The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

NOTE: what follows is more in the line of thinking with the keyboard. I do not propose to actually hold to any of it (nor do I claim not to). Looking at it after I finished it, I realize that it is disjointed and really talks about several things that probably should be broken up. If it weren't 2:06am I might even do this, but I am afraid that if I were to save it for later, it would never make it, and I would rather get some of this out there. I would love to hear your thinking with the keyboard on this matter. Comment away!

I have been thinking about the Beautiful recently. And if one is thinking about the Beautiful, then one must think about the limits of Beauty. In other words: where does Beauty end and Ugliness begin?

If matter is Good and Beautiful (if the Capitalizations offend, sorry, it's just my Inner German taking over), and evil is the result of the witholding of a due Good, then ugliness must be strictly a product of a rebellious will, no?

So, ugliness doesn't exist in nature, correct? I mentioned this to a friend and he replied, "what about poop?"

I have been thinking about poop, and have to come to the conclusion that we must make a distinction between the repulsive and the ugly. Repulsion has a function in the natural world: poop is not good for us to consume, so it is repulsive. Thus the repulsion is a beautiful thing.

Of course not all nature is so well coded. Certain mushrooms are quite delicious, before the liver fails and breathing stops. But to say that poop lacks Beauty seems to be false. Poop is not a consequence of sin, rather it is a consequence of eating. Good, wholesome, completely moral food eaten in moderation still results in poop.

Yes, we are going through the trials of potty training (not me, nudnik!) in our household. Why do you ask?

Anyway, it all boils down to this question: If ugliness is to beauty as evil is to good, then ugliness must represent the willful lack of a due beauty, and must be the product of sin, then is ugliness impossible in nature without the workings of fallen man or demons?

This brings us to Art. It would seem that the charge of an artist is to create beauty. Now, if the artist observes something ugly, what is his duty towards it? To omit it (and avoid the risk of glamorizing it)? To highlight it, thus creating due repulsion towards said ugliness (bringing good from existing evil)? To find the parts of the thing that are good and emphasize those?

On the one hand you have art as spiritual uplift: the artist does not portray ugliness, rather shows the beauty of the ugly situation had the wills involved been oriented towards the Good. If a situation is so bad and ugly that this is impossible for the artist, then the subject is rejected as unfit for art.

However, there is the duty of the artist to portray Truth. And the truth is that we do some pretty hideous things to one another. By portraying events, situations, states of mind accurately, we deepen our understanding of the subject matter. We may create resonances in our audience that communicate (always a dangerous thing to look for in art) the commonality of the human experience, bringing about the possibility for later uplift.

Then there is the part of me that recoils against the whole notion of content in art. Art is something bigger than simply reporting, something that does its best teaching by teaching obliquely. If I were to look at a Diebenkorn Ocean Park painting, there is no clear moral, there is not even a subject, exactly. Instead there are various references to things in the world that I might see or can imagine, but without a subject that can be verbalized. What is there is Beauty, Joy, and an invitation towards an interior dialog: Contemplation.

However, I cannot say (or won't say) that the obliteration of the Subject is the ultimate end of Fine Art. To paraphrase Arnold Schoenberg: there are still plenty of great paintings to depict things and events. I do find in my own work a tendency to move towards a Symbolist approach to art: to find as much inspiration in musical (abstract) structures as in concrete structures.

While I am working a little less in the messy abstract expressionist vein that I normally work in, I still find a lot appealing in the raw, encrusted, painterly surfaces of AbEx (which is one of the reasons that I am working in little, miserly brush strokes, as a discipline to focus my attention on working within strict parameters, a valuable lesson I got from studying composition with Gordon Mumma at UC Santa Cruz). I find the aesthetic of AbEx fairly easy to grasp: paring painting/sculpture down to the creation of things, often using the detritus (in terms of images as well as objects) of society to bring forth the Beautiful.

And here's the clincher: I find it easier to come to terms with this understanding of painting than with dealing with concrete subject matter. When I stand before a canvas and work with gesture and line and color to create something that is itself first and foremost, it seems pretty straightforward: I am attempting to create something beautiful. It might not work, but the goal is there. I am not trying to say anything about something. But when I go at a canvas with a historical or narrative in mind, there is something else that comes into the picture, and it is nearly impossible to get away from the temptation to paint words, to argue by pigment, which then weakens what should be the primary aim of art, which is to create Beautiful things.