I'm currently reading It was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God which returns me to my earlier reflections on the nature of beauty because the book contains a chapter on 'Beauty transfigured' by Adrienne Chaplin.
Chaplin begins with some art historical reflections by arguing that the concept of beauty has been absent from and even inimical to modern art. Beauty has been associated with the sentimental and shallow while the purpose of modern art was to subvert and to shock. She quotes Barnett Newman as saying, "The impulse of modern art is the desire to destroy beauty."
This changes, she suggests, in the early 1990s as art critics and others begin discussing the concept of beauty once again. She contrasts the Regarding Beauty and Sensation exhibitions suggesting that Sensation was "the last gasp of the modernist belief in art as agent of social confrontation and change, while Regarding Beauty heralding the beginning of a renewed focus on beauty and "aesthetic" experience."
This latter perception would seem to be disproved by subsequent events as the Sensation artists went on to become major figures within contemporary art retaining their ability, as has contemporary art generally, to shock. At the same time, beauty has not generally become a major strand of artistic creation or criticism in the way that Chaplin envisaged in 2000. In her comments on modern art, Chaplin does not seem to acknowledge the interest, attraction or beauty which modern art sees in the 'found object' or the 'ready-made' or the way in which later generations see beauty in art which was once perceived as 'ugly' or 'shocking', as is evidenced by the repeated success of exhibitions showing work from the early to mid modern period.
Chaplin then highlights the confusion which exists regarding definitions of beauty. Entering this debate means entering "a complex interdisciplinary web of theories and views". Where, she asks, "in this jungle of views and opinions should Christians position themselves?"
Firstly, she suggests we need to question aspects of our own tradition including abandoning the Platonic conception of "a two-tier world in which earthly beauty is either a mere shadow of or a pointer to another higher world of capital B beauty." Beauty, she writes, "whatever may eventually decide it means, is an integral feature of the one world created by God and deserves to be honoured exactly as such." Secondly, we need to nuance the idea that God is beautiful as this is a term very rarely used of God in the Bible and which is often seen as "frivolous, seductive or deceptive." A more accurate attribution to God, she argues, is that of glory but glory seen in relation to the self-sacrificial love of Christ which "passes through the ugliness of the cross."
Chaplin then undercuts this significant perception by stating that, "although this account of the "beauty" of Christ may help us gain a deeper understanding of the meaning of the cross, it does not help us very much with the question of beauty in art or nature." I would say exactly the opposite, that this perception helps us to see the beauty of modern art which embraces offence, pain, darkness, death, and ugliness.
Next Chaplin highlights the definition of beauty given by Aquinas as "that which pleases when seen." She nuances this definition by stating that "something may please because it is striking, or stunning or just plain intriguing"; it does not have to be ""pleasing" in a conventional or confirming way." Again, this would seem to encompass the possibility of finding beauty, as modern art has done, in pop, kitsch, the ready-made, and the found object but Chaplin's contrasts in this section - strip malls, highways, subway platforms - suggest not. These are "ugly urban scenes" where there is nothing that "calls for our more focussed attention." Modern art, I suggest, operates within Chaplin's nuanced version of Aquinas' definition but disagrees with her examples of ugliness on the basis of her own definition of beauty.
Aquinas' statement is not, to my mind, a definition of beauty because it depends entirely on subjective responses which will differ instread of providing objective criteria on which many can agree. Chaplin notes that beauty "always appears in particular historical and social contexts" and so is "not the same for everyone at all times" meaning that "we cannot point to an objective feature of something beautiful, which can be considered to constitute the kernel of its beauty." So, if Aquinas' statement is useful to us but not as a definition, how is it to be understood? I would suggest that it can be understood as a way of seeing; an affirmative approach to life which is looking for what we perceive as pleasing, attractive, intriguing, striking or stunning (to use Chaplin's phrases).
So, we have two perceptions of beauty drawn from the Christian tradition which Chaplin articulates but does not clearly link within the argument made in this chapter. I, however, want to say that they are synergous; that an affirmative way of seeing is analogous to Christ's embrace of human pain and suffering in order to redeem it.
Chaplin ends her chapter on a similar note by highlighting a third exhibition, A Broken Beauty, in which was exhibited works which invite the viewer "to consider the body's capacity for beauty despite its brokenness, in the midst of its brokenness, and, ironically, because of its brokenness." I agree with this perception of beauty, which I think accords with what I have outlined above, but am unclear as to how Chaplin reaches this point through her use of the materials and ideas which she considers in this chapter.
Finally, I think that the picture she paints of modern and contemporary art in this chapter confuses the issue as, in my view, many of the perceptions of beauty which she wishes to commend to us are exemplified by the very examples of modern and contemporary art which she seeks to critique.
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Nickel Creek - Seven Wonders.
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