A single rose is every roseand this one: irreplaceable,perfect, a supple vocableby the text of things enclosed. Rainer Maria Rilke, Les Roses
Girls wear pink and boys blue; girls are good at English and boys excel at mathematics; boys like rough-and-tumble, girls befit flowers. Beauty is now seen as presiding within prejudice and frequently prohibits the aesthetic from operating at all without the guilty exigencies of a critical standpoint. Rosemary Laing and Elizabeth Pulie, while perhaps having some regard to the deconstructive mechanisms at work in portraying images so overabundantly 'feminine', are aware of the incongruity of withered debates. Their motivation is in the purest of pleasure. But how pure?
Beauty is discordant, its dissimulation is in its claim to being whole and true, the terror of decay is complicit in its transitory finesse. Laing's lavish cibachromes of pink roses (a pun?) within fabricated plexiglass panelling taken from her Paradise series of works, and Pulie's coquettishly pristine decorative canvasses, prevail upon the simplicity of just being beautiful, pretty, cutesy, what you will. The starlet who erects her own pedestal is grotesque in the admiration that she demands, but the one who represents her imposes a meta-level that is a dialogue of indictment and celebration.
The lure of beauty is not the promise of vital truths as Plato understood it, but this: "Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought in the certainty of profaning it". Bataille goes on to say, "There is always the tradition from compression to explosion. The forms may alter but the violence is constant, at once horrifying and fascinating ".1 Beauty