9/100, When something's ugly, it's ugly

I spent Monday evening in conversation with BDSM model and author, Ariel Anderssen at London’s Last Tuesday Society. I will write more about it because Ariel is very wise about sex work, freedom, power and submission. I am too tired to form thoughts coherent enough for it to be something readable, but talking to her made me think of value judgements placed on art, and how often that judgement still harks back to the largely protestant culture we still find ourselves living in the shadow of in the UK.

There’s still an expectation art should be beautiful or useful, which is as dangerous as it is pernicious, especially if it’s an expectation placed on women’s work - how far have we come if we’re still expected to make something beautiful or acceptable? Especially when it can be argued that art is a bodily substitute. I think it’s bullshit. It’s regressive and unhelpful to place value judgements on art that are essentially moral judgements.

Again, I’m too tired to articulate much of this well, but in the spirit of the point I’m hoping to briefly make, something does not need to be beautifully said for it to be effective. The power of art lies in its ability to create surprise, often by misalignment or startling juxtapositions. The only time I’ve seen beauty used effectively recently was by Edward Burtynsky, which was really the whole point of his exhibition - he made our effect on the planet beautiful as a way of creating shock. Beauty was the surprise, and in finding the ugly beautiful, our own shame was exposed, making the viewer after think twice about aesthetic judgements.

To demand beauty is to run into problems. How many ways can you say I don’t love you anymore beautifully? Or is it more beautiful to be honest? Would it be ugly to prevaricate? I often come back to Patricia Lockwood on this, either it’s beautiful or it isn’t, you can’t make it sound beautiful (I paraphrase, I am excruciatingly tired). I’d go further, to expect something ugly to be beautiful is to infer there’s a shame attached to the ugly remaining simply ugly. Shklovsky is useful here, art exists to make the stone more stony; we don’t ask the stone to become something else.

And since both beautiful and ugly are only aesthetic judgements, who decides what’s ugly or what’s beautiful? Culture leads here, and since culture is still lead by our religious hangover, aesthetic judgements are also moral judgements. Beauty is also a class judgement. Let’s not get into that. Or maybe, let’s.

If criticism or value is reduced to solely aesthetic qualities, it reduces the potential and the power of the thing. I’m thinking of Lockwood again here and her poem, The Rape Joke. If we expect poetry to be beautiful, then we demand Lockwood writes something beautiful about something terrible; I can’t think of a more immoral or illogical demand. And where does it stop - do we then demand the same of photojournalism? The expectation of beauty is myopic at best, tyrannical at worst. The Zone of Interest is useful here; Hedwig Hoss insisted that her family’s life be beautiful as a way of absolving herself of the crimes it was predicated on, in this way insistence on beauty becomes a corruption of its own.

If there’s value to be found in an increasingly pointless endeavour, and make no mistake, I do consider a lot of my work to largely be pointless, the value perhaps lies in the lack of dressing up. Allow the thing to exist on its terms and sure, sometimes it might sound beautiful and sometimes it might sound ugly, but to exist as an artist and only make what’s popular or acceptable or what makes me sound nice or appealing, would be to undergo a type of creative death, which leads me to thinking of Ted Hughes who I’m sure said similar, which leads me to thinking of Rob Doyle which leads me to thinking of Jenny Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays but I’m going to stop right here and explain this part another time. Oh lucky people.