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Enjoyment It appears to be a policy matter that women are encouraged to look not only good but fabulously good. I am talking about the editorial policy of women's magazines. Men should read these. Maybe they do. I do sometimes and it's a pleasure. There were always lots of women's magazines around when I was growing up. My mother was keen on sewing so she subscribed to the German magazine 'Burda' that came with cut out patterns. There were brilliant photographs inside shot with long lenses with the background out of focus. This made the models seem larger than life. I was more interested in the women than the clothes. I thought they were made in heaven. My sisters liked reading 'Seventeen'. They were exceptional! Interwoven with sumptuous photos were great articles. The compositional content of these magazines were about being female and in that context the writing was very much to the point therefore also full of meaning. The specificity made these magazines interesting and for me, rather entertaining. People can become obsessive and compulsive when the object of beauty is confused with the object of desire and voyeurism combine with exhibitionism. This happens quite widely and explains in part the descent of art into pornography. That is, the imagery is made to pass straight into the arteries of instinct without the filter of thought. Pornography is watched less for reasons of enjoyment than for need. It touches the imagination at a raw point, stimulating much more than just the mind. Cinema strives at the limits where representation borders with real life. As for enjoyment, modern films are an ordeal to watch but there is in contemporary cinema a greater element of direct engagement. However an expressive director like Carl Dreyer ('Joan of Arc') would have found the technical facilities of today, an actual hindrance. Again, following on from the previous article on composition, we turn our attention to buildings. Are good buildings imbued with a certain sense of enjoyment? I do believe so but then again, I am a lover of Baroque Architecture. To me a building must render a certain sense of weight with the idea that it rises up 'dramatically' from the ground. To me the idea that a building is by its nature something organic and alive is fascinating. Because I imagine the building to be something more than it apparently seems, the experience of looking at buildings is thereby heightened by an induced mystic sense. 'How did the building get here?' The fact that these building were made by transient souls, transfering their energies to lift, shift and carve heavy materials, to be still intact hundreds of years later, is plainly, phenomenal. So acknowledging the source of pleasure in things, that is, what one enjoys, is important for art. Direct experience and not circular academic arguments will cause the next Renaissance. |