Hegel observed that only with Christianity did the artistic portrayal of pain and horror make its first appearance. “Forms of Greek beauty,” he said, “cannot be used to portray Christ flagellated, crowned with thorns . . . crucified, dying.” He was wrong, because the Greek world wasn’t just white marble Venuses, but also the punishment of Marsyas, the anguish of Oedipus, and the murderous passion of Medea. All the same, in Christian painting and sculpture there is no shortage of faces disfigured with pain, notwithstanding the sadism of Mel Gibson. In any event, Hegel reminds us, thinking in particular of early German and Flemish painting, that deformity triumphs when Jesus’s persecutors appear.
Someone recently pointed out that in a famous painting of the Passion, by Hieronymus Bosch in Ghent, two of the hideous torturers would send many of today’s rock singers and their young imitators mad with envy: one with a double piercing on his chin and the other with his face pierced all over with metal gewgaws. Except that Bosch wanted in this way to produce a sort of manifestation of evil, anticipating the belief of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso that those who tattooed and interfered with their bodies were innate delinquents, whereas today one might have feelings of distaste for youngsters with beads on their tongues, but it would be, if nothing else, statistically wrong to consider them genetically defective.
If we then think that many of these same young people swoon over the “classic” beauty of George Clooney or Nicole Kidman, it becomes clear that they follow their parents, who, on the one hand, buy cars and televisions designed according to the Renaissance canons of the golden ratio or crowd the Uffizi Gallery to experience Stendhal syndrome, while, on the other hand, they get their entertainment from splatter movies where walls are covered with brain matter, buy dinosaurs or other toy monsters for their children, and go to happenings where artists pierce their hands, torture their limbs, and mutilate their genitals.
Not that parents or children are rejecting all things to do with beauty in preference for what in previous centuries was considered hideous. That was perhaps what the futurists were doing when they sought to shock the bourgeoisie by proclaiming, “Let us boldly create ugliness in literature,” and what Aldo Palazzeschi was doing in Il controdolore (1913) when he suggested giving children a healthy education in ugliness by letting them have, as toys, “puppets that are hunchbacked, blind, gangrenous, crippled, consumptive, syphilitic, that mechanically cry, shout, complain, that have attacks of epilepsy, plague, cholera, hemorrhages, hemorrhoids, discharges, madness, that faint, gasp, die.” Quite simply, people today still enjoy certain kinds of classic beauty, and appreciate a good-looking child, or a fine landscape, or a Greek statue; and then, at other times, they gain pleasure from what had once been seen as intolerably ugly.
Ugliness is indeed sometimes chosen as the new model for beauty, as happens in cyborg “philosophy.” In William Gibson’s early novels, a human being in whom various organs had been replaced by mechanical or electrical equipment could still be seen as representing a disturbing vision of the future. Today, however, certain radical feminists propose that sexual distinctions can be overcome through the creation of neutral, postorganic, or transhuman bodies, and Donna Haraway has launched the slogan “I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”
According to some, this means that the postmodern world has removed all contradiction between beauty and ugliness. It’s not even a matter of repeating with the witches in Macbeth, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” The two values, they argue, have simply merged, losing their distinctive characteristics.
But is it true? And are certain forms of behavior among young people and artists just phenomena of marginal significance, celebrated by a minority of the world’s population? On television we see children dying of hunger and reduced to skeletons with distended stomachs, we learn of women raped by intruders, we hear about human bodies tortured, while, on the other hand, constantly returning before us are the not-too-distant images of other living skeletons destined for the gas chamber. Only yesterday we saw limbs torn apart by the explosion of a skyscraper or an aircraft in flight, and we live in terror that this might also happen to us tomorrow. Each of us knows that these things are gruesome, and no awareness of the relativity of aesthetic values can persuade us to experience them as an object of pleasure.
Perhaps, then, cyborg, splatter, The Thing from Another World, and disaster movies are all superficial manifestations, hyped by the mass media, through which we exorcise a far deeper horror that besieges us, terrifies us, and which we desperately want to ignore, pretending that everything is a sham.
2006