Thoughts on the Contemporary Sublime
Having examined several major enquiries into the sublime and applied their theories to modern artistic practice we begin to see the emergence of a contemporary discourse on sublimity. We can argue for a place for the modern sublime - despite its conferred historical role it still has something very relevant to offer to our existing cultural development. We find it present in all facets of engagement, representing not only that which is breathtaking or awe-inspiring but also as that which informs the mind as to its ability. An encounter with the sublime can form from simple, small gestures or an appraisal of the vast natural world; from a reaction to terror and revulsion to the contemplation of the infinite. Our moral compass – that, which makes up our ethical character and our engenderment of the beautiful and transcendent, can all be defined by the notion of sublimity. It is a categorised state of mind. It is agreed that encounters lead to epiphany and a sense of absolution or totality. It is also a description – a quality to admire and ascribe to. It both dominates and stimulates - analogous not only to terror but representative of desire/awe. If an object can be described as sublime, so too can our reaction to that object – what Kames calls a ‘double signification.[1]’ Peter de Bolla writes:
‘It denotes both a quality found in objects as well as the affect experienced in the perceiving subject. The identification of this dual detonation is a crucial step forward and allows a far more supple analysis of the aesthetic realm: we need no longer worry about whether the cause of the elevated experience is out there in the world or in here, in our own internal responses to that world.[2]’
One of the key identifiers of sublime experience is that of transformation. The effect of sublimity is apparent in the changed perception of the viewer/hearer/reader. What has come before, what we had expected is now transformed into something different. Throughout the course of the thesis this has been defined under many different headings; transcendence, sublimation. It is a ‘sinking down’ or ‘breaking through’ of previous thought and vision to create something new – be it an epiphany of entirely unconsidered thought, a complete change of engagement with a stimulus or indeed a synthesis of thought to create new perceptions. We imbibe objects with new, radical dimensions or drastically alter viewpoints based on a simple engagement with that object. There is a ‘rushing in’ of understanding or emotion. It offers solace in an epiphanical construction of new identity, changing comfortable signifiers into something fresh and unconsidered. For some, this is a ‘delightful longing,[3]’ for others a dispassionate obliteration – a breaking down, rather than through, of preconceptions. It becomes a consideration of lacking, of the void at the centre of our contemplative existence. De Bolla writes that the aesthetic:
‘...is not primarily about art but about how we are formed as subjects, and how as subjects we go about making sense of our experience. “What is it that moves me?” is, therefore, a question centrally posed to human nature, which at its furthest extreme threatens to dissolve and dissipate the human in a technology that has the potential to overmaster all sense of being. This question, the problematic of the aesthetic ...is most fully explored under the rubric of the sublime.[4]’
One of the key themes of sublime experience is the notion of being ‘primed’ or readied for that engagement. It has been defined as experiential – something that has and is influenced by previous modes of experience. Burke speaks of a cultivation of the mind to allow its growth. However, this type of experiential intertextuality is not an applicable to the genuinely sublime. While it may be that we understand something to be sublime compared to previous encounters which have not been, the sublime depends on a forceful reckoning of the new. There is a type of paradoxical event, what Thomas McEvilley calls ‘a negation of the boundaries of selfhood, a negation at once exalting and terrifying.[5]’ Frances Reynolds writes in 1785:
‘It is a pinnacle of beatitude, bordering upon horror, deformity, madness! An eminence from whence the mind, that dares to look farther is lost! It seems to stand, or rather waver, between certainty and uncertainty, between security and destruction. It is the point of terror, of undetermined fear, of undetermined power![6]’
While it may be something that we have been primed or prepared for, the idea of the familiar and the sublime are rarely linked. Hughes writes of ‘The Shock of the New,’ Newman heralds ‘The Sublime is Now.’ It may call upon emotions that are known to us or promote recollections of times that were precious or fearful but the sublime will ultimately construct a new language of the mind to assimilate that which has, heretofore, been unknown.
