DORNBRACHT - Butterfly Trading

DORNBRACHT the SPIRITof WATER Beauty – the last Anarchy
114
BEAUTY
–the last
ANARCHY
Those who devote themselves to beauty were until recently considered to
be hopelessly old-fashioned. The technical age saw in the respect accorded
to it a relic of the intelligentsia; beauty was too simple and often indistinguishable
from Kitsch, its harmonious dimensions could easily be produced
en masse by industry and in the media. Even the hedonistic nineties did not
warm to it, as the dotcom generation was too preoccupied with its own opportunities
to seek beauty, that no longer wants to go anywhere. Anything that
promised prestige was desirable – in other words anything that was expensive,
showy and loud. In the wake of boundless opportunities the globally networked
world looked feverishly to the promises of a new millennium. Since then the
mood has changed.
The crisis in the world economy and the emergence of international terrorism
prescribed the self-intoxicated West a lesson in transitoriness. Since the disappearance
of the delirium, we are faced with the sober realisation that
the Earth has not changed into paradise. A great clearance has begun that is
putting things to right and creating clarity. It is therefore no coincidence
that beauty is again the subject of public debates and large exhibitions. The
aesthetic discourse attempts to wrest it from the commercial grip in order to
make it fruitful again for art. For, just as in fashion which reacts quickest to
changing trends, a new era has also begun in art. While shocks of all kind are
the order of the day, artists have lost the desire to be provocative. A growing
interest in the decorative has been reported in the New York contemporary art
auctions. Even fashion is falling hopelessly in love with decorative details
and seams and a flood of accessories.
Those who are creative share the wish to arouse emotions, to move instead of
Editor INGEBORG HARMS
to alienate, to fascinate not to snub. Since German classicists saw the idea
embodied in beauty, a certain kind of it has been seen as mysterious and cold.
Feelings which might be aroused bounce off it regardless of whether it is
Athens’s Adonis in stone, Garbo or the Barcelona Chair. A typical advocate
of this austere beauty is the Viennese modernist Adolf Loos, who equated
ornament and crime. His colleague Walter Gropius, for whom the form of
beauty was identical to its integration into function and anything with function
was beautiful, had similar beliefs.
“What would you say if I simply do not like your architecture?”, an American
student once asked him after a lecture. “Then you are neurotic”, countered
the master, for whom his dictum was over and above questions of taste. The
plucky student made himself the advocate of a beauty which was not mathematically
perfect and was reduced to the elementary. His was one of the first
voices of a postmodernism that in its search for a non-dogmatic beauty produced
such varying phenomena as Mark Rothko and Roy Lichtenstein, two
artists who obtained the highest prices in this New York autumn. An idealist
like Hegel would have denied Rothko’s heady, floating, coloured surfaces and
the comic motifs of Lichtenstein any beauty, and would have declared them
as much too arbitrary and sentimental. Loos’s modernism treated works,
where the subjectivity of the artist was evident, just as rigidly.
Yet today’s scholars of such playful emotional beauty prove that they have
once more survived their critics. The vulnerable and biographical detail, the
brush stroke, the personal signature are what we now regard as beautiful. In
the galleries of New York and Berlin, there are drawings that bring to mind
kindergarten attempts or beer mat scribblings. They are lacy, done with a pale
coloured pencil, intimate, private and encoded. In their anti-monumentalism
they have the charm of pictorial stenogrammes, the freshness of snapshots
and the modesty of initial sketches. Only at second glance does the observer
realise that experienced hands are at work, which, instead of oil and acrylic,
prefer to gently articulate themselves. You have to grant their works a certain
premature confidence, bend down for a closer look and try to understand
them.
The same phenomenon can be observed in film, such as when a young lady
like Sophia Coppola in “Lost in Translation” puts the internal processes of
her unspectacular heroes in the limelight instead of all-consuming action
material. The sudden worldwide success of the Korean film also speaks in
favour of a transition of our cultural needs. The last Berlinale celebrated Im
Kwon-Taek with a retrospective and showed poetic films portraying a traditional
funeral ceremony or the mourning of a young love lost in the Korean
War, to full cinemas. The young Kim Ki-Duk also gained respect by telling
the story of a tiny Zen monastery on a remote island or of young lovers living
the life of nomads in the cities without exchanging even a word with each
other. Here the cosmopolitan world of consumption is challenged by a Zenlike
concentration and shamanistic transcendental moments.
Also Philip Gröning’s 3-hour long film about the silent monastery La Grande
Chartreuse wants to move away from the pull of hectic mobility. The beauty
of “The big sleep” lies in the venture to capture the senses of the audience
not through stringent action. Instead of being overwhelmed, the observer is
reminded of himself by the filming of the everyday life of the Carthusians.
The director says he would like to open a “room for resting”, in view of a
DORNBRACHT the SPIRITof WATER Beauty – the last Anarchy
world full of “panic hubs” and pass on the experience that the real present is
“pure luck”. All in all this cinema takes an unrelated look at the specific and
at life forms that elude the general standards of value and render themselves
vulnerable through their individualism, for part of beauty is the acceptance of
limitations. It is not obtrusive but leaves it to its counterpart to discover its
hot core. Perhaps it is plastic surgery that first enables us to realise the central
role that deviation plays in beauty. Faces given smoothness and symmetry by
wrinkle treatment or tightening resemble each other eerily. They often look
comical, rather like a parody of beauty. Tom Ford, who helped define the
course of the nineties as Gucci’s chef designer recently remarked that we are
fascinated by the exaggeration of form, by the large and pumped-up. It is not
only our cars that look like squat tanks, but also our lips, cheeks, breasts, and
bottoms look like blown-up cushions. The American misses the nuances of
manipulated beauty: “We are only used to looking at altered photographs and
in doing this, we have turned ourselves into solid forms. We look like comic
strip figures. But because for thousands of years we have studied what looks
human, artificial faces cannot convince us so easily.”
Meanwhile the natural face is becoming more and more a rarity and is already
gaining a certain cult status as a rarity. Yet Ford is not concerned with rarity
value but with genetic coding and instinct, which shied away from the empty
face, unchallenged. Our feelings are aroused by signs of life and character,
Phoenix 1
VERONIQUE BRANQUINHO, STATEMENTS 5
Photography Willy Vanderperre
115