STIL BIUTI
On Beauty Unbidled

Center of Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, 27 may - 25 june 2006

The title Still Beauty is a wordplay with the English term "still life". The above term implies the perception of represented reality as being still alive: it is a time-frozen fragment of a pulsating reality, a situation on the basis of which the subsequent turn of the events and the possible ending can hardly be guessed. In this sense, the exhibition's title refers to beauty that lasts in a state of suspension, in the face of a lack of definition, in the search for its own form.

The second key to the exhibition's interpretation is the deliberately incorrect spelling of the title. It is an allusion to the impingement of a so undefined, and thus open and dynamic, concept of beauty, that, as a result of searching for its own identity and in its eclecticism, "contaminates" the existing aesthetical conventions.

... our translations originate from a wrong conviction: they want to germanise Hindi, Greek, English, instead of hinduising, hellenising, or anglicising that which is German.

Rudolf Pannwitz, quoted after Bolivar Echeverria, La modernidad de lo barrocco, Mexico 2000

The concept of beauty is ceasing to function as a dynamic aesthetical category. Perceived until recently as an expression of cultural diversity, it is transforming into a closed notion subordinated to the global standards of aesthetics. A sense of beauty appealing to human sensitivity and abstract ability to represent the world is being increasingly often reduced to the image of a pair of shoes, a garment, a vehicle - series of empty images condensed in the streaming media broadcast of the TV, radio, advertising, comercial music, or urban development plans. In this sense, beauty no longer serves to study and imagine the reality surrounding us in the various cultures, but only to create and distribute homogenous aspirations on a global scale.

That kind of instrumentalisation and narrowing of aesthetical categories carries also the danger of instrumentalising moral judgements: objectified in the process of mediation, beauty starts to play a key role in understanding goodness, and is thus reflected in a new configuration of happiness and social well-being. On the other hand, ugliness, filtered through the mass media channels, becomes a universal image of evil and the sense of unhappiness, fear, and collective hysteria accompanying it. Ultimately, the pattern, harnessed to global interests, becomes often the only one determining the public’s reactions and resulting in a radical polarisation of political views.

In the above context, defined and dominated by western thinking, there looms the exceptional situation of the post-colonial world, where different identities, torn between two opposite civilisational models, are being shaped by western aspirations to the "standard", and at the same time in relation to the local, contemplative Eastern culture, built on the basis of diversity, memory, and tradition. That complex and equivocal reality is further complicated by economic inefficiency caused by, among other things, neo-colonial policies restricting, to a significant degree, the ability of those regions inhabitants to satisfy the needs created and promoted by the mass media. As the result, situated at the meeting point of many different value systems, the post-colonial countries have developed their own, alternative forms of production, that is "piracy", "recycling", "made-by-yourself production" and "low-tech", which function very effectively, offering, at the same time, wholly new values and a virtually unlimited freedom of action.

Of course, this complex identity-building process is strongly at odds with the western world's value scale, its Platonic search for pure forms defining a homogenous canon, the Pythagorean belief in the existence of harmony and a universal rhythm imposing a certain order, of finally its Aristotelian need to homogenise the world by defining and classifying all of its elements. That is why attempts to literally transpose the western interpretation of reality, grown on the basis of purism and progress, to a different cultural and social context raise so many doubts. A good example of this is the contemporary, aesthetical and moral, eclecticism of the post-colonial societies.

The Métis, Mulatto and Negro women numerous in Mexico cannot use the Spanish woman's scarf, and the Indian dress they hold in high contempt. So they walk around town in extravagant costumes: instead of a scarf, they cover their head or shoulders with a petticoat, which makes them look like some kind of devils.

Giovanni F. Gemelli Careri, quoted after quoted after Bolivar Echeverria, La modernidad de lo barrocco, Mexico 2000

Piracy is a disgraceful and demoralising social cancer; its continued development could result in an apocalyptic, universal, great, historical, spatial catastrophe… (which means: PRACTICE IT!).

Miki Guadamur, Generation Mex, Mexico 1997

Alejandro Pérez Tamayo, Agata Raczynska
POLMEX