The sublime is also a name, given to that which we cannot account for. The most extreme of adjectives are used to denote the experience – Burkean terror meets Kantian totality. It is however, always situated in the mind. The storm is sublime because we witness it. We may ascribe its power to a vengeful all-knowing creator but the situ of sublimity will lie, ultimately with the bearer of that experience. We are reminded of Hopkins once more - ‘O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/ Frightful, sheer, no-man fathomed. Hold them cheap/ May who ne’er hung there.[7]’ In contemporary discourse, the notion of sublimity is defined by missing content – our inability to place language adequately on experience. Our facilitation of reason in the face of sensory handicap becomes sublime in and of itself.
As discussed, the sublime has been continually twinned with ‘terror’ throughout history. Whilst in naturalistic terms this could be described as ‘awesome’ – man’s ascent of said mountain-top defined as sublime in the treacherous ascent/struggle and subsequent appraisal of landscape, in the late eighteenth century it begins to represent that which is terrible to behold. It is something conversant of terror and there is a return to this notion in late twentieth and early twenty-first century discourse. The skyward-expanding Manhattan skyline is as likely to inspire awe/wonder as the mountain-scape. Man’s strength, force and ingenuity are what dominate the urban sprawl – the Petronas Towers are lit by electricity rather than the divine will of an almighty deity. The nature of our aesthetical interaction changes considerably in the light of two world wars and the now twenty-four hour visual access to modern warfare, genocide and famine. This is coupled with an increasing apathy to visual stimulant – the next ‘big thing’ is culturally often defined as sublime only in terms of its fleeting cinematic visual/special effects. The most terrible/sublime imagery of the modern age depicts that which we only thought possible with the help of those special effects – the events of 9/11. In terms of art therefore, this has led to the return of the sublime as a quiet utterance, albeit on a generally grand scale. A consideration of the terror of the everyday, evocative of Burke’s sublime ‘triumph of sympathy[8]’ is depicted in works such as Peter Eisenman’s ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’ in Berlin, or Ai Wei Wei’s ‘Remembering’ installation of 9,000 backpacks representing the loss of children’s lives in a Chinese earthquake. Slavoj Žižek sees this new type of sublime as lying in the failure of representation of any true thing – it gives us what he calls a ‘presentiment’ of its real dimensions writing:
‘This is also why an object evoking in us the feeling of sublimity gives us simultaneous pleasure and displeasure: it gives us displeasure because of its inadequacy to thing Thing-Idea, but precisely through this inadequacy it gives us pleasure by indicating the true, incomparable greatness of the Thing, surpassing every possible phenomenal, empirical experience.[9]’
Philip Shaw surmises that the sublime’s link to the ridiculous is not coincidental writing that it:
‘encourages us to believe that we can scale the highest mountains, reach the stars and become infinite when all the time it is drawing us closer to our actual material limits: the desire to outstrip earthly bonds leads instead to our encounter with lack, an encounter that is painful, cruel, and some would say comic.[10]’
There are however, points in art history where an artist can draw the sublime away from the treacherousness of transcendentalism and false hope, back toward the domestic hub – the sincere desire for knowledge and epiphany based in an authentic engagement with the familiar and everyday. Appraisals of routine and engagements with the detritus of everyday living are made at once familiar and strange to us. Diego Velázquez’ ‘Las Meninas,’ and Francisco de Goya’s ‘Charles IV of Spain and his Family’ are notable for their true depiction of royalty as well as their considerable skill. The humanisation of the characters renders them at once familiar and their traits are recognisable – almost to the point of caricature. They have an unsettling quality in an art historical sense. While we understand and appreciate the composite skill of the artist, our inclination is to compare ourselves using the measure by which the patrons were inspected. With this consideration in mind, it is no wonder that Goya, incensed as what he saw as the desecration of Spain through civil war, retreated to a darker place - depicting murderous savagery and dreamlike terrors in his later black paintings rather than the frippery and indulgence of a royal court.
