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Can't we simply find something beautiful for a change? Does
everything have to be immediately relegated to the level of the
ridiculous and the kitsch? Why do we desire a thing of beauty and yet
regard it with suspicion? What methods of seduction are in play when
the beautiful woman in the advertisement appears more beautiful than
the beautiful woman next to you? And can one regard heroic masculine
poses as an expression of biological superiority without making fascist
idols of them? Before you know it the beauty has faded. (Photo: Wang Gongxin & Lin Tianmiao: "Here? Or There?" (detail). 2002. Video installation. Photographer: The artists)
Beauty is booming
in German universities. After a decade of intensive gender research and
practice in equality – sexual, religious and racial – a roll-back is
under way. Beauty lost its power because it defected to the side of
advertising, computer animation and plastic surgery. And because beauty
contradicts the principle of egalitarianism. "Beauty entices", says Winfried Menninghaus, professor
of comparative literature at Berlin's Free University, who is currently
touring and talking on the subject. According to Menninghaus, Darwinian
theory, which like biologism is undergoing a renaissance, states that
beauty solely serves biological selection. This is why so many cultures
have undermined the power of beauty. Islam covers up its women to
prevent inequality from determining the choice of partner. And uniforms
are there to lower the pressure of competition. 
The level of
competition in the globalised world has spawned the new adoration of
the beautiful and strong. In fact, Menninghaus tells us, clothing and
fashion signalled the end of Darwinian selection. Nakedness
necessitated clothing and thus culture. Since then the naked body has
been taboo. As a way of concealing the painful memories of the now
surmounted natural state, nakedness has always simultaneously stood for
obscenity and the ideal of beauty. Art history was the first to
idealise the body; later the health and fitness industry and all the
other preening and pruning practices built up around nudity adopted the strict dictates of the beauty ideal. 65 percent of US Americans are overweight.
The conclusion: the body is bad, it belongs to the forces of evil. The
idea of beauty is therefore also bound up with the rediscovery of
shame. The real body stands ashamed before the propagated ideal.
Everybody knows the body can never be as flawless as it has to be: pure
and sinless, healthy and efficient. And yet one searches for it, at
least in art. And then one denounces art for this reason. (Photo: Susanne Linke: "Im Bade wannen". Photographer: Klaus Rabien)
The whole of Paris was outraged when choreographer Jan Fabre
put a naked, oil-covered dancer on stage and called the piece "Beauty
warrior". The oil, the impure element, ran counter to beauty. At the
JFK airport in New York two dozen mouth-wateringly gorgeous black models recently posed
naked in shackles. America wanted to protest, but by alluding to the
legacy of slavery and inflamed desire for beautiful others, Vanessa Beecroft silenced her critics.
Now the celebrated French sinologist, Francois Jullien,
currently touring with his new book "Le nu impossible", has suggested
looking at beauty through the eyes of other cultures. Berlin's Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures) has taken up the challenge and on March 18 opened its festival
"About Beauty", comprising exhibition, dance programme and a series of
podium discussions. Jullien views beauty from the Chinese perspective.
In his book, he maintains that to the Chinese eye a person cannot be
beautiful as such. According to ancient Tao wisdom, it is in
movement that a person attains beauty, in Tai-Chi for example. The
Chinese syllable "mei" (literally: fat sheep) means beauty. It is used
to describe good food, a sense of well-being, a pleasant bodily
feeling. And, ironically enough, also the United States (literally:
beautiful land). So it is possible to have beauty without burdening it
with ideals of physical self-improvement and abstinence. Why not just
enjoy life? But Europeans abide by Jacques Lacan, who stated that pleasure is also a dictate. (Photo: Zhuang Hui: "Chashan County · June 25". Sculpture.)
The Berlin choreographers Jutta Hell and Dieter Baumann rehearsed a dance piece
in Shanghai titled "Eidos_Tao" with Chinese dancers. Tao, which is
generally translated as "the Way" means movement in China, the flowing,
unstoppable movement of dance as opposed to our classical ideal of
fixed "eidos". Precisely here, says Jullien, lies the difference.
Chinese see beauty in flux, while we try to force it to stand still.
Good food and letting the daughters dance are still the measure of
beauty in remote areas of southern China. Traditional generosity is
beautiful too. (Photo: "EIDOS_TAO". Performance. Photographer: Dirk Bleicker)
One might suspect that Europe simply does not want to find the beautiful beautiful. Bertolt Brecht
coined the phrase: "Beauty comes from overcoming difficulties". The
peak is only beautiful when it has been scaled. Pleasure is beautiful
when it has to be paid for in sweat. Perhaps this is why beauty
hardly qualifies as an aesthetic category any more. Schiller's
sentence "Beauty is freedom in the appearance" has only been dug up
again for his bicentennial. He spoke of dignity as a category of
beauty. The dignity of the healthy, of the beautiful body? What
Schiller really meant - and what the Chinese believe today - has
largely been forgotten: superior intellect, wise politics, expert
craftmanship, human prowess. For the Chinese, only what is true and
good is also beautiful, says Jullien. Essayist Dave Hickey
goes a step further. In his book "The Invisible Dragon", he describes how
this "classical" stance is about to be driven out of the Chinese. (Photo: "Shanghai Beauty". Performance. Photographer: Dirk Bleicker)
They
too are subject to the influence of academies, museums and
universities. As in Europe, these institutions search for beauty in
constructs and systems. But the Chinese no more believe in concepts
than they do in making sacrifices to achieve an end. Their traditional
view of beauty is a celebration of change, eternal circulation and
transformation. And according to Hickey, this is precisely the opposite
of everything rigid and statutory embodied by institutions.
But this culture of the transformative is in retreat, and it is disappearing faster than people are aware of. As Chinese choreographer Jin Xing
puts it: "Chinese bodies look weak in comparison with beautiful African
bodies. And the Chinese don't have the overriding sense of envy and justice
that makes bodies hard and people rich in the West. But the concept of
spending money in a fitness studio is still utterly alien in China. The
Chinese work hard because true beauty for us is wealth."
"Über Schönheit - About Beauty". 18.3.05 - 15.5.05. Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
*
Arnd Wesemann is editor of Ballet-Tanz magazine.
The article was originally published in German in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, on 17 March, 2005.
Translation: lp.
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