Putting Beauty In Its Place

By Rory A.A. Hinton

The Martyr Of Beauty - 2012

"It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident any more, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist." (Theodor Adorno)

The paintings of Xiao Guo Hui are a playful response to the modern idea that beauty is not the raison d'être of art. Beginning in the 1860s avant-garde artists made beauty a martyr for its cause by sacrificing it upon the altar of subjective experience. This singular act dismantled the idea that beauty is synonymous with artistic excellence, an idea that had been slowly evolving for over half a millennium (beginning with Plato's Republic and rising to its zenith in the art of the Christian religion). Nietzsche's claim that "Christianity is Platonism for the masses" sums up this history decisively. With the modern rejection of this ancient ideal, it was no longer art for art's sake, but art for artist's sake.
     Artists like Charles Baudelaire humanized art in the process, making it less ethereal and more visceral. By focusing their attention on the human subject, they made beauty truly belong to the eye of the beholder. So, when Xiao says that he does not want his work to be "seen apart, but rather for people to see themselves within it," he is echoing an old idea that the subject-matter of art is the only object-matter that matters. Nothing is "beautiful" apart from what our eyes consider to be beautiful things (breasts on a platter, no less).
     Baudelaire asks “What is pure art according to the modern idea?” His answer is instructive, and sums up how best to think of his work and what followed in its wake: “[Art] is to create a suggestive magic, containing at the same time the object and the subject, the world external to the artist and the artist himself.” Modern art is as romantic as it is real, as external as it is expressive, and as suggestive as it is subjective. Modern art is magic.
     This turn to the subject as the object of concern freed us to practice what Xiao calls "inventive thought and discernment." However, Xiao's insightful response to this story of martyrdom is to playfully argue through his discerning brush that while the modern avant-garde were right to reject beauty as the criterion of art, they were wrong to think that beauty was not an essential component of human life. Xiao knows it is. His paintings show that life has beauty because it is ugly, grotesque, macabre, deviant, pathological, and horrifying. 'Beauty' is a relative term. Winner's Game as Guantanamo Bay.

Winner's Game - 2011

       
     By putting beauty in its place among every other aspect of our experience, Xiao makes it possible for each of us to figure out how to live a beautiful life on our own terms (the only terms that matter). How is this done?
     The first step is to follow Xiao's historically sensitive lead in affirming beauty's modern displacement. Consider Edouard Manet's "beautiful" Olympia. It is rightly regarded among art historians as the first real modern painting. Why? It hints at the fact that such relative beauty has within it the seeds of its own subjective destruction. Notice the black cat at the right side of the canvas. If anything represents the harbinger of the disaster that is to befall the beautiful Olympia, it is this femme feline.
     For there will come a time when beauty's attendants won't notice her any longer, nor send her flowers, nor position her lying languidly on her bed as she stretches her sweet anatomy. She will no longer be art's darling. In The Martyr Of Beauty Xiao bears witness to the fact that this lost time has already come and gone. Beauty is not so picturesque as Olympia, nor should she be. Rather she is now sprawled out on an operating table like a cadaver waiting for an autopsy. Everyone else does everything but notice her (and rightly so), whether it is engaging in the play of sexual innuendo, or the work of necrotic analysis. Beauty is dead. Long live the beautiful.

Olympia - 1863

     This death should give us serious pause. If beauty is no longer art's reason for being, it cannot be used as the basis for determining what is a work of art from what is not. Xiao's work cannot be understood apart from this fact. If you look long enough at his paintings a curious sense of estrangement begins to demand your attention. This demand can be expressed in the form of a question: What makes The Martyr Of Beauty, or Winner's Game, or Unclothe Hercules art? Can we look at these paintings and find within them what we need to answer this question? Does Xiao's work wear its artistic essence on its canvased sleeve? In the post-Warhol era the answer to these last two questions is a decisive "No."
     What made Andy Warhol's Brillo Box so important in the history of modern art is that it was the culmination of art finally coming into critical consciousness. This "sculpture" raised within itself the question of what it is. Clearly in this case you can't point to further Brillo Boxes to determine which one is a sculpture and which one is merely a shipping container. In the Stable Gallery show of Warhol's work in 1964 art finally exhausted its own resources to define itself. Art raised the question of its own essence (Is the Brillo Box art?), but was incapable of answering it. At this point art and reality were indiscernible.
     "It has always been taken for granted that one could distinguish works of art from other things by mere inspection," Arthur Danto writes. "Now we know that this straightforward way of learning cannot work, and that the meaning of art cannot be taught by examples." How can it be taught? We need philosophy to answer this question.



     What makes Xiao's work important, and well worth collecting, is that it hints at a philosophy of play as the way to teach the meaning of art. "I am fascinated by play for I believe that only in play is our true nature revealed," Xiao writes. "I like to create a limitless playground where [the viewer's] imagination is free to envision endless possibilities and personal reflections." Painting is Xiao's playground of the imagination. It is only through a life of play that we can begin to figure out what makes life beautiful.
     Consider the card game as an example of what it means to play. This game runs as a theme through Xiao's work like a narrative spine. The card game in this context functions as a metaphor for the job of statistics: the taming of chance. To live a beautiful life is to tame chance. Of course one way to tame chance is to stack the deck. Even the mighty Hercules stands no chance against lady luck when she is both player and dealer. In the game of life we pay our money and we take our chances (especially when it comes to sex and romance). Xiao's The Martyr Of Beauty, Winner's Game, and Unclothe Hercules respect chance enough to play with it, and chance respects this play by allowing herself to be tamed by him and through them, at least until we are taught that art is getting away with surviving in style.

