Calling Beauty

A group exhibition taking as a point of departure Susan Sontag’s essay “An Argument About Beauty” to reconsider ingrained parameters of what constitutes the “beautiful” in art today.

Curated by James Voorhies

Columbus College of Art & Design, OH
February 17–April 10, 2010

Thorsten Brinkmann, Moyra Davey, Elizabeth Gerdeman, Ellen Harvey, Matts Leiderstam, Ryan McGinley, Anna Molska, Susan Sontag, Eve Sussman/The Rufus Corporation, Darren Waterston

Made possible with funding and staff of Columbus College of Art & Design with grants from Greater Columbus Arts Council and the Ohio Arts Council; realized within my responsibilities as Director of Exhibitions at Columbus College of Art & Design

In her essay “An Argument About Beauty” (2005) Susan Sontag traces the evolving definition of beauty from concepts of rarity and exclusivity to less discriminatory notions of it. While beauty is historically aligned with high culture, class and refinement elicited by old master and modernist art, for instance, Sontag delves into alternative notions of what is beautiful, pondering beauty in that not always considered as such.While Calling Beauty does not serve to illustrate Sontag’s essay, her words serve as valuable points of entry for considering what has been traditionally viewed as beautiful, how that view has influenced contemporary art, and how it has shaped, paradoxically, an aesthetics of the everyday.

Calling Beauty was organized around four pillars of reflection: still life, landscape, nude and portraiture. It included work that drew peripherally and specifically on traditional subjects typically deemed “beautiful” within the realm of art. Alas, the works brought to the surface a retreat from that tradition to a contemporary reconsideration of it, thus a renewed engagement with historic artistic conventions.

Book, Documentation

Anna Molska, Tanagram, 2006–2007, video, transferred to DVD, 5:10 minutes. Courtesy of Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw.

Thorsten Brinkmann, Villa Silverbaum, from the series Portraits of a Serialsammler, 2005–ongoing; 13 c-prints and installation. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Kunstagenten, Berlin.

Eve Sussman and The Rufus Corporation, Dog Rolls, 2004, video still from 89 Seconds at Alcazar, 11 minutes. Courtesy of Eve Sussman and The Rufus Corporation.

Matts Leiderstam, Paris 1999-03-15, Returned, Parc des Buttes-Chaumont made after Nicolas Poussin’s Spring or The Earthly Paradise, 1660–1664, Rome, 2000–2001, installation with slide projection and wooden bench. Copy produced with permission of Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Courtesy of the artist.

Darren Waterston, three monotypes from the Tondo series, 2009, monotype on Rives BFK Buff, 22.5 x 15 inches, published by Smith Anderson Editions. Courtesy of the artist and Smith Anderson. Beata, 2008, oil on wood panel, 47 x 36 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco.

Moyra Davey, Photographs from Paris, 2009, 16 c-prints, postage, tape, ink, 11.75 x 17.75 inches each. Courtesy of the artist and Murray Guy, New York.

Ellen Harvey, from the series My Collection Inadequately Documented, 2009, oil on wood panel, 20 x 20 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Meessen De Clercq, Brussels.

Ryan McGinley, Marcel, Ann, Coley, 2007, c-print, 16 x 20.5 inches. Courtesy Mr. and Mrs. Charles Newman.

Ryan McGinley, Fireworks Hysteric, 2007–08, c-print, 40 x 30 inches. Courtesy Mark Fletcher and Tobias Meyer.

Elizabeth Gerdeman, Grandeur: From Cole, Church, Bierstadt and Moran, 2010, latex paint, site-based mural, 27 x 11 feet. Courtesy of the artist.

Calling Beauty, 2010, 96 pages, 8.25 x 5 inches.