My Defintion of Beauty

What follow are my responses to questions about beauty on an internet forum.

My story begins in my late teens when I was obsessed with the concept of beauty. I remember writing long rants about it though I had nothing to rely on. It was something that had entered my mind in an intuitive sort of way and I do feel that it was a foreboding of my leap into spirituality. I will try and capture what my ideas on beauty have been since. Bear with me; this is tentative and I never was a student of aesthetics.

Since I became aware of beauty, I loved walking around town looking at beautiful old buildings and antiques in antique shops. In those days, it seemed that only old things qualified as beautiful. Looking back, I'm not surprised that the style of the 1980s repelled me! There is no way I can find beauty in it to this day. I soon came to the conclusion that there are some guidelines to beauty. First, a classic measure of sorts that is based in the platonic ideas of the perfect proportions. The second criteria has to do with the natural world - natural materia as well as a natural attitude seem more beautiful than artificial materia and fake behaviour. The third criteria is connected to the degree to which something or someone is soulful - in other words older objects seem more beautiful because they are impregnated with more energy and the traces of use while more profound people who know themselves will appear more beautiful than shallow people. The interesting thing is that while slick perfection can be pretty, it tends to lack interest. While proportions are important, the slight imperfection (the trace of a human hand, the uneven character of a wooden floorboard) often induces more beauty rather than taking away from it.

I've never attempted to map all this out before so it's sketchy, however I would say this is how I still perceive beauty. It seems to me that the same values can be transcribed to any level of existance. Ugly is thus artificial, fake, shallow, pretentious and so on. Brainless young bimbos with implants would thus not qualify! We are surely talking of other values in that case... But... You will surely argue that some modern items as well as young people can be very beautiful. I do agree. In fact I love a lot of modern things. The freshness of new things and new ideas, or people who are only just beginning to live! Yet if we look more closely I think we can find the above values attached to these things. A modern building can be very beautiful when it has been carefully and lovingly planned with natural materials and depth of thought, as well as using a good sense of proportions (something which I feel people felt intuitively in the old days but lost since functionalism in the 20th Century).

It seems to me that I've tried to transcribe these values to my artwork (proportions, depth, meaning, materia, vintage charm and so on). A few years ago my interest in photography escalated and I found myself seeking out interesting surfaces that would make for abstract photo artwork. I loved visiting the junkyard where I found rust and decay; these surfaces made for quite beautiful pictures. In my case it was not a question of just recording what I saw. First, I had to recognize potential. Then I had to choose angle and approach. After this, I still did things to the picture in photoshop. I was in other words elevating what I saw to a higher level of aesthetic experience. It was not so much a case of seeing beauty as seeing potential that could be turn into beauty with the use of a creative attitude.

The ability to see potential in things has been transcribed to my relationships. I've had a number of boyfriends that were diamonds in the rough, but never grew to bloom in full glory. The relationships ended and I realized I had to find someone who was already "something". This something mirrors an array of personal requirements, my subjective perception of a beautiful person. It's someone who is already by force of their own intervention a reasonably accomplished, profound and wise "old soul". I suppose that in the case of human beings there is so much soul and spirit that the desire for external beauty (the perfect proportions and so on) recedes into the background (well I appreciate external beauty but am not obsessed with it and don't need for it to be present in my personal life - this has been a bit difficult to deal with and I'm not done yet, however it's important that I get there). Sure it would be great to have it all but in this world, that would be a shallow attitude! I myself am certainly not the epitome of external beauty. But I hope my inner richness will make up for that in someone else's eyes. As we all know other people only mirror what we see in ourselves. So I wouldn't expect anything else from anyone.

There is just one more thing I'd like to add. In the 1990s as I got to know New Age people and the movement I was a bit surprised to find that aesthetically speaking, people chose glitter and slick looking pictures with space themes or otherworldly subjects. While some glitter and slickness is fine, too much of it becomes boring to me. I then realized that these people were indeed reaching for "other than this reality" and that it was a very different form of spirituality than what I was interested in. My career as an artist does reflect to a very high degree the aesthetics of this realm and a desire to express values connected to the earth. I don't think my preferences are particularly personal. I would think they are quite "integral" and universal in nature.