Unclothe Hercules - 2015

        I began this essay by stating that Xiao's work is a playful response to modern art. This is not the response. It is a response. In fact, it is my response to what I take to be Xiao's response. It is the product of my attempt to be inventive and discerning. This is as it should be. 

     I usually interview the artists I write about before I start an essay. But in this case talking to Xiao was not necessary. In talking to him I would only be confirming what I have already gathered from his paintings. By not talking to him I honor and respect his work. Even if I did talk to him about his paintings he would not be able to talk about them. Not really. Why? Because he does not fully understand one painting he has produced. No one does. Not even someone like Dali, who claimed that the reason why he never understood one of his paintings is because he only creates enigmas. 

Sources

Andy Warhol. The Philosophy Of Andy Warhol. Harcourt. 1975.
Arthur C. Danto. Beyond The Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective. The Noonday Press. 1992.

Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (eds). Modern Art And Modernism: A Critical Anthology. Harper & Row, 1987.

Frank Pavich. Jodorowsky's Dune. Sony Pictures Classics. 2013.
Friedrich Nietzsche. Beyond Good And Evil. Oxford Paperbacks. 2003. 

Peter Gay. Modernism - The Lure Of Heresy: From Baudelaire To Beckett And Beyond. Norton, 2008.

Plato. The Republic. Penguin. 1987. 

Theodor Adorno. Aesthetic Theory. University of Minnesota Press. 1998.

Xiao Guo Hui. Exhibition Catalogue.

© Christopher Cutts Gallery, 2015

Not So Mad Men

Rothko
Jacob Baal-Teshuva
Taschen
2003

Review by Rory A.A. Hinton

Rothko

The following quote from Rothko is worth the price of the book. It indicates just how divided the Abstract Expressionists were over the notion of worth. When it comes to the dividing line between creativity and commerce, you are either a Mark Rothko or a Barnett Newman. Rothko ended up on the right side of art history. His healthy bourgeois existence made the message of Pop Art possible: American capitalism is an artistic achievement. His art is as commercial as it is fine.

"After Rothko's art was declared to be a good investment by no less a financial authority than Forbes magazine, the relationship between Rothko and his uncompromising colleagues Still and Newman only worsened further in the mid-1950s. They accused Rothko of harboring an unhealthy yearning for a bourgeois existence, and finally stamped him as a traitor." 

Not So Mad Men

Sources
Jacob Baal-Teshuva. Rothko. Taschen. 2003. 

Chart Recognition

By Rory A.A. Hinton

Art is ...

Gekko's Nod To Warhol

My years as a fine art dealer led to my career as a futures trader. The art of the deal convinced me that the money I made meant more to me than the fine art did. This made me love art more, and for the right reason. Warhol's claim that art is what you can get away with helped me understand that by trading dealing for hedging as a way to make my living, I was merely moving from one artistic market to another. I was not leaving art behind, I was just doing art differently. Art dealing and futures trading are nothing but related ways to get away with sum things. Gekko knows.

My father knew too. He traded stocks. After he died my mother told me that he ran a stock trading club for his fellow employees at IBM where he worked as a mechanical engineer. This made retrospective sense since as a kid I remember him taking notes while reading stock market reports after dinner. He was preparing for something, obviously. I once asked him what the market was about. With an omniscient grin on his face he replied that it was "all about psychology." He was exaggerating, but he made it easier for my young eyes to see the charts he examined as the patterned psychological product of supply and demand decisions between buyers and sellers (guided by fear, greed, and ignorance). To recognize a chart is to recognize the patterns it presents.

Japanese-Canadian abstract artist Kazuo Nakamura (1926-2002) made the remarkable claim that the artist and the scientist do the same thing but in different ways: they recognize patterns in nature. A universal pattern that symmetrically exists in nature makes it possible for string painters and string theorists alike to equally contribute toward our collective understanding of the universe (Nakamura's string paintings predate string theory by at least fifty years). This leads Nakamura to conclude that art is nothing but "the total activity of man." This totality includes trading. 

Nakamura Meets The Nasdaq

Traders who analyse market charts for a living are doing the same thing as physicists, painters, and even psychiatrists (since the market is "psychological" by definition). Chart analysis is nothing but the activity of recognizing patterns in nature. In this economic case they are supply and demand patterns created by individuals without and within financial institutions. What made me see my work in aesthetic terms was the realization that charting is part of Nakamura's total activity of the human species. This too is art.

My trading platform has drawing tools. Each morning before the market opens, I draw. I bring up the chart for the asset class I trade and draw lines and shapes on it (horizontal, vertical, diagonal, circular and rectangular). I draw lines indicating the Globex highs and lows from the previous evening of trading, lines showing the trading highs and lows of the previous day, lines pointing to the price at which my asset class closed the day before, and the present day opening price when the market opens. This graphical information helps me recognize the supply and demand zones I use to make trades (whether short or long depending on market trends). Here is a minimalist sample from the S&P 500 (my almost empty canvas, as it were, before I mess it up):

Abstract Chart

   







   




I can't draw, not really. But I can trace. The tracings I create for a living contribute toward the total activity of the human species. They also chart capitalist patterns of human consumption in a way that must be understood in artistic terms. Of course, the art dealer in me thinks I should cash in on the art of chart recognition by creating a new abstract chart market (chart art). And the artist in me agrees. I am an abstract chartist.

Sources
Andy Warhol. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001.
Ihor Holubizky. Kazuo Nakamura: The Method Of Nature. The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2001.
Oliver Stone. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. 20th Century Fox. 2010. 
Richard William Hill. Kazuo Nakamura: A Human Measure. Art Gallery Of Ontario, 2004.