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The New Sublime:Is there a new definition of the Sublime in contemporary art?
By Mariah MacGregor
August 2010
The “Contemporary” Sublime
“There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.”
Napoleon Bonaparte
A dictionary definition of Sublime is: “impressing the mind with a sense of grandeur or power; inspiring awe, veneration, etc.” [i] This definition is not too different from Kant’s definition of the Sublime in the context of Aesthetics. As Kant described the Sublime: “it is the disposition of soul evoked by a particular representation engaging the attention of the reflective judgment, and not the object, that is to be called sublime.” [ii] It is not the object(s) itself that is Sublime, but the state of mind that is created by the object. Kant and his contemporaries often spoke of the Sublime being a response to awesome vistas; nature’s divine glory. The “inadequacy of imagination”[iii] to comprehend these subjects magnitude created the state of the Sublime. The Sublime is present in Contemporary art but achieved by new media and contemporary subjects. This new Sublime is emerging out of the work of artists like Laura Splan, Ingrid Bachmann and Xiang Yang.
The artwork made by these, and other contemporary artists does not deviate from Kant’s originally definition, if it seems so it is only because the definition has been simplistically misinterpreted to mean only particular kinds of art. Kant’s definition is that the Sublime is a state of mind, the over-whelmed imagination. “Sublimity… does not reside in any of the things of nature, but only in our own mind.”[iv]
Contemporary imaginations are different from the Kantian imagination because we are exposed to different stimuli. For example, the sheer magnitude of a modern city with its people, cars and skyscrapers might have been Sublime to the Kantian imagination. But to the modern western person urban life has become ordinary and therefore not Sublime, though there is still the possibility for the Sublime through the “artificial infinite”.[v] Contemporary artists such as Andreas Gursky and Jeff Koons work with artificial infinite. They are using contemporary materials and subjects, like grocery aisle and dogs, and create the Sublime through “conspicuous vastness”. [vi] Though contemporary, this relates to Kant’s definition of the Sublime because he referenced the vastness and Nature. In an article about Gursky’s photographic work, Alix Ohlin writes: “Things that are small and attractive can be beautiful, but physical greatness is sublime.”[vii] Both Gursky and Koons take small things and make them vast.
Andreas Gursky, 99 Cent II Diptychon, 2001 Jeff Koons, Puppy 1992
One of the reasons that the majesty of nature creates the feeling of the Sublime is that man cannot control it. The Sublime was historically a masculine idea, since Kant and his contemporaries believed that women should not think so as not to lose their femininity. “The transcendental or “masculine” sublime represents the male writer’s desire to control the natural world, a world from which he feels alienated and by which he feels threatened…” [viii] Therefore the feminine was in the realm of the Sublime; something mysterious and tied to nature because of women’s role as creator and nurturer.
In contemporary western culture gender roles are not so clearly defined, and women are using the traditional symbols of femininity in new ways. The ‘Feminine Sublime’ in art is being created by taking things that are ordinary/domestic (those “small and attractive” things that Ohlin mentions) and putting them in a context that confuses the imagination into a state of the Sublime. This is a contemporary feminine response to artists such as Gursky. Kant said “A pure judgment upon the sublime must, however, have no end belonging to the object as its determining ground, if it is to be aesthetic…”[ix] This means that any medium, at any scale can be Sublime if it evokes the right state of mind, because the object itself can not be the determining factor in judgment.
Ingrid Bachmann is one artist that is consciously working with the idea of the Sublime. Bachmann has a piece called “The Portable Sublime” in which she installed suitcases in a room. The viewer is able to open each suitcase, and each one has something different inside: glowing shattered glass, floating speakers playing music etc. Another piece of Bachmann’s is called “Symphony for 54 Shoes” where she has shoes mounted on hydraulics with sensors that detect motion and cause the shoes to stomp out sounds.[x] Though it is not directly titled to reference the Sublime like “The Portable Sublime”, both pieces create the Sublime by taking everyday objects out of context, which stretches the imagination to inadequacy.
