Bonito Living

During the last five years, International Women’s Day has been for me a day for activism and art. Exhibitions like RawTag and Yonis, have happened coincidentally during this month of the year, and alongside the artifacts and installations, I have developed a number of workshops on gender politics and promoting a reflection about what is to be a woman in this time and place. For example, one year we swapped stories in the RawTag workshop linked to our favorite garments, reflecting about how clothes can build our identity, and how we use them as prompts of what we want to be in a particular situation.  Next year, my question was about the Fairy Tales of the Menopause, deconstructing the narratives about older women in fairy tales as witches, cruel stepmothers or wild women living in the forest.  Another interesting workshop was about Yonis: art and feminism, with the very popular workshop of exploring our super-powers, using textiles and sewing.  This year we are still in Covid lockdown, but nevertheless, I would like to continue the tradition.

In fact, the last few months have been dedicated to reading about Beauty and Aesthetics, in preparation for my latest project, a book encompassing some of the ideas that inspire my work both as educator and as artist, but mostly about how I try to live my life. This blog has been a way to talk about “beautiful living” or “bonito living” as a daily composition creating the conditions for having a healthy, balanced, harmonious and beautiful life. Beauty -once a higher value- seems to have fallen out of fashion. A work of art is never referred to as “beautiful” and “pretty” normally undervalues its power.  I disagree:  Beauty is powerful and transformative, and bringing beauty in our everyday can enhance our self-care and our relationship with others and the planet.  

During the first period of writing this book I have been reading as much as I’ve been able about aesthetic theory and notions of beauty. The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics and other books have been useful in mapping out the historical evolution of notions of beauty, and its associated themes of goodness, the sublime, taste and art. Notwithstanding, this story tends to be concentrated on [male] authors ideas, detached from the historical and sociological context, with the occasional “token” article on gender and aesthetics. Few chapters refer to how these ideas came to life. Most worryingly, there is not so much of a balanced view, women only appear as “muses” or “objects” to be admired as “beautiful” but never as subjects, creators, thinkers or innovators. 

Although most of the discussions about beauty has taken place from philosophy, and more specifically from the eighteenth century onward, and that most of the work has been produced by white, european males, with their own idiosyncrasies and their hetero-normative approaches, I must confess that I was ready to burn the books and dance around the fire in explicit protest against the lack of sensibility and recognition of the female contribution in this history. I reached burning point when I was reading about Clive Bell’s Formalist approach to art and aesthetics, and there is not a single reference to the fact that he was married to Vanessa Bell, one of the most prolific painters and art influencers of her time. Not only Vanessa was the core of the Bloomsbury group, but she was Virginia Woolf sister, and their search for new ways of living a beautiful life, will take them to question traditional forms of family, transgressing gender roles and allowing themselves the freedom to experiment, fail and create in their artistic processes.  

Aesthetics, as any other philosophical and cultural reflection is also a way of exercising power, excluding groups and creating hierarchies.  Women seem to be relegated to the role of muses, or chastised for their sentimentality and excess sensibility.  While male artists are celebrated in their genius of balancing  artistic sensibility with material prowess. And paraphrasing the groundbreaking article by Linda Nochlin’s “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (1971), I have to ask: Why are women excluded from the philosophical discussion on aesthetics? The answers lie in the structural historical barriers that prevented women to go beyond the practice of an apparent female pastime of drawing or singing, to a more professional practice; as well as the barriers imposed for female students to paint the nude body; passing by the imprisonment of women within the domestic boundaries and the banning of women in the public sphere.  Not even the comprehensive History of Beauty, by Umberto Eco, addresses this aberration! Although he mentions the role of women in the enhancement of arts and the possibility of a community around aesthetics in the Salons in France in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, it is only a passing reference. But at the end of the book, Eco splashes on the contemporary role of fashion and mass media in creating an ideal of beauty, without mentioning that such “ideal”  objectifies women while favouring the “male gaze”:  “Et tu, Umberto?”

It is also important to distinguish between the role of women in art, and their role in the evolution of the notion of beauty and aesthetics in philosophy. Most of the feminist work of the 1970s and 1980s has been to reivindicate and restore the lives of female painters across western history of art: the incredible passion of Artemisia Gentileschi;  the scientific precision of Maria Sybillia Merian and Marianne North and their botanic illustrations; the technical innovations of artists like Mary Cassals, Berthe Morisot under the rather general umbrella of the impressionists, and Gabrielle Munter playing for the expressionists.  We must also include the subversive role of surrealist artists, going beyond mere muses toward creators in their own right:  Leonora Carrington, Lee Miller, amongst many others; and Dadaist Hannah Koch, using collage as a way of questioning the objectification of women.  Consider also the wealth of female art from Latin American artists in the first half of the 20th century:  with Frida Kahlo epitomising a new type of female embodied form of art in Mexico; Debora Arango in Colombia, and Leonor Fini in Argentina. On the other hand, a feminist aesthetics is only a relatively new aspect in the philosophical discussion on aesthetics, inaugurated around the 1970s and 1980s amongst others by Griselda Pollock and Roszika Parker in the United Kingdom, parallel to the work influenced by Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, of Helene Cixous and other scholars in this field (See Caroline Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics).  

For me, the important thing is to balance my anger at the historical negation of the role of women (and I am not even getting started with race, able bodies or class) with the need of not throwing the “baby with the tub”. While there are inspiring and powerful ideas in the history of aesthetics, we can be also critical and realise their shortcomings. It is not possible to go back in time, but it is possible to integrate a gender perspective in the consideration of beauty and aesthetics in this moment of our history.  The moment is ripe. Beauty, for so long associated with kitsch and sentimentality (See Kathleen M. Higgings: Beauty and its Kitsch Competitors, in “Beauty Matters” edited by Peg Zeglin Brand), is being appropriated by female artists in so many diverse ways: some of them by counterpointing the real sweaty, bloody female body; or by celebrating craft and “minor arts” as medium for aesthetic revelry. 

While the examples presented here are related with visual art, my intention with this book is rather different. It aims at being as inclusive as possible, weaving a conversation between the philosophy of aesthetics and beauty, with everyday lives and habits. It is all about slow, meaningful ways of living, where I can bring my favorite works of art -created by women and also men- and musing about how to live my life in a beautiful manner, in relation to my family, friends, colleagues and community, and getting the reader to enjoy a beautiful text.  

Second Part here: https://drbeatrizacevedo.com/2021/05/03/reclaiming-beauty-2-what-can-we-learn-from-a-feminist-aesthetics/