Before getting into Exercise 1.6 (and at the moment I do not really know what work I am going to focus on – I will come back to that) I have first been looking at the concepts of Beauty and the Sublime. What follows is a very partial, no doubt characteristically personal, and admittedly not particularly profound, series of thoughts and observations on what I encountered so far, and ideas formed accordingly, on these concepts.
To be honest, apart from dipping into Beech (2009) (the introduction alone makes the book worth having), I have not read very much on the idea of Beauty. Rather I have concentrated more on the Sublime, which I think is the more interesting, if not necessarily the more controversial, of the two ideas. Frankly the academic discussion of Beauty does not really interest me. Aesthetics, as a subject, has never been a subject that holds my attention. Someone that I know has written a book on aesthetics, which I understand is well regarded, and teaches – or at least used to teach – at university, so I am well aware that this is a serious and, to some extent at least, an important area of study. Nevertheless, though I mean no disrespect, it simply does not do much for me personally as an intellectual subject. Though I had not quite thought of it in these terms before this is one reason why I find the work of Marcel Duchamp intriguing. Dadaism was rooted in rejecting aesthetics and the problems that it posed, not least the aestheticisation of capitalist society and culture.
If nothing else this highlights for me what I see as a flaw, or at least an overstatement, in Burke’s argument that beauty is a matter of taste and that taste is universal. As Beech argues in his beautifully concise introduction that is simply not true of all cultures at all times. To take just one example (not meant in at all a sexist way) consider the ideals of feminine beauty and how they have changed and varied over the centuries, as is clear from even a cursory reading of Berger (1927) in his discussions of the male gaze.
The other book I have read specifically on the subject of beauty in photography, is the aptly titled one by Robert Adams (1996). This beautifully concise and lucid collection of essays really only addresses the question of beauty in just one chapter, but it is one that gets straight to the heart of the matter. Without wishing to reduce his argument to an inaccurate and unrepresentative over-simplification, Beauty is Form. As Stieglitz is quoted at the end of the chapter (page 36): “Beauty is the universal seen.” An admirably pithy observation to offset so much of the academic blether that has been written on the subject. (I have a particular target in mind so far as the Sublime is concerned that I will come to anon.)
I did also go back to Alexander (2015) which I had read earlier in connection with I&P, looking again at the sections on Beauty and the Sublime in chapter two. Perhaps unsurprisingly, as Alexander apparently wrote this course, the book and course material pretty much cover the same ground so I did not really get much from this rereading. Still a good book though!
A paragraph that is particularly apt, emphasising the importance of understanding traditions and conventions, and which also speaks to some of my concerns about Ansel Adams, or at least about the way his work has been used and abused, and the salon-style approach to the striking single image, is this one (at page 27):
“One standard, then, for the evaluation of art is the degree to which it gives us a fresh intimation of For. For a picture to be beautiful it does not have to be shocking, but it must in some significant respect be unlike what has preceded it (this is why an artist cannot afford to be ignorant of the tradition within his medium). If the dead end of the romantic vision is incoherence, the failure of classicism, which is the outlook I am defending, is the cliché, the ten thousandth camera-club imitation of a picture by Ansel Adams.”
As a bit of an aside from the present consideration of Beauty and the Sublime, there are a couple of other comments Robert Adams makes in a later essay, Making Art New, (at pages 81 and 82) that caught my eye and are relevant to the issue of understanding traditions and conventions:
“Every serious artist borrows not only from those conventions but from the particular insights of individuals he admires. … It sometimes even seems as if the greatest artists borrow most.” (Picasso would of course have it that great artists “steal”!) “No serious artist would, in short, ever set out simply to repeat another.” Knowledge of the conventions is important butt must then be applied in a way to make out of them something new and personal.
The Sublime is on the other hand something about which I have been reading rather more, starting with Burke (1998), but giving Kant a miss (I have never got on well with Kant – perhaps I simply have not tried hard enough – and indeed do not have currently have any of his work in my library, unless of course there is something squirrelled away in an anthology, though I am at a loss to know which that might be). Again at the risk of being reductionist and over-simplifying, what I get from Burke is a sense that the Sublime is exalted and awe-inspiring (which also happens to be my dictionary definition), that it is about the attempt to represent the unrepresentable, to whit the Creator, although he was otherwise describing profound and moving experiences in what are purely secular terms.
How paradoxical though that Burke was of the view that art was not really capable of communicating a sense of the Sublime and that this was better done through poetry. From what little I know of Kant’s work, he too dismissed art from his consideration and concentrated on the importance of the aethestics of the experience of nature. (What little I have picked up of Kant’s thinking comes form the surprisingly engaging and interesting Melvin Bragg radio programme referred to in the course material which I thinks stands as a really useful primer on the subject, and more useful than some of the more “scholarly” stuff that has been written on the subject. (Unfortunately the BBC have just introduced their wretched Sounds app which means that the quoted link no longer works. After a bit of searching I have found the current one, cited below.) Paradoxical because just about everything else that there is readily available to read on the subject is from the perspective of the visual arts. Indeed, the subject of the Sublime seems to have all but disappeared from poetic discourse. OK, it might still be there and I have missed it: I read quite a lot of poetry still but fairly selectively, and none of the modern and contemporary poets I habitually turn to seem to dip their toes into this particular murky pond. If I want a poetic Sublime I find I have to go back, principally, to Milton!
