RESEARCH / PHOTOGRAPHY
On Aesthetics of Ugliness - What is Ugly?
Views on the ugly are diverse, and only a few of them are more thoroughly discussed in the technical literature. In my dissertation, I studied the phenomena and perceptions of the ugly in Western culture from the perspective of the theory of aesthetics, history, art, and philosophy.
Ugliness is often encountered in everyday life, but it does not have a unified definition of its role for the individual and society. I wondered what is ugly on a personal and cultural level, how to get to the ugly and recognize it, and why the ugly is necessary and useful. I unified the findings into three categories of ugly and described the process of finding relevant images of ugly around me.
BA THESIS
Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana
EXHIBITED AT
Ponjava 2.0, Ljubljana, 2022.
Through philosophical reasoning and objective visual equivalents, I tried to answer some of the questions that the ugly raises. The photograph, taken as objectively as possible, each time showed too much of one and too little of the other. I have come to the realization that we can discuss every experience from the point of view of the beautiful; that, after all, the experience of excrement can also be aestheticized.
Unable to find an objective representation of the ugly, I looked inside myself and decided to translate visually what was ugly to me. By reflecting on my feelings, I found that I was feeling anxious. I perceive my lack of understanding of anxiety’s origin itself and my reactions to it as something really ugly. Anxiety is like dirt, without the right shape, sound, or smell, and yet it should not be there. By building a doll, I, therapeutically, built another self, purely intuitively and experimentally, to distance myself as much as possible from the rational. Photography is only one part of the process, but it is crucial because with it I translate a sculptural work anew.
In my search for what is objectively ugly, I find that there is no answer to the question What is ugly? and that, at the same time, this is the answer. The essence of the ugly and understanding it is a matter of individual perception.
Each person belongs to a different society with whom they share similar views, yet events and experiences change our perception of the world quite individually. It is important to be aware of why we perceive something the way we perceive it. If we consciously notice stimuli from the environment, they can calm us down, cheer us up, upset us...
To understand ourselves, we have to ask ourselves why this certain thing standing in front of us upsets us, and what is the reason for it—in the perceived object, in the situation or in ourselves? Is it possible that there is a part of us that, at a certain perception (perhaps naturally), tends to trigger pleasure or other intense feelings? If this is true, then the potential to respond to the ugly with intense feelings, e.g., disgust, resistance, attraction, already exists in us evolutionarily. Perhaps only the intensity of experiencing the various ugly is subjective.
