The Art and The Sublime Tate Modern

1.
Behold the Buffoon: Dada, Nietzsches Ecce Homo and the Sublime
Christine Battersby
The connections between buffoonery, the work of the philosopher Nietzsche and the anti-sublime in the art of
Dada have been under-explored. Christine Battersby links key Dadaists in Berlin and Zrich to Nietzsches Ecce
Homo, and to the Hanswurst a tradition of German buffoonery.
In 1918 a heckler interrupted a church service with a shout that announced Dada in Berlin: What is Jesus Christ to you? To you hes
rubbish! (The German word is Wurst, literally, a sausage.)1 We had to recognise the death of God and make it known, reports Raoul
Hausmann, the Dada philosopher, giving Nietzschean significance to Johannes Baaders outburst. 2Via humour, parody, irony the
Dadaists poked fun at Christianity, art, culture, genius, the sublime: those characteristics that were supposed to make European
civilisation superior to that of non-European and primitive societies, but which had not stopped the slaughter of over two million soldiers
in just one year of the First World War.3
Raoul Hausmann 18861971

The Art Critic 191920
Lithograph and photographic collage on paper
support: 318 x 254 mm
ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2002
Purchased 1974
Tate T01918
T01918
Fig.1
Raoul Hausmann
The Art Critic 191920
As has often been recognised, the Dadaists not only parodied art and culture but also portrayed themselves in parodic terms. In
HausmannsThe Art Critic (191920), the mockery is multi-directional (fig.1). The art critic is portrayed with a strategically placed pencil
(inscribed with the name VENUS) substituting for his penis, with money (a torn banknote) and fashion (the dandyish shoe) merging with
his head, with its unseeing eyes and aggressive, yet also partially toothless, mouth. At the same time, Hausmann also undermines his
own status as an artist by not only writing on the body of the art critic, Constructed by George Grosz implicitly denying his own status
as the producer but also incorporating a self-parodic text next to the critic, Raoul Hausmann president of the sun, the moon and the
little earth (inner surface) Dadasoph Dadaraoul, director of the Dada circus.
Circus and clowning were integral to Dada, and the influence of Nietzsche on the Dadaists is well known. However, the links between
buffoonery, Nietzsche and the anti-sublime in Dada have remained underexplored. 4In this article I shall focus on the links between
Nietzsches Ecce Homo(1888/1908) and a tradition of German buffoonery: that of the Hanswurst, suggesting that it is this element of
buffoonery that appealed to the Dadaists, and that this tradition also needs to be understood in terms of the Schopenhauerian sublime. 5
Hugo Ball is sometimes described as the father of Dada. But Ball knew his Nietzsche well. Not only had Ball a German national who
left Berlin for neutral Switzerland in 1915 written an unpublished doctoral dissertation on Nietzsche, 6 he also refers to him extensively
both in his Critique of the German Intelligentsia (1919)7 and also in his Flight out of Time: A Dada Diary.8 There he claims that Nietzsche
sang the praises of foolishness [Torheit] whereas Schopenhauer sang the praises of cleverness [Gescheitheit].9 Since in
his Critique he discusses both Schopenhauer and Nietzsches Ecce Homo in some detail, we might speculate that some of the
background that I am sketching in here would have been familiar to Ball. 10 If so, it might help explain Balls (temporary) adoption of the
role of the fool; his joining of an itinerant vaudeville group; and the eventual foundation of Cabaret Voltaire in Zrich in 1916: the event
that is generally picked out as the origins of Dada as a movement.
In Ecce Homo Nietzsche asserts: I have a terrible fear that one day I will be pronounced holy: you will guess why I publish this
book beforehand; it should prevent people from doing mischief with me. I do not want to be a holy man, sooner rather aHanswurst.
Perhaps I am a Hanswurst. .11 Hanswurst (sometimes also Hans Wurst) translates literally as Hans the Sausage: it is conventionally
translated as either buffoon or clown. Hanswurst was a crude, burlesque-style rascal in a tradition of German-language semiimprovised comedy in which obscenity was both celebrated and valued.
Originally a character in Austrian (especially Viennese) folk theatre, the Hanswurst became a stock character in much German popular
theatre and comic opera. Appealing primarily to the lower classes, Hanswurst appeared in scripted and unscripted plays, but also in
pantomimic interludes in plays put on by the strolling players as they travelled from town to town. A nave and boastful simpleton whose
main characteristics were greediness and lewdness, Hanswurst was always looking for money and other means to feed his gargantuan
appetites. As the critic Aikin-Sneath puts it, Either running away from old women, or running after young ones, [Hanswurst] is unfailingly
sensual, lewd and philoprogenitive: the epitome of lusting humanity. 12
The subversive and vulgar tendencies of the Hanswurst tradition are clearly illustrated by a letter from the English traveller, Lady Mary
Wortley Montague, who attended a version of Amphitryon in Vienna in 1716 which featured Josef Anton Stranitszky, nicknamed the
original Viennese Hans Wurst. She confessed, I never laughed so much in my whole life, even though I could not easily pardon the
liberty the poet had taken of larding his play with, not only indecent expressions, but such gross words as I dont think our mob would
suffer from a mountebank. As well as featuring a tailor, a banker and a Jewish moneylender, all pursuing Jupiter who had been
transformed into the character Amphitryon for outstanding debts, there were also two servants who very fairly let down their breeches
in the direct view of the boxes, which were full of people of the first rank that seemed very well pleased with their entertainment, and
assured me this was a celebrated piece.13
Of a peasant class (sometimes wearing a pointed green hat, with a large red heart and the letters HW embroidered on his
breast),Hanswurst was a licensed fool who spoke ironically and openly about contemporary affairs. Hoaxed and duped by the other
stock characters, such as Harlequin and Pulcinella, Hanswursts clownish antics interrupted otherwise serious and tragic dramas. As
Aikin-Sneath puts it, Tragic and comic scenes alternate, and frequently in the same scene the ludicrous and calamitous are juxtaposed.
A murder or a suicide does not prevent Hans Wurst from playing his tricks ... The comic element, though it borders on the gruesome, is
kept free of any counteracting emotions, such as pity or fear. 14
Ecce Homo the book in which Nietzsche expresses his Hanswurst ambitions is a half humorous and half megalomaniac
autobiography, with chapter titles such as Why I am So Wise, Why I Write such Good Books and Why I am So Clever. From the start,
Nietzsches tone alerts us to the fact that we should not take his words at face value as we certainly should not, given the falsehoods
and crazy exaggerations that the text includes. Written in 1888, Ecce Homo was not published until 1908: eight years after Nietzsches
death, and nearly twenty years after Nietzsches catastrophic nervous breakdown in January 1889 which left him completely
incapacitated. During the intervening years Nietzsches sister, Elisabeth Frster-Nietzsche, edited the text (and the rest of his oeuvre) in
such a way as to portray her brother as favourable to German nationalism redacting those passages in which Nietzsches criticisms of
Germany (and of her) were at their most extreme. 15Despite Elizabeths success in promoting a Nietzsche cult and aligning it with antiSemitism, Ecce Homo is a clear influence on the exiles from German militarism who were linked to Dada in Zrich, and also on the
Dadaist critics of German culture and nationalism in Berlin.
Ball comments extensively on Ecce Homo, and we know that Hausmann himself owned a copy, along with three other books by
Nietzsche.16 A 1922 photomontage by his partner, Hannah Hch, includes a direct quotation from Nietzsches Ecce Homoamong her
proverbs. Placed next to a (partly obscured) photograph of herself in the photomontage Meine Haussprche (My Household
Proverbs) 1922, the passage translates as: acoustic illusion that where nothing is heard, also nothing is there. 17 Art historian Michael
White has argued that Johannes Baaders exhibit at the first International Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920, Great Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama,
reworks the genre of fantastical autobiography in a way that is indebted to Nietzsches Ecce Homo.18 The structure of the five tiers and
pinnacle of Baaders elaborate installation which was constructed out of a mlange of found objects and printed posters, newspapers
and papers was explicitly linked by Baader in the accompanying text to his fictional autobiography, The Fantastic Life Story of the
Oberdada.
Even more obviously (although generally missed by art historians and commentators), George Grosz is drawing on Nietzsche when he
gives the title Ecce Homo to a portfolio of eighty-four drawings and sixteen watercolours that he produced between 1915 and 1924. The
ultimate derivation of Groszs title which translates into English as Behold the Man is the Latin phrase used by Pontius Pilate (John
19:5) when he presents Christ, scourged and crowned with thorns to a hostile crowd shortly before his Crucifixion. But, more
immediately, it refers back to Nietzsches autobiography in which he positions himself as a Hanswurst and a counter to the wounded
Christ.
George Grosz
Twilight, Dmmerung Plate XVI from Ecce Homo (Berlin: Der Malik-Verlag) 1923 1923
Watercolour
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Fig.2
George Grosz
Twilight, Dmmerung Plate XVI from Ecce Homo (Berlin: Der Malik-Verlag) 1923 1923
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
The final watercolour in Groszs original initially banned, but later reissued book based on Ecce Homo is entitled Dmmerung
(Twilight): a title that itself recalls the title of another of Nietzsches late works, Gtzen-Dmmerung (Twilight of the Idols) 1889 (fig.2).
Nietzsches title is itself a satirical play on the title of Wagners opera, Gtterdmmerung (Twilight of the Gods), and like the late
Nietzsche Grosz was evidently opposed to the German nationalism of Wagner and the Wagnerians, as is evidenced by Drawing 16 of
his Ecce Homo book. In Memory of Richard Wagner depicts a paunchy, middle-aged, male who is attired in Teutonic costume from the
waist up, with cow horns on his head and a spear in his left hand and a cigar in his right, but with bare buttocks. The cigar (marked with
an imperial cross, symbolising German militarism) points suggestively towards a completely naked and overweight female, of Wagnerian
type and stature, and an equally naked and sexually immature girl. Groszs contempt for Wagner, and the symbolism of Teutonic
militarism as deployed by the Wagnerians, is hard to miss.
Groszs portfolio offered a vicious satire on German society, German militarism, and the hypocrisy (especially the sexually driven
duplicity) that was acted out on the city streets of Berlin during those years. About those times, Grosz himself commented: All moral
codes were abandoned. A wave of vice, pornography and prostitution enveloped the whole country. Je mens fous was the motto, at last
Im going to have a good time.19 Commenting on the inflation, the cabarets and the anti-Jewish and pro-Marxist violence, he
remembers, The whole city was dark, cold, and full of rumours. The streets became ravines of manslaughter and cocaine traffic, marked
by steel rods and bloody, broken chair legs. 20
It is unclear whether Grosz was an objective natural scientist simply recording these events, as he claims in hisAutobiography, or
whether as he then goes on immediately to assert he identified with all the characters that he lampooned. 21 In any case, the Ecce
Homo portfolio triggered an obscenity trial in 19234, and it is not hard to see why. Grosz explains how he simply played along with the
persona of the talented loafer, circus clown and sidewalk artist, and he suggests that all these roles were integral to Dada, although
he also remarks, I was and still sometimes am something of all the above. 22 What this has to do with Nietzsche and the sublime, I shall
now attempt to describe.
As well as proclaiming himself as a Hanswurst in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche describes Shakespeares Hamlet in similar terms: I know no
more heart-rending reading than Shakespeare: what must a man have suffered to have such a need of being aHanswurst! Is
Hamlet understood? Not doubt, but certainty, is what makes one insane. But to feel that way, one must be profound, an abyss, a
philosopher. Were all afraid of the truth.23 This extremely odd link between Shakespeare, Hamlet and being aHanswurst needs to be
understood in terms of the account of the sublime to be found in the philosopher who most influenced Nietzsche as a young man: Arthur
Schopenhauer.
Schopenhauer had argued that tragedy above all the other types of poetic art can best generate the experience of the sublime, and
take man beyond the illusions of the phenomenal world. 24 Space and time, objects and subjects especially the individual self are all
rendered insignificant. According to Schopenhauer, there is no qualitative difference between the beautiful and the sublime; but the
experience of the sublime involves a more abrupt breakdown of the illusions of the phenomenal world than is the case in respect of the
enjoyment of the beautiful.25 The experience of the sublime allows us to penetrate the veil of Maya, and grasp that all individuality is an
illusion. He glosses the truth hidden behind the veil as follows: I am all this creation collectively, and beside me there exists no other. It
is an elevation [Erhebung] beyond our own individuality, a feeling of the sublime [Erhabenen].26
Schopenhauer has substituted the Hindu trope of Veil of Maya from the Upanishads for the apparently Egyptian but, in fact, GrecoRoman trope of the veil of Isis which Kant, Schiller, Reinhold, Novalis and Mozart had all associated with the sublime. 27 As Kant
himself put it: Perhaps nothing more sublime has ever been said, or thought ever been expressed more sublimely, than in the inscription
above the Temple of Isis (Mother Nature): I am all that is and that was and that shall be, and no mortal has lifted my
veil.28 Schopenhauer like Schiller, Novalis and Reinhold (but unlike Kant) believed that it was possible to gain contact with this
suprasensible truth via the experience of the sublime.
Schopenhauer suggested that tragedy induces a kind ascetic saintliness: the summons to turn away the will from life remains the true
tendency of tragedy.29 Schopenhauer also insisted that modern tragedy especially Shakespearean tragedy is far superior to that of
the Greeks.30 This is, he says, because it is the function of tragedy to produce compassion or pity [ Mitleid], and to act as a quieter of
the individuals own will.31 The best tragedy will produce resignation, the giving up not merely of life, but of the whole will-to-live
itself.32 For Schopenhauer, this will-negating response to tragedy occurs when ones own individualised will is made to seem pointless
and, as such, is disabled, leading the spectator (or tragic hero) to turn his or her back on life.
Schopenhauer illustrates this ascetic resignation through the example of Hamlets to be or not to be monologue. His claim is
that Hamlet illustrates that life is so wretched that complete non-existence would be decidedly preferable to it. It shows that, faced with
the choice of living or not living, no sincere man who is still in possession of his faculties could, at the end of his life, ever wish to go
through it again. Rather than this, he will much prefer to choose complete non-existence. 33 For Schopenhauer, the superiority of Hamlet
over any Greek hero is proved precisely by the fact that Hamlets failure to act or even will his own suicide displays a pessimism
which is at odds with Greek optimism, and the latter is dismissed as not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked way of
thinking.34 For Schopenhauer, Shakespeare is supremely sublime because he sees into the horror of existence, and leads the
audience towards despair.
Schopenhauer also makes some further comments about Hamlet in his discussion of the nature of the ridiculous (thelcherlich). In
chapter 8 of volume II of The World as Will and Representation (translated by Payne as On the Theory of the Ludicrous),
Schopenhauer claims that which is truly humorous is not in conflict with the sublime, but can be found alongside it. True humour derives,
according to Schopenhauer, from the sudden apprehension of an incongruity between ... a concept and the real object thought through
it.35 The incongruity can be registered in a number of differing ways, and Schopenhauer catalogues some of these. He then adds that
because the opposite of laughter and joking is seriousness, and because incongruity is integral to that which is laughable, the transition
from profound seriousness to laughter is particularly easy, and the more capable of complete seriousness a person is, the more heartily
can he laugh.36
Schopenhauer then goes on to make a sharp distinction between humour (Humor) and that which is merely comic (komisch) or the
output of a Hanswurst (translated by Payne into English as clown). 37 Schopenhauer notes that the wordhumour [Humor] is borrowed
from the English, and claims that it is a quite peculiar species of the ridiculous which is ... even akin to the sublime. Schopenhauers
chapter ends with the lament that the term humorist is nowadays used to dignify the output of the Hanswurst. 38 It is the nobler,
English, style of humour not that of the Hanswurst which is explicitly described as the child of the ridiculous and the sublime. 39
Schopenhauer gives various examples of the profound and sublime type of humour, including Shakespeare. A couple of instances of
humour in Hamlet are quoted, both given in German translation. The first is Hamlets answer to Polonius in Act II, scene ii, where Hamlet
jokingly remarks that there is nothing that he would more willingly part with than the company of Polonius except my life, except my
life, except my life.40 Schopenhauers second example involves Hamlet speaking to Ophelia (III, ii, 133 9) just before the performance
put on by the players:
Hamlet: What should a man do but be merry? For look you how cheerfully my mother looks, and my father died withins two hours.
Ophelia: Nay, tis twice two months, my Lord.
Hamlet: So long? Nay, then, let the devil wear black, for Ill have a suit of sables. 41
Importantly, for Schopenhauer, Hamlets humour does not conflict with the utterly sublime moral that he elsewhere claims to find in
Shakespeares play. Indeed, the first joke shows Hamlet repeatedly willing his own death but without actually committing suicide in a
way that neatly illustrates Schopenhauers belief that Hamlet makes us register that no man can will to live his life more than once.
Schopenhauers second example also seems to show that deep seriousness (death and murder) can be appropriately expressed
through merriment, playfulness and an outward display of cheerfulness. For Schopenhauer, however, a Hanswurst is incapable of real
humour and is, by implication, also estranged from the sublime.
Schopenhauers contrast between the German and English comic traditions gains resonance from earlier Enlightenment attempts to
ban the Hanswurst and all improvisation, slapstick and gross humour from the German stage, and to replace this low German and
Austrian kind of humour with translations from more refined English, French and Italian tragedies and dramas, and with no deviation
from the written scripts. The banishment of Hanswurst was symbolically staged in 1737 by Caroline Neuber who wrote a special
prologue, entitled The Victory of Reason or the Death of Hanswurst, for her acting troupe, to back up the theories of Johann Christoph
Gottsched who was concerned to eject the disorderly figures ofHanswurst and Harlequin from the stages of German-speaking
theatres.42 Hanswurst was solemnly burnt in effigy; but Gottsched himself was himself a Francophile, and initiated a debate that
resonated through the eighteenth century as to whether Racine or Shakespeare should provide a more adequate model for the German
stage.43 In Vienna, meanwhile, theHanswurst found defenders in the so calledHanswurststreit (Hanswurst controversy) which lasted
between 174769; and even in the North the ban on extemporised performances involving Hanswurst-type figures was never fully
implemented.
Schopenhauers contrast between the German comic tradition allied to the Hanswurst and to a more elevated and profound
English kind of humour clearly incorporates some elements of the reforming zeal that was initiated by Gottscheds and Neubers
attempts to create a new and moral theatre for German-speaking peoples. However, since Schopenhauers chapter on the ludicrous
also itself cites the attempt to ban improvisatory drama as giving rise to an example of the ludicrous when a horse dunged on the
Berlin stage, despite the ban on improvisation it is clear that he is not straightforwardly writing in opposition to the Hanswurst.44 It is
just that he is insisting that the Hanswurst the merely comic cannot also be sublime.
It is hard to disentangle the views of the young Nietzsche from those of Schopenhauer, his philosophical master, although
Schopenhauers moralistic view of art is clearly quite different from his own. Thus, in his first published work, The Birth of Tragedy(1872),
Nietzsche both quotes with approval Schopenhauer on the sublime, and yet also seems to completely negate Schopenhauers analysis.
Thus, in The Birth of Tragedy he indicates that the (Dionysian) man who has been taken outside the framework of spatio-temporal
individuation by the spirit of tragedy resembles Hamlet: both have once truly looked into the essence of things, they have gained
knowledge, and nausea inhibits action.45 Like the Dionysian man, Hamlet has true knowledge, and registers only the horror or
absurdity of existence. Furthermore, an insight into the horrible truth outweighs any motive for action. Like Schopenhauer, the young
Nietzsche draws a moral from Hamlet: that unless we remain wrapped in illusion, action will seem pointless and that all motivation will
simply be killed within us.46
Up to this point, the analysis that the young Nietzsche provides of Hamlet sounds like that of Schopenhauer; but whereas the latter
claimed that there is no remedy for insight into true being, in The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche insists that,
Here, when the danger to his will is greatest, art approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing. She alone knows how to turn
these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live: these are the sublime [das
Erhabene] as the artistic taming [Bndigung] of the horrible, and the comic [das Komische] as the artistic discharge [Entladung]of the
nausea of absurdity.47
The feelings of horror and of nausea engendered by Dionysian knowledge are discharged through comedy and healed by sublime
tragedy. Thus, the underlying message of The Birth of Tragedy is optimistic. This is also borne out by an even more striking difference
between the two philosophers accounts of the tragic: namely, that Nietzsche portrays Greek tragedy as greatly superior to that of the
moderns. Indeed, Nietzsche values precisely that Greek cheerfulness that Schopenhauer had dismissed as both senseless and
wicked. Hamlet is given Schopenhauerian significance by Nietzsche, but the Schopenhauerian framework of values is also implicitly
undercut.
In his late writings Nietzsche moved further and further away from Schopenhauer, and he criticises those who are sublime for their
inability to laugh. Thus, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (18835), Zarathustra complains that the man who is sublime is disfigured by disgust:
Contempt is still in his eyes and nausea hides round his mouth. 48 Earlier, as a young man, Nietzsche had modified Schopenhauer as
he found a way to think the sublime as taming or, more literally, binding the horror of existence, and opening up the possibility of
willing to live ones life over again. But now Nietzsche finds a different response to Schopenhauer, as Zarathustra discovers a different
way of rationally willing the recurrence of ones life however terrible and tragic that life might be. He insists that the greatest human
being (the overman) is able to say yes to life, and will that the world should repeat itself in all details an infinite number of times again
however awful that thought (and the suffering) might be. 49 This is the climax of the third book of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Part 3); and in
the final book (Part 4) Nietzsche affirms a kind of ecstatic buffoonery as Zarathustra embraces this most terrible thought.
In his so-called late period, Nietzsche denies that there is any underlying or sublime truth that is covered over and healed by art.
Instead, we are left with a play of surfaces, and with the affirmation of life as the new ideal. Indeed, in Ecce HomoNietzsche takes an
additional step as he aligns himself with the Hanswurst: with a mode of the ridiculous, the crude and the all-too-human with that which
is, above all, not elevated, self-denying or sublime in the Schopenhauerian sense. Thus, in the section of Ecce Homo in which Nietzsche
links Shakespeares Hamlet to the Hanswurst, he goes on to claim that it was Francis Bacon, not Shakespeare, who wrote this play. And
Nietzsche not only praises Bacon for being the first realist in every great sense of that word, he also praises the strength that Bacon
possessed for action, for monstrous action, for crime. 50 In adopting the persona of a Hanswurst in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche is aligning
himself not only with a mode of the ridiculous that is cut off from the sublime, but also with that which is morally repellent with
monstrous action and crime.
This is also borne out by other references to the Hanswurst in Nietzsches Notebooks and late texts. In Nietzsches early
worksHanswurst seems to be used primarily as a term of abuse and a synonym for a simpleton or fool. By 18867, however, we find
more positive uses of the Hanswurst terminology. Thus, in his unpublished Notebook of 1887 Nietzsche explicitly describes the Abb
Galiani as that most deep and reflective Hanswurst,51 and in Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche provides a positive description of Galiani
which fits with the stereotype image of the Hanswurst. Ferdinando Galiani (172887) was, Nietzsche says, the profoundest, most clearsighted, and perhaps also filthiest man of his century in whom genius is tied to an indiscreet billygoat and ape. 52
As far as the references to Galiani are concerned, I do not think Nietzsche was thinking primarily of Galianis (undoubtedly) lecherous
character (as Kaufmanns notes to Beyond Good and Evil seem to suggest),53 but to the fact that, like theHanswurst, Galiani was above
all concerned with the mechanisms of desire, money and of greed. He wrote wittily about value, and how it fluctuates in relation to
appetites, need and scarcity. Nietzsche makes several references to his friend Galiani in his late Notebooks. As in the equation of
Shakespeare with Bacon in Ecce Homo, Nietzsches positive comments on Galiani as aHanswurst suggest the need to search for truths
not at the level of what is deep or objective, but through a new kind of realism in which attention is paid to surfaces, to human
motivation and lusts.
In the Preface to the 2nd edition of The Gay Science (1887) Nietzsche, famously, substitutes the trope of Baubo, and truth as naked, for
the notion of a truth that is hidden behind the veil of Isis or of Maya:
Perhaps truth is a woman who has reasons for not letting us see her reasons? Perhaps her name is to speak Greek Baubo?
Oh those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore
appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial out of
profundity.54
Baubo was an old crone who acted as comforter to Demeter after Persephone (Kore) had been snatched into the underworld. In the allfemale mystery rites of Eleusis in which Demeters running for help was annually re-enacted, Baubo acted as a kind of clown. Not only
did she personify the obscene songs that the women sang, but she seems to have provoked laughter by lifting her skirts and showing
her naked sexual organs beneath, in a way that mimicked the action she performed to amuse Demeter. In his invocation of Baubo,
Nietzsche deploys laughter as a counter to the sublime, and the need to stop at the fold of the surface as a block to depth and to a
metaphysics that locates truth beyond appearances. 55
It seems that in his late writings Nietzsche came to regard Galiani and all other Hanswrste as also superficial out of profundity. Truth is
not veiled but naked; fleshiness and human baseness are affirmed as Nietzsche seeks to strip away any sense of pity or compassion,
and block all conventional notions of the tragic. This is a dangerous endeavour, as Nietzsche also registers. Announcing the move from
Incipit tragoedia (Let the tragedy begin) to incipit parodia (Let the parody begin) in this 1887 Preface to The Gay Science,
Nietzsches voice also proclaims the arrival of Something downright wicked and malicious. 56 It is the Hanswurst and of Nietzsche
himself as a downright wicked and malicious Hanswurst who enters and seeks to put an end to the tragedy of life with these ominous
and mocking words.
Interestingly, in an unpublished draft of the second Preface to The Gay Science, Nietzsche actually uses the term Hanswrsteas he
describes the tragic and foolish young men who pursue the Egyptian goddess, Isis, in their mad and overly enthusiastic attempts to
unveil the truth.57 However, in the published version, the derogatory reference to the Hanswurst is missing. Countering any suggestion
that the joy in surfaces and the pleasure in appearances masks a deep and hidden truth, Nietzsche now writes as a convalescent who
has recovered from the illness that marks all aspirations after the sublime [Erhabenen], lofty [Gehobenen] and weird [Verschrobenen]!
No, if we convalescents still need art, it is another kind of art a mocking, light, fleeting, divinely untroubled, divinely artificial art that, like
a pure flame, licks into unclouded skies.58
We can now see the links between the sublime and the Nietzschean-inspired buffoonery of the Dadaists in Berlin. Their response to the
chaos and tragedy that confronted them in war-ravaged and inflation-blighted Germany seems to echo Nietzsches announcement: Let
the parody begin. Indeed, Nietzsches description of his filthy, yet clear-sighted, Hanswurstfriend, Galiani, might also serve as a
depiction of George Grosz or at least of the way Grosz portrays himself in the Ecce Homo portfolio. Like the mythic clown Baubo,
Grosz seems to delight in showing female nakedness, and laughing at the notion that there is a sublime truth concealed behind the veil.
Instead, skin, flesh and nakedness are celebrated in a laughter that seems designed to counter the sublime. Grosz seems to have taken
the admonition to become superficial out of profundity as his own ideal.
But there is one important difference and it is a difference that might be taken to apply, more generally, to Berlin Dada. We do not find
in Grosz the affirmative attitude to life that Nietzsches late works promote. Grosz clearly does not will (with Nietzsche) that all suffering
(however terrible) should recur over and over again. The German title of Groszs own autobiography A Little Yes and a Big No
clearly indicates as much. Groszs title is an implicit refusal of the ecstatic yes-saying scenes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where
Zarathustra himself joins the ass in braying I-A, I-A, I-A (Yea-Yuh, Yea-Yuh, Yea-Yuh) as he affirms the infinite repetition of life in all
its detail and all its repetitive tragedy, torment and pain. 59
Away from the chaos and suffering of Berlin, Hugo Ball would adopt a different solution. His Critique of the German Intelligentsia(1919)
ends with Ball signaling his retreat from Dada into a kind of radical Catholic mysticism, as he explores his unease with the late
Nietzsches alignment with Satanists, such as Napoleon, Machiavelli and the French Enlightenment philosophers. 60 There are
extensive references to Nietzsches Ecce Homo at the end of the text, as well as to Schopenhauer.61 The question of Balls relation to
Nietzsche in his Dada phase is complex, since it has been argued that Ball edited his Dada Diary before it was published in 1927, in
order to align it more with his growing distance from Nietzsche. 62However, since Balls contrasting attitudes to the early (protoSchopenhauerian) Nietzsche and the Satanic elements in late Nietzsche is already evident by 1919, it would seem that Balls unease
with Nietzsches philosophy sets in earlier than some have supposed. 63
Hugo Ball reciting Karawane in a cubist costume at the Cabaret Voltaire, Zrich 1916
Gelatin silver on paper
Courtesy Fondation Arp
Fig.3
Hugo Ball reciting Karawane in a cubist costume at the Cabaret Voltaire, Zrich 1916
Courtesy Fondation Arp
With the contrast between Schopenhauerian (saintly) humour and Nietzschean (profane) laughter in mind, it seems clear that Ball
always was closer to the sublime type of humour which Schopenhauer linked to asceticism, than he was to Nietzsches late
prankishness. Thus, in a famous description in his Dada Diary of his recitation of a poem without words, which he performed dressed
in a shiny blue cylinder outfit in 1916 (fig.3), Ball records:
Everyone was curious. So, because I could not walk as a cylinder, I was carried onto the stage in the dark and began slowly and
solemnly:
zimbrabim
glandridi lauli lonni cadori
gadjama bim beri glassala
...
I noticed that my voice had no other choice but to take on the ancient cadence of priestly lamentation, that style of liturgical singing, like
that which wails in all the Catholic churches of East and West ... Then the electric light went out, as I had ordered and, drenched in
sweat, I was carried down off the stage as a magical bishop. 64
There are superficial similarities between the absurdity of the costume that Ball adopted as he recited this sound poem and that of
the Hanswurst even if the shiny blue surface substituted for the more traditional reds and greens of the Hanswurst attire. However, it
would seem that, even during the foundational performances that announced Dada in Zrich, the underlying mood of Balls antics is
closer to Schopenhauer in which the self is completely surrendered, and all individuality falls away than to theHanswurst tradition
that seems so closely aligned to the dandyism of Dada in Berlin. Balls Dada Diaries of 1916 show him depicting himself as a kind of
Schopenhauerian magical bishop who surrenders all agency, consigning his body into the hands of others as he becomes simply a
mouthpiece for a kind of universal lamentation.
Balls costume might have made him look like a fool; but there is something profoundly serious and also Schopenhauerian
underlying his performances. This impression is heightened as we notice that in a much earlier entry in his Dada Diary written in 1914,
only three months after Germanys invasion of Belgium (which Ball witnessed, with horror, as a volunteer) Ball could be found
advocating a kind of Schopenhauerian asceticism, claiming that there is nothing interesting about the demonic, given that now all the
world has become demonic. The demonic no longer differentiates the dandy from the everyday. One now has to become a saint, if one
wants to differentiate oneself still further. 65
By contrast, the laughter and parody which emerged from the Dadaists who remained in Berlin during the war years seems far more
Nietzschean. But if we listen more intently, we find ourselves detecting a kind of hybrid between Nietzschean buffoonery and the
Schopenhauerian ridiculous. Grosz, in particular, aligns himself with the monstrous and the criminal, even as he subjects it to excoriating
critique. Outwardly, he assumes the mask of the Nietzschean Hanswurst; but elements of Schopenhauerian pessimism and of the
sublime still persist. If not exactly ascetic in the Schopenhauerian sense, the overwhelming mood of the laughter is nihilistic closer to
Schopenhauers humour that is both ridiculous and sublime than to the Yes-saying and ecstatic buffoonery of Nietzsches late texts.
Notes
1
Raoul Hausmann, Am Anfang war Dada, Steinbach, Giessen 1972, p.16. I am grateful to Gwendolen Webster who emailed the editor
of Tate Papers (10 June 2010) to point out that the more standard translation of the sentence Was ist Euch Jesus Christus. Er ist Euch
Wurst! is What is Jesus Christ to you? You couldnt care less about him!, and I have accordingly made a correction to the original
published text (revised September 2010). The standard translation does not, however, seem strong enough to explain why Hausmann
thinks it appropriate to use this sentence as direct evidence for the death of God. I have therefore retained a non-idiomatic translation in
an attempt to connote some of the bawdier uses of Wurst in the German language (including its links to the male sexual organ and to
excrement) which are also at stake in the tradition of Hanswurst drama that is the focus of this article. In the email correspondence,
Gwendolen Webster also argues that Johannes Baaders heckle should be understood as opposing hypocrisy and, as such had nothing
to do with the Berlin Dadaists attitude to religion. However, even if Baader did nurse religious fantasies, as Gwendolen Webster
maintains, Hausmann himself clearly uses Baaders intervention for anti-religious (and Nietzschean) ends when he remarks that we
need to publicise the death of God and, in the very next sentence, quotes Baaders interruptive shout to illustrate the point. The pronoun
Euch is the plural of thou (so thee all), and Hausmann implicitly suggests that all of us not only the preacher or the congregation in
the Berlin Cathedral have turned the Christian God into meaningless and valueless Wurst.
2
Nietzsche first puts forward this doctrine in The Gay Science (1882), s108, 125; but it is Thus Spoke Zarathustra(18835) that is best
known for popularising this thought. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science [1882/7], trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York 1974,
pp.167, 1812 (KSA 3/467, 48082), and also Zarathustras Prologue, s 2, 3,Thus Spoke Zarathustra [18835], in The Portable
Nietzsche, (ed. and trans.) Walter Kaufmann, New York 1972, pp.124, 125 (KSA 4/14, 15). KSA refers to the volume and page number
in the standard German edition: Friedrich Nietzsche,Smmtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, eds. Mazzino Montinari and Giorgio
Colli, Berlin, 15 vols., 1967. The KSA pagination is provided for all references to works by Nietzsche, since translations and also texts
are markedly different.
3
It seems to be generally accepted that the total number of military deaths during the 191418 war was around 8,500,000. The statistics
for civilian casualties is harder to determine, varying between 6.6 and 9 million. See Mathew White, Source List and Detailed Death Tolls
for the Twentieth-Century Hemoclysm.
4
See, for example, the chapter on Tricksters, Carnival, and The Magical Figures of Dada Poetry in Richard Sheppard,ModernismDada
Postmodernism, Evanston 2000, pp.2958. Sheppard links the Dada trickster to Bakhtin and Jung, ignoring the Nietzschean background
that I explore here.
5
Sheppard does not discuss Hanswurst at all, instead linking the Dada trickster to the figures of Kaspar and Kasperl. See ibid., pp.292
303. Kasperl is a kind of Austrian and German puppet, analogous to the British Mr. Punch. A diminutive, less obscene and much tamer
version of Hanswurst, Kasperl is generally regarded as a later development of the Hanswurst tradition. See, for example, Karen Jrs-
Munby, Hanswurst and Herr Ich: Subjection and Abjection in Enlightenment Censorship of the Comic Figure, New Theatre Quarterly,
vol.23, no.2, 2007, pp.1334.
6
Hugo Ball, Nietzsche in Basel: Eine Streitschrift, written 190910, is the introduction to the unpublished dissertation. See Hugo
Ball, Der Knstler und die Zeitkrankheit: Ausgewhlte Schriften, ed. Hans Burkhard Schlichting, Frankfurt am Main 1988, pp.61101.
See also Debbie Lewer, Hugo Ball, Iconoclasm and the Origins of Dada in Zurich, Oxford Art Journal, vol.32, no.1, 2009, pp.1735.
7
Hugo Ball, Critique of the German Intelligentsia [1919], trans. Brian L. Harris, New York 1993.
8
See Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary [1927], ed. John Elderfield, trans. Ann Raimes, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London
1996. When referencing this work, dates of diary entries are given as well as page numbers.
9
Ibid., p.47 (20 November 1915).