Ingrid Bachmann, The Portable Sublime 2008
Another artist that is creating the contemporary Sublime is Laura Splan. She references women’s role both as procreator and keeper of domestic arts. John Pipkin quotes Anne Mellor as saying that women artists use the “feminine” or “domestic sublime” to celebrate their unbroken, archetypal bond with the natural world, a bond that their male contemporaries have lost.”[xi] Splan uses her own body (skin, blood etc) in traditionally feminine crafts such as crocheting doilies and knitting. Everyday objects such as purses and scarves become Sublime when combined with the body. Splan made a scarf that is filled with the wearer’s blood. Blood and scarves are worldly, if not completely mundane. It’s the new relationship Splan puts those materials in that creates the Sublime experience.
Laura Splan Blood Scarf 2002
Xiang Yang is a Chinese born artist who uses embroidery in non-traditional ways. Unlike Splan and Bachmann, Yang is male, but his art can be included in this group that is interpreting the Sublime in a different way than male artists such as Gursky and Koons. He is using a traditionally feminine material (fibers), and making it three-dimensional. This new context for what traditionally was a feminine and two-dimensional medium pushes it into the realm of the sublime. Though much larger than traditional embroidery work, it is not on the grand scale of Gursky and Koons. Yang’s work is also small things made Sublime.
When Kant attempts to define what about Nature is Sublime and can not come up with a constant such as size, or any certain characteristics he says: “Thus, instead of the object, it is rather the cast of the mind in appreciating it that we have to estimate as sublime.”[xii] This again shows that there is no new definition of the Sublime because Kant gave no definition of the physical characteristics of the Sublime object; contemporary artists are working within Kant’s Sublime, not creating something new.
Xiang Yang, Buddha Says 2007
There are many more artists that could be used as examples of this use of the Sublime. The state of mind that Kant described has not changed, but how it is invoked by artists, has. As the feminine is allowed in to the boy’s clubs of the Fine Arts and philosophy old ideas will be re investigated. The contemporary world is more fragmented and hurried, so while the majestic vistas of nature might still evoke the Sublime, so do familiar things put into new relationships. Small dogs made large, scarves made of blood, suitcases that contain glowing glass, all of these things are familiar subjects made unfamiliar, thus confusing the imagination into a state of the Sublime.
In her book Women’s Liberation and the Sublime: Feminism, Postmodernism, Environment, Bonnie Mann argues that there is a contemporary Sublime. She says: “Today we live, as David Harvey and others have pointed out, in the instant, that is, in the time of instantaneous gratification of desire, of instantaneous obsolescence, instantaneous global communication, the instantaneous image (Harvey 2 These conquests of time and distance (I can communicate with my friend in Brazil in the matter of a moment) don’t free us from time…”[xiii] So in contemporary life we are always moving quickly from moment to moment without rest, we are not free of time, not have we conquered it as Mann suggests, we just operate at a faster pace than we did historically.
Mann goes on to remind us that “For Kant, as we saw in the last chapter and as Lyotard reminds us, sublime experience ‘‘removed the time-condition,’’ that is, threw the subject into a kind of out-of-time and beyond-time, where the mechanism of nature and the time of sense experience no longer limit. In postmodern accounts, by contrast, the sublime is the very experience of the time condition. It traps the subject in the instant.” [xiv] This distinction does not actually prove that there is a contemporary version of the Sublime that is different from Kant’s. Both versions that Mann describes take a person out of their normal perception of time, whether that normal reality is the kinetically frantic modern world or a slower Kantian one. If our normal reality is a continuous stream of moments that we are not free from, then something that “traps the subject in the instant” is actually an “out of time… beyond time experience”, because it is different from our normal experience of time.