Philip Guston is another such artist. Weighed down by an engagement with a disingenuous abstract expressionism he retreated from the gallery-driven urban spaces of New York to the quiet solitude of his Woodstock studio. Struggling for many years at an impasse between what had been trumpeted as an astonishing career in abstraction and what he felt to be the epitome of ‘true’ painting, he made the difficult choice to discard with the ‘mysterium tremendum.[11]’ He moved instead to depict what he called the ‘common objects[12]’ of the everyday, painting them in a feverish cartooned manner, items in and of themselves, and also in the hands of ghoulish Ku Klux Klan hoods. Few artists understood the draw of the sublime as much as Guston. He was amongst those announced as the avant-garde of American culture – the saviours of abstract thought and visionaries for the future. His peers and colleagues included Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, the now darlings of the tourist-trap New York museums. Guston’s dramatic return to figuration until recently, was seen as a stop-gap between the heady aspirational advance of Abstract Expressionism and the tongue-in-cheek plastic heraldry of Pop-art consumer culture. However, in terms of a contemporary definition of the sublime, Guston’s quiet challenge subscribes to the notion of an authentic sublime through the technique and content of his work alone. Where, by Caspar David Friedrich’s methodology, man could encounter the sublime in the dynastical natural world, Guston places it at home, in man’s own environ – surrounded by the familiar objects of conventional living. Here too, we can encounter sublimity – ascribe to sublime thoughts and feelings and demonstrate our ability to contemplate totality. Žižek accounts for this by applying Hegelian rationale – the dialectical appraisal of the everyday:
‘What we must grasp is this intimate connection, even identity, between this logic of reflection (positing, external, determinate reflection) and the Hegelian notion of the “absolute” subject – of the subject which is no longer attached to some presupposed substantial contents but posits its own substantial presuppositions.[13]’
The work of French conceptual artist Sophie Calle also reveals something unique about the world in which we live. Her approach to her subject matter provides new theories on the notion of event-hood. Using photography, film, documentation, and various types of confessional curatorial devices, she makes observations about the trivial everyday events of life that we take for granted. The things that happen-to-us-all become things of great importance. Shaw writes however that ‘sublime matter is that which resists the impositions of forms and concepts[14]’ and quotes Lyotard:
‘For forms and concepts are constitutive of objects, they pro-duce data that can be grasped by sensibility and that are intelligible to understanding...the matter I’m talking about is “immaterial,” an-objectable, because it can only “take place” or find its occasion at the price of suspending these active powers of the mind.[15]’
Calle however, despite rendering her ideas through the use of graspable, intelligible objects places them together in such a way as to create new syntheses of thought. We are indeed forced to suspend the ‘active powers of the mind’ when we consider what we thought to be a photograph of a telephone becoming signifier of the event-hood of heartbreak and the pain of others. A discarded wedding dress displayed draped across a man’s chair becomes a signifier for female seduction rather than the wholesome virginal white of the pure bride. The term ‘beauty’ is almost always considered as a preface or afterthought to sublime enquiry with the vast majority of writers compelled to propose their theories and its relationship to sublimity before getting on with the matter at hand. Jean-Luc Nancy writes ‘the sublime represents...nothing less than that without which the beautiful could be nothing but the beautiful (which paradoxically comes down to the same thing.).[16]’ Calle is an artist at the forefront of European conceptual art who capitalises and demonstrates this theory to her own advantage. Her work is almost exclusively based in feminine territory yet she has avoided being categorised solely in terms of a ‘female’ artist revelling instead as the provider/provocateur of the unpresentable. The necessity of a relationship between the sublime and the beautiful are appropriated by Calle to her advantage and it is as Shaw admits:
‘In practice, sublimity cannot be separated from the appreciation of form. What attracts us to the sublime is not an abstract quality but the fact that the sense of the awe-inspiring or the overpowering is conveyed in this particular mountain, in this particular moment.[17]’
It is through encountering this type of art that we are left on the edge of the precipice once more – what we thought to be true and matter-of-fact is instead a ‘something else,’ an ‘other’ and it is to this notion that the contemporary doctrine on the sublime continually returns. Lyotard writes that it is the paradoxical nature of art turning towards ‘a thing which does not turn itself towards the mind[18]’ and it is here that Calle’s unpresentable resides – a sublime for the modern ethos.
