two images, in particular, are emblematic of the unsuspected relationships that emerge: the jellyfish and the pentagram.
on the show in Chatham, Ontario/Canada:
The Jellyfish and the Pentagram:
Reflections on beauty as longing and renewal
What is beauty? This is a perennially difficult question to answer. The word “beauty” is derived from the Greek term “kalos,” suggesting “delightful,” “fine,” “excellent.” But, of course, beauty has many forms and meanings in different cultures, at different times and places, and amongst different peoples: it can be real, physical, and tangible as well as imagined, virtual, and ethereal; and it might be embodied in a person or thing or expressed more abstractly as an idea or fantasy. The Oxford English Dictionary offers a series of definitions for beauty, including the perfection of form and charm of colouring which affords keen pleasure to the senses or charms the intellectual and moral faculties; the prevailing fashion or standard of the beautiful; the abstract quality personified; a beautiful person or thing, especially a beautiful woman; a beautiful feature or trait. These definitions suggest that perfection, charm, grace, fashion, and femininity are the pleasure-giving aspects of beauty, all qualities that in one way or another produce delight, excitement, and gratification while also stirring the desire to experience these sorts of feelings over and again. And that’s the conundrum, for our delight in beauty seems to be a temporary satisfaction that only acquires the appearance of permanence through a continual longing for more. We want to replicate the feeling we associate with beauty – that delicious, dizzying moment of being overwhelmed by our senses – because, quite simply, it thrills us but also eludes us. How, then, can we explain our relationship to beauty?
Browsing Beauty, by artists Andrea Sunder-Plassman and Sigi Torinus, doesn’t seek to resolve or smooth over the difficulties of defining beauty, but instead explores the tensions and contradictions that emerge when formal and unfamiliar conceptions of beauty are juxtaposed together. Using a website as their studio space, these artists create a deliberate work-in-progress, an aesthetic experiment that models and locates beauty in spatial and technological terms. Earlier exhibitions in Sydney and San Francisco (1997), and Moscow and Berlin (1998) addressed themes of intimacy, nostalgia, identity, magic and pleasure, whereas the new installation at the Thames Art Gallery Chatham (Oct 30 - Nov 29, 2009) ponders the importance of longing, migration, renewal, and the duality of North and South to our experience of beauty. Images of jellyfish and scientific formulae (of, for example, the hyperbola, pentagram, and logarithmic spiral) are projected onto the surface of three huge balloons and interspersed with recordings of migratory birds in flight, the breaking waves of the ocean, snow and lush vegetation, a butterfly, sea creatures, and so on. At the same time, a soundtrack whispers ideas about beauty that fascinate a mathematician alongside the physical expression of these ideas in sign language, and handwritten ideas of beauty collected from respondents in the local region and from the internet (via a call on Akimbo and the artists’ website) are relayed onto the walls. This is a visceral and active rendering of beauty which navigates the border between our individual sensory experience and the diversity of languages that we use to describe that experience. The panoply of symbols, words, patterns, and sounds is initially more bewildering than beguiling for it’s hard to focus on one motif without getting distracted by a series of others. But it’s also immensely playful in its use of media technologies to convey the ephemeral and random nature of beauty. Nothing is stable, fixed, or still, and the effect is quite unsettling; we try to grasp an image before it evaporates while at the same time wondering how to make sense of it all.
It’s clear from the form as much as the content of the exhibition that the artists don’t want to simply affirm established categories of understanding or conventions of meaning for beauty—and the traditional distinction between the philosophical idea of beauty and the historical study of works of art isn’t remotely relevant. Rather, as the title of the exhibition indicates, we are invited to browse. Alluding to the now-common practice of surfing the worldwide web, browsing involves reading, looking, scanning, or grazing so as to discover the things you know you do not know and the things that you do not know you do not know. This sounds like a paradox, but, of course, we browse – shops, the internet, television, libraries, museums, newspapers, parties, markets, social networking sites, and so on – in order to fill time and find things out; sometimes we want to inform ourselves about a matter of curiosity or interest, and oftentimes we acquire ideas and/or objects by serendipity, only to later discard them. Thus to browse beauty is by no means a straightforward activity: it might be an act of discovery that seeks to connect the intimate and bizarre worlds of our imaginative lives, but it could also be a superficial act, little more than skimming over the surface of things. How, therefore, should we proceed? Where do we begin? And when do we end? How do we explore? And what are we exploring? I’d like to suggest that two images, in particular, are emblematic of the unsuspected relationships that emerge when browsing beauty: namely, the jellyfish and the pentagram. What if the jellyfish and the pentagram are metaphors for beauty? How might they speak to our desire to capture, contain, and preserve beauty?