10
Ibid., pp.21 (20 June 1915), 120 (18 June 1917), 156 (5 May 1918), for example.
11
1 of Why I am a Destiny, Ecce Homo (KSA 6/365), own translation. See also Ecce Homo [1888/1908], trans. R. J. Hollingdale,
Harmondsworth 1979, p.126.
12
Betsy Aikin-Sneath, Comedy in Germany in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century, Oxford 1936, p.46.
13
Mary Wortley Montague, The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Montague, 2nd (revised) ed., London 1837, 3 vols., vol.1, pp.284, 285.
14
Aikin-Sneath 1936, pp.445.

15
It is only the most recent editions of Ecce Homo which have restored the passages that Nietzsches sister suppressed. Compare, for
example, 3 of Why I am so Wise (KSA 6/2679) in the revised and abridged version of Hollingdales translation of the Ecce Homo text
in The Nietzsche Reader, eds. Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large, Oxford 2006, pp.5045, with the same section in the original
translation by Hollingdale, 1979, pp.412.
16
See Michael White, Johannes Baaders Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama: The Mysticism of the Mass Media,Modernism/Modernity, vol.8, no.4,
2001, pp.583602, fn.29. White gives as his source Hanne Bergius who notes that Hausmann also possessed copies of Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, Twilight of the Idols and The Gay Science. See Bergius, Architecture as the DionysianApollonian Process of Dada, in
Alexandre Kosuth and Irving Wolrath (eds.),Nietzsche and An Architecture of our Minds, Los Angeles 1999, p.115.
17
The passage is taken from Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Why I Write such Good Books 1 (KSA 6/300). See Ecce Homo, trans.
Hollingdale, 1979, p.70. The citing of Nietzsche by Hch and, indeed, the siting of the proverb next to her own photograph is ironic
and also poignant. Echoing Nietzsches own compilations of pithy, newly invented proverbs (Sprche), it evidently expresses Hchs
feeling that because Hausmann does not hear her voice, she has simply disappeared as a person and artist. Hchs Meine
Hausspruche (Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum fr Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur) is reproduced in Ruth Hemus, Dadas
Women, New Haven and London 2009, p.121.
18
White, 2001, p.595. And see photograph published in Tilburgsche Courant, 1920, collection Bibliothque littraire Jacques Doucet, Paris
19
George Grosz, An Autobiography [1946/1955], trans. Nora Hodges, Berkeley and London 1998, p.119.
20
Ibid., p.119.
21
Ibid., p.125.
22
Ibid., p.126.
23
4 of Why I am so Clever, Ecce Homo (KSA 6/287), own translation; see Ecce Homo, trans. Hollingdale, 1979, p.59.
24
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation [1819/59], trans. E. F. J. Payne, New York 1966, 2 vols., vol.2, p.433, and
see vol.1, pp.2523.
25
Ibid., vol.1, p.202.

26
Ibid., vol.1, pp.2056 fn., corrected.

27
See Christine Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference, London and New York 2007, chs.5 and 8 for a detailed argument of
this point.
28
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis 1987, 49, p.185 fn.
29
Schopenhauer, World, 1819/59, vol.2, p.435.

30

31
Ibid., vol.1, p.253, and see pp.3767 and vol.2, p.435.

32

33

34

35
Ibid., vol.2, p.91.

36
Ibid., vol.2, p.99.

37
Ibid., vol.2, p.101; see also Arthur Schopenhauer, Smmtliche Werke, ed. Julius Frauenstdt, 2nd. ed., Leipzig 1908, vol.3, pp.111, 112.
38
Schopenhauer, World, 1819/59, vol.2, ch.8, p.101, corrected; Schopenhauer, Smmtliche, 1908, vol.3, pp.111, 112.
39
Schopenhauer, World,1819/59, vol.2, p.101, corrected; Schopenhauer, Smmtliche, 1908, vol.3, p.112.
40
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Willard Farnham, Baltimore 1974, Act II, scene ii, lines 2145, p.74. Schopenhauer,World,1819/59,
vol.2, p.100; Schopenhauer, Smmtliche, 1908, vol.3, p.110.
41
Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, scene ii, lines 11924, pp.978. Schopenhauer, World, 1819/59, vol.2, p.100; Schopenhauer, Smmtliche,
1908, vol.3, p.110.
42
See Glynne Wyckham, A History of the Theatre, Oxford 1985, p.177; Karen Jrs-Munby, 2007, pp.1245.
43
Margaret Herzfeld-Sander, Essays on German Theater, New York 2002, p.xi.

44
Schopenhauer, World, 1819/59, vol.2, p.93.

45
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy [1872/88], in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York 2000, 7,
p.60 (KSA1/567).
46
Ibid., 7, p.60 (KSA 1/57).

47
Ibid., 7, p.60 (KSA 1/57).

48
Friedrich Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 18835, Pt.2, On those Who are Sublime (Von den Erhabenen), pp.22831 (KSA4/1502).
10
49
See, in particular, ibid., Pt.3, The Convalescent, pp.32733 (KSA 4/2707).

50
4 of Why I am so Clever, Ecce Homo (KSA 6/287), own translation; Ecce Homo, trans. Hollingdale, 1979, p.59.
51
Nietzsche, KSA 13/18.

52
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil [1886], ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York 1966, 26, p.38 (KSA5/445).
53
Ibid., p.38 fn.

54
Nietzsche, Gay Science, 1882/87, Preface 4 to the 2nd ed. of The Gay Science (1887), p.38 (KSA 4/352).
55
See Battersby, 2007, pp.179, 182 for a further elaboration of this point.
56
Nietzsche, Gay Science, 1882/87, Preface 1 to the 2nd ed., p.33 (KSA 4/346)
57
KSA 14/232. For the background to the Isis myth in German Romanticism see Battersby, 2007, pp.8899.
58
Nietzsche, Gay Science, 1882/87, Preface 4 to the 2nd ed., p.37, corrected (KSA 4/351).
59
Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 18835, Pt.4, The Awakening, pp.4245, corrected (KSA 4/3889).
60
Hugo Ball, Zur Kritik der deutschen Intelligenz, Bern 1919, pp.2278.
61
Ibid., ch.4, see e.g. pp.31922.

62
See Lewer, 2009, p.29, who credits for this point Philip Mann, Hugo Ball: An Intellectual Biography, London 1987.
63
See, for example, Balls final footnotes on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Zur Kritik, 1919, pp.31922. Balls criticism of the late
Nietzsche needs to be understood, in part, as a response to the fact that what he was reading was Nietzsches works as edited by
Elisabeth Frster-Nietzsche, and as favourable to Prussian militarism. Against this Nietzsche, Ball turns towards Catholic mysticism and,
more specifically, towards Thomas Mntzer, the 16th-century Reformation theologian and plebeian revolutionary. See Lewer, 2009. For
Mntzer see also Niklaus Largier, Mysticism, Modernity and the Invention of Aesthetic Experience, Representations, no.105, 2009,
pp.3760.
64
Ball, Flight, 1927, pp.1056 (23 June 1916). This is a shortened version of the account; see also Lewer, 2009, p.29.
65
Ball, Flight, 1927, p.23 (25 November 1914); and see Lewer, 2009, p.22.
11
2.
Contemporary Art and the Sublime

Julian Bell
More than six decades after the publication of Barnet Newmans 1948 article The Sublime is Now, artists are still
trying to give the sublime a contemporary treatment. The sheer range of their attempts makes it harder than ever
to offer a narrow definition. The artist and writer Julian Bell offers here his own critical reflections on the
contemporary sublime, surveying recent art and considering his own practice.
The sublime is a term that has been heavily employed in art writing over the past twenty years. Too heavily, it may be. References to it
have come from so many angles that it is in danger of losing any coherent meaning. We have been offered everything from the technosublime1 and the eco-sublime2 to the Gothic sublime3 and the suburban sublime4: anything from volcanoes and vitrines to still lifes
and soft toys may be sniffed at for sublimity.5 How did we arrive at this state of affairs?
From our current perspective, we can track the terms usage winding stream-wise across the landscape of cultural history. On the far
mountainsides there is the glint of the Pseudo-Longinus, circa first-century treatise, our earliest reference point. Then we catch sight of
two well-known waterfalls, Edmund Burkes Philosophical Enquiry of 1757 and Immanuel Kants Critique of Judgment of 1790. It is easy
to trace the swelling river of references to the sublime that rolls on down from these two, but as the constructions of modernism rise up in
the later nineteenth century, the rivers course gets increasingly obscured. Suddenly in 1948 it swings into view again, traversed by the
bridge of Barnett Newmans rhetoric. But here in the foreground, as of the 2010s, we seem to stand amidst a delta. Channels of
discourse about the sublime meander all around us, but which is the main flow, which the subsidiary, which the navigation canal or ditch
for irrigation has become almost impossible to tell. Ideally, I should like to draw a map of this muddle; pragmatically, I hope at least to
offer a ground-level topographical sketch.
In the first section of this essay, I shall offer a directly personal take on the theme that will open out on to various aspects of current artworld thinking and practice. Many of the tactics and visual effects discussed here can easily be related to the tradition of artistic
production stimulated by the writings of Burke. In the second section, I shall consider some reinterpretations of the theme that are
distinctive to the recent past, even if in principle some are linked to the philosophy of Kant. The period under discussion the phase of
art history currently designated contemporary effectively begins during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Finally, I shall offer some brief
qualifications, suggesting what the sublime is not. The sublime has always implied the over-powering, but once it becomes the allswallowing, the term eats up its own meaning.
The sublime as it gets made

A painting by the author
I approach the sublime not as a philosopher or cultural theorist, but as an artist. Specifically, as the painter of a canvas to which many
viewers have responded with mentions of the sublime. They do so, I should add, to describe the tradition to which they feel the painting
relates, rather than to praise it. I shall try to discuss this canvas quite simply as a symptom of the mentality of a British painter who was
born in 1952, asking how far that symptom might assist in a broader diagnosis of artistic trends.
The painting in question is named Darvaza 2010 (fig.1), after a site in Turkmenistan that I visited as a tourist. The site, in the middle of
the Karakum Desert, was drilled by Soviet engineers reconnoitring for fuel in 1971. Hitting a cavity, the engineers decided to burn off the
gas inside, but the resulting inferno passed quite beyond their control. They abandoned the site, which was far from human habitation. At
the time I visited, the vast crater was still burning away, night and day, among the bare compacted sands of the Karakum.
12
Julian Bell
Darvaza 2010
Oil paint on canvas
1397 x 2438 mm
Julian Bell
Full screen
Fig.1
Julian Bell
Darvaza 2010
Julian Bell
On my return home, I represented what I had seen on a canvas eight-foot wide. On the craters far side, I placed a small male figure, just
over an inch high, standing turned towards it, his palms raised to face the upward surge of heat. The figure functions as an indicator of
scale and equally obviously as a testimonial. This is I, it tells the viewer, I the artist: I witnessed what I am showing you. I was a tourist
who came close to this spectacle and now I wish to draw you close to it likewise. With that objective in mind, I took two chief decisions in
translating the sketches and photos I had made at the original site into a picture intended for a British gallery wall. I chose to crop what
could be seen of the craters round rim, so that there is no central foreground and from the pictures base all is fire. And so as to set that
fire ablaze, I took the white-primed canvas this was my first act in marking it leant it at an angle, and poured down, from what would
become its base, a loose turpentine solution of a very strong yellow, letting the liquid stain and sediment however it chanced to run.
The results required editing with a brush in order to arrive at a shaped space, a crater that would seem to cup and enclose any viewer
who drew near the canvass eight-foot span. But this way, inviting a relatively random process into the making of the image, I could feel
that I was reaching out to touch something other in my studio something not entirely self-willed and human even as I had confronted
something powerfully other, standing a previous evening by that flame lit cliff-edge.
A tradition of the pictorial sublime

What I was doing conformed, as the critic Jonathan Jones has noted, 6 to a pattern of artistic behaviour that is over two centuries old.
Joseph Wright of Derby, returning from a visit to Vesuvius in 1774 to create a number of images for British viewers, upended his brush,
forsaking its bristles for its butt, or took to a palette knife in order to conjure up the primal force of the geological phenomenon he had
observed (Tate T05846, fig.2). These randomising tactics are still more in evidence in the purely imaginary spectaculars created by John
Martin in the 1840s: the topographies of his The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah 1852 (Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne)
and his Plains of Heaven 18513 (Tate T01928, fig.3) coalesce around swooshing force-fields of oil paint, here accreted, there
13
vaporously fine. A more recent interplay between free-flowing washes and controlled image design can be found in the awestruck
landscapes Michael Andrews created in the mid-1980s, following a pilgrimage to Australias Ayers Rock (Tate T06677).
Joseph Wright of Derby 17341797

Vesuvius in Eruption, with a View over the Islands in the Bay of Naples c.177680
Oil paint on canvas
support: 1220 x 1764 mm; frame: 1461 x 1941 x 95 mm
Purchased with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Art Fund, Friends of the Tate Gallery, and Mr John Ritblat
1990
Tate T05846
T05846
Fig.2
Joseph Wright of Derby
Vesuvius in Eruption, with a View over the Islands in the Bay of Naples c.177680
John Martin 17891854

The Plains of Heaven 18513
Oil paint on canvas
Bequeathed by Charlotte Frank in memory of her husband Robert Frank 1974
Tate T01928
T01928
Fig.3
John Martin
Wright of Derby, an acute barometer of intellectual trends, undoubtedly painted with an awareness of Burkes 1757 Enquiry.He takes up
a challenge that Burke doubted painters could meet: for the young Irishman argued that painting, when we have allowed for the
pleasure of imitation, can only affect simply by the images it presents 7; whereas the words used in poetry can affect us much more
strongly8 than the things they represent. Poetry, therefore, with its suggestive obscurity, was the art that could bring us closest to the
14
sublime the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling; 9 a state of astonishment including a degree of horror that
anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force. 10 Burke contended that darkness the darkness of words dying
away into silence is more productive of sublime ideas than light, the condition within which paintings present their static imagery. And
yet he allowed that such a light as that of the sun, immediately exerted on the eye, as it overpowers the sense, is a very great idea. 11
Wright of Derby chose to exploit that possibility. Dazzling light is the type of overpowering optical impact his views of Vesuvius seek to
exert an impulse also followed by John Martin and indeed myself. And the chance-courting studio tactics in each case are related, at
least by natural sympathy, to the temporal rhetoric Burke employs: immediately, hurries us on when Burke is talking about the
sublime, he often sounds like a drug user seeking a rush. Except of course that his thrill-seeking falls within respectable channels the
appreciation of nature and of art. Burkes innovations in aesthetics challenged visual artists to disrupt the stasis of the two-dimensional
image and, by the same token, the beautiful, which he interpreted as the perfectly self-contained. But did such tasks lie within their
capacity? Their efforts, after all, generally lie contained within gallery walls: viewers always have the option to leave by the door. This
image, the viewer may say, has no hold over me.
Going back to the eighteenth-century formation of an art of the sublime, I have been searching for a provisional working grip on this
paradoxical concept. Let us take it for a controlled encounter with power that is beyond our control.
The scale of the sublime

A space modelled into the likeness of a crater literally, a bowl-shape that is nearly eight feet wide: such a space will invite the viewer
to step in close, and then do its best to engulf him in a fiery embrace. Once you approach the canvas of myDarvaza, your eyes are going
to need to look far to the left or right to find any rim to clutch at, let alone a stable foothold. So ran my working idea. And then, affecting it
from an early stage, there was an awareness that I was due to exhibit in a largish public gallery. I needed a painting that would make a
firm, strong impact on anyone who entered the room, before they turned to other works of mine with other agendas. Showmanship, in
other words, gets inextricably bound up with an artists desire to deliver the sublime. This is hardly novel think of the legendary
attention-seeking of J.M.W. Turner, not only blasting his Royal Academy competitors into insignificance with the final varnishing-day
touches to his marine spectaculars but giving them titles that insisted (probably falsely) on their own eye-witness status.
Richard Serra
The Matter of Time 2005
Installation of seven sculptures, weatherproof steel, Varying dimensions.
2012 Richard Serra/DACS
Fig.4
Richard Serra
The Matter of Time 2005
2012 Richard Serra/DACS
But in contemporary art terms, eight foot is minute. What they are are vessels that you walk into, 12 Richard Serra has said of the
looming, labyrinthine corridors and coils of steel that now fill a gallery at the Guggenheim Bilbao, some 430 by 80 feet wide (fig.4).
Walking into those vessels, you submit to the mute yet muscular cliffs of raw metal as if to geological limitations constraining your
movement. You are brought up close to right into, in fact a great and daunting, continually unfolding otherness. It is a matter of
being inside of a contained space where, if any content is going to be revealed at all, you have to pay attention to every part of the
surface thats surrounding you, says Serra.13 To ask for mere meaning when it comes to an experience on this scale seems almost
trivial, but the title of the ensemble The Matter of Time tells us in part what the artist had in mind. This most magisterial of
contemporary sculptors was putting out a hand to apprehend things too big to catch in a single image: not only physical weight and the
15
experience of passage, but his own capacious, kingly strength. 14 The massive materialists meditation overpowers the viewer selfconsciously, intent on its very own power.
And yet this permanent exhibit inside the Guggenheim could be seen in terms of retreat. Produced between 1994 and 1997, it followed a
much publicised legal contest which Serra fought and lost, his struggle to keep Tilted Arc, a 120-foot curved wall of steel originally
erected in 1979, in place in a New York square. Serras sculpture presented a neighbourhood public with an obstruction that not only
was daunting and resistant to interpretation but which they could not avoid as they walked the street: in effect, an uncontrollable
uncontrolled. Their rejection of a challenging, advanced sculpture has had repercussions. 15 The past twenty years have seen a
plethora of outsize outdoor sculptures (Jeff Koons and Anthony Gormley are familiar field-leaders), but by one means or another these
works mostly seek to ingratiate, modulating the sublimity their scale proposes.
Instead, turn-of-the-millennium culture has kennelled the sublime. The Frank Gehry-built museum in Bilbao another sort of materialistic
masterpiece, as shimmering and heady as the steel maze that it houses is dun and obdurate is one such monster-cage. Dia:Beacon in
upstate New York is another, a resource of vast orthogonal interiors that bracingly complement the most ambitious artworks of the
minimalist movement, the stable out of which Serra emerged. And Dia:Beacons aestheticised reinterpretation of an architectural space
designed for early-twentieth-century industry is of course matched by Tate Modern with its Turbine Hall.
Anish Kapoor
Marsyas 2002
Installation at Tate Modern
Tate Photography
Fig.5
Anish Kapoor
Marsyas 2002
Tate Photography
The cage, in this case, creates its own monsters. The Tates Unilever Series commission to conjure up some equivalent to the vanished
machinery some activation of imaginative power gets annually awarded to artists seen to possess the requisite megaphonic
showmanship. An outstanding example was the 2002 installation Marsyas by Anish Kapoor (fig.5). Addressing himself to the titanic
interior with a knack for topological paradox, Kapoor devised a design that would seem to turn the space inside out. His magic trick
depended primarily on the psychological suggestiveness of the big circles he had drawn within that cube. In other words, he proposed
giant mouths to swallow all that surrounded them: and then, in an inspired firming up of the metaphor, he employed blood-red elastic
sheeting to swoop from one steel ring to the next, evoking an eviscerated throat. The radical disorientation thus effected struck at the
dwarfed viewers by analogising their own bodies with the Turbine Hall and seeming to empty out both. To what end? To deliver the
sublime for the sublimes own sake, if we are to go by Kapoors comments: the work, he said, was all about fear and vertigo and being
confronted by something which one immediately has to recognise is bigger than oneself bigger than ones imagined self, even. 16
The content of the sublime: global
16
Fear of what? What is that something which one immediately has to recognise is bigger? Does the contemporary art of the sublime
have some substantive content in mind? Or do its meanings reside in its very nihilism, its hankerings after the sheer effect of power? Or
is that taking matters too seriously? Why should we not simply celebrate showmanship, in this our age of spectacle?
Returning to my own studio, I would like to review various potentially significant concerns that passed through my mind as I worked on
my Darvaza. Some of these thoughts were about the planet. As we stood by that crater edge in the Karakum, we could see old pipelines
dangling and breaking away into the abyss. Central Asia is in fact littered with jagged relics of Soviet industrialisation in all its furious,
heedless hubris. On a separate stretch of barren sands, we got shown a rusting fleet of trawlers: the inland Aral Sea they had once
fished had evaporated after the waters to feed it were rerouted to boost cotton production yields in another state of the USSR. But
anyone with the faintest interest in what goes on around them will know that the march of ruination goes far beyond that little lamented
twentieth-century political experiment. The frontline has simply moved on: we might locate it now in the dammed Yangzi valley, or in the
uprooted forests of the Amazon or of Kalimantan.
Edward Burtynsky
Oil Spill #2, Discoverer Enterprise, Gulf of Mexico, May 11, 2010
Digital, colour print on paper
1524 x 2032 mm
Photo Edward Burtynsky courtesy: Nicholas Metivier, Toronto / Flowers, London
Fig.6
Edward Burtynsky
Oil Spill #2, Discoverer Enterprise, Gulf of Mexico, May 11, 2010
Photo Edward Burtynsky courtesy: Nicholas Metivier, Toronto / Flowers, London
We, meaning media consumers, art gallery goers. We aspire to an awareness of the trajectory to which global civilisation seems to be
committed. We want, at least lightly, to run our fingers along the blade that is wounding the planet. We sense that, since contemporary
art culture is a function of urban life, we may be beneficiaries of the whole process and that, as of May 2012, BP continues to sponsor
Tate and yet we can hardly regret that Tate displays artworks such as Edward Burtynskys Oil Spill #2, Discoverer Enterprise, Gulf of
Mexico, May 11, 2010 2011 (Tate L02996, fig.6). Burtynsky, a Canadian preoccupied with the zones where mass human consumption
most spectacularly impacts on the planet quarries, refineries, recycling yards alternates between high-horizoned panoramas and, as
here, delirious plunging overviews of great processes in action. Again, scale is crucial to Burtynskys Industrial Sublime (the title he
gave to a 2011 exhibition): his two-metre-high study of the seas deathly swirling at once imposes and mesmerises. A terrible beauty: a
further title for Burtynskys projects could have been taken from the famous closing line of W.B. Yeatss Easter, 1916.
Beauty, here, seems to coexist comfortably with sublimity because the image has the status of reportage. Photography outside the
studio, being tethered to external, real-world processes, has a weighting unlike other art forms: it can persuade us that it is those
processes which beautify, rather than individual human volition. Since painting has no such grip on factuality, I saw little point in including
those broken pipelines in my picture. (They would merely have complicated the design.) But if painting cannot stand up in court as
evidence of what is going on physically on this planet, perhaps it could still tell us something imaginatively about the nature of massed
human volition? For you might argue that the uncontrolled forces welling up to pollute the Gulf of Mexico are at root consumer avidity
and the pursuit of profit. Concluding a spirited attempt to identify a genuine sublime for our times, the American art critic Thomas
McEvilley declared that the unknown face of global capitalism is terrifying in its vastness. Art and technology and so on are just roleplayers in the grand game.17 Here, he argued, was an object truly worthy of our fear.
17
Julie Mehretu
Dispersion 2002
Ink and acrylic on canvas
2286 x 3657 mm
Julie Mehretu
Collection Nicolas and Jeanne Greenberg, New York
Fig.7
Julie Mehretu
Dispersion 2002
Julie Mehretu
Capitalism is a master-abstraction of massed human processes, never wholly clear to the view and yet, just as Burke argued when it
came to poetry, that obscurity can add to its imaginative significance. Think of the alarm that a free-falling diagonal on an economics
graph can induce. This is the level of abstracted signification worked by the graphic language of the New York-based artist Julie
Mehretu. Her melodramas of swooping vectors and nested graphemes, with their bravura, baroque complexity, seem to picture the
dynamics of the age on a very large and general scale. Sometimes a local detail snags the quasi-infrastructural flowchart into specificity:
in Dispersion2002 (fig.7), a ghost aeroplane provides it. The reference, easy to intuit, is to events in New York the previous September.
Here is visual art attempting zealously to respond to a moment of global crisis and convulsion. Mehretus work seems to ask for the
description tremendous an epithet that closely tracks sublime, touching on both Burkes horror and his astonishment.
The content of the sublime: cosmological

The sublime may be political in effect if it hurries on our reasonings, prompting us to this or that response and yet it cuts across
morality: it anticipates those reasonings, oblivious of good or evil. The spectacle of 9/11 could at once constitute an imagistic masterstroke (hailed as such by Damien Hirst and Anselm Kiefer, and anxiously so acknowledged by various cultural theorists) while at the
same time remaining humanly contemptible. Its sublimity by another light reappears as banality: the mindset involved is one many male
adolescents pass through and a few never leave. Most innocently computer-game their way through this psychic terrain. On the other
side of that zone, some come out with artworks which give contained poetic shape to schemes of world-destruction and worldreconstruction.
Matthew Ritchie
The Iron City 2007
18
Still from video

Matthew Ritchie
Fig.8
Matthew Ritchie
The Iron City 2007
Matthew Ritchie
Titanic structures tower overhead or tumble into an ocean traversed by some bobbing boat from which we look out, in a digital animation
by the British-born, USA-based Matthew Ritchie. The Iron City 2002 (fig.8) belongs within a larger sequence in which, according to the
artist,
First the universe assembles itself into a garden, and its sort of like the beginning of the world. [But here] gradually that world decays
and falls apart and is turned into a kind of ruined city, which is the world weve created. And then that ruined city transforms gradually
into The Morning Line [the works overall title], which then dissolves back to the beginning of time and the whole thing becomes a kind of
endless narrative loop.18
On one level Ritchies project has a direct contemporary agenda, speaking to the often apocalyptic pessimism with which people
conceive the twenty-first century: The idea is to confront and perhaps even transcend the rhetoric of fear that has recently come to
dominate all discussions of the future. 19 But as in several installation projects he devised during the 2000s, the immediate means to
hand point his viewers towards a large scale reflection on change and possibility in general, informed by readings of physics and
cybernetic theory.
Anselm Kiefer born 1945

Lilith 19879
Oil, ash and copper wire on canvas
support: 3815 x 5612 x 500 mm; support, each: 3815 x 2806 x 50 mm
Anselm Kiefer
Purchased 1990
Tate T05742
T05742
Fig.9
Anselm Kiefer
Lilith 19879
Anselm Kiefer
Science comes together in The Iron City with a narrative based on the epic that also did much to provide Burke with his images of the
sublime Miltons Paradise Lost, in which Lucifer and his devils build the city of Pandemonium. Art that conceives of a cosmological
sublime may proceed by way of structural, rational extrapolations; equally, it may lean primarily on myth. Anselm Kiefer has had much to
do with the latter approach since the 1970s. Science serves mythology by illustrating it, 20he likes to claim. Kiefers Lilith 198789 (fig.9,
Tate T05742) has a real-world referent of sorts the streets and roofs of So Paulo, seen looking down from one of the citys tallest
skyscrapers. But this ash-caked canvas can hardly be mistaken for photo-reportage of contemporary living conditions. Copper wires
festoon the accreted gunk, rising up in coils. In analogy they are snakes or winding tresses of hair, attributes of the malign Lilith who has
been mankinds shadow-companion since before the creation of Eve, a seductress warping all his purposes so that they head towards
systemic collapse. What there is to fear is not capitalism but a witch from the Kabbala, as Kiefer peers down into the smog of the
megalopolis from the ninety-ninth floor. Or is there anything to fear at all? Might not the spectacular apparatus of arcane reference
19
conspire with the superheavy, insistent materiality of Kiefers canvases to deliver yet another demonstration of artistic power for its own
sake? Myth, notoriously, is religion without the responsibility and anxiety of belief.
Andreas Gursky
Shanghai 2000
C-print
2800 x 2000 x 62 mm
Andreas Gursky/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/DACS 2012Courtesy Sprth Magers Berlin London
Fig.10
Andreas Gursky
Shanghai 2000
Andreas Gursky/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/DACS 2012Courtesy Sprth Magers Berlin London
There is perhaps a comparable abstraction of purpose in another, younger, German specialist in the spectacular. The large-scale photoworks of Andreas Gursky often look to be reporting on patterns of contemporary global human activity, in parallel say to those of
Burtynsky, discussed above. A stock exchange, a supermarket, a beach full of bathers or a block of flats provides the image material
or, in the case of Shanghai 2000 (fig.10), a hotel lobby. There are usually small human figures as indicators of scale. But the organisation
of Gurskys images, since the 1990s effected by PhotoShop techniques, is not far from that of M.C. Escher, the master of visual paradox,
for the intention, remorselessly repeated, is to generate an endlessly extending and repeating perspective. The universe (which others
call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries: 21 the other correlative to Gurskys
dread-inducing art is Jorges Luis Borgess unforgettably oppressive story The Library of Babel (1941). In fact Gurskys photos, as
various critics have noted,22 relate as closely as any artworks can to Kants account of a mathematical sublime when the sublime is
that in comparison with which everything else is small. 23
If we are seeking an adequate object and content for our subjective sensations of sublimity, then the universe by definition provides an
answer, the universe being absolutely big. But if we are to produce artistic representations, then we must seek some way to grapple with
that totality, and this is where a scheme of interrelated cosmic states becomes relevant. Kiefers mythologies mull over such schemes
continually, often by way of alchemy; Ritchie, using time-based media or interactive game scenarios, represents states as they develop
and succeed one another.
For my own part, painting Darvaza, the idea of a succession of states implicitly governed the progression of the work from a whiteprimed canvas to a liquid yellow staining to the many deeper hues that my brushes eventually laid down. Running backwards through
that sequence, you move away from solidity, this peculiar local condition in which a few objects in the orbits of stars happen to find
themselves. You move back through gaseous flame towards plasma towards the condition in which particles dance about in such a
white heat that they become electrically conductive. For plasma is the state in which, overall, most matter exists: the condition of the sun
from which, historically, the materials of our planet originated; this universes vast and humanly intolerable normality.
The content of the sublime: theological

But another theme, far more immediate than the counter-intuitive, science-derived reflection mentioned above, was much on my mind as
I painted Darvaza.
20
The title of my painting means gateway in Persian. The name was in fact originally given to a camel halt in the Karakum Desert, but
since 1971, when the Soviet gas probe blew up, locals have understandably taken it to mean gate of hell. Hell as a pit of fire is an
image that is vivid and potent to any reader of the Quran and which remains verbally alive wherever cultures have been formed around
the Bible. In those scriptures, the pit of fire is the ultimate threat to those who disobey God. It is how God appears to us at his most
terrible. And yet an interesting thing happens if you start depicting a pit of fire. You are obliged to visualise light, and light, in the same
scriptures, is a facet of God that draws us towards him. The red and yellow tints of your flames fade back to the same white ground that
supplies your painting with the radiance of the sky of heaven, in other words.
Symbolically, this is in accordance with standard theology. Humans are bound to approach God in his unity from multiple, circumstancebound perspectives and these facets in which he shows himself will at first appear to contrast, but on deeper inspection will start to
dissolve. Gods fearfulness his sublimity is for the Abrahamic religions ultimately subsumed within his radiance and perfection, his
beauty. For European artists informed by a strong sense of this, the task has typically been to keep their work transparent to that
brightness, by one route or another. What once Gothic stained glass delivered, William Blake and later Cecil Collins strove for with the
translucence of staining inks on paper, and for that matter pious Victorians such as William Holman Hunt worked to the same end with
the glazing of their oils.
But we are a long way from Gothic stained glass, and the emergence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of a category of taste
that came to be labelled the sublime is a marker of that distance. Other papers in this Tate Research project discuss the historical
relations between that emergence and the process of secularisation. My own extremely simplified formula would be that art itself as a
cultural category had progressively established an autonomy, vis--vis religion, during the Renaissance, and that afterwards this new
sub-category of the sublime arose as a way of sealing the separation, for it enabled its users to redesignate any impulse that headed
towards the transcendent as an affair of purely human taste. (Pseudo-Longinus, the antique writer who for us is the originator of the
sublime, describes the Let there be light of the Bible as an effect of authorial good judgment on the part of Moses. 24) The more a notion
of the sublime is entrenched and absorbed, the less it becomes possible for new artworks, however full of spiritual aspiration, to pretend
to a publically defined, distinct religious function. That is why whatever thoughts I may have had about Hell while painting Darvaza, my
big canvas for a public art gallery, could only be as it were in play.
There is nothing to stop an artwork maintaining an indistinct spiritual availability witness the popularity of Rothkos Seagram
murals 195859 (Tate) and more recently of Bill Violas video triptychs and James Turrells presentations of pure light. Currently the
spiritual is a category a whole degree more vague than the sublime with which to be sure in these cases it overlaps. The spiritual, a
category contemporary art can more or less share space with, really just amounts to an ever-latent inflection of consciousness. The
religious, a category it effectively cannot, is about something, or rather someone, namely God.25
Kazimir Malevich
Black Square 1930
Oil on canvas
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets.
Fig.11
Kazimir Malevich
21
Black Square 1930

The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets.
Nonetheless, various strands in the intrinsically extra-religious art of the sublime might correspond to various ways of religiously
approaching God. One, the subject of much exegesis, is the via negativa, the attempt to come to God by way of what he is not.
Interpreters of modern painting have been fond of characterising any blocked-off vista, or any point at which expression-driven
brushwork collapses into the muteness of mere paint, as an analogue for a failure to discover the divine within the visible or even as
an attempt to jump the viewer into his own spiritual crisis. To come at this critical line reductively, all that is being reconfirmed here is that
painting (in parallel, famously, with British politics) doesnt do God. But painting has a predisposition to dual effects and paradoxical: at
its mutest it is liable to be at its most eloquent; its darknesses may dazzle. Witness the archetypal modernist moment of 1915, Kazimir
Malevich painting his Black Square (fig.11)while rhapsodically declaring that, through this zero of form:
I have destroyed the ring of the horizon and escaped from the circle of things ...
I have released all the birds from the eternal cage ...
I have untied the knots of wisdom and set free the consciousness of colour! ...
I have overcome the impossible ...26
Mark Wallinger
Via Dolorosa 2002
Projected video installation, continuous loop
Mark Wallinger. Courtesy Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London
Fig.12
Mark Wallinger
Via Dolorosa 2002
Mark Wallinger. Courtesy Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London
Even if contemporary art cannot be positively and substantively religious, it might provide a forum in which to consider this very problem.
This is what Mark Wallinger did during the 1990s and 2000s, using a variety of tactics, from statuary to video. His Via Dolorosa 2002
(fig.12) is by genre a typical specimen of appropriation art: Wallinger laid claim to sixteen minutes of footage from Jesus of Nazareth, a
reverent and highly popular film for television made in 1977 by Franco Zeffirelli. His concept was to black out the centre of the screen,
leaving only a fringe of visible image, a picture that is in effect a frame. In the watching, Via Dolorosa is an experience of frustration. A
salutary frustration? Are we thereby brought to the brink of sublimity, induced to contemplate the unpicturable pain of the crucifixion? A
supercilious frustration? How dumb of Zeffirelli to translate divine mysteries into a florid picturesque: how much smarter this latter-day reedit. The exercise is almost insufferably poised, not least in its arch nod to the Malevich modernist icon mentioned above; and yet it
somehow obtains the benefit of the doubt. Wallinger would not have wanted to do it, if he had not wanted to think about something
seriously.
***
We have looked at various formats in which contemporary art attempts effects that Edmund Burke might have recognised as sublime,
and we have looked at certain types of content they might involve. The various issues we have touched on bear on a larger issue what
claims contemporary visual art can make for its own cultural centrality: why should it be accorded such titanic architecture and such an
exorbitant status as a form of financial investment? Evidence, such as that assembled above, might be brought out in response, as a
way to refute any allegation that the scene represented by and revolving around the Tates, the Guggenheims, the MoMAs and all the art
22
fairs and biennales is petty, trivial or timid in its concerns. On the contrary, as I have tried to show, it is not only that we have this great
big bag called art this massive cultural kennel, this monster cage. It is that when we talk about the contemporary sublime, we are very
largely talking about the way that artists have tried to fill that bag with appropriately huge subjects. (Or at least, very big-looking beasts,
whether or not they really bite.)
The sublime as it gets spoken

