Shared Lecture today with Juliette Kristensen, talking about “The Ugly”. (I read quite a bit of Eco’s On Ugliness last year for my dissertation.)
Juliette divides the lecture into three parts: Standard and measures of aesthetics, the Kitsch and the grotesque.
(Thanks Marilia (my lecturer in BA) for preparing me with this knowledge and readings in Year 2, YEAH! She is amazing!)
The standard of aesthetics may vary across the time but beauty seems always ties with the good virtue, while ugliness is less desired, frightening and is “the body of becoming”. People judges people with aesthetics, record them, classify them according to their look, which may parallel to how we put people in different tag groups, how we do our make up to be the hip hop girl or innocent cutie cat.
I first get to know the term “kitsch” when I was in High School in Singapore, doing my Art A Level course. My tutor at that time (who is also an alumni of Goldsmiths) introduces the term with Greenberg’s reading, but I found myself reading in the foggy forest at that time.
I revisit “kitsch” in BA and start to understand its relationship with mass culture, with the “bad taste” and popularity. I read a bit of Bourdieu’s Distinction, thinking the relationship between taste, lifestyle and class.
Marilia once said, even the wealth changes, the habit of living is still maintained. What we want to spend on reflects our taste and class.
Think from the perspective of a designer, we create works, but the work ties with our aesthetics, taste, interest, nationality, identity and experience. It is who we decide what work we can produce, what message we want to voice out, which approaching method and what aesthetic presentation. We are selling an ideology to the audience, either intentional or not, we are selling ourselves as embodiment, therefore I am here writing the design log, to record my life, my practice, my thoughts, my aesthetics and my taste. That is how I am constructed and how my work is created.
While grotesque may tie to exaggeration, may tie with the notion of “different”, ”ugly” and “strange”. We always encounter the grotesque body as “otherness”, we are judging them as a group, a group formed by “normal” people, the “otherness” are dehumanised, miserably treated, exhibited and enjoyed.
Here are the questions exaggerated from the lecture slides:
Can the ugly be good? Can the beautiful be evil?
Can the ugly be transcendent?
Is what is evil always ugly?
What is the relationship between aesthetics and ethics? What is the relationship between aesthetics and politics?
And my extra question discussed with the class via Teams:
What is the difference between Kitsch and camp? Can they overlap with each other and how?
May be will talk about this later with more research and thinking.
P.S.
I bought Fontself and start to work on creating my own fonts.
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