Beauty Unlimited

Introduction

1 We are more than a full decade into the new millennium and, inevitably , the world has become smaller, more complex, and immanent. Post9 /11, we live daily with the “war” on terror. An image of a veiled woman is fraught with political overtones, yet stunning in its starkness, simplicity, and evocation of beauty that is innocent and long gone (plate 1). Try to ignore world events, debates over nuclear proliferation, arguments over immigration, battlegrounds of ethnic cleansing, strategies for economic recovery, and you will appear out of touch and indifferent. Assert your self, your home state, or your country as superior and someone—somewhere —will invariably challenge your claim on the grounds of economic, political, or religious principles. YouTube, 24/7 news, blogs, Twitter, and iPhones allow people across the globe to access one another, at least on a technological level, thereby making all of us Other. Visually, we can never go back. Isolationism is naïve in an era of collapsing Twin Towers, the tortures at Abu Ghraib, and extraordinary rendition. We enjoy—or endure—a new era of representation, artistic production, and aesthetics. Images abound; we cannot escape their impact. Is it a brave new world or one of bravado and abandoned beauty? Beauty must compete with the horrors of the world as well as the images that we are not allowed to see.1 How do we see and process world events, such as the quiet and unremarkable return of a woman to her home devastated by war (plate 2)? Is beauty relegated to the scrap heap or insistently, perhaps even unintentionally , ever-present? Introduction peg zeglin brand 2 PEG ZEGLIN BRAND Consider a comparison of two prime ways we as viewers might choose to perceive an image of such an event: as photo-documentary and as artistic vision. Plate 2, taken by photojournalist Michael Kamber, cannot help but portray a certain beauty of contrasts—the lone figure against the clutter of brick and stone, the vertical figure against the slope of a destabilizing horizon and clear blue sky—as well as an irony of reversals: the blackness of life against the whiteness of rubble and death. The photo was prominently placed on the front page of the New York Times on July 12, 2008, and its caption read, “Nafeeya Mohsin looked over what remained of her house last month, two days after returning to it in the village of Al Etha in Iraq.”2 Did Kamber intend to capture the haunting beauty he portrays, or is beauty far from his mind when he sets out to accurately document a moment in time? Moreover, how do we as viewers process the beauty we see: with despair? Disinterest? Or perhaps a bit of both? Compare the image in plate 3, which is uncannily similar. Three years earlier, video artist Lida Abdul had returned home to find whiteness and ruin as well, but, in her case, within her native Afghanistan.3 How does this portrayal of the lone dark figure amidst the whitened ruins of her former house compare? Does this work of “fine art” exhibit beauty better than the more recent journalistic photo? A sensitive observer would not presume so distinct a difference and would, I suspect, allow the artist to document and the journalist to beautify. As viewers who process and perceive beauty in the two photos, we might ask ourselves whether this beauty differs from past, traditional beauties we have come to enjoy for their pleasure(s) or their promise of happiness.4 What sorts of pleasure or happiness can be felt, if any? How is our perception of beauty in the second image informed by our knowledge of its title, White House—particularly once we know that Abdul spends the full five minutes of the video whitewashing (with a brush and a bucket of paint) architectural ruins? The term is, of course, ambiguous in meaning, vacillating as it does between the residence of the U.S. president who ordered the initial bombing of the Taliban in 2002–2003 (George W. Bush) and the resulting white rubble that underlies the action of the artist who whitewashes . To whitewash is to hide the truth about something or to cover up. Difficult questions like these can challenge the presumptions operative in our perception, (re)cognition, and interpretation of these images as examples of beauty. They are landscapes, but do not easily resemble idyllic scenes of the eighteenth century or the tempests of J. M. W. Turner. They...