That said, it is doubtful whether any of the artists mentioned above would care one way or the other whether or not they were described
as exponents of the sublime. They might be willing to adopt the term as a convenient presentational hook, but most of them would
probably regard it as a curatorial device, incidental to their real working concerns. Speaking for myself, I was peripherally aware that the
label might be invoked when people looked at my painting Darvaza, but if anything I rather hoped that it could be avoided. And this was
because it might involve me in an ongoing critical wrangle as to the definition of the sublime the very thing, in fact, that has come to
pass as I write this. In this second section, I will try to disentangle the verbal complications I had been holding at bay, approaching the
sublime through those who have consciously given shape to the theme rather than through those artworks that merely happen to reflect
it.
A genealogy of the contemporary sublime: Newman to Lyotard

The sublime is a concept, and concepts belong more properly to writers who theorise than to makers of things to look at. Yet some
individuals straddle both categories. One, notably, was Barnett Newman, a philosophically educated controversialist who drafted the
article The Sublime is Now in 1948 in a bid to position his fellow New York painters in contrast to the European tradition. The latter had
been overwhelmingly fixated on beauty, Newman claimed, whereas he and his friends pitched their new art at the absolute emotions.
The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, 27 he asserted, bombastically and paradoxically equating
transcendence and physicality. But then a kind of God-shy spiritual presumptiveness posited on large and simply constructed artefacts
would become Newmans habitual arena. His activities epitomised the trait the philosopher James Kirwan ascribes to post-Romantic
thought in general: the aspiration of the self to lift itself up by its own bootlaces. 28 Newman went on two years after his essay to entitle
his vastest canvas to dateVir Heroicus Sublimis 195051 (MOMA, New York). His rhetoric echoed the thinking of his sometime associate
Clyfford Still and to some extent that of Mark Rothko; but Newmans invocation of the sublime did not, as far as I can trace, result in the
term joining the studio lexicon of 1950s painters.
Instead, it got reshuffled by the inventively revisionist New York art historian Robert Rosenblum. Rosenblum published an essay on The
Abstract Sublime in 1961, incorporating its arguments into an engaging and widely read book, Modern Painting and the Northern
Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko, in 1973. As the title indicates, Rosenblum argued that Newmans generation did have European
forebears, only they did not come from Italy and France the motherlands of beauty, sensuality and good taste, those qualities that
Newman scorned. The art historians eye traced a certain vein of sensibility that runs from early nineteenth-century German landscapes
in which the horizon the limit of the visible is forcefully symbolic, through Van Gogh, Munch and Klee to abstract expressionist
canvases in which there is an equally emphatic reaching out to the ultimate. Rosenblum described a pictorial sublime that had been a
means for two centuries of artists to seek the sacred in a modern world of the secular. 29 A great deal of landscape-based painting and
photography has been created in awareness of his book from the 1970s onwards, and to that extent an account of values
acknowledging the sublime did re-enter studio currency.
In 1982, many artistic revolutions onwards from Newmans invocation of the sublime in 1948, a totally separate interpretation of his
rhetoric appeared.30 Jean-Franois Lyotard was a Paris-based philosopher in his late fifties who had participated in the dramas of the
French left over previous decades and who remained intent on igniting radical, oppositional momentum as a conceptual possibility, at
least. Three years earlier an analysis of the cultural dynamics of the age, The Postmodern Condition, had brought him fame. The
postmodern that Lyotard presented was marked by a collapse of cohesive grand narratives and as such was a development to
embrace, since regimes on every level political, cultural, epistemological needed to be confronted with their own limits, the
borderlines at which they ceased operating. It was a potential to deliver this sort of confrontation that Lyotard discerned in Newmans
artworks, linking them to works by Czanne, Duchamp and Malevich as exemplary moments in the history of the avant-garde. Lyotard
built on the fact that Newman had employed a term theorised by Kant, the philosopher to whom he himself most often returned.
Lyotard argued through a succession of essays and the curation of a 1985 Paris exhibition for an art of the sublime that was
concerned with presenting the unpresentable. 31 Certain radical, abrupt, uncompromising artistic acts might actively refuse to be
understood refuse to fall within known narratives and schemes of meaning and might thereby confront viewers with their own
conceptual limitations. Such avant-gardism could deliver the vitalising mental shock that Kant believed inherent in the experience of
natural sublimity of threatening rocks, thunder clouds and the boundless ocean. 32 It might interrupt the continual destruction of
experience in which the homogenising processes of global capitalism involve us. The stark verticals on which Newmans artworks
depend his trademark zips provided Lyotard with one such sudden rush; Malevich with his irreducible Black Square supplied
another.
23
Lyotards theorisations of the sublime (which ran alongside other French academic work on the theme, less concerned with
contemporary art33) were meant to relate, at least implicitly, to a positive, proactive politics. If they were of a piece with his own account
of the postmodern, they stood in declared opposition to a more common 1980s interpretation of postmodern art the mix it up,
anything goes version, one might say. As to the painting thats now generally referred to as postmodern, Lyotard stated in a 1985
interview,
I can only say that it strikes me rather unfavourably. These forms of painterly expression that one now sees returning, these
transavantgardists, or lets say neoexpressionists ... seem to me to be a pure and simple forgetfulness of everything that people have
been trying to do for over a century: theyve lost all sense of whats fundamentally at stake in painting. Theres a vague return to a
concern with the enjoyment experienced by the viewer.34
This is what happens when scratchy ageing philosophers decide to address themselves to the theme of art: they not only avoid the
tiresome business of actually looking at artworks, they make it their business actively to disparage it. By the same token, there was no
particular form of visual sensibility that Lyotard appeared to advocate, while he clove to his lineage of verbally articulate avant-gardists.
And thus an intellectually imposing, politically stirring description of the sublime entered into international artspeak its importation
reflecting a widespread 1980s vogue for French theory as a joker in the pack: from Black Square to carte blanche.
A genealogy of the contemporary sublime: Kelley to Tuymans

As of the early 1980s, many a campus beyond Paris was acquainting students with the concept of the sublime. Emerging from CalArts,
the trans-media arts institute outside Los Angeles, Mike Kelley used the term as the title of a Longinus-citing performance in 1984.
Transgressive performances, erudite texts, crude drawings, sculptural installations and post-punk amplified noise all came together in
the work of this bricoleur-provocateur, with his focus on the truths that might be exposed via base materials, ranging from recycled soft
toys to excrement. Kelleys imaginative world turned around working-class life in his hometown of Detroit, and as such his sublime was
very much an affair of the street, of youth culture. The limit point to articulate thought did not come from mountains and oceans. For me,
Kelley reflected in an interview,
psychedelia was sublime because in psychedelia, your worldview fell apart. That was a sublime revelation, that was my youth, and that
was my notion of beauty. And that was a kind of cataclysmic sublime. It was very interiorized, it wasnt about a metaphysical outside; it
was about your own consciousness. Thats my starting point of the sublime. 35
Kelley went on to suggest that such a sublime could be produced by image clash, image resonance, things like that. 36 An instance
would be his Silver Ball 1994 (fig.13), a big unshapely scrunch-up of cooking foil and chicken wire suspended above a gallery floor and
attended by a sound system and baskets of plastic fruit. The UFO-esque anomaly is desperate to be weird, is desperate to be
worshipped, is desperate, period; and in this has a kind of sad integrity. Such a bathetic endpoint of meaning locates the sublime once
again in adolescence with its familiar terrains of science fiction, drug-taking and intensive, abrasive noise. Another artist emerging from
the 1980s LA scene, Fred Tomaselli, offered a comparable interpretation: In my life I have only ever been able to access the sublime
chemically ... Its a major subject in the history of art and it also happens to be the major component around drugs. 37 Tomasellis
paintings, however literally pill-studded variations on the final, Beyond the Infinite sequence of Stanley Kubricks film 2001: A Space
Odyssey are defiantly, exultantly (and self-consciously) whimsical in their subscription to mind-alteration.
They offer a wilfully naive descant on a scene in which bathos and shamefulness had come to the fore. The late 1980s and early 1990s
were the heyday of the grunge movement in rock and of its art world equivalent, the vogue for the abject. Exhibitions dealing in blood,
shit or viscera would habitually reference the Paris-based theorist Julia Kristeva and her 1982 book Powers of Horror. Kristeva took her
cue (as to a large extent did Kelley) from Freud and his notion of the unheimlich or uncanny: the object which disturbs because it brings
an individual into contact with matters that he or she has repressed. The overall shape of such a pattern of repression, for Kristeva, was
an individuals symbolic order, the foundation of their own self-definition the abject being whatever it excluded. Kristeva found feminist
and indeed more general political implications in this formula, which readily fell in line with the notion of the sublime as a limit to the
comprehensible. It equally spoke to would-be avantgardists who sensed that their tradition had arrived at a defensive, dejected,
historical low ebb.
Between Lyotards visually unspecified call-to-disorder and Kristevas backhanded picturesque of the repellent, between mass societys
ever-latent groundswells of spiritual dissatisfaction and articulate artists such as Kelley and Tomaselli who were finding new ways to
emblematise them, there was every reason why the sublime should prove a very convenient curatorial hook for a growing number of
exhibitions from the early 1990s onwards, the tag being archly extended in many an ingenious direction. For all the thinkers I have just
named, whatever was sublime must inevitably offend against taste against, that is, received ideas of aesthetic decorum and discursive
etiquette. And yet such exhibitions spawned their own loosely defined taste zone, proposing what might be an appropriate sensibility,
what type of image-stock to use.
The catalogue illustrations to The Sublime Void, a show held in Antwerp in 1993, return repeatedly to emptied vessels (for example
Rachel Whitereads object casts, or the dangling coats of Juan Muoz ) and to forlorn, anomalous vestiges (Robert Gober body parts,
Thomas Schtte putty figurines). The window-picture that is veiled or blurry (as in the paintings of Gerhard Richter) and the blocked-off
receding road (as in the photos of Willie Doherty) would be co-opted in other exhibitions for the same triste symbolism of spiritual
24
disappointment often associated, as I indicated above, with the theologians via negativa. Back in Barnett Newmans day, the sublime
had still bristled with hunky machismo: no longer. It was now reassigned to keep company with the trace, that wistful sigh of the intellect
so cherished by poststructuralist theorists.
Luc Tuymans
Still Life 2002
Oil on canvas
3470 x 5000 mm
Image courtesy of The Saatchi Gallery, London Luc Tuymans, 2002
Fig.14
Luc Tuymans
Still Life 2002
Image courtesy of The Saatchi Gallery, London Luc Tuymans, 2002
The doyen of such dejection was the Belgian painter Luc Tuymans, whose work gained an international profile during the 1990s. He
described his canvases, which have usually been modest in scale, as outcomes of a trace-on-trace process of analysing and
redrawing a photographic image until it was entirely dead and then recreating it in paint. 38 The ostensible content of the image would
itself often be modest some fraction of a human figure, some corner of a room. The title (and accompanying exegesis) might then
propose that this small tamped down trace derived from something ungovernably large and hideous the Holocaust, the Belgian
exploitation of the Congo or the events of 9/11, as in the case of Still Life 2002 (fig.14), an unusually large painting of a fruit bowl. An
interpretive text for Still Life issued by the Saatchi Gallery epitomises the tone of the disappointed sublime, as Simon Morley has termed
this style in artspeak:
The sheer scale makes the contemplation of this painting almost impossible: a vast canvas representing an absolute nothingness. Luc
Tuymans chose the subject of still life precisely because it was utterly unremarkable; a generic brand of object rendered to immense
scale; it is banality expanded to the extreme. The simplicity of Luc Tuymanss composition alludes to a pure and uninterrupted world
order; the ephemeral light, with which the canvas seems to glow, places it as an epic masterpiece of metaphysical and spiritual
contemplation. In response to unimaginable horror, Luc Tuymans offers the sublime. A gaping magnitude of impotency, which neither
words nor paintings could ever express.39
Tuymans himself positions his values on another level:
Im not so much interested in the spiritual aspects of culture beauty or poetic descriptions of beauty dont seem real enough for me.
Reality is actually far more important than any form of spirituality. Realism. Its much more interesting to crawl from underneath to the socalled top.40
To this author, both statements seem deeply misleading. Tuymanss paintings gained their reputation owing to the fact that they are, in a
melancholic fashion, extremely beautiful. Like the Belgian Symbolists of an earlier era Fernand Khnopff, Lon Spilliaert he revels in
the poetry of cold, November-afternoon pastel tones and seems incapable of delivering an inelegant brushmark, even on the rare
occasions when he tries. A fine judgment about how far to diminish and distance his motifs has been crucial to Tuymans in his attempts
to conjure a frisson of menace from such exquisiteness. It deserted him as he worked up his response to the loud public agenda of 9/11:
the result is neither extreme nor epic, merely vapid and inert. In this case the vogue for the sublime delivered not merely inflated
verbiage, but pretentious art.
The limits of the sublime

Burkes Philosophical Enquiry and in its wake Kants Critique of Judgment each consistently distinguished the sublime from the beautiful,
treating both categories as forms of taste, that is to say of aesthetic experience. The aspects of recent art practice and discourse that I
have been reviewing return me to these distinctions, making me want to reconsider them. Can the sublime in art, I might ask, also at
25
once be the beautiful? Can the controlled-uncontrollable, or presented-unpresentable, that which pushes me to teeter one foot over my
mental cliff-edge, somehow bed down comfortably within the zone that we simply term taste? good taste being aesthetic experience
that meets with contemporary social approval.
Or rather, perhaps I should ask: how can they not? How can any sublime that is presented through art not get bound up in the take-it-orleave-it luxury of spectatorhood, how can it not be complicit in sheer showmanship? Surely Kant was right to dismiss artworks from
consideration in his analysis of the sublime, instead positing his aesthetic on experiences of nature? By 2001, when Jeremy GilbertRolfe published Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime, the institutionalisation of a concept that in Lyotards hands had been definitively
anti-institutional was already a given. Gilbert-Rolfe contrarily proposed (as far as I can tell) that nowadays it was the category of beauty
(idiosyncratically defined) that was truly radical and liberatory. A short sample of the books argumentation may suggest why it failed to
resolve the issue to universal satisfaction:
The extreme mobility of the contemporary sublime erodes autonomy because it calls for movement through the heteronomous which is
itself heteronomous, provisional singularity taking the place of the irreducible, movement being the basis of the indeterminacy of what is
erased and represented within it.41
The book was in fact the occasion for Thomas McEvilleys riposte, quoted earlier, that if contemporary art was looking for a genuine
challenge to its prevailing modes of representation, then it needed to peer out of the gallery window at the vast and fearful unknown of
global capitalism: only that way could the sublime regain its old dignity and danger. 42
My impressionistic survey has tried to demonstrate, however, that artists themselves are not to be collectively arraigned for a failure to
think seriously. A truth-seeking instinct seems to be a permanent feature of our mental equipment, and it reveals itself in any number of
contemporary art initiatives. Axiomatically, we cannot foretell what truths these artworks might arrive at, or whether in fact they will arrive
at any. The whole zone called art is in many senses a fictive space, and to push at this limitation is bound to involve the artist in
paradoxes. The critic and curator may in turn wish to round up any number of those paradoxes those presentations of the
unpresentable within the category of the sublime.
It is just that, as of 2012, the process of rounding up feels to have gone a little too far. As a painter a dealer in surfaces, a literally
superficial individual I need to keep in mind some look that distinguishes what is sublime from what is not. For me, it does not seem
useful to include in the category art that employs the whole human figure as its central property. Art that describes the human figure in
completed relationships is surely outside the province also. Individuals in relation to interiors they inhabit and in their social interrelations
make poor candidates for the sublime, and by extension associated subject-matters whether we are talking about identity issues and
political contestation, or pastoral landscape and still life are not well described in this way. (It is true that any of these prescriptive
guidelines might be overturned as soon as an artist reaches out for extremes of scale.) Completed relationships on a formal and abstract
level are obviously non-sublime. Donald Judd, Patrick Caulfield, Sophie Calle, Thomas Hirschhorn: these are all in their differing ways
exemplary artists of the non-sublime. How far to gather them up within the attractive enclosure of the beautiful, I leave to others.
That still leaves rather a vast amount of contemporary art stuck in the bracing cold outside. And I think the point has been reached where
a blanket description for these aesthetic asylum-seekers will no longer do. The critical border police need to find superior methods of
discrimination.
Notes
1
For example in the 2005 exhibition of that name at the University of Colorado.
2
For example in Lee Rozelle, Ecosublime: Environmental Awe from New World to Oddworld, Tuscaloosa, Alabama 2006.
3
For example in the essay of that name by Vijay Mishra, in Simon Morley (ed.), The Sublime: Documents of Contemporary Art, London
2010.
4
For example in the photographers website http://www.jeremyhogan.name/portfolio/11/military-industrial-shopping-complex, accessed 18

September 2012.
5
For example in the artworks of James Turrell, Damien Hirst, Luc Tuymans and Mike Kelley respectively.
6
Jonathan Jones, Julian Bell, Joseph Wright and Britains Titian Triumph, Guardian, 2 March 2012, www.guardian.co.uk/.../2012/.../julianbell-joseph-wright-art-weekly, accessed 18 May 2012.
7
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 1757, Part 2, Section IV.
8
Ibid., Part 5, Section VII: the essays closing line.
26
Ibid., Part 1, Section VII.

10
Ibid., Part 2, Section I.

11
Ibid., Part 2, Section XIV.

12
Richard Serra interviewed in David Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, London 2001, p.289.
13
Ibid., p.296.
14
The sheer effort to build these things has a lot to do, finally, with what theyve become, Serra acknowledges. Ibid., p.301.
15
My belief that the opposition to Tilted Arc stemmed from a genuine groundswell of popular opinion rather than from politicians
contrivances is based on conversations with New York residents, including members of the arts community.
16
Comments made in the film Anish Kapoor Marsyas 2002 theEYE: Anish Kapoor: www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1Ouyhjx06k, accessed
19 September 2012.
17
Thomas McEvilley, in Bill Beckley (ed.), Sticky Sublime, New York 2001.
18
Matthew Ritchie | Apocalypse | Art21 Blog: blog.art21.org/2008/08/21/matthew-ritchie-apocalypse/, accessed 18 May 2012.

19
Matthew Ritchie: The Iron City Saint Louis Art Museum www.absolutearts.com/artsnews/2007/07/02/34566.html, accessed 18 May
2012.
20
Anselm Kiefer, Art Will Survive its Ruins, Paris 2011, p.204.
21
Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel (1941), opening sentence: this translation by James E. Irby in Jorge Luis
Borges, Labyrinths (1964).
22
For example Caroline Levine, Gurskys Sublime, pmc.iath.virginia.edu/issue.502/12.3levine.html, accessed 19 September 2012.
23
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, Book 2, 26.

24
Longinus, On the Sublime, ix.9.

25
A lively, shrewd and deeply informed survey of these issues is available in James Elkins, On the Strange Place of Religion in
Contemporary Art, Routledge, 2004: see in particular pp.95100 for a discussion of the sublime.
26
Kazimir Malevich,text to accompany The Last Futurist Exhibition, 1915: translation as included in C. Harrison & P. Wood, eds, Art in
Theory: 19001990, Oxford 1992, pp.166176.
27
Quotes from Barnett Newman, The Sublime is Now 1948.

28
James Kirwan, Sublimity, London 2005, p.155. Kirwans book is the sharpest history of modern concepts of the sublime that I have read,
wide-ranging and written with philosophical wit and discrimination.
29
Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko, London 1978, p.218.
30
Jean-Franois Lyotard, Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime, translated by Lisa Liebmann, Artforum April 1982, 20(8): pp6469.
31
Ibid.
32
27
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, Book 1, 28.

33
See the essays collected in Jean-Franois Courtine et al, Du Sublime, Paris 1988.
34
Bernard Blistne, Les Immatriaux: A Conversation with Jean-Franois Lyotard, Flash Art, no.121, March 1985.
35
Mike Kelley, interview with Art21, 2005: www.art21.org/.../mike-kelley/interview-mike-kelley-language-and - ..., accessed 18 May 2012.
36
Ibid.
37
Fred Tomaselli and Philip Taaffe in conversation with Raymond Foye and Rani Singh, 2002: www.philiptaaffe.info/Interviews.../TomaselliSmith-Taaffe.php, accessed 18 May 2012.
38
Luc Tuymans, BBC Radio 3 interview with John Tusa: www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/johntusainterview/tuymans_transcript.shtml, accessed 18
May 2012.
39
Saatchi Gallery website: www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/luc_tuymans.htm, accessed 18 May 2012.

40
Luc Tuymans interviewed in Gordon Burn, Sex & Violence, Death & Silence: Encounters with Recent Art, London 2009.
41
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime, New York 2000, p.55.
42
Thomas McEvilley in Beckley 2001.

Julian Bell is a painter and writer.
3.
Bill Viola and the Sublime

Rina Arya
The new media art of the 1970s and 1980s offered new possibilities for expressing the sublime. Rina Arya
discusses selected works by the video artist Bill Viola in light of romantic notions of the sublime.
28
Bill Viola born 1951

Five Angels for the Millennium 2001
Video, 5 projections, colour and sound (stereo)
Bill Viola Studio
Purchased jointly by Tate, London courtesy of Lynn Forester de Rothschild, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York courtesy of
Leonard Lauder, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris courtesy of Lily Safra, 2003
Tate T11805
T11805
Full screen
Bill Viola
Five Angels for the Millennium 2001
Bill Viola Studio
Bill Viola born 1951

Nantes Triptych 1992
Video and mixed media
duration: 29 min., 46 sec.
Bill Viola Studio
Purchased with assistance from the Patrons of New Art through the Tate Gallery Foundation and from the Art Fund 1994
29
Tate T06854
T06854
Bill Viola
Nantes Triptych 1992
Bill Viola Studio
As is well documented elsewhere on these pages, the sublime was a key theme for the theory of the visual arts in the late eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries and interest in it has revived in recent times. To summarise the contemporary position, as a category of
aesthetic experience, the sublime gives artists the opportunity to define their relationship to a host of different subjects including nature,
religion, sexuality and identity. The main shifts that have occurred in conceptualising the sublime in the modern era are twofold. First, the
sublime started to be regarded less as an attribute of nature than as a mode of consciousness. The Enlightenment philosopher Edmund
Burke having shifted the focus towards the experience of the viewer or beholder of the sublime, the perceptual qualities of the sublime
experience were categorised further by the philosopher Immanuel Kant. Secondly, attitudes towards and presentation of the sublime
changed. In Romanticism, two main types of response are discernible: the theological where nature was viewed as a reflection of the
sublime and the imaginative where the sublime was seen as a source of creative inspiration for the artist. In the twentieth century,
the key question raised by the sublime in critical discourse and the arts lay in the presentation of what was beyond representation. InThe
Postmodern Condition (1979), the philosopher and literary theorist Jean-Franois Lyotard showed how the sublime articulates the
incommensurability of reality to concept.1 It cannot be expressed positively (in figurative terms) and relies on the language of
abstraction to give it form. It is expressed in negative terms, such as through the dissolution of form or through the presence of voids.
For example, the painting White on White (MoMA, New York) 1918 by the Russian pioneer of abstract art, Kazimir Malevich, is widely
regarded as the apotheosis of absolute emptiness, conveying a feeling of infinite space as it strives to render that which is beyond
representation.
The abstract expressionist artist Barnett Newman was intent on aligning the sublime with contemporary aesthetic concerns, writing a
theoretical text, The Sublime is Now in 1948 for the avant-garde magazine Tigers Eye. His canvases often extraordinarily large
show fields of flat colour with vertical strips of a different colour breaking up the homogeneity of the surface. The relationship between
these zips (Newmans term) and the background colour fields can be posited as a relational difference between immanence and
transcendence. As the philosopher Paul Crowther writes, The implied analogy is that just as the zip is properly defined and
comprehensible only through its opposition to the colour-field, so humanity can only define and express its own finite rational nature in
opposition to the infinite and unknown.2 Discussing NewmansOnement I 1948, Crowther argues that here Newman could express
humanitys relation to the unknown not simply by destroying form in the standard manner of sublime art but by creating an artefact that
embodies this relation through a subtle kind of non-representational symbolism. 3 The sublime was activated in the relation between the
viewer and the painting. The theologian Mark C. Taylor observes how Newman translated the Kantian dynamic sublime from nature to
culture by reinscribing the power of formlessness in the sensation of paint as such. 4 Instead of being deflected into an other-worldly
realm, Newman feels that the sublime is here, is now, leading the art historian Robert Rosenblum to make a characteristically quirky
observation: what used to be pantheism has now become a kind of paint-theism. 5
One could argue that if Newman and other abstract expressionist artists encapsulated the ethos of the contemporary sublime so aptly,
then there could be no possible further pictorial development from the abstract expressionist position. 6 If geometrical abstraction is able
to convey the radical immanence of the sublime, which is in the here-and-now, then how can the sublime be further developed in the
visual arts? Within the remit of painting (and arguably sculpture) Newman appeared to have developed a persuasive thesis not a total
and unproblematic thesis, but one that gained critical acclaim, nonetheless, and one that self-evidently stimulated further thought.
However, a shift in thinking about the sublime was brought about by the intervention of technologies in new media art of the 1970s and
1980s.7 The art historian Simon Morley has described how in the 1980s a new wave of postmodern sublimity swept over the art
world.8 Technology widened the possibilities for creating transformative environments that were totally immersive especially in the
combination of the relationship between space and light (such as in the work of James Turrell) and in the exciting possibilities for the
interaction of the senses from the visual to the aural to the tactile. The video screen was a radically different interface and created
possibilities of thinking about virtuality, hyperreality and cyberspace. The American artist Bill Viola embraced the potential of video art
while a student at Syracuse University in the 1970s, and has since been central in expanding the possibilities of this medium through his
innovative explorations of content and form. 9 Compared to the more traditional media, such as painting and sculpture, video has the
power to engulf the viewer entirely.10 It has an immediacy and directness that commands the attention of the viewer in a much more
sensory way. The art theorist Cynthia Freeland describes Violas work as excessive: not only does its scale of presentation
increasingly tend towards the grandiose, but the effects of encountering it may exceed our capacity to contain our responses. 11 Viola
varies his choice of format, work by work, and his mode of delivery has varied over time but the outcome is always that he creates art
that is absorbing and contemplative.
Five Angels for the Millennium
30
Five Angels for the Millennium 2001 consists of five video sequences: Ascending Angel; Creation Angel; Fire Angel; Birth
Angel;and Departing Angel. Each video is projected directly onto a wall in a dark room and shows a male figure submerging in or
remerging from water, at times diving into the waters surface, and at other times hovering over it. These actions occur in a continuous
loop, which are enhanced by a soundtrack of underwater noises, including the crashing of waves and colour changes (from blood red to
grey blue). The action of the figure seems fairly simple, in that we are looking at the rise and fall of a figure above or below a body of
water. However, it soon becomes clear that the trajectory of the figure is not straightforward. Viola runs the sequences in slow motion.
He also varies the direction of events, so that the sequences run backwards as well as forwards, upside down as well as the right way
up. An additional factor is the soundtrack of crashing waves, which does not correspond with the instant that the figure hits the surface of
the water. Although there is a buildup to the climax, the timing of the crash remains unpredictable and, as a result, is entirely arresting.
The combination of factors the life-size scale of the figures and the speed, order and sensation of these sequences is disorienting
and contributes to the overriding sense of the sublime. In the Critique of Judgment (1790) Kant describes the sublime as referring to
things which are formless or which have form but, for reasons of size, exceed our ability to perceive such form. 12 Violas Five
Angels are life-size but their scattered placements, as well as the sensory effects that accompany the movement of the figures, make the
overall image formless: the viewer simply cannot take it all in and is completely overwhelmed. The work evokes the duality of the
sublime. It plays on our primal fear of drowning while also introducing passages of wonder, namely when the figure emerges from the
surface of the water and hovers in mid-air, which defies all expectations.
The shift of all aspects of the video (from the direction of movement of the figure, to the sound, to the alteration of colour) contributes to
the sensory overload. Burkes Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful(1757) lists certain qualities
that give rise to the experience of the sublime. These include vastness, infinity, magnificence, succession and uniformity, all of
which, Five Angels exhibits.. The scale is vast, the projections of the figures create the perspective of infinity, they display magnificence,
and the rise and fall demonstrates succession and uniformity (and infinity, as the cycle never ends). Burke also includes obscurity, which
is also applicable in this context. With Five Angels the darkness of the room, the unpredictability of the sequence of events, including the
movements of the figures, and accompanying colour and sounds is obfuscating. Burke states how:
To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can
accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes. Every one will be sensible of this, who considers how greatly night
adds to our dread, in all cases of danger.13
The action of Violas figures (their rise and submersion in water), coupled with the religious reference in the title, encourages comparison
with the Christian sacrament of baptism. Viola takes the core ritualised action of baptism and distorts it to dramatic effect so that reemergence does not necessarily follow on from submersion. In a baptism the surface of the water operates as a threshold between the
old (not saved) and the new (saved). The symbolism does not apply in this context: we have only the experience of the limit, whether this
be when the figure has plummeted into the depths of the water and lies still as if drowning, or when the figure has been raised up into
the air. Both these trajectories create fear in the viewer and the ascended figure creates exhilaration. When analysing the meaning of the
work it is worth questioning the significance of the title of the work, Five Angels. Although it appears as if we are looking at ordinary men
they do not behave as if they are ordinary. It appears as if they have been invested with supernatural forces, which enable them to defy
the laws of nature, or else these are ordinary men suspended in a universe that runs contrary to the laws of science.
In Five Angels we experience conflicting emotions: despair, exhilaration and uncertainty. We feel despair at the seeming immobility of the
still figure at the bottom of the water. This is counterbalanced by the exhilaration of the ascension. And, the unpredictability of the
sequence gives way to a general feeling of uncertainty. Viola invites the viewer to consider the importance of ritual as an ordered activity
that structures behaviour and responses so that we equate the period of submersion with representing reflection, inactivity and quiet.
This is accompanied by the rising above the water, which indicates new life, new beginning and is energising. But here we have a
distortion of the conventional pattern of activity in baptism . The paradox is that, through distortion, the conventional cycle of baptism is
reconfigured in the mind of the viewer, in the following way. The familiarity of viewing a baptism (or viewing any ritual or repeated activity
for that matter) can generate thoughtlessness, where the viewer is not properly paying attention to the activity or, because they expect a
particular sequence of events, they may be thinking about the unfolding of the sequence rather than actually looking at what is going on.
The solution to this problem is to disrupt the pattern, which Viola has done, and this prompts reflection and hence the fresh recognition of
a familiar phenomenon. From a cognitive standpoint Viola is making an interesting point about the function of a particular ritualised
episode. From the experiential sense, however, the viewer experiences the uncertainty and discontinuity of the sequences, where our
anxiety when the figure submerges is challenged by the sublimity of the surge of the figure as he is lifted high up above the surface of
the water. The slow motion freezes the sequences as the viewer feels suspended in this state of animation.
Ritual in in fact a key term that is resonant within Five Angels and within Violas work in general. A ritual is a practice with strong
conventional (often socialised) elements to it that is routinely performed. Rituals can be individual or collective, personal or general.
Religions use rituals to organise and structure behaviour, particularly around the sacred. Rituals are an indispensable part of life and
have a multiplicity of sociological functions. They define the social by bringing people together through collective action, and they also
give structure to individual identity. A recurring motif within the ritual is the threshold or the boundary. This can be visible or invisible (and
31
psychological) but what is paramount is that the crossing of this boundary indicates a shift of state or mentality. And so, effectively, we
have a before and after and we feel the force in the crossing from one to the other. In Five Angels the water represents the boundary,
the submersion and ascension represent two opposing states and the point of submersion and ascension is the threshold. Viola
annihilates the straightforward simplicity of this pattern by introducing colour changes in the water, which disturb our interpretative
framework. Even more distracting are the sounds, which, as mentioned earlier, do not concord with the actions. Hearing a crash or roar
at inopportune moments is dislocating. Furthermore, the feature of having to process all these different actions on different screens in a
darkened room adds to the sublime confusion of the event.
Nantes Triptych
Nantes Triptych 1992 involves the viewer in a different way. Viola chose the form of a triptych, traditionally used in mediaeval,
Renaissance and later western art to depict religious subjects. The three panels show video footage, which from left to right are of birth,
as represented by a young woman in the last stages of labour culminating in the birth of her baby; a clothed man underwater; and a
dying woman. The clothed man in the central panel moves between alternate stages of struggle and stillness, and is held in suspension
before an indistinct shadowy space. He signifies the journey of life with its ups and downs, and is literally suspended between birth and
death. These three videos mark the various stages in life with a poignant urgency. What is alarming is the range of emotions that this
work induces in the viewer. In daily life and in most cultures the activity of childbearing is regarded as joyous and is kept apart from the
process of dying. The potentiality and energy exuded by the first panel is counterbalanced by the stillness of the third panel while the
central figure can be seen to be enacting the emotions of both stages vitality in his movement, and morbidity in his stillness. The first
and third panels embody emotions that are simply beyond words. The creation of a new life is inexhaustibly joyous while the final
breaths of a dying person are too poignant to capture in words. Scholar of the sublime, Philip Shaw describes sublimity as referring to
the moment when the ability to apprehend, to know, and to express a thought a sensation is defeated. Yet through this defeat, the mind
gets a feeling for that which lies beyond thought and language. 14 This sentiment applies when considering the first and third panels in
Violas piece. The knowledge that the footage of the third panel is taken from Viola filming his mother during her final illness adds to the
emotional pitch. The three scenes are connected by a soundtrack of crying, the movement of water and breathing in a thirty-minute loop.
In A Philosophical Inquiry Burke articulates how experiencing otherwise terrifying phenomena from a position of safety can elicit a sort of
delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror; which, as it belongs to self-preservation, is one of the strongest of all the
passions.15 Viola appeals to this ambivalence of emotions in the set-up of Nantes Triptych. The three screens fill the visual field of the
viewer, which makes it difficult to avert our gaze. Furthermore, the sounds vitalise the images and force the viewer to confront the
realities that await us both literally (in our visual field) and symbolically, during the course of our lives. Sound both intersects and
interjects into each of the frames, which requires the viewer to begin to view the three frames as a coherent whole. Initially, the three
panels are viewed as embodying radically different emotions and this causes the viewer to regard them as separate frames. The
repetition of the soundtrack helps to synchronise the different sounds of the cries of birth with the last breaths of life. This modulates the
differences until we no longer hear them separately and we begin to unify the experiences. The linear framework of birth, life and death
is transcended and the three become entwined in the cycle of existence, where death is not viewed as a state that occurs at the end of
life but is inherent within its very condition.
The sublime in Viola