A key misconception of Kant’s theory of the Sublime in relation to nature also comes up in Mann’s writing. She states: “Kant described sublime experience as a confrontation with nature at its most wild and formless, its most terrifying.”[xv] Mann goes on to describe Hurricane Katrina and how forces of nature like this are terrifying, and the terror and inability of humans to control it are what make it Sublime. Though Kant does say: “If we are to estimate nature as dynamically sublime, it must be represented as a source of fear”,[xvi] he goes on to say that “One who is in a state of fear can no more play the part of a judge of the sublime of nature than one captivated by inclination and appetite can of the beautiful. He flees from the sight of an object filling him with dread; and it is impossible to take delight in terror that is seriously entertained.”[xvii] Something that is truly terrifying cannot be judged aesthetically because the viewer is not able to disassociate from it. This objective distance was important to Kant’s aesthetic theory. Something that brings pleasure is not beautiful because the viewer, by feeling pleasure, or desire or in this case fear, is not being objective in his/ her judgment. Mann qualifies that: “… I don’t want to imply that Hurricane Katrina was primarily an aesthetic experience”. [xviii] She needn’t worry because according to Kant it could not be an aesthetic experience unless you were somehow able to detach from the fear and helplessness that most victims and observers felt.
The musician Karlheinz Stockhausen, described 9/11 as: “the greatest work of art that exists for the whole Cosmos…people practice like crazy for 10 years, totally fanatically, for a concert, and then die.”[xix] Stockhausen did not use the word Sublime, though it seems as if he was getting at the idea of the Sublime by saying 911 is the “greatest work of art that exists…” something so great it is inconceivable to our imagination. But the same argument that applied to Mann’s analysis of Katrina applies here as well; the actual product (the impact of the planes and the death of the victims) of all the “practice” was too terrifying to be Sublime. In his article on Stockhausen’s comments Anthony Tomassini said: “Art may be hard to define, but whatever art is, it’s a step removed from reality.”[xx] This definition of art does help to refute Stochausen’s statement but is by no means the most relevant definition of art.
9/11 Hurricane Katrina
The aesthetic theory that contradicts Tomassini’s definition of art and Kant’s idea of the Sublime is John Dewey’s idea that art is a holistic experience. It is not separate from life at all, but an enhancement of living. This could mean using a beautiful tool instead of a strictly functional tool, or singing and dancing, which is an artistic experience that doesn’t result in a product. “ The intelligent mechanic engaged in his job, interested in doing well and fining satisfaction in his work, caring for his materials and tools with genuine affection, is artistically engaged.”[xxi] Even a mechanic is an artist if he is working in an artistic state of mind. In some ways this is actually similar to the idea of the Sublime because it is not what but how. It is not the specific object or process but the state of mind that the object or process leads to.
In Art as Experience Dewey says: “it is quite possible to enjoy flowers in their colored form and delicate fragrance without knowing anything about plants theoretically. But if one sets out to understand the flowering of plants he is committed to finding out something about the interactions soil, air water and sunlight that condition the growth of plants.”[xxii] Dewey believed that interactive experience was the essence of the artistic experience. “ There is no limit to the immediate sensuous experience to absorb into itself meanings…” [xxiii] In contrast to historic classical art that was most often static, and separate, either a painting on a wall of a statue, much of contemporary art is interactive. Ingrid Bachmann’s The Portable Sublime” invites viewers to open the suitcases on their own and experience each interior. Relational Aesthetics takes this idea to the next level in which the art is the experience, not just part of it. While there is much to be said of Relational Aesthetics in relation to politics, and the traditions of art history and criticism, for the purposes of this paper it will only be discussed in the context of Kant’s Sublime.
One quintessential example of Relational Aesthetics is Rirkrit Tiravanija’s piece “Pad Thai”. Tiravanija cooked pad thai for gallery goers, and it was the experience of being there and receiving the meal was the artwork.
Rirkrit Tiravanija Pad Thai 1996
Nicolas Bourriaud, a French critic and curator, wrote an essay called “Relational Aesthetics” in 1998 that helped to define the genre/movement. In it he says that Relational Aesthetics is about: “the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space”.[xxiv] Instead of a private relationship between art and viewer, or institution and art, it is about the artist/artwork interacting in a social space and time with others. This already puts Kant’s Sublime into question, because can the viewer (or experiencer in this case) have the necessary detachment to experience the Sublime when in the midst of a social context? There is not only the collective experience of the art, but also the interactions of the people that can contain all the things that Kant said disqualified the Sublime: desire, fear and emotional investment.
