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 Tiger’s Eye. 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. It is expressed in negative terms, such as through the dissolution of form or through the presence of voids. 1 It cannot be expressed positively (in figurative terms) and relies on the language of abstraction to give it form. In The Postmodern Condition (1979), the philosopher and literary theorist Jean-François Lyotard showed how the sublime articulates ‘the incommensurability of reality to concept’. 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. 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. Secondly, attitudes towards and presentation of the sublime changed. 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. First, the sublime started to be regarded less as an attribute of nature than as a mode of consciousness. The main shifts that have occurred in conceptualising the sublime in the modern era are twofold. 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. © Bill Viola StudioAs 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.
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