«I remember telling my analyst that I was fed up with elegance and good painting, that I would love to do something bad, not very acedemic. Make ugly painting, he told me», Gérard Garouste.
As an aesthetic category on its own, the «ugliness» refers to the unpleasant, the untoward and to what often arouses a peculiar mix of disgust and fascination, or even pain. «Ugly» is commonly said of something that deviates from a conception of perfection or from an advocated norm or standard (the beautiful), or of something which takes the opposite of a positive value in terms of morphology, physicality and aesthetic as well as of morals.
At this level, the notion refers to hubris and tragic excess, to unwholesome and noxious as well as to uncontrolled passions, such as fury, violence or destructive madness. At the morphological level, the ugly refers to the formless, to the deformed or the shapeless, in the sense of what has not yet been shaped or which edges are not defined (ideas of chaos, obscurity, gaping, confusion). In terms of form, the ugliness can also be characterized by a degradation or an alteration, such a mouth that screams, a face disfigured by suffering, a mutilated, destroyed or dismembered body.
The aesthetic and emotional effects associated with the representation of ugliness in literature and visual arts have raised many debates, especially in the eighteenth century around the figure of «Laocoon» on the limits of representation of suffering and torments of loss, agony and death (Winckelmann, Lessing, Goethe). Subsequently, the dialectic of contradictories and the debates around the beautiful and the ugly as intertwined notions will lead the Romantics to shift the dominant views on beauty. The «ugly», both grotesque and sublime, becomes an integral part of the beautiful, even the «beautiful itself», and its characteristics are elevated to the rank of artistic principles such as they are found in the aesthetics of the fragment, the unfinished, the disharmony, even the disintegration and the heteroclite, etc.
In 1853, Karl Rosenkranz publishes his famous book, «Aesthetics of Ugliness». In spite of an approach still characterised by Christian Neoplatonism, it is nevertheless the first work of aesthetics which tends to postulate something like an «autonomy of ugliness». This transition from the normative ideal of Beauty as the goal and first rule of arts to a conception that may take account of all aspects of reality, with its tragic, sordid and pathetic sides, its absurdities and trivialities, gives rise to a multitude of artistic expression breaking more or less strongly with traditional and classicist styles, criteria, values and constraints.
The explosion of the State barbarianism and terrorism, the violent oppression and cruelty that persisted from the 1871 Paris Commune on throughout the twentieth century, with the massacres of vanguard revolutionary, reformist and libertarian movements and of civilian populations, with the imperialism, the rise of totalitarianism, the heavy militarization, the tests and use of a broad range of weapons, the large-scale conflicts and wars, the gulags and concentration camps, the mass torture practices, the false flags attacks and illegal invasions of sovereign states will lead many artists to express wildly their indignation, fury and disgust. Not only do they use art as a means of social and political transformation and innovation, but also as a vehement tool of refusal, denunciation, provocation and subversion, as well as of Resistance or political outrage. This is the case, for example, with Fauvism, Cubism («Guernica»), Dadaism and Surrealism, New Objectivity, Art Brut, Informal Art, Action Painting, as well as outsider, folk, naive, self-taught, intuitive and visionary arts... As Jean Dubuffet put it, «These artists derive everything – subjects, choice of materials, means of transposition, rhythms, styles of writing, etc. – from their own depths, and not from the conventions of classical or fashionable art».
In a more extreme way with body art, Viennese Actionism and certain other trends in contemporary art, the limits of representation, the thresholds of perception through bodily harm and degradation, the scatological and the brutal evocations of death are put into play, probably as a form of theatrical externalization of an introjected widespread violence.
Multiform, subversive and terrible, driven to its climax towards the monstrous, the abject and the disgusting, the ugly becomes a driving force of creation – if not a purging one – and of renewal of artistic expressions. Whether sublimated or implacable in the act of transgressing the limits into the «unpresentable» – which seem to be constantly pushed back by the human dynamic of desire – ugliness, regardless of any normative device of aesthetic or ethical judgment, has the merit and interest of magnifying the levels of perception and of requiring a resolute facing of the complexity, harshness and infinite diversity of the world.
*A first version of this essay has been published in the «Dictionnaire d'Esthétique et de Philosophie de l'Art», (Ed. Jacques Morizot et Roger Pouivet). (2007). Paris: Armand Colin.
Katherine Sirois