The Beautiful and the Grotesque - a memorial for Alexander Mcqueen

Marion Schnitzer

THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE GROTESQUE A Memorial for Alexander McQueen

MASTERARBEIT eingereicht an der LEOPOLD-FRANZENS-UNIVERSITÄT INNSBRUCK FAKULTÄT FÜR ARCHITEKTUR

zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades DIPLOM-INGENIEURIN Beurteiler Ao.Univ.-Prof.i.R. Dr. Peter Trummer Institute of Urban Design Innsbruck, 12.05.2016

Index

A Study on the Beautiful and the Grotesque The Beautiful is always strange The Origin of the Grotesque Alexander McQueen - Fashion meets the Grotesque From Fashion to Architecture A Memorial for Alexander McQueen Form Studies Colours and Patterns Elevations Sections Programs Renderings statutory declaration Referrences

A Study about the Beautiful and the Grotesque

Over the following pages I will introduce the various forms of beauty, where it eminates from, what it is caused by and why along with the beautiful always comes the grotesque.

The question regarding what is beautiful and how can we know somethings is, is one of the most fascinating riddles in philosophy. Is beauty in the eye of the beholder, is it universal? And if it is, why can we maintain that some things are more beautiful than others?

According to Hume Beauty is subjective, lies in the eye of the beholder, so he argues in „species of philosophy“: ....„Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquisce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others. ...“ Hume reduces Beauty or the appreciation of beauty to Sentiment. As he continues that sentinent has a referrence to nothing beyond itself, all sentiment must be right, because it is always real, wherever a man is concious of it.

However sentiment can never be true or false since ...“ a thousend different sentiments excited by the same object are all right. Beauty is no quality in things themselves....“ Beauty is not graspable.

For Kant the beauty experience is an attunement (German. „Stimmung“), as he launches his discussion of the matter in „The Critique of Judgement“: ...“The judgement of taste is therefore not a judgement of cognition, and is consequently not logical but aesthetical, by which we understand that whose determining ground can be no other than subjective. ...“ If Beauty was entirely subjective, how come that people of all cultures seem to aggree on certain principles, or specific items to think of as beautiful. There seems to be a „standard of taste“.

A „standard“ of taste would be fairly difficult to describe though since one had to define the meaning of „taste“ first, really.

Hence, Hume compiled a list of qualities that any critic must process, who may be capable of determining the form that exists within the aesthetic object. „... strange sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character, and the joint verdict of such, wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of all taste....“ In less philosophical words, Hume says that standards are establised, and wherever one can ascertain „taste“ it is to meet with approbiation, and the best way of determining it is to appeal to those modules and principles which have been establisehd by experience of nations, cultures and ages. Beauty is established over time, by a certain environment, by the people that live in it.

According to Kant we are able to make a ...„hierarchical scheme for claiming that some things are more beautiful than others, independently of how we may feel about the particular existence of the object in which beauty inheres...“ He maintains that „taste“ is the ability of judging an object or a method of representing it by entirely desinterested satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The object of such satifaction he calls beautiful.

Both Hume and Kant begin by acknowledging that taste, the ability to experience the beautiful, or the appreciation of beauty, is fundamentally subjective. That there is no universal code describing beauty, there is no standard of taste in

the sense that if people did not experience pleasure, there would be no beauty.

Beauty is pleasure, regarded as the quality of a thing, beauty is value: „..., it is an emotion, an affection of our volitional and appreciative nature. An object cannot be beautiful if it can give pleasure to nobody: ... Beauty is therefore a positive value that is instrinsic; it is a pleasure. ...“ (Santayana)

Baudellaire: „The Beautiful is alway strange“

The beautiful invites observation and involves a certain harmony of things (Kants Harmony of equals), that interact productively with each other in freedom, while having no higher purpose than itself. Whereas the sublime, typically involves a sense of magnitude beyond our understanding causing not a sense of pleasure in the orderliness of things, but an uneasy very contradictory type of pleasure at the vastness of things. One could picture the sublime as towering cliffs, tornadoes, or vast stretches of desert, causing violation of the purposivness of nature, but appear in a sublime kind of beauty, a beauty beyond our comprehension of pure reason in its own limitlessness. In literature it often appears in studies of giants and the gigantic, as an overwhelmed response to vast size or scale in nature.

It is a pure type of beauty, something that is bigger than we can think of. So it could be enormous waves in the tameless sea hitting cliffs in a storm. Something that is beautiful in an intimidating way, because we are uncertain of its power.

