- [Presenter] Good evening,
ladies and gentlemen.
Welcome to tonight's event.
We ask that you turn off all cell phones
and electronic devices at this time.
Still photography, video
and audio recording
are not permitted.
Please take a moment to look around
for the available emergency exits.
In case of an emergency,
calmly proceed to the
nearest emergency exit.
AA100 10 Questions is now in session.
Please welcome Brett Steele,
Dean of the School of the
Arts and Architecture.
(applause)
- Thank you everybody
so much for coming in
for week three of 10 Questions.
And this evening's
question, what is beauty?
As I've said before in
these introductions,
Cathy Opie, one of the
world's greatest photographers
and a colleague of ours
here in this school at UCLA,
has said it this way:
ideas always start with questions.
And as I think we all know today also,
the asking of questions
is what drives research
in almost any human form today,
across the humanities, in the sciences,
in medicine and indeed as
a predicate to this course
in what we think of as the arts.
If you'll allow me to
take just a few minutes,
I'd like to briefly introduce the course
for those of you that
are new to this evening
in our public audience.
And after that, we'll have
the honor and privilege
of introducing our four terrific guests
who will get on with the conversation
around tonight's question.
I'm Brett Steele, Dean of the School
of the Arts and Architecture
and, like many of you,
very much a student of this course
and everything that's
coming out of it so far.
You are joining us for a
very special experiment
in higher education today
in which a combination
of students and members of the
larger public come together
for a rolling program that will look at
each of the weekly questions
that we've set as an agenda.
This is very much a combination
of a student audience.
We have 80 students that
are enrolled from across
the entire campus and not just here
at the School of the Arts and Architecture
and those of you who have come
in from beyond the borders
of the campus this evening
to enjoy this event
and everything it offers.
I'd like to say as a part
of my introduction today,
something briefly about the materials
that we also have available,
as some of you have come
and asked about that after some
of our previous discussions.
We are striving here to make
the state of art education
very literally more viable and visible
to a larger audience of
people thinking about
the state of the world today.
We're working to make the
university more porous,
to bring down some of the borders between
highly specialized forms
of knowledge and expertise
that make up UCLA, like many other
research institutions today.
And more than anything, for
your students in the audience,
to find a way to make the work you do
in not just this classroom or this class
but also in the various performance halls,
seminar spaces on the
stages and in studios,
more open and available to
larger audiences around our work.
This is very much a course about the work
that all of you are doing as students.
In addition to what I've
already said about trying
to make the work we're
doing here at the university
more accessible, a point
to, make tonight especially
in our attempts to
broaden the conversation,
and this follows on from a couple of weeks
of looking up and
periodically seeing a laptop
or a mobile phone in operation,
is that we encourage you to do that
and to do it in real
time during this session.
For those of you that are interested
and have immediate responses
and ideas and thoughts
about some of the things being said,
simply go online and do that.
We've got all sorts of portholes
and access places to do that.
Please try and use, if you
can, the #ucla10questions.
It's yours, make use of
it and get the work out.
You can also of course be sure to visit
arts.ucla.edu/10questions,
which is like how
machines talk today.
I think if you just ask Google or Siri
to go to UCLA 10 Questions,
you'll get there.
The course materials, including
these terrific presentations
that our guests are
arriving with every week,
are available to all of
us and on that website.
Please, please make use
of it and understand
that to be a part of any audience today
is to be a part of multiple audiences.
And indeed, that's very
much one of the premises
that this kind of a course
is testing and learning from,
which is how it is we
all operate and think
and live across multiple domains.
Over these 10 weeks, 10
Questions bring together
40 terrific faculty from
across our entire campus.
Students enrolled in the
course also include majors
of the School of Arts and Architecture,
but many other departments
across this entire UCLA campus.
In addition to being
here Tuesday evenings,
our students meet weekly
with their graduate teaching assistants
to discuss these questions and create
their own responses to them in a variety
of forms and formats and to reiterate
the kind of conversation
that's taking place
up here on the stage this evening
in their own interesting
and individuated ways.
Each of the questions
being asked in this series
is drawn from a critical
engagement of arts practitioners.
Our questions are central
to artistic practice today.
This we know because we
shaped and curated this list
from an ongoing conversation
with artists across this school
and others here on campus.
By sharing these inquiries
with not only artists
but also scientists,
scholars and activists,
we believe that we are
building a firmer foundation
here at UCLA for understanding both
the disciplinary forms of knowledge
essential to research and creation today,
but as well the different
individuated perspectives
that experience and live lives and careers
within those fields.
A couple of short thanks please
in advance of me introducing
tonight's guests.
10 Questions, this course,
its format, its design,
its impetus is very much
the work of Victoria Marks,
a choreographer...
(audience cheering)
A choreographer and Associate Dean
in the School of the
Arts and Architecture.
Victoria has developed this initiative
alongside Anne Marie Burke
and her terrific team here
within the school who
have worked with Victoria
and with Marilyn Pace here at the School
of the Arts and Architecture
for her considerable expertise
in the running and organizing
of courses here on campus
to make sure this initiative in this form,
as both public and academic activities,
could go forward in the way it has.
Please join me in thanking
all of them for that effort.
(applause)
As I have done before,
we need also to thank
World Arts Culture/Dance for allowing us
to use this terrific room and venue here,
not only for making the room available
but for the accommodation of
technical expertise and magic
that make sure things like
lights and microphones
and cameras, air heat, electricity
and all of that stuff works
in the way we need it here.
And thank you everybody in the department
for making that possible.
So with that as a broader introduction,
let me just briefly introduce
each of our four guests
who have agreed a running order.
And in the form that we've done
this in the previous weeks,
we'll each begin this
evening's conversation
with a short presentation themselves.
Come on out here, our guests
are here tonight already.
(applause)
Thank you.
Thanks.
As was the case in the first two sessions,
we have four guests with us this evening.
Just to briefly introduce them
to all of you, J.Ed Araiza
(applause)
is head of the UCLA School of Theater,
Film and Television's MFA Acting Program.
He is the principal
actor and original member
of the SITI Company, which
he founded with Anne Bogart
and Tadashi Suzuki in 1992.
He has a long and accomplished career
working on multicultural,
cross-disciplinary projects
as writer, director and performer.
Paul Barber
(applause)
is an evolutionary
conservation geneticist.
As professor in the Department of Ecology
and Evolutionary Biology
and Principal Investigator
of the Barber Lab,
his research integrates genetics, ecology,
oceanography and geology
to understand the processes
that promote speciation
in marine environments
creating marine biodiversity hotspots.
Marla Berns in the center chair,
(applause)
has served as
the Shirley & Ralph Shapiro
Director of the Fowler museum,
our immediate neighbor
to the east of here,
although I've lost track
of east in this room.
It's right there.
At UCLA since 2001.
Marla is a curator and
scholar of African arts.
Her work focuses primarily
on the arts of northeastern Nigeria.
Marla is a three-time Bruin.
She received her
undergraduate, graduate and PhD
in art history degrees from here at UCLA
and specializes in African
art and was director
of the University Art Museum
at the University of
California Santa Barbara
before coming here to the Fowler.
And finally, Kathleen McHugh
(applause)
is a feminist, media theorist and critic.
Kathleen teaches in the
Department of English
and in the Cinema and
Media Studies program
in the Department of Film, Television
and Digital Media at UCLA
where she currently serves as chair.
From 2005 to 2012 and
again in 2013 and 14,
she served as Director of the UCLA Center
for the Study of Women.
Please join me in welcoming
all four of our guests.
(applause)
Thank you everybody so much for coming in.
We have agreed in advance a running order
for this evening's presentation,
which I need to bring up on the (mumbles)
and Paul will begin this
evening's presentations.
Thanks everybody.
- So I'm a biologist
and when I thought about
what beauty is in biology,
I thought about perhaps
talking about biodiversity
and all of the amazing,
different forms of life
that are out in nature.
And I also thought about perhaps
talking about complexity,
because these ecosystems
that these organisms inhabit
and that we share with them on this planet
are incredibly complex.
But I thought instead
I'd focus on the idea
of beauty being simplicity.
And this may seem a little
odd to have diversity
and complexity and simplicity
in the same sentence,
but it's simplicity that
gives rise to complexity
and creates diversity.
