The Beautiful exists. We can all remember having perceived a landscape, a person, a vase, or a moment as being especially beautiful. Yet we also know that, while one person rapturously loses himself in the openness and silence of the early morning landscape, in the same place another person complains that his feet are freezing, and he just wants to hurry back to the moist, warm farmhouse bread, the fresh butter, and a hot coffee. A third person delivers an unsolicited lecture on erosion and air pollution, and spoils our enjoyment by pointing out the superficiality of our observation of the visual feast. The Beautiful exists, this we know. For that, we do not need scientific insight to tell us that nature exhibits beauty also purely as an end in itself. Yet we have difficulties with this. And not only today.
Philosophers escape from this trap by distinguishing between that which pleases and that which gives enjoyment. Thus they draw a line between the baser, immediate gratification of the senses, and deferred, sublimated enjoyment of higher aesthetic observation. The former is pure sensuality and not worth much; the latter can be easily connected to the spirit. What is beautiful in appearance quickly becomes beautiful and right in essence. This depreciation of the beautiful, of what is beautiful in appearance, has not existed forever. In early Western history, homage was paid to beauty. The True, the Good, and the Beautiful formed an inseparable unity which was only fully realized in God, but, as participants in divine nature, mankind was capable of organizing the world according to this principle. Thomas Aquinas knew this full well: “For beauty includes three conditions, ‘integrity’ or ‘perfection,’ since those things which are impaired are by the very fact ugly; due ‘proportion’ or ‘harmony’; and lastly, ‘brightness’ or ‘clarity,’ whence things are called beautiful which have a bright color.” With the Enlightenment, with the attempt to find a first, primary True, the decline of the Beautiful began. Descartes separated the humanist disciplines from philosophy, thereby dissolving the triad of the True, Good, and Beautiful. From then on, the quest for truth would have absolute precedence. Truth and reason became monogamous, forming an exclusive pair. The beautiful in appearance was sacrificed in exchange for the true essence, and art was stripped of its social task and degraded to being edifying, beautiful compensation. Hegel finally smothered art with grandiose praise: “The realm of the fine arts is the realm of absolute Spirit.” With that, he deprived it of its unique power of radiating sensuality, because it was to serve the purpose of “easing the violence of desire.” And he located art’s high point in antiquity:, However, in the nineteenth century, where Spirit comes to itself (to reason), the world is explained conceptually, and no longer experienced through art.
Art did not become extinct, as Hegel predicted it, but from then on it no longer wished to simply “appear beautiful,” but rather to be true, real. In what followed, art became concrete; that is, it denied the painted marks on the canvas any relationship to the external world. The marks were no longer allowed to simulate a landscape; they were rather only themselves. The only thing that is true and real is what occurs on the painted surface. The self-referential areas of color on canvas are real. In Max Bill’s statement, “It [concrete art] should be the expression of the human spirit, intended for the human spirit, and of such sharpness and clarity, of such perfection, which can only be expected from works of the human spirit,” we hear an echo of the sharp voice of Hegel, who wanted to tie art to the Spirit of the world, to reason. Beauty was obsolete; it had become ephemeral; beauty was only allowed if it had a function, when it was useful. Otherwise it did not exist.
The material for art in the twentieth century was accordingly cold; the analytic thinking was cold. The colors appeared dark, even bleak, in those cases where painting was done at all. And viewers stood before conceptual works and commented: interesting, strong, precise, insightful. Or they stood before subjective, mythological works and aspirated: impressive, real, potent. The quality, essence, of “beauty” was long avoided. The beautiful, reduced in importance, shifted into advertising, fashion, and design, and has since soared to super-aesthetic commercial heights.
Without much ado, without the murmuring about aura and the sublime that made the notions of beauty and power possible again in the 1980s, Walter Pfeiffer has produced since the beginning of the 1970s a body of work that is apparently dedicated with great lightheartedness to beauty and exhilaration. It is a body of work that appears not to quarrel or fret, which elegantly skirts every dark chasm and endures time with style. This was already recognizable in the series “Carlo Joh.” which Walter Pfeiffer showed in the famous exhibition Transformer—Aspects of Transvestitism in the Kunstmuseum Lucerne in 1974. The model, Carlo, tries out different postures in that area of tension between masculine and feminine, representing them for the camera. The series, made up of small-format black-and-white pictures on thin, fragile document paper, creates its own aesthetic—a special, almost transparent, divaesque beauty. The travesty-like character of the work and the play with the beautiful fuse together into a dazzlingly tender series on identity in the 1970s. It was the time of photo performances, the transition from the pure documentation of happenings and performances to “presentations” that were made specifically for the camera. Similarly to Urs Lüthi’s self-stagings, Carlo presents himself only to the photographer—and to us through the photographs. Yet the photos maintain their narrative character, coming across as excerpts from a film that cannot be seen, from a hidden narrative. It was also the era of pop art. Freed from totality, from the over-arching whole, from disconnected objectivity, personal, individual, intimate, and especially ambivalent roles are tentatively explored. “Carlo Joh.,” and the artist Walter Pfeiffer, together explore both sides equally on the level of mind and body. The ambivalent, split subject becomes a new, still fragile principle of life.