I do feel that some artists are meant to reveal the beauty in the most unlikely places. What many people would pass by an artist is able to capture and express in a way that helps other see something there as well. I love when you say "Beauty is not a device to create disharmony", lol, so very true! How often in this world beauty becomes a vehicle for selfish, egotistic pursuits. It's interesting how condemned a person can get for their lack of conventional beauty of the internet where people have little else but a buddy icon to go by. I've been ridiculed for my glasses! I assume that the same people would never say a thing in real life - let alone notice the eyewear. Still it signals a society that is obsessed with slickness and perfection at the expense of soulfulness.

Artwork: "Twists of Fate", handmade collage, copyrighted by author 2009

Beauty, Truth and Art

Yesterday was the opening of my first one woman show of photos, in a real gallery founded for photography only. I've been feeling tired and disconnected from everything so it was a somewhat arduous undertaking. When I left the house a snow blizzard suddenly hit me hard and all my make up ran down my cheeks. Needless to say I wasn't terribly happy when I reached the train where my mother waited for me.

The photos were all taken a year ago in Kansas where there was little else to do but visit a big manmade lake and research all the quirky details that the creation of this lake had caused in the landscape. During that long period of cold winter months I also got to witness the land as it changed depending on the very unusual weather circumstances. The photos can be seen on my website or on Flickr. Just before the opening a journalist was asking me about it all, and all I could think of saying was that during this time, I went through an inner process as a photographer while nature went through its own processes. I mumbled something about the way abstract photography is fascinating because you know that it has reality as its base, and how the digital era allows you more easily than before to make a simple photo into something that extends into the arena of art. I'm not sure this really came across right. Another journalist called me today and I still didn't have the presence of mind to simply say: it's about the process of discovering beauty in unexpected places.

It does indeed require a special state of mind to notice something that you can capture or turn into a piece of art. First of all you have to be mindful. My cat Marius has now forgiven me so when I pet him he starts to pur. It reminds me how terribly important it is for me to witness my cats' happiness every day, and every time they come to me to spend quality time I make an effort to switch off my absentmindedness and be truly present to them. There is no knowing if I will still have this kind of moment tomorrow or next week... These moments make life worth living even when you feel disconnected and tired. Mindfulness is thus what makes life meaningful. Without it you have nothing. It may not make you into an artist, but you can at least appreciate the beauty inherent in all natural things.

I read and responded to an interesting topic about an experiment conducted in Washington D.C. Joshua Bell, who is a famous and talented violinist, played in the subway like any other street musician. The point was to see whether busy people running off to work would recognize the beauty in his performance and whether context creates art. You can read more about it here. The comments are also well worth reading. Some people did feel that the context was a bit unfair to those who didn't pay attention to the music - how much can you really ask of the poor Americans who are so busy making a living in a country where this is especially accentuated!

Anyhow, I personally think that context is always present in everything we do - perhaps I might even go as far as to say that context cannot be separated from the product because everything we ever do is dependent on a whole bunch of elements to do with time and space and things that are meaningful in relation to these.

It seemed to me that people confused beauty with art. I do not think beauty necessarily equals art. There is ugly art that provokes and helps people re-evaluate their lives. The object of art is to awaken people to something, and this can be about aesthetic values as well as concepts. However, I think beauty is inherent in life, it equals truth. Untruth, denial and deception cause ugliness unless this ugliness becomes intentional through the filter of an artist. I also think that people have more and more trouble being mindful about life, because of all the trivial obligations that we have been programmed to put our minds into. You have to clear your mind of preconceptions, theories and any other form of mind clutter in order to really look and hear. People are not educated to do this. The brain does get programmed into certain tracks very easily. Even I as an artist have to remind myself at times to be present to something really lovely, for instance the happiness of my cats when they come and want to spend time with me. I remind myself, that I may not get to see that beauty tomorrow, so I must not waste the moment. I am lucky to have time and education to do this, but how many people do?