Now you can see this by
watching origami be made.
You can start with a
single piece of paper.
And through the simple
action of simply folding
that piece of paper, you can, over time,
create a very complicated an
object like this little fox.
Impressively, it gets even
more complicated than that.
This is a single piece of paper.
As is this.
And this.
Now there's natural origami as well.
So this is a ladybug extending its wings
from underneath its carapace.
And this ladybug, the wings
have to be flexible enough
to be folded, to be protected
underneath its carapace,
but it has to be strong
enough in order to be able
to support flight.
And it's the complexity of
something like the folding
of these ladybug wings that scientists use
and engineers use to guide the development
of new technology and new
approaches to technology
such as this folding and expanding
solar array on a satellite.
Now there's an entire
field of study where people
are developing new math
and new tools to understand
how to create different
shapes through folding.
And yet this ladybug
doesn't need that math.
The ladybug's figured
it out all on their own.
So how did this happen?
Well, it's through simplicity.
And what I wanna introduce
you to is a simple idea
that was first put forward
by Sir Alfred Russel Wallace
on your left, and Charles
Darwin on your right.
And they proposed a very
simple idea of evolution
through natural selection.
And natural selection
is a principle by which
each slight variation of a
trait, if useful, is preserved.
Now another way of phrasing this is that
individual organisms that have traits,
that are better suited
to their environment,
have a higher probability of surviving
and in that, have a higher probability
of leaving more offspring
that carry those same traits.
Now an example of this, a classic example
comes from peppered moths.
Peppered moths are found in Britain
and they live on the bark of trees.
And as you can see, this
light with dark modeling
of this particular moth
makes it particularly
well camouflaged on this bark.
This is what trees looked like before
the Industrial Revolution in England.
After the Industrial Revolution,
through the emission of
smoke from burning coal,
the bark looked like this.
Now suddenly that moth that was incredibly
well camouflaged sticks
out like a sore thumb.
However, you should
notice up to the right,
there is a darker colored moth.
And it is through the
process of slightly darker
colored moths being less
susceptible to predation over time
that will yield that darker form.
Now we can see this experimentally,
people have done experiments
where they've raised birds
and they've only allowed the birds
with the largest beaks to reproduce.
And over 20 generations,
what you see is the beak size
that you start with ends
up being much smaller
than where you end up.
And what is amazing about
this very simple process
is that by these minor variations
occurring over long
periods of time gives rise
to diversity and complexity.
So if we look at
something like a seahorse,
this is the standard shape of a seahorse.
But there are also amazing
seahorses that look like this.
The leafy seadragon
evolved from a seahorse
that looked like the first
one that I showed you.
But over time, because it lived
in a kelp forest environment,
it began to develop
a morphology that closely
resembled the kelp.
This is a tree frog common to Arizona.
And this ancestral form over
many, many years of evolution,
through natural selection,
gave rise to a form like this
that looks like a piece of granite.
And for those of you that can't see it,
it's right in the middle
facing this way, all right?
So natural selection
amazingly can converge
on a common solution, even
though it's a random process.
So all three organisms here
have a very similar morphology.
They have a very similar shape.
So the shark represent fish.
They evolved about 420 million years ago.
In the middle is an ichthyosaur.
This is an extinct group of
reptiles that actually evolved
from a terrestrial group of reptiles
that re-entered the sea.
And as it re-entered the sea, it began to,
over long periods of time, change in a way
to resemble a similar morphology.
Similarly with the dolphin there.
Those ancestors to the
dolphins came from land,
and they re-entered the sea.
And through natural selection,
acting in very similar ways across these
very different groups of organisms,
we end up with very similar forms.
This is true in plants as well.
A well-known example is
in cactus and euphorbs.
And the most recent common
ancestor to these two plants
is 130,000,000 years
ago, and yet they look
strikingly similar
through the small changes
of natural selection acting
over long periods of time.
And one of the cool things
about natural selection
is that there is this
aspect of randomness.
And so you can get
uniquely bizarre creatures
like the platypus that
are like a cross between
a beaver, an otter and a duck.
And there's no rhyme or reason,
but the simplicity of natural
selection acting in a way
to create something as unique as this.
So what I'd like you to
think about when you look at
the diversity out in our world
and you look at all of the amazing animals
and you see the complexity
of these ecosystems
on this planet of which we are stewards,
what I'd like you to think
about is that all of this
happened through the very simple process
of natural selection.
And through this simplicity is beauty.
Thank you.
(applause)
- No transition, I guess I'm up.
Good evening.
Good evening.
Good evening.
- Good evening.
- Good, I'm hoping that we can have
a dialogue and a conversation.
Thank you for being here tonight.
I know it's evening, it's
Los Angeles so it probably
took you a bit of an effort to come here,
so I'm very grateful for your time.
I'm a performing artist,
so let me begin by saying
that the opinions expressed here tonight
reflect only myself and
not the School of Theater,
Film and Television, and
especially the Theater department.
(audience laughter)
Okay.
As a performing artist and educator,
my view is necessarily
informed by the work
to which I have devoted my life.
So tonight, with your indulgence,
I'm interested in discussing beauty
in the laboratory of
art, specifically the art
of performance, which
is inclusive of course
of also directing, writing and design.
I wanna discuss beauty and the concept
of craft and discipline as a search for
and an appreciation of beauty.
I'd like to share an
appreciation of the preparation
and the rigor it actually
takes to make art
look easy, simple and
sometimes accessible.
I recently performed with my
company, the SITI Company,
a performance, a show that ran for a month
at The Getty Villa.
And then after that, I just came back,
we took it to the Brooklyn
Academy of Music in New York.
While we were in rehearsal at the Getty,
a crew came out from BAM
and did a short promo
of which I'm gonna show
you a bit of an excerpt.
Bear with me, it's about a minute, 45.
I may talk over it.
(percussion music)
- We have long wanted to do the Bacchae,
but we have also been terrified of it.
It's a story that is both
simple and complicated.
- (mumbles) Here, we're very, very excited
that we'll be taking it directly
to the BAM Harvey stage.
- Are you trying to spoil me rot?
- The god, Dionysus,
comes back into Thebes
disguised as a human
to, among other things,
proselytize and spread his religion.
He's been provocated to seek revenge
on the house of Pentheus,
the young, newly seated king
because Pentheus's fierce
denial of this new religion.
Through many machinations,
Dionysus gets Pentheus
to go up to the mountain to
spy upon his band of Bacchans,
but the ultra plan is
that he's going to have
Pentheus murdered by
his own mother's hands.
(drum beats and horn bellows)
- The violence of the
action, what that would be
is much wilder in our
imaginations than it could ever be
in any other form.
But the humanity of that moment,
when Agave has this realization
that she has done this thing
is something that we want to experience,
channel through an actor.
- Part of our background
comes out of our DNA
by being in association with
the Suzuki Company of Toga in Japan.
In many ways, that training
came about in an attempt
to bring a contemporary
body up to the demands
and the parameters that
the Greek plays demand.
- Every day before
rehearsal, we not only train
with Suzuki training, but also viewpoints.
And the viewpoints is an
improvisation in which the actors
actually essentially can
look at the play out of time.
In other words, they're
not performing it in order,
with the characters in order.
They're in a sense hyper-texting
on the ideas of the play.
Dionysius says, and
Thebes, you are in danger
of shutting down and becoming smaller
and becoming hegemonic and
becoming a kind of dictatorship.
- Greek theater was, we're
living in a society right now
that has really important
questions to come...
- So you notice that, that was a bit
of the rehearsal process.
It's not a finished project.
There wasn't any big
costumes, not a lot of lights.
I wanted you to get an idea of
the tremendous amount of work
it takes to put something.
When you go see a show,
it's an hour and a half,
maybe two hours.
If it's abstract, maybe three hours.
But it takes a tremendous amount of time.
If we're lucky, four to six
weeks, eight hours a day,
six days a week, 48 hours
times six times six,
however many hours that
is, to present to you,
not including all of the research
that we all do individually,
the rigor of the research
to put the 90 minutes that
you might see on the stage.
So one of the reasons I didn't
show you the finished project
aside from the fact that
most stage productions
look terrible on film and video,
and especially in our
SITI Company productions,
they can either be very
loud and jarring...
Will that work?