By examining artists such as these we can look at key developments and shifts in theoretical discourse. A theory of the sublime can be applied directly to their practice and quantified in such a way as to synthesise new thoughts and appreciations on sublimity. Their artistic enquiry reflects our own investigation and desire to define the sublime in terms anew; propelling discourse forward. The artist Clyfford Still wrote that art should be ‘a modern power in the age of conformity.[19]’ Of his own painting he said:
‘I held it imperative to evolve an instrument of thought which would aid in cutting through all cultural opiates, past and present, so that a direct, immediate, and truly free vision could be achieved, and an idea revealed with clarity. To acquire such an instrument however, - one that would transcend the powers of conventional techniques and symbols, yet be as an aid and instant critic of thought – demanded full resolution of the past, and present through it.[20]’
We see a continued desire for this type of clarity – for an amendment of vision and rhetoric so as to fuel further discourse on the sublime and, in so doing, attend to our insatiable appetite for cultural and philosophical evolution. Newman wrote in 1948 that the sublime is ‘now’ and yet we find that this is still the case. Shaw, rather embarrassed, writes that in all the questioning and labelling could it be that the sublime does indeed ‘affirm the unlimited nature of being...lead ultimately to the triumph of the mind over matter, or possibly towards an affirmation of the divine?[21]’Whatever the case, it is universally agreed to be something at the heart of human nature. When we ask what it is that moves us, we are encountering that which is sublime with the answer to that question. Our innate sense of our own perceptions, one that transcends all else and belongs solely to that individual can be defined by the simple act of looking.
[1] DeBolla, Peter, ‘Introduction,’ Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, Ed. Ashfield, Andrew, de Bolla, Peter, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p.13
[2] Ibid. p.14
[3] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.152
[4] DeBolla, Peter, ‘Introduction,’ Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, p.2
[5] McEvilley, Thomas, The Exile’s Return, Toward a Redefinition of Painting for the Post-Modern Era, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p.10
[6] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.46
[7] Manley-Hopkins, Gerard, ‘No Worst, There Is None,’ Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, DigiReads Publishing, 2010, p.49
[8] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Oxford University Press, 1998, p.43
[9] Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso, 1989, p.229
[10] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.10
[11] Keyes, Charles Don, Brain Mystery Light and Dark, The Rhythm and Harmony of Consciousness, Routledge, 1999, p.119
[12] Coolidge, Clark, Philip Guston, Collected Writings, Lectures, Conversations, University of California Press, 2011, p221
[13] Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p.244
[14] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.124
[15] Op.Cit
[16] Ibid. p.149
[17] Ibid. p.151
[18] Silverman, Hugh, J., Jean-François Lyotard – Between Politics and Aesthetics, Routledge, 2002, p.204
[19] Gottlieb, Carla, Beyond Modern Art, Dutton, 1976, p.363
[20] Op.Cit
[21] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.11
‘It denotes both a quality found in objects as well as the affect experienced in the perceiving subject. The identification of this dual detonation is a crucial step forward and allows a far more supple analysis of the aesthetic realm: we need no longer worry about whether the cause of the elevated experience is out there in the world or in here, in our own internal responses to that world.[2]’
One of the key identifiers of sublime experience is that of transformation. The effect of sublimity is apparent in the changed perception of the viewer/hearer/reader. What has come before, what we had expected is now transformed into something different. Throughout the course of the thesis this has been defined under many different headings; transcendence, sublimation. It is a ‘sinking down’ or ‘breaking through’ of previous thought and vision to create something new – be it an epiphany of entirely unconsidered thought, a complete change of engagement with a stimulus or indeed a synthesis of thought to create new perceptions. We imbibe objects with new, radical dimensions or drastically alter viewpoints based on a simple engagement with that object. There is a ‘rushing in’ of understanding or emotion. It offers solace in an epiphanical construction of new identity, changing comfortable signifiers into something fresh and unconsidered. For some, this is a ‘delightful longing,[3]’ for others a dispassionate obliteration – a breaking down, rather than through, of preconceptions. It becomes a consideration of lacking, of the void at the centre of our contemplative existence. De Bolla writes that the aesthetic:
‘...is not primarily about art but about how we are formed as subjects, and how as subjects we go about making sense of our experience. “What is it that moves me?” is, therefore, a question centrally posed to human nature, which at its furthest extreme threatens to dissolve and dissipate the human in a technology that has the potential to overmaster all sense of being. This question, the problematic of the aesthetic ...is most fully explored under the rubric of the sublime.[4]’
