New Version

Bonsai Ethiopia : A esthetic Beauty and Artistic Beauty

[A Diversion from Fixation on Politics]

By Tecola W. Hagos

I. Introduction

In an earlier article, I had narrated about my visit to the National Arboretum in North-East DC . Because I started out being overwhelmed with the Bonsai Garden and the majesty of the Pine and the Oak trees and the colorful Azalea, I decided to investigate up close the concept of �beauty� and the idea of the �sublime� in our contemporary discourse. Even thinking in those terms left me feeling that I might as well be dressed in velvet with tight fitting silk breeches stepping out from the period about the end of the Enlightenment or even further back from the ancient world dressed in Roman Toga. 

For our contemporary artists the term �beauty� let alone the concept of the beautiful ever enter their vocabulary. The other day I was watching a taped interview/statement of Julie Mehretu, the �American� artist, on occasion of the opening of her exhibition of six of her recent works at the Guggenheim Museum NYC, May 14 to October 6, 2010.  What is striking is how very little there was in her statements on the treatment of the subject of �beauty� in her paintings. She frequently used terms like �geometric abstraction,� �developing a language,� �ghost image,� �intuition� et cetera, and these are familiar sounding terms but used in a supporting role in earlier discourses. All of her focus was on her craftsmanship and execution. There is no attempt to share the inner impulse as to what is her aspiration in her work.

Of course, it will be foolish to expect a full fledged answer on that from any artist. �Content� in contemporary art could only be understood as the presentation itself. There is no moralization, symbolization, or representation of some grand revealed truth. Despite the fact that architectural drawing dominated her work, it is obvious that her attempt is not to recreate blue-prints of beauty. Immensity as an art form has been in practice for thousands of years�the Pyramids and Stonehenge are living evidence. In our own modern era we could start with Mount Rushmore�s massive sculpted faces of four United States Presidents, and move on to temporal environmental art pieces where we had whole sea-shore dyed, entire country side wrapped in fabric et cetera. For example, there were memorable works that clearly illustrate the sublime in art, such as Robert Smithson�s sculpture Spiral Jetty (1969); Christo and Jeanne-Claude�s Running Fences (1976) et cetera. There we see the effort in creating the sublime by extension. I think of Julie Mehretu�s humongous tableaux in the same vein.

The �end of art� as the philosopher Danto sensed would happen in the individuated artist separated from society even from patrons, adored and held in a golden chalice untouchable and fabulously wealthy as part of the money making setup of the public-relation world. The suffering-artist can only be found in narrative works of legends. If I am as courageous as I am cynical, I would say that Danto got it wrong, for he should have stated �the end of artists� and the birth of celebrities rather than the �end of art.�

The very title of this essay would date me as anachronistic, a person from a different era altogether. For some who read this essay, I might as well have walked out of the pages of Tolstoy dressed in velvet and silk breeches with antediluvian ideas about art and artists, and hopelessly antiquated. Nevertheless, I insist in reexamining fads and trends for authenticity, for that seems to be the last weapon left in the hands of individuals genuinely interested in the creative process.

II. Philosophical Interlude of the Beautiful and the Sublime

Walking through the Bonsai trees display was a whole new experience. There I learned with amazement the longevity of some of the Bonsai trees. A Japanese White Pine, also displayed in the brochure of the Arboretum, was listed in training since 1625, almost four hundred years old. A number of Elms, Junipers et cetera were also in training since the 1860s. The awesome beauty of these Bonsai trees is not describable in words in full; one must visit and stand in awe in front of such marvels of nature and the hands of man in order to have a first-hand experience of the �sublime.�

As Abraham and I walked through the �sublime� Bonsai Japanese and Chinese displays, we started to talk about what beauty really is. We ended up in disagreement, I holding the view that beauty is totally in the mind and Abraham holding the view that beauty is partly in the thing and partly in the mind. We did not try to resolve the difference in our ideas of the beautiful, and we just continued to soak in the beauty and fragrance that was engulfing us. When we reached the herbal garden our sense of smell was stimulated to intoxication with fragrances of clumps of Rosemary, Thyme, Sage, Oregano et cetera.