Or they can be very still
and quiet, like that.
So rather than talk about
the beauty or lack of beauty
of a finished theatrical process,
I'm gonna talk to you, share some thoughts
about the rehearsal process.
While I love and I was first drawn
into the performing arts
by a sense of community,
joy and cast parties (audience chuckling),
for myself, the rehearsal process,
and please don't get me wrong,
the rehearsal process is
actually more exciting,
meaningful and creative
than the actual performance.
And don't get me wrong, I am
both thrilled and terrified
by performing live on
stage like I am tonight.
I'm a little terrified to be here tonight.
And I also understand that without you,
without the audience, a play
as I love and understand it
can't be complete.
Oh, and I wanna challenge
you as an audience,
and sometimes I want to, maybe
often I want to confuse you
as an audience, but still I understand,
as the comedian Sarah Bernhardt says,
without you, I'm nothing.
Without an audience, the
work that I do doesn't exist.
A rehearsal is only a means to an end.
The end is the act of
communicating with an audience.
And that communication involves
a sense of rigor and craft.
Most audiences don't know or understand
the rigor of a good rehearsal
process, and you shouldn't.
Good technique is hidden technique.
We don't want you to see how we do it.
We just want you to see the characters
in an extreme circumstance
telling you a story
that I hope perhaps is important for you.
By nature, I'm a profession,
I'm a storyteller.
And often, while my work as
a member of the SITI Company,
which is based in New York
where the work that I do
with the SITI Company is I
often practice and create
in the abstract world, in the
modern or postmodern world.
Even though I often work
in these kind of wacky,
postmodern and postmodern
world, I'm constantly
asking myself what is the story?
What am I saying?
And most importantly, why am I saying it?
Why should I say it and
why should people care?
Why should people come and,
if we're lucky, pay money
to come see what we're trying to say?
So I don't work only exclusively
in the abstract world,
but I work in a large
part with the SITI Company
and in my own work as well
in the abstract world.
I believe that you,
the viewer, the hearer,
the shared experiencer,
you might not completely
or at all sometimes understand the story
that I'm trying to share with you,
but I personally feel I
have to know and understand
the narrative that I'm
trying to share with you
even if you only get abstract imagery.
Does that make sense?
The more abstract the story is,
the more I have to understand what it is
I'm trying to share with you
so that you have a sense,
maybe not exactly of
what I'm trying to say,
but you get a sense of a point of view.
You get a sense of something important.
You get a sense of
something that you might
wanna pay attention to.
And that takes rigor.
So what does all this
have to do with beauty?
What is beauty?
For me, I believe that quite simply,
and it sounds rather simplistic,
beauty is the search for beauty.
For myself at this juncture in my life,
beauty has become a sense
of art and artisanship,
of craft and discipline.
And while beauty might be
in the eye of the beholder,
for myself as an artist
based in performance,
as a director, a playwright,
an actor and an educator,
I look for beauty in the
attempt of virtuosity.
Bad acting is easier to talk about,
easier to criticize than good acting.
And we all do it, we all
criticize bad acting.
But good acting, harder to talk about.
You know what you liked.
Why did you like it?
I'm not sure, but something about that
touched me, reached me, moved me.
And in theater, it's very
ephemeral, good and bad.
The bad stuff you do in theater,
unless there's a critic
in the audience, gone.
The good stuff that you
do, that's gone too.
So if you go to see a play
and you find something
that moves you, something
that's of interest to you,
something that you love,
count yourself lucky
because no one is ever
gonna see that again.
What is beauty?
Beauty in performance
and beauty in rehearsal.
For me, it's the beauty of preparation.
The process, the ritual that
connects artists through time.
Preparation of the space, of the body,
of the tools of the trade.
By space, I mean still.
I find, I take it as an
honor with my students,
with myself, with people
I work on in our company.
We still make sure the place is clean
and ready to start to work
because we work a lot,
you might have noticed,
in rehearsal we work a lot
in bare feet or in socks.
You might have noticed that in the film.
So we make sure that the room is prepared.
We prepare our bodies.
We do very rigorous physical training
before every rehearsal.
We do it before every show,
and we do rigorous preparation
in terms of research, deep research;
and also in terms of what it
is that we bring every day
to the rehearsal process.
So part of that rigor is
not only being well prepared
but being able to let go of it,
let go of whatever you
thought you were going to do.
Let it go because of what's happening
into the room that day.
Because the actor that
you're working with tells you
something that you've heard
five times or six times
or 25 times but says
it in a different way.
But the rigor, to be in the moment,
to be able to express yourself
back and to really listen
to what that actor is saying to you
takes training and rigor.
Where am I?
So yes, the beauty of rigor,
the beauty of preparation,
the beauty of expressing
yourself through exhaustion,
pain and discouragement
because that is a large part
of the life of a performing artist
in singing, in the world of
dance and in performance.
It's a lot of disappointment.
They say, I don't know if it's true,
this is an anecdotal story,
we say it in the theater
so maybe dancers say the
same thing about dancing,
but in theater I've heard it said often
that three of the most
nerve-racking professions
are landing, and my father-in-law
was a Navy jet pilot,
landing a jet at night
on an aircraft carrier
going up and down, one;
second thing that they
say is a brain surgeon
performing brain surgery;
third thing, an actor on opening night.
(audience chuckling)
It's terrifying, and yet we keep doing it.
Why do we do it?
A sense of love, a sense
perhaps of a search for beauty.
The beauty, the connection
of the deepest self,
what drives one to the current moment.
Why do we do this?
Why do we want to be in that moment?
Because that moment is
important because we're trying
to say something to the world.
And for me as an artist, for
the students that I work with
at UCLA that I'm privileged
to work with here at UCLA,
its challenging ourselves to be present
in the world that we live in now.
I don't find that beauty or art
is a distraction from the world.
I don't think that art is different
or separated from the world.
I think that my art puts me
in the middle of the world.
I try to find beauty in having to say
terrifying difficult
things to an audience.
Some of the things I say on stage,
some of the things I ask
my students to do or to say
are very difficult.
Well, we say them for a reason.
I just finished a Greek play,
I just finished the Bacchae
by Euripides in where,
how are we doing on time?
Okay, great.
Oh, is that over?
Am I way over?
Great, okay, I'm so sorry.
I didn't look at that.
I'll wrap it up very
quickly, my apologies.
In the Bacchae, it's
basically about the battle
between opposing powers,
old power, new power,
religion and the state,
ends up with a woman
ripping the head off of her son
while in an ecstatic,
besides yourself, state.
Why?
To keep asking the questions
of what is the meaning
of power and what is the meaning of god.
I think those are
questions that we can still
continue to ask ourselves now.
Let me finish up by saying this.
I'm going to close by echoing something
my new colleague, Paul Barber
said and wrote recently.
Beauty is simplicity,
complexity and diversity.
That's something that I long
for, search for constantly
in my own work.
Simplicity, complexity and diversity.
In rehearsal, I look to
discover and explore that.
And then on stage, I
try to artfully recreate
that moment of discovery
eight times a week.
I can only do that by
relying on the techniques
that I've learned through exploration
of rigor and preparation.
Thank you.
(applause)
How long did I go over?
- Lights down for the slides a little bit?
Thank you.
Good evening everyone.
Thank you, Brett; thank
you, Vic, for inviting me
to participate in this program.
Clicker?
- [J.Ed] It's right here.
Thank you, my apologies.
- Okay.
Ideals of beauty are socially
and culturally constructed
and are used to express difference.
Although rarely practiced today,
for many ethnic groups
in sub-Saharan Africa,
arts of the body rendered women and men
attractive at the same time they served
as powerful expressions
of identity and belonging.
Skin is a highly mutable
and expressive medium.
And for many cultures around
the world, including our own,
it's irreversible transformations
and very particular patterns
of modification and
ornamentation possess beauty,
as well as profound social
and spiritual significance.
It is not surprising that in most cases
these programs of
scarification begin before
or during puberty so that
their completion and stages
coincides with the physiological
and social transition
from childhood to sexual
maturity, marriage and childbirth.
Only by completing these age-based changes
does a woman become
beautiful and marriageable.
Anthropologists have considered
it likely that the skin
was the first canvas of humanity,
a threshold between self and others
that implies interaction and exchange.