One of the key themes of sublime experience is the notion of being ‘primed’ or readied for that engagement. It has been defined as experiential – something that has and is influenced by previous modes of experience. Burke speaks of a cultivation of the mind to allow its growth. However, this type of experiential intertextuality is not an applicable to the genuinely sublime. While it may be that we understand something to be sublime compared to previous encounters which have not been, the sublime depends on a forceful reckoning of the new. There is a type of paradoxical event, what Thomas McEvilley calls ‘a negation of the boundaries of selfhood, a negation at once exalting and terrifying.[5]’ Frances Reynolds writes in 1785:
‘It is a pinnacle of beatitude, bordering upon horror, deformity, madness! An eminence from whence the mind, that dares to look farther is lost! It seems to stand, or rather waver, between certainty and uncertainty, between security and destruction. It is the point of terror, of undetermined fear, of undetermined power![6]’
While it may be something that we have been primed or prepared for, the idea of the familiar and the sublime are rarely linked. Hughes writes of ‘The Shock of the New,’ Newman heralds ‘The Sublime is Now.’ It may call upon emotions that are known to us or promote recollections of times that were precious or fearful but the sublime will ultimately construct a new language of the mind to assimilate that which has, heretofore, been unknown.
The sublime is also a name, given to that which we cannot account for. The most extreme of adjectives are used to denote the experience – Burkean terror meets Kantian totality. It is however, always situated in the mind. The storm is sublime because we witness it. We may ascribe its power to a vengeful all-knowing creator but the situ of sublimity will lie, ultimately with the bearer of that experience. We are reminded of Hopkins once more - ‘O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/ Frightful, sheer, no-man fathomed. Hold them cheap/ May who ne’er hung there.[7]’ In contemporary discourse, the notion of sublimity is defined by missing content – our inability to place language adequately on experience. Our facilitation of reason in the face of sensory handicap becomes sublime in and of itself.
As discussed, the sublime has been continually twinned with ‘terror’ throughout history. Whilst in naturalistic terms this could be described as ‘awesome’ – man’s ascent of said mountain-top defined as sublime in the treacherous ascent/struggle and subsequent appraisal of landscape, in the late eighteenth century it begins to represent that which is terrible to behold. It is something conversant of terror and there is a return to this notion in late twentieth and early twenty-first century discourse. The skyward-expanding Manhattan skyline is as likely to inspire awe/wonder as the mountain-scape. Man’s strength, force and ingenuity are what dominate the urban sprawl – the Petronas Towers are lit by electricity rather than the divine will of an almighty deity. The nature of our aesthetical interaction changes considerably in the light of two world wars and the now twenty-four hour visual access to modern warfare, genocide and famine. This is coupled with an increasing apathy to visual stimulant – the next ‘big thing’ is culturally often defined as sublime only in terms of its fleeting cinematic visual/special effects. The most terrible/sublime imagery of the modern age depicts that which we only thought possible with the help of those special effects – the events of 9/11. In terms of art therefore, this has led to the return of the sublime as a quiet utterance, albeit on a generally grand scale. A consideration of the terror of the everyday, evocative of Burke’s sublime ‘triumph of sympathy[8]’ is depicted in works such as Peter Eisenman’s ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’ in Berlin, or Ai Wei Wei’s ‘Remembering’ installation of 9,000 backpacks representing the loss of children’s lives in a Chinese earthquake. Slavoj Žižek sees this new type of sublime as lying in the failure of representation of any true thing – it gives us what he calls a ‘presentiment’ of its real dimensions writing:
‘This is also why an object evoking in us the feeling of sublimity gives us simultaneous pleasure and displeasure: it gives us displeasure because of its inadequacy to thing Thing-Idea, but precisely through this inadequacy it gives us pleasure by indicating the true, incomparable greatness of the Thing, surpassing every possible phenomenal, empirical experience.[9]’
Philip Shaw surmises that the sublime’s link to the ridiculous is not coincidental writing that it:
‘encourages us to believe that we can scale the highest mountains, reach the stars and become infinite when all the time it is drawing us closer to our actual material limits: the desire to outstrip earthly bonds leads instead to our encounter with lack, an encounter that is painful, cruel, and some would say comic.[10]’
There are however, points in art history where an artist can draw the sublime away from the treacherousness of transcendentalism and false hope, back toward the domestic hub – the sincere desire for knowledge and epiphany based in an authentic engagement with the familiar and everyday. Appraisals of routine and engagements with the detritus of everyday living are made at once familiar and strange to us. Diego Velázquez’ ‘Las Meninas,’ and Francisco de Goya’s ‘Charles IV of Spain and his Family’ are notable for their true depiction of royalty as well as their considerable skill. The humanisation of the characters renders them at once familiar and their traits are recognisable – almost to the point of caricature. They have an unsettling quality in an art historical sense. While we understand and appreciate the composite skill of the artist, our inclination is to compare ourselves using the measure by which the patrons were inspected. With this consideration in mind, it is no wonder that Goya, incensed as what he saw as the desecration of Spain through civil war, retreated to a darker place - depicting murderous savagery and dreamlike terrors in his later black paintings rather than the frippery and indulgence of a royal court.
