Rupturing Beauty

In 1929 French writer Georges Bataille published an essay entitled “Formless,” consisting of a mere six sentences. At Hyde Park Art Center the group exhibition, Rupturing Beauty, curated by Chuck Thurow and Pat Swanson, investigated the influence of Bataille’s text by assembling together five artists whose work in some way demonstrated, contended with or elaborated Bataille’s ideas of “formless.” The exhibition raised questions about beauty, baseness, form and the use of varied materials in art by calling into question “conventional understandings and old distinctions between high and low, good and bad, fine and base, beautiful and ugly.” The artists in Rupturing Beauty challenged rather than rejected the notion of beauty, and did so with a formal elegance that made their disruptive effects all the more unsettling.