The use of the body for
encoding symbols is ancient
and is attested by cave art
in the Tassili region of the Sahara
from over eight to 9,000 years ago.
African cultures have
incised and sculpted skin
to create patterns of
meaning and identity,
which relate to ethnicity, kinship,
social status and gender.
Scarifications were done by
lifting the skin with a hook
and then making shallow
and deft cuts across it,
which were then irritated
with soot or red iron oxide
or other substances so that
the scars stood in sharp relief
against otherwise smooth skin.
As illustrated by these two photographs
of Bamileke women from Cameroon,
the geometric designs formed
by meticulously cut rows
of scars enhance the natural
curves and flowing lines
of a woman's young and fecund body,
producing what have been
called marks of civilization.
The Tabwa of southeastern
Democratic Republic of the Congo
covered themselves head to
foot with scarifications.
And one observer in the late 19th century
wrote that they did so
in the most artistic
and symmetrical manner, with raised spots
and lines of relief.
My colleague, Alan Roberts,
a professor here in the
Department of World Arts
and Cultures/Dance and a foremost scholar
of the Tabwa describes this
practice of scarification
as seeking to perfect the
body through a system of signs
ready to be read.
These scars were highly tactile
and considered highly erotic,
especially when a woman was young
and the scars were fresh,
aiding in conception,
parenthood and continuity.
My own research was in
northeastern Nigeria.
And I show you a map,
and I'm gonna see if I
can handle a laser pointer
with my other hand here.
I guess I can't.
Are you seeing it?
Anyway, the three groups with whom I did
long-term field research
are the Ga'anda, the Bena and the Yungur.
And this is a rather
remote part of the country,
very different from the
highly urbanized south.
It was a place that no one else had done
any kind of sustained work in until I came
to do that research in the early 1980s.
The landscape was stunning.
It was part of the savanna.
Communities were small.
Villages were also not very large.
Houses were made of mud and
sometimes concrete block
and corrugated tin, but it was a place
that stood outside of time.
And so when I did my work,
it was just at the end
of body scarification being practiced
because it was prohibited
by local government officials in 1978.
As you can imagine between
the onslaught of missionaries
and Christianity,
colonization, new governments
in the post-independence era,
making these marks was
not considered modern,
not considered appropriate.
But I did study the women at the time
who still bore the marks
of full-body scarification
in these highly elaborate programs
that were actually
transacted over many years,
sometimes in six stages, sometimes more,
always beginning when a girl was young
and the first marks
always made over her navel
to mark that part of her body
that would be the guarantor
of community survival and continuity.
The marks were then done sequentially,
leaving areas empty so that
certain design patterns
stood out as discrete entities,
so that those designs became
templates for their use
on other things, making the woman's body
that kind of template for meaning
as it moved across different categories.
These are two Ga'anda
brides who were presented
to their community after
they should have completed
all of their body markings
but had only done so
with the marks that were over the navel
and down the center of the torso
because it had been prohibited.
And they came out, they were ornamented,
they were transformed,
they became beautiful.
And the important thing
about undergoing this process
is that it's not only a
form of beautification
but it's also marking the fact
that these permanent
modifications to the body
coincide with the irreversible
forward march of physiology.
That you move from childhood to adulthood
and then you become a
proper member of society.
And by doing so, you must
look like an appropriate
perfected Ga'anda person.
This was a neighboring
group called the Bena.
I'm sorry that, I don't
know if you can dim
the lights a little
because her body shows you
these marks, all these
tiny meticulous cuts
that these programs of
marking were highly regular,
highly symmetrical and highly specific.
And maybe later I'll talk about why it is
that this young woman
doesn't look very happy
with my photographing her,
because it was something
I was very intent to do.
I was trying to document
this wonderful practice
that was now outlawed
and would soon be gone.
But she's showing us most of her body
and the designs that you see conformed
to the diagram that I've created.
What became extremely interesting to me
in doing the research in these communities
and asking people about
all the kinds of arts
that they made, was to look
at how, as I mentioned,
the body designs moved from a woman's skin
to the surfaces of pottery,
to the decorations and gourds,
to paintings on architecture,
and especially the way that
the most important spirit pots
were marked as appropriate containers
and receptacles for the supernatural
and for those spirits
that even made it possible
for those cuts to scar
beautifully and not otherwise.
And if you look at the scarring,
and you can actually see it here,
you can see how the scars
become these tiny light areas
against the skin, the body of that pot
which is named in Ngum-Ngumi,
this is the Ga'anda's culture hero,
they followed this perambulating
pot to where they live.
The pot becomes a bearer of memory,
and the pot only looks
right and the spirit
will only enter the
receptacle so that people
can interact with it
when it looks perfected,
just like a woman's body.
And so this interesting way
that the bodies of women
became equal to the bodies of spirits
as represented by objects that humans make
is really a powerful message
about how these signs
are signs of belonging,
of collective memory,
of history, and really of the future.
And of course, if we think
about the fact that these women
are no longer being marked,
it's at least important to know
that the memory of that design system,
that program of beautification,
has been retained in the
objects that will indeed last.
The objects that will keep going
and become those permanent
records of history
and memory and the way people find access
to expressing beauty.
And I hope with this discussion,
that we can think about,
even in our own culture,
what it means when we mark ourselves,
when we mark ourselves
permanently with tattooing
and piercing and all other kinds of ways
and how we do so with dress.
And I think it's important
to acknowledge and respect
that these systems of decoration
are not unlike what we do,
they're just different;
and how important it is
to value that difference and that way
in which other people
express what's important
to them in their lives.
Thank you.
(applause)
- Hello.
My remarks today will move from meditation
to critique to aspiration.
So my question, what is beauty?
I think of beauty as a capacious,
empty, conceptual space
filled endlessly by
objects, persons or things
that give their viewer or
perceiver a rush of pleasure.
Indeed, we say this or that
person or thing is beauty full.
But what is it that they are full of?
Beauty is in an object or person,
but it is also in the eye of the beholder.
Thus, beauty is a relationship
between eye and object,
between sensation and quality,
between internal and external,
between beholder and beheld.
In the Western tradition,
women frequently embody beauty.
Poets, painters and philosophers,
frequently men, have
tried to answer what it is
that she is full of that
so compels their pleasure?
In words, paint, ink and
stone, they craft symmetry,
pleasing shape, color or form
according to the parameters
of their desire.
Their work captures, freezes beauty,
renders it still and timeless.
Beauty is a woman whose
radiance poets compare to
"roses, sun, alabaster and pearls."
For painters, beauty
required that the hair
"be long, fine and blonde;
cheeks gleaming white;
"teeth even and gleaming white;
"and the neck, round,
slender and gleaming white."
In the Western tradition then,
beauty tends to the feminine,
blonde and gleaming white.
It is race and gendered.
We can sometimes forget that
beauty is a relationship
and understand it as
objective or subjective.
Objectively understood, beauty can be
judged, evaluated, determined.
This is the realm of criticism, the canon,
beauty pageants, the market,
art and film history.
Subjectively understood,
beauty is relative.
My sense of beauty, my
eye is like no one else's.
What stirs my pleasure
or awe is singular to me.
This is the realm of the
personal, the authentic,
idiom, spirit, transcendence, love.
But three elements make up
the experience of beauty:
subject, object and affect.
The pleasure, attraction
or awe the perceiver feels
at the sight, touch or
sound of the beautiful
object or person.
Beauty's pleasure moves
the perceiver to act
upon the object, to
define it, replicate it,
judge it, own it, purchase it, sell it,
contemplate it, want it,
seduce it or love it.
For the object, there is
only one role: to be it.
I would like now to turn to these roles
as they have been
understood in the cinema.
And this is the critique.
Cinema, a mass popular art,
comes later to the other arts
to questions of beauty and the human form.
In mass media, beauty's
pleasures are variously used.
Representations of erotic beauty
manufactured by cinematic
craft, technology and casting
provide a popular commercial draw.
Beauty sells.
We all know this.
Critiques of commercialized
visual pleasure
and in the cinema, beauty is relatedness
termed visual pleasure, note
the race and gendered nature
of erotic cinematic
beauty and its production.
For the most part in
the Hollywood industry,
on screen and off, white
men act, have agency, look.
And white women are
looked at and acted upon.