The French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy describes the sublime as being, a feeling, and yet more than a feeling in the banal sense, it is
the emotion of the subject at the limit.16 This describes the viewers experience in the face of both Five Angels andNantes Triptych. The
continuity of movement of the figures in Five Angels from lying in the depths of the water to hovering in mid-air takes the viewer to the
edges of their threshold of experience. Indeed, we would not know how to respond to a figure whose actions have taken them beyond
the boundaries of normality. Equally, in Nantes Triptych the viewer is forced to confront extreme experiences, such as birth and dying,
which takes them to the limits of our emotional, cognitive (we do not know what it is like to die) and linguistic experience (where the only
responses to such events are anterior to language, such as the cry). Five Angels and Nantes Triptych typify Violas articulation of the
overcoming of limits. The religious connotations of the titles that Viola has given to these works may lead one to believe that the nature
of overcoming is religious, where the self is in a transaction with the divine.
The religious dimensions of Violas work have been increasingly recognised by interpreters of his work. 17 In 1996 he installedThe
Messenger in Durham Cathedral. In 2007 he was awarded the AAR (the American Academy of Religion) Religion and Arts Award as
recognition for his contribution to the field. In 2009 he was commissioned by the Anglican Church to create a work of art for St Pauls
Cathedral in London. Religion is a part of Violas background. He was brought up as an Episcopalian but has a varied interest in cultures
and spiritualities. He is influenced by the approach of the twentieth-century Indian philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy, who
encouraged a cross-cultural approach to his work, aiming to bridge the gap between eastern and western philosophy. In particular, Viola
is drawn towards mysticism (including the writings of St John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart and Islamic Sufism). He also cites Zen
Buddhism, which he practised during his year-long sojourn in Japan in 19801, as having a particularly strong influence on his outlook
and practice. Zen is central in the reception of his art and in its effect in encouraging mindful reflection on everyday life. Although it is
32
undeniable that the wealth of religious resources spurred on Violas aesthetic practice and philosophical reflection this does not,
however, make his work religious. It is not religious in the sense that he is not supporting a religious tradition or particular doctrine, nor is
he making any claims about the divine. The religious titles of some of Violas works The Arch of Ascent 1992, Stations 1994, The
Messenger 1996,Five Angels for the Millennium 2001, The Passions 2003 and 2005, and Transfigurations 2008 are perhaps
misleading in that they do not refer to an alternative or parallel universe but to the real world in which Viola firmly places his work. Violas
titles are used poetically where they are meant to be evocative of religion and mythology and the emotions accompanying the
experience of that evocation.18 But any further reference to the religious sacrament of baptism or theme of the Passion of Christ, for
instance, is eschewed. Violas use of the devotional art of the late middle ages and the early Renaissance, such as the work of Giotto
and Piero della Francesca, follows a similar pattern. He was interested in the emotions evoked in these religious images with a view to
recreating emotive viewing in a contemporary audience but not with the view of inspiring piety to the divine.
If his titles are meant to be poetic allusions and not literal descriptions, what then is the subject of his work? Violas primary subject is the
human condition. He is interested in the place of the human in the world, the ambivalence of the forces of nature, 19 the life cycle of the
human and the impossibility of representing death. All these issues can be encapsulated in the following central theme the humans
relation to finitude.20 How do we feel when confronted by our most elemental fears, such as drowning? Violas evocations of the sublime
do not induce a sense of transcendence in the religious sense of being united with the divine or of understanding our creaturehood.
Rather, the experience of the sublime simply affirms the fact of our immanence, which is an immanence of the bodily. The final breaths of
the dying figure in Nantes Triptych do not open up a world of eternal life but are an acute reminder of the shortness of time between birth
and death.
Shaw describes how, the postmodern sublime is defined not by its intimations of transcendence but rather by its confirmation of
immanence.21 Simon Morley adds that we are looking at immanent transcendence ... about a transformative experience that is
understood as occurring within the here and now. 22 The sublime effects of the soaring figures in Five Angels and the mesmerising
effects of the three figures in Nantes Triptych transport the viewer from being in a mundane state of mind to feeling beside oneself.
However, we are not taken to some otherworldly place but rather return to the mundane with a fresh perspective. Behind the frail exterior
of the dying woman is not eternal life but a realisation of the immanence of the flesh and the transience of life. In returning to the
inevitability of our mortality Viola is making the everyday sacred. In thinking about experiences of the liminal, David Morgan makes a
distinction between transcendence and transformation. He defines the former as that which posits a mystery present in the work of art
as an encounter with a metaphysical order beyond or hidden within the ordinary sensuous world. In contrast, transformation means the
rupture of the ordinary domains and patterns of authority. 23 Both Five Angels and Nantes Triptych rupture our conventional
understanding about the world. In addition, Five Angels ruptures the notion of the ritual and our understanding of the laws of science.
Equally, Nantes Triptych ruptures our customary and cultural placement of the relationship between life and death. Through rupture we
learn. Viola presents allegorical representations of human experience. 24
Violas work is as much about the viewer and our personal and prophetic journey as it is about his inception of the idea and his execution
of the work. The figures that participate in his performances are ordinary people, and the dramas are about lifes processes of growing,
ageing, dying, and about reconciling ourselves with the inevitable changes in life. Many of his earlier works require the interaction of the
viewer.25 Nantes Triptych is not solely about the experiences of three anonymous individuals at different stages in their lives but about
the viewer integrating themselves into the fabric of life. Viola casts his figures in the role of everyman/everywoman, and this increases
the level of empathy that the viewer has with the work. The observation of minutiae and the manipulation of temporal and spatial frames
sharpen the intensity of the vision and the coagulation of emotion. We are implicated in the narrative, and it becomes about our life and
the paths that we take. His video art holds up a mirror to our lives, where self-perception becomes a path to self-knowledge.
Updating the sublime

Viola is updating the sublime for a contemporary secular audience. He alludes to religious images and metaphors in his titles and in his
art historical references to the past, but then does something radically different by deflecting the focus onto the everyday. The sublime is
then experienced within the context of events that define our humanity, such as childbirth or death. But in all cases there is no beyond.
In Five Angels the pattern of rise and fall does not point to a new life but the endless cycle of life with its ups and downs. Viola uses rich
and evocative symbols, such as angels and messengers, but the only supernatural aspects are in the connotations that we recognise.
In his art Viola is holding a mirror up to the viewer and is showing the full force of the sublime. We are not experiencing the sublime of
Romanticism, which is mediated by symbols and metaphors with reference to a higher faculty. Here we see the postmodern sublime
wholly as the other which cannot be assimilated and that retains its shock value. Viola has followed in the footsteps of Barnett Newman
who cast aside archaic religious symbols in order to devise what he regarded as his own self-evident reality. Newman explains the
purpose behind his work in The Sublime is Now:
We are reasserting mans natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship to the absolute emotions. We do not need the
obsolete props of an outmoded and antiquated legend. We are creating images whose reality is self-evident ... We are freeing ourselves
of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European
painting. Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or life, we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. The image
33
we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the
nostalgic glasses of history.26
Newman wanted the power of the sublime to speak for itself through the intensity of his images. The hallucinatory feelings that viewers
experience when seeing his works firsthand are what Newman referred to as mans natural desire for the exalted. He regarded
figurative symbols of the past as outdated and as not immediate enough for the revelation of the present. Instead, he abstracts (both as
a language and as a process) to the point of emptiness. Similarly, Viola casts aside the nostalgic glasses of history in his art. The
notable difference is that while Newman wholeheartedly rejects figuration and art historical traditions Viola uses art-historical references
only in order to subvert them. He presents Nantes Triptych as if it was a Passion narrative and even utilises the triptych form; but instead
of the suffering of Christ we see only three ordinary individuals. In a conventional religious triptych, the central panel is invariably the
most significant, being the painted space that remains on show when the side wings of the altarpiece are closed. Moreover, the central
panel frequently depicts the crucifixion, which is the climax of the Christian narrative. The comparative bathos of looking at a clothed
man struggling under water as the central panel of the Nantes Triptych is sobering. There is nothing beyond this. And death does not
lead to eternality but only to the cessation of life.
In updating the sublime Viola conveys the ferocity of elemental fears. Nineteenth-century examples of the sublime in painting, such as
J.M.W. Turners Snow Storm Steam Boat off a Harbours Mouth 1842 or Caspar David Friedrichs Wanderer above the Sea of
Fog 1818 demonstrated two things: the overpowering and unpredictable forces of nature and the relative insignificance of the individual
in the face of such danger. In their works we see, amongst other things, the magnitude of the elemental forces of the sea and sky. These
feelings draw the viewer into the spectacle while also causing sentiments of terror. This irreducible ambiguity of emotions renders the
experience sublime. Rosenblum aptly encapsulates the terror in TurnersSnow Storm: steam, wind, water, snow and fire spin wildly
around the pitiful work of man the ghost of a boat in vortical rhythms that suck one into a sublime whirlpool before reason can
intervene.27 Violas work represents a development within the history of art. He heightens the pitch of emotions by abstracting the
elements: we do not experience water as a topological feature that combines with sky and land but as the totality of the experience.
Furthermore, the advancement of technology means that Viola can use actual water, rather than a representation of it, and this
exacerbates the sense of fear that is generated. The technologies at his disposal enable him to create the spatial and temporal
conditions of a storm that is more frightening and more encapsulating than Turners and Friedrichs contributions. Our capacity to seek
critical distance from Viola is limited and hence the encounter with the sublime more fearful. In both Turners and Friedrichs art the
materiality of nature is articulated in quasi-spiritual terms. However, in Violas work the materiality is all that there is; there is nothing
other than the materiality of the elements.
Viola evokes the sublime in order to engage the viewer emotionally and he does this by affecting the sensory aspects of being. He does
not have a specific message to impart in his work and considers his work as a meditation on such central questions and issues in life as
Why are we here? and Where are we going? And, he shows us what it feels like to be alive. Viola does not advocate an overtly
didactic approach he simply wants to invite the viewers to respond to his work on an experiential level. Violas work is about the human
condition, which is primarily about coming to terms with the fact that we are embodied and encounter suffering, pain, alienation and
death. Some viewers may be able to seek solace in his work the realisation that there is nothing beyond this life might prompt some to
seek fellow-feeling or community with others, as a way of overcoming their limited condition.
Video art has an immediacy and presence that is entirely appropriate for Violas expressions. An indispensable aspect of his work is the
medium. Video is a tool of inquiry and wonder that enables Viola to attain his goal ... of a close contact with the stream of life. 28 The
reason that the viewer responds so strongly and emotionally to some of his installations is due to the intuitive aspects of video art, which
invites the viewer to participate in an open-ended dialogue. 29 The darkness of the room encourages a feeling of complete absorption in
the work. One is not distracted by other visitors as one would be in any other museum experience. In The Elemental Sublime (1997)
Lisa Jaye Young discusses how, by means of darkness, repetitive imagery, slow motion, sound, and abstraction, Viola encourages a
meditative response from the viewer. Furthermore, he transforms the art museum into both public viewing space and private
meditational space.30 In his manipulation of light, space, sound and visual imagery Viola creates a Gesamtkunstwerk (a total art work)
that simulates the real. Lori Zippay observes how Viola creates a visual, perceptual and ultimately allegorical language from the raw
material.31
Viola reminds us what it is to be alive and embodied, conditions we often suspend in the fast-paced hyperreal world of peak
experiences. The irony is that in his high-tech microcosms we move further and further back into the body. We do not see
representations of the body but experience sensations in the body. We are not simply viewers but undertake a more participatory role:
we are witnesses who experience what is being unveiled before us.
Viola has revived the sublime for a contemporary audience. His work is an update and a radical revision of the offerings of Romanticism,
for example, Friedrichs Monk at Sea 180810. In this work a diminutive figure stands at the edge of the land mass beside a dark sea
and immense sky that seems to envelop him. Clothed in a dark robe, the form of the monk seems to disappear into the black sea. Taylor
describes how the monk is both overpowered by the forces of nature and absorbed in a totality that infinitely surpasses the isolated
individual.32 Rosenblum qualifies this relationship in theological terms. The tiny man in Friedrichs work represents a poignant contrast
34
between the infinite vastness of a pantheistic God and the infinite smallness of His creatures. 33 In the dual forces of attraction and
repulsion represented in the painting, nature is sublime, or to use a cognate term in a religious sense, numinous.
Violas update occurs on many levels. First, the power of nature in Viola is distilled. In Monk at Sea nature takes the form of a mystic
trinity of sky, water and earth and appears to emanate from one unseen source. 34 By contrast, in Viola we do not see the environs but
only experience the force of the elements vis--vis the dialogue between the visual and aural, and the combined sensory effects are
overwhelming. Young comments on how the sublime, usually associated with an overpowering sensation, is for Viola the abstract force
of fire or water, the awesome power of natural forces. 35 This is crucial the lack of context makes the natural forces more brutal and
potent. They are unbridled. The second main change is the level of interactivity that new media invites. In Friedrichs work we empathise
with the monk, but in Violas art we are unable to distance ourselves from the action as we fall victim to the full force of nature. Friedrich
commonly used the trope of theRckenfigur, a person seen from behind contemplating the view. The anonymity of the figure prompted
connections to be made between them and the viewer. As in Violas work, the figure is an everyman or everywoman, who stands in for
the generic experience of humanity. His sophisticated use of technology creates a simulation of the real resulting in a more sustained
experience of the sublime. Finally, there is a difference of intention Friedrich used the landscape as a vehicle to convey religious
mysticism while Viola uses the elemental power of nature to remind us of our humanity. In Viola, the sublime does not have an upward
inflection: it is not connected with transcendence or the overcoming of the self. Nor does the artist wish to convey the horror of the abyss
the absence of an afterlife as shown in Nantes Triptych communicates to us the reality of our material flesh-and-blood condition: it just
is. In that respect Violas sublime is closer to Newmans sublime, which conveys the impossibility of representation rather than as a way
of attempting to create a dialogue between the phenomena and the noumena.
Notes
1
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. By Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi,
Manchester 1984 [1979], p.79.
2
Paul Crowther, Barnett Newman and the Sublime, Oxford Art Journal, vol.7, no.2, 1984, pp.529, 56.
3
Ibid., p.56.
4
Mark C. Taylor, Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion, London 1992, p.89.

5
Robert Rosenblum, The Abstract Sublime, in Ellen G. Landau (ed.), Reading Abstract Expressionism: Context and Critique, New Haven
and London 2003, pp.2738, 278.
6
This is discussed in Crowther 1984, p.57.

7
New media is an umbrella term that encompasses video art, computer art and in general incorporates the developments of the digital
age into fine art practice.
8
Simon Morley, Introduction, in Simon Morley (ed.), The Sublime, London and Cambridge MA 2010, pp.1221, 13.
9
Viola employs electronic, sound and image technology to create an extensive range of works, such as videotapes, architectonic video
installations, music performances and flat panel video pieces.
10
Barnett Newman encourages this sense of direct participation by removing the frame. This allows for the union of viewer and painting.
11
Chris Townsend, Call me old-fashioned, but..., in Chris Townsend (ed.), The Art of Bill Viola, London 2004, pp.623, 9.
12
Paul Crowther, The Kantian Sublime, Madison 1974, p.99.

13
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Oxford 1990 [1757], part II, 3, p.54.
14
Philip Shaw, The Sublime, London 2006, p.3.

15
Crowther 1984, p.52.

16
35
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sublime Offering, in Jean-Francois Courtine (ed.), Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, trans. by Jeffrey S.
Librett, Albany 1993, pp.4448, 44.
17
See David Jasper, Screening Angels: The Messenger, Durham Cathedral, 1996 and David Morgan, Spirit and Medium, in Townsend
(ed.) 2004, pp.180195, 88109.
18
Interestingly, Newman used religious titles for a similar reason. His titles, Onement, The Beginning, Pagan Void andAdam evoke
sentiments of the sublime.
19
Viola plays up the opposing features of the elements water can give life but can also take it away.
20
Although I suggested that Violas work was not meant to be interpreted as religious art it is possible to argue that if religion is to be read
broadly in the sense of engaging with ones place in the universe and grappling with the meaning of life then his work is broadly
religious/spiritual. However, this does not alter the indubitable fact that there is nothing beyond the flesh. This eschatological reality is
poignantly summed up in Nantes Triptych.
21
Shaw 2006, p.3.

22
Morley 2010, p.18.

23
David Morgan, Secret Wisdom and Self-Effacement: The Spiritual in the Modern Age, in Richard Francis and Sophia Shaw
(ed.), Negotiating Rapture, Chicago 1996, pp.3448, 412.
24
John-Paul Stonard, Viola, Bill, Grove Art Online, Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.
25
Lahey makes a distinction between Violas early works, which he describes as being more conducive to viewers participation, and hence
more interactive, and later work, which relies less on the viewers interventions. Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield, On the Anticipation of
Responsibility, in Townsend (ed.) 2004, pp.7287, 76.
26
Barnett Newman, The Sublime is Now [1948], in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (ed.), Art in Theory 190090, Oxford 1992, pp.572
74, 574.
27
Rosenblum 1961.
28
Maria Antonella Pelizzari, Writing on White Paper, Performing Arts Journal, vol.18, no.3, 1996, pp.205, 24.
29
Ibid., p.20.
30
Lisa Jaye Young, Reviewed work(s): Bill Viola: Fire, Water, Breath, by Bill Viola, Performing Arts Journal, vol.19, 1997, pp.6571, 65.
31
Lori Zippay, Untitled Review, Art Journal, vol.45, no.3, 1985, pp.2639, p.264.
32
Taylor 1992, p.18.

33
Rosenblum, in Landau 2003, pp.2746.

34
Ibid.
35
Young 1997, p.70.
Acknowledgments
A shorter version of this paper was given at the conference on The Contemporary Sublime held at Tate Britain in February 2010,
organised by the AHRC-funded research project The Sublime Object: Nature, Art and Language.
Rina Arya is a Reader in the School of Art and Design at the University of Wolverhampton.
36
4.
The Seventeenth-Century Sublime: Boileau and Poussin

Emma Gilby
The ancient Greek text On the Sublime by the Pseudo-Longinus had a great influence on its seventeenth-century
translator, Nicolas Boileau. Emma Gilby examines its impact on Boileau and others, seeking to explain why some
writers have taken Nicolas Poussin as the sublime painter par excellence.
The poet Anne Carson has described the sublime as a documentary technique. 1 Longinuss treatise On the Sublime (Peri hypsous) is
defined, she writes, by the way he chooses to loot someone elses life or sentences in a constant process of documentation through
quotation:
What is a quote? A quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone elses orange. You suck the slice, toss the rind,
skate away. Part of what you enjoy in a documentary technique is the sense of banditry. To loot someone elses life or sentences and
make off with a point of view, which is called objective because you can make anything into an object by treating it in this way, is
exciting and dangerous. Let us see who controls the danger.2
Here I shall consider Longinuss text, its quotations, their dangers and their significance in the context of French art and literature. My
main focus will be on Nicolas Boileau (16361711), who makes an appearance in most histories of the sublime as the author of an
influential 1674 translation of Peri hypsous, or On the Sublime.
If we are to believe Boileau, the influence of his translation is inversely proportional to the effort he spent on it. He says confidently that
he dashed it off in quelques-unes de mes veilles, or in a few evenings. 3 Even if he did not spend much time on his translation, Boileau
certainly understood its importance: when he came to publish his collected works, he singled out the treatise for particular attention,
giving his work the title OEuvres diverses, avec le Trait du Sublime ou du merveilleux dans le discours, traduit du grec de Longin.
Boileaus preoccupation with Longinus stamps itself upon the volume.
Boileau states in his introduction to the OEuvres diverses, in a further display of self-confidence, that the treatise had been properly
understood only by un trs petit nombre de savants (by a very small number of scholars). 4 In fact, Longinuss treatise had been fairly
widely distributed in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. From about 1554, the Peri hypsous had been published and
paraphrased and commented upon, in various Greek and Latin editions, in the early-modern republic of letters. There had also been an
Italian translation in 1575, and an English translation in 1652, brought out by John Hall of Oxford. 5 An anonymous manuscript translation
was completed in the middle decades of the seventeenth century.6 We know from seventeenth-century catalogues of the most
prestigious French libraries that several copies of Longinus were available in each.
What Boileau is getting at with his comment that nobody had really understood Longinus is a confusion of the Longinian sublime with a
discussion of sublime style. In the tradition of Ciceros or Quintilians rhetoric of stylistic gradation, the sublime style is characterised by
complex figurative language, and thereby contrasted with the mediocre and the low styles. 7 The Longinian sublime is not to be
associated with this fancy figurative language; indeed, it is sometimes identified with the simplest of words. Boileau dismisses those who
chercheront le Sublime dans le Sublime (who look for the sublime in the sublime), meaning by this tautological expression that one
should not look for the Longinian kind of sublime in the sublime style. 8 So what is this Longinian kind of sublimity? Boileau defines it as
cet extraordinaire et ce merveilleux qui frape dans le discours, et qui fait quun ouvrage enleve, ravit, transporte (the extraordinary and
the marvellous which can strike us in discourse, making a work lift us up, ravish us, transport us). 9 The sublime is the well
communicated. It is a je ne sais quoi quon peut beaucoup mieux sentir que dire (a je ne sais quoi that it is easier to feel than speak
about).10 Some of the language we come across, by reading other people or by listening to them, transports us. It can seem to
anticipate an intimacy with us or to require a response from us; it occupies us and involves us. So sublimity here is tied to discourse,
language. We are dealing with what some later commentators have referred to as the rhetorical sublime. 11
Longinuss overwhelming preoccupation, described beautifully by Boileau in one of his reflections on the sublime, is with la petitesse
energique des paroles (the energetic smallness of words).12 Energy always carries a sense of transference: it has to be transferred,
reassigned as work done to or upon another person or object, or else it is lost as entropy. Longinian sublimity carries this sense of
transference too. The sublime of the treatises title is always an encounter. In Boileaus reading of Longinus, language is sublime when
it gives us, as readers or listeners, such a deep understanding of what its author communicates that the words seem somehow to have
come from within ourselves. So, for Boileau, Longinus raises the absorbing matter of self-absorption: how we can be met in a moment of
communication, and how this leaves us to view ourselves and the world around us in a new light.
Longinuss paraphrases of sublime experience, as these comments already suggest, show that moment to be related to the intellectual
structures of its participants authors, readers, speakers, listeners as well as to the language they use. There is a complex
relationship between the world described in a sublime text, the words used to describe it by an author, and the minds which receive it.
37
Longinus therefore quotes constantly. He gives many examples of texts which have affected him powerfully, in the interests of analysing
what makes them work on him in this way. One important example he gives is a version of the passage near the beginning of Genesis
generally known as the Fiat Lux: God said what? let there be light, and there was light, let there be earth, and there was
earth.13 This passage, so Longinuss theory goes, gives the reader an absolute and immediate understanding of the qualities of the
divine being conceived and portrayed by the author. Thus, the utterance is not just great, noble or elevated (although it may be seen to
be all of these things too). It is sublime: characterised by hypsous or sublimity because of its authors successful communication. The
fact that the Christian Gods power is communicated in the Fiat Lux (or that the communicator is inspired by God) is secondary here (the
analogy in Peri hypsous is with Homers depiction of Poseidon, Longinus, 9.8). Furthermore, the association of sublimity and divinity can
be overstated in discussions of Peri hypsous: Longinus spends a lot more time discussing Sapphos glimpse of another woman, for
instance, than he does on God. We understand with this example, though, that simple, everyday language can produce the revelatory,
transformative experiences with which Longinus is concerned.
Another fertile source of Longinuss examples comes with Homers recounting of lives threatened in battle or at sea. In theIliad Homer
himself seems to enter into the fray at Troy: The battle is blown along by the force of Homers writing, and he himself [says Longinus,
quoting the Iliad] stormily raves, as the spear-wielding War-god, or Fire, the destroyer (Longinus, 9.11). 14 In a further example taken
from the Iliad in 10.6, Homer has tortured his language into conformity with the impending disaster, magnificently figured the disaster by
the compression of his language, and almost stamped on the diction the precise form of the danger. Syntagms (grammatical structures)
and synapses (the structures of the brain) spark off each other in Longinuss analysis of Homers text. Both author and reader seem to
participate in the storm. Euripides similarly seems to join Phaethon in his chariot (Would you not say that the writers soul is aboard the
car, and takes wing to share the horses peril? [Longinus, 15.4]). To write sublimely about heroic adventure, then, an author must seem
to participate fully in the dangers portrayed in his or her text.
As an aside, we might note that there are intermittent faults which would cause the sublime to short-circuit. Authorial defects which would
prevent a sublime moment taking place include the spectre of plenitude that is bombast or tumidity: tumours, we are told, are bad
things whether in books or bodies (Longinus, 3.3). They include puerility: the exact opposite of grandeur, an idea born in the
classroom, whose over-elaboration ends in frigid failure (Longinus, 3.4). And they include false sentiment (what Theodorus used to call
the pseudo-bacchanalian): emotion misplaced and pointless where none is needed, or unrestrained where restraint is required (Iliad,
3.5). The refrain which Longinus modulates with these examples points to sublimity as the experience of encounter: as an interpersonal,
transactional moment. The sublime cannot survive indifference catalysed by boredom or confusion.
If the sublime pertains to discourse, one can nonetheless find powerful analogies for the experience of being moved by words. One such
analogy might be the way that natural phenomena can affect us; another might be music. In chapter 35, Longinus contrasts small
streams, clear and useful as they are with the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine and above all the Ocean, and the little fire we kindle for
ourselves with the craters of Etna in eruption (Longinus, 35.4). But his point here merely concerns the force of the unusual: On all such
matters I would say only this, that what is useful or necessary is easily obtained by man; it is always the unusual which wins our wonder
(my emphases, Longinus, 35.4). Music and powerful natural phenomena are analogies for, rather than examples of, the sublime, which
pertains to discourse (discourse can itself make forceful or sublime use of metaphors and analogies sourced from the natural world).
These references to grandeur in nature furnish an authority in Longinuss text itself for later theories that find instances of the sublime in
the natural world.15They also facilitate a school of criticism that sees Nicolas Poussins landscapes, and his depictions of tempests,
floods and storms, as sublime, as I shall discuss in more detail later.
Longinus, though, writes about words. He cites and he writes about citing. This is significant in the context of the intellectual output of the
French seventeenth century, which came to be characterised by what was called a nouvelle methode de raisonner 16 a new way of
reasoning according to which each individual should come to self-evident conclusions about the world around them, by starting with
clear and distinct ideas that they have deduced for themselves. We are moving in the area here of Descartes and his theory of mind, and
the emergence of ideas of the individual conscious subject. To subordinate oneself to the thoughts of others is to devalue the reasoning
self which should be conscious of its own functioning. Quotation should be rejected as a mode of utterance. Cartesian thought stands for
critical independence; the whole notion of quoting other people is an outmoded way of thinking. Longinus stands for everything bad
about Ancient thinking: his treatise is unruly, fragmentary, contradictory, complex.
One of the most important ways in which Longinuss treatise relates to seventeenth-century thought is in its contribution to the episode in
literary history known as the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns. The two chief participants in the quarrel were Boileau and his
contemporary Charles Perrault. The latter set things off with a reading of his poem, Le Sicle de Louis le Grand (The Century of Louis
the Great), at the Acadmie franaise. Charles Perrault, unlike Boileau, was a Modern. He contended that Moderns were superior to
Ancients in most respects because they had the benefit of standing on the shoulders of their predecessors. He espoused a Modern
model of a progressively linear development culminating in the seventeenth century of Louis le Grand. The Ancients are seen by the
Moderns as demanding a return to the classics, and as tracing out a trajectory, in their reading and thinking, which is more or less
cyclical: a continuous movement from the present to the past and back again. Homer in particular the source of many of Longinuss
examples of the sublime, as we have seen could not simply be venerated without criticism because he contained many defects and
38
had been improved upon in subsequent French literature. The quarrel was played out in writing, too, with the publication of
Perraults Parallel of the Ancients and the Moderns and of Boileaus Critical Reflections on Some Passages from Longinus.17
One of Charles Perraults chief criticisms contains Homers use of metaphor, as we see from Boileaus seventh critical reflection.
Homers metaphors are too stretched, the distance between the two points of the comparison too great. Think of Homers comparison as
a dress, says Perrault: the train of the dress is too long. But then he modifies the terms of his criticism. It is not the length of the train that
is the problem (a princess, he admits, would have a very long train on her dress); it is that the train of the dress is made from a different
fabric from that of the dress itself. The two points of Homers comparison are made of entirely different material. Perrault is comparing
metaphors to dresses. Quel rapport, asks Boileau in response, ont les comparaisons des princesses? 18 What have comparisons got
to do with princesses, and what does metaphor have to do with fashion design? Perrault is doing exactly what he accuses Homer of
doing: he is making extravagant comparisons. In any case, says Boileau (who is wondering why he is having the conversation in the first
place), fashions are so fickle that one could certainly imagine a day when it might be highly desirable to have a dress with a train made
from a different fabric from that of the body. Boileau succeeds impatiently in making Perrault look ridiculous; and he succeeds in turning
Perraults own accusations (a lack of understanding of rhetoric in Homer) against him. The point is that Perrault aims to circumscribe the
domain of rhetoric, to bring to bear rules and regulations. But successful, powerful, moving rhetoric goes beyond rhetorical rules and
regulations, as Longinus tells us. One cannot fix metaphor, just as one cannot fix the sublime, within a single frame of reference or
regulation. Longinuss documentary technique does not just tell us about the sublime; he shows us with his examples. Boileaus criticism
of Perrault is not just that the latter fails at classical scholarship, but that his pedantic discourse makes him incapable of understanding
the sublime. His censorious, rule-bound attitude cannot cope with the ineffability of the sublime.
Accompanying a discourse of clear and distinct ideas, explanation, and rationalism, we find in the French seventeenth century a
discourse of ineffability, of affect, of the sublime. This has been of interest to those literary and historical critics who have sought to
redefine a classicism which had been associated only with Aristotelian method and the paradigms of axiomatic thinking, as it was for
example in Ren Brays La Formation de la doctrine classique of 1927. Classicism comprises exaltation as well as explanation,
transcendance as well as rationalism. It embraces a preoccupation with what can be felt as well as a preoccupation with the paradigms
of axiomatic thinking. Emotive effort and the entire related semantic field of the inexpressible, the ineffable, the intuitive, the affective and
so on can be integrated into critical accounts of classical literature. 19
As a result of the way that the inexplicable and affective clash with the attempt to explain and rationalise these, the seventeenth-century
work I have been discussing can be integrated into a long line of criticism on the sublime. This conceptual clash, so important in the
seventeenth century and in the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, might be seen to be of interest in relation to Kants work, when
he looks at the aesthetic consequences of the interplay between our sensory reception of formless and limitless phenomena in the
natural world and our rational comprehension of these. 20 It might similarly be juxtaposed with the thinking of the modern philosopher
Lyotard, who, in his writing on the avant-garde, makes the sublime a sentiment, a sensation of shock upon being confronted with an art
object (such as the paintings of the American artist Barnett Newman) that neither bends itself to models nor testifies to reality.21 In
thinking about the sublime, sentiment clashes with the adequacy of discourse to that sentiment, which makes the subject particularly
attractive to the poststructural discourse of representation and semiology. The term sublime itself, in as much as it refers to an affective
moment, is a citation of impossibility, reminding us of the shortfalls and rootless repetitions of a language which aims to evaluate or
symbolise: The Longinian sublime is [...] an event, a force of enunciation as coming to act, which, as such, can never be represented,
was never present, because of the blinding force of its effect, which acts as a dissimulation or a withdrawal. 22Paul de Man, writing on
Kant, succinctly has the sublime determined by linguistic structures which are not within the authors control. 23 This clash between
experience, vision, choice on the one hand and the constrictions of language and society on the other haunts poststructural concerns
with representation.24
For the key poststructuralist critic Louis Marin, what is of interest in Boileaus reference, cited earlier, to a je ne scay quoy quon peut
beaucoup mieux sentir que dire (a je ne sais quoi that it is easier to feel than speak about) 25 is precisely the writers inability to
describe sublime affect in terms other than the irretrievably periphrastic. 26 The je ne sais quoi, emblematic of sublime experience, can
only therefore be read in its literal sense: that which cannot be known. Sublimity can never transcend, but only repeat and sustain,
scepticism. Sublimity as sublimity is a je ne sais quoi; sublimity as scepticism is an I dont know. Boileaus interest in sublimity reveals
a knowing kind of alienation, an awareness of the inadequacy of discourse.
For Marin, the sublime painter par excellence is Nicolas Poussin (15941665). There are two reasons for this. The first is the subject
matter of his work: Poussin is particularly talented at portraying the storms and the tempests which provide Longinus with an analogy for
sublime experience and which become, in later theories of sublimity, the catalyst for that experience. 27The second reason for Marins
interest in Poussin is that the latter is a philosopher-artist whose writing about painting, says Marin, successfully questions the limits of
representation. As Poussin writes in a 1651 letter, Jai essay de reprsenter une tempte sur terre, imitant le mieux que jai pu leffet
dun vent impetueux, dun air rempli dobscurit, de pluie, declairs et de foudres qui tombent en plusieurs endroits (I tried to portray a
tempest, and I imitated the best I could the effects of a sudden, headlong wind, a darkened sky, rain, lightning and thunder striking the
earth).28 Poussins obsession is with representing the unrepresentable. Take his Les Bergers dArcadie, a painting which Marin
39
analyses extensively. The shepherds of the title gather around a simple tombstone inscribed with the words Et in Arcadia ego (Even in
Arcadia, I exist). The tombstone represents death and utopia which are, of course, never available to lived human experience in any
form other than symbolic representations.29 Poussins display of the tomb and its inscription draws attention to the way that death and
utopia are only perceptible to us in the form of the signs that represent them. He paints the process of representation itself. Thus,
Poussins paintings are sublime, according to Marin, but his writing about them further sublimes his paintings by theorising in ways
which chime with the concerns of Longinus.
The critical focus on death and utopia in this poststructural discourse of the representation of unrepresentability omits a sense, crucial in
Longinus, that the sublime has its origin and source in the myriad details of everyday life. For Longinus, theOdyssey is less sublime than
the Iliad, because, in this later text, no longer does [Homer] preserve the sustained energy of the great Iliad lays, the consistent
sublimity which never sinks into flatness, the flood of moving incidents in quick succession, the versatile rapidity and actuality, dense with
images drawn from real life (Longinus, 9.13). Longinuss treatise, as Anne Carson points out with her reference to its documentary
technique, is dense with images drawn from real life. The dangers at sea are fairly banal for a sailor; Sapphos subject is just a woman
in conversation with a man. Poussins floods and storms are populated: these too deal not just in the ineffability of the storm or the
landscape but also in the lives lived within them. (What are these miniature figures in Poussin about? asks T.J. Clark in The Sight of
Death. Why do they come and go in perception? Why, once seen, do they matter so much? 30). Poussin tackles versatile rapidity and
actuality. We might in some senses be taken out of our world in the ineffability of the sublime moment, but we are also forced to grapple
with action and interaction. As Longinus, Poussin and Boileau all teach us, the je ne sais quoi of the sublime makes us view the world
afresh.
Notes
1
Anne Carson, (Essay with Rhapsody): On the Sublime in Longinus and Antonioni, in Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera, New York
2005, p.45.
2
Ibid.
3
Trait du sublime ou du merveilleux dans le discours, traduit du grec de Longin, in Boileau, OEuvres compltes, ed. Antoine Adam and
Franoise Escal, Paris 1966, p.336. Page references to this edition are cited in brackets. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my
own.
4
Ibid.
5
See the introduction to Emma Gilby, Sublime Worlds: Early Modern French Literature, London 2005.
6
See Emma Gilby (ed.), Pseudo-Longin, De la sublimit du discours, LAct Mem: Chambry 2007.
7
The genera dicendi were formulated notably in the Ad Herennium, in Ciceros Orator, and in Quintilians Institutio oratoria. On this,
see Longinus On the Sublime, ed. D. A. Russell, Oxford 1964, pp.xxxivxxxvii.
8
Boileau, Trait du sublime, p.337.

9
Ibid., p.338.
10
Ibid., p.1.
11
We can begin with the hypothesis that the encounter with literary greatness the so-called rhetorical sublime is structurally cognate
with the transcendence, gentle or terrible, excited in the encounter with landscape, the natural sublime. Thomas Weiskel, The
Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence, Baltimore 1976, p.11.
12

13
On the Sublime, 9.9. References in English will be to that edition of Longinus in which the translation of W. Hamilton Fyfe is revised by
Donald Russell: Aristotle, Poetics, Longinus,On the Sublime, Demetrius, On Style, Loeb Classical Library, 199, Cambridge, Mass.
1995.
14
40
The reference is to the Iliad, book 15, line 605.