The 1980s present a completely different body, a new, invigorated self-confidence. The gay body is no longer presented shyly and delicately. Well-formed, trained, and highly stylized bodies, partly beefed up with testosterone and anabolic steroids, confront Pfeiffer’s camera with strong, gay self-awareness. The narrative quality gives way to iconic presence. These photographs become emblematic of an extraordinary decade: perhaps the most hedonistic decade in the history of the Christian occidental world. On the one hand, liberated from breeding and order, from religious and social values, and apparently immune even to history, it is a decade dedicated to the new, hard-won freedoms. Freedom of the individual, of the body, of enjoyment, of sexuality. Total surrender, living out fantasies totally, total carpe diem, aided by the demands of the new advertising industry, new marketing industry, which had discovered the body as a support for advertising. On the other hand, (in the beginning) it is the time before AIDS, the era of the euphoria of controllable sexuality: controllable veneral diseases, controllable fertility, and “treatable” pregnancy. Walter Pfeiffer’s image world of the 1980s embodies this freedom, this lust, this euphoria. As if addicted, he continually sought the pure, pleasurable, beautiful face, which was no longer child and not yet adult; he sought pure bliss, pure beauty, still free from the traces of life, free from drama and history. In this way, his photographs of individuals reflect a decade which, under the influence of enormous promises of bliss, desire, beauty, and release from reality, indulged in lust for a short period of time.
After many signs of foreboding, the decade definitively came to an end with the “return,” the renewed incursion, of reality. The HIV virus developed into the AIDS epidemic. The Bosnian war in Europe brought the hard facts of human co-existence painfully back into consciousness. Parallel to these, the singer of beauty and exhilaration fell silent. Walter Pfeiffer only began to photograph regularly again at the beginning of the new millennium, with, and after, the publication of his book Welcome Aboard. This time around, his photographs exhibit beauty with an almost sculptural, Greek purity and silence, or present life as a colorful patchwork, as an animated still life. Other images turn the reality of things and certainty upside down, with a new, exhilarating, curious humor—doubling, displacing, camouflaging. His attention is still aimed at the youthful face, the flawless, masculine (or recently also feminine) figure, the perfect beauty, the gleaming, unblemished polish of adolescence. Yet his attitude has become more relaxed, his standpoint less sexual. Youth is eternal; the gaze, on the contrary, has matured, become older, calmer, more serene, even if the pleasure continues unabated.
In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche wrote: “Great style comes about when beauty is victorious over the monstrous.” This line reads almost as though it had been written about Walter Pfeiffer. Although Walter Pfeiffer’s work does not have the ambition of announcing the so-called “really big things,” it insists on beauty, and precisely the pure, non-convulsive, unspoiled, unspent beauty. Like a cellophane manufacturer, Walter Pfeiffer produces exhilarating, beautiful, spirited appearances, which affectionately cover the abyss. An eternal smile caught on camera palliates and conceals one’s own pain and the pain of the world. Beauty, exhilaration, ornament as relief from the turmoil, gravity, and abysmal depths of the world. In the best sense of the term, Walter Pfeiffer’s photographs make use of the principle of the clown, who works hard to give pleasure, to enhance exhilaration, beauty, to add brilliance to life—behind which hides the melancholy of transience, silent and still.
References
Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae I, Q. 39, Art. 8. [English translation by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province.]
Friedrich Nietzsche. “Menschliches, Allzumenschliches.” Werke in drei Bänden. Vol. I. Frankfurt am Main, 1969.
Willy Rotzler. Konstruktive Konzepte: Eine Geschichte der konstruktiven Kunst vom Kubismus bis heute. Zurich, 1995.
Beat Wyss. Trauer der Vollendung: Zur Geburt der Kulturkritik. Munich, 1985.