TATE
This paper was presented by members of Art & Language (Michael Baldwin, Charles Harrison and Mel Ramsden) at Tate Modern in March 2003 as part of the talks series Painting Present. It argues that painting resists the Institutional Theory of art in as much as it does not depend on institutions for its status as art. In this respect, painting after conceptual art may be seen as just as critical of art institutions as conceptual art used to be.
Although it was written over a century ago, Alois Riegl’s ‘The Modern Cult of Monuments’ still provides a valid analytical framework for the study of key theoretical issues surrounding the transmission to the future of works of art. Given their age, some of the broader philosophical principles underlying the text may appear outdated (for example, Riegl’s evolutionism and his theory of Kunstwollen, the notion of art specific to each period in history).
Parodic humour was integral to Dada, and the influence of Nietzsche on Dada is well known. However, the connections between buffoonery, Nietzsche and the anti-sublime in Dada have remained under-explored. This paper links key Dadaists in Berlin and Zürich to Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, and to the Hanswurst – a tradition of German buffoonery – which Nietzsche deploys to counter the Schopenhauerian sublime.
As Sebastiano Barassi and Yve-Alain Bois point out in their contributions to this symposium, Alois Riegl’s essay ‘The Modern Cult of Monuments’, 1903, offers a useful set of co-ordinates for thinking about the Tate’s Gabo project, both because Riegl is explicitly addressing the problem of restoration and because, rather than advocating one attitude or another, he offers a taxonomy of possible positions.
The desire to blur the boundaries between art and life was shared by a great number of artists working across the world in the 1960s. One of the most radical forms to emerge from this shared concern was a type of art that emphasised the lived experience of its viewers by requiring them to adopt new forms of active participation.
Nineteenth-century images of the Arctic suggest that the sublime lost its religious and moral dimensions. While Frederic Church’s painting Icebergs 1861 evoked the glories of this pristine environment as God’s temple, Edwin Landseer’s grimly materialistic Man Proposes, God Disposes 1864 – polar bears crunching the bones of Sir John Franklin’s lost men – equated human traits with bestial behaviour. This might have been related to a growing Darwinian awareness that humans and other species were united by a struggle for existence in a hostile environment.
Soon after the opening of Tate Modern in 2000, a fragment broke off a work by Naum Gabo, Spiral Theme 1941, in one of our displays. Though this has yet to unleash terror, it was, as far as I was concerned, a spontaneous and unexpected action certainly raising amazement and unease. However, from talking with colleagues in conservation, it appeared that the various plastics of which the sculpture is composed were pulling against each other, and the most fragile gave way.
This article summarises the key concerns of Pseudo-Longinus’s On the Sublime, and considers their interest for one of the most influential translators of the treatise, Nicolas Boileau (1636–1711). Boileau’s translation of the ancient Greek text is situated in the context of seventeenth-century French literature, looking particularly at the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns and seeking to explain why modern criticism has taken Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) as the sublime painter par excellence.
For the past several decades art theorists have been wrestling with the consequences of fine art’s accelerated absorption into technologies of reproduction. Following Walter Benjamin’s qualified embrace of this situation in 1936, some have greeted technical replication as the final deliverance of art from outmoded notions of authorship, originality and uniqueness. The more democratic dissemination possible with photography, film and video positioned them as the contemporary artistic media.
This paper discusses Lucretian themes in the idea of a ‘cosmic sublime’ in the context of the discourse of the night sky at the end of the seventeenth century and through the eighteenth century.
For Naum Gabo, the issue of making replicas, copies, and reconstructions emerged with some force during his lifetime. Like many of the sculptors working in Russia during the revolutionary period, he was sometimes forced to execute his ideas in poor-quality materials, and works frequently became lost or damaged through the upheavals of the time. His colleagues, such as Vladimir Tatlin, who remained in Russia, tended to move into design.
This paper addresses the work of Mark Rothko (1903–1970) and Robert Smithson (1938–1973), and, referring to the philosopher Kant and psychoanalyst Lacan, discusses how the sublime can have a psychotic aspect. It argues that Kant’s categorical imperative, for all its attempts to exclude self-interest and the pathological aspects of the hypothetical imperative, establishes a frame not only for sublime aesthetic experience but also for psychotic delusion.
This paper reflects upon the implications of J.M.W. Turner’s close and varied attention to the depiction of sea-water. In particular, Turner’s ability to suggest the liquid depths and gravitational force of the sea – most particularly in Snow Storm – Steam Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth – is read as a means by which alternative forms of sublime experience might be conveyed, ones in which drowning rather than ascendancy are at stake.