15
This is the case although, as Kerslake notes, if we pay strict attention to what the treatise says, we realise that Longinuss own position
does not accord with such an interpretation (Lawrence Kerslake, Longinus, in Essays on the Sublime: Analyses of French Writings on
the Sublime from Boileau to La Harpe, Berne 2000, p.39).
16
M. de Fontenelle, Digression sur les Anciens et les Modernes, in OEuvres compltes, ed. by Alain Niderst, 7 vols., Paris 198996, ii
(1991), p.420.
17
Charles Perrault, Parallle des anciens et des modernes en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences, 4 vols., Paris 169297;
Boileau, Rflexions critiques sur quelques passages du rheteur Longin, o, par occasion, on rpond quelques objections de Monsieur
P*** contre Homre et contre Pindare in OEuvres compltes, pp.493563.
18

19
See for instance Paul Bnichou, Les Morales du grand sicle, Paris 1948.For a more recent article, see Gilles Declercq, Topique de
lineffable dans lesthtique classique (rhtorique et sublime), XVIIe sicle, no.207, AprilJune 2000, pp.199220.
20
Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, tr. John T. Goldthwait Berkeley 1991, first published 1757,
and book II of the Critique of Judgement, trans. by James Creed Meredith, Oxford 1991, first published 1790.
21
LInstant, Newman, in LInhumain: causeries sur le temps, Paris 1988, pp.8999.

22
Suzanne Guerlac, The Impersonal Sublime: Hugo, Baudelaire, Lautramont, Stanford 1990, p.194.
23
Paul de Man, Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant, in H.J. Silverman and G. E. Aylesworth (eds.), The Textual Sublime and its
Differences, Albany 1990, p.105. See Richard Scholar, The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe: Encounters with a Certain
Something, Oxford 2005, p.11.
24
This has had the side effect of sublimity being deflated as a moribund aesthetic: In contemporary criticism and the general
development of structuralist thinking we are instructed how little, really, of our creations belong to individual vision and choice. It is
against this sense of an increasingly constricted and structured world that the ideology of the sublime looms up retrospectively as a
moribund aesthetic. Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime, p.6.
25

26
Louis Marin, Le Sublime dans les annes 1670: Un je ne sais quoi?, in Sublime Poussin, Paris 1995, pp.20922 (first published
in Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature,25, 1986, pp.185).
27
See also Cllia Nau, Le Temps du sublime: Longin et le paysage poussinien, Rennes 2005, p.314: Le classicisme pouvait trouver
sallier avec le sublime, quelle que conflictuelle que soit cette alliance, quel que problmatique soit cet appariement. Ce dont loeuvre de
Poussin est la plus parfaite illustration. Il y a chez lui une aspiration lordre, la mesure, la raison (au sens du logos grec), qui fait de
lui un classique. Mais il y a aussi, simultanment, et pourrait-on dire, contradictoirement, chez lui une fascination pour le dsordre.
28
Quoted in La Description du tableau et le sublime en peinture: A propos dun paysage de Poussin et de son sujet, inSublime Poussin,
p.73.
29
See also Timothy Murray, Et in Arcadia Video: Poussin, The Image of Culture with Marin and Kuntzel in MLN (112.3), German Issue,
April 1997, pp.43153.
30
T.J. Clarke, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing,Newhaven: Yale University Press, 2006, p.45.
41
5.
Psychosis and the Sublime in American Art: Rothko

and Smithson
Timothy D. Martin
The sublime, seen in the context of the writings of the philosopher Kant and
the psychoanalyst Lacan, can have a psychotic aspect. Timothy D. Martin
explores the common features of sublime aesthetic experience and psychotic
delusion, looking at the work of the artists Mark Rothko and Robert
Smithson.
Rothko
It is often, if somewhat crudely, proposed that American postmodern culture is, or was, a
culture of ethical and aesthetic relativity in which master narratives or hard and fast moral
rules broke down. If this is put in Kants terms of moral reasoning then post-modernism may
be regarded as an age of hypothetical imperatives. If you want x then practical reasoning is
employed to calculate the means, y, the formula for which may be expressed thus: If you
want x then you must do y. Kant, of course, thought very little of this type of instrumental
moral reasoning. In this comparison with Kant, clichd as it is in part, American modernism
appears as an age of the categorical imperative, you must do x. Regardless of personal gain
or loss, one must do x.
It is generally accepted that American modernism had principles that came from within, that
is, from the demands of reason itself. These demands were meant to be unconditional, even if
they conflicted with the artistic challenge of implementing them in the real world.1 We all
know the stories of the honourable struggles of the abstract expressionists, and the way these
artists set aside personal gain for the moral high ground of a truly modernist painting. As the
painter Mark Rothko (19031970) put it, Truth must strip itself of self, which can be very
deceptive.2
The idea that I would like to explore here is that Rothko and many of his colleagues adhered
to a proto-sublime categorical imperative in their views about painting, and that they adhered
to this idea sometimes right to the psychotic bitter end. Before saying why this bitter end
might be called psychotic, I would like to start by saying a little more about why this
categorical imperative might be called sublime. For this I would like to turn, somewhat
unusually, to Kants early work on moral reasoning,Groundwork of the Metaphysics of
Morals (1785). Here Kant argued that wilful adherence to a categorical imperative marked the
beginning of proper ethical judgement because such adherence comes from the part of the self
that is autonomous, super-sensible and rational. One cannot hit the high road to the sublime
by starting from that other part of the self, the part that lives in the phenomena of direct bodily
experience and self-interest, otherwise known as the will to enjoy. The practical morality of
the hypothetical imperative lacks the capacity to become sublime, not just because it allows
considerations of personal interest to intervene in judgement, but because such piecemeal
moral rules quickly run into mutual contradiction. The categorical imperative, on the other
hand, has the capacity to become sublime because it touches on the principle of free action.
Boiled down to a maxim, any true moral judgement only has validity if it is universally and
necessarily binding upon us. As Kant put it, Act on the maxim which can at the same time be
made a universal law.3
42
I should like to suggest that it was the influential art critic Clement Greenberg (190994) in
his devoted insistence on Kantian aesthetics and medium specificity that provided American
modernist painting with its explicit categorical imperative (Greenberg called it immanent
criticism) in his essay Modernist Painting (1960).4 We know the maxim so well today that
it seems little more than a toy: that the medium of painting was the art that dealt with a
tension between flatness and depth. This maxim was, in effect, the universal explicit law, the
principle to which all American modernist painters had to adhere in order to warrant the
name. The modernist pursuit of pure abstract form was envisioned as a pursuit that was
compelled by the principle of painting (its internal categorical imperative of flatness and
depth) and this imperative was meant to cleanse the pursuit of painting of any personal or
pathological elements. In America there was a general turn away from surrealist practices
over the course of the 1940s because of their dependence on personal unconscious content.
The move toward abstraction was partly a move to avoid the personal, subjective and
pathological. But this shift from the hypothetical to the categorical ultimately stages Rothkos
encounter with a psychotic bitter end.
If Kants work on moral reasoning refigured European enlightenment ethics and American
modernist art criticism, by Greenbergs day it also had to contend with psychoanalytic work
on the Oedipus complex and the superego, work that Rothko and the artist Robert Smithson
(19381973) knew well. This work drew analytic attention to the fact that the command of
reason as lodged in its maxims was always accompanied by an imaginary figure. Indeed, even
Kant recognised Freuds basic point when he says that, in the subjects sublime assent to
universal law there is always an indeterminate relationship between the faculties of the
imagination and of reason. It is in this register of the imagination that Freud sees the
function of the superego.
For Freud, the law of reason resounded with the superego, and, taking into account the
Lacanian cultural critic Slavoj ieksSublime Object of Ideology (1989), Rothko and
Smithson should perhaps be seen in the context of a century that was deeply marked by the
problem of the superego and its all too often tyrannical function in ideology. The battle of
ideological imperatives, fascism and communism in its command of duty to the fatherland or
to the proletariat, barely masked a battle of superegos. Rothko in the 1940s, and the much
younger Smithson in the 1950s, were very much concerned with psychoanalytic texts by Carl
Jung, and these as well as other texts raised for them the problem of the superego, where
something in the function of the paternal metaphor that should bind society to just laws
instead breaks out in such a way that it takes command of the body politic in a vast spectacle
of carnage and savage enjoyment.5
The Rothko catalogue is interesting here. In the early 1940s Rothko was fond of the painter
Adolph Gottlieb the latters endorsement of the Jungian conception of painting as a medium
for clarifying and unifying discordant archetypes within the subject. In reading Jung, Gottlieb
turned a therapeutic practice for the treatment of schizophrenia into a form of self-exploration
for the neurotic by making painting into an archaeological dig into childhood experiences and
personal inner conflicts, thereby raising such experiences to the level of historical myth.
Throughout the 1940s Rothko, tired of such self-expression, progressively abandoned the
Jungian and surrealist project of revitalising historical mythology. In its stead, abstract
painting, he thought, held out the promise of new types of spaces, tensions and limits as a
means of communicating an I that was thought of at the time to be fundamentally prelinguistic or, more specifically, pre-narrative. Rothkos friendship with the abstract painter
Clyfford Still marks the beginning of this shift. Rothko once said that Still was creating new
counterparts to replace the old mythological hybrids who have lost their pertinence in the
intervening centuries.6 The new counterparts were flatness and depth as played out in purely
abstract painting. This was a way of painting that required no objects in a narrative, no story
43
in the sense of a symbolic with its historical reservoir of mythological beings and laws.
Abstraction offered a way to paint an underlying categorical level of what Rothko called the
Spirit of Myth.
Rothkos literary preference at the time was Nietzsches Birth of Tragedy (1872) with its
sense of a subject that has abandoned all historical forms of myth for a new historical subject
that is engaged in a pre-narrative conflict. Rothko cites Nietzsche to provide a way to
verbalise his sense of modern tragedy. A little later Greenberg starts to call on Kant and the
sublime. Rothko also occasionally put his project in more Jungian terms. If surrealism gained
access to the domain of the Jungian archetypes, abstraction gained entry to the Who or the
Thing that guarantees this domain of metaphors, the Spirit of Myth itself. In his pursuit of
subjective stability and coherence Rothko follows Clyfford Still by trying to paint directly in
the flatness of reality a little fragment, a metonym, or little piece of the Thing. In Lacanian
terms Rothko attempts to paint the Other of the Symbolic, the radical unconscious alterity in
mythopoetic language, or what Freud would term the superego behind the law. This is how
Rothkos biographer James Breslin described it:
Rothko ... constantly felt the imminent danger of being smothered by encroaching physical,
social, or domestic circumstances. His new paintings created a breathing space. Yet these
paintings do not seek simply to transcend the walls of an unalterable external reality by
soaring upward into either an untrammelled freedom or a vaporous mysticism. Rather, by (in
Rothkos words) pulverising the verge of dissolution his works free us from the weight,
solidity, and definition of a material existence, whose constricting pressures we still feel.
Rothko combines freedom and constraint and if these paintings create dramas with the
shapes as the performers they stage a struggle to be free.7
The subject makes a powerful pulverising rational response; he conjures the Thing itself.
Rothko does not blithely apply the maxim of flatness and depth. Instead, he invents the ethical
grounds on which the maxim is necessary. It is the way to turn flat materiality into the deep
ethical dignity of a Thing that can resist the powerful smothering Other that threatens him
with dissolution.
Why does the appearance of the maxim of flatness and depth change the paintings and launch
Rothko from a mild late surrealism to the status of sublime American modernist hero? I would
argue it is because he calls upon his inner sense of a sublime ethical Thing as a defence
against the commands of a sadistic superego agency, an Other that takes pleasure in his
dissolution as a subject, that takes away his enjoyment with its irrational contingent demands.
Mark Rothko 19031970

44
Light Red Over Black 1957

Oil paint on canvas
support: 2306 x 1527 x 38 mm
Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 1998
Purchased 1959
Tate T00275
T00275
Fig.1
Mark Rothko
Light Red Over Black 1957
But this is not exactly what happens. The tension between flatness and depth leads to an
ambiguous space where, as Breslin puts it, shapes cannot be firmly bound, easily located, or
securely identified(fig.1).8 In one sense Rothko is in the very zone that Kant marked out,
where the rational and the imaginary cannot be distinguished. But this goes beyond Kant into
psychoanalysis, and Rothko is able to see a third term emerge, one that presses in from the
Real itself. Behind the ethical Thing lies a deep ground, a pure drive; desire itself as a demand
that has not been caught up in the dialectic of flatness and depth.
This third term begins to emerge in the mid 1950s, just at the time that Greenberg was writing
favourably about Rothko and about the imperative of formal purity; just at the time that
Rothko was painting the Seagram Murals. Having started slowly, Rothko was then the living
father figure of an American modernist painting. Setting Nietzsche aside and reading
Kierkegaards Fear and Trembling (1843), Rothko began to openly identify with the Old
Testament prophet Abraham. His willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac was more than the
neurotics struggle of internalised oedipal conflict: it was a merging of his will with the will of
God even to the point of absurdity. Abraham is able to pass to the act because of his
possession of anabsolute imperative of divine will. In a pure battle of wills against the
superego Other, Abraham steps beyond universal law; he calls on the power of God, a God
whose drive is not pathological, a God who halts Abrahams arm as it thrusts the knife. As a
subject, Abraham is beyond the ethics of reality at this point and fully in the Real; and so it
may have worked for Rothko. Certainly Rothko reported that his reading of Kierkegaard on
Abraham filled him with a particular sense of I, saying, Kierkegaard has that passion for the
I, for that I experience, like Abraham in his Fear and Trembling. It is the I that I myself
experience everyday.9
Taking Abraham as a model presents Rothko with a potentially terminal paradox. He is caught
between two clashing enjoying substances that exist beyond all subjectivity. Although he
starts with the categorical imperative here the expression of pure form as a way of
avoiding the pathological superego, he ends up putting the traits of his subjectivity at risk. By
imitating Abraham in this way what emerges is precisely another un-subjectified and unsubjectifiable form of enjoyment, but this second substance emerges directly from the Real.
Thus, the quest for form purified of all pathology ends up with the pure expression of a
pathology.
Why, in Freudian terms, is Rothko in psychotic territory? Because the appeal of this will of
the God of Abraham, this absolute imperative to the id is so strong as to distort the ego and its
sense of reality. There is a loss of reality because the ego is so overcome by the id that it is
torn away from the external world. Rothkos route to the Kantian sublime did not lead by
neurosis and its problem of repressed wishes created by the law. Rather it led towards a
psychosis, an encounter with the openly unmitigated enjoyment of the mythical Other, the
pure presence of the Other. It is not just an encounter with a smothering overbearing superego
that emerges out of the depths of the Others imperatives, but also the pure drive of his own
45
imperative. In the end Rothko cannot win but at least he can die in the studio with his boots
on. The route to the sublime ends here in his last ethical act. He dies at the hands of the blind
enjoyment of his Other.
Smithson
Robert Smithson in his studio, New York c.1960

Estate of Robert Smithson
Fig.2
Robert Smithson in his studio, New York c.1960
Estate of Robert Smithson
In the decade or so before Rothkos death his way of doing art became widely admired by
younger artists such as Robert Smithson. In the mid 1950s at the age of sixteen Smithson
started attending the Art Students League in New York, a teenage refuge from the stifling
small town culture of nearby Passaic New Jersey. In a studio photograph he commissioned in
1961 just before his first one-man show he presents what he knows about himself: poised in
the middle of his dialectic of desire he, too, was a captive of a battle between the blind
enjoyment of two Others (fig.2).
When Robert Smithson came to New York he brought with him an appreciation of the power
of a categorical imperative and for rational thinking partly received from his family history.
As a boy Robert had to deal with the knowledge that he was a replacement child for a brother
who had died slowly and painfully from leukaemia. The need to make sense of this family
inscription was partly filled by his maiden aunt who lived with them, and her cosmological
and theological ruminations.
It would seem that it was Aunt Julia, his second mother as he called her, who posed a
question that came to haunt the young Robert for much of his life: how could God be
considered rational if this kind of death was an instance of his laws? Robert also had to
account for himself in the context that he, too, was being monitored for the symptoms of
leukaemia, he, too, was inscribed in an argument in the Real that threatened his life.
Smithsons appreciation for the way he is inscribed in the cosmos was, in his early years in
New York City, matched by his appreciation of Christian icon painting: both were encouraged
by his reading of modernist poets and critics such as T.S. Eliot and T.E. Hulme, and literature
on Christian mysticism. But even more than Rothko, Smithson was engaged by Jungian selfanalysis.
At the age of twenty-three, as Smithson read this literature, he made a series of paintings for
his first one-man show, held in Rome in August 1961. The presence of the photographer in the
studio just before the show was shipped to Rome allowed him to create a statement, a
photograph that identifies his position between The Ikons of Good and Evil. Two enjoying
substances flank him in this picture: one is an icon of an Aztec god who enjoys eating the
subject, the other is an icon of a crucified Christ. At the time, his letters speak of his wish for
visions of a divine suffering. What he knows through Jung, although not present in the
46
letters, is that he is caught between two archetypes. In one sense he may know that he is
caught between a psychotic option and a neurotic option. The Aztec icon depicts the blind
enjoyment of a brutally powerful god, one that threatens a consummation of his blood that
dissolves him as a subject. The Christ icon shows a god who sacrifices his own blood such
that the subject may know the law of a forgiving god.
I would like to suggest that in another sense he was caught between a sadistic option and a
masochistic option. The Aztec god is sadistic but allows that the subject is granted a magically
infinite body; there is a kind of immortality in being an object of its enjoyment. The Aztec
god imposes a sadistic external necessity that the subject accepts as an objective categorical
imperative; although the subjects desire is humiliated, his body cannot be destroyed lest
enjoyment cease. In the case of the Christian icon, a son accepts his fathers law regardless of
the suffering and humiliation it causes. Christ has to match his desire with the desire of god,
and in this masochism the subject is also granted immortality.
These paintings raise many questions. Does Smithson identify with these gods? Does he
worship them? Or are they statements of what he has come to know through his attempts at
having Jungian visions of an Other place? In the case of the pleasure of this photograph I
think it is the latter case: he uses the photograph to demonstrate what he knows about desire,
not what he desires by way of identification or defence. The clue to this lies in a third painting
seen just above his head on the back wall of the studio. A young sexualised subject lies bound
and receptive as an object of desire. In this photograph he sets up a scene in which he is
framed by two superegos, two Others whose desires both support and bar him from his desire.
This is worth comparing to Rothko. Rothko brought an internal Other in to support him as a
subject in a battle with an external Other that was able to smoother or desubjectify him.
Smithson brings in an object of desire, an ethical Thing, to support him as a subject in a battle
with two Others that could similarly desubjectify him, make him into an object of their blind
enjoyment. These Others could also help him to get his object of enjoyment. He is responsible
for creating the ethical grounds on which these two conflicting maxims are necessary.
One of the books Smithson read at this time was Jungs explanation of historical myths as
expressions of a process of male maturation in which the libido is switched from mother to
wife, a process accomplished by a transformation of childhood archetypal conflicts into a
single unified image of God.10 Jung shows him what Kant also maintained: it is the subject
that must create the ethical ground, must find a Thing to elevate to the ethical status of law.
Unlike Kant, however, Jung does not regard desire as necessarily pathological. There is an
ethics of desire, a truth to desire that would warrant the making of an icon to it. The
painting The Eye of Blood 1961, made several months after the paintings in this photograph,
has many formal similarities to the images of a unified libido that Jung provides in the
illustrations of his book. Jung prompts Smithson to consider his mythical traumatic relations
to two maternal superegos and then establish an ethical regard for his own libido, to maintain
an unhumiliated desire for an object. The painting consists of a bloody spiral composed of red
paint over magazine collage clippings. He arrives at this image in what he describes as a
powerful vision that dispels his demons, and later as a painfully frozen image that leaves him
in a deadlock of his own making. The painting borders on being a Thing in the Real; the
bloody spiral could overwhelm the collaged objects of reality. It comes close to being an
image of the enjoying substance within his own body, and precariously close to an image of
the substance of enjoyment found in his two Others of The Ikons of Good and Evil.
Why consider this as psychosis rather than neurosis or perversion? Smithsons dilemma has a
parallel with Rothko in that for both their enjoyment threatens a desubjectification. More than
a guilt, there is a substantial anxiety that the spiral of blood would erupt in the Real. This is
something that needs a strong reality check, a way to retain the Thing in reality rather than in
47
the Real. For this he needs to answer for himself the question what is the rational law of
blood? Does it answer to his desire, or the desires of the Others, or does it obey the law?
Smithson later married and began what he called his mature work. This work has found its
ethical ground, its law. He has concluded that the rationale of the cosmos is entropy; the
spontaneous dissipation of energy. The law of entropy, third law of thermodynamics, is taken
as the sublime categorical imperative to which all wills must assent. Smithson is Kantian in
his search for the sublime Other of the Other, the law under which even the Other is inscribed.
In his first published essay Entropy and the New Monuments (1966), Smithson presents the
artist as a director of entropy, a maker of monuments to desubjectification. While this has a
morbid side, his own monument to entropy, the sculptureEnantiomorphic Chambers 1964 has
its erotic potential. Why? With the help of an entropic image of the self (what is sometimes
called the barber-shop effect of parallel mirrors that reflect to infinity) one can avoid the
commands of the Others. A certain amount of controlled desubjectification allows a
distinction to be made between the superego and the law, and to see both of them as having a
relation to an enjoying substance somewhere over the horizon of comprehension. In the essay
Smithson cited and praised a range of contemporary artists who made theatrical monuments to
a controlled entropic desubjectification. These sculptures were sublime ethical Things that
could be visited in the world. Similarly, Smithson praises the torpor of desire in Warhols
films and in the formal simplicity of minimalism. The assent to the law of entropy gives
ethical dignity; one is not humiliated by the imaginary Other. And, entropy is free from
Hegelian or Marxist theories of the historical contingency of the law. Entropy is the proof of
the very existence of time itself. He asks his readers to operate on a scale of thought and time
so grand as to raise the question of delusion. Entropy emerges as the rational of the cosmos,
the universal law to which all supersensible beings must assent, and yet it is also a law of
desubjectivication.
Rothko got caught in a psychosis of his own creation and despite the parallels, Smithson does
not. One reason this may be is that Smithson theatricalised psychosis and reason in the same
measure. His success as a writer depended on his ability to tease out what Kant called the
vague space between the imaginary and the rational, in effect creating a theatre of reason and
madness on a single stage of desire. Smithsons stage is inhabited not by specific fantasies but
by the structural elements of fantasy, its impossible objects such as mirrors and vanishing
points. Smithson would engulf everything, an old hotel, a woodshed, the magazine on the
readers lap and even language itself into a Thing participating in the drama of entropy. But in
pushing reality as far as he can into the Real, he always returns empty handed; entropy rules
again and he is thrown out, never having really crossed past reality to a place truly of the
Other.
I would like to suggest then that Rothko and Smithson take on the categorical imperative as it
leads to the Real, but that Smithsons skill, his sentiment de la vie, is to theatricalise the Real;
it is what will make him picturesque. The subject that emerges in the essay has a will to make
of art a theatricalised glimpse of the Real in reality. He provides a tour of the pure faculties of
desire in the cosmos, inhabited over and over by the pure objects of desire, the vanishing
point, the mirror, the horizon line. It is here that he lays his ethical grounds. He understands
the sublime, he knows he has to be the author of the law that constitutes his subjectivity.
This ethic can be seen in Smithsons response to Michel Frieds defence of Rothko and other
abstract painters against the theatricality of minimalism.11 Smithson pointed out that Frieds
attack on theatricality was itself theatrical; it was a question of where one sought to be
theatrical, Is the artist to be theatrical in art or theatrical in the world? The important thing for
Smithson was where the artist sought to make the Thing emerge, and here his assent to a law
in the Real allows an ethical relation to the reality of the world. This is evident, too, in
Smithsons interests in the German phenomenological philosopher Martin Heidegger; man is
48
a being-in-the-world who is subject to entropy. And when Smithson turns to the sciences of
physics and geology, he finds that all matter is headed toward energy loss and stasis in a
crystalline structure. The essay played across a line in a way that appealed to scientists and
artists alike. Was this essay an hallucination about science or science about hallucination?
Robert Smithson
Ithaca Mirror Trail, Ithaca, New York 1969
Mixed media
image (map): 525 x 365 mm image, each (photographs): 510 x 760 mm
Purchased with funds provided by the American Patrons of the Tate Gallery, courtesy of the
Tate American Collectors Forum 2002
The estate of Robert Smithson/VAGA, New York/DACS, London 2006
Fig.3
Robert Smithson
Ithaca Mirror Trail, Ithaca, New York 1969
Purchased with funds provided by the American Patrons of the Tate Gallery, courtesy of the Tate
American Collectors Forum 2002 The estate of Robert Smithson/VAGA, New York/DACS, London
2006
Unlike Rothko, Smithson takes the Thing out in the world, out in reality. The difference can
be seen in a work such as Ithaca Mirror Trails 1969 (fig.3), where he uses the same formal
trope as Rothko, a square shape set against a rectilinear ground, a background with an inner
square that repeats the frame. But Smithson uses a mirror for a square, and the landscape as a
ground.
In this work reality is not indexed by the flat materiality of the canvas support and frame.
Smithson has shifted the frame. Reality is the external world, its material support. Into this he
places the mirror. Anywhere in the world of reality the Real can be seen, conjured, made to
erupt. By repeating this formal trope over and over Smithson gives us the cinematic effect that
iek suggests we use in Rothkos work to see the eruption of the Thing in the Real.
For Rothko the tension between flatness and depth is pursued to the point at which the
abstraction of limits reveals the presence of the Thing, of enjoying substance located at the
heart of the field of the Other and intruding into the subjects experience. The tension between
flatness and depth in Rothkos work becomes an impossible vacillation that collapses with the
approach of the Real. The point with Rothko is that the pure freedom of the categorical
imperative goes in the direction of this without limits, and that for Smithson even this
direction ends with entropy. Entropy is the without limits that need not entirely desubjectivise
the subject. In acting as the universal limit it resubjectivises the subject in the world. It is
worth noting here a remark Smithson made in an interview in 1970 where he proposes that the
49
subject is inscribed as a limit not just in an argument of art or language but in the world: to the
question, When Yves Klein signed the world, would you say that was a way of overcoming
limits?, he responded, No, because then he still has the limits of the world.12
Ithaca Mirror Trails was made and documented as a cinematic encounter of the limits of
reality in the Real, one that leads on to another and another instance with moments of
recuperation of the body in between. For a moment the body is occupied by the Thing and
then it is not; it must be done again and again leading to a truly sublime encounter. The trail
leads somewhere, to a salt mine with a cave, a feminine womb is mentioned from the
mythologies of mining. It is a mine of crystalline salt, a place in reality where all matter has
done its duty to the law of entropy, but here there is no art, no photographs in the
impenetrable darkness, and for good reason: the effect of the Real is lost. The enjoyment of
the Other is non-specular, and rationally not limitless at all. There is only a wonderfully
grainy photograph of him coming out of the cave in the afterthoughts of an encounter with the
drives. He is theatrical in giving us the non-site of the Real and not a bit of a charlatan, as his
aunt Julia used to call him.
If we go back to the photograph of the young Smithson in his studio we see the advance he
has made. The drives are not just in art, they are in the world; revealing them as material
empirical facts of the world strips them of their pathological character. More than this, it
reveals the faculty of desire in man as one and the same faculty in the world. He need not be
humiliated in his desire by these powerful often sado-masochistic drives; he can sit in the
middle with his own natural faculty of desire intact.
Robert Smithson
Spiral Jetty April 1970
Black rock, salt crystals, earth, red water (algae)
3 X 15 X 1500 feet
Estate of Robert Smithson / licensed by VAGA, New York, NY; Collection: DIA Center for
the Arts, New York
Photograph: Gianfranco Gorgoni
Fig.4
Robert Smithson
Spiral Jetty April 1970
Estate of Robert Smithson / licensed by VAGA, New York, NY; Collection: DIA Center for the Arts,
New York Photograph: Gianfranco Gorgoni
The story Smithson presented around the making of the Mirror Trails was a theatricalised
struggle to remain subjectivised even after an exposure to the full force of the drives. Several
months later he found a site on the Great Salt Lake of Utah, a lake so heavily coloured by red
algae that it appears to be a lake of blood. This became the site of his most famous
work,Spiral Jetty1970 (fig.4).
50
Filmed from a helicopter, and with sunstroke threatening his clarity of mind, Smithson walked
along the spiral jetty to its end. This was a carefully orchestrated shot, one that he
diagrammed with the pilot and cameraman such that when he reached the end he appears to
dissolve into the sunlight reflected from the water, reeling in a spiral of blood. The Thing does
not erupt in the Real. If anything, he walks back in reality, tired and reflective, even
depressed. The walk returns his body to him. If Rothko and Smithson had Jung to show them
how to psychoticise their artistic practice, by 1967 Smithson also had Anton Ehrenzweig
(190866), who shows how to formulate an exit strategy. In The Hidden Order of
Art Ehrenzweig used Melanie Kleins concept of a dedifferentiation leading to an
undifferentiation that produces an encounter with the Real, but with a return via a schizodepressive position.13 Smithson had a way out of the psychotic potential of the sublime, a
way back to the picturesque.
In the land reclamation work he undertook in his last years after Spiral Jetty, and in his essay
on Frederick Law Olmsted (designer of Central Park in New York), Smithson showed an
ambition to be an artist-negotiator between man and land, between industrialist and
ecologist, an ambition to turn his practice away from the sublime and to the picturesque. This
phase of work deserves further attention beyond the scope of this paper. But what he proposes
as a negotiator is that a categorical imperative can be both a scientific principle and the real
harbourer of the drives. We would tend to think of the drives as something pathological,
something that is at work only in the hypothetical imperative. Smithsons point will be that it
is when we are most rational that we are also closest to the drives.
Notes
1
Paul Crowther, The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art, Oxford 1989, p.19.
2
Lecture given by Rothko at the Pratt Institute, October 1958, quoted in James E.B.
Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography, Chicago 1993, p.397.
3
Immanuel Kant, The Moral Law: Kants Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans.
H.J. Paton, London 1972, p.98.
4
Clement Greenberg, Modernist Painting (1960), in The Collected Essays and Criticism,
Chicago 1995, vol. 4, p.86.
5
Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s,
New Haven 1993, pp.49120.
6
Breslin, Mark Rothko, p.168.

7
Ibid., p.279.
8
Ibid., p.278.
9
Ibid., p.393.
10
Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation, New York 1952.

