Beauty is something that is distilled out of an artistic work as an effective force. It is not a term that I would apply to given objects or works of art.
I see it as a form of expression of harmony, where the most opposing forces, which tend to move apart or be hostile to each other, agree to interact, to play together.
Isabel Lehnen (LOGON) interviews the artist Alfred Bast (Germany)
I.L. Dear Alfred Bast, thank you for agreeing to this interview. We would like to try to come closer to the secret of beauty. Mankind has been devoted to the topic of beauty since time immemorial. Nowadays, this is producing strange results: I am thinking of the cosmetics industry, beauty clinics, and the obsession with beauty in general. Influencers on social media are making enormous sums of money. There are also surprising developments in the modern art today. Recently, I read in the newspaper that an art installation that consisted of nothing more than a banana taped to a wall was sold for 6.2 million dollars. You once said that you have been reflecting on the mystery of beauty for a long time. What does beauty mean to you as a freelance artist?
A.B. Beauty is something that is distilled out of an artistic work as an effective force. It is not a term that I would apply to certain objects or works of art. I see it as a form of expression of harmony, where the most opposing forces, which tend to move apart or be hostile to each other, agree to interact, to play together. I consider beauty as the force that can transform the scream of existence into a symphony, and for me that is also the core of art.
Beauty in the Ugly, Beauty in the Terrible
I.L. You speak of opposing forces. It is noticeable that – at least since the two World Wars – the representation of beauty is frowned upon in art. The feeling arose from the fact of so much destruction and violence, the representation of beauty is no longer possible. Recently, I visited a fine exhibition about surrealism in Munich. There were a lot of monstrous things to see, grotesque distortions, the dissolution of forms. Do the ugly and the beautiful perhaps complement each other on a higher level, like light and darkness? There is also the saying in the Tao Te Ching ‘When the whole world recognises the beautiful, the ugly has already been established.’
A.B. Everywhere, ugliness can be seen as a shadow, as a quality associated with beauty. I have great respect for that. I would like to introduce another distinction, namely the one between the beautiful and the terrible. In Rilke’s Duino Elegies, there is a wonderful saying: ‘Beauty is nothing but the start of the terrible which we can only just bear, and we worship it for the graceful sublimity with which it disdains to destroy us.’ The concepts of the terrible and the ugly seem to come close to each other here. But there is a big difference between them. ‘Every angel is terrible,’ Rilke continues. Everyone can say “yes” to that, because it is a dimension that goes beyond our comprehension. This forces us to exaggerate, and therein lies a terror. But terror is not necessarily ugly. If you were to say “every angel is ugly”, it´s immediately clear that this is not true. The terrible is also the beautiful, only in a dimension that goes beyond our comprehension. We are shocked by beauty when we approach its core. It is a great power. And because that is the case, it is appropriated, it is captivated, enslaved for ugly purposes, also for fraudulent, questionable intentions. Then it becomes a mask, a beautiful mask, a lie.
And here the problem begins, also in modern art: when truth recognises that beauty comes in the guise of a mask that has been painted over with hypocrisy, then it destroys this mask; and this destruction as a process is ugly. But the truth does not automatically appear underneath. Only when something new has already matured underneath, like an egg that is broken open, when a new quality of beauty can come to light, a new power of harmony and wholeness, then this moment of ugliness, of destruction, is a positive transition. Ugliness then serves to further develop our perception, taking it to new levels. It is then an integrating component as a destructive element within beauty.
In the visual arts, there is a wonderful sentence from Paul Klee: ‘Art does not reproduce the visible, rather it makes visible.’ With this statement, Klee resisted a naturalistic dogma that made any kind of experiment taboo and excluded it. Klee wanted to bring about a breakthrough to something new. Under National Socialism and Communism, nature was depicted with a beauty that was exaggerated to the point of pathos, verging on kitsch.
