About Beauty

ABOUT BEAUTY tk bout Beauty was a summer exhibition held S3 fa h N U tta 11 M\ in December 2007 and January 2008 at the m m Goodman Gallery Cape in Cape Town.1 Curated by Emma Bedford, it featured the work of nine artists: Frances Goodman, Joy Gregory, Robert Hodgins, William Kentridge, Vivienne Koorland, Penny Siopis, Kathryn Smith, Nontsikelelo Veleko and Sue Williamson. The exhibition was created in conversation with the book I edited, Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics.2 I was not involved in the conception and curation of the exhibition, but was invited to write this essay reflecting on the exhibition and its relationship to the project explored in the book. The book was based on an observation and a question. I began to notice how across the millennial years (roughly 1998 to 2003) beauty as an idea and a focus for aesthetic inquiry was once again being examined in Europe and America. Long relegated by modes of Marxist intellectual life to the 136* IMka Journal of Contemporary African Art Jo y Gr eg or y, Plaza de Espaha, Seville, 2 0 0 1 , Sou t h Af r ican edit ion 2 0 0 7 . From t h e series: Cinderella Tours Europe. C- print, 40.6 x 50.8 cm . Edit ion 1/ 3. Spring/ Summer 2008 N k a- 1 3 7 Jo y Gr eg or y, Silver Link, 2 0 0 3 , f r om t h e series: The Handbag Project. Salt print, 59.4 x 8 4 .1 cm . regressive and suspicious and encased in a moralizing obligation to "justify beauty," conversations about beauty had been, for many decades, almost entirely neglected. Added to this was modernism's virtual abandonment of beauty in favor of exploring notions of revulsion and disgust. With the demise of Marxism as a widespread social ideal and an academic practice and a less acrimonious politicization of theory, critics now began to herald the "return of beauty," but a beauty "of our own time or in our own sense."3 It seemed to point toward some of the shifting intellectual signs of our times. During a semester spent in the United States, I threw myself into reading this new work. Then came the question. None of the books I was reading, despite the vitality and interest of many of them, located their archive or concerns beyond the aesthetic production of Euro-America. Not one of them that I came across routed their theoretical enquiries through the aesthetic life of anywhere else—Africa, India, Brazil, Australia—in short, the South. Few displayed an interest in what a properly global epistemology might look like.4 It was strangely incurious and remarkably provincial —and just plain surprising, given the strides made in the academy during the last years of the twentieth century in decentering and transnationalizing international scholarship. The question then: What would debates about beauty look like—what shape would they take, and how could they shift and revise analyses emerging from the North—when routed through African material and African art practices in the broadest sense? That question was embedded in a wider one long asked by the continent's best intellectuals: how to study the sign of Africa as an aesthetic category ? The book made the argument that if we are to study the question of beauty—in this case in the context of Africa—then we had better consider it in intimate relation to ugliness. One reason for this was that beauty in Africa, as it has been understood by the world at large, has an ugly history. Both Africans and that which they have made have frequently been viewed in damaging, fundamentally racist ways. A second reason was that in contexts of poverty and distress, such as in many African contexts, the beautiful will stand in intimate relation to a socially inflected ugliness, the ugliness of dispossession. Thus the possibility arises, and is borne out in the book by many of the continent's artists, that African aesthetic production will reveal, in a self-referential and often ironic way, a play between the beautiful and the ugly. These artists will be acutely...