Uncontrollable Beauty

Toward a New Aesthetics

David Shapiro, Bill Beckley, Bill Beckley

• Publisher: Allworth
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781621531111
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Teoria e critica dell'arte

In this acclaimed art anthology, a prestigious group of artists, critics, and literati offer their incisive reflections on the questions of beauty, past, present, and future, and how it has become a domain of multiple perspectives.Here is Meyer Schapiro's skeptical argument on perfection... contributions from artists as profound as Louise Bourgeois and Agnes Martin... and reflections of critics, curators, and philosophers on the problems of beauty and relativism. Readers will find fascinating insights from such art theorists and critics as Dave Hickey, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Donald Kuspit, Carter Ratcliff, and dozens more.

III.
PRACTICE

The Practice of Beauty

JAMES HILLMAN

I. The Repression of Beauty

By calling this talk this morning “The Practice of Beauty,” my desire is to show why an idea of beauty is useful, functional, practical. Too often and for too long when the words Bella and La Belleza appear, they raise us to lofty thoughts. This high style, of course, has been declared to be a function of beauty: It inspires, reminds us of our wings as Plato would say, lifting the mind to permanent values and eternal truths. This higher idea of beauty, shown immediately by the effect it has on our rhetoric the moment we begin to enter into discourse on aesthetics, would not be disputed by either Classics or Romantics. And it is also this higher idea and lofty rhetoric that often makes the discussion of beauty, finally, stupefying, nuoso, narcoleptic.

The narcoleptic effect of the usual discussions of aesthetics, the disguised moralism that beauty is “good for you,” in fact, is Good itself, have turned an entire century against anything to do with beauty, classic and romantic, and have banned beauty from painting, music, architecture, and poetry, and from criticism too, so that the arts, whose task once was considered to be that of manifesting the beautiful, will discuss the idea only to dismiss it, regarding beauty only as the pretty, the simple, the pleasing, the mindless, and the easy. Because beauty is conceived so naïvely, it appears as merely naïve, and can be tolerated only if complicated by discord, shock, violence, and harsh terrestrial realities.

I therefore feel justified in speaking of the repression of beauty, and am immensely appreciative of this opportunity afforded by this event. It demonstrates that we are here today engaged in a profound question, not only regarding the arts, psychology, and the theory of aesthetics, but as I intend to show, regarding the world we live in and the condition of its soul and ours.

To speak of beauty today with this Gulf War in the air, this apocalyptic devastation going on right now as we sit here, could seem precious, elitist, even fascist. I assure you this is not the case. Discussions of beauty during most of this century have been perverted by the fascist appropriation of the subject too often neglected by the humanist and existential concern for democratic social improvement. The political Right took over fields left untilled by the political Left. If we do not boldly open this question, it remains not only repressed, but worse: subject to fascist misuse. So, what I am hoping to do today is to make one small step toward reclaiming for the democratic tradition some of the abandoned terrain— much as I have tried on previous occasions regarding Greek myths and romantic thinkers. For, let us be quite clear, fascism today is not where it was fifty years ago; nor is it here in our reclamation of this theme. Today, fascism is on television, its glorification of war equipment, the technology of destruction, the suppression of human feeling with uniform language, and the mass patriotism stirred by the letting of blood.

Psychology—by which I mean of course a psychology that is true to its name, psyche logos, the study of the soul, psyche, anima—has been influenced by theories derived from scientific medicine, from physics, chemistry, physiology and pharmacology, from anthropology and linguistics. Psychology has been influenced, however, also by aesthetics, particularly by the very denial of beauty that appears in psychological discourse as an absence, a repression. Beauty is not a category in psychotherapy or a factor in considering the language used, the style of the patient, the taste displayed by the therapist, the preferences in the arts of the patient, or that we all live, one way or another, within aesthetic ideals: imagining ourselves in terms of the lives of dead artists or as figures in their works, or in present films, or enacting moments in our lives that consciously repeat in recollection leitmotivs from painting, music, novels. We choose fashions, decorate our rooms, search for restaurants, and judge our friends.

This curious refusal to admit beauty in psychological discourse occurs even though each of us knows that nothing so affects the soul, so transports it, as moments of beauty—in nature, a face, a song, an action or dream. And, we feel that these moments are therapeutic in the truest sense: make us aware of soul and make us care for its value. We have been touched by beauty. Yet, as I say, therapy never discusses this fact in its theories, and the aesthetic plays no role whatsoever in therapeutic practice, in developmental theory, in transference, in the notions of successful treatment or failed treatment, and the termination of therapy. Are we afraid of its power?

