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AESTHETICS MUSINGS

Greetings to all,

With gratitude for your encouragement, I've started sketching out something on aesthetics.  The impetus was a wish to respond to an important radio show put on by one host of our community radio program: Bramble On on Fridays, between 11 and 12 on KMRD.FM.

Advice and thoughts will be welcome.

Trevor

As before, I greatly enjoy listening to Bramble On on KMRD today from 11 to 12. And am gratified that it dealt thoroughly (from its viewpoint) on aesthetics, a subject so dear to me. 

I made a few quick notes, hoping I can get more into the subject later.

My window into the environment was based on aesthetics. When I returned to Jamaica after seven years of one type of art school, then another, I was convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt, that everything was wrong. They were cutting down trees and tearing down houses, replacing the latter with sharp-edged blocky highrises. No one else was nearly, or at all, concerned the way I was. The difference is that I was trained to see more, I had travelled to Europe and gotten my mental wiring transformed by seeing so much beauty. 

But architecture wasn't separate from the natural landscape. Although I had zero training about plants, I could see that a very integrated and deep beauty was being removed and replaced by monoculture non native species. The latter was what I'd call a false aesthetic. It had to do with destructive ideas of merchantilism, growth, expedience, blindness (where you don't see the landscape but only can calculate in hard, left brain ways, how to make money from it). 

So I would hesitate to make a distinction between aesthetics and practicality. There is always aesthetics; you can't get away from it anymore than you can from air to breathe. There's the aesthetics of life and the aesthetics of death, and a considerable muddle in between.

Another way I look at aesthetics is openpenness to the world around you: visual appearance, sound, movement. Hunter and gatherers must rely greatly on aesthetics to know when or what to hunt, when to move, when plants do what. I hold that aesthetics are a means of survival

What matters most to me are the little incremental hurts to scenic character along the Turquoise Trail. Things like sculpture right against the road to remind viewers how clever humans are, and why nature can't catch a break away from them.  Why do we need human artifacts when the natural landscape does something wonderous in terms of complexity--who could ever fathom the complex undulation of planes along the route from here to the city? Where else could we get a sense of infinite space without losing access to the infinitely small? Isn't human sculpture just a stale and limited thing by comparison? Isn't building on such land--because it's your legal right--not just a violation of nature's aesthetics, and replacing it with a false aesthetics around human sense of entitlement?

We must remember that If you are surrounded by nature where you live, Madroids have no other way to be in nature other than driving through this landscape that is relatively unfettered. And other people driving through might have even more need for this scenery. 

So I don't see concern about the Turquoise Trail as being a preoccupation with aesthetics. Neither is it just a spiritual necessity for the inner joy and peace of people; it's also about our relationship to the land.

Can nature catch a break, and left just to BE?

Many other points there isn't time for now involve:

- consider aesthetics are about relationships. There might not be a distinction as in saying it is different from that

- collectives thinking vs individualism

- Madrid is a wood place

- status and aesthetics

- the politics of aesthetics

- principles that underline and guide the work

 - the visual underline as stabilizing elements

- syllogisms --creating separations that are the product of a mental framework, and baseless.

- GLAD AT THE MENTION THAT USING NATURAL MATERIALS MIGHT NOT SUIT OUR MOMENT AS WELL AS USING WASTE AND DISCARDED MATERIALS FROM INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY --the new natural

- the relationship of aesthetics to intuition

- Intuition as a way of knowing

- the eye is the main door of perception

- Frank Lloyd Wright and Starchitecture

- elitism--is it always bad?

- style as the set of visual metaphors