What else have I been reading? Top of my list has been Morley (2010), whose introduction os again admirably concise and clear, giving a good overview of the subject. I have to say though that that overview, as goos as it is, leaves me with the inescapable feeling that much of what has been, and unaccountably is still being, written is more of the same angels dancing on pin-heads stuff and that the range of different types of Sublime has now become so wide and varied as to make any definition, indeed any conception, of the Sublime almost meaningless and otiose, except as an hermetic, academic discipline. Apart from the introduction I have so far only doomed in and out of the main body of the book but the overriding impression it gives is just that, that the subject has become so broad and varied it is in danger, if it has not done so already, of collapsing under its own weight. Nevertheless there a a few potentially useful things that I have already happened upon, and a few more that I can see I am going to want to think about more in connection with Exercise 1.6. (I have included Morley’s Tate essay in the references below as I have read it – and found it useful – in connection with this current rumination. I will withhold any direct comment on it though until I actually address that next exercise.)
One of the key texts included in the book so far as more contemporary conceptions of the Sublime is concerned is of course Barnett Newman’s The Sublime is Now of 1948 (page 25). In large part of course it is just a commentary on the development of the idea of the Sublime. I have to say though that apart from putting the idea back into contemporary critical discourse I am not sure it does much in itself to develop the idea. Rather what I get from the essay is a sense of a concern on Newman’s part to separate contemporary American artists from the history and conventions of European art, which he saw as having failed to achieve the Sublime and had got bogged down in debates about beauty and aesthetics. It is a call to American artists to be new. Whether that is something that was actually achieved is another matter for debate elsewhere.
In some ways even more useful is the essay by Julian Bell that I found when trawling through the mass of stuff on the Sublime on the Tate website e(Julian Bell, ‘Contemporary Art and the Sublime’, in Nigel Llewellyn and Christine Riding (eds.), The Art of the Sublime, Tate Research Publication, January 2013.) This has the advantage of not only not being bogged down with tortoured academic modes of discourse but also of approaching the subject from the point of view of a practical, practising artist. There are a couple of useful, or at least interesting, things I get from his article.
One thing is that it has got me to look a little more closely at Jean-Francois Lyotard (though I still have to read his contributions to Morley more closely). I have previously fought shy of reading him, given my inherent antipathy towards Theory and wariness of the philosophising of the French Left in the latter half of the last century. Nevertheless it seems to me that in some ways Lyotard hit the proverbial nail on the head. The Sublime is “presenting the unpresentable”, or as I put it earlier representing the unrepresentable. How this works in practical terms I need to think about more but this seems to me to encapsulate what the Sublime is about now, regardless of how it might have been presented in the past.
Another is his all too gentle swipe at Gilbert-Rolfe (1999), which I found strangely reassuring. Despite my antipathy towards much academic theorising, because his book is on the reading list I obtained a copy and had a go at reading it, not really knowing what to expect. I got through the introduction and most of the first chapter before completely losing patience with it. I spent 33 years practicing as a lawyer. Words and language were my primary tools and precision and, despite common misconceptions, economy of their use were of paramount importance. As a result I have no truck with such self-consciously and determinedly “clever” academese, with its mangled syntax, imprecise use of language, other than in an almost hermetic, private-language sort of way understandable only by fellow academics who speak the same language. I find it obscurantist, exclusionary, and often straightforwardly incomprehensible. All of the other work that I have read on this topic so far has been written in clear immediately intelligible language. Some of it has needed a bit more close analysis but nothing too onerous. This book though all too often simply comes across as the polar opposite. I very nearly ended up throwing it across the room in frustration. It is not so much that I cannot tease a meaning out of the word-salad but that it is frankly not worth the effort. So step forward Julian Bell who nicely, and subtly, puts this book in its place:
“By 2001, when Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe published Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime, the institutionalisation of a concept that in Lyotard’s hands had been definitively anti-institutional was already a given. Gilbert-Rolfe contrarily proposed (as far as I can tell) that nowadays it was the category of ‘beauty’ (idiosyncratically defined) that was truly radical and liberators. A short sample of the book’s argumentation may suggest why it failed to resolve the issue to universal satisfaction:
The extreme mobility of the contemporary sublime erodes autonomy because it calls for movement through the heteronomous which is itself heteronomous, provisional singularity taking the place of the irreducible, movement being the indertiminacy of what is erased and represented within it.”
I rest my case and I doubt that I am going to spend much more time trying to wade through this book’s verbal soup.
I wil come back with more on this when I address the next exercise.
Adams, R, (1996). Beauty in Photography. New York: Aperture
Alexander, J.A.P, (2015). Perspectives on Place. London: Bloomsbury
Beech, D, (ed), (2009). Beauty. London: Whitechapel Gallery
Berger, J, (1972). Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin
Burke, E, (1998). A Philosophical Enquiry. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Gilbert-Rolfe, J, (1999). Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime. New York: Allworth Press
Morley, S, (ed), (2010). The Sublime. London: Whitechapel Gallery
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p004y23j
https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-20-autumn-2010/staring-contemporary-abyss
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