People of color partake of
only the smallest sliver
of the screen on screen, on and off.
While writing this presentation,
I recalled that the first
undergraduate essay on film
that I ever wrote was
tangentially about beauty.
My essay analyzed the tagline
for Roman Polanski's film, Tess.
Tess was the first film
Polanski made in Europe
after fleeing rape charges in the US.
The tagline for the film was,
Tess, a victim of her
own provocative beauty.
Here, beauty's object provokes
brings sexual victimization upon herself.
It's a tautology.
Here, beauty provides an aesthetic alibi
for entangled, exploitive,
on-screen, off-screen
sexual misbehavious, and worse,
that the Me Too movement has
recently addressed and exposed.
Cinema also recounts what beauty excludes.
In John Stahl's 1933 Imitation of Life,
a film about two mothers
and their daughters,
one pair white, the other black,
a scene features the
black teenage daughter
played by the stunning
actress, Fredi Washington,
looking into a mirror.
Gazing at her image, she
says why can't I be white?
The black woman in classical cinema
cannot even ask the
somewhat abject question
that white women ask of their mirrors.
Why can't I be beautiful?
Beauty's traditional affiliation
with whiteness and light excludes her.
Hollywood cinema favors erotic beauty
for its commercial draw,
shaped by standards and norms.
Beauty that instantly pleases,
beauty that is familiar,
beauty that is easily consumed.
We can say that what
Hollywood's beautiful object
is full of is shaped
by cultural priorities,
values and biases; a
consensus of the popular.
Yet the forces of critique,
demographics and talent
change what counts as beauty,
as we can see in the greater
and greater diversity
on screens today.
To conclude, I will turn to the personal,
and here's the aspirational.
I pose myself the question:
what are the most beautiful
films I have seen?
Answering the question
that's often asked me,
what's my favorite
film, I find impossible.
But I decided I would just
ask myself the question.
And several films came to mind.
Jane Campion's The Piano.
Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker.
But the film that came
to me first and foremost
and most powerfully was Charles Burnett's
1978 Killer of Sheep.
Burnett made the film for
$10,000 when he was an MFA
directing student at UCLA.
It was his thesis film.
Because of the music rights,
it wasn't officially released until 2008
and was immediately
designated a national treasure
by the Library of Congress.
Set in Watts, the film follows
an African-American family,
Stan, a slaughterhouse worker, his wife,
young children and friends.
Beyond everyday incidents,
not much happens.
The film is laconic.
It conveys its meaning
primarily through spare,
beautiful, black-and-white images.
Here is one.
A group of boys aged eight to 12
leap from the second-storey
roof of one apartment building
to another immediately adjacent.
The camera is below as
we see one after another
make the jump, and we're
looking up at them.
The boys are exuberant,
laughing, having fun.
The shots capture their joy,
the beauty of their bodies
and the precarity inherent to their play.
A friend asked me why, given a somewhat
depressing subject matter,
I find this film beautiful.
I do so because of the
singularity of the images
the film gives us to contemplate.
Because I have not seen
these images, these framings,
these subjects before.
I do so because of the beauty
the film finds in precarity
without a hint of pathos or condescension.
I do so because the film is full of...
I'm sorry, I do so because
what the film is full of
does not rely on conventional
priorities, values or biases;
is not familiar or easy.
Killer of Sheep's beauty
showed me something
I had not seen before, taught
me something, did something.
Its object was active.
The pleasure it gave
me was active, bracing.
It knocked me back in my seat,
took my breath away, awed me.
I share this film with you on streaming
for the course website.
And Killer of Sheep gave me
the occasion to speak tonight.
See it if you get the chance.
It is beauty full.
Thank you.
(applause)
- Thank you, thank you so much Kathleen
and all four of you for
terrific, terrific presentations.
And if I were to call them
beautiful presentations
on the topic of beauty, I'm
wondering if that's a tautology
or an aspiration, and I'm not yeah sure.
But the one thing I know
is it's a beautiful set
of four presentations together.
And I'm very struck by
the way in which an idea
of the body comes up
in very different forms
in relation to your own fields of work,
but that runs as a kind
of theme through these,
which we might tease out in a minute
in an extended conversation
around the ideas you bring up.
But my first question to open this up is
before receiving an email
and an invitation from us
to address a question of beauty,
have you asked the question
of yourself sometime recently
or regularly in your own work,
and when did you, do you have a memory
of that first coming
up in your own research
and thinking about the kind of ideas
that you presented here?
What is beauty?
Have you asked yourself that in the past
or did you wait for us to come in
from the outside and prompt you?
- Speaking for myself,
I can't say that I never
consciously thought of that.
And that made the
assignment that much more
interesting and challenging.
- Yeah, Marla, you (mumbles)--
- Well, I think in the work that I do,
I think we're considering
beauty all the time
because when looking
at sculpture or objects
that are made by other people,
those kinds of aesthetic
evaluations are always at play.
And I think that in my training as someone
who's tried to look at the art of others,
using criteria that are
not strictly my own,
it's interesting how I find consistency,
consistency in those aesthetic criteria
in the sense of symmetry.
And when you see a beautiful sculpture
from a culture, say, in West Africa,
the women possess the
same kind of qualities
that we might value in ourselves.
And so there's something
that's interesting
in that universality,
but I refuse to believe
that there is a universality
because of course
that goes directly against my saying
that ideals of beauty are
culturally constructed,
which I believe they are.
But still, there's something
about the human being
that is the thing we share,
that has features that are common
that I think lend themselves
to those judgments
that are similar.
- [Brett] Yeah, fantastic.
Kathleen or J.Ed?
- Well, I hadn't asked myself
the question of beauty.
Aesthetics comes up in
film primarily with regard
to film form, because
the question of beauty
of the human body or figure
I kind of came in with Laura Mulvey's
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.
So the idea of visual
pleasure and aesthetics
vis-a-vis bodies was very much
about a critique of gender.
So this sent me back to my complet roots
and thinking about the tradition
and how to, but I ended up
with the critique anyway.
- [J.Ed] I think about
beauty all the time.
The difficulty or the challenge,
my work is all about
obstacles and challenges
and how to work with them,
and that's where the joy comes out of.
For me, the challenge, the obstacle was
could I make my remarks
and my point of view
accessible to the people that
were gonna be in the room?
I'm an observational artist.
I think most artists are,
particularly in performance art,
as well as in fine and graphic arts.
So I'm looking to find the beauty
in how this young lady is bent over
and writing down in her notebook.
So I believe so much in what you said
that it starts, beauty starts
from taking something simple
and making it complex.
That, to me, is everything about art.
So I look for beauty everywhere,
and then I try to see how
I can make the invisible
more visible to an audience.
I also think that's what
we try to do on stage.
- Your observation, Kathleen,
that beauty is a kind of relationship
sometimes between different subjects,
between a subject and audience.
There's a striking kind of relationship
one can imagine in that
to the idea of beauty
as a form of difference making
and that that's a kind of process.
And that's another thing that comes across
in the presentations in different ways,
that it's a sort of unfolding in time
of difference, either within a culture
or between species and their environment
but that in each case,
this body that comes up
is in relation to something
outside of itself.
It might be the local culture,
it might be the environment
as you as a scientist describe it.
But that kind of, the
importance of a sort of
relational or process-driven
account for what beauty is,
is teased out in very
different and interesting ways
between the four of you.
And at a certain level, one
can imagine wanting to spend
a great deal of time understanding
what that larger context is
for these individual
objects or performances,
whether it's an audience
or a natural environment
or a small part of a larger environment
or the local communities that
these cultures evolve around.
And to a certain level,
though I'm struck by how
those environments are, the
larger settings aren't being
spoken of as much as
the individual members
or examples within them.
And I'm wondering if
they become a means then
to try and understand these larger worlds
that these species or
cultures operate within.
- Well I think cultures
or people are highly aware
of everything they see in front of them.
I mean, that's what we do
all the time, all day long,
is take in people, look at their faces,
think about what we see, what people wear.
And it goes on almost without thinking,
these judgments, these
calculations, these assessments.
It's just part of being in the world.
And sometimes, you think
about them in terms of beauty.
You don't like to judge
people, but you do.
