flat 70 is a community arts project in SE17.
We exist to support artistic, therapeutic & redistributive exchange between our existing and emerging community.
MWATHI GAKONGA
the artist
Mwathi Gakonga (b. 2001, Wythall) is a British visual artist of Kenyan and British heritage. A 2022 graduate of Camberwell College of Art.
Through exploring the philosophy of beauty, looking at experiential accounts of beauty, and spiritual writings on the same subject, I hypothesised that beauty comes from the proximity of an object's aesthetic outcome to its goal.
“Plato's account in the Symposium and Plotinus's in the Enneads connect beauty to a response of love and desire, but locate beauty itself in the realm of the Forms, and the beauty of particular objects in their participation in the Form. Indeed, Plotinus's account in one of its moments makes beauty a matter of what we might term ‘formedness’: having the definite shape characteristic of the kind of thing the object is.” - Crispin Sartwell
In this way, beauty can be characterised as how closely an object resembles itself in the ‘realm of forms’. This resonates with me, as I feel that ugliness is located most in objects that are created with a lot of skill, but no taste. i.e. having a clear goal, but missing the target. It also makes sense to me that objects made without aesthetic purpose (i.e. trees, clouds, texture) seem to hold the most beauty, since they have no aesthetic ‘goal’ to hit so they can’t be deemed tasteless. In this way, ultimate beauty can be seen as creation without design.
In religious terms beauty/divinity can be seen as the opposite of sin. Etymologically sin means to miss the target in archery. Using this definition, Beauty then means to hit the target, and as previously discussed, ugliness is most present in that which has missed its target (that which has sinned). Even if there is no target and the piece is a mess, it can be interpreted in an abstract and beautiful way. But if the target of the piece has been clearly defined (by the merit of artistic skill) then the goal can’t be misinterpreted, and it must hit it to be seen as beautiful. To be clear, it doesn’t matter what the target is, just the accuracy with which it is hit. This explains why even art about concepts that may seem horrible can be very beautiful. This principle also applies to the absence of form, which goes to explain the beautiful/divine experience of sensory deprivation or meditation.
Perception of beauty is only subjective in so far as the interpretation of the goal differs. So, if there is an agreed goal, there must be an objective value of beauty that an object holds denoted by its position in comparison to that goal. This demonstrates that the experience of beauty is reliant on perceived purpose. It then seems that there are two options in approaching trying to make something beautiful; either figure out how to make something perfectly achieve its purpose, or make something devoid of purpose.
Instead of honing one’s skills to be able to perfectly hit the target, is it possible to make a piece of art without any target at all? I believe that this is the beauty we perceive in nature. Creation without design. A cloud has no aesthetic goal, yet its beauty has captivated humans regardless of culture or time period. It would be nonsensical to describe a cloud as a bad cloud, since good and bad implies there is a goal that must be achieved. The question then becomes: How can you make art without design?
It seems paradoxical to create without design, since to consciously make anything introduces agency to a piece which is synonymous with designing it. The colours you decide to use, the brush strokes, what you choose to include, what you choose to exclude, the scale, the composition. All these factors require choices in the production of a piece, even if they are not fully conscious decisions, they are still made (designed) by the artist. Even taking a picture of something created without design (e.g. a cloud) introduces agency; a choice was made on which cloud to photograph, what angle to use, which light settings, it seems impossible to remove our own agency from a piece of art.
This seems to imply that it is impossible to create art that is completely devoid of agency/design, but I believe that an approximation of pure beauty can still be made by removing as much agency as possible from a piece of art. This is like the inverse of the beauty that is experienced in meditation or sensory deprivation; When there is no object to perceive (whether physical or conceptual), then there is no target to miss, and the lack of disjunct between an object and its target evokes a transcendental feeling of beauty. This also explains the common problem people find with meditation, that when they seek this transcendentally beautiful feeling it won’t come, and if they try to hold on to the feeling, it disappears. These thoughts create a target of what is desirable which prevents the experience of beauty. Gautama Buddha himself said that “desire is the root of evil”, and I believe it was for the same reason; There will always be a disjunct between what we have and what we desire. The common human impulse to this problem is to acquire more things so that we have what we desire. However, judging by the lack of satisfaction in modern society where we have access to more material things than ever before, this appears to be an ineffective solution. The Buddhist approach to this problem (which is also a common approach for other religious traditions) is to remove the desire itself. This principle applies in the context of beauty and art since a lack of aesthetic judgement (desire) evokes the experience of beauty, and this is demonstrated by the beauty within the psychedelic experience (which entails a breakdown of our preconceived expectations of objects). But how do you produce a viewer response that is devoid of expectation? Can a lack of purpose in the creation of a piece induce a similar reaction to the viewer?
I became very interested in Agnes Martin’s abstract expressionist work. She often spoke of painting with her back to the world, she famously never read the news and lived in a self-built adobe home. It seems that she wanted to remove external factors from influencing the work, almost ascetically. She would wait in a rocking chair waiting for the next piece to appear in her mind and then she would go and paint it. She didn’t actively search out what her pieces would look like, but let them come to her, accepting and allowing a deeper creative intuition to come forward.
This attempt at the removal of cultural or personal bias in the creation of her work seems to be in search of the same thing I’m looking for; a pure form of beauty (or at least a pure form of artistic expression), removed from metaphor or symbolism. She would say to herself that she tries to paint inspiration itself, emotion itself. In the following quote she expresses her feeling that there is a lack of willingness from viewers of art to just look and experience the work:
“From music people accept pure emotion. But from art, they demand explanation.”
Martin’s aim of removing metaphor/representation and painting concepts directly is similar to my goal of removing agency. However, I wonder if this is even possible. Anything that describes something else, whether it is visually or otherwise, is a representation of it. One can have better and worse representations, but any thing is only ever purely itself, it can never be fully anything else. It seems that Martin’s work was a movement towards this ideal of a pure representation, and perhaps that is all that is humanly possible.
From this exploration, my belief was that if I imitated the principles of creation that occur in nature I could achieve some form of beauty through outsourcing the creative agency to organic mathematics and inherent mistakes/randomness. By doing this, I aimed to follow my principle of ‘creation without design’, or at least approach it as closely as possible. I looked to fractal geometry for inspiration, since through simple algorithms it creates intensely beautiful fractal patterns with infinite complexity. I hoped to imitate this by creating my own rule-set that I would follow and iterate out to create similarly complex and beautiful patterns. I did this with the understanding that, unlike the fractal algorithms, my patterns would have human error embedded within them, which I believed would contribute to the uniqueness and nature of the pieces. It reminded me of organic growth patterns within nature. Trees do not grow in a vacuum, they have to adapt to their environment, whether it is a rock or non-ideal soil conditions. These particularities only add to the interest and beauty of the growth.
I started with a line which I termed the ‘seed’ and started to draw lines on either side of it, following the bumps and curves in the initial line. I continued this iterative process until I reached the borders of the page. I liked the result, so I repeated the process with slight variations within the rule-set.
Visit Mwathi’s website