Earlier, as we drove down to the Arboretum, Abraham and I discussed the similarity of trees and children, for we both marveled at the dignity displayed by children from all walks of life in any community, and how all trees have that splendid quiet majesty about them. Further into the innards of the Arboretum, our eyes were dazzled by the stupendous display of color from red Maples and the Azaleas nestled by the feet of Pines and Oaks. And by the Azalea garden proper, we came face to face with the towering majesty of all kinds of pine trees, some were familiar trees to both of us from our far away Ethiopia and yet very close.

The question of beauty has preoccupied philosophers from the pre-Socratics to date in every generation. I suppose that early in mankind�s communal life, the creative impulse was solely decorative and the enhancement of the physical presence of the individual, and maybe part of the mating ritual. In our own time there had been a real revolutionary process that may be compared to a philosophical convulsion [See Arthur C. Danto, The abuse of beauty: aesthetics and the concept of art, Carus (2003)]. Among those who shaped the way the art of the West is looked at were art critics from the Victorians such as John Ruskin, from the Romantics such as Kenneth Clark, and from the modernists such as Clement Greenberg. Greenberg is a serendipitous find, for his pitch to discredit and discount the effort of �socialist realism� in art as the corner stone of the Soviet Union�s World of Art, while in the pay of the CIA, had unexpected outcome�in a very talented and successful art critic. [See Francis Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?: CIA and the Cultural Cold War, Granta Books (2000); The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, New Press (2000). See also Richard Cummings, �Art and the CIA,� June 20, 2002, https://www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/cummings3.html. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on Apr 19, 2010.]

The more recent approach is declaring the end of art as the philosopher Arthur C. Danto did in an article in 1984, but some how tamed that earlier statement away from such provocative assertion in a book he wrote a decade later [After the end of art: contemporary art and the pale of history, Princeton University Press, NJ (1997)]. And I audaciously state that the history of art shows in varying paces a movement from the thematic to the anecdotal, and one may throw in there as an afterthought for effect the early classical ideas on beauty, the different movements since the time of the impressionists, and the art-for-art sake concepts, then you would have covered most anything in the history of Western Art. One may even be cynical saying that what I have stated is no different than Hegel�s idea of the evolution of the spirit through time, and in no way entertains the most important earlier distinctions made by Hegel of aesthetic beauty (pertaining to the senses) and artistic beauty (pertaining to the intellect). Hegel�s distinction may be unfortunate for it implied two forms of beauty, which to me is impossible. I suggest that artistic beauty be understood to mean strictly the craftsmanship or virtuosity of the artist.

The history of art does not tell us much about either aesthetic beauty or artistic beauty as an intrinsic subject matter, but as standards presumed by observers not from the point of view of the artists themselves�thus its great deficiency. Nevertheless, philosophers seem to have the more authentic and profound discussions of such subjects than art critics or historians. It is alleged that of all the philosophers Hegel had written the most on the philosophy of art. It is true that Hegel was a great critic as well as theoretician on art and the philosophy of art, and his opus is immense. That does not come as a surprise to me, for Hegel was fortunate to have as references and role models giants who came before him, such as Kant, Mendelssohn, and his own teachers Schelling and Fichte. Sadly his immense capacity did not protect him from premature assumptions of racist theories of developmental history of civilization. 

I presume that we all have read that Longinus (AD 213 - 273) is allegedly the pioneering theoretician about the idea of the �sublime� in his discussion of the subject of beauty in literature [Cassius Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. W. Rhys Roberts, (2007)]. [The manuscript was attributed also to two other individuals from the same era as Longinus.] The distinction between the concepts of beauty and the sublime is absolutely made clear by Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) in his philosophical writing. �We have seen that what is genuinely beautiful has definite boundaries which it may not overstep.� [Moses Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Cambridge UK , 1997, 192-93.]  However, wrongly Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is often credited for the distinction between the �sublime� and the �beautiful,� in which the main feature of the �sublime� he seems to contend to be the fact that it is not bounded, whereas the �beautiful� he identified as limited by the very individuality of the object or the thing. [Immanuel Kant, (1914) Critique of Judgment, Cosimo: NY, 2007, 64-67 (written in 1790)] It seems to me that it is obvious that who is copying whom, certainly not Mendelssohn. Although Kant in his book Critique of Judgment did make references to Burke, Batteaux, Lessing et cetera, he does not mention Mendelssohn whose views are almost identical to his writing written some twenty years earlier.  By the way Lessing who is mentioned by Kant was Mendelssohn�s great friend and co-editor of their literary series called Briefe, die neuesteLiteratur betreffend (referred to as Literaturbriefe).