In her article “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics” Claire Bishop clarifies: “it is important to emphasize however, that Bourriaud does not regard relational aesthetics to be simply a theory of interactive art. He considers it to be a means of locating contemporary practice within the culture at large: relational art is seen as a direct response to the shift from a goods to a service based economy.” [xxv] This statement re-iterates Bourriaud’s definition, because instead of goods, or a product that you can go to a gallery and see alone and on your own terms, relational aesthetics is an active service that you have to be there and participate in. It’s the difference between watching a movie On Demand and going to a live theater performance; or buying a suit at Target as opposed to having a tailor fit one to you in his/her shop.
One could argue that even interactive experiences like “Pad Thai” could produce the state of the Sublime, since it is a mental state and not embodied in an object. Kant says: “If we attribute the delight in the object wholly and entirely to the gratification which it affords through charm or emotion, then we must not exact from any one else agreement with the aesthetic judgment passed by us. For, in such matters each person rightly consults his own personal feeling alone. Hence if the import of the judgment of taste, where we appraise it as a judgment entitled to require the concurrence of every one, cannot be egoistic, but must necessarily, from its inner nature, be allowed a pluralistic validity…”[xxvi] So even though Kant wants the viewer not to be emotionally invested in the art to judge it, an aesthetic judgment is not personal, but plural. In light of this quote a Relational Aesthetic piece could actually lead to a true Sublime experience, because it is by nature a pluralistic experience. Even Bachmann’s “Portable Aesthetic”, in which the viewer individually opens and closes the suitcases, there are other people doing the same thing to other suitcases in the room, and there is the knowledge that other people have touched the suitcase, and the same experience you are having.
In traditional static art the viewer is not integral to the ‘viewing’ of the piece. One can view the “Mona Lisa” passively, but one cannot view “Portable Sublime” or “Pad Thai” passively. The communal nature of Relational Aesthetics might actually make it more likely to evoke a Sublime state because the imagination is stretched to the state of the Sublime by trying to comprehend the presence and consciousness of many other people experiencing the same thing as you are. The unknown variable is how much do the viewers/ experiencers have tied up in the emotions and expectations of being around other people. If we are distracted by desire, embarrassment or social etiquette we may not be able to surrender to the plural Sublime experience.
John Dewey thought that art was an experience, (not an object) whether it was the experience of making, such as the artful mechanic, or the enhanced daily experience of using a beautiful tool. Relational Aesthetics fits Dewey’s theory of the artistic experience, which does not necessarily mean that these experiences cannot be Sublime. Since Kant’s definition of the Sublime is that it is a state of mind it may in act be the same state as Dewey’s artistic experience. That artistic zone that Dewey alludes to when he describes the mechanic at work is not unrelated to Kant’s description of the Sublime. The mind leaves the mundane of the daily and enters an altered state of consciousness. This could be induced by the grandeur of nature, the grotesque fascination of the Blood Scarf, or dancing, singing, and meaningful work.
In conclusion, contemporary art is not re writing Kant; there is no new definition of the Sublime. If an artist or critic states that they have re interpreted, or re defined the Sublime it is because they have misread the original definition which is broad enough to include Gericault’s “Raft of the Medusa” and Laura Splan’s “Purse”. Relational Aesthetics comes the closest to getting out from under the shadow of Kant’s Sublime. Are these experiences individual or plural experiences? Can one have the distance required for aesthetic judgment when interacting socially? It does not fit neatly into Kant’s theory, so perhaps Relational Aesthetics is the first contemporary art movement to start to disassociate from the Sublime. But Koons, Gursky, Splan, Bachmann and others are not redefining the Sublime; they are just getting their viewers to reach the state of the Sublime with materials and methods that Kant could never have imagined. The materials are new, but the Sublime is original.