To conclude from this fact in my own field, and in the field of my colleagues here today who I hope will enter the discussion as we proceed, I shall claim that the most significant unconscious today, the factor that is most important but most unrecognized in the work of our psychological culture, could be defined as “beauty,” for that is what is ignored, omitted, absent. The repressed therefore is not what we usually suppose: violence, misogyny, sexuality, childhood, emotions and feeling, or even the spirit, which receives its due in meditation practice. All these themes are common in daily conversation. No, the repressed today is beauty.

With this in mind, let us attempt now to show how beauty affects our contemporary practical concerns beyond both psychology (my field) and the arts (yours). You notice of course that I am postponing any sort of definition of beauty, any move to make it clear what beauty is. I ask you to hold this question in abeyance, and to feel instead whatever idea of beauty you have, letting what I say resonate with the recollections of beauty and feelings of beauty that have established themselves in your way of life.

The first of these concerns is the world itself: ecology. Our approach, in general, today has turned to the mythical figure of Gaia. The Gaia hypothesis of deep ecology holds that the world is a living and breathing organism; even the magma and rocks at the earth’s core, Gaia’s basic stuff, shall be imagined organically. This hypothesis that interconnects all the world is the triumph of feminism and organicism. The hypothesis that the world is alive represents a complete reversal of values, an enantiodromia from the paternalism of God the Father and his instrument on earth, the Pope, as well as the doctrines of higher spiritualism, which see the world as an act of creatio ex nihilo and the matter of this earth as merely dead, Cartesian res extensa.

Nonetheless, the Gaia hypothesis of deep ecology reduces the puzzles of the world to interacting functionalism—Darwin up-to-date—so that our wonder in the face of the world’s complex magnificence attends less to its sensate presence than to its subtle interactionism: microorganisms, ozone layers, virus strains, methane, tropic heat, evaporation, chlorophyll, gene pools, interdependency of species. Our ecological wonder remains scientific—as it should be since the Gaia hypothesis was formulated by Lovelock and Margulis, both physical scientists. The world of deep ecology remains physis. But is this vision enough to draw us toward the world? That we must do it is clear enough. Great Mother Nature no longer provides our support; we are now obliged to care for her.

Nature today is on dialysis, slowly expiring, kept alive only by advanced technology. What can stir our depths equal to the depths of ecological need? Duty, wonder, respect, guilt, and the fear of extinction are not enough. Only love can keep the patient alive—a desire for the world that affords the vitality, the passionate interest on which all other efforts rest.

We want the world because it is beautiful, its sounds and smells and textures, the sensate presence of the world as body. In short, below the ecological crisis lies the deeper crisis of love, that our love has left the world. That the world is loveless results directly from the repression of beauty, its beauty and our sensitivity to beauty. For love to return to the world, beauty must first return, else we love the world only as a moral duty: Clean it up, preserve its nature, exploit it less. If love depends on beauty, then beauty comes first, a priority that accords with pagan philosophy rather than Christian. Beauty before love also accords with the all-toohuman experience of being driven to love by the allure of beauty.

The second of our major concerns that calls for a practice of beauty is economic. This may seem surprising. For usually beauty is imagined as an accessory, a luxury, beyond the scope of economics. If, for instance, a public plaza is to be constructed, town planners first arrange the traffic question, then the accessibility for shopping and other commercial uses, last comes the “look” of the place: a commissioned sculpture, a fountain, a little grove of trees and flower beds, special lights. The artist is brought in last and is first to be eliminated when the project begins to go over budget. Beautification costs too much. It’s uneconomical.

Contrary to this usual view, ugliness costs more. What are the economics of ugliness: What is the cost to physical well-being and psychological balance of careless design, of cheap dyes, of inane sounds, structures, and spaces? To pass a day in an office under direct glaring light, in bad chairs, victim of the constant monotonous hum of machine noise, looking down at a worn, splotched floor cover, among artificial plants, making motions that are unidirectional, push-button, sagittal in and out that repress the gestures of the body—and then, at day’s end, to enter the traffic system or the public transport system, fast food, project housing— what does this cost? What does it cost in absenteeism; in sexual obsession, school drop-out rates, overeating and short attention span; in pharmaceutical remedies and the gigantic escapism industries of wasteful shopping, chemical dependency, sports violence, and the disguised colonialism of tourism? Could the causes of major social, political, and economic issues of our time also be found in the repression of beauty?

The third repression of beauty we find at home, in depth psychology. Today, our field is characterized by an intense subjectivity of self-reflection. Introspection, reminiscence, reconstruction, feelings—the cultivation of personal interiority. The mirror has become a favorite metaphor, adolescence and childhood the major topos, resulting in a contemporary syndrome, a character disorder, relatively unnoticed in the first seventy-five years of psychoanalysis: I am of course referring to the diagnosis, “narcissism.”

Narcissism had classically been described by ...