Aesthetic Philosophy
November 18, 2008
Regarding my personal aesthetic philosophy I will begin with a clarifying and guiding statement that this shall be a short treatise on my process and system of perception and classification of sensations as beautiful. My semester long daily journal of beautiful experiences or “beauty log” will serve as supporting material through this discussion, despite the fact that it is scattered at best, by-and-large incongruous, and not to mention a forced exercise. There is no end in belaboring the point of the foolishness of the proceeding beauty log (as that task has already been carried out in the beauty log itself) so I will get right to the meat of the matter through the conclusions I can logically draw from my semester long exercise.
First, the perception of beauty has a relative quality and it is foremost relative to the psychological state of the perceiver. Discussion of this point could fill a slim volume but my page space is limited so I will concisely conclude this: when feeling overwhelmed or bogged down in day-to-day drudgery, experiencing the same surroundings and daily activities I find it impossible to perceive, let alone appreciate, beauty in the world. I believe this stems mainly from total mental preoccupation but also has roots in the mundane qualities of life as we know it.
Second, and ironically perhaps, the largest class of sensations I do perceive and classify as beautiful can be thought of as mundane. This class of sensations for me consists of those produced by things over which man-kind has no control other than our intense curiosity to know; natural processes large and small, from the subatomic dance of quarks and the images produced in learning them to the astronomically large structures of the universe. For lack of a better way of talking about it, I can say those things that fall between the categories of theoretical and observational science will tend toward classification as beautiful. I say for lack of a better way of talking about it because it is not the classification of natural phenomena I find beautiful but the images and theories produced in the search for classification that I find beautiful: the evidential by-products in the search for knowledge. These things are ironically mundane because most of our physical world can be deconstructed into constituent parts in search of understanding making beauty an easy thing to find if my mind is tuned to find it.
Third, there is a second class of objects or experiences that produce sensations I classify as beautiful that are strictly man made (at least until we discover intelligent life elsewhere in the universe). These objects are those things in which man-kind has created the kind of complexity one would otherwise expect only natural process might produce (barring discussion of man-kind as natural process). For instance, the Large Hadron Collider is a beautiful monument to human understanding and the Chronophage clock is an elegantly complex time piece. Machines, created by the hand of man in defiance of God as clockmaker make me stop and stare in awe and thus fall into the classification of the beautiful.
Lastly, there is a third class of objects or experiences that produce beautiful sensations. This class can best be described as the absurd. Finding a sailboat in a public fountain or seeing and experiencing a giant walking wind powered sculpture can best be described as absurd and also beautiful in the surreal quality it lends to an otherwise mundane existence. One will note that there are substantial overlaps and contradictions in the classes I have described in this brief summation. To this I can only reply that existence is a strange happening that we fail to understand and beauty is its misunderstood sidekick.

The title of this entry is a clever double meaning, and everyone loves a clever fucker. This is a rare day because I had two moments of beauty to comment on and in the interest of scientifically recording each one as a separate and isolated incident they earned each their own entry. The second one, strangely enough, happened first thing this morning when I checked my email. A fellow artist found my website while searching google for Golden Proportion Calipers. You will notice that I am way down on the second page of results but this California based painter emailed me anyway and asked if I sold my calipers and I said that I would to him if he wanted. Now for straightening the record, this is in no way an invention of mine, but rather an exercise I did a few years ago when I was pursuing some interest I had in the golden ratio. Anyway I’m going to make him a set, he even offered me a deposit. The internet is beautiful even in small ways.

I made my first ever spring catch today for a small box I have been working on. It is beautiful, and one of the most satisfying things I have done in a long time. Each time it snaps shut and re-opens my heart skips a beat and my mind is clouded with a euphoria better than most drugs could ever produce… most drugs.

I found a little beauty in the talkie-showie-box this evening. In a fit of recreation Crystle and I watched Alton Brown’s new mini-series “feasting on waves” which was a spin-off from his series “feasting on asphalt.” The premise of both series being finding good homemade food while on the go, be it on the road, or the high seas of the Caribbean. Without going into a whole lot of boring detail I will say this. He concluded the series with a statement about a wonderful meal being enhanced by the amazing people he was enjoying it with; people of a different race, ethnicity, culture and climate than his own but who obviously held very similar values, like one would expect of any good people around the world: the valued each other. Then I cried in the face of the homogenizing box before me; it was a beautiful moment. It was also ugly and disturbingly ironic to have a moment of beauty concerning the basic interconnectedness of all people on earth delivered through the most anti-social method possible: the television. The amazing contrast of seeing honestly happy people who live in relative destitution displayed through a technology so ubiquitous to our culture was beautifully disturbing and made me yearn for the lights to go out in the small hope that if the lights went out people might find one another again in the darkness. Maybe next year I’ll say dash this art shit and get as much money as possible together to buy a boat and start a charter boat service in the Caribbean.

I felt the first chill of crisp winter air this morning and it was breathtakingly beautiful, literally. I love winter: death to everything; the only way to witness rebirth in the spring. Wonderful.

