ART IN MARCH: FURTHER REFLECTIONS ON BEAUTY

NIGHT JOURNEYS: BRENTON HAMILTON & DON HANSON
On view at the Hay Gallery in Portland, Maine
From March 3 to March 28, 2004

NEW WORK BY LUCINDA BLISS
On view at the Hay Gallery in Portland, Maine
From March 3 to March 28, 2004

By Laurie Meunier Graves

Lately, I have been thinking about beauty and art. Not long ago, I wrote about it at some length in an essay about an Eliot Porter photography exhibit at the Portland Museum of Art, and in truth, I thought I was done with this subject for awhile. In the Eliot Porter essay, I concluded that beauty was not enough, that there had to be something more for a piece, whatever the medium, to be art. I seem to be a writer who enjoys making pronouncements, because in another essay, I decided to tackle the definition of art itself: “Art…is the union of mind and imagination coming together to make something that provides illumination—religious, mythic, or secular. The greater the mind and the imagination, the greater the art.” I realize, of course, that this matter is far from settled, but I thought it might be time to move on to safer topics.

Well, March is here, the most unbeautiful month in Maine, a time when tempers are short and the snow is a hard, ugly clump that taunts all but the most optimistic personality. It seems like an inappropriate time to return to the notions of beauty and art, but one book and two art exhibits have, in synchronistic fashion, brought me back to the subject. As a result, I am considering the topic yet again, and I’m beginning to suspect that I’m not done with it, not by a long shot. Perhaps I never will be.

In Just Looking: Essays on Art, John Updike describes going to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City when he was a young writer. To him, the experience was almost sacred, and the museum was “a temple where I might refresh my own sense of artistic purpose, though my medium was words.” So far, so good. In going to far less grand museums and galleries, I have often felt the same way, and I’m guessing the same is true for many writers, great and small. Words are indeed our medium, the way we explore the world, but there is something undeniably thrilling about seeing artists doing the same thing with images rather than with words.

Then Updike writes, “[I]t was among the older and least ‘modern’ works in the museum that I found most comfort, and the message I needed: that even though God and human majesty…had evaporated, beauty was still left, beauty amid our ruins, a beauty curiously pure, a blank uncaused beauty that signified only itself.”

Here we are, back to beauty, apparently a requirement for Updike, at least in his younger days. Religious and humanist art might be gone, but beauty remained as a sort of consolation, and Updike uses Cézanne’s Pines and Rocks as an example. Yes, Pines and Rocks is beautiful, but it also has something more, which Updike describes as “ardor,” and without this ardor, the painting would only be lovely. It would be decorative perhaps, but it wouldn’t be art.

Even as he has aged, it seems that Updike can’t let go of the notion of beauty and art and because of this, can “not adjust to artworks that lay on the floor, bricks and tiles and coils of ropes that could be accidentally kicked. Outside the museum, on Fifty-third Street and beyond, the world changed…” Indeed it has. We are in the atomic age, and there is no turning back. It is, as the saying goes, a bitter pill to swallow, but swallow it we must if we are going to survive. And, as is quite often the case, artists are the first to swallow. Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were among the first to reflect this new sensibility, and the art they made is fascinating but not beautiful.

The same is true of current art in Maine as well as in the rest of the United States. At the Hay Gallery in Portland, Maine, there are exhibits that are perfect examples of this contemporary aesthetic. None of these exhibits are what you would call beautiful, but each, in its own way, is fascinating, and in varying degrees, even illuminating.

In the Night Journeys exhibit, Brenton Hamilton, with his cyanotype on paper technique, comes the closest to beauty. According to the gallery’s handout, Hamilton uses “a nineteenth century technique [and] coats his paper with a photosensitive chemical and then exposes it to the light of the sky for several days.” Afterward, he uses “text, appropriated imagery, and drawn elements” to achieve an effect that is best described as dreamy and otherworldly. Many of these large pictures are predominately blue, which only serves to emphasize the archetypal, nighttime quality of the work.

In one picture (Obscura), a man has lines and angles drawn from his eye. The lines and angles converge on an arrow, and Obscura has a Leonardo da Vinci feel to it, man and science coming coolly together. In others, there are figures with various floating spheres and shapes, all in that deep lovely blue. At the same time, these pictures have a serene, disquieting aspect, and it is this quality that prevents them from descending into mere beauty.

My favorite, Poet of Levitation, has a more Eastern approach but has the same serene, disquieting aspect that the others have. A large Buddha-like head floats among not lotus leaves but rather cyclamen leaves. The butterfly-shaped flowers flutter above the head, and the whole plant, roots and all, is lifting into space, leaving behind the landscape and perhaps its own grave.

Exhibiting with Brenton Hamilton is Don Hanson, who also uses photographic techniques in his work. Hanson’s series of large, striking pictures have an Egyptian motif, using insects, birds, and hieroglyphs. The groupings of crows, beetles, dragonflies, and stiff little humans give the work a very specific, formal feeling. We know this imagery, if only through books and movies, and it brings to mind a time of heat and sand and sun. As such, even though they evoke an ancient time that is long gone, they do not have the moody, dreamy feel that Hamilton’s work has. One is extraverted; the other is introverted. As is so often the case in art (but, alas, not in real life), the introvert trumps the extravert. Although Hanson’s work is good enough, the eye keeps returning to Hamilton’s deep blue pictures and floating figures.

Then there is Lucinda Bliss’s new work, tucked in a smaller gallery behind the Night Journeys exhibit. Bliss has taken two books—Diary of a Provincial Lady by E. M. Delafield and The Meaning of Anxiety by Rollo May—and after reading them, she disassembled them, transforming them “into drawing pages as coats of gesso were painted over parts of the original documents. After a process of reading, writing, and sketching, a series of drawings emerged…”

I must admit I’m not entirely comfortable with this “disassembling” process. To me, the book is a nearly perfect form that doesn’t need to be tampered with. Also, taking apart a book brings to mind book burnings, repression, and censorship, all of which are anathema to anyone who believes in the freedom to “report the universe,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it.

On the other hand, I realize I might be a little too squeamish about this. Why not use a book as part of artistic exploration, even it means taking that book apart? Especially when, as in the case of Lucinda Bliss, the results are so fascinating. In the process of disassembling, she has assembled her own story which might be called “The Age of Anxiety.” In two large pieces—Cortical Control and The Meaning of Anxiety—the pages have been assembled quiltlike and are peppered with snippets from the text showing through the gesso. Here’s a little something from Kierkegaard: “I would say that learning to know anxiety is an adventure.” If so, it’s an adventure with which many of us are well acquainted, especially in this atomic age. There are also animals—among them a large, fluid wolf and an elephant.

Bliss uses a different approach in Diary of a Provincial Lady, a series of fifteen small wood-framed pictures. In one, there’s a brain in underwear with a phallic brain stem. In another, a pile of plates and dishes. But brains figure heavily in this assemblage. In one picture, the brain has become a sort of octopus, and still another has socks floating around it. The whole thing has a surreal look, yet at the same time, feels very specific. Could this have been retitled "Notebooks of a Provincial Gentleman"? No, it could not. It centers on the concerns of women, past and present.

All the works have the feel of a feverish imagination, yet there is also a sense of tight control. It’s an arresting combination, and it produces a nice tension in the pieces. Bliss’s work is not pretty, but there is an artistic exploration of ideas and the world that stays with the viewer.

This brings us back to beauty. In these exhibits, would there have been any benefit if the pieces were beautiful? My answer is no. Art can be beautiful, but it doesn’t have to be, and it should not be a condition. Beauty is neither necessary nor sufficient. 

 

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