Let’s consider the jellyfish first. A symmetrical and virtually transparent marine creature, the jellyfish is a free-swimming member of the phylum Cnidaria and Scyphozoa class. Known for their capacity to sting, jellyfish are fragile creatures that go through a number of changes in their life cycle (usually planula, polyp, and ephyra) until they reach the final and most recognizable medusa form. Yet the complexity of their life cycle belies the simplicity of their body. For jellyfish have a network of nerves but no brain, nor a specialized circulatory, digestive or respiratory system; they react to external stimuli through a “nerve net,” which is composed of tentacles that transmit impulses through the bell-shaped body in order to sense other animals and catch prey. Moreover, jellyfish are composed of approximately 95% water and move on a vertical plane, relying on currents and tides to stay suspended, but they’re also incredibly prolific and multiply in large numbers. It’s not often that we have the chance to appreciate the strange beauty of jellyfish in their natural environment; more commonly, we might see them in the shallow waters of the ocean—and it can be a painful, and sometimes dangerous, encounter.
The pentagram is an altogether different form. Sometimes described as an endless knot, and often called a “pentacle” or “star pentagon,” the pentagram is a five-pointed figure produced by extending the sides of a regular pentagon until they intersect with one another. A pentagram includes ten isosceles triangles, five of which are acute and five obtuse, and so calls to mind the Pythagorean theorem, which states that in a right-angled triangle the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the other two sides. There’s much controversy as to whether the theorem existed before Pythagoras, but what’s important is the role of the Pythagoreans in elaborating a theory of numbers to comprehend the cosmos. Often associated with magic and the occult, the pentagram has long been used in religious faiths, literature, and pagan rituals as an expression of, for instance, the five planets, the five wounds of Christ, the five senses, the golden ratio, the five Classical (water, earth, fire, spirit, air) and also Chinese (fire, earth, metal, water, wood) elements, the five virtues of Knighthood, Venus, and so on. Above all, the abstract beauty of the pentagram depends on a visual illusion, because it looks as if it forms a continuous line with no obvious beginning or end and therefore suggests infinity.
The jellyfish and the pentagram present an intriguing duality: on the one hand, there’s the shape-shifting, transparent, curvy jellyfish, at once mysterious and dangerous; and, on the other hand, the pointed, dimensional pattern of the pentagram, both austere and mystical. Drawn from the natural world and mathematical symbolism, these two images give shape and substance to the experience of beauty in the exhibition while also, and importantly, extending beyond its bounds. The artists may have prompted us to think about the ways in which longing and renewal are part of our everyday experience of the beautiful, but there’s certainly no grand thesis about truth and virtue, nor any attempt to impose definitive or absolute meanings; instead, we encounter versions of beauty that are partial, contingent, and impermanent. Thus the task of interpretation is firmly in our hands, and we’re compelled to navigate through verbal and visual forms, revolving in a seemingly random loop, in search of our own understanding. We could think about the project as a whole as an attempt to democratize beauty, encouraging us to play with definitions and dualities as well as perspective and scale via a multi-media format. Yet we must not forget that the jellyfish and the pentagram are representations - like everything else in the exhibition, and on the website - that act and speak on behalf of beauty. If we’re intrigued and perplexed by beauty, it’s surely because we want it to be meaningful in some way or another, possibly as pleasure, attraction, happiness, or even perfection. We therefore translate it into an expression of value for the ideas and things that matter to us. Perhaps that, in the end, is the purpose of Browsing Beauty: to enlarge the impressions and illusions that are constitutive of beauty and leave us free to decide what, if anything, to make of them.