After the Second World War, these distortions led to the idea of beauty being questioned and rightly deconstructed. However, if nothing new is created, a new aesthetic, a new power, a new quality, then people lack the nourishment that beauty imparts, even as a shocking encounter with something greater, such as an encounter with an ‘angel’. In modern art, the ugly has become a dogma itself.
It pursues beauty like a transgression. With every attempt by an artist to create something beautiful, he is suspected of not perceiving reality, of not being able to look life in the eye, of wearing rose-tinted glasses. Beauty is thus deprived of its power. However, this is only apparently the case. In reality, it merely shifts its setting. Think of beautiful cars, beautiful apartments, the cult of beauty in advertising. Provocative installations often take place in the most elegant museum architecture of the most beautiful aesthetics. The contrast to the ugly becomes particularly clear here. I respect this departure from beauty in art, but it tends to become dogmatic itself and to reverse the principle and to say: the truly beautiful is ugly.
When you look at paintings by Hieronymus Bosch (from the 15th/16th century), for example, ugliness is painted incredibly beautifully, fantastically depicted, and it always has a tremendous attraction. In his triptychs, hell is always much more attractive than heaven. For the simple reason that it is much closer to us. Heaven is far away. We imagine it to be boring, which is, of course, nonsense, because it is full of dynamism, but that is difficult to depict. Here the mystery of beauty shows us our limits.
What Nature Teaches Us
I.L. As an artist, you have been concerned with the processes of nature which seem to be governed by an intrinsic law. You once said: ‘My gurus are the forget-me-not, the apple tree and the quince.’ You emphasised that the quince, through the very natural processes of putrefaction and decay, can also bring very ugly aspects to light. What can the contemplative observation of nature teach us?
A.B. I can see time and again that nature is not dogmatic. It produces the most beautiful blossoms, which always contain the opposites, the complementary colour pairs. Here expression of beauty is an expression of wholeness. The different parts are integrated in such a way that they enhance each other. That is what creates beauty. You can see that in a daisy and in all the ‘harmless things’ of nature that we find so harmless because they do not scare us. Everything that does not scare us, trees, flowers and the plant world in general, is one of our sources of food. Without them, we could not exist. Nature does not work with division in the sense of good and evil. Good and evil are, in my view, inventions of man. Nature works in interactions between ‘yes and no’ as equal opposing polar forces. And it is precisely in the polarity of opposites that it allows the unity of everything can be recognised and accepted. However, by postulating certain polarities as good and evil, we have created problems for ourselves that nature does not present. At least that’s how it seems to me.
The quince first blossoms, then the petals fall away as if they were worthless, and then, slowly over the summer, this wonderful golden-yellow structure emerges, this ‘embodied summer’, which hangs towards the earth as a beauty that has become heavy. In spring, the blossoms are directed towards the light; in autumn, the heavy fruit hangs down towards the earth. This movement from heaven to earth is already contained in the allegory of flower and fruit. When the fruit is ripe, it falls from the tree. It is gone, no drama, it never falls out of existence. We have to be clear about this. In nature, nothing falls out of existence. We always want to expel evil from existence and think that when it is defeated, everything will be wonderful and good again. But that is not the language of nature. It tells us: there is the visible and there is the invisible. There is the energy that contains a becoming and a passing away, a coming and a disappearing, as we take it as natural and obvious in our own lives. Death is the loss of form, not destruction. It is a component of life from which new life and new forms arise. Death is not annihilation. Therefore, with all due respect to the history of art, I experience nature as the more universal teacher, by which I orient myself, as artists have done throughout the ages.
I.L. You quoted Paul Klee’s famous saying earlier: ‘Art does not reproduce the visible, but it makes visible.’ There have always been important artists who believed that the purpose of art is to bring the invisible into the world, to make it visible. I am thinking of Caspar David Friedrich in the 19th century, who also said that one should not simply depict nature as an imitation. On the other hand, I think of photo-realism in American art of the 1960s, where you have to look very closely to notice that it is not a photograph, but a painted picture. For me, art becomes interesting when, through the visible, through the almost tangible, it refers to another dimension that operates behind the visible.
