These were part of a April Fool's Day screening called It's No Joke at SFMoMA. Included were early videos by William Wegman—clunky, funky, very, very funny, wacky scenes of himself with dog. The man has natural comic genius—and also knows about set-up, practice, editing.
It was a little video diversion on a blustery San Francisco day. It is nearly always a blustery day in San Francisco, so really I could have left that bit out, but it was in keeping with the experience: I blew in, saw the show and blew right out again.
Seeing Holt and Smithson in conversation reminded me of their dialog with Lucy R. Lippard in ArtForum, February 2008. The conversation was recorded in 1973. Lippard, preparing to write a book about Eva Hesse, interviewed friends who had known her. Lippard had wanted to edit the dialog for print, but the magazine editors and Nancy Holt persuaded her to leave it "rough." It is a little rough, three people speaking over one another, but they're not play-acting artists here as in their video. They are thoughtful, engaged, and a bit prescient as they consider what impact an early death has on the effect of an artist's work. Smithson died in a plane crash some six weeks after the interview.
One exchange in the conversation was particularily interesting to me:
RS: I think I was really interested in, most of all, her perception of the world, or just her outlook... I mean, there was a kind of understanding, as I say, of these more troublesome areas of things. It was a kind of mutual comprehension of the problems of the world, but not being sentimental about them, just sort of facing them. I never really had that idea that it was ugly art. That seemed to be too much of a one-sided view, it seemed to me. There was this whole thing with you [Lucy] for awhile there about "ugly" art.
LL: I always used the word ugly in terms of "unexpected." I meant that people didn't want art to be ugly until they accepted it to be what they wanted art to be—then it became beautiful.
RS: There's more of a moral thing, probably, not so much between ugly and beautiful but more between evil and good and those two interlacing elements. She seemed to respond to that.
NH: She was very conscious of reacting to "tastefulness"—you know, she always tried to go against it, in a very, very shrewd and honest way...
LL: Yeah, like if somebody liked it immediately. I don't think she was very worried if none of us liked something.
(This last bit reminds me of Tracy Emin saying, "Being an artist isn't just about making nice things, or people patting you on the back; it's some kind of communication, a message.")
Any way. Around the time I read the ArtForum piece, I was also reading Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein by Marty Martin, a one-character play based on published and unpublished letters and manuscripts. At the end of Act One, Stein recalls how her brother Leo considered the portrait which Picasso had painted of her "incoherent." Stein goes on:
Picasso said and I agreed that at that time ugliness and the confrontation of ugliness in art was beginning to unsettle people's pictures of life just a bit everyone's definition of ugliness was beginning to grow vague and it was understandable the nineteenth century was in a total state of inertia with regards to esthetics until just toward the end when it began to break and give way to the explosion that was and is the twentieth century. Always before ugliness was an effrontery to traditional esthetics but once those traditions were thrown into question by the fact that a painting can totally disregard and in fact challenge one's concept of beauty and still remain an intense and pleasurable experience, then everyone's definition of what constitutes ugly started to become vague indeed.
Ugly is "incoherent," "unexpected," unfamiliar, what we don't know we don't like.
The play, set in 1938, was first produced in 1979. Also in 1979, James Hillman presented a lecture, The Thought of the Heart at the Eranos Conference, Ascona, Switzerland. He followed up in 1982 with an essay titled, Anima Mundi: The Return of the Soul to the World. Both these works concern aesthetics and posit another way of approaching the question of beauty. First, he unhooks the notion of beauty from adornment, decoration, making pretty. "Beauty is appearance itself," he says, "an epistemological necessity." "Aisthesis is how we know the world." Each particular thing had its own display, each form its own presentation by which we know it.
"...what I mean by aesthetic response," he says, "is closer to an animal sense of the world—a nose for the displayed intelligibility of things, their sound, smell, shape, speaking to and through our heart's reactions..." Hillman's heart, any more than Eva Hesse's, is not the romantic or sentimental heart, but a sense organ, the aesthetic heart which takes in, takes to heart, interiorizes the image presented by the object, the other, the eachness of each thing. In the Shabda Kalpadrum, lexicon of Sanskrit, beauty (sundar) is defined as a perception which melts the heart (ardra).
If beauty then is the face of things, then ugly is the faceless. And as Smithson supposed, this is where evil and good interlace into the question of beauty and ugliness. Here is where Hillman's expanded thought unpacks what is behind what these others are saying.
The novelists William Styron and George Orwell, and the social philosopher Hanah Arendt, in writing of totalitarian evil and the Nazi systematic murders in particular, have each come to the conclusion that evil is not what one expects: cruelty, moral perversion, power abuse, terror. These are its instruments or its results. But the deepest evil in the totalitarian system is precisely that which makes it work: its programmed, single-minded monotonous efficiency; bureaucratic formalism, the dulling daily service, standard, boring, letter-perfect, generalities, uniform. No thought and no responsiveness. Eichmann. Form without anima becomes formalism, conformism, formalities, formulas, office forms—forms without luster, without the presence of body. Letters without words, corporate bodies without names. ...
The "general" and the "uniform" happen in thought before they happen in the street. They happen in thought when we lose touch with our aesthetic reflexes, the heart no longer touched. The aesthetic reflex is indeed not merely disinterested aetheticism; it is our survival. So, when we are dulled, bored, an-esthetized, these emotions of bleakness are the reactions of the heart to the anesthetic life in our civilization, events without gasping—mere banality. The ugly now is whatever we no longer notice, the simply boring, for this kills the heart.
So I started with a yawn in It's No Joke and it is no joke: questions of beauty still matter—35, 70 years on. Perhaps it is time for the plant, or the planet, to teach us its alphabet.
