The beauty of ugliness

Little bodies of Siamese children joined together at the hips and huddled to form a group, arranged so as to appear to be posing: the statues of the Chapman brothers are horrific monstrosities. The statues of very young-looking but already sexually mature adolescents of the Japanese artist Tadashi Murakami are no less unsettling. His manga-looking, hyper-sexed characters flaunt prominent physical features such as firm, round breasts, perfectly sculptured buttocks, swollen chest muscles, long necks for the girls, and prodigious erections for the boys.

Modern-day art has often been accused of betraying the sense of beauty, because either deficient or excessive. Mightn’t this allegation, though, be a bit naïve and stereotyped? The point is, what do we mean when we speak of beauty? After all, most would agree that Goya’s painting, “The Executions of the 3^rd of May,” rightly deserves to be called beautiful, as does his self-portrait done shortly before his death, or the portraits of the Spanish Royals, who were his generous patrons for many years but whom he seems to want to mock, even though their only fault was to be ugly.

The fact is that beauty is a weak term, escaping exact definition. It would appear to have something to do with being consonant with a scope and having an inclination for the wondrous. In any case, it is as cogent as it is obscure and so deeply rooted in our evolutionary selves that it cannot be lightly brushed aside or too easily joked about. Be it understood as essentially Eros-based or as purely a figment of the imagination, or even as a sublimated derivative of the former, it appears to be here to stay. When, for instance, in the mid-nineteenth century the desire to break out of the strictures of a harmonic framework that had turned into grim rules and staid conventions began to be urgently felt, the philosopher Karl Rosenkranz started theorising about how ugliness could be beautiful. But he was cautious, in fact, not to do away with the concept of beauty. First impressions, whether good or bad and in any case the ones we most often go by, have also something to do with our outward relations, which are strongly centred around an idea of what is or isn’t beautiful. Over the ages we’ve learnt to seek beauty in increasingly sophisticated ways, even to the point of pursuing naturalness in the strictly artificial. It’s enough to think of the falsely natural effect achieved by the expertise pruning of plants, the deviation of streams and rivers from their natural beds, the fantastic architecture of some buildings, artfully worn-and-torn items of apparel, women with shockingly over-stretched necks, and so forth.

Well, it may be said that none of this goes against the grain of beauty as such. It indeed witnesses to the pursuit of an ever more evolved form of beauty, over and above what is given and from which we may start out and detach ourselves. From the spiralling pattern of rose petals to the irradiation pattern of daisies, from hand-shaped maple- and oak-tree leafs to all those patterns that thanks to their symmetrical configuration convey to the onlooker, whether human or arthropod, a sense that all is right and well with the world, the quest for beauty is indeed endless.

Even a mathematical equation may be deemed better or more appropriate the nicer it looks. According to the British physicist, Paul Dirac, one of the founders of quantum mechanics and Nobel Prize winner for physics in 1933, beauty is a far more reliable criteria for endorsing an equation than how well it fits experimental data. It was with this idea in mind, where symmetry is once again the underlying principle, that Dirac arrived at the formulation of the existence of antimatter long before the theory was backed up by experimental findings.

Admittedly, though, visual art no longer abides by this principle. It’s launched on new quests where the visual is subordinate to the conceptual. They’re new quests in matters of taste and appreciation of sense stimuli, not unlike those for the sounds, sometimes dissonant sometimes cacophonous, that have wrought such a revolution in the musical field. Beauty is no longer sought in form itself, but rather in gesture as eidetic instantiation. When Duchamp’s rack for draining bottles is dragged into an art gallery and exhibited as a work of art its beauty derives from the fact that it stands as a reminder of a captivating mental process, a physical rendition of a coherent and astonishing piece of cogitation on the relationship between text (the object in its stark, unadulterated straightforwardness) and context (the venue and setting in which it is displayed). Beauty is hence no longer a romantic landscape, or at least not only that. It’s also about visualising mental processes, like Sol LeWitt’s great wall drawings, the first being all the more rigorous when he used to trace all the possible directions a line might take starting from a given point. Beauty may even be getting visitors to the German pavilion at the 2005 edition of the Biennale involved in a discussion on the market economy in an empty room without even a scratch on the wall.

At this point and after a lot of intricate detours the beautiful and the good may once again be said to form an inseparable pair, as when Thomas Aquinas stretched out the meaning potential of the famous Greek dyad. To bees, beautiful is pollen at its brightest and yellowist. To humankind it’s a quest and a challenge, a stimulus equally of the mind and senses. From this point of view, modern-day art is as beautiful as it ever was, or at least it strives to be. Beware of any superficial imitation.