Thus the sublime does violence to the imaginations capacity it is of pure beauty. „The sublime“, writes Nietzsche, „is the artistic conquest of the awful. There can be great beauty in tragedy, sadness, even in suffering. Evil can give birth to creativity. Ugliness and beauty are two polar sides of being, and both must be seen, accepted and appreciated as such. ...“ When confronted starkly with these horrendous events, there is no denying that there is a dark side of existence. Life can be tragic, cruel, brutal and daunting, therefore evil is an existential fact of life. Death is inescapable and an ever present possibility.

There is a thin line between the Sublime and what we know as the Grotesque, since there is a natural attraction to evil or the morally disfigured. Eversince there was something beautiful found in the abnormal or enstranged.

This is exactly how the Grotesque could be described: The enstranged world.

Suddenness and surprise are essential elements of the Grotesque, as well as ambilvalency, oddness, absurdity, strangeness and disgust. It appears unnatural in shape, appearance or character, fantanstically ugly, bizarre, volatile, and yet, beautiful.

It represents a world upside down, full of contradictions, where it combines ugliness and ornament, the bizarre and the ridiculouss, the excessive and the unreal. The grotesque creates a powerful relationship with representations that are simultanousely appealing and revolting.

Kant‘s idea of the Grotesque suggests a willingnesss to contemplate with dsinterrest, and yet pleasure, the morally degrading or repulsive. Thus the Grotesque represents a desire to elevate the aesthetic above the moral, and therefore involves a morally disfigured attitude.

According to Sircello the moral doesn‘t always equal the beauty, he claims there is an attraction to evil in the human nature, as he describes how an atomic bomb blast can be thoroughly beautiful. The voluptous cloud, gracefully evolving is quite magnificent as an object, but holds a certain difficulty because of its moral obscenety to call it beautiful. „The Grotesque, deformed, and obscene obviously can be depicted or portrayed with remarkable skill, imaginativeness, or vividness and hence beautifully without thereby making the grotesque, the deformed, or the obscene themselves beautiful.“ (Sircello, „a new theory of beauty“) The Grotesque is mesmerizing, because it is a rare kind of beauty, far from the standard. A concept that invovles both,

the beautiful and the repulsing.

The common reaction to the grotesque and the monstruos is fear. We fear the uncanny, certain phenomena like monstrosity, abnormality or otherness. But there seems to be a certain affection towards the fearful, as we can see in literature, art and philosophy.

There is a peculiar curiosity toward the grotsque, as we can see in Ovids „Metamorphoses“, or Dante‘s Inferno.

In Ovids Metamorphoses nature sometimes acts with cruelty and amorality, nature is often described as a giant that with its vastness and magnitude belittles humanity.

That something is grotesquely incongruous doesn‘t, strictly speaking, proceed from the elements themselves, but from what is understood as incongruous and perceived as such.

The simplest notion, the classical idea of the grotesque is one of a subverted natural order resulting in monstruous forms, from which developes a strong tendency of dehumanization.

Hence, a feeling of the bizzare, the unnatural, the fearful and the enstranged is created. The inconsistency between the perceived image and its juxtaposition to the real world causes a mixed feeling of contradictory sensations, such as amusement and fear, awe and disgust, fun and terror, the comic and the tragic, the base and the elevated.

The Grotesque is a style of art, architecture and literature that infuses paradoxical elements like tragedy and comedy, horror and laughter or fear and the festive spirit in one piece of work.

It leads to the Sublime because it corrects, unlike the monstruous which merely entertains. This is usually done through imagery, in the case of literature.

Dante‘s Inferno is a compendium of such Grotesque paradoxes. „The monstrous is only monstrous in relation to a consensual but artificial norm.“ (Nietzsche) What Nietzsche is saying is that in reflection of an ideal it requires an opposite. The beautiful cannot be without the Grotesque, the Grotesque cannot exist without the beautiful.

Gustav Dore - Illustration of Dante‘s Inferno, Treachery

The Origin of the Grotesque

The Grotesque has its origin in the noun „grottesco“, which derives from the Italian grotta, „cave“. The initial meaning was constricted to an extravagant style of ancient decorative art found in Rome in the late 15th century.

Later in the 18th century grotesque has become a general adjective for the stange, abnormal, bizarre, ugly, unpleasent or disgusting. The grotesque form can be found on gothic buildings, as decorative monsters, called gargoyles or chimeras.

