Move from aesthetics

Aesthetics always sits a bit outside the subject being depicted, connecting us to the subject, some may even call it a lens through which we look at the objects in question. But it always calls to itself more than the subject. We know about aesthetics through itself as much as we think we know the object aestheticised. Or aesthetics maybe like light, fine enough to understand eye level world, but the moment things are broken down, it gets thrown off as any real parameter. It obfuscates what it means to portray.

The thingness of aesthetics cannot be done away with. Till we don’t contend with this, we can not discuss problematic art, bad narratives, and even our ambivalence about all things art, there are always knots that form in our guts when we look at art. Do we just appreciate it, be moved, or move afterwards? When Aesthetics makes a banal thing beautiful, it is not merely exposing object’s inherent beauty, for another set of aesthetics applied can also expose the banal in the beautiful, or the sublime. So it must be that either everything has all properties, from beauty to banal to sublime. Or Aesthetics is the object that lends it’s characteristic to a subject.
Which further implies, yes you can make art about anything. Anything. But that also means aesthetics can easily make all art about itself. So what about the things we intend to talk about. The object perhaps always lost, in the medium we choose to survey it. The objective is lost even further, forever diluted between us, our application of Aesthetics, and the medium we so choose.

What probably constitutes Aesthetics?

It’s perhaps similar to light again in the sense that it shines on the object. The shine, the context, the appeal. It’s an appeal to approach an object, probably. The approach of our senses. Like a light turned on suddenly in a darkened room. The turning of light, the initial spark itself which prompts a head turn, the initial onslaught is part of that appeal. And so this appeal may lie within or without Aesthetics, but is again an integral.

Ofcourse light is everywhere, ever present, if we look at through our common sense, but it is.. it’s own thing. It doesn’t predate the objects it falls on, it doesn’t define the objects either. So is Aesthetics, yet it cannot be just that. Ofcourse a definition is an approximation, you find the nearest point of relativity between the defined and the reader. Aesthetics which itself is an approximation of the objects it illuminates, is itself approximated. Yet we cannot escape it, as diffuse as it seems when we notice it. So here we are, mid distance from both the object, and the lens, the light. The medium. And we flow with some friction in this medium, as it flows invisibly through us too.

So…What lies beyond Aesthetics? How do we untangle the object depicted from it’s aesthetics?

It’s probably another war we will always lose, like we lose to death or meaninglessness. But at least we can approach the sublime, we can at least defy the aesthetics of the day. We can atleast beat aesthetics if not Aesthetics.
We can attempt reaching to the sublime, going beyond language, reaching a thing before logic does, before our understanding grasps it and makes it part of common knowledge, approximating further to our knowledge through histories. We can build new tools, never falling for the allure of the appealing.

We Stare at something till it loses meaning in words. Breaking down the object of your thought before setting a tone or trope to it. Letting things fester till they are so abstracted that you are helpless with the current words in dictionary. Till you have to form new words. Lose language that has vested interests in the past. Legacy has to be lost, for us to forge new paths. I don’t mean losing history but losing the glasses of adoration to set ways. Lose empathy for the protagonist, lose hero’s journey. Three act structure. See how much are we in water without the life jacket of tropes and tradition.

Embrace stillness of no movement. Or violence of all things living themselves out at once. Sit, without speaking. Let it boil over. When it spills out, it will find its path. All will be sublimated by language eventually, but at least you wont carry around your spill in tupperware.