Critical beauty: the decorative, the grotesque and the explicit in the work of Aubrey Beardsley and Kara Walker

This research project centres on a representative mode in the visual arts marked byseemingly contradictory operations. Made through a particular use of decorativeform, this mode combines the operations of aesthetic pleasure and a morechallenging or destabilising affect. It co-implicates formal beauty and a criticalcontent usually associated with so-called anti-aesthetic art practices.The written component analyses the occurrence of this contradictory logic ofrepresentation in the work of late Victorian artist Aubrey Beardsley, andcontemporary African American artist Kara Walker. Here I argue that while existingcriticism on Beardsley and Walker points to the co-existence of these seeminglycontradictory operations, it consistently privileges one term (i.e. beautiful form orcritical content) over the other. As such, this criticism has failed to properly accountfor the formal and conceptual strategies of these artists’ work. Examining relationsbetween the decorative, the grotesque and the sexually explicit in the art of Walkerand Beardsley, and utilising Kantian and psychoanalytic theories, I examine reasonsfor this failure and interpret the work of each artist in a way demonstrates the criticalfecundity of their dismantling of given oppositions been formal beauty and sociopoliticalcriticism.The practice component of this PhD engages with this contradictory logic in themedium of painting. It is similarly geared towards an exploration of grotesque andsexually explicit dimensions articulated in and through decorative form. It does sothrough the appropriation and manipulation of graphic traditions: mainly theJapanese tradition of Ukiyo-e, and the work of Aubrey Beardsley. Like the writtencomponent, the practice component of the project seeks a means of accommodating acritical position within the aesthetic of beauty