Revisiting: John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle and the So-Called Aesthetics of DIY

 Revisiting: John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle and the So-Called Aesthetics of DIY

I actually possess a copy of a zine I put together in high school- early in high school, and when I was looking at it a while back I noticed that I still have a similar authorial voice- that nothing much has changed over 30 years of amateur cultural criticism.  As I continue the process of editing this blog down to a manageable, exportable size, I notice that I said much of what I had to say about "big topics" way back at the beginning, between 2008 and 2011.  I haven't ever followed up or expanded on anything because this is an amateur affair, but as revise and edit, it increasingly looks like the earlier posts were more significant than anything I've written in the past decade or so- post divorce, let's say (2014).

3/2/10
John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle and the So-Called Aesthetics of DIY

Aesthetics (wiki entry) ("Modern Aesthetics interior section")
John Ruskin (wiki entry)  Section 2.1 Art and Design Criticism
Thomas Carlyle (wiki entry) (Sign of the Times essay)

    I was reading the Los Angeles Times free weekly the other day and I saw an alternative headline for the "Queens of Lo Fi" article.  The alternative headline, used for the cover of the free weekly, but not the newspaper articles was "Lo Fi is DIY"- and then it was the same article inside.  That is an equivalence I subscribe too, personally.  The essence of whatever you want to call lo fi is homemade, bedroom pop by individuals in non-professional surroundings.  As I said before, it is the mode of production, rather then any particular sound that results, which describes "lo fi" and therefore lo fi is simply an update of the familiar diy music phenomenon.

    In an attempt to describe a particular SOUND or LOOK or FEEL people will sometimes discuss the "Aesthetics" of a certain category of art.  "The aesthetics of diy" for example, though it could be "the aesthetics of heavy metal" or something not involving music at all.  Aesthetics has a visual and thematic aspect that recalls it's role in history as the "science of beauty."  Beauty takes many forms.  Aesthetics is the study and description of beauty.

       The first important point to make is that the discussion of aesthetics was not confined to debate over what popular musician is better then another popular musician or the merits of the latest Rodarthe rtw  line.  In England, in particular, writers like Thomas Carlyle and most importantly, John Ruskin created a comprehensive critique of 19th century industrial age English society by focusing on the ugliness of the environment.  These guys were super hoity toity intellectuals, criticizing  directly from where they considered themselves "above" i.e., they were into medieval architecture, understood the importance of craftsmanship in production, thought the middle class was stupid, etc.

      But when you talk about an aesthetic of diy, you are essentially talking about John Ruskin.  His ideas in turn inspired William Morris, who inspired the "Craftsman" movement of the United States in the early 20th century.  Perhaps the major difference between the aesthetics of John Ruskin and William Morris vs. the DIY ethic of today is that DIY today is slap dash and amateurish.  People aren't even trying for beauty, it is more important to experiment, express raw emotion or simply to exist.

     However, the larger audience has been taught by culture to seek beauty from art (see above) so these attempts, however satisfying they may be to the artist, are doomed unless they comport with contemporary ideas of beauty.  You might ask yourself, if you are going to make something that people will not consider beautiful, "Why bother?"  The value of art absent an audience is dubious.  The idea of art or beauty without an audience to perceive it is something that would have been foreign to the ancient Greeks (who invented the science.)  On the other hand, it is well in line with the aesthetic theory of the romantics (i.e. wildness, individualism, disregard of the group, etc.)

     Ruskin and Carlyle are more in line with the Ancient Greeks- that's something that separates their thought from the larger romantic movement in the UK and Europe.  Their whole goal is to persuade society of the rightness of their position, they actually involve out of the passion of romanticism.  Romanticism came first, then came the aesthetics of John Ruskin.

    Modern DIY is different from all this because the beauty is in the background.  It needs to be in the foreground.  An Aesthetic that isn't consciously concerned with the description of a particular kind of beauty, is not, in fact, an aesthetic at all, and so to the extent that DIY is not concerned with beauty, it is not an aesthetic at all, but simply a description of a particular form of mass production within consumer capitalist society.