And if it does, what makes it beautiful anyway?
I did an Illustration degree 20 years ago and that time one of the worst ways you could describe art was ‘illustrative’. The same goes for the idea of merely creating ‘pretty pictures’. But can we use beauty to our own ends and what’s so wrong with it anyway?
The art world has a love/hate thing going on with ‘beauty’ (mainly love for several centuries, then hate since the 20th) and I was interested to see the two exhibitions, by Nengi Okumu and Adebayo Bolaji, at the Arnolfini Arts Centre in Bristol, explore this head on. They also made me think about my relationship to art and beauty and making too.
This post is taking a roundabout route through the exhibitions at the Arnolfini and then onwards to how and why we can make and use beauty as artists.
The Arnolfini is split between two solo exhibitions for Nengi Omuku, on the ground floor, a Nigerian artist who trained at the Slade, and Adebayo Bolaji, a British artist of Nigerian heritage, on the second floor (and whose exhibition, entitled ‘In Praise of Beauty’ tackles these notions more explicitly).
Okumu paints Eden-ic scenes of people in nature onto the traditional Nigerian textile, Sanyan, leaving the edges untreated and unstretched. Her paintings reminded me of nothing so much as Matisse’s ‘Luxe, Calme and Volupte’ and the paintings that came out of a group of artists working in the South of France around the turn of the century, depicting mainly impossibly paradisiacal scenes, usually involving naked women.
The difference here though is that there are no power or gender games going on. More a gratitude for people and nature. In fact, Okumu is taking the Western (male) tradition of women and indigenous people depicted on that symbol of power and money that is oil on canvas, and giving us another angle.
She’s using oil paint on a canvas of sorts, but the canvas is traditional textile, unstretched, and the paintings don’t reach to the edge, so they’re saying what they are loud and proud. A painting on some fabric- it’s not trying to be anything else.
The people in her pictures are almost anti-Protestant work ethic- taking pleasure in nature and each other. There is no anxiety in them. They are, in fact, beautiful, and still manage to make points about Western art and colonialism.
And that is one of the points that starts Bolaji’s exhibition off upstairs. It begins with a short film of Bolaji talking about his thoughts on beauty. In it, he confesses that he overheard a conversation at one of his exhibitions along the lines of, ‘what he’s saying is important, but the artwork is only beautiful’.
Bolaji’s rambling, written response to this is shown along the walls of part of the gallery. His work could, indeed, be seen as decorative in some ways (though his mediums are varied), but again, does that mean his art isn’t thought provoking?
Some of his larger paintings are reminiscent of Picasso and much of his imagery seems to be from Africa or African heritage (which was often dismissed as ‘decorative’ before Picasso championed it). Bolaji’s colours are intensely bright and he often can’t resist decorating edges and frames- making them part of the picture. They are also beautiful in a different way to Okumu’s.
They both seem to be saying, ‘Who says what’s beautiful?’
Alain de Botton makes the point in his book, ‘The Art of Travel’, that we and our eyes must be ‘trained’ to see society’s idea of beauty, and ‘re-trained’ when a new kind of beauty comes along. It is usually artists that find that new kind of beauty before we are trained in it. Think of the initial reaction to the Impressionists, Pre-raphaelites, Fauvists, Pop Art,- almost any kind of ‘ism’ that we now take for granted wasn’t seen as ‘beautiful’ when it was first shown. Does that mean we should first make ‘ugly’ art so that we can see new beauty more clearly?
I think not- there are very few of us that are visionary in that way. The rest of us are dealing in what the majority already find beautiful. The painter Robert Irvin said ‘beauty is my business’, and for most artists it is- and there should be no shame in that.
Perhaps the post-modern art world has got it knickers in a twist about beauty. It is a wonderful vessel to bring ideas and joy to viewers. Like Bob Dylan said (I’m paraphrasing), you need a great tune to make people listen, then you hit them with the poetry.
I love to make ‘beautiful’ pieces of art, a harmony, or dissonance, of texture, tone, contrast, that delights the viewers eye. I’m not trying to bring a political, or otherwise, message to bear. And yet, the very fact that I, a woman in the 21st century, am making art at all, landscape art, often on paper, that most democratic of mediums, says something in itself.
Bringing beauty into other peoples lives is incredibly important and the attention paid to the subject and the making could be said to be a radical act in itself.
A very wise friend once said to me, after I had been moaning that I didn’t feel I was a very ‘useful’ person, ‘Who gets to decide what’s useful?’
If bringing beauty to bear in this life, for whatever purpose, message or no message, makes the world easier and more joyful to live in, then it’s worth doing. And yes, you can decide what’s beautiful- who knows, perhaps you will turn people to your way of seeing in time.
‘The Dance Of People and The Natural World’ by Nengi Okumu and ‘In Praise of Beauty’ by Adebayo Bolaji continue at the Arnolfini Arts Centre until September 29th