Beauty, Irony and the Found Image

A conversation between Robin Bernat and Karen Tauches–
Beauty, Irony and the Found Image: consideration of two exhibitions.
Joe Peragine, Nature Porn, Etc., Solomon Projects
Dawn Black, Mad Semblance, Get This! Gallery

Robin:

On the whole, I find artists are troubled by the idea of beauty. For instance, in several online conversations I have had with fellow artist, Phillip Buntin, professor at Kent State University, he warns of the slippery slope beauty can create into a kind of beautiful emptiness.

These are Phillip’s words precisely:
“I am judging the merits of and arguing for the value of some aesthetic experiences over others, and warning of the dangers of seductive imagery that seeks to sway or appeal to our emotional natures without intellectual depth or compassion.”

I think he makes some clear distinctions between “beauty” and “the beautiful” but I would argue that anything beautiful is tapping into this larger idea of beauty and I’m not so sure that beauty is so easily corruptible.

Phillip expounds further saying, “Well I do think that most people are easily manipulated, but I wouldn’t say that most are stupid. Certainly in the U.S. we have devolved into anti-intellectualism and our culture continues to drift towards being almost entirely one of passive consumption. A state of being that plays into a ready acceptance of simplistic messages and seductive predigested imagery.”

What are your thoughts about how beauty is used in contemporary art and more specifically in Joe Peragine’s current exhibit?

Karen:

I agree with Phillip Buntin that people are easily manipulated by “beautiful emptiness.”  But I, too, enjoy beauty, especially when it’s on my own observational terms.  I prefer to discover a beautiful flower, an altered billboard, or professional artwork on my own, without prodding and by surprise.  I couldn’t live in a world without finding beauty, but it is an elixir not unlike alcohol. It’s intoxicating. It offers an escape. It’s one of the most basic human pleasures and it’s readily there for us at every turn.  A wise 21st century person is reverent to beauty’s corrupting power, as it’s so overused.

Contemporary artists are in a tricky position.  As independent producers of imagery, objects and environments that wish to attract, we must compete with some very powerful visual forces.  Already, our daily lives are submerged in the aggression of mainstream visual culture; it constantly bombards us with images that wish to manipulate and stir up desire. Why make more of that? Why get lost in that desperate cacophony? Serious artists are pushed to make things that are somehow distinguishable from the kind of common beauty that has been harnessed to sell things.  Or, on the contrary, they mock and reflect our ridiculous commercialized world. Some artists are successful by making their content and style the source of beauty instead of focusing on technique & surface value. In this way, they flaunt their freedom from the visual norms of advertising or propaganda. Ultimately, this is the radical opportunity every artist possesses.  Artists are free to use their own creativity any way they please. Unlike paid creatives, they are self-authorized to communicate.

To make purposely ugly (unaesthetic) or political work just to get attention and express outrage often proves a waste of energy (see artwork of the 90s). This approach is relatively unpopular right now.  Speaking this kind of art language may get an initial response or street credibility, but ultimately turns people away. We hold on to things of beauty and throw away that which disgusts us. In the end, an artist still wants to please an audience, albeit small, and be remembered.  Of course there are different contexts for different genres of art. For instance, I just love to see ignorant graffiti in gentrified neighborhoods. The contrast warms my heart. There’s one scribble near my house in Cabbagetown that says, “public art is for fags.”  It’s ugly, ignorant, raw. . .and also beautiful in its rebellion. After all I tend to agree: a lot of public art is absolutely terrible, institutional mediocrity.

So fine art is a challenge for anti-intellectual American masses who are used to cracked out visual aesthetics or some watered down aesthetic symbol of aristocracy. Bold colors, sexuality, flashy text, false promises, gold-framed oil paintings. Contemporary fine art tends to be a lot weirder than that. It’s harder to get to sometimes and it’s more subtle  and demanding.  Let’s face it, most Americans just simply aren’t interested in visual refinement but then they have a choice not to engage in the cult of “art.”