11
Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood, Artforum, June 1967, pp.1223; Robert Smithson,
Letter to the Editor, Artforum, October 1967, p.12.
12
51
6.
Suffer a Sea-Change: Turner, Painting, Drowning
Sarah Monks
The artist J.M.W. Turner was able to suggest great depth and gravitational force in his depictions of seawater.
Sarah Monks looks at the ways in which these qualities conveyed new forms of sublime experience.
Set or raised aloft, high up; Rising to a great height, lofty, towering; Exalted; Supreme: by dictionary definition, sublime signifies a
state of elevation through which ascent towards physical or metaphorical heights brings about transcendence. 1 Go, fell the timber of
yon lofty grove, the poet Alexander Pope (16881744) had the Greek author Homer say in The Odyssey, And form a Raft, and build
the rising ship, / Sublime to bear thee oer the gloomy deep. 2 Yet, as these lines suggest, sublime (etymologically perhaps sub limen,
up to a high threshold) always carries with it even if only as trace memory that over which it climbs or floats: the gloomy deep.
Pope quickly turned to this alternative site or state of sub to which sublimity is umbilically attached but from which it had to be
distinguished if transcendent achievement, poetic or otherwise, was to remain clear in an increasingly competitive world. He therefore
set about defining this realm which lay beneath the sublimes aerial firmament, a realm which reaches down into the depths and which is
characterised by both dazzling material riches and mysterious profundities: The Sublime of Nature is the Sky, the Sun, Moon, Stars, &c.
The Profound of Nature is Gold, Pearls, precious Stones, and the Treasures of the Deep, which are [as] inestimable as unknown. In
Popes satirical account (his tongue was firmly in his cheek here), these depths are the imaginary province to which the second-rate
artist seeking wealth and patronage aspires, the decidedly sub par counterpart to those exalted heights of poetic sublimity at which their
more talented and judicious colleagues arrive. Mediocre writers and painters therefore practise (Pope argued) an Art of Sinking, a
descent into that jarring mixture of obscure nonsense and trivial or gaudy allusions which nevertheless seemed to represent poetic depth
to the pretentious. By keeping under Water, the artist could therefore achieve precisely that over which the sublime soared: the Bottom
of his art.3 This is a wholesale revision of the ancient Greek term bathos, whose original reference to depth remains in the technical
terms for deep-sea diving equipment, the ocean bed and its measurement yet whose rhetorical formulation by Pope as a ludicrous
descent from the elevated to the commonplace ... anticlimax is now dominant. 4 Seeking to consolidate an opposition between high
and low, Popes bathos is shot through with its divisive social implications, which find form in the fictive poetic examples among them
the lady who acts like a street hawker and the footman who speaks like a prince with which he illustrates his account. 5
By engaging with the implications of beneath, of the sub- in the sublime, this article sets out to challenge any sense of the sublime as
necessarily already ascendant, as always and easily cut free from its murky remnant. In particular, this article will focus on the ways in
which J.M.W. Turner set about suggesting, to an extent which is unprecedented in the visual representation of water, what it might be to
be beneath beneath the horizon, beneath the water and beneath paint. The broader implications of this submarine state for the forms
of subjectivity at stake in Turners work will be hinted at towards the end but, by way of instructive analogy, I want to begin with a
metropolitan site which was all but given over in the early nineteenth century to the idea that paintings and people speak from the deep,
in a process which seemed to conjure both the sublime and the subliminal.
52
Easter Amusements The Greenwich Pensioners (with biographical details on each) The Illustrated London News 13 April 1844,
p.233
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
Fig.1
Easter Amusements The Greenwich Pensioners (with biographical details on each) The Illustrated London News 13 April 1844, p.233
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
A living museum, Greenwich had become (within a few decades of the battle of Trafalgar) the resting place of national prowess on
the ... ocean, an entire pantheon to a now-past greatness whose human and cultural fragments were placed on conspicuous display in
order that a commercial world be reminded of its moral debts. 6 For the architects of nineteenth-century Greenwichs transformation, all
members of Londons cultural lite, those debts were it should be understood by the sites visitors owed to the political status quo, to
the charismatic leadership naturally possessed by those of rank and to the heartfelt obedience of those who served under them. The
latter could still be found in abundance at Greenwich, old sailors, the pensioned and policed veterans of naval warfare, who when they
were not to be found scattered around Greenwich Hospital like wreckage on the sea bed were employed to serve as the mouthpieces
for this sanctioned vision of the past (fig.1). As guides to the growing collection of portraits and seascapes hung in the nations Naval
Gallery (which covered the walls of the Painted Hall from 1824 onwards), the Pensioners attentive engagement with these art works
was figured as an exemplary lesson in paintings capacity to prompt and restore affective patriotism. As the journalist Henry Clarke put it
in 1842:
Every blue-jacket [that is, every old sailor], may now ... reclaim from oblivion some anecdote of courage or of kindness. An attentive
public, in listening to the unaffected strain, will learn to respect the knowledge displayed, and the generous effusions of a brave mans
heart ... From such observations a candid and judicious artist may learn how to improve his compositions: why some pictures ... fail to
call forth the feelings of an unsophisticated public; whilst ... one of rude aspect, may kindle all the outward expression of deeprooted sympathy.
The impact of such Pensioner soliloquies would therefore be perceived not only in the improved taste ... and in the improved feelings of
that attentive public but also in the output of contemporary artists who, listening to the sailors ekphrastic recovery from oblivion of past
officer-class merit, might learn how to improve his compositions so that they appealed to the better sentiments of plebeian
audiences.7 Moreover, by inhabiting a public exhibition space aimed at the articulation of conservative ideals to an audience of
increasingly and, to some minds, worryingly socially enfranchised urban day-trippers, painting was made to illustrate self-sacrifice in
the name of a greater good. Only then, Clarke claimed, are the arts of peacemade to put forth their best energies to shed their lustre
on the history of a nations bravest sons, and tempt the early germs of enthusiasm to rivalry with past greatness. This is the proper
application of the art of painting.8
That medium appeared at Greenwich as a means of redressing the apparently diminished role of both lite example and popular
heroism in a railway age, as a proactive presence capable of working its magic upon the political and moral sensibilities of its viewers
decades, even centuries, after its own production. 9 For Clarke (and he was merely echoed by the Naval Gallerys other commentators),
paintings proper application was to instantiate a past greatness that might thereby be raised up, resurfacing in the present to powerful
(if reactionary) social and cultural effect.
This sense of paintings ability to transcend the impact of change and the stark temporal difference wrought by modernity referenced the
broader reconception of arts powers which had been elaborated in aesthetic theory since the late eighteenth century. There, art had
increasingly been deemed capable of challenging the distance not only between past and present but also between seeing and
feeling.10 Furthermore, by the time that Clarke put pen to paper in the 1840s, the notion that both painters and their paintings might
have such transformative effects on their viewers had come to be associated in particular with the works of one artist: Turner.
53
Joseph Mallord William Turner 17751851

Fishermen at Sea exhibited 1796
Oil paint on canvas
Purchased 1972
Tate T01585
T01585
Fig.2
Joseph Mallord William Turner
Fishermen at Sea exhibited 1796
In 1796, the year after the Naval Gallery had first been mooted,Fishermen at Sea (fig.2) appeared at the Royal Academy, the first oil
painting to be exhibited by this artist, barely out of his teens. Hung (as was usual for lesser-known painters) in the Academys Ante
Room, Fishermen at Sea shows Turner deploying his works relatively gloomy destination to his own ends by portraying the dazzling
effects of searing moonlight as it emerges through a parting in the clouds to glow upon sea-water. 11 As one reviewer noted, Turner had
used significant artistic licence here to provide his scene with two pools of reflected moonlight rather than one; the overall effect was
enough to draw his viewers in to gaze more closely upon his own public emergence and breakthrough as oil painter. 12 Still almost
unknown, Turner here produced a painting which variously considered by exhibition critics to be the result of empirical observation or a
more theoretical exercise in the laws of light has not its superior within the walls of the Academy. 13 It was not, one critic thought, an
auspicious subject (Moon-lights are trite subjects, he said) but Fishermen at Seaappeared to transcend the restrictions of literal
meaning and cater immediately to its viewers capacity for aesthetic responsiveness. For exhibition critics, this was a picture about how
things dimly seen through the gloom of the night are indistinct and almost undeterminable, and how a boat might be about to be buoyed
up by the undulation of tidal waters.14 Indeed, this painting plays on contrasts of surface and depth just as it plays on the paradox of
simultaneous illumination and obscurity. The seas unseen depths are therefore suggestively alluded to in the foreground study of lights
different effects upon and through water whilst, on the horizon, that water appears now as sheer sparkling surface.
As a sea-piece this picture is effective, declared one critic, in a phrase which explains the works impact on the one hand and damns
with faint praise on the other.15 For this was a genre which seemed to be practised only by artists who had (in the words of another) too
servilely followed the steps of each other, and given us Pictures more like japanned tea-boards, with ships and boats on a smooth and
glassy surface, than adequate representations of that inconstant, boisterous and ever changing element. 16 Only Turner seemed to his
commentators to have recognised the seas redesignation in contemporary culture as a space where, par excellence, transcendent
mastery might be realised, and where the real extent of ones physical, moral and aesthetic responsiveness might be revealed. As
the Naval Chronicle (not a publication ordinarily given to philosophical enquiry) would put it in the 1790s, the sea appeared to its viewers
only as it exists in the mind of the beholder: if he does not possess a soul sufficiently enlarged to feel the sublimity and endless variety of
such a scene, he should daily endeavour to awaken a sense within him, which either the force of habit has closed, or the want of a
discriminating taste has never called forth.17
Through such statements (and students of literary romanticism will know they are not hard to find during this period), the sea was
emphatically assigned the status of testing ground for a self able to convert the world into indicative sensual experience. At once deeply
material and dematerialised, both boisterous element and something existing in the mind of the beholder, the seas depiction
presented Turner with distinct challenges, among which was the potential capacity of one possessed with genius and judgment to
revive a moribund pictorial genre as the grounds for an effective art of aesthetic invention and experiment.
54

The Shipwreck exhibited 1805
Oil paint on canvas
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Tate N00476
N00476
Fig.3
The Shipwreck exhibited 1805
An analysis of Turners long engagement with these challenges, which lasted into his final years, would more than challenge the
boundaries of this article. Certainly, we can find repeated evidence for his radically three-dimensional conception of the painted
seascape as implying X, Y and Z co-ordinates, in images which push the planar significance of the genres conventional elements (see,
for example, fig.3). To an unprecedented degree, foreground buoys are highlighted in his seascapes (in the images and their
titles);18 ships tip towards us, capsized and sinking; men at sea appear to reach down into water to grab ropes, nets, bodies and
oranges,19 or row away from us in boats bearing the anchors with which ships will be secured to the seabed. 20 Elsewhere, anchors and
mooring rings rest on shorelines between tidal waters and solid ground, where fish from the sea are laid out, filleted and
consumed.21 This emphasis upon flotation and the possibility of descent towards a deeper ground serves not only to describe the sea
as a gravitational body which both holds up and pulls down but also to draw our attention to the relation between surface and depth in a
manner with metaphorical implications for the relationship between painting and the painter. Thus, while George Beaumonts comment
about Turners Calais Pier 1803 (National Gallery, London) that the water is like the veins on a marble slab seems to describe the
almost sculptural treatment of this element, that treatment nevertheless contains a pointed emphasis upon the white foam that salt water
produces in its own wake, the sea serving not only to buoy up a human world but also as a surface upon which rough, involuntary and
inchoate pattern is produced from somewhere beneath, in a manner analogous to the sketchbook and canvas of the modern responsive
artist.

Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth exhibited 1842
Oil paint on canvas
55

Tate N00530
N00530
Fig.4
Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth exhibited 1842
The multilayered relationship between surface and depth suggested here existed alongside an equally complex relationship between
past and present in Turners work.22 As he matured into old age, Turners experience as a modern subject, existing in the as-yet
uncharted space between these axes, would increasingly find concrete form in the transformation of his historical status wrought by the
history of, and market for, art as it developed in the nineteenth century. At once a contemporary artist and an Old Master, his own
absorption and transfiguration by painting alone was a process which Turner would reflect upon from his sixties and as he began
breaking up fast in his final years.23 Lying on his deathbed, cared for by the wife of a man who had drowned, Turner asked his fellow
artist David Roberts a question which smacks of remarkable defiance against nature and history: So I am to become a nonentity, am
I?24 The spectres of dissolution and its defiance repeatedly characterise his late seascapes, and it is on one of these Snow Storm
Steam-Boat off a Harbours Mouth (fig.4) that any discussion of Turners relationship with the sublimity of drowning must focus.
Exhibited as Snow Storm Steam-Boat off a Harbours Mouth making Signals in Shallow Water, and going by the Lead. The Author was
in this Storm on the Night the Ariel left Harwich, this painting makes explicit claims (in its image and in its title) to first-hand experience.
As so often in Turners work, that experience is one in which nature and human culture work across and against each other. In its
confrontation with raw unassailable forces beyond human determination, that cultures attempts to organise and cut through the world in
its own interests (courtesy of engines, boats and straight-ahead navigation) are cast as a hubris familiar from ancient mythology. And in
his desperate attempt to remain upright and proceed through space on his own terms that is, to resist being stilled, swallowed and
negated man burns out both himself and his resources, the overworked engine that drives the boats thrashing wheel leaving a foul
scorchmark across the sky. There, even the systematisation of the visual into language appears futile, the boats distress signal
appearing little more than a transient spectacle already most clearly figured by its own feeble remnants: a rocket and red cinders falling,
like Icarus and his feathers, into the sea. 25 The vessels crew (indicated perhaps by a figure who reaches down to the water from
directly beneath the mast) go by the lead, plumbing the depths in order to gauge their proximity to the bottom and to death.

The Sun of Venice Going to Sea exhibited 1843
Oil paint on canvas
Tate N00535
N00535
Fig.5
The Sun of Venice Going to Sea exhibited 1843
That such an effort will result in only temporary and apparent truths is suggested by the water itself, which threatens at one point to pull
the vessel down and at the next (and most especially in the left-hand side of the painting) to be capable of throwing it up into the
heavens. Like the fold, the wave serves as a means of transporting bodies between and through different states: 26 the subjects of
Turners seascapes are swept up, down and along by his waves, and therefore undergo a giddying alteration 27 between being borne
56
aloft and consumed, between transcendence and decomposition. 28 In this painting, the characteristically circular composition of his late
seascapes acts as an engine, forcefully propelling the paintings effects out and into our space, so that Turners waves serve as both
figures and vehicles for an aesthetic experience in which the image might enfold its viewer. 29Yet the circular format also leaves us in
little doubt about the real source and sole site of that experience: the artist, around whom the world seems to revolve and who compels
its movements like a more powerful Canute.30 This painting is perhaps the pinnacle of Turners ability to carve multiple axes within
pictorial space. At its heart is a large flash of whitish paint which might represent the glaring light cast by the flare, or the spray of
towering waves similar to those we see in the foreground, or indeed the ghost of a sail (of a kind that Turner would hymn and whose
extinction he would seem to mourn in The Sun of Venice Going to Sea fig.5).31 In any case, this area of the image also appears both
as a highly worked patch of thick paint, at one point almost obliterating the boats mast, and as the compensatory interlude between
glowering expanses of darkness which seem to press in upon it from all sides. The phantom of a figure (another of Turners onboard
surrogates perhaps, to join Van Tromp and Ulysses from earlier works) stands in its midst. Somewhere between field experiment and
self experiment, Snow Stormsignals Turners buccaneering desire to assume art in extremis, inserting himself into its raw force as heroic
test case.
In a painting which highlights the readiness of its Author to find himself adrift from his cultural inheritance, compelled to devise his own
pictorial materials, language and forms whilst exercising his own criteria about their use, it is significant that the resulting image depicts
not a scene of clear departure or arrival but rather a moment out at sea and mid-voyage. Snow Storm is about artistic process (making
Signals) rather than product; indeed, it seems to be a signal fired off from the very midst of painting. What Turner reveals himself to
have been caught up in here is therefore less the agonies involved in taking leave of tradition (or those of establishing the new) than the
full whiteout of art itself, away from its ports of call. 32

Peace - Burial at Sea exhibited 1842
Oil paint on canvas
support: 870 x 867 mm; ;
Tate N00528
N00528
Fig.6
Peace - Burial at Sea exhibited 1842
This painting therefore indicates even beyond the titular myth of its origin a substantial shift in the relationship between art and
embodied knowledge. Since the late seventeenth century, marine painters had worked with a perspectival formula which enabled them
to stage an expansive world of freely circulating bodies as if seen, known and gauged by an embodied viewer. In its systematic relation
of horizon line and eye level, that formula was able to articulate a searching, speculative regard which was ambitious because it looked
forward, projecting knowledge and possession out to visions furthest reaches. In turn, this perspectival formula helped to constitute the
self as taking place before a visible world within which it found its capacities and its clear limits, an effect underlined by the marine
painters established repertoire, which ran between calm and storm, the beautiful and the sublime. Turner shattered the horizon and,
57
with that, this settled epistemology. Snow Storm Steam-Boat off a Harbours Mouth concerns itself not with knowledge of the world as
an entity over there, but with knowledge of the self as an isolated body immersed within, and overtaken by, inchoate experience;
system, whether perspectival or mechanical, has little purchase here. What Turner has observed (and simultaneously staged) is less the
world and its elemental forms than the processes of painting and thought: this work seems to depict its own creation. In particular, the
picture (its title opening with a blizzard of alliteration) performs the moment before knowledge, when vision, thought and bodily
experience are effectively equivalent and have yet to tip over into the re-cognition that will define them as distinct, and differently valued,
types of knowledge.33 A chaotic miasma from which form only hesitantly and incompletely emerges, Turners painting approximates the
blank space the khora, prior to knowledge, words and meaning into which origins are born in philosophical thought. Significantly, this
primordial state of suspended possibilities is no longer implied by the horizon but rather constitutes the entirety of the scene before us.
Vaguely discernible within it is the upright human figure (the figure for but not necessarily of Turner himself) around which the image is
organised. At once inside and outside the seascape, the artist is now its sole structural predicate, taking the place of both the horizon
line and its viewer. Turner seems to speak to us from over there, from the underside of painting, matter and pure, asocial experience.
He was, after all, an artist who apparently wanted to be buried in one of his pictures, and whose Royal Academy exhibits in 1842
included both this painting and Peace Burial at Sea (fig.6), two works which between them triangulate painting, drowning and
death.34 The purported subject-matter of Snow Storm implies the costs of such a voyage into the unknown: the possibility of a disaster
which can only be kept at bay by the careful and constant monitoring of ones proximity to the seabed, a perfect metaphor for the selfreflective, self-scrutinising methods of the artist, and indeed the individual, within modernity. Estranged from the safe havens of
established convention by conspicuous historical change, the (artistic) subject was now obliged or liberated Turner would have it both
ways, practising a melancholic exuberance into old age to travel under their own steam.
Read as an image of culture in tension with nature or as an allegory of artistic originality, Snow Storm shows Daedaluss realm of human
ingenuity and creation at once assaulted and reasserted. But his is not the only mythology conjured by this picture of tempest. In a veiled
reference to the recent disaster of the Fairy (which had left Harwich in November 1840, sinking with all hands shortly afterwards),
Turners title conjures the malign sprite Ariel from Shakespeares play, The Tempest.35Turners evocation of this play is more than
passing fancy or allusion.36 For, in his most significant intervention into the narrative, Ariel whispers into the ear of shipwrecked
Ferdinand a beautiful lie about drowning:
Full fathoms five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.37
In Ariels song, Ferdinands father Alonso survives his drowning in mutated form, having been transformed into something rich and
strange courtesy of a merger with his new environment. Alonso has not vanished or faded but rather has undergone a liquefying seachange, his difference from his surroundings diluted to the point that his body has become (in the words of the literature theorist Ian
Baucom) a catalog of the things that wash over it, a body of work. 38 As a figure for arts capacity to deceive and delight, Ariel also
refers us back to Turners status as artist and, perhaps, to the sea itself, which appears in painting and play alike as a space of
deception and artifice,39 reaching out like the sailors tropical delirium calenture to challenge settled distinctions between high and low,
art and sinking.40
7.
58
Modernism and the Sublime

Philip Shaw
In the modern era, the sublime took on new meaning, going into the territory of the infinite and the unknowable,
working in what Czanne called iridescent chaos. Philip Shaw reflects on modernism and the sublime,
contrasting dada, surrealism and art informel with De Stijl, suprematism and abstract expressionism, and looks to
the ideas that inform the search for the sublime today.
Mockery and blockage

In his Ten OClock lecture, delivered in London in February 1885, the painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler mounted a sneering attack
on the commercial and state appropriation of the arts. Singling out for particular opprobrium John Ruskins doctrine of truth to nature,
the artist claimed that while the common man wishes to see, for the sake of seeing, the painter, by contrast, does not confine himself to
purposeless copying but rather seeks the realisation of an ideal. 1 Rejecting the publics delight in detail, the painter discarded also the
stale, hackneyed discourse of the sublime: how dutifully the casual in Nature is accepted as sublime, may be gathered from the
unlimited admiration daily produced by a very foolish sunset. 2 The spread of a vulgarised vocabulary of sublimity had, in Whistlers view,
led to a decline in artistic judgement. For critics trained in this vocabulary, a mountain is synonymous with height a lake, with depth
the ocean, with vastness the sun, with glory. So that a picture with a mountain, a lake, and an ocean however poor in paint is
inevitably lofty, vast, infinite,and glorious on paper.3
James Abbott McNeill Whistler 18341903

Nocturne: Blue and Silver - Cremorne Lights 1872
Oil on canvas
Bequeathed by Arthur Studd 1919
Tate N03420
N03420
Fig.1
James Abbott McNeill Whistler
A decade earlier, however, Whistler had painted a landscape that conforms, in many respects, to this description. HisNocturne: Blue and
Silver Cremorne Lights 1872 (TateN03420, fig.1) depicts a large natural phenomenon, the River Thames, with the tiny lights of the
constructed world barely discernable on the far horizon. In the terms used in the Ten OClock lecture, the river is not only vast it is also
infinite and arguably lofty and glorious. But closer attention to the form and content of the painting reveals the inadequacy of these
descriptors. The Cremorne pleasure gardens were, in the first place, a site associated with lewd activities incongruent with the sublime.
Likewise, on the opposite bank the artist has depicted the mills of Battersea, the chimneys of which supplied the pollutants responsible
for the vague, romantic atmosphere of the scene. Whistler, however, is not primarily interested in portraying the reality of the
connections between industrial production and the pursuit of pleasure; rather, the blurring of the division between the two banks and the
actual and reflected lights is an artistic contrivance, a product of Whistlers commitment to the binary colour schemes of Japanese
painting. The artificiality of the scene is underscored further by the use of motifs derived from Japanese woodblock printing: the painters
butterfly signature bounded by a rectangular frame appears to the extreme right of the composition, while a bamboo-like shrub peeps
above the bottom edge. As the eye vacillates between the illusory depth of the far horizon and the two-dimensional immediacy of the
59
butterfly icon, the viewers sense of spatial coherence is undermined so that that which appeared sublime the association between
landscape painting, depth of field and the imprint of the divine is rendered gloriously artificial.
A further point of disturbance is provided by the indeterminate form floating in the centre of the painting. Most likely a barge, the vague,
amorphous shape nevertheless seems eerily human and, as such, is suggestive of the rivers association with violence and death. 4 It
takes time to conceive that the shape drifting towards us may be a dead body, but once this possibility is grasped we become subject
once more to the uncanny force of the paintings gaze. Photo-graphed, as the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan describes it, from the
perspective of the no longer human, our self-fashioning as vital and heroic, perhaps even sublime, undergoes a debilitating
transformation.5 Instead of penetrating a mystical horizon, the viewer is confronted with an intimation of mortality that is alternately
repellent and fascinating. To adapt the scholar David Ellisons distinction, the force, or energeia, of the painting is such that the viewer
can no longer, as in traditional conceptions of the sublime, establish themselves in relation to a coherent boundary; instead of
possessing the sublime, the would-be possessor finds him or herself unwittingly possessed by the uncanny.6
Paradoxically for a work so apparently invested in the artificial and idealised, Cremorne Lights is radically materialist in its approach to
the sublime. With its unsettling reminders of the intense pleasure of self-dissolution, Whistlers painting challenges the traditional notion
of the sublime as a staging ground for the triumphant recovery of the self from the jaws of destruction. Just as the anamorphic form in
the foreground prevents the ego from encompassing the work in its totality, so those other contrivances the decorative foliage and
butterfly icon draw attention away from the illusion of depth towards the reality of the painted surface, suggesting, in opposition to
conventional Victorian narrative painting, that there is nothing beyond this painted surface. 7
What the painting achieves, therefore, is a sustained interrogation of its very status as a painting; neither wholly committed to flatness
nor to depth, Cremorne Lights exceeds the discourse of the sublime precisely as a result of its critical engagement with all that that
discourse entails: the elevation of the spiritual over the material; the disclosure of truth behind the veil of appearances; the triumph of the
rational over the sensual. Still further, through its investment in the artificial rather than the reality of the moment, which modernism
proudly proclaims as its mark of authenticity, Cremorne Lights announces itself as both timely and belated, as if the painting were
observing itself failing to be new.
In 1886, a year after Whistler had shocked his London audience, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, in the preface to The Gay
Science, advanced a related attack on the worn-out taste for the sublime:
How the theatrical scream of passion now hurts our ears, how strange to our taste the whole romantic uproar and tumult of the senses
has become, which the educated mob loves, and all its aspirations after the sublime, lofty and weird! No, if we convalescents still need
art, it is another kind of art a mocking, light, fleeting, divinely untroubled, divinely artificial art that, like a pure flame, licks into unclouded
skies.8
In many respects Whistlers sly undermining of the stereotypical sublime meets Nietzsches criteria for another kind of art. And yet, for
all its mockery of the taste for the vast, the grand and the infinite an air of melancholy taints Cremorne Lights, transforming pleasure into
sickness, reducing mockery to sad laughter. In holding up a mirror to the educated mob, the Whistlerian sublime succeeds only in
disclosing the conditions in which bourgeois identity is forged while stopping short of an out-and-out transfiguration of those conditions.
John Martin 17891854

Oil paint on canvas
Bequeathed by Charlotte Frank in memory of her husband Robert Frank 1974
Tate T01928
T01928
Fig.2
John Martin
60
In the second half of the nineteenth century, artistic representations of the sublime continued, for the most part, to reflect the ponderous,
grave and divinely troubled values of the aspirant middle classes. A huge, monumental painting such as John Martins The Plains of
Heaven 18513 (Tate T01928, fig.2), for example, with its lush rendering of a divine yet familiar topography, is exactly the kind of
sublime fantasy that panders to the imaginations of the Victorian entrepreneurial classes. In this painting, as the critic Terry Eagleton has
argued, the sublime is on the side of individuation, rivalry and enterprise. The presentation of an infinite and potentially threatening vista
is a danger we encounter figuratively, vicariously, in the pleasurable knowledge that we cannot actually be harmed. 9When faced, that
is, with the prospect of dissolution the viewer experiences a compensatory pleasure in the realisation that infinity can, at least in theory,
be observed from the safety of a mortal perspective. Despite the initial defeat of potency, therefore, the boundaries of the mind are
expanded to accommodate the lofty, the vast and the unending. 10
Gustave Courbet 18191877

The Source of the Loue 1864
Oil on canvas
984 x 1304 mm
Photo National Gallery of Art, Washington
Fig.3
Gustave Courbet
The Source of the Loue 1864
Photo National Gallery of Art, Washington
But how specifically is the confrontation of danger, which Eagleton correctly describes as a battle for phallic integrity, rendered more
than merely procedural? 11 In Gustave Courbets The Source of the Loue (La Grotte de la Loue)1864 (fig.3) a river emerges from the
darkened interior of a vast, maw-like cave; a sense of excessive, brooding scale is created by the inclusion of a solitary figure, balanced
precariously in the foreground. With its stark contrasts between light and dark, large and small, the painting appears a model of the
Romantic sublime. Yet, as the critic James Elkins notes, the subject of The Source of the Loue is markedly different from the endless
plains and panoramas of the Romantic tradition because the view is cut off, ambiguously, by the mouth of the cave. In place of ...
thrilling infinity ... there is an uninviting darkness in the form of a huge and potentially boundless anamorphic stain. 12Elkins goes on to
cite the literary critic Neil Hertzs influential reading of the painting as an instance of the dead-end of Romantic sublimity: with nowhere
to go, the viewer is confronted with the brute, material substratum of subjectivity, a realm of dead matter resistant to transcendental
recuperation. In this alternative sublime the subject lured by the promise of individuation is scuppered on the rocks of its own
impossibility.13
It is Courbets acknowledgement of this hard kernel at the heart of the sublime that accounts for the unstintingly tragic tone of his
progressive realism. This tragic note, concomitant with the self-subverting qualities of the paintings claims to modernity, is echoed,
notoriously, in The Origin of the World (LOrigine du Monde) (Muse d'Orsay, Paris)14. Commissioned in 1866 by Khalil Bey, a
connoisseur of erotic art, the painting depicts the naked torso of a woman enclosed within coarse swirls of linen. Conceived as a
concentric sequence of naturalistic frames, the centrepiece of the image is a carefully rendered vagina, the slightly parted vulva
surrounded by dark and abundant pubic hair. The hidden realm of sexuality, symbolised by the yawning darkness of the grotto in the
earlier painting, is here rendered explicit. One could even go so far as to say that the latter painting functions as a desublimation of the
former. As the philosopher Slavoj iek comments in The Fragile Absolute (2000), Courbets painting directly depicts what previous
realistic art merely hinted at as its withdrawn point of reference. By bringing the sublime object down to earth, as it were, by showing
that the real object of desire is not a transcendent, unknowable Idea (in the Kantian sense) but a fleshy, material thing, The Origin of the
61
World goes even further than The Source of the Loue in assaulting the foundations of modern masculine self-fashioning. 15 Like the
Whistlerian corpse, Courbets impenetrable darkness turns out to be an abject object. As the philosopher Julia Kristeva has argued, the
abject is related to the uncanny by virtue of its capacity to exceed the distinctions between subject and object, self and other. Neither one
thing nor the other, as vomit, faeces or corpse, the abject is a reminder of the primal repression preceding the subjects entry into the
symbolic order. As such, the abject marks the point at which the subject differentiates itself from the mother and thereby learns to discern
the boundaries between I and the other.16
With Kristevas theorising in mind, we might wish at this juncture to reflect on why female sexuality should have become the dead-end
of the Romantic sublime. In a recent critical response to Hertzs reading of the sublime, the scholar Christine Battersby observes how the
male ego constitutes itself through the encounter with a specifically feminine form of excess. Within this encounter woman is figured as:
the unknowable unconscious of man (his Other): an elusive absence that underlies the I, and which marks the limits of the knowable
and the representable, while simultaneously acting as a continual allurement to the consciousness which it haunts. As such, woman
represents both the beautiful object of desire and the egos drive towards its own dissolution which is warded off via the structures of
the sublime.17
As an outline of Hertzs account of the sublime this seems true enough; in Hertzs readings of Pseudo-Longinus, Kant, Wordsworth and
George Eliot, a unified self is established when the ego cuts itself from the indeterminate, chaotic feminine principle to which it is initially
bonded.
Where I depart from Hertz and indeed from Battersbys critique of Hertz is in the assumption that art is unable to reflect on or
intervene in the process by which feminine sexuality is converted from the structural limit of masculine self-fashioning into its ineffable
metaphysical Other. A reading of Courbets The Source of the Loue that regards the terror of the cave as a representation of the
masculine egos fear of being absorbed by a mysterious feminine beyond thus misses the point: the true source of terror is the
realisation of the non-existence of this beyond. What the painting discloses, I would suggest, is the means by which a conception of
feminine excess or abjection functions as the illusory Other of masculine integrity, an Other created by patriarchy as a means of filling in
a fundamental emptiness. In The Origin of the World the structure of this illusion is made explicit. As i ek argues, the recalcitrant
fleshiness of the painting indicates how femininity actually functions in the sublime economy of masculine self-fashioning: not as the
absent, ineffable beyond of the phallus but as an indicator of the material limits of the phallus beyond which there is nothing. 18
Nature and ekstasis
At the time of writing The Gay Science, Nietzsche was seeking an alternative to the baleful restrictions of the Romantic sublime. In the
previous decade he had expressed the contest between excess and limitation in terms of that between the Dionysian and Apollonian
principles. Just as Kant had asserted the primacy of the mind over the chaos of sensual existence by portraying reason triumphing over
the threat of destruction from the excessive and the unquantifiable, in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) Nietzsche depicts the Apollonian as
the veiling, healing, transfiguration of Dionysian horror, converting terror into action and making ekstasis, or being outside of oneself,
intelligible. Thus tempered, the mind paradoxically forgets the specificity of its initial encounter with the raw materiality of the world; the
cost of individual and collective health is a willed negation of otherness.
Although in the aftermath of The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche began to explore alternatives to the Apollonian mode, for the most part he
manages only to hint at what might lie beyond the limits of the German Idealist sublime. The task of jettisoning the Kantian philosophy
that enables the bourgeois subject to regard itself as lofty and incomprehensible and that, by extension, allows it to represent the Other
merely as a reflection of that which it must exclude in order to posit itself as individuated, masterful and free, remains largely
unrealised.19
Nevertheless, as Battersby has proposed, there are suggestions throughout Nietzsches work of an alternative to the Kantian mode of
sublimity. While the Apollonian orientates the subject along the path of bourgeois individuation, the Dionysian Other threatens always to
break through, diverting consciousness towards an acknowledgement of its inherent emptiness and an affirmation of the terrifying
pleasures of self-overcoming. An awareness of the potential for material difference to exceed the imposition of instrumental reason is
evident even in the work that Nietzsche produced around the same time as The Birth of Tragedy, as the following extract from the essay
On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873) illustrates:
Every concept arises through the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it
is certain that the concept leaf is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and forgetting the disturbing aspects. This
awakens the idea that, in addition to the leaves, there exists in nature the leaf: the original model according to which all the leaves were
perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and painted but by incompetent hands, so that no specimen has turned out to
be a correct, trustworthy and faithful likeness of the original model ... We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is
individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X
which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us. 20
Nature, that is, persists in its irreducible otherness despite our best efforts to present it as an object of consciousness. When, as
Battersby argues, the artist forgets material differences in the act of representing a concept (of a leaf, for example), material differences
62
are not simply negated but remain on the fringes of consciousness thereby raising the possibility of an encounter or an intuition that
smashes conceptual understanding to pieces.21
The artist whose work seems most closely related to Nietzsches conception of the sublime is Paul Czanne. As is well known,
Czannes art has traditionally been understood as an attempt to reconstruct the primacy of the tangible world, prior to the imposition of
representational frameworks. According to this understanding, the artist strives to convey a sense of the world in its raw immediacy,
enabling differences to emerge from simple observation. 22 In essence, what Czannes art accomplishes is a realisation of the
otherness of nature and a vision of the sublime freed from the fiction of self-realisation. One could go further and claim that such art goes
beyond the mordant deconstruction of phallic mastery observed in Courbet and Whistler. As we shall see, however, Czannes
expression of the experiential or Dionysian sublime is not without its contradictions.
Paul Czanne 18391906

The Grounds of the Chteau Noir circa 19006
Oil on canvas
Lent by the National Gallery 1997
Tate L01891
L01891
Fig.4
Paul Czanne
The Grounds of the Chteau Noir circa 19006
The Grounds of the Chteau Noir c.19006 (Tate L01891, fig.4) is one of several studies executed around the Chteau Noir, a site close
to the artists home in Aix-en-Provence. In this powerful post-impressionist work, typical of Czannes mature style, the struggle to realise
pure sensation, untainted by conventional ways of seeing, is expressed in the vibrant tension between naturalistic forms, such as the
trees to the right and left of the canvas, and areas of pure abstraction. Commenting on Czannes achievement, the artists friend and
fellow Aix painter, Joseph Ravaisou, argued that these abstractions are inherent in the nature of the objects depicted and that between
abstraction and realism there is only an apparent contradiction. 23 There is, then, in Kantian terms, no distinction between the sensible
what can be seen and the supersensible what can be assumed.
A yearning to apprehend rather than merely infer the unrealisable beyond of representation is therefore central to Czannes vision; as
the artist remarked to his friend Henri Gasquet: under this fine rain I breathe the virginity of the world. I feel myself coloured by all the
nuances of infinity. At this moment I am one with my canvas. We are an iridescent chaos. 24 In The Grounds of the Chteau Noir the
attempt to capture the virginity of the world prior, perhaps, to its transformation as the origin of the world leads to a blurring of the
lines between painter and painting, self and Other. The viewer, too, is undoubtedly seduced by this process. An irritable reaching for fact
and reason, that prime characteristic of critical judgement, is absorbed in rapturous contemplation. 25
And yet, before too long, the endeavour to become one with the moment, to lose oneself in lustrous indifference, is baffled by the return
of the very distinctions cognitive, temporal and representational that the artwork seeks to efface. One could argue that the return of
these distinctions renders Czannes painting Kantian after all since what is affirmed here is not the recovery of a pre-individual,
63
Dionysian relation with the plasticity of the world but rather the return of Apollonian measure and division: in short, the painting can be
interpreted as a rather tragic meditation on the triumph of instrumental Reason.
Not long before his death, the artist wrote: I am becoming more lucid before nature, but with me the realising of sensations is always
painful. I cannot attain the intensity that is unfolded before my senses. 26 In Kants Analytic of the Sublime (1790), the realising of
sensations becomes painful when the faculty of Imagination, responsible for the representation of sensual phenomena, discovers its
inability to comprehend an overwhelming magnitude or multiplicity. In the Kantian schema, the failure of Imagination to present an Idea
of the sublime serves to negatively exhibit the higher faculty of Reason. Thus, the subject is made aware of a capacity for selfrealisation essentially transcendent to (that is, free from) all determinations of nature, inner and outer. 27 With Czanne, however, the
focus on the traumatic failure of sensible intuition goes well beyond the recuperative dialectic of Kants sublime. Instead of conveying a
negative awareness of Reason, the failure of the painters endeavour leads, inexorably, towards the moment when the sensual qualities
of paint, what we might call its materiality, become strikingly apparent. 28 For Czanne, that is, a painful awareness of the inadequacy of
form and content, an inadequacy directly related to the impossibility of presenting a synthesis between the mind and the world,
culminates not in the discovery of a capacity for transcendence but in the acknowledgement of the minds entanglement with the alien
matter of the world. Painting, for Czanne, therefore becomes an endeavour to unveil a mode of otherness that is not simply a reflection
of the knowing subject but is related to the pre-individual, inchoate drives of the body.
In a similar vein, the philosopher Jean-Franois Lyotard has argued that what Czannes painting thus reveals is the unconscious or
figural aspect of visualisation, the Dionysian materiality that must be suppressed, rendered invisible, so that visual coherence may
emerge.29 With each interminably suspended brush stroke, the disturbing aspects of the individual leaf threaten constantly to erupt in
the midst of representation.30 The appeal of Lyotards Nietzschean interpretation of Czanne is easy to grasp. Where Kantianism blocks
access to the living or sensual world, locating truth in a veiled, abstracted realm beyond the reach of understanding, Nietzsche seems to
offer in its place the possibility of a blissful, unmediated contact with nature and the body. However, what Nietzsche neglects in his
privileging of the openness of the corporeal to alien otherness is the sense in which the life-energy of the world is informed, and indeed
pre-dated, by an unnatural, mechanical force.
In his later works Nietzsche himself makes reference to the blind autonomy of the will to repetition, otherwise known as the principle of
the eternal return. Only a being willing to say yes to the return of life, in the full acknowledgement of lifes pain as well as its glory, can
unshackle itself from the fiction of truth hidden behind the veil of illusion. For Battersby, what is sublime in the work of the later Nietzsche
is the will to repetition in which there is no beyond and also no concealment. The I that emerges from this process is not derived
from an encounter with an other to which it is opposed but is located in a dynamic relation with alien multiplicity and difference. 31
There is, however, within the will to repetition a notion of absolute difference that casts all attempts at affirmation into doubt. In order to
grasp this notion we may usefully consider the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freuds discussion of repetition in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle (1920). As is well known, in this text Freud argues that the desire for joy or pleasure is inseparable from the appetite for
destruction. Indeed, as he goes on to suggest, it is the death drive that exists prior to the life instincts, which aim for reunion with the
primary state of inertia. When, to extend this reading, in the experience of the sublime the subject encounters an object that prompts a
painful or excessively pleasurable response, it is at this moment that the subject is made suddenly aware of the organic insufficiency of
being, and that life is possible only as a result of the intervention of the death instinct. In his revision of Freud, Jacques Lacan insists that
the death instinct has nothing to do with the organic body. Rather, the death instinct is only the mask of the symbolic order. 32 Just as
the subject only comes into being as a result of submitting its primary desires to the mechanical defiles of the Symbolic, so the
Nietzschean conception of Dionysian vitality cannot be separated from the mortifying effects of the eternal return.
Similarly, for Czanne it is not the joyful intensity of nature that is revealed in The Grounds of the Chteau Noir but the realisation of a
painful drive persisting beyond and intervening in the life of the world. For Lacan, as I have suggested, this drive is synonymous with the
symbolic order. The disclosure of this drive is painful because it comes perilously close to revealing the moment in which artistic illusion
as such in some way ... destroys itself ... by demonstrating that it is only there as a signifier. 33 The point again is not that Czannes
brushstrokes recall a hidden realm of vitality, which conventional representation fails to perceive (for the phenomenologist Maurice
Merleau-Ponty: the object in the course of its appearing; for Lyotard: the invisible), but rather that the otherness of nature itself only
comes into being as a result of the intervention of that shocking drive or X, the uncanny dimensions of which, as Nietzsche himself
insists, remain inaccessible and undefinable for us. With Czanne, therefore, poised between the virginity of the world and the deathly
realm of the Symbolic, we arrive at the point at which a new and disturbing conception of the sublime begins to emerge. What these
brush marks signify is not the resurgence of an occluded world, but the anamorphic oozings, the traces of the Real that remain when the
world submits to signification.
Towards the abject

