-11-2009 |
|
|
| |
|
simplicity can be beautiful, Great venting Matthew!
dan adams/dannnnnnna | |
It`s time Matthew Collings and Emma Biggs won the Turner Prize.I`d be happy to exhibit with them in the same exhibition.Ban the meaning cultists for a couple of years.I`m actually totally indifferent to it all.One of the Broken Egg sculptures by Jeff Koons won top prize at last years Royal Academy Summer Exhibition for simply being beautiful.Koons said recently that "we are all the children and grandchildren of Marcel Duchamp".Duchamp`s "beauty of indifference" isn`t in a void either.Obviously he couldn`t have cared less what Clement Greenberg or Sir Ken Clark thought about anything.You`d get a cigar from Duchamp but Greenberg wouldn`t even offer you a fag. David Hockney would.Ever since western capital "stalinised" itself it`s been turning culture into a Jehova`s Fitness club with a madrasah of meaning extension.Art is all about blowing smoke in Waldemar J`s face (that`s a very english summary).My proposition that Factory Records was the modern art context (see comments after articles 37and 38)seems more existentially true than ever.Beauty connected to situationist or the "total feminist" ethics of Julie Burchill broadens the subject globally.Other countries seem a bit quiet on this.Onward Christian Soldiers.
Arthur Mc Donald | |
I think the way you have broken down the discussion on beauty is effective. Beauty can be a daunting subject, and it would be easy to spew out artsy fartsy nonsense.
Jason | |
I`m glad I only caught the last ten minutes of Waldemar J`s B.B.C.2 programme about beauty in art.Last week in the Times he attacked and insulted the personal appearance of the presenter of the next programme in the series,Roger Scruton. It`s clear to me that WJ is the one who resembles Uncle Fester from The Addams Family.Perhaps they`re both part of the "fragrant,intellectualised debate" Collings has no interest in.The feeling so far seems to be mutual.So do three female presenters have a go at it next? Or is that it? Probably.I liked the part in Desperate Romantics where Holman Hunt comes back from the Holyland with a stash o f hashish and all the Pre-Raphaelites light up and enjoy his painting The Scapegoat.Proper Victorian values ! And then straight to the modernism of Basquiat and the long musical intro to SOMEONE TAKE THESE DREAMS AWAY (Joy Division).Cut to John Lydon outside a mosque asking a policeman what time it opens.John wants to Know why it looks like a closed fortress.What ethical or moral ideas is this beauty connected to? Cut to young arabian woman persecuted for being a christian but now living safely in England.She says "It`s beautiful here but nothing is as beautiful as Jesus." (B.B.C.)The scene fades and into view comes my painting The Pope`s Daughter.I should catch the School of Saatchi tomorrow night as I`m stuck at home with a cold.
Arthur Mc Donald | |
I watched the School of Saatchi (b.b.c.2) last night.If it was Eugenie Scrase that made the sculpture with the string and whistle then I hope she wins.The work of a young Rauschenberg.Can I buy it? I read that Saatchi isn`t actually going to buy anything.Rauschenberg bought a Bottlerack from Marcel Duchamp for $3. A more "yba" resonance would be early days Sarah Lucas.The philosopher Slavoj Zizek and situationist poet Raoul Vaneigem believe we are "living in the end"(which is also the title of Zizek`s next book).It`s actually all over already.
A Mc Donald | |
I have always said: A great work of art is one that is so beautiful that one never tires of looking at it. The forms, colors, textures and almost all subject matter for great art are found in nature, even the bridge can be compared to forms found in nature. Nature is for me a continuing inspiration and challenge and never fails to surprise, delight and confound my creativity. There is far too much "rubbish" being touted as "art" and peddled as "fine art"
when it is usually and sometimes literally SHIT!
Janet Summers - modern realist painter | |
Last week the Pope spoke to an audience of invited artists.Some actually turned up.He said "Beauty can lead us to God".But since beauty is God why does anyone need a Pope? He said this sitting underneath Michelangelo`s Sistine Ceiling . He`s obviously going to hell for this.I`ve already got that Prophet of Allah.Hard luck,President Gadaffi.
Satan | |
Roger Scruton and Michael Craig-Martin were on tv last night.Two cardboard cut-outs set up against one another according to the spectacle`s standard operating procedure.Marcel Duchamp was a dadaist and surrealist revoluionary.What these two balls of intellectual fluff achieved was to be a bit fluffy on the subject.It wasn`t exactly Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Raoul Vaneigem(Google Vaneigem/Obrist).So I award MCM and RS my Celebrity Formalism Prize (a photo of my painting of Jordan`s tits for £5).I can just see it now on MCM`s glass shelf next to the glass of water.Proper Pagan Modernism!And then the mind in contemplation of created things can be led by stages to the experience of absolute beauty.Thus appealing to both the traditionalists and the avant-garde.Public art projects on School of Saatchi next.Beautiful gallery just right for a cult of beauty in painting and prints exhibition?
A McDonald | |
I am glad to see discussion of beauty.
The visual banality of Post-Modernism is
soul-crushing. It is phony because it is mannered and pointless.
Ellen Dissanayake, ethnologist and sociologist,
in her wonderful books, "Homo Aestheticus" and
"What is Art For" discusses the human need for
beauty and meaning in Art - and how modern art,
in spite of all the freedoms it brought, has
let us down terribly.
Bill Bahmermann | |
|
| |
| click here to go back to magazine home | click here to post a comment on this entry
|
|
|