Robin:
Ok….so we’re still talking about the merits of beauty in art here..but I’m a little confused by your terminology — I’m wondering which art you mean that is “some watered down aesthetic symbol of aristocracy” and I’m wondering, too, what you mean when you describe “political work [that is made] just to get attention and express outrage and often proves a waste of energy”?  We’re getting a little off topic perhaps but to my recollection, there are some amazing pieces that I would consider both political and beautiful, that elicit profound reactions from their viewers and it lasts over time. A little later in this conversation we talk about Gustave Courbet, but there are other examples.  You could easily say that Goya’s portraits of the Spanish Royal Family were intensely political images and at the same time amazingly beautiful and forceful.  They, indeed, were made precisely for the aristocracy to which I think you are referring. I don’t think they were a waste of energy.  To provide a more recent example, I’ll talk a little about a performance work that was made by Mierle Ukeles completed in 1980 called “Touch Sanitation” in which she traversed all five boroughs of New York City  shaking hands with every single sanitation worker in the city.  Her performance, documented in photographs, was intended to show how these sanitation workers existed as a kind of underclass of untouchables in the city and her actions were meant to expose an unspoken caste system and to undermine it.  The work was political, meaningful and, I think, timeless.  I’ve made similar remarks about a particular work by Ann Hamilton that she made for the Spoleto Festival in 1991 called “Indigo Blue” in which she reminded everyone — the city of Charleston and the audience for the Spoleto Festival — that the very industry that had provided wealth to the city historically was based on slave labor.  I’d say that was a very specific political work, effective, and also timeless — and flew in the face of the very “aristocracy” or power elite who had commissioned her to create the piece.

You’re completely right about artists having an opportunity to be agents for beauty, for social commentary. Do you want to respond?

Karen:

Beauty is a motivator like bright colors in graphics. In the same way, flowers use beauty to attract bees and gardeners who cultivate them. It’s a useful veneer, an important survival technique. Artists have an opportunity to communicate inside a protected tradition. Fine art audiences ultimately gather in the name of beauty; this is a long-standing tradition handed down by the most elite people in world history who could afford the luxury of focusing on such a splendorous and intellectual part of life.  As we have matured, our concepts of beauty have become more sophisticated. Personally, I find content to be the greatest source of beauty in art; this is where the greater visual culture often fails us. Aesthetics only sweeten the punch.

“Watered down aesthetic symbols of aristocracy”–I’m thinking here of “art” spaces in general.  Although the spaces where we traditionally receive fine art are not supposed to be the focus, they have a great effect on our experience.  Regardless of the actual art that is sanctioned for their decoration, these spaces allow average people to experience the grandeur of aristocracy and the power of art institutions.  For many, a visit to an art space is a fantasy.  Average people do not live or work in such environments–high ceilings, emptiness, bright light, people dressed in designer clothes, wine, socialites, hollow sounds, shelves minimally populated with esoteric art publications. And so, humorously, this aesthetic is replicated even in the smallest of spaces. Thus the elixir is watered down.  Don’t get me wrong. I love grand white art spaces. Local examples include the High Museum, MOCA-GA and the Contemporary. But they are, indeed, symbols.  Right now, with so many average people feeling disenfranchised from the dream of getting rich, the tradition of maintaining grand art spaces, just for the pleasure of looking, seems ridiculously opulent. And now we are seeing low-brow and street art positioning themselves as the accessible gritty alternative.

As far as ugly and provocative work goes,  I agree with you that there is some very good work that is beautiful, provocative and political.  But that is not the norm.  I think a lot of people cringe at the mention of political art, the same way people cringe when they hear the words performance art.  That’s unfair but, quite frankly, justified.  There’s a high quotient of failure, hostility and risk involved in those genres that produce a lot of waste.  It’s really challenging to want to keep such works around. The true anger and the desire for change that some artists need to express become muffled by the actual process of publishing within the boundaries of the fine art institutions. On the contrary, there are plenty of opportunities to make art within political movements but that work is not protected or promoted by galleries or upper class patrons who appreciate subtlety and intellectualism.  Art within political movements has to be art for the masses, online art that gets a lot of hits, art that can be carried in a protest march or wheat-pasted to a city wall in the middle of the night.

So if artists want to participate inside the fine art community where aesthetic standards are much better yet want to produce work that reveals ugly truths, they must produce beautiful/artful style, be friendly or otherwise use clever tricks, obscuring or burying the ugly parts.  This is exactly how Goya and Courbet operated.  Both had gorgeous technique and were full of compassion (that is quite beautiful), so much so that history kept these works for the record.  Mean-spirited, attention getting acts don’t go very far because you must be a pretty charismatic magician to convince the fine art community that your ugly outrage is important enough to support.  A much better bet is operating inside the tradition, sticking closely to beauty albeit of an unconventional sort.  Humor is another contemporary form of beauty as illustrated in Ukeles’ work.