In 1900, in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud presented a case study in the relations between the world, the flesh and the Symbolic.
As with many of the examples discussed in this essay, Freud framed his analysis in terms of a sublime encounter with female sexuality.
A few years earlier he had treated a friend of the family, a young woman known as Irma, suffering from hysteria. He notes that this
treatment had only limited success and that the patient was not relieved of her symptoms. Shortly after the termination of the analysis
64
Freud was visited by his friend Otto, who had been staying with Irma and her family in the country. Otto reported, somewhat
reproachfully in Freuds view, that Irma, although a little better, was not entirely well. In the evening Freud decided to write out the
womans case history, with the idea of giving it to Dr M. (a common friend who was at that time the leading figure in our circle. The
analyst then had a dream:
A large hall numerous guests, whom we receive. Among them Irma, whom I immediately take aside, as if to answer her letter, and to
reproach her that she doesnt accept the solution yet. I say to her: If you still get pains, it is really only your fault. She answers: If you
knew what pains I have now in my throat, stomach and abdomen, its tightening me up. I am startled and look at her. She looks pallid
and puffy; I think, after all I am overlooking something organic. I take her to the window and look into her throat. With that she shows
some resistance, like women who wear a denture. I think to myself, she doesnt need to do that. Her mouth then opens properly, and I
find on the right a large white spot, and elsewhere I see some remarkable curled structures which are evidently patterned on the nasal
turbinal bones, extensive white-grey scabs. I quickly call Dr M., who repeats and confirms the examination ... Dr M. looks entirely
different from usual; he is very pallid, limps, is beardless on the chin ... My friend Otto now also stands next to her, and my friend
Leopold percusses her over the bodice and says: She has a dullness below on the left, points also to an infiltrated portion of the skin on
the left shoulder (which I, in spite of the dress, just as he, feel) ... M. says: Without a doubt, its an infection, but it doesnt matter;
dysentery will follow and the poison will be eliminated ... We also directly know where the infection comes from. Recently my friend Otto,
when she was not feeling well, gave her an injection of a preparation of propyl, propyls ... propionic acid ... trimethylamin (whose formula
I see in heavy type before me) ... one doesnt give such injections so lightly ... Probably, too, the syringe wasnt clean. 34
In the dream Freud reproaches his patient for failing to accept his solution (in German, the word is lsung, meaning both the solution
one injects and the solution of a conflict). The talking cure thus results in a deadlock: Irma cannot symbolise, literally give voice to, the
reality of her desire and Freud is unable to persuade her of the efficacy of his solution. It is at this moment that the dream shifts from the
verbal to the visual realm: Freud is startled and looks at Irma who, after some initial resistance, concedes to open her mouth. No words,
no magic solution, issues from this orifice; instead, what the analyst perceives is terrifying: the turbinate bones covered with dull grey
scabs conjures a host of associations from the nose, to the mouth to the female sexual organs (at around this time Freud had endured
an operation on his turbinate bones). As Lacan remarks, there is
a horrendous discovery here, that of the flesh one never sees, the foundation of things, the other side of the head, of the face, the
secretory glands par excellence, the flesh from which everything exudes, at the very heart of the mystery, the flesh in as much as it is
suffering, is formless, in as much as its form in itself is something which provokes anxiety. Spectre of anxiety, the final revelation of you
are this You are this, which is so far from you, this which is the ultimate formlessness.
For Lacan, the disclosure of this unnameable ... unlocatable form ... the abyss of the feminine organ from which all life emerges, this gulf
of the mouth, in which everything is swallowed up is a revelation of that which is least penetrable in the real, of the real lacking any
possible mediation, of the ultimate real, of the essential object which isnt an object any longer. At this point, Lacan concludes, theres
no Freud any longer, there is no longer anyone who can say I.35
How does Freud recover from this encounter with formlessness? As with Kants narrative of the sublime, the disclosure of the abyss is a
structural dislocation, granting a negative exhibition of a higher, synthesising faculty. By way of an appeal to the paternal authority of Dr
M., the Freudian ego is rescued from dissolution; Irmas malady, after all, turns out to have a somatic origin, and the fault lies, not with
Freud, but with his friend Otto.
But the chain of release from guilt and anxiety does not end there. Miraculously, as Lacan notes, Freuds nightmare changes into a sort
of ataraxia, a state of blissful lucidity brought about by the production of the formula of trimethylamin, a chemical substance associated
with the decomposition of vaginal secretions and male ejaculate. 36 The dreamers salvation is thus precipitated by a retreat from visual
terror and a return to verbal order. Lacan notes that the formula, which Freud sees written in heavy type, enables him to convert the
traumatic abyss of the Real into the sense-making realm of the Symbolic. 37 By nominating this solution, Freud recovers the integrity of
the theory on which he founds his identity: Thus this substance led me to sexuality, the factor to which I attributed the greatest
importance in the origin of the nervous disorders which it was my aim to cure. 38
The egos deliverance comes at a price, however. The release from the Real is accomplished only by submitting the integrity of the I to
a series of partial identifications: the imaginary father, Dr M.; the dutiful friend, Leopold; the beloved enemy, Otto. 39 Dispersed among
these functions, the Freudian ego replaces the knowledge of its primary guilt with the reassurance of professional validation. As Lacan
comments, the intervention of the symbolic function in its most radical, absolute usage [thus] ends up abolishing the action of the
individual so completely that by the same token it eliminates the tragic relation to the world. 40
According to Lacan, in the visual arts in the first half of the twentieth century, responses to the encounter between the suffering intensity
of the flesh and the regulatory mechanisms of bourgeois identification seem roughly divided. On the one hand, we may identify an art
that seeks to dispel the illusory transcendence of the Real through an insistence on radical desublimation, thereby forcing an encounter
with various forms of occluded matter; on the other, an art that seeks to re-establish the minimal gap separating the void at the heart of
the Real from the object that informs it, thereby reanimating an idea of the beyond. To the former group we might assign movements
65
such as dada, surrealism and art informel; to the latter De Stijl, suprematism and abstract expressionism. The distinction between these
groups turns on their respective treatments of the Real in its relation with the Symbolic. But in order to understand the specificity of these
treatments we must first consider Lacans subsequent examination of the sublime in his seminar of 195960, later published as The
Ethics of Psychoanalysis.
To be exact: for Lacan what modernist art attempts to convey is not the Real itself but the enigmatic void or absence that resides at the
core of the Real, otherwise known as the Thing (das Ding). For Lacan, it is the emptiness of the Thing that marks the point at which the
Real lends itself to signification. The Thing can thus be conceived as that which in the real suffers from the signifier; as void or absence
it assists in the creation of meaning yet prevents meaning from ever being complete. The Thing is therefore characterised by the fact
that it is impossible for us to imagine it.41 Objects, Lacan goes on to explain, become sublime when they are raised to the dignity of the
Thing. By way of a reversal of the Freudian concept of sublimation, objects that come to inhabit the gap at the heart of the Real maintain
their material specificity (for example, as clothing, flesh or dirt) even as they resonate with elevated glitter or Schein. When considering
the sublime in this light it is thus important to remember that the sublime object is nothing in itself, but is rather a mere secondary
positivisation of the void or Thing that inhabits the Real.
What happens when art attempts to inform this Thing? In the art of desublimation (a category that extends from Courbets The Origin of
the World and that includes works as varied as Meret Oppenheims Breakfast in Fur (Dejeuner en Fourrure) 1936, and Robert
Rauschenbergs Dirt Painting [for John Cage] 1953)42 we find that if we force our way through ... to the Thing itself, all we will get is a
suffocating nausea of the abject. In other words, all we encounter is the object in its recalcitrant material specificity. In the art of
sublimation, by contrast, we discover the matrix of sublimation at its most elementary, that is, as purely structural opposition between
the Real and the Symbolic. 43
Kazimir Malevich
Black Square 1915
Fig.5
Kazimir Malevich
Black Square 1915
In The Fragile Absolute, iek explains this distinction in terms of the opposition between Kazimir Malevichs Black Square on a White
Background 1915 (fig.5) and Marcel Duchamps Fountain1917. From the outset, Malevich sought to affirm the value of abstraction over
realism, announcing in his suprematist manifesto that the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the
significant thing is feeling.44True to these principles, Black Square on a White Ground is radically non-representational. The slab of
black paint that dominates the canvas works as grand refusal, repudiating nature in favour of pure abstraction. As such, the painting can
be conceived, in Kantian terms, as a negative representation of the supersensible. Still further, it can be seen as an attempt to transcend
the material restrictions of representation, presenting a feeling or impression of the divine. Malevich himself regarded his minimalistic
geometrical forms as the secular equivalents of Russian icons, a form of painting which aspires to present the divine as pure or
unmediated reality. This idea is corroborated by a comment from the diary of the artists friend, Varvara Stepanova, dating from 1919: If
we look at the square without mystical faith, as if it were a real earthy fact, then what is it? 45
Yet there is, as iek has suggested, another way to understand the sacred quality of Black Square. Through its stark distinction
between the empty, elementary space of creation (the white background/surface) and the material object (the dark, material stain of the
66
black square), Black Square on a White Ground isolates the minimal gesture that is required to raise an Idea of the divine. In the
Analytic of the Sublime Kant makes the point that the feeling of enthusiasm for the divine is linked directly to the failure of
representation: Perhaps the most sublime passage in the Jewish Law is the commandment: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven
image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven or on earth, or under the earth, etc. 46 However, as iek confirms, the problem
with Kants determination of the thing-in-itself is that it assumes the existence of this thing as some sort of positive determination
persisting beyond the field of representation. By way of Hegel, i ek goes on to claim that Kants conception of the breakdown of
representation should be understood literally. In other words, rather than perceiving this breakdown as a negative indication of a
supersensible realm beyond phenomenality we should regard it as confirmation that there is, once again, nothing beyond
phenomenality.47
Marcel Duchamp 18871968

Fountain 1917, replica 1964
Porcelain
unconfirmed: 360 x 480 x 610 mm
Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2002
Purchased with assistance from the Friends of the Tate Gallery 1999
Tate T07573
T07573
Fig.6
Marcel Duchamp
Fountain 1917, replica 1964
ieks radical negation of the Kantian sublime has interesting implications for our understanding of the theological significance of
modernist art. If Malevich displays the formal gap that separates the object from the place of the Thing, then a work such as
Duchamps Fountain (Tate T07573, fig.6) shows that any object, even a urinal, can become sublime if it finds itself in the place of the
Thing.48 Instead, therefore, of regarding the artwork as a sensuous object revealing through its very inadequacy the idea of the beyond,
we may see it more bluntly as an object which occupies the place, replaces, fills out the empty place of the Thing as the void, as the
pure Nothing of absolute negativity. The Sublime, i ek concludes, is an object whose positive body is just an embodiment of [this]
Nothing.49That which seemed, at first, to raise an idea of the divine thus comes to signify the fundamental nothingness, the absence at
the heart of the Real, that a certain kind of art endeavours to inform.
Reduced to the bare marking of the distance between foreground and background, between a wholly abstract object (square) and the
Place that contains it, Black Square and the abstraction it inspires (from Barnett Newman to Ad Reinhardt) may therefore be conceived
as a quasi-transcendental reaction to the insistent matter of the world. 50 More particularly, it identifies the means by which visual art
seeks to sustain itself in relation to the terrifying excess of the uncanny sublime. Freud, as we noted earlier, gives an indication of what is
lost when excess submits to symbolic gentrification: when the abyss is filled in with symbolic chatter the man of reason is returned to his
rightful place. And with this return comes the loss of tragic authenticity. As Eagleton argues, the combative staging of the sublime is a
diffuse, aestheticised version of the uproarious violence of the old, feudal regime. And so tragedy [is] repeated as comedy. 51 Like the
murder scene depicted in Ren Magrittes The Menaced Assassin (LAssassin Menac) 1926 (MOMA, New York), the bourgeois subject
turns his back on the horrific truth of the sublime (the dead body on the couch), preferring to gaze at the symbolic equivalent of the
67
impossible Real (the gramophone horn as a representative of the sexualised Thing) rather than encounter it directly. 52 The death drive
that led him to engage in violence in the first place is thus substituted for the pleasurable circulation around a domesticated abyss; and
with this substitution comes the dispersal of the ego and the externalisation of guilt and agency: the voyeuristic observers at the window;
the hidden policemen about to spring.
In Magrittes painting the viewer apprehends the mechanism that converts the threat of the abject object into a pleasing encounter with
stage-managed horror. But it is another, later work, The Looking Glass (La Lunette dApproche) 1963 (The Menil Collection, Houston,
Texas) that gets to the heart of what is at stake in the relation between abjection, sublimation and sublimity. The painting depicts a halfopen window through the panes of which the viewer perceives a blue sky with some light clouds. Yet what the viewer sees in the gap
between the windows is not a continuation of this scene but a stark black vertical mass. As i ek comments, the frame of the
windowpane is the fantasy-frame which constitutes reality, whereas through the crack we get an insight into the impossible Real, the
Thing-in-itself.53 This Real is impossible because it cannot be confronted directly, only registered as an absence when the frame is
removed. That which appears to be infinite the endless blue sky is thus shown to be a fantasy formation dependent on the occlusion
of a primary void, which symbolisation retroactively designates as the Real.
Marcel Duchamp 18871968

Fresh Widow 1920, replica 1964
Mixed media
object: 789 x 532 x 99 mm
Purchased with assistance from the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund 1997
Tate T07282
T07282
Fig.7
Marcel Duchamp
Fresh Widow 1920, replica 1964
In Duchamps Fresh Widow 1920 (Tate T07282, fig.7) the connection between abjection, sublimity and sexuality is taken further.
Duchamp has created a miniature French window, obscuring the glass panes with black leather. Instead of peering out to a realm
beyond appearance, the viewer is greeted instead with their own, murky reflection. Punning on the connections between sex and death,
pleasure and pain (the black widows weeds and the fetishists material of choice), Duchamp, perhaps more so than Magritte, insists that
the void within the Real is nothing other than an inverted projection of a sensible intuition. The dull opacity of black leather belies the
illusion of the Thing as an infinite beyond. As such, it serves as a materialisation of the structural limit marking the distinction between
the Real as impossible and the Real as prohibited (if we stare directly into Irmas throat we die; if we progress further into the abyss we
cannot return). By reflecting itself in black leather the subject sustains a pleasurable relation with the horrifying void of the Real.
Duchamps unflinching critique of the sexualised foundations of the sublime, originating in the Fountain of 1917 and continued in The
Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) 191523, reaches its apogee in tant donns 194466.54 Installed in
68
the Philadelphia Museum of Art since the late 1960s, the work consists of an old weather-worn door in which two peep holes have been
fashioned. Through these holes the viewer looks at a naturalistic diorama, consisting of a partially obscured naked woman, her legs
splayed, lying on a bed of twigs and leaves. In her left hand the life-sized mannequin holds a gas lamp, while a sparkling waterfall and
an idealized, picturesque backdrop complete the fairy tale setting. Surveying this work is an uncomfortable experience and not merely
because of the disturbing content. To enter the public space in which the work is housed and then to peer through the aperture is to
place oneself in the difficult position of being seen to be watching. The feminist critic Amelia Jones, noting the works connection with
Courbets The Origin of the World, has argued that while Courbets work was commissioned to be viewed in the privacy of the home
(like proper pornography), tant donns places pornographic content in the public arena of the museum, where the viewer can be seen
(always threatening to destroy her or his voyeuristic relation with the object) ... As such, Duchamps piece illustrates the impossibility of
voyeurism, the fact that the consumption of the erotic is always attended by the consciousness of being assessed, judged, by the
Other.55
An additional disturbance is provided by the fashioning of the mannequins vagina. As Jones notes, the crevice between the legs has no
labia majora or labia minora, and certainly no clitoris. Any suggestion of depth is cancelled out by the appearance of the flat, nonnaturalistic depression. This body, Jones argues, refuses, finally, the penetration of vision ... It turns the gaze back into the look,
exposing the insufficiency of masculine attempts at visual mastery. 56 With literally nowhere to go, the relation between the mannequin
and the viewing subject is reversed: the subject becomes the object of the dioramas gaze. Unable to convert the depthless, hairless,
resolutely impossible vagina into a signifier of feminine lack, the penetrating masculine gaze is transformed into a mere look. All that is
given, as it were, in the view from this room is a vision of the fact that [the] subject is not self-sufficient but constitutes his or her
coherence in relation to that which he or she works to master. 57
Beyond abstraction
Lucio Fontana 18991968

Spatial Concept 'Waiting' 1960
Canvas
unconfirmed: 930 x 730 mm; frame: 1161 x 982 x 86 mm
Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milan
Purchased 1964
Tate T00694
T00694
Fig.8
Lucio Fontana
Duchamps attempts to desublimate the sublime seem, at first glance, to be far removed from the concerns of abstract expressionism.
Crudely, where Duchamp forces the viewer to dwell on the underlying material conditions of the Thing, artists like Barnett Newman and
Mark Rothko seem more concerned with attempting to reanimate a sense of the noumenal. Yet abstraction never wholly purges itself of
69
the remnants of fleshly desire. Spatial Concept Waiting 1960 (Tate T00694, fig.8) by the spatialist artist Lucio Fontana is a case in point.
At around the same time that Duchamp started work on tant donns, Fontana began to punch holes (or buchi) through his canvases,
the aim being literally to break through the surface of the work so that the viewer can perceive the space that lies beyond. Fontana
seems to have regarded this gesture as a means of disclosing the unlimited space of the sublime, announcing I have created an infinite
dimension.58 Towards the end of the 1950s, the artist experimented further with cuts (or tagli) executed with a razor. Although carefully
premeditated, the slashes in these later canvases appear spontaneous. In some works the slash seems to erupt outwards, conveying
the force of the original assault towards the viewer in a way that is both energetic and terrifying. Like Duchamps piece, Fontanas spatial
concepts seem to dramatise the moment when the illusory integrity of the ego succumbs to the overwhelming might of the dynamic
sublime. However, where these works fall short of tant donns is in failing to critique the sexualised underpinnings of this confrontation.
In contrast to the ironic naturalism of the vagina in Duchamps work, the suggestive cuts, holes and slashes of Fontanas canvases still
allow for the resurrection of phallic mastery in relation to a hidden, yet penetrable, beyond.
What happens when we subject abstract expressionism to this kind of critique? In 1948 Newman, in The Sublime is Now, famously
declared that the impulse of modern art resides in the desire to destroy beauty. The problem with beauty, according to Newman, is that
it prevents the artist from realising mans desire for the exalted, in other words for the sublime. In religious art, in particular, a
preoccupation with the beautiful, with its emphasis on the figurative, the perfection of form and the reality of sensation, has impeded the
perception of the Absolute.59 Despite his reservations about Kant, Newman believes that the sublime is on the side of mind rather than
nature; and since the extent of the mind is unbounded it cannot be adequately represented by an object with determinate bounds.
Inspired by the art critic Clement Greenbergs pronouncements on the flatness of modern painting, Newman averred that painting
should seek to destroy or neutralize the material support of the image. A painting, that is, should strive to abolish the false infinity
attendant on traditional, perspectival space. What Newman calls the terror of [the] blank area is thus related to the opening up of the
abyssal potential of the flat ground. As the art historian Pierre Schneider comments, to represent the infinite, as perspective claims to
do, is tocomprehend it in both meanings of the word: to understand but also to contain, and to contain is to limit. In order to paint the
impossible, the artist must therefore endeavour to unlimit the relation between ground and figure: the infinite is not revealed by the
illusion of the receding horizon but rather by the truth of the engulfing flatness of the ground. 60
For Newman, then, the disclosure of the infinite is related to the dispelling of painterly illusion. But it is important to recall that the painter
was also keen to represent the quest for the impossible in religious terms. The Romantic spectre of split religion thus comes to haunt
the Greenbergian credo of pure abstraction.61 From the mid-1940s onwards, the titles that Newman chose for his works reflect his
developing interest in the Old Testament, the Talmud and Jewish mysticism. Titles such asGenesis The Break 1946, The
Command 19467, Joshua 1950 and Adam 19501 leave no doubt in the mind that Newman regarded the sublime as primarily religious
in orientation. His use of vertical lines or zips possibly inspired by Edmund Burkes suggestion that the perpendicular has more force
in forming the sublime, than an inclined plane can also be read as an echo of the primal act of divine creation. 62 As the artists friend
and commentator Thomas B. Hess noted, Newman claimed that the artist, like God, begins only with chaos, the void. The artists first
move is thus to re-enact Gods primal gesture by informing the void with a downward stroke, analogous to a gesture of separation, as
God separated light from darkness, with a line drawn in the void just as the emptiness of the Thing is said by Lacan to be informed by
the intervention of the Symbolic.63
In The Sublime is Now, Newman, while fully aware of the religious cognates of his work, urges contemporary artists to free themselves
from the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend [and] myth ... Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or life,
we are, he insists, making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. 64 The subject matter of Newmans work is thus creation itself,
an act associated no longer with God but with man. Ultimately, the terrifying or overwhelming aspects of Newmans paintings become
subordinate to the idea of sustaining the distinction between form and formlessness. As Newman stated, after visiting the sacred
mounds of the Native Americans in south-west Ohio: Looking at the site you feel, Here I am, here ... and out beyond there (beyond the
limits of the site) there is chaos ... but here you get a sense of your own presence ... I became involved with making the viewer present:
the idea that Man is present.65
70
Barnett Newman 19051970

Eve 1950
Oil on canvas
support: 2388 x 1721 x 50 mm
ARS, NY and DACS, London 2002
Purchased 1980
Tate T03081
T03081
Fig.9
Barnett Newman
Eve 1950
In recent years much has been made of Newmans stress that man is present. He has been accused, variously, of a fetischization of
virility and of a politically regressive exaltation of the individual. 66 Yet, as Lyotard has suggested, Newmans affirmation of the individual
is precariously conceived. In Eve 1950 (Tate T03081, fig.9), for example, the zip separating form and formlessness is located on the
outer margins of the canvas; it barely registers as an act of creation. The fragile division between ground and figure, marked by the
sudden disclosure of the zip, is, above all, understood by Newman as a temporal event. In his 1949 Prologue for a New Aesthetic, the
artist wrote that he was not interested with a manipulation of space nor with the image, but with a sensation of time. Lyotard adds that
the conception of time presented in The Sublime is Now has nothing to do with continuity or duration and as such is opposed to the
constitution of the human subject. According to Lyotard, Newmans now is a stranger to consciousness and cannot be constituted by it.
Rather, it is what dismantles consciousness, what deposes consciousness, it is what consciousness cannot formulate, and even what
consciousness forgets in order to constitute itself. 67 Lyotard goes on, pace Nietzsche, to claim that anxiety in the face of privation is
converted by Newman into joy obtained by the intensification of being. As Battersby summarises, this joy is not located in the beyond
of the Romantic sublime, but in the here and now. 68
What Lyotard intends with his conception of the here and now in Newman is difficult to determine with any precision, but what he seems
to have in mind is a disruptive, unrecuperable and above all inhuman notion of temporality as pure difference. In The Sublime and the
Avant-Garde (1984) Lyotard maintains that for Newman the sublime resides not in an over there, in another world, or another time, but
in this: in that (something) happens ... the it happens is the paint, the picture. 69 The sublime, in other words, is the event of the
picture, what we might call its material occurrence. Writing in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (1988) on the relation between painting
and matter, Lyotard defines matter as a presence [that is] unpresentable to the mind. 70 When painterly matter insists on the mind, the
viewer thus experiences a disorientating, excessive mode of sublimity far removed from the Romantic notion of transcendence.
Lyotards comments in this respect recall his earlier observations on Czanne and the unveiling of the figure. Earlier in this essay I noted
how Czannes interest in the virginity of the world concealed a latent fascination with the death drive. The vivacity of Czannes brush
marks, I suggested, ought not to be understood as a phenomenological disclosure of the living world but rather as an indicator of the
haunting return of the death drive in the guise of the Symbolic order. Similarly, with Newman, a more accurate examination of the relation
between time and subjectivity can be gained from a consideration of Lacans observations on time and symbolisation. Noting in his 1955
71
seminar that the percepi of man can only be sustained within a zone of nomination, Lacan goes on to claim that the word doesnt
answer to the spatial distinctiveness of the object ... but to its temporal dimension. The object, he states,
is strictly only recognisable through the intermediary of the name. The name is the time of the object. Naming constitutes a pact, by
which two subjects simultaneously come to an agreement to recognise the same object. If the human subject didnt name as Genesis
says it was done in earthly Paradise ... no word, not even a perception, could be sustained for more than one instant. 71
That is, it is only through the intervention of time and the word that subjects are rescued from the formlessness of the pre-symbolic.
Newmans here and now can thus be read in relation to the dream of Irmas injection: just as the spatial fixity of the Real is displaced in
Freuds dream by the narrative continuity afforded by entry into the Symbolic, so the zip in conjunction with the name
(Abraham 1949, Onement III 1949, Cathedra 1951, Jericho 19689) places the viewer in relation to an Idea-Thing persisting beyond the
field of representation.
What is repressed, of course, in Newmans pursuit of the sublime and his denigration of beauty is the hidden domain of sexuality. Far
from eradicating the lure of the hidden (the feminine other), as Battersby has argued, I would suggest that Newmans terror in the
face of the blank ground is directly related to the fear of the absence of vaginal depth portrayed in Duchamps tant donns.72 But
whereas Duchamp sets out to cultivate anxiety by forcing the viewer to reflect on her/his complicity in the sexualised power dynamics of
the gaze, for Newman the threat of the abyssal ground is countered by the entry into symbolisation. As a result of this intervention the
viewing subject is placed in a relation with the abyss; the waste that lies beyond the limits of the site and that threatens to overwhelm
the subject is bounded, given form, by the line. The zip, together with the name, thus enables the viewing subject to sublimate the
formlessness of the Real and to orientate her- or himself in relation to a transcendental beyond. The matter, which Lyotard regards as
unpresentable, turns out, after all, to bemater, the principle of female abjection against which the subject is symbolically defined.
Philip Taaffe
We Are Not Afraid 1985
Linoprint collage, acrylic paint on canvas
3050 x 2590 mm
Courtesy Thomas Ammann Fine Art, Zurich
the artist
Fig.10
Philip Taaffe
We Are Not Afraid 1985
Courtesy Thomas Ammann Fine Art, Zurich the artist
There is, as Napoleon suggested, and as Duchamp and Lacan imply, but a step from the sublime to the ridiculous. What happens,
therefore, when Newman is unzipped? By way of an answer we may consider a recent postmodernist intervention by Philip Taaffe.
In We Are Not Afraid1985 (fig.10), a response to Newmans Whos Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue? 1966, Taaffe replaced the zip with a
plaited braid of hair, rendered in blue and placed in the dead centre of the canvas. To the extreme left- and right-hand sides of the
painting the artist introduced two snaking lines of yellow. The overall effect is decorative, even beautiful a dtournement of Newmans
sublimity brought about through a recollection of Henri Matisses bronze sculpture Back (IV)c.1931, which shows a long braid passing
into the gap at the bottom of a monumental nude female torso. Poised between abstraction and figuration Matisses sculpture, with its
72
own recollection of Czannes female bathers, thus becomes a reminder of the material limits on which the image of the masculine
sublime is raised.
In a reading of Taaffes painting, the scholar Lisa Liebmann observes how the twisted yellow lines on the extreme edges of the painting
resemble the caduceus, the snake-entwined staff borne by the ancient Greek god Hermes (Mercury in Roman mythology). Liebmann
states that the mythic caduceus ... is a sexualized symbol, indeed a confluence of carnality and the sublime. 73 According to one Greek
myth of origin, the caduceus was created when Tiresias killed a female snake after he had discovered it copulating with its mate. As a
result of his action, Tiresias was transformed into a woman. He was turned back into a man when he was able to kill the male snake
seven years later. As such, the appearance of the caduceus in Taaffes answer to Newman becomes a symbol of the labile distinction
between the sublime and the beautiful, the masculine and the feminine, the mind and the body. Neither one thing nor the other, Taaffes
zips speak of the impossibility of sustaining the sublime as pure abstraction.
The abject sublime

From Malevich to Newman, the struggle to overcome the accretions of the material realm is typically understood in theological terms. In
America in the 1960s, the critic Robert Rosenblum, in his influential essay The Abstract Sublime (1961), made explicit the connections
between the religious imperatives of Romanticism and the transcendental aspirations of abstract expressionism. Drawing comparison
between paintings by the Romantic painters Caspar David Friedrich and J.M.W. Turner and the abstract expressionist Rothko,
Rosenblum claimed that the floating, horizontal tiers of veiled light in the Rothko seem to conceal a total, remote presence that we can
only intuit and never fully grasp. These infinite, glowing voids carry us beyond reason to the Sublime; we can only submit to them in an
act of faith and let ourselves be absorbed into their radiant depths. Following a discussion of Newman, Rosenblum announces that while
in the Romantic era, the sublimities of nature gave proof of the divine, in the mid-twentieth century such supernatural experiences are
conveyed through the abstract medium of paint alone. 74

Red on Maroon 1959
Mixed media on canvas
support: 2667 x 2388 x 35 mm
Presented by the artist through the American Federation of Arts 1969
Tate T01165
T01165
Fig.11
Mark Rothko
Red on Maroon 1959
Rosenblums powerful influence on the reception of abstract expressionist painting is detectable even today. An air of sacerdotal
reverence clings to Rothkos paintings and the impression of the artist as, in essence, a painter of the divine an impression fostered by
the work he produced for a Houston chapel is difficult to discourage. Visitors to the Seagram installation at Tate Liverpool in 2009, for
73
instance, were seen wrapt in contemplation, absorbed by the iconic presence of the vast canvases before them. The nine Seagram
murals in Tates collection (other surviving paintings can be seen at museums in Washington and Tokyo) are united by simplicity of form
large vertical columns and frame-like structures predominate and by their dark, fustian colour scheme: four of the paintings are
titled Red on Maroon; five are called Black on Maroon. The example shown here (Tate T01165, fig.11) belongs to the former series and
was completed in 1959. In many ways this particular Red on Maroon seems atypical of the series: a feathery, silver-grey veil appears to
shimmer above a dark purple background; the red frame, which seems to hover above the painting, serves as a portal, inviting the
viewer to gaze into the ineffable beyond.
But what precisely are we meant to see in this space? As the scholars Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit observe, although the internal
frames repetition of the canvass verticality creates an impression of depth, the desire for legibility is ultimately frustrated. Due to the
difficulty we experience in trying to distinguish between foreground and background at times the silver-grey section appears to resist its
subordinate position so that it almost appears to be on the same plane as the red frame the viewer may well come away with the
impression that there is, after all, nothing to see in this work. 75 Thus, while on the one hand the painting seems to encourage a
revelatory response, akin in many ways to the effect of the Romantic sublime in works by Turner, of whom Rothko was a great admirer, it
works no less to baffle or block such a response. The contest between the transcendental and the materialist aspirations of the painting
results in what Bersani calls an effect of narrative suspense; unlike, say, Turners Angel Standing in the Sun 1846, or indeed
Newmans Vir Heroicus Sublimis 19501, in the face of this work it becomes impossible to sustain the sense of a determinate beyond.
In this respect it is worth considering the effect of scale. Measuring 2667 x 2388 mm, Red on Maroon, by any standard, is extremely
large. To paint a small picture, Rothko once commented, is to place yourself outside your experience. However you paint the larger
picture, you are in it. It isnt something you command. 76 When enclosed in the windowless, claustrophobic space of the Seagram room,
the viewer may well feel similarly overwhelmed. In his later works, particularly the Houston Chapel series and the grisaille paintings of
his final phase, Rothko goes even further in equating the effects of scale and obscurity with the defeat of spiritual significance. In such
works the force of the sublime seems utterly disabling; in an instant the impulse towards transcendence is both raised and dashed.
Often, towards nightfall, Rothko confessed, theres a feeling in the air of mystery, threat, frustration all of these at once. I would like
my painting to have the quality of such moments. 77
Rothko famously insisted that his work was an attempt to express basic human emotions tragedy, ecstasy, doom. 78Something of
Nietzsches interest in the Apollonian veiling of terror, in the ability of art to render terror bearable, seems implicit in this statement. If the
artist or the viewer seeks to go beyond the frame of the Symbolic, then she or he does so at their peril. However, as Lacan noted, when
the subject is delivered from the threat of the Real then he or she submits, in turn, to a form of gentrification in which the tragic
dimension is diminished. In the Seagram series, Rothko, I would argue, holds the tragic and comedic aspects of the sublime encounter
in delicate suspension. The viewer is simultaneously attracted to and safely delivered from the overwhelming terror of the abyssal
ground.
By way of a conclusion to this essay I wish to place Rothkos later work in relation to an artist whose work appears, on the face of things,
to have little to do with the sublime: Francis Bacon. With his stress on viscosity, on the raw, material ooze of embodied experience,
Bacon seems to block the route to transcendence that is the dominant aspiration of abstract painting. In an important review of Gilles
Deleuzes Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981) the literary critic Allon White comments on Bacons radical refusal of
transcendence a firm refusal of narrative and a refusal of sublimation. There is a kind of material resolution in the paintings, which
amounts to a modern heroism, not to allow conventional beauty to obliterate or falsify the moments of abjection which permeate daily
life.79 Unlike Taaffe, whose work connives to unsettle the sublime by reframing it in terms of the beautiful, Bacon sets out to destroy the
sublime through a violent immersion in abject matter. Kristeva, as we have seen, notably defines the abject as that which does not
respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. 80 When Bacon introduces the abject into his paintings
he thus destabilises the very distinctions on which the sublime is raised.
74

