It's a Beaut!

Made some comments on a photo by Cleeo Wright, a landscape that’s much darker and realer than his usual work.

I honor and revere Ansel Adams, but his work, though perfection of a kind, lacks the richness and depth of E. Weston’s. A.A. created a world beyond worry, a Perelandran paradise where Adam never fell. However much I honor and however hard I revere him, he has in common with N. Rockwell or Currier & Ives a certain sweetness and light that are charming but, well, facile. E.W. did the dirty work. He even photographed a dead human body he found in the desert. His nudes have hair between their legs. I don’t mean we have to seek out nastiness to be “serious”; but we need to rise above pretty if we want to be beautiful.

I’m reminded of Samuel Johnson’s remarks on Dryden and Pope from his “Lives of the Poets”: If the flights of Dryden are higher, Pope continues longer on the wing. If of Dryden’s fire the blaze is brighter, of Pope’s the heat is more regular and constant. Dryden often surpasses expectation, and Pope never falls below it. Dryden is read with frequent astonishment, and Pope with perpetual delight.

It’s also worth remembering that in the 17th century the Dutch paid far more attention to Jan Steen than to Rembrandt, much less to Vermeer.

Art S. demurred, saying that there was nothing visually interesting about Cleeo’s picture.

Says Art: For me to like an image there has to be something interesting to see – one can intellectualize that this one is good because its not like AA’s........etc.,etc.....

The eye’s an extension of the brain, and seeing’s cerebral. You know the old studies in which those born sightless were cured at some advanced age, but never learned how to see. Hence all those figures of speech. Do you see? No, I don’t, quite. Well, look at it this way. Oh, sure, now I see. Cats won’t chase photos of mice, dogs don’t bark at photos of cats, chickens never peck at photos of corn. We see something they don’t. The question whether there’s “something interesting to see” sounds easy but isn’t.

“A fool sees not the same tree a wise man sees.” – William Blake

Art answered: “Leslie – I ‘see’ your point but I also think there’s a tremendous amount of mental masturbation in the whole field of art, not just photography. Too often I think we convince ourselves that something is ‘excellent or boring or terrible’ based on the reputation of the artist, ‘trendiness’, intellectualizations, etc., etc. Let’s face it.... a lot of art famous or otherwise just plain sucks.”

Masturbation’s much maligned. If it’s so bad, why is it popular? But seriously, folks, I won’t argue the awfulness of over-intellectualization. That’s one of many reasons I swore never again to set foot in a university. But that was long ago. Now I’m a tottery old man and less dogmatic. Let’s admit it: there is something to be said for “art appreciation,” though the words still gag me. I’d rather wring whatever juice there is out of a “work of art” than get my kicks sneering at it, though the only way to enjoy some things (like Keane’s paintings) is to see them as high camp or comedy.

Reputation’s a sticky point. Certainly most prolific “artists” generate plenty of frass and scat. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Still, if somebody I consider a master of the craft produces a picture that looks absurdly bad, I have to consider the possibility that he sees something there which isn’t (yet) clear to me, and that if I find another way to look at it I can see it too. OK, maybe the guy’s paresis finally kicked in and there’s nothing there after all; but as I say, I’d rather enjoy something than not, so I’m willing to try some of whatever he’s been taking and see if I like the trip.

The thread then turned to discussions of the beautiful, what it is and whether it’s necessary to make a photo great.

The problem with arguments involving truth, beauty, art, love, honor, duty and such is that nobody can agree on the meaning of the words. Most of us use them, I guess, as a kind of shorthand, since it’s silly to rely on periphrasis: “The sight of Jane Doe raises my blood pressure, the touch of her hand induces proximate tumescence, and I’m willing to enter into contractual arrangements that will beggar me if I leave her.” Easier to say “I love Jane.” But we should remember it’s only shorthand, and tendentious shorthand at that.

Art then posted a Weston nude with the legend, “Any question about this one?” (I.e., as an example of beauty.)

“Any question about this one?” says Art. But of course. Read “The Fleshly School of Poetry,” by Victorian critic Robert Buchanan, who considered obscene the work of harmless exotics like Rossetti and Swinburne. To him I think E.W.’s nudes would all look clinical and, well, dirty – not nudes at all, since that word evokes the appliances of art, just pictures of naked females.

Beauty’s strictly cultural. Most G7 citizens (now G8, I guess) are repelled by cosmetic scarification and saucer-sized lip disks and bound heads and infibulation, but those enhancements are still appreciated in some quarters, as are 300-pound brides anointed in pig fat, and circumcision and pierced lips and tongues. Oh, wait, those last examples are all-American, aren’t they? Well, you get my point. Beauty’s learned.

All right, all right, I hear you say, you didn’t mean matters of fashion, you meant natural beauty, landscapes, misty mountains and like that. But it’s all fashion. Before the late 18th century a high, snow-covered mountain (“a horrid Alp”) impressed nobody in Europe, unless as an obstacle to commerce and invasion. Climbing and skiing and hiking and camping weren’t sports, they were what Europe’s hillbillies did to survive. A suntan marked you as a member of the servile class.

It’s all but impossible to separate esthetics from ethnology. Sometimes I think there are esthetic elements that cross cultural isobars – the Golden Mean, the Rule of Thirds, the color wheel. Sometimes I believe the whole business is entirely relative and that all our esthetic striving is arrogance and folly.

