One of the inglorious reasons I became an artist was to
avoid writing, which, thanks to my parents and public
school, I associated with odious authoritarian demands. I
found the language of painting, in spite of all its
accumulated historical and institutional status, happily
able to speak outside those constraints. Of course language
and writing shade even mute acts of looking. The longer and
more developed my involvement with painting became, the more
reading and writing freed themselves from a stupid super-
ego. Writing about art could be an extension of making it.
But there persists in me a lingering desire to make
paintings that resist description; that play with what has
trouble being named. I was recently asked to speak on a
panel about beauty in contemporary art and found myself in
the analogous position of speaking about something that I
would prefer to resist description. Describing beauty is
like the humorlessness of explaining a joke. It kills the
intensity and surprise intrinsic to the experience. I
found, however, descriptions can have more importance than I
originally thought.
The rhetorical demands of defining beauty often lead to
ingenious contradictions or sly paradoxes. It's amazing how
adaptable the word is to whatever adjective you put before
it; radiant, narcotic, poisonous, tasteless, scandalous;
shameless, fortuitous, necessary, forgetful or stupid
beauty. I think artists have the power to make those
proliferating adjectives convincing based on what Henry
James called the viewer's "conscious and cultivated
credulity." A description can have the power to
prospectively modify experience. To describe or name a
previously unacknowledged beauty can amplify its possibility
in the future for others; it can dilate the horizon of
beauty and hopefully of the imaginable. To assume that
experience is shaped by the evolution of our ingenious and
unlikely metaphors is also helpful to artists; it can
enhance our motivation and cultivate enabling operational
fictions; like freedom and power. We are provided another
reason to thicken the dark privacy of feeling into art.
Loving claims are frequently made for beauty's
irreducibility, its untranslatability or its radical
incoherence. André Breton ardently said that "convulsive
beauty will be veiled erotic, fixed explosive, magical
circumstantial or will not be." Henry James defined the
beautiful less rapturously as "the close, the curious, the
deep." I think that to consider beauty as the history of
its descriptions is to infuse it with a dynamic plastic
life; it is to understand beauty as something that is
reinvented over and over, that needs to be invented
within each person and group.
Beauty's problem is usually the uses to which it is
put. Conservatives use beauty as a club to beat
contemporary art with. Its so-called indescribability and
position at a hierarchical zenith makes beauty an
unassailable standard to which nothing ever measures up.
This indescribability, however, is underwritten by a rich
tangle of ambiguities and paradoxes. For critics more to
the left, beauty is a word deemed wet with the salesman's
saliva. They see it used to flatter complacency and
reinforce the existing order of things. Beauty is here
described as distracting people from their alienated and
exploited condition and encouraging a withdrawal from
engagement. This account ignores the disturbing potential
of beauty. Even familiar forms of beauty can remind us of
the fallen existence we have come to accept. When beauty
stops us in our tracks, the aftershock triggers
reevaluations of everything we have labored to attain.
Finding beauty where one didn't expect it, as if it had
been waiting to be discovered, is another common
description. Beauty's sense of otherness demands, for some,
that it be understood as universal or transcendent;
something more than subjective. Periodic attempts are made
to isolate a deep structural component of beauty;
articulated by representations of golden sections, Fibonacci
series, and other images of proportion, harmony and measure;
a boiled down beauty. Even in the most unexpected
encounters with the beautiful, however, there coexists some
component of déjà vu or strange familiarity. To call that
experience universal or transcendent performs a ritual act
of devotion. It protects the preciousness one's beauty
experience in a shell of coherence. I think there are
strong arguments for beauty's historical and cultural
breadth based in our neural and biologically evolved
relation to the world, but arguments for artistic practices
built on that foundation often flatten the peculiar and
specific details that give artworks their life. The
universalizing description also overlooks the work's
character as a rhetorical object, subject to unanticipated
uses within the culture. It draws people toward clichés and
reductive stereotypes which are then rationalized as truths
and archetypes.
If I have any use for the idea of beauty, it would be
in its troubling aspect. I was describing to a friend my
mother's occasional fits of oceanic rage during my
childhood, and she told me I should approach beauty from
that angle. Like mothers, I suppose, beauty can be both a
promise and a threat. All roads eventually lead back to
family matters. Perhaps this path to beauty begins to slant
towards the sublime; to that earliest state of relatively
blurred boundaries between one's barely constituted self and
the tenuously attentive environment. Attendant experiences
of misrecognition, identification, alienation and
aggressivity during early ego development become components
of the beauty experience. The dissolving of identity, the
discovery of unconscious material in the real, a thralldom
of the senses underwritten by anxiety, are a few of my
favorite things.
If there is a useful rehabilitation of beauty in
contemporary art, I think it would be to understand it as an
activity, a making and unmaking according to associative or
inventive processes. Beauty would reflect the marvelous
plasticity and adaptability of the brain. I'm tempted to go
against the artist in me that argues against words and throw
a definition into the black hole of beauty definitions; that
beauty is psychedelic, a derangement of recognition, a flash
of insight or pulse of laughter out of a tangle of
sensation; analogic or magical thinking embedded in the
ranging iconography of desire. But any definition of beauty
risks killing the thing it loves.
David Humphrey is a painter who shows at McKee Gallery and
publishes writing regularly in the journal Art
Issues.