So it's kind of how we live in the world,
and I think the great deal of difference
that we're allowed in,
say, our Western tradition
of people having individuality,
in a way that I would not have
seen in a Ga'anda community
where individuality was
not valued in the same way
as we might, produces a
different visual universe
because conformity, for us sometimes,
seems not something you aspire to,
whereas elsewhere it's
something you do aspire to.
- Yeah, you were thinking
in terms of performance
on that front.
- You know, I think whereby
nature, we're narrative animals.
If we hear a noise at
night in the other room,
we go, oh, that's the cat
jumping off to get some water.
We look up at the stars
and we connect the dots
and go oh, that's a belt that Orion is in.
So we tend to try to
explain things for ourselves
so we can survive an onslaught of stimuli.
So I think in terms of the differences,
I tend to try to look at differences
and see how they're related to me.
I try to look at the differences
and find the things, as
in nature, are so related.
Diversity is what allows (mumbles)
correct me if I'm wrong, professor,
diversity in nature is what allows nature
to continue to grow and
to evolve and to prosper.
And I think that, that's
something that we can,
perhaps as human beings,
take a little more acknowledgment of.
- And certainly, we call
it, at a certain level,
is about the building of models
that account for those differences.
- Yeah, some of the things
that have struck me here
is Kathleen talking
about this idea of desire
and Marla talking about
these cultural differences
and beauty being cultural.
And yet people can go
into a different culture
and say, go into a market in Africa
and you can see some
piece of local craft work
and you find it just intrinsically
beautiful and desirable.
And in fish, I mean there
are examples in biology
where you can do these
mate choice experiments
to look at the attractiveness
of certain features.
And a really good example of
this is there are these fish
called swordtails and they have
different lengths of swords,
these different lengths of projections
off of the caudal fin.
That's the back end fin.
And you can artificially
attach a longer fin
to a particular fish.
And even to a different species,
it will find it more attractive
than an individual from its own species.
And so one of the things I
find remarkable in all of this
is there really is so much individuality
in terms of what we find desirable,
what we find beautiful.
And yet there's those individual,
those individual differences can coalesce
into these cultural differences,
but we still have the
ability to bridge them.
And it just shows how
how plastic it all is.
- And plastic in time,
(static noise drowns dialogue)
touch on that in different ways,
the sort of evolving whether
it's the continuous rehearsal
of a piece to leave with
a final presentation,
the evolution of the
scarification over time
at a moment of which that's
changing dramatically.
And it sort of begs
questions around the extent
to which that's conscious
as a part of these events
or consequences that are
being observed by all of you
in your own work as you're doing it.
- Well, Paul, to your point,
I think that there's a real
tension between sort of beauty
or the response to
beauty of the individual
and then the culture industry
and what the culture industry
has produced for us 24/7,
in film and all the ancillary products
and advertising and so on so that
no one feels beautiful, right,
if they're measuring themselves
against these cultural norms.
Anyway, but it does change, right?
It does change, it is changing.
We're seeing many different
kinds of bodies now presented
as desirable or beautiful.
But there is the tension between
what culture is giving us
and what we feel and how
what we feel is shaped
by those very pervasive images.
And some things are up on
the, are in blockbusters
and some things really aren't.
- So if you step back in
time and go into these
indigenous societies where
the other isn't media,
there isn't film and
advertising and a whole industry
built around this notion
of defining and creating
what is beauty, how
does it differ in these?
Do you have that same sort of phenomenon
just without the technology?
Or is it something that really evolves
much more organically
without any real intention?
- Well, I think it's a kind of a falsehood
to imagine that communities
living even in a remote part
of Nigeria don't change and
don't change all the time.
I think that we presume
that that isolation
is a kind of a restricting,
but it's not because
you have ideas coming in all the time
even before everyone had
their own cell phones
and all the things that have now actually
opened up the world to people
that they had no idea about before.
Because as soon as Europeans
came and brought cloth
and people began to
incorporate these new things,
but as they did, they were building
on their original
aesthetic and adding to it
with the new things until, as I said,
the old things become prohibited.
And then you figure out
how do we do without them
but still have the same systems
of expressing who we are
and what are the limits
of that as things change?
Do they broaden, how do they alter?
- I think in general, we're, as a species,
attracted and intrigued by difference
until we feel threatened.
And I don't know when that
happens, that it changes
from an attraction, intrigued by something
that's different and then it
becomes something threatening.
But that idea, no matter
what the isolation,
there's always something that's
coming in that's different.
We have to keep, human beings anyway,
and then most animals probably,
from a certain amount of inbreeding.
There needs to be a difference.
And I think that's maybe genetic.
We're attracted to the
difference to keep us changing
and developing as human beings.
So I think beauty, I would say then,
beauty, whatever your definition
of it is, can be healthy.
I really do believe that.
I think we sometimes allow
ourselves to be dictated to
what a concept of beauty might be.
But for me, the idea
that beauty is noticing
and appreciating something
different, I think,
is a very healthy thing.
- I mean, a bit like
Kathleen's observation
about the idea of visual pleasure
figuring into an account to beauty,
you're touching on attraction and fear,
also brings the question of
emotion into the conversation
in an interesting way,
that beauty, as a concept
as we wrestle with it, has that dimension
built into it in some way.
It's a thing experienced
and we experience through
emotion in some degree
and not just observation
in a more distanced way.
- Beauty is very sensory.
It's all about the senses.
It's tactility, it's olfactory,
it's everything combined.
It's not just one thing or the other,
it's what we see, it's what
we feel, it's what we smell,
all those things come together
to make for an experience
that's pleasant or pleasurable
but defined by oneself.
- Terrific, terrific.
We're gonna open up the floor.
We have microphones as always.
We want to extend the
conversation out into the room.
And if our microphones are available,
we've got a question right up front here.
- Thank you all so much, this
was really very inspiring.
I have a question about
any definitions of beauty
that are universal.
We've talked about relative beauty.
We've talked about sort of
personal definitions of that.
But have any of you, in
your various disciplines,
come across a more universal
definition of beauty?
- I would say this personally,
I don't know if I've come
across a definition of it,
but I would say that the sense
of rigor and craftsmanship
as a partial definition
of beauty, I think,
is fairly universal in my opinion.
That's what I think.
(audience laughing)
- Anyone else wanna take that?
(laughs)
They're looking at one
another, I'm not sure.
- I avoid universals, I don't know.
- Okay, questions?
Right up in the middle
here in the audience.
We're just bringing a
microphone around, sorry.
- Thank you, I have a
question about something
that hasn't been mentioned
about terror and beauty
and terrifying beauty.
Images that we find terrifyingly beautiful
or Baudelaire, Fleurs du mal.
Can you comment on that?
- On terror and beauty,
the sublime, right?
- [Woman] Or images, for example, of 9/11
that many people have found
terrifyingly beautiful.
I know that's an extreme,
but there is that edge
that one encounters in beauty.
- Well I think one way,
I don't know how to immediately respond
but one way is to think about,
again, the affect, right?
Because with the sublime,
you're floored to your being
and there is terror in it.
But maybe you can't take
your eyes off of it.
I don't know much.
(overlapping dialogue)
- It seems to me
that's a really important
component of beauty
in our culture these days as well.
- I think there's also,
just to use your specific of the 9/11,
is there's a distance of time
that allows the viewer
to look at the image
as an image itself and not
as a symbol for an event.
And I think that that
might make a difference.
I think not all the Greek plays
but a lot of the Greek plays are,
the tragedies are extremely terrifying
and deal with terrifying acts.
And I bet that they had
a very different reaction
to the people watching them
there than they do now.
- Tying back to what
J.Ed was saying earlier
about beauty eliciting
an emotional response,
I think that the kinds of images
that you're talking about,
they are very emotional.
And I think that it does
sort of tie into that
same sort of emotion pleasure center
that makes us think of things as beautiful
and whether that is essentially just
evolutionary crossed
lines where it happens
to trigger the same sort of system,
or whether there's actually
some sort of evolutionary
advantage to that sort of
emotional trigger, there may be.
Because those images being
so captivating and powerful,
they really do leave an impression.
And so it may actually influence how
you live your life in the future
because those images just
stay with you forever.
- And evolution in a way,
while being beautiful,
is also very terrifying.
I mean, if you're not the
fish that's got the big
caudal fin in the back
that makes you good-looking
to other fish, so there is
something necessarily terrifying
about evolution if you're not the one
that gets to go forward.
