Sublime
August 31, 2006
JMW Turner
Shields, on the River Tyne (1823)
In thinking about the posts and comments from yesterday, and how that might relate to art production, I was reminded of ideas of the sublime. I had a rather fuzzy idea that it was associated with the Romantics during the 1800s, and was based on the idea that humans feel awe and insignificance when confronted by “nature red in tooth and claw” (Tennyson).
According to the article in Wikipedia, “In aesthetics, the sublime (from the Latin sublimis (exalted)) is the quality of transcendent greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation. This greatness is often used when referring to nature and its vastness.”
The Tate glossary refers to the sublime as ” Theory of art put forward by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful published in 1757. He defined the Sublime as an artistic effect productive of the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling and wrote ‘whatever is in any sort terrible or is conversant about terrible objects or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the Sublime’. In landscape the Sublime is exemplified by Turner’s sea storms and mountain scenes. The notion that a legitimate function of art can be to produce upsetting or disturbing effects was an important element in Romantic art and remains fundamental to art today. “
I find the Tate definition quite funny, because romanticism and the sublime fell out of fashion quite dramatically during the modernist period, and ideas of transcendance and awe are considered a bit quaint in this post-post everything age, whereas being upsetting and disturbing (or just sensationalistic) is still very ‘avant-garde’.
Fast forward two hundred years, to the technological sublime, a term coined by Perry Miller, referring to feelings of awe inspired by large-scale applications of technological prowess and examined in American Technological Sublime by David Nye. More reading needed!
