Thursday, February 26, 2009

Some Thoughts on the Aesthetics of Horror

"The Pathological Sublime: Beauty and Horror in the Age of Terror" - by Mark Dery - from a lecture delivered at the School of Visual Arts, New York http://www.markdery.com/archives/news/#000087
"The eye is an erogenous zone; beauty and horror, aesthetic ecstasy and moral revulsion: philosophical binaries aren't always poles apart, in the aesthetic realm.

In the world after 9/11, the aesthetic eye is confronted---and the moral mind confounded---by images that are undeniably horrific yet in their own ineffable, ethically dissonant way, beautiful: blurry newswire images of jumpers leaping from the burning Trade Towers; the Towers themselves at the moment of impact, blossoming into terrible flowers of flame. The cognitive dissonance inspired by such images, and the outrage sparked by aesthetic responses to images so emblematic of horrific tragedy (Karlheinz Stockhausen, white courtesy phone...), opens the door to a contemplation of what Oliver Wendell Holmes called "the pathological sublime"---images or objects that confound the aesthetic gaze, flickering irresolvably between aesthetic seduction and moral revulsion.

That contemplation takes us far afield from 9/11, leading us to wonder about the awful, pitiable beauty of medical museum exhibits; the "installation art"-like crime scenes left behind by highly ritualistic killers such as the Black Dahlia murderer; the troubling persistence of Beautiful Dead Women---exquisite corpses?---in art and high fashion; and the Burkean sublimity of that 20th century icon, the nuclear mushroom cloud. And speaking of mushroom clouds, Walter Benjamin warned his readers, in 1936, that humanity's "self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic."

Do his words have special meaning for us, in the world after 9/11? Is the aestheticizing of the unspeakable the essence of the fascist imagination, which dreamed of a Nazi utopia consecrated to Aryan beauty and purified by "racial hygiene"? What are the limits of the aesthetic gaze?"
I think these are interesting questions that have certainly occurred to artists long before 9/11... many asked in the aftermath of the Holocaust whether art could continue to be made at all. I had a discussion about this lecture with a friend yesterday and she was pretty convinced that the idea of beauty made from horror is impossible and that finding any beauty in say, the images of those who jumped from the Twin Towers into the endless blue sky, is callous and wrong-headed. She went on to say that it is both insensitive and desensitizing to repeatedly view images of suffering, never mind to dissect them and potentially re purpose them for artistic use. I can understand her point, but I don't agree. There are an infinite number of ways in which an artist can be callous, but one way for sure is for the artist to plant her head in the sand and hide from the daily reality that so many others share. I am not insisting on political art, but I do insist that the artist be aware of her surroundings both locally and globally.

Refusing to find beauty in horror, or denying its existence undermines our ability to find humanity amidst the sea of suffering that surrounds us. What right do we have to tell the political prisoner that she cannot find beauty in the confines of the jail? How can we look into the eyes of a malnourished child living in the slums and tell him that he cannot marvel at the beauty of the world around him? Why must we focus so narrowly on the horrible, only to turn away in shame at any hint of beauty within it? Buddhism teaches us that all life is suffering, but also that there is an infinite amount of joy in the world. Perhaps, it is impossible to really know beauty without knowing horror... these two must exist together in order for us to be able to tell them apart. In a way, I think the artist has a responsibility to investigate the horrible and find some way to fashion beauty from it. Not as a means to deny or undermine the truth of brutality or to demean beauty, but as a way redeem humanity. Knowing that so many people suffer and die each day, how can we possibly refuse beauty?

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Stirrings

I've been thinking about sculpture and poetry and this image speaks to something stirring in my subconsciousness. The hive hangs from the tree like an adornment. I love it's fluidity, it's texture, and color.

Photo by Chris Buckley
http://www.pbase.com/gandolf67/image/12856770

The hive image reminded me of a photo I recently took on a walk in Jamaica Plain...

Photo by Phoenix Mayet

I snapped this image outside of the Rochester Library and it's been in the back of my mind ever since. I like all the lines, the stubborn angularity chanted by every brick and mitered edge. But the white line bisecting the clear sky, the trail left by a passing jet, authoritatively asserts itself for only a moment before fading from memory like the signatures of the dead.

Photo by Phoenix Mayet

I also took a couple of photos of the pen I made for Joey's birthday...



Photos by Phoenix Mayet