.. why
beauty from human order
The Dream of Man (2015)
Euclid alone has looked at Beauty bare.
- Edna St. Vincent Millay
made to order
If Chaos is the law of nature, as Henry Adams believed, then our universal passion for Order "is the dream of man.” Beauty manifests itself both in orderly image composition and in photographs of order-making activities such as
. building
. gating
. shaping
The class of order-based beauty is richly diverse and endlessly expansive. We instinctively absorb, for example, the clanging industrial excitement underway at building construction sites. We also draw aesthetic satisfaction from the pleasing sight of gracefully-formed, manmade things of every conceivable variety.
My work here idolizes technical equipment, common bridge underpasses and fire escapes, high school batting cages, muffler pipes, the elaborately striated, plastic-sheet wraps of merchandise pallets, painstakingly woven aboriginal war bonnets, and many other overlooked miracles of practical invention that, upon close inspection, turn out to be as wondrously wrought as a Bach fugue.
the look of parsimony
To the extent that a principle of good order lies at the heart of a certain kind of beauty, it is to be found and celebrated in many places where artists seldom looked before. Such as in the way that a field irrigation gate can make water quiver in a satisfyingly precise moire pattern. Or in the complex interplay of rigorous system versus random improvisation in German railway wiring. We can spot ordered beauty, too, in the color-speckled canyonlands of empty plastic milk bottles bundled and stacked for recycling at a collection center.
Good image composition is, in itself, an obviously essential aesthetic dimension, but the arrangement of elements also entails something more. We find handsomeness among objects in a photograph that look sensibly ordered in their display, or that appear to have been exactingly optimized. That is, we are drawn toward scenes whose objects have the uncanny, parsimonious property of looking "just right" for their place or purpose.
platonics
This notion of beauty that emerges from visual order and from order-making activities could seem, at first, to be merely a derivative of Plato's famous theory that visual aesthetics proceed primarily from the principle of techne, that is, from refined measurement, correct proportion, symmetry and harmony.
And presumably any new approach to beauty from order will have been long-since preempted by Pythagoras, who (allegedly) argued that pleasing proportions are aligned with mathematical concepts such as the golden mean; hence, when we see such proportion in art, the experience "uplifts the soul" because it calls, to our awareness, "the true sublime" inherent in the order of the universe.
Ideas along these lines surface, time and again, under various lights over the long history of aesthetic debate, from philosophers as unalike as Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke, to romantically philosophizing artists such as Alfred Stieglitz and Robert Adams.
No doubt our kind has an inherent love of visual symmetry and balance, something probably hardwired into the evaluative subroutines of the evolved human brain.
At the same time, I am persuaded that the specific forms, values and patterns in our aesthetic sensibilities - the sorts of factors that social constructionists like Herbert Marcuse used to put down to our conditioning in support of the existing social order - may indeed play a big role in coding how we perceive beauty as an aspect of order.
a progressive lens
But surely that's not the whole picture here. Tidy classical precepts fail to capture the full scope of phenomena that trigger our sense of beauty from order. This scope isn't limited to pictures of objects that look well placed and composed within the frame.
It also includes our appreciation of objects that look ingenious and well made, and it includes our intuitive embrace of systematizing processes - for instance, pictures of intricate social collaboration or construction of complicated structures - that embody the viewer's optimistic ideal of progress.
Obviously, to perceive beauty linked to so many possible colourations of order depends upon each viewer bringing his or her own evolved apperceptions and meanings about the things in the picture, about what purposes these things ordinarily serve, and about how they should properly perform.
My galleries grouped under Beauty from Human Order gather instances of the beautiful that please the mind in terms of any of these aspects.
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