THE SUBLIME

Sublime: under the lime. Lime: lintel. A lintel is something

that spans an opening, above the opening, carrying the

weight of the wall above it, the collapse of which would

close the opening. The word sublime also has an old and

physical verbal meaning of causing of solid state to pass

into a vapour state and condense back into a solid state.

Hence it came to mean elevation and exaltation,

converting something inferior into something of higher

worth.

Limes, an Old French word, “a boundary that confines.” A

limen is a threshold. We have in sublime the sense of a

limited opening by the passing through of which one is

transformed in an elevated movement. In the Dionysian

context, one enters a higher state by means of a dissolution

of ethnic regulation and identity.

Dionysius Longinus 1stC

“For our soul is raised out of nature through the truly sublime, sways with high spirits, and is filled with proud joy, as if itself had created what it hears.”

The Grand Tours of the 17th & 18thC

The Grand Tour was undertaken as an opening to sublime experience both interms of crossing over the Alps but then discovering the fragmentary ruins ofAncient worlds. Artists such as Salvatore Rosa embodied the taste for thisSublime aesthetic experience.

Salvatore Rosa, The Death of Empedocles (1665-70)

Poussin, Landscape with a Man killed by a Snake, 1647

Edmund Burke (1729-97) published his second

philosophical essay in 1757 called ‘A

Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our

Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.’ His central

discussion is that the enjoyment of beauty

develops out of the way the imagination is

engaged with obscurity as opposed to

intellectual clarity whereas with respect to the

sublime by a pleasurable form of terror and

ignorance.

“In his analysis of the sublime effect, Edmund Burke termed 'horror' the state of mind of a person whose participation in speech is threatened. The power which exceeds the capacity of interlocution resembles night.”

Jean-Francois Lyotard

Kant accounts for different perceptions of

what is sublime, or different judgements,

from the same vantage point, of objects that

may inspire the feeling of sublimity, in terms

of the subject’s deference to “the moral

law”. To feel the sublime, and not merely

terror, we must susceptible to certain ideas:

we only feel sublimity insofar as our reason

exercises a dominion over our sensibility,

letting it look beyond itself into the infinite,

which for it is an “abyss”. For this reason,

Kant says, only the individual who has

developed moral ideas will experience the

sublime- the untutored will merely

experience terror.

Kant wrote his ‘Critique of Judgment’in 1790.

Kant divided the sublime into two manifestations, the mathematical and

the dynamical. The mathematical expresses the extent and the

dynamical forces.

“Whereas the beautiful is

limited, the sublime is

limitless, so that the mind in

the presence of the sublime,

attempting to imagine what it

cannot, has pain in the failure

but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt”

Kant

The sublime relates to the response of the subject rather than the quality of

the object, “The sublime in the strictest sense cannot be contained in any

sensual form, but only refers to ideas of reason.” If the sublime is that “which

is absolutely great” it cannot be a property of the senses because

imagination would be unable to synthesize the sensual manifold. Therefore,

there are no sublime objects, but rather, sublime states of subjectivity

thought are derived from encounters with certain types of objects. With the

mathematical sublime there is the presentation of the idea of infinity that

defies sensory experience. Imagination though does not allow us to think

totality but we are able to think of infinity which “requires a faculty in the

mind that is itself supersensible.” The imagination both appears to lack a

grasp of the formless object and yet grasp it at the same time and for this

reason there is not a disharmony between imagination and understanding.

The dynamical sublime differs in that it contains a moment of anxiety or fear

in the face of a possibility of being undone by the force of nature. This

manifests as intense displeasure because of the vulnerability we experience,

and yet this experience in its self does not qualify as sublime. Rather it is

within the movement of this displeasure being overcome in the process of

reflection in which a process of resistance is achieved, and with it, the

discovery that human freedom is not subject to natural destruction.

“The sublime in art is the attempt to express the infinite without finding in the realm of phenomena any object which proves itself fitting for this representation.”

Hegel

Joseph Wright ofDerbyAn Experiment1768

John Martin, The great Day of his Wrath 1851-3

“The sublime does not prepare us for anything and nothing prepares us for the sublime.”

Evy Varsamopoulous

Casper David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, 1808-10

Casper David FriedrichThe Wanderer Above The Sea Of Fog1818

Turner’s work captured the inter-relationship of the forces of both the natural world and the human attempt

to mobilize these forces.

Turner painted historical events such as in his work ‘The Slave Ship’ 1845 or ‘TheFighting Temeraire’ 1838 but also, mythic episodes as in ‘Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus’ 1829. The sea represented great forces either of majesty or terror, one moment dire, the next radiant. The sublime could in alternating ways stage intensification, shock, and excess. Romanticism represented a counter-Enlightenment opposing the notion that nature should become an object of calculative control.

