WRITINGS
CHASING BEAUTY by A. Blanc, 2020
Chasing beauty or landing in beauty? We chase harmony, balance and rhythm, which is considered by early design thinkers as Order. Is beauty the result of
experiencing order? In A Theory of Pure Design: Harmony, Balance, Rhythm American painter, art historian, and theorist Denman Waldo Ross (1853-1935) tells us that beauty is not a principle of design but rather “an experience which defies analysis and has no explanation.” For Ross design was Order in the activities that human feeling and thought is expressed.
Design is the Order of human feeling and thought that is expressed through objects: Order being Harmony, Balance and Rhythm. Many things are beautiful which are not designed. Many things are designed (instances of Harmony, Balance and Rhythm) which are not beautiful.
Is Beauty the experience of design that features at least one or two or three of the instances of Order?
What is design without beauty? Experiential.
The process of making an object is not a means to an ends - the process of making can swallow up the process of design, rendering it muted, abstracted and hidden. Unless the object deliberately celebrates its design (Order) over its own self aware act of becoming made. The making of the object is subdued, perfected and seamless so as to celebrate the formal qualities above all else.
The making of the object matters intensely, this is without question. Our hand is in each object - but the making serves as a means to an ends, and the tension between the means and the ends is tenuously fought over until the resulting object and its Order triumph over the spectacle of the Made object. The quality of how the piece is made is inherent, we take it for granted and expect the viewer to as well - it is without question that the highest methods of production are used. It is not that the process of making, whether it is a hand sculpted bronze or tediously spun fiber object, is not central to the piece or important to its existence, it is - but our process privileges final form over the making process. It privileges material over making processes and the only way for it do that is to use the highest quality making processes so that the form is not interrupted, the design is not excessive and “By Design I mean Order in human feeling and thought and in the many and varied activities by which that feeling or that thought is expressed. By Order I mean, particularly, three things — Harmony, Balance, and Rhythm. These are the principal modes in which Order is revealed in Nature and, through Design, in Works of Art.”