Paper short abstract:

This presentation suggests considerations of the term/ word, idea/notion/ conception, necessarily questioning its conceptual validity, if not also its purpose.

Paper long abstract:

Like the term landscape, we each know what beauty means in passing. In a reflection of landscape, we make landscape. Conflating beauty and landscape, we may find it in the curve of a body of a hill and valley - as a felt expression we may (or may not) share. The artist Peter Lanyon expressed this as feeling that took him in imagination from a partner’s armpit to the countryside. Perhaps we simply feel beauty; or make it up, make it what we want it to be. This may happen in an everyday way: not universally agreed, but to oneself and perhaps others it is known; perhaps only shared in a rather hazy way. Trying to set a conceptualisation of beauty tends to produce nausea; one feels blocked. Pursuing this line of thought we may readily agree that beauty can be culturally asserted, categorized. Colouring, styling, eating etiquettes, learnt ‘skills’ to use beauty as a commodity set to serve the interests of a particular group, culture, or practice. Social hierarchies: even in admired artwork beauty divides, constructs status, positions human beings in a scalar hierarchy. Perhaps beauty turns out to be a very third-order term/word etc. it is used to assert superiority, when there may be much deeper essentials through which that status is imagined, pursued. The discussion may counterpose authors such as Mikel Dufrenne, who approaches beauty through phenomenology and Kenneth Clarke (partly thanks to John Berger’s critical exposures) who saw in artwork marks of a particular hierarchical categorisation of civilisations, of cultures, of societies, of human beings. Following the work of the former writers such as Ben Anderson and Yves Lomax - who works this feeling in her autobiographical accounts of doing artwork. Pursuing Deleuze, O’Sullivan moves to ignore the established claim of ‘the right way to see a painting’ and instead opens the space to what and in what way the individual who encounters an artwork brings her or his life into it. Maybe at best, beauty, like many other terms that have been seen as set categories, criteria, inherent character emerge at best as a very ‘smudged’ category, denying labelling. Since antiquity imagined, or constructed, as of being, existence organised, perhaps beauty is more of becoming. The spoken part of the presentation is accompanied by or accompanies a collection of visual images. These are some 30 images simply chosen from my own artwork on jpegs. These are Not declared as beautiful to anyone, perhaps not even to me as artist. They may resonate beauty; the one who encounters them may resonate beauty on them, even just one. They are not dogmatic. The sequence of images, of which there could be dozens, could (hypothetically at this stage) be shown on a steady sequence as given without any need to ensure direct association of any particular part of the presentation: the two, text and images, mutually inform.