Art almost made me puke today and I don’t think it was because I was overwhelmed by beauty. SOFA was like a sensory overload phantasmagorical cluster-fuck. Glass makes me want to vomit now, it seemed like all there was to see in that over oxygenated event hall. Although I may have figured out the trick to selling craft/art work to people: make it astronomically overpriced and they will figure its worth it. I swear the whole spectacle was a dance to see who could overvalue their work the most without going over some unspoken and unrecognizable limit. I found one artist who’s work I enjoyed very much, and I ran into a person I knew while in undergrad and I was happy to see him promoting his work with a Ferndale MI gallery. I attended two good lectures and Lisa Gralnick’s gold standard body of work was fantastic as a whole, although I am still a little uneasy about fictitiously historisized objects. Aside from those things the most beautiful part of the day was getting together with some old friends in Chicago away from the sensory overload of SOFA.

Citizens of the United States of America have spoken and the message is clear. This is a truly momentous occasion with Barack Obama a clear winner in our recent presidential election. I am elated and overwhelmed with joy. No longer will the grim specter of a John McCain/Sarah Palin presidency hang over us and now for the first time in eight years I honestly feel that some good might come out of our government. Hope shall replace anxiety, and that is a beautiful thing.

This has become a rarity and I can tell by my posting history that my mind is continuously and curiously drawn to the heavens. My favorite skeptic astronomer Dr. Philip Plaitt has posted one of the most breath-taking images I may have ever seen. I will show it to you before I describe its beauty.

This eerie image is many things but first it is credited to Justin Quinnell of Bristol UK and was published in New Scientist. The effect is a result of a fact theorized by Copernicus and later confirmed by Galileo which is that of the earth going ’round the sun. Taken with a pinhole camera over a period of six months this image shows a record of the sun’s path in the sky either from the winter solstice to summer solstice or the other way around, it seems impossible to tell. The wonderful arcs are a reminder of our dynamic universe which can be a terrifying and beautiful place. For the terrifying, read Death from the Skies by Dr. Philip Plaitt, , for the wonder read anything by Carl Sagan.. However I think this is more than even the venerable Phil Plait mentioned in his article because it is also a record of cloud cover during each day that the photograph was taken. If you look closely at some of the lines, they are broken which denotes a time when sunlight did not reach the film. In this case it may, in fact be possible to tell at least which months were covered by the photographer if you compared the sun record to the annual weather record which just might tell you the exact months in which the image was made, if weather patters in fall and spring were different enough. Fascinating, beautiful.

If you haven’t been to Walt Disney World or the great wide north that is the UP of Michigan, you can’t possibly understand what a small world is. Its people who look like menacing stiffly moving animatronic robots singing incomprehensibly of course. But it is also everyone you know knowing everyone else that you know without you introducing them or being aware that they all know one another. I had one of those small fucking world, “I can’t believe it” moments just recently, and for lack of a better word it was beautiful.

The story goes like this: my brother roomed with some people who went to Kalamazoo College while he was going to Western Michigan University for his Bachelor’s degree. One of those people was an artist and amazing musician named Scott and John played music with him for a while in a band called Office. (Seriously, click the link, listen to the music and gawk in wonder at the pop sensation and thoughtful lyrics.) Office is one of those music projects that, like a bad haircut or needy girlfriend, will probably never go away because it always finds new people to make music together, like an orgy that never really had a beginning and will never end. So it still exists in all its wonderful glory, only now in Chicago.

The story continues, like a Quentin Tarantino film, with a short rewind to my undergrad which I partially did in photography. At that time I met and became friends with another photographer, John Sturdy who I met smoking cigarettes in a shitty newspaper photo lab when he edited photography at the school newspaper. To skip some boring shit, his work has always amazed me and he photographed my wedding with Crystle shortly after he ended up in Chicago working for a commercial photo studio.

The small world moment comes in presently when my brother emails me to say that Office is coming out with a new album and its fucking amazing and low and behold Sturdy shot the cover art. Check it out, it will make you cry its so fucking beautiful. No, seriously, click that link and look at the first photo on the left, it will make you cry. Anyway, the guy on the left is Scott, who roomed with my bother, the photo was taken by John Sturdy, its amazing and you wish he had photographed your wedding. Personally, if I had one wish, it would be enough money to make John my full time staff photographer so when I die there is a little beauty left over as a by-product of my otherwise unremarkable life.

Small fucking world.

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s beautifully exciting conceptual development, I found today to be stifling, awkward and totally lacking in beauty. There is no beauty when I can’t find time to make or design my own art. How can I have time to appreciate beauty when I just spent an hour reading a useless New Yorker article about some random guy who made it as an art dealer and hired people to piss on his dinner guests at his gallery? The obvious answer is that there is no beauty and I don’t give a shit anymore. Here’s to Jeffrey Deitch for temporarily destroying my love of making things. Today art is nothing or at most being an unapologetic market manipulating capitalist low life.