The gothic architecture is indeed different from the baroque or classical architecture, since walls and roofs are fluently conneccted, columns and beams are melted throughout the space and the diagram of forces is expressed in the interiority through materialisation. In the Baroque first comes the structure and then the act of beutifying is applied, in the gothic though, beauty is already in the figures, it precedes structure. Hence, in the gothic beauty cannot be distinguished from utility - beauty is beauty that has a purpose. Every piece is active, they come together to a beautiful entity that simultaneously produces the structure.

Wheres classicism restates the same universalism, the gothic is always changing its face and adapting, becoming historically self evident.

Gothic Architecture is inevitably intertwined with the Grotesque since it is something that cannot be entirely planned. The Gothic owns a certain savageness, which invites a certain range of imperfection. Albeit the fact that they were planned sysmmetrically, through circumstances and imprecision a certain savageness developed.

Ruskin says in „the stones of venice“: imperfection is in some sort essential. To all what we know of life nothing that lives is or can be rigidly perfect. Part of it is decaying, part of it is nascent. ...“ Spuybroek explains this theory with saying that „he looks at the object not in space but in time. Through the object goes the vector that creates it, this is the nascent moment, and at the same time beaks it down, which means part of it is already decaying.“ The fundamental variability of the numerous different figures and their realtions and connections make the gothic thoroughly digital. Through fairly simple behavior by individual variables resulting in a cumulative behavior, a stepwise assumption of iterative adjustments, is a form of computation.

Spuybroek compares the gothic and digitalism to a birdsnest. „It cannot be drawn before it is built, because it is made of parts that are defined, but at the same time they exhibit the same linearity as ribs, giving the final nest a quality of a drawing. There is indeterminacy around the parts that allows them to be knitted, interlaced, stacked, depending on their own shape as well as that of their neighbours.“ One could refer to the gothic as a form of digital grotesque, a certain form of architecture that emenates from a sympathy between chaos and order, both natural and artifical, neither strange nor familiar.

Alexander Mcqueen - fashion meets grotesque

„I‘m about what goes through peoples‘s minds, the stuff that people don‘t want to admit or face up to. The shows are about what‘s buried in people‘s psyches.“ (Alexander McQueen) Alexander McQueen introduced the world of the grotesque to fashion design. His designs were determined by controversial qualities of the grotesque. He wanted to provoke, to open people‘s eyes to the ugly things that are hidden in their minds. He wanted to force them to look at something bizarre, but still beautiful in a way, so they couldn‘t turn away.

His designs were feeble and fierce, he combined absurdity, morbidity disgust, the ugly and the beautiful with traditional dressmaking and tailoring, practised through displacement and deconstruction.

He brought the ambivalency of death and decay versus nobility and romance into fashion.

His genuine talent enabled him to treat morbidity and death with volatile elegance and vividness that his shows became less about designing wearable clothing and more about introducing the audience to conflicting concepts, such as the bizarre and elegant, the monstrous and the beautiful, chaos and order, life and death, romance and revulsion.

McQueen‘s shows were installed in the most abstruce yet fantastic scenarios, a mirrored cage that the models cannot see through but the audience can watch, centered by a naked obscene woman, wearing a gasmask, surrounded by butterflies.

He wanted to demolish the rules of fashion, but keep its tradition. He wanted to provoke, take people out of their comfort zone, to confront people with their darkest thoughts, but yet in the most elegant way.

His early works were inspired by paintings of the spanish artist Francisco Goya, a mid 18th century provocateur.

Goya‘s paintings are of dark and grotesque nature, but combined with a beautiful aesthetic.

Another big influence was the american photographer Joel Peter Witkin, who brought mostly disfigured people or corpses into his artwork.

Fashion, for Alexander McQueen wa not only about making dresses and tailor suits, it was about changing the human silhouette. Adding an edge to fashion and changing the initial form of the body. He wanted to make the people he dresses look powerful, almost like putting armor on them.

In Art, the term grotesque is not equivalent to ugly. It is determined by amibavelency, by the controversy of the strange and the familiar, the beautiful and the ugly, the delicate and the disgusting, the real and the fantastic, life and death.

Joel Peter Witkin, Sanitarium Photograph, Joel Peter Witkin Stage Scenario, Alexander McQueen

Alexander McQueen, Dress, The Birds, 1995 Alexander McQueen, Dress, Voss, 2001

Alexander McQueen, Dress, The Birds, 1995

Alexander McQueen, for Lady Gaga, 2010 Alexander McQueen, Dress, The Birds, 1995

From fashion to architecture

It was the incongruity of the grotesque, its otherness and ambivalency, foreign in a way but strangly familiar in another, going along with Alexander Mcqueen‘s understanding of using its tools to create something weirdly fantastic and beautiful, that inspired me. The way he dealt with the silhouette is one of the profound ideas that lead through my project.