“The only protagonist now is the toiling artist.”[xxvii]
Footnotes
[i] www.dictionary.reference.com/browse/sublime
[ii]Meredith, James Creed, trans. “Part I: Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” in
The Critique of Judgement (The University of Adelaide Library) § 25
[iii] Meredith, James Creed, trans. “Part I: Critique of Aesthetic Judgement” in
The Critique of Judgement (The University of Adelaide Library) § 27
[iv] Meredith, James Creed, trans. “Part I: Critique of Aesthetic Judgement” in
The Critique of Judgement (The University of Adelaide Library) § 28
[v] Ohlin, Alix, “Andreas Gursky and the Contemporary Sublime” Art Journal, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Winter, 2002), pp. 22-35
College Art Association
http://www.jstor.org/stable/778148
[vi] · Ibid
[vii] Ibid
[viii] Pipkin, John G. The Material Sublime of Women Romantic Poets (Rice University, 1998) pg 599
[ix] Meredith, James Creed, trans. “Part I: Critique of Aesthetic Judgement” in
The Critique of Judgement (The University of Adelaide Library) § 26
[x] www.redbull381projects.com/en/otherworld_artists.php
[xi] Pipkin, John G. The Material Sublime of Women Romantic Poets (Rice University, 1998) pg 599
[xii] Meredith, James Creed, trans. “Part I: Critique of Aesthetic Judgement” in
The Critique of Judgement (The University of Adelaide Library) § 26
[xiii] Mann, Bonnie. Women’s Liberation and the Sublime : Feminism, Postmodernism, Environment (Oxford University Press 2006) pg 60
[xiv] Mann, Bonnie. Women’s Liberation and the Sublime : Feminism, Postmodernism, Environment (Oxford University Press 2006) pg 61
[xv] Mann, Bonnie. Women’s Liberation and the Sublime : Feminism, Postmodernism, Environment (Oxford University Press 2006) pg 162
[xvi] Meredith, James Creed, trans. “Part I: Critique of Aesthetic Judgement” in
The Critique of Judgement (The University of Adelaide Library) § 28
[xvii] Ibid
[xviii] Mann, Bonnie. Women’s Liberation and the Sublime : Feminism, Postmodernism, Environment (Oxford University Press 2006) pg 160
[xix] Tomassini, Anthony. “Music; the Devil made him do it” The New York Times, September 30, 2001. Arts Section
[xx] Ibid
[xxi] Dewey, John. “Art as Experience,” in Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology. Ed. By Steven M. Cahn and Aaron Meskin. Blackwell, 2008 pg 297
[xxii] Ibid
[xxiii] Ibid
[xxiv] Bishop, Claire “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics” October, Vol. 110, (Autumn, 2004), pp. 51-79
The MIT Press pg. 54
[xxv] Ibid
[xxvi] Meredith, James Creed, trans. “Part I: Critique of Aesthetic Judgement” in
The Critique of Judgement (The University of Adelaide Library)
[xxvii] Paulson, Ronald “Versions of a Human Sublime” New Literary History, Vol. 16, No. 2 pgs 427-37
The Johns Hopkins University Press
REFERENCES:
Bishop, Claire “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics” October, Vol. 110, (Autumn, 2004), pp. 51-79
The MIT Press
John Dewey. “Art as Experience,” in Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology. Ed. By Steven M. Cahn and Aaron Meskin. Blackwell, 2008
Dictionary Online
www.dictionary.reference.com/browse/sublime
Mann, Bonnie. Women’s Liberation and the Sublime : Feminism, Postmodernism, Environment (Oxford University Press 2006)
Meredith, James Creed, trans. “Part I: Critique of Aesthetic Judgement” in
The Critique of Judgement (The University of Adelaide Library)
Ohlin, Alix, “Andreas Gursky and the Contemporary Sublime” Art Journal, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Winter, 2002), pp. 22-35
College Art Association
http://www.jstor.org/stable/778148
Paulson, Ronald “Versions of a Human Sublime” New Literary History, Vol. 16, No. 2 pgs 427-37
The Johns Hopkins University Press
Pipkin, John G. The Material Sublime of Women Romantic Poets (Rice University, 1998)
Red Bull 381 Projects: a platform to engage and gather creative minds to collaborate and broaden passions within the worlds of art and design.
www.redbull381projects.com/en/otherworld_artists.php
Tomassini, Anthony. “Music; the Devil made him do it” The New York Times, September 30, 2001. Arts Section. www.nytimes.com/2001/09/30/arts/music-the-devil-made-him-do-it.html
Xiang Yang Artist Website.
www.xiang-yang.org/text.html
