Venus in Exile by Steiner Wendy

Author:Steiner, Wendy [Steiner, Wendy]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2001-10-23T16:00:00+00:00

In this passage, beauty is either harmonious and symbolic of social peace and stability, or it is a mitigation of death and loss. In both cases — as a vision of a utopian order or a refuge from the unendurable here and now — beauty flies from real-world agency. It is always the “not here” — the harmony that will exist only in an ideal future, the transcendence that exists only as a delusory escape from an intolerable present. As long as beauty is understood in Kantian terms, this separation from agency will prevail.

But if the experience of beauty is located in less pure states of mind, its efficacy will be proportionally greater. Ornament, paradoxically, is an opening to such impurity, and symbolizing beauty as woman — a fully realized female subject and not a merely passive object — would be a further step toward an efficacious art. We can barely describe at this point what the impurity of efficacy would do to our sense of artistic beauty, in part because of our automatic distaste for the “vulgarity” of such an aesthetics. But if we could see woman-as-agent as beautiful — Olympia as a person and a nude — we would be on the right track.

James Hillman insists that opening up the topic of beauty, previously “perverted by the fascist appropriation of the subject,” is “reclaiming for the democratic tradition some of the abandoned terrain.”37 This would seem to be a crucial undertaking for art, for women, and for democracy. But so far, it has been hard to disconnect beauty from objectivization and oppression. The female subject in particular, as we have seen, provokes the fears of well-intentioned people on all sides — feminists, art experts, political activists — and so the use of the female subject as a symbol of artistic beauty still might appear a retrograde, repressive enterprise.

The tenacity of the modernist legacy in this respect is striking, an unquestioned orthodoxy that pervades our culture. How many recent films have been made about the threat of the beautiful woman: Dangerous Beauty, Fatal Attraction, Fatal Obsession, American Beauty? Marie Ponsot, a prize-winning poet in her late seventies, says that her poems “are meant to be beautiful. That’s a very unfashionable thing to say. So unfashionable. Transgressive.”38 Jorie Graham names a recent book of her poetry The End of Beauty. When the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron create dazzlingly beautiful surfaces, “contemporaries like Rem Koolhaas have questioned their work’s intellectual substance. Can truly good architecture use decoration so blatantly? Can it be so happily sensuous? Can it be so attractive?” All the modernist enmity toward ornament and allure is evident here, with the prejudice against craft following in quick order: “Should Herzog & de Meuron be designing a line of clothing or fabrics instead?”39

Architecture is the art in which this Frankenstein aesthetics remains most persistent. A shockingly literal instance was a 1999 exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London called “Cities on the Move: Urban Chaos and Global Change — East Asian Art, Architecture and Film Now.

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