Lucretius’s De rerum natura is a neglected source for the emergence of the theory and practice of the sublime in the early modern period. This paper shows how two committed Puritans, the poets John Milton (1608–1674) and Lucy Hutchinson (1620–1681), engaged with Lucretius. After examining Lucretius’s quest for sublimity in subject and style, the article considers the ways in which Milton and Hutchinson responded to his presentation of the gods, his cosmology, his treatment of the death of the soul, his politics, and the ways in which sublimity might be gendered.
The paper traces the frequency with which familiar tropes of the sublime are used in the writing and painting of the 1930s. Crowds, boundaries, mountains, theatricality and death carry a legacy of ideas of the sublime but tend to be treated allegorically rather than in their own right. Looking at paintings by Wyndham Lewis, Paul Nash and Edward Burra, and written works by Stephen Spender and Rex Warner, among others, I argue that the way the idea of history is conceptualised in the urgent melodramatic politics of the decade creates a different sort of sublime, one in which the inexpressible, the void, is located within time itself. Time, allegorised under the pressure of the intensity of political anxiety, becomes an uncanny sublimation of the sublime.
Music’s capacity to expose the contradictions which emerged within late nineteenth-century understandings of the sublime is explored in relation to the aesthetics of decadence and of emergent modernism.
This paper considers the historical coincidence of modernism and the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. In particular, it contextualises allusions to representations of Antarctic journeys in the writings of Henry James and T.S. Eliot, and reflects on the way these bear on the fate of the sublime in the twentieth century.
I am currently in the midst of writing a book on Carl Andre’s poems and sculptures, so when I read through the list of issues the Steering Committee outlined for discussion, my mind immediately turned to the occasions when Andre has chastised museums for installing replicas, or ‘forgeries’ of his works. What light do these episodes throw on the larger debates surrounding replication?
This paper examines affinities between the Bauhaus-indebted instructional methods and practices of Josef Albers and the sculpture of Eva Hesse, his student at Yale University. The author argues that pedagogy affects artistic practice, or that the means or process through which artists are educated contributes to how they approach their work.
This essay examines the relationship between George Stubbs’s Lion and Horse series of paintings and the redefinition of the sublime given by the philosopher Edmund Burke in his famous treatise of 1757. It argues that Stubbs sought to provide visual equivalents for Burke’s maximalist languages of neuro-physiological description of viewing experiences, exploring the visual implications of the novel concepts of sympathy, pain, contractility and expression in ways that help explain the unconventional intensity of his images.
In his critical writing on Claes Oldenburg during the 1960s Donald Judd explained how emotional content might be conveyed through representational imagery, without the emotion depending on either the identity of the represented object or the subjective mood of the artist. Such art was neither representational, nor abstract, nor expressive in the usual understanding of these general terms. To establish the specificity of his position – through Oldenburg – Judd resorted to catachresis and syllepsis, rhetorical devices that operate where more familiar language fails.
This paper examines the notion of the contemporary technological sublime, and asks what sublime affect means in the context of contemporary digital technologies such as video games. It argues that the contemporary technological sublime finds expression in an affective combination of elevated emotion and banality – a combination in which the subject also encounters the limits of the self.
Jack Burnham’s systems aesthetics was one of the first, fully developed, critical theories of postformalist artistic practice. Yet Burnham, undeservedly, is little known today. Recovering, reprising and reassessing his work produces a richer reading of art production c.1970. It also suggests an alternative genealogy of contemporary practice.
This paper examines images relating to therapies for mental illness in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Seeking to trace the history of the sublime aesthetic in the visual culture of medicine as well as in the fine arts, I suggest that clear traces of the literary and visual rhetoric of the sublime can be identified in the literature on lunacy and later professionalised discourses of psychiatry.
In Western art history the grid has been positioned as an emblem of modernism. In Russia, however, early constructivist artists saw the grid as both a formal and ideological device. After a period dominated by socialist realism, the grid was re-adopted in the 1960s and 1970s by some dissident modernist and conceptualist artists. This essay argues that the grid can still be an effective device in radical art practices as long as it is not perceived as an escapist structure that does not address the topics of today.
Focusing on Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living 1991 which contains a preserved shark, this paper explores the longer cultural resonance of sharks as exemplars of the natural sublime. The paper argues that the shark, in Hirst’s work and elsewhere, is a figure which intertwines an aesthetic of terrible nature with the capitalist sublime.