Philip Guston is another such artist. Weighed down by an engagement with a disingenuous abstract expressionism he retreated from the gallery-driven urban spaces of New York to the quiet solitude of his Woodstock studio. Struggling for many years at an impasse between what had been trumpeted as an astonishing career in abstraction and what he felt to be the epitome of ‘true’ painting, he made the difficult choice to discard with the ‘mysterium tremendum.[11]’ He moved instead to depict what he called the ‘common objects[12]’ of the everyday, painting them in a feverish cartooned manner, items in and of themselves, and also in the hands of ghoulish Ku Klux Klan hoods. Few artists understood the draw of the sublime as much as Guston. He was amongst those announced as the avant-garde of American culture – the saviours of abstract thought and visionaries for the future. His peers and colleagues included Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, the now darlings of the tourist-trap New York museums. Guston’s dramatic return to figuration until recently, was seen as a stop-gap between the heady aspirational advance of Abstract Expressionism and the tongue-in-cheek plastic heraldry of Pop-art consumer culture. However, in terms of a contemporary definition of the sublime, Guston’s quiet challenge subscribes to the notion of an authentic sublime through the technique and content of his work alone. Where, by Caspar David Friedrich’s methodology, man could encounter the sublime in the dynastical natural world, Guston places it at home, in man’s own environ – surrounded by the familiar objects of conventional living. Here too, we can encounter sublimity – ascribe to sublime thoughts and feelings and demonstrate our ability to contemplate totality. Žižek accounts for this by applying Hegelian rationale – the dialectical appraisal of the everyday:
‘What we must grasp is this intimate connection, even identity, between this logic of reflection (positing, external, determinate reflection) and the Hegelian notion of the “absolute” subject – of the subject which is no longer attached to some presupposed substantial contents but posits its own substantial presuppositions.[13]’
The work of French conceptual artist Sophie Calle also reveals something unique about the world in which we live. Her approach to her subject matter provides new theories on the notion of event-hood. Using photography, film, documentation, and various types of confessional curatorial devices, she makes observations about the trivial everyday events of life that we take for granted. The things that happen-to-us-all become things of great importance. Shaw writes however that ‘sublime matter is that which resists the impositions of forms and concepts[14]’ and quotes Lyotard:
‘For forms and concepts are constitutive of objects, they pro-duce data that can be grasped by sensibility and that are intelligible to understanding...the matter I’m talking about is “immaterial,” an-objectable, because it can only “take place” or find its occasion at the price of suspending these active powers of the mind.[15]’
Calle however, despite rendering her ideas through the use of graspable, intelligible objects places them together in such a way as to create new syntheses of thought. We are indeed forced to suspend the ‘active powers of the mind’ when we consider what we thought to be a photograph of a telephone becoming signifier of the event-hood of heartbreak and the pain of others. A discarded wedding dress displayed draped across a man’s chair becomes a signifier for female seduction rather than the wholesome virginal white of the pure bride. The term ‘beauty’ is almost always considered as a preface or afterthought to sublime enquiry with the vast majority of writers compelled to propose their theories and its relationship to sublimity before getting on with the matter at hand. Jean-Luc Nancy writes ‘the sublime represents...nothing less than that without which the beautiful could be nothing but the beautiful (which paradoxically comes down to the same thing.).[16]’ Calle is an artist at the forefront of European conceptual art who capitalises and demonstrates this theory to her own advantage. Her work is almost exclusively based in feminine territory yet she has avoided being categorised solely in terms of a ‘female’ artist revelling instead as the provider/provocateur of the unpresentable. The necessity of a relationship between the sublime and the beautiful are appropriated by Calle to her advantage and it is as Shaw admits:
‘In practice, sublimity cannot be separated from the appreciation of form. What attracts us to the sublime is not an abstract quality but the fact that the sense of the awe-inspiring or the overpowering is conveyed in this particular mountain, in this particular moment.[17]’
It is through encountering this type of art that we are left on the edge of the precipice once more – what we thought to be true and matter-of-fact is instead a ‘something else,’ an ‘other’ and it is to this notion that the contemporary doctrine on the sublime continually returns. Lyotard writes that it is the paradoxical nature of art turning towards ‘a thing which does not turn itself towards the mind[18]’ and it is here that Calle’s unpresentable resides – a sublime for the modern ethos.
By examining artists such as these we can look at key developments and shifts in theoretical discourse. A theory of the sublime can be applied directly to their practice and quantified in such a way as to synthesise new thoughts and appreciations on sublimity. Their artistic enquiry reflects our own investigation and desire to define the sublime in terms anew; propelling discourse forward. The artist Clyfford Still wrote that art should be ‘a modern power in the age of conformity.[19]’ Of his own painting he said:
‘I held it imperative to evolve an instrument of thought which would aid in cutting through all cultural opiates, past and present, so that a direct, immediate, and truly free vision could be achieved, and an idea revealed with clarity. To acquire such an instrument however, - one that would transcend the powers of conventional techniques and symbols, yet be as an aid and instant critic of thought – demanded full resolution of the past, and present through it.[20]’
We see a continued desire for this type of clarity – for an amendment of vision and rhetoric so as to fuel further discourse on the sublime and, in so doing, attend to our insatiable appetite for cultural and philosophical evolution. Newman wrote in 1948 that the sublime is ‘now’ and yet we find that this is still the case. Shaw, rather embarrassed, writes that in all the questioning and labelling could it be that the sublime does indeed ‘affirm the unlimited nature of being...lead ultimately to the triumph of the mind over matter, or possibly towards an affirmation of the divine?[21]’Whatever the case, it is universally agreed to be something at the heart of human nature. When we ask what it is that moves us, we are encountering that which is sublime with the answer to that question. Our innate sense of our own perceptions, one that transcends all else and belongs solely to that individual can be defined by the simple act of looking.
[1] DeBolla, Peter, ‘Introduction,’ Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, Ed. Ashfield, Andrew, de Bolla, Peter, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p.13
[2] Ibid. p.14
[3] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.152
[4] DeBolla, Peter, ‘Introduction,’ Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, p.2
[5] McEvilley, Thomas, The Exile’s Return, Toward a Redefinition of Painting for the Post-Modern Era, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p.10
[6] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.46
[7] Manley-Hopkins, Gerard, ‘No Worst, There Is None,’ Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, DigiReads Publishing, 2010, p.49
[8] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Oxford University Press, 1998, p.43
[9] Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso, 1989, p.229
[10] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.10
[11] Keyes, Charles Don, Brain Mystery Light and Dark, The Rhythm and Harmony of Consciousness, Routledge, 1999, p.119
[12] Coolidge, Clark, Philip Guston, Collected Writings, Lectures, Conversations, University of California Press, 2011, p221
[13] Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p.244
[14] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.124
[15] Op.Cit
[16] Ibid. p.149
[17] Ibid. p.151
[18] Silverman, Hugh, J., Jean-François Lyotard – Between Politics and Aesthetics, Routledge, 2002, p.204
[19] Gottlieb, Carla, Beyond Modern Art, Dutton, 1976, p.363
[20] Op.Cit
[21] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.11