henry klimowicz art

Responce to Jeremy Gibert-Rolfe on Beauty

link to the original esay by Jeremy Gibert-Rolfe on Beauty

Jeremy Gibert-Rolfe essay on beauty is quite compelling. Its concluding statement that for me is, "Beauty can be a very socially subversive agent" is powerful. His analysis allows beauty to have a strength that as he says is not what the critical world nor the art sales world has allowed for it in the past half century. I am completely unable to analyze whether he has portrayed the sighted intellectual thinkers appropriately so my default through out will be to assume he has gotten it right and he has stated each of their opinions fairly.

Jeremy Gibert-Rolfe starts with a realistic definition of the sexual attributes of beauty as female and its close relative the sublime as male. He then follows that with an explanation of beauties working parts and describes them as frivolity. He comes close to purposing that beauty is like the electron something without place. And that this thing-less entity has great power within society because of the oximoronic quality of nothingness. For me this pathway leads to an unfortunate ending in that it would seem that for an artist to purposefully engage in the creation of an object of beauty that object would by definition not be frivolous because of the artist engagement and so would become not beautiful.

I do find a great deal of strength in Jeremy Gibert-Rolfe conclusion that beauty in are present culture should be seen as a powerful but wholly underused subversive agent. What follows is an attempt to get to the same conclusion by way of an alternative pathway. A pathway that allows for the artist to use beauty without rendering it ugly by his uses.

From my perspective as a physicalist, one existing in the physical world, I linger on my own needs for the beautiful to help me understand its definition and its qualities. Physical flowers are a good place to start. Many flowers are acknowledged to be beautiful. Structurally most flowers are both male and female, stamen and stigma. As a realist I must then say that an object of beauty can be both male and female. If the object has these traits then the description of it must also have them.

The next question is this flower frivolous as Jeremy Gibert-Rolfe would hope for. The answer is complex in that the flower is often excessive and wasteful from a puritanical perspective and this does lead to labeling it frivolous. Unfortunately this is almost a romantic explanation of the flowers purpose and it completely undervalues the extremely hard work that the plant undertakes when making the flower. That work is procreation. procreation being the most important activity that the living can endeavor at. From this perspective the flower is in a sense hiding its massive responsibilities behind its showy exterior. This would seem to place beauty historically as a attribute often used in conjunction with subterfuge, or guyle.

The natural next question is how is beauty being precised. Again as a physicalist I would look to the bee for answers since the bee is acting as critic to the flowers traits of beauty. Also the plant is making the flower for the eye of the bee. I think we can assume that the bee has not been taught to find the flower attractive. On that assumption we then must look to the bees brain and by extension are own. One description of the workings of the brain is of a great number of pathways. That some of those pathways connect together in ways that are pleasurable, seems intuitive. That groupings of pathways can be remembered as pleasurable and that when these pathways are triggered or used post there creation they produce what we call memory, thoughts of beauty in this case. I do not want to say that I know if the bee finds the flower beautiful but as a bee keeper I am sure that the bee will return to the flower, and will tell her sisters how they can find the flower. Since we and the bee share much of the same brain structure I put forth that we may be equally predisposed to appreciating the flower, as is the bee.

I think this explains why beauty for many is a thing often associated with the past or memory. The brain pathways that we call beauty have often for us and the bee ended in very present positive results. The bee finds its food, few things are better for a bee. That we would go back to those pathways and in memory recreate them seems correct. Unfortunately the memory often comes to its end without the original object of beauty being present. If I think of my lover, finding her beautiful, within that thought I am most times in my life going to find that she is not with me. My natural next reaction would be sadness at her absence. I think that Stephen Henry Ross as referred to by Jeremy Gibert-Rolfe is trying to get at these differences between the present tense of beauty and the past tense of beauty "It wants to make mourning a prior condition, and end, of pleasure".

Do we all have set pathways that predispose us to emotional connections. If yes then why has the art world left beauty as a pathway. Or has it just left the shell of beauty the kind of beauty which has no work or purpose. Just as it is less then interesting to produce a work of art that is merely socially subversive. It would seem that to make a beautiful object that is only beautiful would render the object quite shallow. The question which I think may be personal, not the same for every viewer, is that for most it is no longer a truly beautiful object since without the grit of beauties work no one pines for it. Longing seems as important. This brings the thought back to the importance of time, and the depth to which beauty is connected to memory. A beautiful memory is so much juicer then just a fleeting visual experience with a beautiful object.

To conclude I think that Jeremy Gibert-Rolfe's conclusion is insightful although it seems to me that he has not gone far enough in his call to artist to reclaim beauty. The statement is really two fold, One: use beauty, Two: arm it with a pointed idea but keep the point below the surface. We the viewer will love it, we are wired to and we will bring focus, and attention to the beloved in ways that will allow for almost any idea to be past on to us, for we are at most big bees.