(audience chuckling)
- Perfect. Right up front here.
- We're getting to grad school.
- It's kind of a personal
question for all of you guys.
Since beauty can be very
empowerfully attractive,
when was the first time
you experienced beauty
in your particular field of study?
And what was the emotional response
that drew you into a life
pursuing your careers?
(overlapping dialogue)
- Mine is pretty cheesy.
(audience laughing)
- [Brett] So much the better.
- I'm from San Antonio,
Texas deep in the heart,
and I grew up in a very low-income family.
I'm the first generation college graduate
and very proud of that.
And in my house, we
mostly watched telenovelas
on our black and white triple console,
because that's what
we, anyway but one day,
switching around when no one was home,
this is a true story,
it sounds really hokey
but it's really true, I came
across the local PBS station
and I saw, I swear to God,
I didn't know anything
from theater ever and I
never even thought about this
for 15 years later that it might happen,
but I saw a Great Performances
theater in America piece
and it was about puppets.
It was puppets, but it
was this virtuosic man
telling all these stories with puppets.
And I just sat there and thought
how beautiful it was.
And it wasn't until later, as
I watched the ending of it,
that it came out that it was one man
who had done all the
voices and all the puppets
and that I didn't even
know what virtuosity was
but I was just blown away
that something so beautiful
could have happened on my television.
True story.
- I think my experience was here at UCLA
as an undergraduate
student in art history,
taking my first course
on the arts of Oceania,
which was, first of all I
wasn't sure what Oceania was
or what kind of art, I thought
well art from under the sea.
How cool is that?
(laughs)
But it was actually a course
about the arts of the Pacific
and it was taught in a large auditorium
that's now actually in Broad,
and it was taught by a person,
a professor named Arnold Rubin
who actually became my mentor.
And he showed us images of masqueraders
coming out of a men's
house in Papua New Guinea.
And these masquerades
extended the human body
to a tremendous height and
they kind of poured out
of this darkness into the light.
And the images, the slides
were projected very large.
And in those days, you
didn't often get rooms
where they could throw a
slide far enough to get that.
And I just thought, I can't
believe people do this.
I've never seen anything like it.
It was so stunning, a
little terrifying to imagine
that these kinds of things
were going on in the world
as you know, a little
girl from Los Angeles
never saw anything like it.
And it totally changed my life
because I probably would have ended up
studying Impressionism or something.
But instead, I was completely
riveted by this idea
of exploring the unknown
and finding beauty
and excitement about what that meant
and what I could learn from it.
- It's a great question.
And my experience, a little anomalous
as I'm thinking about it, but it was,
when I was an undergrad and
I took a film theory class
and it was very dense and
we were reading a lot of
Marx and Nietzsche, and I
would have this experience
during lectures where I would be following
what the lecture was, both
conceptually but with images.
Images would run through my
head and the relationship
between images and thought in film,
both the ideas you attach to images
but also how images attach
themselves to thought.
And it was kind of an amazing experience.
So here I am.
- So most of my life I actually,
or most of my youth I thought
I was gonna be a musician.
And it was much later actually,
after I'd gone to grad
school and was visiting
my mom at home that my former
first grade teacher came over.
And we all did these
assignments in first grade,
it was the one assignment
she kept from every student
which is, what are you
gonna be when you grow up.
(audience chuckling)
Mine was I was gonna be a scientist.
So something happened very early on
before I was really
conscience of this path
that I ultimately took.
But there's certainly been,
like going back to that
musical side of things,
there have been many moments in my life
where I've heard a piece
of music for the first time
and one immediate example
that comes to mind
when I first got a recording
of Philip Glass's Solo Piano,
which kind of goes with the
complexity and simplicity thing
because melodically it's very simple
even though it's incredibly busy.
And I couldn't, I put it on
and I couldn't go to sleep.
I just listened to it over and over
because I had such an incredible
emotional reaction to it
and I was trying to figure out why.
And I didn't sleep at
all, I just listened to it
over and over all night long.
- [Brett] Fantastic.
- What was it?
- Yeah, what was it?
- What's that?
- Philip Glass?
- Yes, Phillip Glass, Solo Piano.
- Amazing, fantastic.
More questions?
Let's go up to the top,
there's a question right
in the middle there.
And then we're gonna come down.
Students, if you've got
any questions down here.
Just right in the middle
of the top row there, yep.
(distant indistinct muttering)
It's a traveling microphone.
- It's a communal act.
- My question is for the scarification
reminds me of like
foot-binding in Asian China.
So it was like the
beauty center at the time
by apparently caused harm to your body.
I think the same applies
for tattoos, piercing,
also even the wearing of high heels.
So my question was what's your attitude
toward the fact that we sometimes say
there's a price we need to pay for beauty?
English is not my language,
so I hope I say clear.
Thank you.
- That's a very good question,
and I didn't actually speak about this
but of course all of
these transformations,
whether it's foot binding
or body scarification,
are all about pain.
And it's about a test of endurance.
It's about the price you pay to belong.
It's like, we all suffer for beauty.
How many of us have worn stupid shoes
and they look really great,
but you break your feet?
I mean, that's a much
more superficial thing
than actually modification of the body,
but I think that there's a side to it
where you wonder if this
is violence against women,
the binding of feet, the cutting of skin.
How do we feel about that
looking at it as Westerners
from the outside,
because that's a question
that you have and you certainly think it.
But it's also a kind of
test of personal empowerment
that you can actually endure and overcome
because the result is
worth the price of pain.
So I think it's complicated,
and I definitely think it's
part of what it takes to belong.
It's part of what it takes to grow up.
And we suffer in our own
lives in different ways,
maybe not as radically as these,
but I think that was part of it.
It was, how do we test you to make sure
that you've got the
muster to be one of us?
And those were the tests that,
and for the boys where I work,
they had initiations where they were going
into a remote location and being subjected
to all sorts of ordeals
that they had to overcome,
and it was the same kind of thing,
it just did not leave the
indelible markings on the body
because I think women's
bodies are more powerful.
They are the containers of the future.
So that's partly why they're marked
or women's feet are bound.
- Building on what Marla was saying,
sorry I just like threw myself in there,
I wonder if the audience could talk about
the psychic, aside from
shoes that give you,
I don't know, blisters,
what the psychic price
of beauty is in your own experience.
- Yeah, so that actually
segways really well into,
I have a comment and
then sort of a question.
I kind of wanted to push back on the idea
of like prizing
individuality in our society
because I think there's a
lot of Eurocentric Western
ideals of beauty that a lot of women,
especially non-white women
actually have to undergo
in this culture, that
our body modifications,
for example extensive hair removal,
often permanent hair removal;
and then also men, some
men all over the world
undergo circumcision, which is also
a ritualized form of body modification.
So I would say that in that case,
I mean there are movements,
feminist movements especially
that encourage women to
keep their body hair,
but I definitely have
suffered my entire life
from being of Middle Eastern descent
in having more body hair
than like white woman would,
so I just wanted to add that.
And then I wanted to ask
you all what your idea
of ugliness is, which I
mean I guess is the opposite
of beauty, or maybe not ugliness but just
the opposite of beauty and if you think
that is also subjective.
- That's a great question.
And one of the directions
that a study of beauty goes
is to what's excluded?
Because beauty always excludes.
There is who is not beautiful,
and what are their qualities
or characteristics?
And I think that one of the ways
that we can think about what is excluded
is anything that's not normative.
Non-symmetrical faces, people
who are differently abled,
that their embodiment is not normative.
And beauty can be very destructive.
Can be a very destructive idea
when we think about its opposite.
We think about ugliness, we
think about you can't get in,
you can't be in this space of beauty.
And Toni Morrison, the famous novelist,
she once said that she thought that beauty
and romantic love were
the most destructive ideas
in the Western tradition
because they always,
because there are people who are in
and people who are not.
So that's how I respond to
the question of ugliness.
- All three are really
tremendous questions
and it's also tricky for me to be honest
to talk about some things now as a male.
But I'll say this.
What's interesting to me perhaps is that,
why the question is, for
me, really more interesting
is because it's not a
question that you actually
deal with a lot with men.
That imposed notions of
beauty, and yes that is you do
accept some things, you do accept,
how did I write this down?