Essentially, I wanted to translate what Alexander McQueen accomplished in fashion into a form of architecture.

The Project is about playing with the silhouette and how a quantitiy of individual fragments can connect with each other in various different ways and by doing so generate a whole new entitity.

For the location I chose the tailor‘s shop and haberdashery „Anderson & Sheppard“, one of the oldest Savile Row firms in London. This is where young Alexander Mcqueen started his first internship.

During the design process the initital building was progressivley removed by growing a new struture into it, creating an entirely different silhouette, pice by piece. The indeterminacy of the individual pieces allows them to be knitted, interlaced, woven and sewed together, dependant on their own shape as well as related to the objects in juxtaposition.

The final building could be a memorial for Alexander Mcqueen, that also exhibits some of his greatest masterpieces.

The idea of fashion and aesthetics is deeply woven into the design and the final result shows certain qualities of the grotesque coming along with gothic architecture. In its ambivalent appearance some would say it could be beautiful, whereas others might think of it as disturbing and unnatural in shape. It deviates from the buildings in juxtaposition through its entirely different form and silhouette, it catches attention, because it describes a different kind of beauty, in a very aesthetic way it is absurd and weird.

Form Studies

Form Study

Form Study

Form Study

Form Study

Form Study

Form Study

Studies on Patterns and Colours

Study on Patterns and Colours

Study on Patterns and Colours

Study on Patterns and Colours

Study on the Silhouette

Study on the Silhouette

Grotesque Column

Grotesque Column

Chunk of Wall with applied form studies

Elevation

Top View

Section 1-1

Section 2-2

Section 3-3

Section A-A

Section B-B

Section C-C

Section D-D

Program Front View

Program Top View

Exterior Rendering

Exterior Rendering

Exterior Rendering

Exterior Rendering

Exterior Rendering

Exterior Rendering

Exterior Rendering

Interior Rendering

Interior Rendering

Interior Rendering

Interior Rendering

Eidesstattliche Erklärung Ich erkläre hiermit an Eides statt durch meine eigenhändige Unterschrift, dass ich die vorliegende Arbeit selbständig verfasst und keine anderen als die angegebenen Quellen und Hilfsmittel verwendet habe. Alle Stellen, die wörtlich oder inhaltlich den angegebenen Quellen entnommen wurden, sind als solche kenntlich gemacht.

Die vorliegende Arbeit wurde bisher in gleicher oder ähnlicher Form noch nicht als Magister-/Master-/Diplomarbeit/Dissertation eingereicht.

Datum

Unterschrift

Acknowledgement I would like to thank all the people who contributed in some way to the work described in this thesis.

First and foremost, I want to thank my Design supervisor JosĂŠ Carlos LĂłpez Cervantes, who has supported me throughout my thesis with his patience and knowledge whilst allowing me the room to work in my own way. I attribute the level of my Masters degree to his encouragement and effort and without him this thesis, too, would not have been possible. One simply could not wish for a better or friendlier supervisor.

Besides him I also want to thank my thesis supervisor and head of the IOUD Institute Prof. Trummer for his insightful comments and encouragement, but also for the hard question which incented me to widen my research from various perspectives.

My sincere Thanks also goes to my friends, who have helped me out, when I needed them. I feel extremely lucky to have such special people in my life.

Last but not least, I want to express my gratitude to my familly, who supported me throughout the entire process and in life in general, without them i simply couldn‘t have done it.

References Text: The Beautiful, the Sublime and the Grotesque, The Subjective Turn in Aesthetics from Enlightenment to the Present Michael J. Matthis Critique of Justment, Immanual Kant Freidrich Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth: selections from Nietzsches notebooks of the early 1870‘s David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, in Enquiries David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste Noel Caroll, Hume‘s Double Standard of Taste, the journal of aesthetics and art criticism The persistence of beauty: victorians to moderns, edited by Michael O‘Neill, Mark Sandy, Sarah Wootton Images: Gustav Dore: File:Gustave Doré - Dante Alighieri - Inferno - Plate 8 (Canto III - Abandon all hope ye who enter here).jpg Witkin: http://www.stufftoblowyourmind.com/blog/artatomical-joel-peter-witkins-harvest/ http://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/26031/1/if-you-like-mcqueen-s-ss01-voss-you-ll-like-joel-peter-witkin Alexander McQueen: http://blog.metmuseum.org/alexandermcqueen/tag/only-a-game/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/11717537/Alexander-McQueen-set-to-become-UKs-most-popular-exhibition-ofall-time.html