Beauty abandoned

 

Art has abandoned beauty.

 

Ancient art dwelled in beauty; it was nourished by it.

 

Art of the modernisms sometimes celebrated the ideas of beauty, the memories and references; ideas of beauty in a beautiful body, not the beauty in nature.

 

The beautiful body became the ultimate taboo in Western art. Over the years I have discovered that, although they indeed crave it and idolize it, the faithful among the Muslims, the fundamentalists of the Christians, the Western intellectuals and the older feminists have found the same strategy of defence in alienating the beauty of the female body.

 

The image of their idol must be ascribed to some other culture, must pertain to some other realm, the realm of the faithless, the godless, the tasteless, the patriarchs. They do not welcome it. Some apply a black felt pen, some pass legislation, some consider it to be tacky and kitsch. Artists find a safe haven in the ugly.

 

Beauty does not like to be abandoned. Beauty likes to be watched, to be scrutinized, to be stalked, to be besieged, to be attacked and to be violated. Beauty is the magnet that draws the sharp iron arrow. The iron arrow that may not know if it is fired or if it is pulled and maybe it doesn’t care; it must fly, it must strike, it must hit and it must penetrate. Eventually and invariably, it must be devoured.

 

 

Every day I greet beauty. I open my eyes and it is there, calling me.

 

My models are not afraid of beauty. They sit in my bathroom combing each other’s hair, treating it with oils and cosmetics and dye, then rollers and hairdryers. They sit around the living room or in front of the wide mirror in the “girls’ room”, discussing make up and fashion, swapping and trying on each other’s clothes. They comment on bellies and buttocks, nails and nipples. They ask me, “are these colours right?”, “is my butt too big in this?” or “have you done my picture yet, can I see?”

 

 

 

 

They question their bodies but they don’t question beauty, just as they also don’t question Yemaya or Ochun. They are right. Let it be.

 

I disrobe them, instruct them, maybe tie them up and then shoot their pictures, in my studio or in some forest. I am not a photographer; I make movie stills of yet to be seen movies, scenes for my stories, some written, some yet to be written, or scenes that some mainstream movie that I liked has left out, unfortunately, out of ignorance or out of self restraint.

I animate my surroundings - a landscape I visit, a nearby museum, my garden, my living room.

 

Making up these pictures, I don’t identify with the art world. I identify rather with the new folk art that has emerged on the internet, that I have labelled Ritual Realism, an international folk art that has yet to be visited by mainstream art criticism. The media and techniques of this imagery are mainly poser programs and photo manipulation, though some artists I will include in Ritual Realism still favour pen and pencil drawings. The defining criteria are obsession and compulsion, roots of authenticity. The artists in Ritual Realism, their brakes broken, never cease to carry out their pictorial acts of compulsion, devoted to personal obsessions, mostly of an erotic nature. I do not have neo-abstract pattern painters and maniac scribblers of numbers in mind, compulsive as they may be too – their subject matter is indifferent to any imagery that the haunted mind may distil from the impact of the unbearable beauty and horrors of the real world.

It has been said of Freud that he saw all art as compulsive re-enactment of realities of mental conflict. “The creations of the artist, in Freud's view, are primarily an expression of the creator's unresolved neurotic conflicts – usually sexual conflicts. The artist is pictured as a sexually-frustrated childish neurotic, who weaves his wild fantasies as a substitute for his unsuccessful attempts at fulfilment in the Real World.” (Sheldon Litt)  Surrealism might agree with him. I think such a view on art in general would be too flattering. But if stated about Ritual Realism, it would be a good observation. Freud would have loved the internet imagery of our time, satiated as it is with forbidden sexual phantasms.

Art should learn that there is no thing more real than a ghost.

 

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