The Visible and the Invisible
A.B. I understand what you mean. If you evaluate the difference between the visible and the invisible as an opposition, it is constructed. Such an opposition does not exist in reality. I would like to add three sentences of my own to the quote by Paul Klee, not as a contradiction but as a supplement: ‘If you want to recognise the invisible, you have to delve as deeply as possible into the visible.’ This is a sentence from the Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism. It says that the visible itself is a mystery, a secret. The poet Novalis explained: ‘The visible is the invisible that has been lifted into a secret state.’ And Goethe postulated: ‘Don’t look for anything behind the phenomena, they themselves are the message.‘ And that is precisely the trump card for me. If I limit myself to saying: ‘Here is the visible,’ then I only show that I myself am too blind to recognise the visible as an expression of the invisible. I am caught in my habitual trap. The grass in the meadow is just grass to be mowed. The dandelion is a weed, it is no longer a wonder to me. The visible becomes commonplace for me. Due to our habits, we overlook the fact that what we see in nature, whether it’s grass, dandelions, eggs or anything else, are expressions of a divine language. Instead, we are attracted to distortions and we might think, for example, that surrealist or abstract images are more likely to show the invisible.
I also like the images of surrealism. Perhaps they can contribute, just like photography, to reactivating the seeing of the visible itself as a process of discovery within us. I also enjoy taking photographs. But that is the quick-glance way of seeing. When I paint, my seeing slows down. Conceptual interpretation dissolves. The visible becomes an enigmatic miracle. What is an egg? What is an apple? Who is the architect of an apple? Who produces it? It is the same molecules that form everything else we see. Why are there different shapes? Form is the great mystery, the great secret. The same basic elements give rise to very different forms. That is why what is visible is an expression of the divine Oneness, of the divine invisible in infinite variation.
That is the actual quality of Maya. Maya is not the deceiver who says: I am the illusion that obscures God for you, who is in the invisible for you. No, we are sensual beings and communicate through the senses and perceive through them. They originated from the same source of creation as everything else. Therefore, they are the bridge through which we may recognise the divine if we look and do not let ourselves be blinded by our concepts and habits. The point today is to make the visible visible. That is where I see my task as an artist. It is about dissipating the blindness as to nature in the face of wonder, about piercing this cataract and truly marvelling at what is there, free and outside. We can experience beauty everywhere. It gives itself to us as nourishment. Why do we close ourselves off from this gift of God? It is an incredible event that we can open ourselves up to. And that is possible by crossing the bridge of the visible. We must not, as it were, pack away the visible in a film and say: ‘That is Maya, the actual truth is hidden in the invisible’. No, it is manifest down to the smallest detail. That is the wonderful thing.
I.L. But it is in the eye of the beholder whether we can see this and how far we see it. How can we awaken and intensify our perception of the Spiritual that is at work in visible things? You have experience with this. Can you give us some advice?
A.B. As I already mentioned, it is important to overcome the apparent dual separation between the visible and the invisible. Because it is not a separation, but a transition. The Spiritual, which we suspect to exist behind it, is in the very form before us, right in the middle of it. When I see more deeply what is within, then I see the Spiritual. Or does not the Spiritual rather see me? Don’t architects communicate with me through the building they have created? By truly appreciating what comes to me as nature and recognising it as a secret that is not made by man but contains and expresses greater dimensions, then I experience the visible as a manifestation of the Spiritual. If you are asking for advice, I would say that it is about spiritualising the material and materialising the Spiritual. The two (the visible and the invisible) belong together. They form a polar unity. When we recognise this unity again, we enter into the secret of beauty.
I.L. Dear Alfred Bast, thank you very much for this interview.
(In the second part of the interview, Alfred Bast addresses, among other things, by what means art can materialise the Spiritual. Both parts of the interview can be found on the LOGON website www.logon.media)