Is it imposed?
Is it an imposed,
is it something that is imposed on you
to be accepted or to be
whatever you consider
might be beautiful, or is it something
that you accept and you take on?
And I think that, and I'm
almost treading on thin ice,
but I think that that's an issue where,
because of the dominance where more things
are imposed on women than are men.
There are men who have scarification
and who have things that
change their appearance,
but it's not the same for men.
For a woman, it's very different issues.
I think that, that's a big
part of it in terms of,
does that make sense,
what I've said so far?
There's a lot less things that we as male,
and I'm a person of color
but still, as a male,
there's a lot less things in terms of my,
and I do have to worry about
my self identity still,
but there's a lot less
things I have to worry about
than people who are not men.
Secondly, in terms of what is ugliness...
(distant indistinct muttering)
Absolutely, absolutely.
(distant indistinct muttering)
She thinks it also depends on what culture
or group that you are a part of.
In terms of the concept of what is ugly,
and again this is just my opinion,
it does not reflect the School of Theater,
Film and Television or theater,
and this is simplistic,
but I find very little
in nature to be ugly.
I really do.
It's handmade in positions
that turns something
that might be beautiful
into something that's ugly.
Nature is chaotic, but
even the chaos of nature
in its destructive paths,
whether a lava field flowing down
or after a hurricane, if it's just nature,
there's an odd beauty to it.
But you can look at like the lushness,
I live in upstate New York
even though I live in California now.
It's very lush and beautiful.
You look at a tropical rainforest,
it's very, very beautiful.
You look at a desert, whether
rocky desert in West Texas
or whether high desert in California
or whether large sand
deserts like the Sahara,
they're all still beautiful.
There are different visions,
but they're all beautiful.
But then you take that beauty
and you put something in it
that man has made, whether
it's debris or debris,
and it changes it.
I don't know if that makes sense,
but that's how I feel.
I feel like there's very
little in the natural world
that is really ugly.
We as human beings tend to
mess things up and make it ugly
and sometimes by putting our perceptions
of what beauty is we turn
something that's beautiful
and different into something ugly.
- Marla, Paul?
Any of you?
- I was just responding to
Judith and thinking that
in cultures elsewhere, the
men are the pretty ones.
There are men that, I
mean, they do the hair
and I mean, there are all kinds of ways
that the gender thing flips.
And we haven't talked about hair.
I mean we have, it was brought up by you,
but in fact the ability to manipulate hair
is a major capacity that humans have.
And if you look cross-culturally,
you can see the extraordinary things
that people have created
just by using mostly
the hair on their heads.
But it is either gone or it's there,
but it's part of norms of beauty.
- So I guess I wanna go back just briefly
to this idea of like the scarification
or the foot binding,
imposing some sort of burden,
and just point out some
examples in the animal world
where this is actually quite common.
So if you look at the antlers
of something like an elk,
that's 35 pounds of calcium
that gets acquired, extruded
and shed on a yearly basis.
And the males are identified
as being more attractive
by the larger the antlers.
And the evolutionary
theory behind this is that
it is displaying the ability to deal
with quite an imposing burden
and that if an animal
like that can withstand
such a burden, it must
be a really good mate
because it has really good genes.
Because a weaker animal would
not be able to survive that.
And so I think sometimes
we have a tendency
to differentiate ourselves from animals
a little too much and forget
that some of these behaviors
that have evolved for
hundreds of millions of years
in all sorts of different animals,
that some of those behaviors and ways
that pleasure centers are
triggered, they still exist.
And so I don't think it's unfair to view
some of these things in terms of a burden
that's being imposed on women.
I also think that,
if you look at it from
the perspective of men,
they may not be doing the foot binding
or the scarification as much,
although they do in some places,
but a lot of what are imposed
on men often are behaviors.
So you look at whether
it's ritualistic combat
in Papua New Guinea or actual combat,
or you can look at something like Masai
where it used to be the
way that you became a man
as a Masai was you slayed a lion.
And so there's a lot of
behaviors that we undergo
because it is displaying our,
it's a way of manifesting
our attractiveness
and our reproductive virility because
if you can deal with that,
if you can deal with being
cut thousands of times,
that must mean that
this is a very strong individual
that's gonna have offspring
that are more likely to survive.
And even if someone's not thinking that,
it's probably somewhere
programmed deep in our DNA
that triggers some sort of
pleasure center towards attractiveness.
But then going back to
the question about ugly,
I'll just give a one
word answer: intolerance.
Simple as that.
That's ugly.
- Terrific.
Sorry?
(distant indistinct muttering)
Final statement.
I'm sorry, we've just come to a close.
Our time has run out so we'd like to end
each of the sessions to see if any of you
have a final statement you'd like to make,
if there's something
that might have come up
in the course of the conversation
or in the questions from the audience.
- It's like the 30-second
rant at the end--
(audience chuckling)
- We wanna give you that opportunity.
- I just think it's been
great to have all of us
from different disciplines
meeting in the middle
and hearing you talk about
how sort of physical power
is about survival and
reproduction and continuity
in ways that I don't think about.
But of course it's very
parallel to even the kind of,
we haven't talked a lot
about conceptual systems
and the mystical and all these other ways
in which people understand
themselves in the world
that also have to do with beauty,
but that's left for another day.
- I was gonna talk about all of that,
but I ran out of time
so I'm terribly sorry.
(audience laughing)
I just wanna say this.
I do wanna thank you all
sincerely for coming tonight,
and my new colleagues, it's a pleasure
to spend time and space with you.
I also wanna say this.
It's complicated, life is complicated.
The notion of what is
beauty is complicated.
The notion of what is taken
on or imposed is complicated.
I think it's wonderful, and
this is one of the great things
that we do at UCLA is we
begin the conversation.
We don't end it, there is no answer.
It's a conversation that's ongoing.
I do wanna say this as well,
is that in my work I
deal a lot with theme.
What's the theme, what is it about?
And I always believe that every theme
also contains its opposite.
So if you talk about Romeo and Juliet,
what's the meaning of love?
It also contains the
opposite as what is hate?
So I think the notion of what is beauty
also contains its opposite of
what might not be beautiful.
And I think in the last five minutes,
we opened up just the beginning, right?
My head is spinning talking about things
that are complicated and really difficult
to speak about, particularly
in an open forum,
but I'm so happy that we're able to talk
in terms of tolerance because intolerance
also includes its difference of tolerance,
to be able to have these kind of,
I don't wanna enlightened and
I don't wanna say educated
but just have this kind of
meaningful conversations.
And so thank you for allowing
me to have that conversation.
- [Brett] Thank you. Kathleen?
- I'd like to wrap up just
by thanking the audience
for the really great
questions and comments
thinking about the sublime,
thinking about memory
and thinking about how we
inhabit standards of beauty
with our own bodies and
live with that or not
and the sort of challenges that causes.
So I wanna thank the audience, yeah.
(applause)
- [Brett] Thank you.
- So I guess what I'd
like to leave you with is
to really think about, we
were forced to think about
what beauty is, and I
think that too often,
in our very busy world, we don't
stop to think about things.
And I think that within our society,
there is so much that is
wrapped up in the notion
of what is beauty that it
seems like it merits some time
to really think about
that and try to unpack it
and think about what is beauty to you
and why do you think the things
that you think are beautiful?
Why do you think that?
And some of it could be
something intrinsic to yourself.
Sometimes it could be things
that are coming from society.
And some of those, some
of that can be innocuous,
and some of it can be damaging.
And so I think if we all
just spend some time,
think about it, ask yourself.
And I think if more people did that,
we wouldn't maybe have so much baggage
that's associated with it.
- Perfect, thank you.
And for all of you who came in today,
thank you so much for joining us.
(applause)
In addition to the suggestion
being made to think hard
and to think on from the
conversation that started here,
do the other thing I suggested
earlier in the introduction.
Record that thought for us.
Go online.
If you live in a world of hashtags,
which I understand many of us do,
record that thinking
immediately in real time.
Respond to it.
Students, as you upload
your comments and feedback,
you gain access then to everybody else's
thinking on this topic.
Thank you everybody for coming in,
we'll see you next Tuesday.
Please join me in thanking our guests
for taking their time in coming in today.
Thank you all.
(applause)