I think that to some extent context helps to wire people’s minds into appreciating art, because they know to expect it. They are then more able to de-clutter their minds and pay attention. I think it’s obvious that the beauty in L’Enfant Plaza where the performance took place was there whether anyone saw it or not. The reference to the koan about whether or not a tree makes a sound when it’s falling if there is no one there to hear it is interesting. The beauty was there in the reality as we know it, though maybe in a deeper ontological way it existed only to the extent that someone was able to pick it up. (Ontology is the basic nature of reality). Let me extend this thought a bit to embrace ideas surrounding the nature of personal truths. But before I go on, let me just say this: stop running around making money like crazy and reconnect with what is truly essential in life! But it’s up to each and everyone to decide if they want to, of course… Perhaps experiments like this help people realize they may have a choice in this regard.

I think serious methaphysical studies and as far as I understand quantum physics and the like also agree that there really is no objective truth. In other words, there are only subjective filters of our subjective minds. We can agree on certain things and that makes them "objective", but ARE they really objective? What is the real nature of these things we can measure? Quantum theory tells us ultimately there is nothing but a field of potentiality. You could argue that science has proven this or that. Well... sure, there are measurable things. But there are also things that are still measured very badly if even at all due to a lack of proper tools. We are surely not at the height of human evolution (that was a Victorian idea, haha...). I'm not one to read much anymore so I can't say what the latest findings are, but it was pretty clear to me back during my student's days that there is no absolute unarguable proof of the existance of an objective reality. It would then mean that truth is relative to each human being.

Can we trust other people's perception of reality? What can we really say about other people's intuitions? I think, that many times other people are really off course: sometimes other people's intuitions are not intuitions at all but delusions and misconceptions that they and possibly a whole bunch of people take for "truth". So it's a tricky thing but it seems to me that truth is really relative most of the time and that absolute truth is forever beyond our reach until we have some experience of enlightment or something of the sort. In my opinion we are really in the dark here but I think we can know more, it's just a matter of learning, intuiting, being open, maybe the time period we live in...

However, who is to really judge that someone else is wrong? You may encounter a person who is totally intolerable from your point of view, who wants to convert you to their beliefs etc. And it may definitely be detrimental to you (and to them I may add) and a community could agree (though often doesn't) that it is not morally sound to try and convert others by way of superiority, authority, manipulation and the like. So the result is there is some kind of truth in that situation that is agreed upon by many but it may be far from the truth of who that person really is in a much deeper, wider or even ontological sense. (Ontology = the basic nature of reality).

Art is thus to a great extent about people's ideas as well as their deeper intuitions and perceptions about life. I think other people's intuitions can show us "something", and that it is often very valuable to our understanding of things as well as enjoyment of life and the creation. In this world, pondering, speculating and feeling is quite central to our existance and it's all very well and fun for many of us, but it doesn't mean it's the same in some other possible world. These intuitions also vary, so cannot be taken for "truths" in my opinion.

It's certainly a question of paths to the truth but that still doesn't make the "ultimate truth" that someone might arrive upon exactly the same as that of someone else. C.f. the idea of enlightment! As far as I know mystical experiences have similarities but they are not always the same. Who knows, really? There are many theories about how we are co-creators of the world through the subjective filters of our individual selves, and that is how "God" expresses him/her/itself. I've looked into it and personally don't see any contradiction there. I do think that we are truly all in it together in a fuller sense than what appears to be. I do think something can be real and unreal at the same time, but it depends what level we're talking about. If we're talking about the physical reality that we all perceive similarly (not quite the same, only similarly) things are more solid (compared to realms of a different type of frequencies or whatever you want to name it). The laws of nature make dualism have a strong hold. But what do we know about higher spheres - provided you believe there are any? Again, many report that they know of these higher spheres. If someone doesn't perceive them it obviously doesn't mean that they don't exist. We know that from history already! The same goes for both art and beauty. Just because people don't notice them or perceive them as such, it doesn't mean they don't exist. So in a paradoxical sense I'd say that even if reality is dependent on a subjective perception and we live in a reality that is agreed upon and in which we collectively contribute to the space of art, philosophy and scientific innovations, there are ways of seeing that are not available to all.

Artwork: "The Freak", digital photograph by authour, all rights reserved 2008

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