Pulchrism: Championing Beauty as the Purpose of Art/Chapter 3
Pulchrism in Practice
I have endeavoured to fully adopt Beauty as the purpose of my art. Although I have been highly experimental, I have attempted more often than not to create art which had Beauty as its core motivation.
From my own etymological study Pulchrism: Discovery of a Lost Romantic Word[23] comes the following information:
"During the filming of my first film El Angel, which was shot in and around the L.A. River in 1994–5, I had a spiritual crisis of deep existentialist doubt. While lying in bed one morning, in my apartment in Los Feliz, Hollywood, I began to die of some sort of despair. I began to let go of life. Ethereal clouds – at once colourless and opalescent – appeared through a parting reality. My soul questioned the purpose of life, doubting its validity. I ascended and descended simultaneously into an extracted space which was Beautiful. At that point some sort of Divine command issued forth at me and I remember deciding to myself, in the deepest core of my being, that I would LIVE FOR BEAUTY. I decided that moment to dedicate my life to attempting to communicate Beauty. It has become the purpose of my life."
I shall here interject some personal notes from my journals in order to illustrate my experience in attempting to freely adhere to the tenets of Pulchrism and practice my art accordingly:
Far from being rigid or dogmatic, I have methodically placed Beauty at the forefront of my industry. From 1995, up until I attended the Masters of Fine Art programme at the University of Brighton, in Southeast England, in 2014–15, I had never actually encountered individuals in person who were drastically opposed to the notion that Beauty should be the purpose of art. It came as quite a shock to me that such a maxim should be perceived as dreadfully controversial as it was amongst certain students on the course. At first I thought they were joking – for certainly they had grown past the outdated brainwashing memes fostered in the 19th and 20th centuries that Beauty had no meaning or purpose in relation to art. Had those students been living in a bomb shelter for the past sixty years?
But no, what I encountered shocked me to my core: certain artists' expired, morbidly outmoded – and I would say criminally ignorant – aesthetic suppositions – undoubtedly the products of mind control indoctrinated into them by mass, pop-cultural, trauma-induced, Brave New World-style mental conditioning – were still solidly rooted in the pseudo-foundation of disingenuous 20th century aesthetic relativism.
Had I fallen through the rabbit hole? Unfortunately yes, for I was subsequently barraged with rabid impositions of subjectivity at every turn. I was attacked by demonic presences disguised as art students, whose true countenance surfaced only during the most extreme spewings forth of vitriol aimed at discrediting my stance on the importance of Beauty to art. Such rampant, disheartening hatred affected my sense of self-worth and outlook on the art I had been producing. In other words: they made me doubt myself and my practice.
In practice, I have made it my objective to create beautiful art. Any results are beside the point, for it is the motive that matters most. I have found that the medium employed is only one variable, and that any resulting beauty can arise more or less independently of whatever given media might have been used. Film does seem to give me an edge in achieving some sort of beauty which can be commonly recognized as beautiful, and I think it is because of the immediacy of film — you get instant results — and also perhaps because I have been practicing with that particular medium for more than twenty years.
Jesse Waugh
Starry Night Cracker — Hamadryas laodamia
2014
Oil on canvas