Pop 89: Seeing Beauty
By Madonna Hamel
Some things are beautiful. One cannot walk along the ridge of 70 Mile Butte and look out over the vast, open grassland as the sun limns the horizon into eternity and shrug. Standing, small and silent under a big sky, there is no debate around the subjectivity of the notion of beauty. There is no condemnation of artistic canons as they pertain to the idea of beauty. The increasingly “golden” grasses are not a commentary on the spoils of capitalism and empire. They are a cause for wonder. They elicit a kind of full-body inner humbling. We emit a gasp, not not a “meh”.
The response to beauty is not mental. It is visceral. So, too it appears, is the response to ugliness. Yesterday I got a look at the covers belonging to the books on the International Booker Prize long-list. My first response was: Are you kidding? Do they not want to sell books? Are all these designers deliberately trying to not sell books? I don’t judge books by their covers, but I do respond to the invitation a beautiful cover offers. But these covers repelled any interest in the stories inside.
The ugliness of the covers went far beyond a purely subjective idea of attractive. In fact, they reminded me of the art of the Futurists who glorified the machine age of the early 20th century.
The Futurists saw war, violence and speed as ultimate expressions of art. The art that came out of Futurism was deliberately ugly and boxy. Buildings and sculptures were cold imitations of cogs and wheels, detached and isolated from nature.
I realize there is a phase in every artist’s life when they believe they are the first to challenge, smash and deride ideas of beauty. “Beauty and beautiful modes of expression are bourgeois,” we insisted. “And I will never sell out to the system.” It get it, it’s a predictable period of an artist’s life, like a teenager rebelling against the ways of the parents. It’s good to keep a bit of that sprit, like a vaccine against mediocrity or cliche.
And when I speak of beauty I am not talking about glamour, with its violent cosmetic surgeries and obscene fortunes spent to maintain superficial laws of “attractiveness”. True beauty is not a disguise, but a revelation, a light that shines from within. Beauty is the opposite of pornography which cleaves sex from intimacy, separates bodies from souls, reduces human beings from humans doing things to each other.
I understand the age-old urge of casting off tradition for the innovative. But once you’ve stood in front of one of George La Tour’s Magdalens or Caravaggio’s Pauls, you cannot but respect the skill and rigour borne from a long tradition of studying composition, colour, shadow and light. Not to mention allegory and symbolism.
Ironically, as the academy leans toward contempt for western tradition, it values the traditions of indigenous cultures, of which they know much less and have not lived. I am not besmirching Indigenous tradition. On the contrary, I’m noting here that Indigenous traditions have a strong tie to generations past and future. Tradition is the way they give the ancestors a voice. All cultures have wise traditions and ancestors worthy of our observation and respect.
Respecting and employing tradition means we lose our terminally unique status. It means having to recognize the shoulders of the giants upon whom we stand. And worst of all, it’s frightening to consider ourselves as just another slob on the bus, just another conduit for beauty. We are not The Creator but creative, thinking God’s thoughts after God.
While studying art I learned about a principle called the Golden Mean. It has been described by philosophers as “the desirable middle between two extremes, one of excess and the other of lack.” Apparently, the ratio of 1:6 is the ideal balance of background to foreground in landscape paintings, among other forms of art. The ratio repeats itself in nature, as in, for example, the rate of growth of a nautilus shell. Seeing beauty in nature, and co-creating with beauty, can be a frightening experience because we cannot control it, it forces our guards down.
In art school I began to see how naturally-gifted artists seemed to work with the golden mean without even knowing it - as if it were the path of least resistance, taking one to a beautiful destination, the way a river finds the quickest way to the sea. Similarly, I’ve learned, when out hiking, to look for the deer paths. Deer forge the easiest, safest path down the butte. They don’t make life difficult for themselves. Scientists and mathematicians get this, too - when discovering a beautiful equation they often refer to it as “elegant in its simplicity.”
But back to this new rash of ugly, “difficult” book covers. When I say “ugly” I’m referring to the intent as much as the aesthetic. I feel provoked, and I resent the provocation to irk me, the potential reader. The fonts are indisputably hard to read, the titles either fall off the cover, or are bent into squiggles or camouflaged into similar-coloured background shapes or become lost in a sea of language resembling the first page of a master’s thesis. The covers seem intent on drawing attention to the designers, not the novelists or the stories inside.
Stymied, I turned to my designer friends for insight, asking: What’s going on? is this a rejection of beauty? Is this intellectual-academic-conceptual assault on the visual world is deliberate? One friend described the covers as “anti-sensual”, another as “resembling a student assignment” and yet another as an inevitable, cyclical “ intentional rejection of a former aesthetic”.
I suspect that by replicating the anti-beauty approach to art taken by the Futurists, these hyper-conceptualist designers are shooting themselves in the foot. In the eyes even. And it might be time to go for a walk and watch the sun set.