Untitled 1969
Acrylic on paper
Presented by the Mark Rothko Foundation 1986
Tate T04149
T04149
Fig.12
Mark Rothko
Untitled 1969
The artists quarrel with the transcendental aspirations of the abstract expressionists is conveyed in one of his final paintings, Blood on
Pavement1988 (Private Collection)81. In terms of its basic structure three horizontal rectangles of contrasting colour in a portrait
format Bacons work has some affinity with Rothkos. In a brilliant reading of Rothkos 1957 painting White and Greens in Blue, Bersani
and Dutoit note how the artists early work tends to confirm our confidence in boundaries ... Such an art legitimizes a comfortable belief
that the movements constitutive of existence in real space, movements that are continuously blurring boundaries and rendering
identifications problematic if not impossible, can be stopped. 82 Rothkos final works, by contrast, set out to undermine our confidence in
spatial stability. In Untitled1969 (Tate T04149, fig.12), for example, from his series of Black and Greypaintings, Rothko divides his canvas
into two more or less equal blocks of colour: a dark black-brown area at the top and a grey-white area at the bottom. Unlike the Seagram
murals or, for that matter, the Houston Chapel installation, the painting conveys no sense of atmospheric haze, no view of the
beyond.83 Instead, the two contrasting blocks seem to deliberately flaunt their flatness. Furthermore, in what might be perceived as a
calculated undoing of Newmans technique, Rothko has left a white frame around the paintings, created by unpeeling strips of masking
tape. Here, again, it is not a sense of the infinite that the frame reveals but rather a sense of the inherent materiality of the painted
surface, as the curator Achim Borchardt-Hume writes: The white border does not frame a view. Rather, it acts as a zone of separation
between real and pictorial space, exposing the painterly surface as an impenetrable membrane. 84
Bacons use of a thick, impenetrable field of black underscored by an equivalent field of grey has obvious connections with Rothkos late
work. But between these monochromatic fields Bacon has inserted a horizontal band of mottled grey-beige on which he has painted a
vivid, ruddy pool the blood on pavement of the title. Whatever remained of the transcendent in Rothkos painting is completely
obliterated with the introduction of this ugly, anamorphic stain. In imitation of Rothkos earlier work, the red mark seems to hover on the
surface of the painting; but rather than providing an intimation of immortality, it serves instead as a memento mori. Like Whistlers
body/barge, Courbets grotto or Czannes stroke, Bacons blood is unsettling because it occupies the middle ground, disturbing the
boundary between subject and object. As a sublime object in the Lacanian sense, the stain inhabits neither the body nor the world;
rather, it resides in a space between, resisting all attempts to convert it into the material Other of an infinite beyond.
Conclusion
75
It has been the contention of this essay that art of the late nineteenth century and of the first half of the twentieth century sustains an
uneasy and at times fraught relation with the sublime: just as Nietzsche laboured against the stultifying legacy of the Kantian tradition, so
modern artists struggled with the persistence of Romanticism. In their attempts to reformulate an idea of the sublime object, artists as
varied as Whistler and Malevich, Czanne and Duchamp, found themselves engaged in dialogue with their Romantic forebears. Central
to each of their endeavours was the cultivation of a sceptical attitude towards ideas of transcendence, particularly in connection with
modes of the sublime that sought to denigrate or repress the claims of human experience, whether conceived as the raw materiality of
the body, the terror of sexuality, or the unsettling otherness of the unconscious. If Nietzsche is responsible for the initial querying of the
Kantian distinction between immanence and transcendence, it is Freud, and later Lacan, who ushers in and oversees the radical
transformation of this distinction. The Nietzschean/Freudian influence, as we have seen, is notable in dada, surrealism and abstract
expressionism. Specifically, it emerges in Duchamps dogged assaults on the conceptual purity of the art object, in Magrittes wry
exposures of the illusory nature of the gaze, in Rothkos haunted meditations on the impossibility of transcendence, and in Bacons
singular insistence on the brutish reality of human experience. In each case, an idea of the sublime is raised, only to be mocked,
interrogated, mourned and finally torn to pieces.
Such a nihilistic conclusion requires, however, some additional commentary. In The Fragile Absolute, iek explains that in
contemporary art the idea that one can raise an object, whether it be blood (Marc Quinn, Self 1991), faeces (Chris Ofili, The Holy
Virgin 1996), a pair of dead cows (Damien Hirst, Mother and Child Divided 1993) or yet another urinal (Sarah Lucas, The Old in
Out 1998) to the dignity of the Thing seems to be increasingly under threat: what is threatened is the very gap between the empty
Place and the (positive) element filling it. If the problem for premodern art was
how to fill in the sublime Void of the Thing (the pure Place) with an adequately beautiful object ... [then] the problem of modern art is, in a
way, the opposite (and much more desperate) one: one can no longer count on the Void of the (Sacred) Place being there, so the task is
to sustain the Place, as such, to make sure that the Place itself will take place in other words, the problem is no longer that of horror
vacui, of filling in the Void, but, rather, that of creating the Void in the first place. 85
When in the sacred space of the gallery we stare at the piece of dead, inert matter, asking indignantly is this art?, it is, as i ek
observes, precisely this negative reaction, this experience of the radical incongruity between the object and the Place it occupies, that
makes us aware of the specificity of this Place. It is, therefore, not only the Place it occupies that confers sublime dignity on an object; it
is also that only the presence of this object sustains the Void of the Sacred Place, so that the Place itself never takes place, but is always
something which, retroactively, will have taken place after it has been disturbed by a positive element. In ontological terms, if we
remove from the Void the little bit of reality, the bloodstain that upsets its stability, we do not encounter the pure Void as such rather,
the Void itself disappears, is no longer there. Paradoxically, therefore, it is the presence of the abject object that sustains the idea of the
sublime.86
In recent years ieks neo-Lacanian account of the sublime has been examined and found wanting by the theologian John Milbank
directly in an essay entitled Sublimity: The Modern Transcendent (2004), and implicitly in a book co-authored with i ek entitled The
Monstrosity of Christ (2009).87 There is not the space here to discuss the finer details of Milbanks critique of i eks insistence on
modern art as a manifestation of the fundamental emptiness of being, but in closing this essay some mention should be made of
Milbanks discussion of the sublime, at least in its Kantian and post-Kantian forms, as a fundamental perversion of the beautiful. Whether
conceived as a transcendental beyond or as a brute manifestation of primal nothingness, the modern, secular notion of the sublime fails,
in Milbanks view, to take account of the analogical relation between the finite and the infinite, whereas beauty, especially when regarded
from a Christian and more specifically Catholic perspective, retains a sense of the continuity between the human and the divine, the
particular and the general, the reality and the idea.
In this essay I have suggested that the religious sublime, originating in Romanticism and reanimated in abstract expressionism is unable
to withstand the challenge of a form of post-Duchampian, abject materialism, loosely identified with surrealism, art informel, neo-dada
and, most recently, with the neo-conceptualists and the Young British Artists. An alternative account of the development of the sublime
could, however, take its bearings not from abstract expressionism, but from minimalism and the Earthworks movement. In both cases
artists have emerged whose interest in the relations between matter and spirituality could be said to mark an advance on traditional
notions of the sublime. In James Turrells light works, for example, viewers are placed in concrete situations a volcanic crater, an
observation chamber that encourage habits of sustained concentration. Drawing on what Turrell calls the Quakers straightforward,
strict presentation of the sublime, the plumbing of visual space through the conscious act of moving, feeling out through the eyes
becomes analogous to ... a flight of the soul. 88 As the curator Lynn M. Herbert summarises: Turrells sublime is compounded as we
observe ourselves seeing. He allows us to look at light in such a way that we can see into ourselves through the universe
beyond.89 Environmental art by Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria and, most recently, Olafur Eliasson, endeavours similarly, with
varying degrees of faith and scepticism, to reconfigure the viewers relationship with space and time, placing emphasis on the
connections between the material conditions of perception and the intuition of an immaterial beyond. 90
The Protestant legacy, with its stress on unmediated vision, plainness and individual autonomy, is evident in those artworks that seek to
place the viewer in close proximity to natural sources of wonder. Catholicism, with its emphasis on mystery, transfiguration and the
76
effacement of self in the face of the divine has brought about an altogether different notion of the sublime. In Yves Kleins
photomontage Leap into the Void 1960, for instance, the artist appears to take flight from an ordinary suburban window as, below him, a
cyclist meanders along a circumscribed road. The image, as the scholar Jean Fisher comments, with its unsettling blend of the
impossible and the mundane suggests an embodiment of the metaphysical union of flesh with the infinite. 91 The notion of the
congruence of the earthly and spiritual is most vividly conveyed in the form of the casket that Klein, a devout Catholic, donated to the
convent of Santa Rita da Cascia in 1961. Consisting of three compartments containing IKB (International Klein Blue) pigment, pink
pigment and gold ingots, the work is dedicated to Santa Rita da Cascia, Saint of Impossible and desperate causes. For Fisher, Kleins
simple but elegant presentation of the sheer vibrancy of colour and light through the raw materiality of pigment and gold is one of the
clearest attempts in art to evoke that transformative immateriality, that fugitive moment of lightness and ecstasy, to which mystic speech
so often refers.92 The work is sublime, in other words, because the transformation of pigment into divinity is impossible; yet still, for
those who believe, the fugitive moment takes place. As the early Christian author Tertullian put it: sepultus, resurrexit; certum est, quia
impossibile ([Christ] was buried and rose again: it is certain [or I believe] because it is impossible). 93
It may be that sublimity consists in nothing more than the movement of desire: in our desire to know what is beyond the painted veil; in
the feeling that something lost must be recovered. And yet, as Fisher concludes, if the language of art seeks to imagine unity it can
only discover its impossibility, becoming, in effect, an affirmation of alterity. 94 Looking again at Bacons bloodstain, for instance, might
we not also see the remnants of divine incarnation of the body that remains when God is denied? And might this impossibility not also
be configured as a paradoxical affirmation of alterity? Perhaps, in this sense, Bacons vision of the abject sublime is closer in spirit to a
premodern work, such as Masaccios Holy Trinity 1427, with its moving portrayal of human as well as divine agony, than it is to the
suave sardonicism of dada and surrealism or the gleeful fatalism of the YBAs. In the end, however, Masaccios work, unlike Bacons, is
literally inscribed on the walls of the Sacred Place the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence a place conceived not as horror
vacui but as a beautiful space of plenitude and becoming. This difference is insurmountable.
Notes
1
James Abbott McNeill Whistler, The Ten OClock, in Mary Ann Caws (ed.), Manifesto: A Century of Isms, Lincoln 2001, p.7.
2
Ibid., pp.78.
3
Ibid., p.9.
4
It is worth noting that during the 1860s reports of accidental deaths, murders and suicides associated with the Thames increased
threefold. In June 1870 an article in the Penny Illustrated Paper claimed that [d]eaths by drowning occur almost daily in the Thames (25
June 1870). Whistler, a resident of Chelsea, would have been aware of this fact and he may well have known of the Mysterious Death
Of A Ladys Maid, reported in Reynoldss Newspaper on 18 June 1871. The victim, a twenty-one-year-old woman named Elizabeth
Slyfield, was seen by a waterman throwing herself into the river at Battersea on the morning of 31 May; a verdict of felo-de-se was
entered by the coroner to East Surrey two weeks later. The report concludes [the deceased] had not been seduced ... [she] destroyed
her own life while of unsound mind.
5
The sense in which the subject is photo-graphed by the gaze of the Other is explored by Jacques Lacan in The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Alan Sheridan, London and New York 1998, p.106.
6
The movement from the Romantic sublime to the modernist uncanny is explored by David R. Ellison in Ethics and Aesthetics in
European Modernist Literature: From the Sublime to the Uncanny, Cambridge 2001. See p.53.
7
The uncanny effect of the anamorphic skull depicted in Hans Holbeins The Ambassadors 1533 (National Gallery, London) is discussed
by Lacan in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p.92. For further discussion of anamorphosis, see Jacques Lacan, The
Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Dennis Porter, London 1992, pp.1356, 1401, 2723.
8
Friedrich Nietzsche, Preface, The Gay Science, trans. and ed. by Walter Kaufmann, New York 1974, 4.
9
Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Oxford 1990, p.54.

10
By contrast, Martins earlier work, such as The Creation 1824, offers a more disorientating impression of the divine. As the Edinburgh
Review commented in 1829, Martins work awakes a sense of awe and sublimity, beneath which the mind seems overpowered. Cited
77
by Robert Rosenblum in The Abstract Sublime (1961); extract reprinted in Simon Morley (ed.), The Sublime, Cambridge,
Massachusetts 2010, p.110.
Mark Rothkos Red on Maroon

Philip Shaw

Red on Maroon 1959
Mixed media on canvas
support: 2667 x 2388 x 35 mm
Presented by the artist through the American Federation of Arts 1969
Tate T01165
T01165
Full screen
Fig.1
Mark Rothko
Red on Maroon 1959
In 1988, and then again in 2009, Tate Liverpool hosted a display of nine thematically linked paintings by the American abstract
expressionist Mark Rothko.1 The chapel-like room in which these large paintings were hung was painted grey in accordance with the
artists wishes; the lighting was strategically dimmed, creating a sombre, meditative atmosphere. Visitors to the room tended to linger;
78
they observed the paintings with rapt attention, moving around, away from and towards individual canvases in an attempt to see more
clearly. Sometimes they sat and closed their eyes; they may have been trying to adjust their vision to the relative darkness of the room,
they may have been thinking about their lives or they may have been praying.
The paintings were commissioned in 1958 for a private dining room in the Seagram building in New York. When Rothko visited the room
in which the works were to be displayed he decided to withdraw from the contract, possibly as a protest against the exclusive conditions
in which the paintings would be surveyed. The nine Seagram murals in Tates collection (other surviving paintings can be seen at
museums in Washington and Tokyo) are united by simplicity of form large vertical columns and frame-like structures predominate
and by their dark, fustian colour scheme: four of the paintings are titled Red on Maroon; five are called Black on Maroon. The example
shown here belongs to the former series and was completed in 1959 (Tate T01165, fig.1). In many ways this particular Red on
Maroon seems atypical of the series: a feathery, silver-grey veil appears to shimmer above a dark purple background; the red frame,
which seems to hover above the painting, serves as a portal, inviting the viewer to gaze into the ineffable beyond.

The Angel Standing in the Sun exhibited 1846
Oil on canvas
Tate N00550
N00550
Fig.2
The Angel Standing in the Sun exhibited 1846
But what, precisely, are we meant to see in this space? As the critics Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit observe, although the internal
frames repetition of the canvass verticality creates an impression of depth, the desire for legibility is ultimately frustrated. 2 Due to the
difficulty we experience in trying to distinguish between foreground and background at times the silver-grey section appears to resist its
subordinate position so that it almost appears to be on the same plane as the red frame the viewer may well come away with the
impression that there is, after all, nothing to see in this work. 3 Thus, while on the one hand, the painting seems to encourage a
revelatory response, akin in many ways to the effect of the sublime in works by the Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner of whom Rothko
was a great admirer it works no less to baffle or block such a response. The contest between the transcendental and the materialist
aspirations of the painting results in what Bersani and Dutoit call an effect of narrative suspense; unlike, say, Turners Angel Standing in
the Sun 1846 (Tate N00550, fig.2), in the face of Rothkos work it becomes impossible to sustain the sense of a determinate beyond.
In this respect it is worth considering the effect of scale. Measuring 2667 x 2388 mm, Red on Maroon is extremely large. To paint a
small picture, Rothko once commented, is to place yourself outside your experience. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it.
It isnt something you command.4 When enclosed in the windowless, claustrophobic space of the Seagram room, the viewer may well
feel similarly overwhelmed. In his later works, particularly the Houston Chapel series and the grisaille paintings of his final phase, Rothko
goes even further in equating the effects of scale and obscurity with the defeat of spiritual significance. In such works the force of the
sublime seems utterly disabling; in an instant, the impulse towards transcendence is both raised and dashed. Often, towards nightfall,
79
Rothko confessed, theres a feeling in the air of mystery, threat, frustration all of these at once. I would like my painting to have the
quality of such moments.5
Piet Mondrians The Tree A

Philip Shaw
Piet Mondrian 18721944

The Tree A circa 1913
Oil on canvas
2007 Mondrian/Holtzman Trust c/o HCR International, Warrenton, VA
Purchased 1977
Tate T02211
T02211
Full screen
Fig.1
Piet Mondrian
The Tree A circa 1913
2007 Mondrian/Holtzman Trust c/o HCR International, Warrenton, VA
Trees were objects of particular fascination for the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian. In 1908 the artist had painted a vibrant, semi-abstract yet
recognisably naturalistic picture entitled Evening; Red Tree (Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague). A few years later, in 1911, he
completed a painting called Grey Tree (Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague), which appears to endorse a Kantian position on the
80
sublime. In this work, conceived under the influence of cubism, Mondrian eschewed the depiction of objective reality, along with the
lively, expressive colours of his earlier works, for an increasingly abstract, monochrome style of painting. By 1913, the year in which The
Tree A (Tate T02211, fig.1) was most probably completed, the artist had gone even further. In this picture there is no attempt to convey
the illusion of depth or perspective; the image is entirely flat. Gone too are the bold, gestural brush strokes that had characterised his
earlier paintings; the intensely wrought trunk and branches of Grey Tree have been replaced by a network of coolly articulated horizontal
and vertical lines. It is possible to see in this painting the beginnings of Mondrians mature style, with its chequerboard of horizontal and
vertical lines and clearly delineated blocks of colour.
Writing in De Stijl (The Style), the magazine founded by the artist Theo van Doesburg in 1917, Mondrian asserted that the
cultivated man of today is gradually turning away from natural things, and his life is becoming more and more abstract. Natural (external)
things become more and more automatic, and we observe that our vital attention fastens more and more on internal things. 1
The artist goes on to state that as a pure representation of the human mind, art will express itself in an aesthetically purified, that is to
say, abstract form.2 In rejecting nature, Mondrian seems to have in mind Kants argument on the Analytic of the Sublime, from The
Critique of Judgement (1790), concerning the unrepresentable faculty of reason. For Kant, reason is sublime because it cannot be
depicted in a sensible or natural form. For Mondrian, however, the commitment to abstraction is primarily spiritual rather than rational. A
sometime follower of the esoteric religious philosophy known as theosophy, Mondrian maintained that the strict geometric lines in his
later paintings were an attempt to convey the dynamic equilibrium of the universe, with the horizontal representing the feminine, or
material, and the vertical, the masculine and the spiritual. 3
Mondrians theory and achievement as an artist is questioned by the American abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman in his
1948 essay The Sublime is Now. In this essay Newman writes: Mondrian ... succeeded only in raising the white plane and the right
angle into a realm of sublimity, where the sublime paradoxically becomes an absolute of perfect sensations. Newman concludes that the
geometry (perfection) [is] swallowed up his metaphysics (his exaltation). 4 Mondrian remains, in other words, an essentially Romantic
artist, wedded to the realm of nature even as he gestures towards the exalted sphere of the pure or abstract sublime.
Notes
Sublime Destruction: Barnett Newmans Adam and Eve

Philip Shaw

Adam 19512
Oil on canvas
Purchased 1968
Tate T01091
T01091
81
Fig.1
Barnett Newman
Adam 19512

Eve 1950
Oil on canvas
support: 2388 x 1721 x 50 mm
Purchased 1980
Tate T03081
T03081
Fig.2
Barnett Newman
Eve 1950
In his landmark essay The Sublime is Now (1948), the American abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman announced that the
impulse of modern art resides in the desire to destroy beauty. The problem with beauty, according to Newman, is that it prevents the
artist from realising mans desire for the exalted, in other words, for the sublime. In religious art, for Newman in particular, a
preoccupation with the beautiful with its emphasis on the figurative, the perfection of form, and the reality of sensation has impeded
the perception of the Absolute.1 Newmans view accords here with that of the philosopher Immanuel Kant (17241804) who argued in
his Analytic of the Sublime (1790), from The Critique of Judgement, that the sublime, unlike the beautiful, cannot be contained in any
sensible form but concerns only ideas of reason. 2 The sublime, that is, is on the side of the mind rather than nature; and since the
extent of the mind is unbounded it cannot be adequately represented by an object with determinate bounds.
Although Newman expresses reservations about Kants theory it is easy to see how frustration with the material limits of representation
might be resolved through a commitment to abstraction. In Eve 1950 and Adam 19512 (Tate T03081 andT01091, figs.1 and 2)
Newman makes no attempt to depict the first man and woman in any natural or literal sense. Instead of recognisable figures the viewer
is presented with vast extents of red, interrupted by darker, vertical stripes. A thin, hard band of purple marks the outer right-hand edge
of Eve, while Adam is divided by lighter, softer bands of cadmium to the far left, the left centre and a sharper, thinner stripe to the right.
Yet although we have come a long way from the naturalism and idealism of Michelangelos Creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel
ceiling (1510), the titles of Newmans paintings maintain a connection with the referential. The viewer, in other words, is encouraged to
perceive the work before them as emblematic, in some way, of the divine.
82
It may be, as the art critic Arthur Danto suggests, that Newman was moved by the Old Testament injunction against the making of
graven images a passage cited by Kant as perhaps the most sublime ... in Jewish Law and there is certainly a sense in which
Newmans refusal to depict sensible forms can be related to his Jewish background. 3 Danto goes on to state that Newmans painting is
about something that can be said but not shown, at least not pictorially. Abstract painting, he concludes, is thus not without content. 4
The sense of the work as a presentation of that which can be said but not shown is enhanced by Newmans insistence that viewers
should place themselves close to the surfaces of his canvases so as to become enveloped or overwhelmed by a sense of
boundlessness.
Above all, however, Newmans painting is about the act of creation itself. And here again the works lend themselves to a religious
interpretation. It is tempting, for example, to regard the vertical bands of colour as analogous to an act of division, a gesture of
separation, as God separated light from darkness, with a line drawn in the void. 5 As the artists friend and critic Thomas B. Hess notes,
Newman himself claimed that the artist, like God, begins with chaos, the void. 6 The artists first move is to re-enact Gods primal gesture
by informing the void with a downward stroke or zip, created by laying a thin strip of masking tape over a freshly painted ground, which
the artist then removes at the end of the painting process in a dramatic, revelatory instant. The zip has also been regarded as a
representation of man, indeed, of the first man, Adam, who walks upright ... virile, erect. 7 The name Adam, moreover, is derived from
the Hebrew word adamah (earth), but is also linked with adom(red) and dam (blood).
Yet Newman, while fully aware of the religious cognates of his work, urges contemporary artists to free themselves from the
impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend [and] myth ... Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or life, we are,
he insists, making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. 8 The subject matter of Newmans work is thus creation itself, an act
associated no longer with God but with man. Ultimately, the terrifying or overwhelming aspects of Newmans paintings become
subordinated to the idea of sustaining the distinction between form and formlessness. As Newman stated, after visiting the sacred
mounds of the Indians in south-west Ohio: Looking at the site you feel, Here I am, here ... and out beyond there (beyond the limits of the
site) there is chaos ... but here you get a sense of your own presence ... I became involved with making the viewer present: the idea that
Man is present.9
In recent years much has been made of Newmans stress that man is present. He has been accused, variously, of a fetishization of
virility and of a politically regressive exaltation of the individual. 10 Yet, as the cultural theorist Jean-Franois Lyotard has suggested,
Newmans affirmation of the individual is precariously conceived. 11 In Eve, for example, the zip separating form and formlessness is
located on the outer margins of the canvas; it barely registers as an act of creation. The fragile division between something and nothing,
marked by the sudden disclosure of the zip is, above all, understood by Newman as a temporal event. In his 1949 Prologue for a New
Aesthetic, the artist wrote that he was not interested with a manipulation of space nor with the image, but with a sensation of
time.12 Lyotard adds that the conception of time presented in The Sublime is Now has nothing to do with continuity or duration and as
such is opposed to the constitution of the human subject. Newmans now, writes Lyotard, is a stranger to consciousness and cannot be
constituted by it. Rather, it is what dismantles consciousness, what deposes consciousness, it is what consciousness cannot formulate,
and even what consciousness forgets in order to constitute itself. 13 By way of Slavoj ieks neo-Lacanian critique of the sublime, we
might add that Newmans now, materialized in the form of the zip, stands in for the impossible, inassimilable kernel of subjectivity. Far
from aggrandising man, the creative act in Adam and Eve can thus be said to mark the degree zero, the bare minimum of difference
necessary for the emergence of the human subject.
Notes
1
Barnett Newman, The Sublime is Now, in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. ONeill (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 1703; passim.
2
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. Walter S. Pluhar (Indiana: Hackett Publishing, 1987), p. 99.
3
Ibid., p. 135.
4
Arthus C. Danto, Unnatural Wonders: Essays From the Gap Between Art and Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 192.
83
Sublime Sexuality: Lucio Fontanas Spatial Concept Waiting

Philip Shaw
Lucio Fontana 18991968

Canvas
unconfirmed: 930 x 730 mm; frame: 1161 x 982 x 86 mm
Purchased 1964
Tate T00694
T00694
Full screen
Fig.1
Lucio Fontana
Lucio Fontana began to punch holes (or buchi) through his canvases in 194950, the aim being literally to break through the surface of
the work so that the viewer could perceive the space that lies beyond. Fontana seems to have regarded this gesture as a means of
disclosing the unlimited space of the sublime, announcing, I have created an infinite dimension. 1 Towards the end of the 1950s, the
artist experimented further with cuts (or tagli) executed with a razor. Although carefully premeditated, the slashes in these later canvases
Spatial Concept Waiting (Tate T00694, fig.1) dates from 1960 appear spontaneous and bear a certain resemblance to the zips in
the abstract expressionist paintings of Barnett Newman. The effect of Fontanas cutting varies from canvas to canvas. In some works,
such as this one, the viewer is drawn into the space beyond the canvas; in other works the slash seems to erupt outwards, conveying
84
the force of the original assault towards the viewer in a way that is both energetic and terrifying. Despite the obviously violent
implications of his art, Fontana maintained that he had set out to construct rather than to destroy.
The sense in which such work holds creative and destructive elements in tension has a clear connection with the comingling of pain and
pleasure that are distinctive features of the sublime. Where Fontana goes further, however, is in his unstinting focus on the unconscious
links between sublimity, terror and sexuality. To understand how these links emerge in this work it is helpful to consider an example from
the world of advertising. In Britain in the 1980s Charles Saatchi spearheaded the design of a poster for the cigarette brand Silk Cut that
depicts a swath of purple silk with a single slash in the fabric. Through the creation of a carefully orchestrated set of associations, linking
luxury (the opulent fabric), violence (the razor cut) and female sexuality (the obscure object of desire which the cut resembles), the
poster effectively circumvented restrictions on the use of explicit sexual imagery in advertising. In Freudian terms the Saatchi campaign
artfully manoeuvred between the twin poles of idealisation and sublimation in the egos relationship with the sexual impulse.
In the realm of fine art, Fontanas work seems no less concerned with the sexualised foundation of the viewing experience. In the terms
of Thomas Weiskels groundbreaking reading of The Romantic Sublime (1976), Spatial Concept Waiting seems to dramatise the
moment when the illusory integrity of the ego succumbs to the overwhelming might of the dynamic sublime. 2Unable to resurrect the
pleasure principle that would enable the ego to circulate around such terrifying delight, the unwitting viewer of Fontanas work is brought
to the terminus of their desire.
Philip Shaw is Professor of Romantic Studies in the School of English at the University of Leicester and Co-Investigator of The Sublime
Object: Nature, Art and Language.
Notes
1
Interview with Lucio Fontana, in Carla Lonzi, Autoritratto, Bari, Italy 1969, p.169.
2
Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence, Baltimore 1976.
Sublime Spirituality: Wassily Kandinskys Cossacks

Philip Shaw
85
Wassily Kandinsky 18661944

Cossacks 191011
Oil on canvas
Presented by Mrs Hazel McKinley 1938
Tate N04948
N04948
Full screen
Fig.1
Wassily Kandinsky
Cossacks 191011
Wassily Kandinskys painting Cossacks (Tate N04948, fig.1) shimmers between naturalism and abstraction. On the one hand it is
possible to discern the elements of a recognisable landscape: three orange-helmeted cavalrymen in the foreground; a cheerfully
rendered rainbow in the middle ground; a horizon made up of jagged, mountainous forms; a flock of birds gathering in the sky. On the
other hand, the reduction of these representational figures to basic black lines and blotches of primary colour, together with the absence
of perspective, lends the work a peculiarly abstract, pattern-like quality. As we shall see, there are echoes here of the ancient theory of
the lightning-like sublime effect, albeit in modernist form.
Painted between 1910 and 1911, Cossacks is an expression of Kandinskys belief in the power of art to awaken this capacity for
experiencing the spiritual in material and in abstract phenomena. 1 The dynamic tension between abstract form and concrete content
may be read as a manifestation of the wider conflict between the forces of political oppression Kandinsky had been deeply moved by
the strikes and upheavals in Odessa a few years earlier and the hunger for spiritual rejuvenation consequent upon the rise of soulless
86
modernity. Like his contemporaries Piet Mondrian and Henri Matisse, Kandinsky saw painting as an extension of religion, capable, as he
wrote in his Reminiscences (1913), of revealing new perspectives and true truths in moments of sudden illumination, resembling a
flash of lightning.2 The echo of the Ancient Greek writer Longinuss notion of sublime speech, which similarly strikes like a bolt of
lightning, is carried over into Kandinskys description of the spiritual mission of the modern artist. In his 1911 essay On the Spiritual in
Art, he compares the life of the spirit to a large, acute-angled triangle, at the apex of which stands the solitary artistic genius dispensing
spiritual food to the multitudes below.3
Notes
1
Wassily Kandinsky, Reminiscences/Three Pictures, in Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (eds.), Kandinsky: Complete Writings on
Art, new edn, New York 1994, pp.35591.
2
Ibid.
3
Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, in Lindsay and Vergo (eds.) 1994, pp.114220.
The Sublime Exceeded: James Abbott McNeill Whistlers Nocturne: Blue and Silver
Cremorne Lights
Philip Shaw
James Abbott McNeill Whistler 18341903

Oil on canvas
Bequeathed by Arthur Studd 1919
Tate N03420
87
N03420
Full screen
Fig.1
James Abbott McNeill Whistler
In his Ten OClock lecture, delivered in 1885, Whistler mounted an attack on what he regarded as the hackneyed discourse of the
sublime. He denounced art critics, in particular, for reducing the singularity of the artists vision to a set of predetermined codes:
a mountain, to them, is synonymous with height a lake, with depth the ocean, with vastness the sun, with glory. So that a picture
with a mountain, a lake, and an ocean however poor in paint is inevitably lofty, vast, infiniteand glorious on paper.1
Nocturne: Blue and Silver Cremorne Lights 1872 (Tate N03420, fig.1), with its artful deconstruction of the divisions between industry
and enjoyment, truth and illusion, is similarly sceptical of the conventional, Romantic notion of the sublime. The view is of the Thames at
night, looking upriver towards Battersea and Chelsea. Whistler, however, is not primarily interested in depicting reality. The blurring of the
division between the mills to the left of the canvas and the lights of the pleasure gardens to the right is an artistic contrivance, a product
of the artists commitment to the binary colour schemes of Japanese painting. The artificiality of the scene is underscored further by the
use of motifs derived from Japanese woodblock printing: the painters butterfly signature bounded by a rectangular frame appears to the
extreme right of the composition, while a bamboo-like shrub peeps above the bottom edge. The disorientating effects of the printing
motifs are related to the displacement of the paintings viewing subject. As the eye vacillates between the illusory depth of the far horizon
and the two-dimensional immediacy of the butterfly icon, the viewers sense of spatial coherence is undermined.
A further point of disturbance is provided by the indeterminate form floating in the centre of the painting. Most likely a barge, the vague,
amorphous shape nevertheless seems eerily human and, as such, is suggestive of the rivers association with violence and death. It
takes time to conceive that the shape drifting towards us may be a dead body, but once this possibility is grasped we become subject
once more to the uncanny force of the paintings gaze. Photo-graphed, as the philosopher Jacques Lacan describes it, from the
perspective of the no longer human, our self-fashioning as vital and heroic, perhaps even sublime, undergoes a debilitating
transformation. Instead of penetrating a mystical horizon the viewer is confronted instead with an intimation of mortality that is alternately
repellent and fascinating.
Paradoxically, for a work so apparently invested in the artificial and idealised, Cremorne Lights is thus radically materialist in its approach
to the sublime. With its unsettling reminders of the intense pleasure of self-dissolution, Whistlers painting challenges the traditional
notion of the sublime as a staging ground for the triumphant recovery of the self from the jaws of destruction. Just as the anamorphic
form in the foreground prevents the ego from encompassing the work in its totality, so those other contrivances the decorative foliage
and butterfly icon draw attention away from the illusion of depth towards the reality of the painted surface, suggesting, in opposition to
conventional Victorian narrative painting, that there is nothing beyond this painted surface.
What the painting achieves, therefore, is a sustained interrogation of its very status as a painting; neither wholly committed to flatness
nor to depth, Cremorne Lights exceeds the discourse of the sublime precisely as a result of its critical engagement with all that that
discourse entails: the elevation of the spiritual over the material; the disclosure of truth behind the veil of appearances; the triumph of the
rational over the sensual. Still further, through its investment in the artificial rather than the reality of the moment, which modernism
proudly proclaims as its mark of authenticity, Cremorne Lights announces itself as both timely and belated, as if the painting were
observing itself failing to be new.
Notes
1
James Abbott McNeill Whistler, The Ten OClock, in Mary Ann Caws (ed.), Manifesto: A Century of Isms, University of Nebraska Press,
Lincoln 2001, p.9.
88

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1.

Raoul Hausmann 18861971

Ibid., p.47 (20 November 1915).

Aikin-Sneath 1936, pp.445.

Ibid., vol.1, p.202.

Ibid., vol.1, pp.2056 fn., corrected.

Schopenhauer, World, 1819/59, vol.2, p.435.

Ibid., vol.2, p.434.

Ibid., vol.1, p.253, and see pp.3767 and vol.2, p.435.

Ibid., vol.1, p.253.

Ibid., vol.1, p.324.

Ibid., vol.1, p.326.

Ibid., vol.2, p.91.

Ibid., vol.2, p.99.

Margaret Herzfeld-Sander, Essays on German Theater, New York 2002, p.xi.

Schopenhauer, World, 1819/59, vol.2, p.93.

Ibid., 7, p.60 (KSA 1/57).

Ibid., 7, p.60 (KSA 1/57).

See, in particular, ibid., Pt.3, The Convalescent, pp.32733 (KSA 4/2707).

Nietzsche, KSA 13/18.

Ibid., p.38 fn.

Ibid., ch.4, see e.g. pp.31922.

Contemporary Art and the Sublime

The sublime as it gets made

A tradition of the pictorial sublime

Joseph Wright of Derby 17341797

John Martin 17891854

The scale of the sublime

The content of the sublime: global

The content of the sublime: cosmological

Still from video

Anselm Kiefer born 1945

The content of the sublime: theological

Black Square 1930

The sublime as it gets spoken

A genealogy of the contemporary sublime: Newman to Lyotard

A genealogy of the contemporary sublime: Kelley to Tuymans

The limits of the sublime

For example in the photographers website http://www.jeremyhogan.name/portfolio/11/military-industrial-shopping-complex, accessed 18

Ibid., Part 5, Section VII: the essays closing line.

Ibid., Part 1, Section VII.

Ibid., Part 2, Section I.

Ibid., Part 2, Section XIV.

Matthew Ritchie | Apocalypse | Art21 Blog: blog.art21.org/2008/08/21/matthew-ritchie-apocalypse/, accessed 18 May 2012.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, Book 2, 26.

Longinus, On the Sublime, ix.9.

Quotes from Barnett Newman, The Sublime is Now 1948.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, Book 1, 28.

Saatchi Gallery website: www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/luc_tuymans.htm, accessed 18 May 2012.

Thomas McEvilley in Beckley 2001.

Bill Viola and the Sublime

Bill Viola born 1951

Bill Viola born 1951

Five Angels for the Millennium

The sublime in Viola

Updating the sublime

Mark C. Taylor, Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion, London 1992, p.89.

This is discussed in Crowther 1984, p.57.

Paul Crowther, The Kantian Sublime, Madison 1974, p.99.

Philip Shaw, The Sublime, London 2006, p.3.

Crowther 1984, p.52.

Shaw 2006, p.3.

Morley 2010, p.18.