This piece was originally posted in January of 2008.
Beauty is a fateful gift of the essence of truth, and here truth means the disclosure of what keeps itself concealed. The beautiful is not what pleases, but what falls within that fateful gift of truth which comes to be when that which is eternally non-apparent and therefore invisible attains its most radiantly apparent appearance.
Martin Heidegger, What is called Thinking?
Heidegger’s concern with beauty here has its essence in Humanity’s relation to its own quest for self knowledge. The quest to understand the Self, that true and unwavering quest is itself the essence of Beauty. He calls this unique human essence Dasein, that which is concerned with its own being. Beauty then, is the clear and unadulterated understanding, or quest for that essence.
When he takes up the issue of art it is most often through poetry. Or poetry as the essential in a poetic understanding of the world. But it is that larger poetic understand of the world that is key. When Keats claims that “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all // Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” he is speaking here to that same essential mode of being, that poetic worldview. But is this “truth” the truth of the poem, or the Grecian Urn for which the poem was written. Or was the Urn itself a mere tool for which the poem may express some larger understanding of the world?
These questions are inherent to the making of art. Surely one can make a piece of art, be it a poem, a painting, photograph or piece of theater and be unthinking in that action. Such a work may even point to some aspect of truth. But such unthinking works rarely tend towards that poetic essence whereby some larger truth is found and some deeper understanding of the Self and its relation to the world is made manifest.
In Architecture of Authority, Richard Ross explores the poetic beauty of post-modern fascist architecture in contemporary culture. In this book he is exploring spaces that, rather than being pure in themselves and allowing the person experiencing them to create their own relation to the space, force a particular mode of relation onto the individual. Prisons, courtrooms and psych wards are explored, but so too are a Chelsea gallery and Montessori Preschool.
In fact, his work calls into question the very idea that fascism and control are mechanisms and tactics perpetrated by individuals at the upper echelons of power. Rather they are ubiquitous throughout culture and humans, at every level of culture and development, create spaces wherein the control and manipulation of their fellow being can occur.
Through his lens these spaces of torture and control, of confinement and terror, become at once beautiful and horrifying. It is as though he has seen the essential truth of the politics of control and captured it here in his book. But more than that, the aesthetics that underlie these spaces are the same design sense that one finds in Ikea furniture, or the structure of an Ikea store itself.
His work begs the question wherein does this Beauty lie? For to most of us, I would presume, a prison is not a beautiful space. Yet Ross captures some essential beauty in his photographs. It seems then that the beauty lies not so much in the thing itself but in Ross’ unique relationship to contemporary fascistic control. Beauty is that which is contained in the worldview of the observer, in the relationship and continual dialog between observer and observed.
The photograph is a visual representation of the relationship of the photographer to its subject. The beauty lies not so much in either of those, but rather in the energy created through this relatedness. For a worldview can not exist in a vacuum, it must, by its very nature have a world to resonate off of, to shape and be shaped by. So too can the world not fully exist in an existential sense without a viewer to complete the relationship. A world is a container and that container is empty without that which it contains.
The world, to return to Heidegger, conceals that which exists only in relation to the viewer, to the subject. But that which exists in the relationship between the viewer and the subject is in turn concealed by the subject’s own subjectivity. Just as the manner in which fundamental particles are measured in physics causes their very nature to change, so too does the subject’s subjective viewing of the world cause that which would be revealed to withdraw once more into concealment.
The world is a collaborative space. It takes the work of every man, woman, child, animal, plant and fungus to make it what it is. The aesthetics of control have pervaded our society so deeply that the same clean lines of the new chic apartment, or commercial play, are those same lines found in the jail cells of the Guantanamo detention facility. We have already bought in to the aesthetics of control. What we have not yet given up fully is our relatedness to that world.