Ann Hamilton is a funny example of how art gets muffled. I saw her speak several times in Atlanta over the years. She was always an art goddess for me. But, the last time I saw her, as time has passed, she seems out of touch as an artist. Perhaps the privileged art life has tamed her.  But then, she always seemed to embrace classical beauty and the aristocracy, elegantly infusing some work with politics. Perhaps, the political aspect in her work is so subtle it’s invisible save for bookish crowds.  That piece at Spoleto festival–those piles of blue shirts was, indeed, one of her best moments. Does it connote slave labor? Well, that’s there very remotely.

Robin:

I want to say briefly that, for certain, “Indigo Blue” was all about slave economies — and hardly in remote way. Indigo and cotton production were at the root of the Charleston economy and it was all made possible by slave labor.

Well, I wasn’t intending to take up the standard for traditional art spaces — but we’re circling around irony again in another form.  Traditionally, art museums like the Louvre or The Hermitage were palaces of an old aristocracy: one that hasn’t disappeared — it’s just been replaced with a different kind of ownership — some of it being public.  These palaces housed the collections of kings and queens, popes, and, in the U.S., the new aristocracy of the robber barons like J. P. Morgan.  So, obviously, yes, these spaces are full of opulence and grandeur and showcase the works in which these patrons had a vested interest.  It promoted their place in society and politics. And, to be sure, when the average viewer visits such spaces, they are taking in not just the art but the architecture and the social milieu of these people. But perhaps these spaces are the perfect examples of the revolution at work: One, these spaces, exhibits, and art works are no longer the property of  Russian czars nor J.P. Morgan; they have been made into public institutions and  are readily available for any one to experience offering free admission for scholars and artists most any time.  And, there may be a history lesson in the experience of those spaces: they have become palaces for art treasures from a particular culture.  Now, we can decide for ourselves whether the objects they house are a part of our cultural heritage or not.

Secondly, some of these cultural institutions are the embodiment of modernity.  The very tall, white cube that you describe is the very one that the Bauhaus posited as modernizing and democratizing the very thing that is the crux of your complaint! The clean functionality that they promoted was intended to be a showcase for modern art – spaces that would not interfere with the experience of art but work in tandem with a new sort of zeitgeist.  Finally, I can’t really get behind this idea that there is a specific “sanctioning” of the one and proper art by arts and cultural institutions.  In my mind, though the form itself may be antiquated, I don’t believe that even the High Museum pretends to say through their exhibitions, “This is the only real art.” I think  their message is directed to a very small small sub-set of society that, unfortunately, is relatively uninformed about the broader cultural movements afoot.

You are completely right that fantastic, engaging, political, beautiful, ugly, provocative art is out there for us all to experience in the form of graffiti,  posters, demonstrations, performances and online experiences.   Surely, we know, as art producers, that these institutions are not and can not prevent, in any way, the creation and dissemination of art that is provocative, forceful, imaginative, accessible and maybe even beautiful.  Something raw and of the moment can and will happen and neither museum directors nor designer-clad patrons can water it down.  It’s akin to what I was asking at the very beginning of this discussion — can something that is inherently pure, like beauty, be corruptible? Perhaps the more important question is why are we looking for an art experience that defies a kind of categorization in the very place that’s the bastion of categorization? If you don’t require museums to validate for you what you think is really art, then don’t look for it there.

So, getting back around to Joe Peragine and his show at Solomon Projects — a clean, white cube! — irony!!

I wonder whether the introduction of the found image changes or mitigates in any way this idea of beauty. Is it introducing an element of irony?  Does the introduction of irony make all that beauty somehow more acceptable?

In my mind, in Joe Peragine’s exhibit, I think maybe that’s what happening: beauty is being reconsidered through this filter of irony.  The more I think about it, the more I am reminded of the paintings of Gustav Courbet: he was doing something truly ground-breaking when he began making paintings of the most ordinary and mundane activities in his own rural province but made them on the scale of grand history paintings.  No one believed that images of road workers or mourners at a funeral should be on the scale of important mythological themes that supported monumental ideas about patriotism and loyalty.  But Courbet persisted and maybe even changed people’s minds about what’s glorious in the mundane.

By making paintings based on dioramas, Peragine is making something ironic yet I feel strongly that these paintings remain, fundamentally, about beauty.

Why this emphasis on the ironic do you suppose? Is there something inherently wrong with beauty? Are we incapable of taking in beauty without tempering it somehow with irony?