Max Ernst, Europe After the Rain 11, 1940-2

Abstract Sublime

Mark Rothko Red on Maroon1959

Barnet Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimus 1950-51

Clyfford Still, Untitled, 1950

Monochrome

Ad Reinhardt produced a whole series of all black paintings which presentedhis notion of the infinite. In part he was influenced by Chinese ClassicalMonochrome paintings. He called these works his ‘last paintings’.

Yves Klein travelled to New York in the late 1950’s and saw the all-white paintingsof Robert Rauschenberg and on his return started to create his monochrome worksIn blue. He also developed a series of performative works such as ‘Leap into theVoid (1960). He said that his paintings were an “open window to freedom, as thePossibility of being immersed in the immeasurable existence of color.”

Walter de Maria, The Lightning Field, 1977

“...The sublime feeling is not mere pleasure as taste is – it is a mixture of pleasure and pain... Confronted with objects that are too big according to their magnitude or tooviolent according to their power, the mind experiences its own limitations.”

Jean-Francois Lyotard

“ the sublime is a sudden blazing, and without a future.”

Jean-Francois Lyotard

Gerhard Richter produced a series of landscape paintings which echoed the work ofCasper David Friedrich but stripped bare of theological connatations.

Gerhard Richter, Betty, 1977

“The sublime does not prepare us for anything and nothing prepares us for

the sublime.”

Evy Varasupoulou

Jean-Luc Nancy (1940)

Includes the essay ‘The SublimeOffering.’

“History is the succession of ruptures of history where this identification plunges back in itself and decision

recurs.”

Jean-Luc Nancy

In the essay ‘A Sublime Offering’ (published in “A Finite Thinking’) Nancy

is concerned with developing a re-reading of Kant and his ideas about

the sublime and with this the notion of negative presentation. For Nancy

“art itself is deranged’ in the sublime but what is central or at stake in the

sublime is “a suspension of art” (P213). A way of understanding this

notion is through the idea that art is provoked by something other than

art and thus in a state of suspension trembles on its own edge. Nancy

notes, that what is at issue with the work of art was not its relation to

truth as representation but rather the presentation of freedom. Nancy

also claims that the sublime is rather “unaesthetic” and is closer to an

ethics and that the sublime, rather than being subordinate to the

beautiful transforms and reconfigures it. The sublime if figured as “an

aesthetics of movement as opposed to an aesthetics of the static” (P223)

and as such an escape from limitation, a state in which everything

becomes small. Placed at a limit, “there is no longer either figure or

figuration or form,” (P229) instead we are given over to a pulsation. For

Nancy the “sublime does not escape to a space beyond the limit. It

remains at the limit and takes place there,” (P239) and that the “sublime offering”

occurs as “the limit of presentation.”

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Aegean Sea, Pillion, 1990

Cornelia Parker, Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View 1991

John Akomfrah, Vertigo Sea 2015

Esther Teichmann, Untitled from Mythologies 2012-4

Mark Bradford, Cerberus 2019

Techno-Sublime

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe suggests a contemporary form of the sublime that is

based on technology (techno-sublime) as opposed to nature and thus

rejecting “the sublime being historically specific.” Part of Gilbert-Rolfe’s

endeavour is to resurrect the position of painting in opposition to post-

Duchampian conceptualism. He addresses the relationship of photography

and painting (“mutual criticality comes automatically with the forms’ mutual

exclusiveness”) believing that Ritcher in exemplifying a relationship between

the two forms excludes beauty in favour of criticality. In the final chapter ‘The

Visible post-Human in the Technological Sublime’ the relationship of the

sublime and technology is developed. “Technology has subsumed the idea of

the sublime because it, whether to a greater or an equal extent than nature, is

terrifying in the limitless unknowability of its potential, while being entirely a

product of knowledge –i.e., it combines limitless with pure ratio- and is thus at

once unbounded by the human, and, as knowledge, a trace of the human now

out of the latter’s control.”

Olafur Eliasson, Weather Report, 2003

Anish Kapoor, Marsyas, 2002 Tate Modern Turbine HallA work that references Titian’s painting “The Flaying of Marsyas’1570

Andraes Gursky, Les Mees, 2016

Doris Salcedo, Shibboleth 2007

The idea of the sublime has become the site of conflicting readings both in termsof the experience of contemporary art and in relationship to theoretical dispute.The introduction of terms such as ‘hyper-objects’ (global warming, radiation) has expanded the philosophical resonance of the discussion.