Cleeo himself protested that some analogs of beauty cross cultural boundaries. “Smiles, I believe, are another example of something found to be beautiful that seem to be universal.”

Cleeo: the problem’s really one of definitions. True about the universality of smiles (even in chimps), but I don’t think of smiles as an aspect of “beauty” – more a kind of behavior, a signal, like the purring of a cat or a dog’s wagging tail. I’d be interested to see the documentary you mention. Certainly some cues are innate: babies will follow any “face” with two “eyes” in it, even if it’s very schematic, and the curviness of feminine fat may well be a universal trigger. Again, though, those are signals. It would be interesting to pursue the idea that “beauty” derives from signals like that.

But those are trivia, really. I’m afraid you and I are poles apart on the far more important question of immanence. I’m a crusty, unreconstructed reductionist, a materialist of the worst kind. Spirit, bah! Souls, humbug! Of course I know you feel differently, and that your conviction inspires and enriches your work, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ve got no patience with folks who think it’s a joke to trick vegetarians into eating meat, or who insist on enlightening everybody who doesn’t believe what they happen to believe. In the final analysis such things make no difference – a basic tenet of my own Futilitarian philosophy.

Tony S. came back with: “Beautiful, ugly, interesting, boring – why should we need to agree on what these terms mean? Where’s the fun in that??”

As Tony says, these points are fun to debate but have little bearing on what we do with our cameras and computers. He and Cleeo and I, and probably anybody else reading this, are on one side of a more fundamental disagreement. Plato’s the first guy I know who said it explicitly. His point of view (put in the mouth of Socrates) was that the arts are dangerous because they mislead us. Fiction is by definition a lie, and music affects us like a drug, clouding our critical faculties. Rhetoric persuades us to believe what we shouldn’t. In sum, the arts are useful in the form of propaganda, but serious folks should avoid them: they’re frivolous at best.

That idea has had immense influence in the Judeo-Christian West and in Islamic societies. There’s a strong puritanical strain that runs through those cultures. At its extreme it forbids not only figurative art but even the worldly vanities of decoration or music. We can debate the nature of beauty or the definition of art till the cows come home, and even get highly ionized about it, but we should never lose sight of the fact that art (whatever it is) and beauty (whoever she is) have enemies who have put the kibosh on the whole business in many times and places, and may well do so again. United we stand. Whatever our esthetic quibbles, we’re family.

Finally, I couldn’t resist a peroration. Steve M. gave me the peg to hang it on by defining art in terms of “expression,” suggesting that landscape photography differed from other genres in being “an expression of the subject” rather than self-expression.

On the understanding that “art” is shorthand and begs a billion questions (see above), what do we know about it in an operational sense? Well, it’s a human activity. It requires an investment of time (and time is money) that could be spent doing something else – finding food or sex. So why do people do it? One reason is to make a living, but for me and most of my readers here that doesn’t apply. What are the other reasons? To be stroked by admirers, maybe, though again that doesn’t happen a whole lot to most of us, and nobody just starting out could count on it. Next reason?

I suspect there are as many next-reasons as there are people who make art (or even “art”). One that’s commonly reported is a quest for ataraxy, the relief that comes when you scratch an itch or take off your shoes after a day on your feet or drink a cool glass of water after working an hour in the hot sun. The oyster makes pearls for the same reason, because a pearl hurts less than a stone in the oyster’s shoe. Another is the can’t-help-it’s: the artist is (take your pick) chosen by the gods or screwed up by bad toilet training or crushed by class oppression or abducted by aliens who plant a doodlebug in his noggin. Whatever the reason, the artist can’t help it – he squirts out art, sometimes at the most embarrassing possible moment.

There are other excuses too, of course; far too many to rehearse here. But I take it that Steve M. is speaking of the second one just mentioned. “Expression” is “squeezing out,” and what he describes is an artist squeezing something out of himself (subsuming “herself,” of course). But I have to admit I’ve never quite understood that process. The phrase “self-expression” is used all the time, but what does it mean really? What operation does it describe? The same question applies a fortiori to “expression of the subject,” which suggests bringing to light some aspect of the “subject” (landscape, etc) that’s otherwise not evident. If that’s what Steve means, I’m not sure it describes this photo of Cleeo’s, which seems to me almost a reaction against that motive. A postcard photograph of Yellowstone (or, to be cruel, an A. Adams photo) does seem meant to bring out some essence of landscape that we might otherwise never see, but this one’s muted, un-idealized, un-abstracted, unforced. Instead of generalizing (so that a given sunset becomes THE sunset or a given canyon becomes THE canyon) it particularizes its subject. Instead of expressing (squeezing out) its essence, it shows us the thing itself with essence still intact. Instead of showing us THE canyon, Cleeo shows us a canyon – a lowercase, common-noun, particular piece of geography – in great detail, guts feathers and all, and says, in effect: Behold. Without trying to sell anything, without a bonus of frequent flyer miles. Nobody will ever turn this into a poster and put it on a sign to parade around at a rally. It’s cool, low-pressure, and sufficient to itself. In that sense it expresses nothing.

All of which is true of nature itself, which has no politics and no agenda. It simply is.

Maybe the final purpose of art is to tell what the meaning of “is” is.