Karen:

Sometimes, I think ironic work is a cop out in that it refrains from sincere emotion. It does however protect us from outright sentimentality. In ironic work, the means of expression is the opposite of the literal meaning. It’s a sarcastic riddle.

Joe Peragine’s title “Image Porn” speaks directly to this and yet his riddle does not leave the audience cold.  His paintings are both nostalgic  and sadly beautiful for the loss of nature and pokes fun at our culture’s commercialization of it. His imagery harkens back to advertisements of wildernesses and animals that are lost now in a style that is an homage to graphics great Ed Ruscha. Everybody loves pictures of wild animals! I see the reference to dioramas. His colors are blown out and airbrushed, look professionalized like National Geographic-commissioned pamphlet covers . The images function more like symbols than original portraiture. I guarantee that when he sat down to paint, he used an assortment of images clipped from magazines. We’ve seen that moose portrait many times before, backlit by a neon sunset. Peragine’s choice of romanticized animal poses, of sparkling stars in the woods are humorous as well as indulgent. It’s a tease that walks the line between beauty and marketing. By using traditional fine art techniques and showing in an upscale gallery, he positions the imagery and audience. Otherwise he could sell directly to the zoo’s marketing campaign. Indeed, this is an ironic approach to beauty. Making his cake and eating it too, he makes social commentary while also producing visual pleasure. I have no problem with art that’s enjoyable. That’s the stuff we keep around.

I like your reference to the paintings of Courbet, who made historic paintings of unseen reality or realities that certain classes deny. Paintings are a language that speak to a particular audience. Patrons of fine art tend to be more educated and have more adventurous artistic palettes. They are also more connected to power. To speak politics to them is more bang for the buck. When an artist is able to do both, make beauty and communicate something meaningful, that’s when Art with a capital A is produced.

Robin:

Which all made me wonder about Dawn Black’s images.  On first viewing, I was astonished by both how beautiful the images were and how imaginative each image was. But, after I learned she had re-created these images from found images, then I had no choice but to remove originality from the equation and re-evaluate what I thought of the work.

Finally, I decided that, whether they were found images or not, she had managed to make them her own by re-contextualizing them, not so different from Joe’s approach, and they remain things of beauty, of intense attention to craftsmanship, ethereal and formidable.

I’m especially fond of the watercolor and drawing she made of the model Kate Moss.  She managed to take this very recognizable public figure — a living symbol of pre-digested beauty in some senses — and recreate an image that is tentative, illusive and, I would argue, beautiful in itself beyond the actual subject of “Kate Moss.” This piece and several others from that exhibition demonstrate that appropriation cannot really be an end in itself — that her very reinterpretation of these found images into delicate objects brings a kind of transcendence to the appropriated image.

Any thoughts?

Karen:
I think unoriginality is particularly important in art right now.  The gates have been opened for using found imagery. I’m glad. For, it would be wasteful not to reuse some it for fine art purposes. It makes a statement to the future about this over-abundance of visuals in our mainstream culture all having a certain flavor.  When an artist starts to collect from these massive amounts of visual refuse, new bodies of art become re-contextualized. Lots of artists are playing with this in our time. It’s a movement. Black takes the time to repaint something that was mass produced for magazines. With technical prowess –she sure knows how to use watercolor! — she imbues new importance into images with her careful attention and placement in a gallery. I like her small works the best, which emphasize their candy-like preciousness, no doubt titillating consumers. Some works are much better than others. The grid shows off her ability to curate a fine assortment of images from the third world and fashion.  I guess this is the strongest content of the show, which is fairly light. . .fashion juxtaposed with indigenous style.  Ho hum. . . I see much wilder approaches to third world and fashion in a Peter Beard journal .

Images:
Mierle Ukeles, Touch Sanitation, 1980, New York

Lisi Raskin, Command and Control, 2008, Installation view, High Resolution: Artists Projects at the Armory, Park Avenue Armory, New York, NY, Courtesy of Guild & Greyshkul

Joe Peragine, American Elk, 2010, courtesy of the artist and Solomon Projects, Atlanta, Georgia

Dawn Black, Conceal, 2010, courtesy of Get This! Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia

Dawn Black, The Basel Lepidopterist, (2010) courtesy of Get This! Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia

Filed under: Conversation, Exhibition, Dawn Black, Joe Peragine, Karen Tauches, Robin Bernat