This neglect or oversight by Kant of Mendelssohn is strange indeed since Kant knew Mendelssohn quite well, for they competed on some essay writing contest in 1763 where Mendelssohn won over Kant. Mendelssohn wrote his piece on the subject of �beauty� and the �sublime� starting sometime in 1754 and reworking it in 1760 for inclusion in his book Philosophical Writings; whereas, Kant produced his Critique of Judgment in 1790, some twenty five years later. At any rate what comes through is that the quality of being �beautiful� seems to involve both the act of judgment and the sensation of the thing or object of perception [Kant, Critique of Judgment, 111-112], which seems to support Abraham�s views. At any rate, I prefer Schopenhauer�s approach than either approaches of Kant or Hegel. In Schopenhauer I find elements of the Platonic Ideas/Forms�a universality mediated by individual minds.

There is much gobbledygook written both in the arts and the sciences. I have read countless books on the arts, and what I learned from all that exposure and numerous discourses over a span of forty years or more is that writing or speaking about art authoritatively is dangerous and limiting. It seems to me that the creative process in art might have Platonic ideations, but the execution and delivery is firmly an inductive process because life ultimately is experienced-reality. I cringe when critics or philosophers speak in terms of right and wrong about art. My approach is deceptive, in the sense that it is the subjective �apprehension� and the pleasure of such creativity of that which is apprehended of in the World as �representation� [Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, trans. E.F.J. Payne, vol. 2, Oxford UK, 1974, 445-452] that I find far more enlightening on the subject of �beauty� and the �sublime� than the views of any of the other philosophers including Hegel. It seems to me that Schopenhauer saw in the self realization or absorption of the artist in his creation of art/beauty a great liberation from the terrifying ever presence of the �Will.� This means beauty is in the creator or beholder, which seems to support my views. What Julie Mehretu was attempting in her statements was what Schopenhauer articulated Centuries earlier, there is really nothing original about that.  

III. Courage as the �Sublime�

It seems to me that there is one kind of beauty, i.e., the beauty of courage that only very few people seem keen to bring into discussion while most would not even register such a thought in their minds. In fact, I think of courage as the �sublime,� for its dimension is unbound and its immensity overwhelming. My first encounter with the concept of courage as a philosophical issue was reading Plato�s The Republic as text book for a philosophy undergraduate course when I was barely eighteen. I did not do that well in that course because my interest was in logic and rhetoric, and that book seemed to support what I dreaded most at that time: an authoritarian household, with a king at the top. It did not matter to me whether that king was a philosopher or a street thug. That experience with Plato left a bad taste with me for years. Then in graduate school I had a fresh start in an ethics course reading Tillich�s book The Courage to Be, (Yale, 1952) a moving dialogue of a devout Evangelical Lutheran writing to assure himself of unbound courage to be as opposed to giving in to dread and anxiety over nothingness.

�Tillich brings examples of creative existential expressions of despair of men such as Heidegger, Sartre, T.S. Elliot, Kafka, Auden, Camus, Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, Marx and Nietzsche. The combination of the experience of meaninglessness and of the courage to be as oneself is the key to the development of the visual arts since the turn of the century. This is something that those secure in both democratic conformism and collectivism, those with the courage to be a part apart from the courage to be, can not handle. They find it disturbing and distasteful to see art and creativity that express the despair, meaningless and ambiguity of Existential thought. They cannot face those who fail to interpret the man created world of objects into subjective form. They are unable to distinguish the genuine from the neurotic anxiety in Existentialism.�

[Edited, abridged and expanded by Richard Schwartz, �An Outline of Paul Tillich�s The Courage to Be, (1952),�  This is where I see great dignity in individuals who do manual odd jobs no one else could touch. The man that digs deep into the innards of the earth to get its minerals, or works his way in the stinky underbelly of civilization to clean its sewer system is a true physical manifestation of �the courage to be� that is most sublime than anything I have encountered. To put it more concretely, for example, I am always moved by people who collect and remove society�s garbage, take care of the dead both human beings and animals, serve at cafes and restaurants even when they are rude. My great respect to immigrant workers and strangers in any settled society is simply an extension of that one recognition of the beauty of courage as sublime. I tell my wife that I lack that type of courage to accept my circumstance in life, and I infuriate her more when I add that if I win over a hundred million dollars in a lottery, I can afford to be poor and live without pretentions wearing sandals and jelebia with humility.