The Sublime

The Sublime

For a while I was reading this book, and I’m not going to lie, I didn’t have a bloody clue what they were getting at. I mean everything about it from the way it starts off is just so over the top. I think this is because I’ve come to the conclusion that academic writing is a little pretentious for my like, I clearly must not be on the same wavelength as these people. Case and point:

The word ‘sublime’ may seem rather outmoded [I think the word outmoded is outmoded dear author] - etymologically it comes from the Latin sublimis (elevated; lofty; sublime) [why does the author feel the need to use so much punctuation? and three examples of synonyms? Is it not obvious that the latin word sublimis must mean sublime seeing as the title of the book is sublime and this is the introduction? Is it just me or is this not a bit patronising? how do people read these books for fun? he continues…] derived from the proposition sub, here meaning ‘up to’, and, some sources state, limen, the threshold, surround or lintel of a doorway, while others refer to limes, a boundary or limit. 

So then the author waffles for a bit and introduces a character who wrote some Greek pieces of Text who is classed as ‘an anonymous Roman-era author known as Longinus.’ Very mysterious. But there is one meaningful sentence. 

 Longinus had declared that true nobility in art and life was to be discovered through a confrontation with the threatening and the unknown, and drew attention to anything in art that challenges our capacity to understand and fills us with wonder. The sublime artist was, according to Longinus, a kind of superhuman figure capable of rising above arduous and ominous events and experiences in order to produce a nobler and more refined style.

Well, how incredibly poetic is that. How does this statement not make everyone in the world want to be a painter of sublime pieces of artwork? I know it makes me want to be. Okay so I continued reading and I’ll some it up in a nutshell but basically I don’t think it’s relevant just because of the way it’s written, it’s really not worthy of quoting isn’t the first 100 pages. But basically the books thinks there’s three types of sublime and there’s the sublime that’s full of horror and then there’s beauty and the technology.  The thing that annoys me most I think is the fact that the author basically (well it seems to me this way) to name drop every philosopher possible, as soon as possible in the introduction. So it probably wasn’t the best book for someone who really doesn’t care about whose taking credit for the thought because I’ll forget after a good night’s sleep anyways. But he goes from Nietzsche to Marxism is like three sentences, without joining the dots, but he will spend like an entire page breaking down the word sublime into Latin. I just don’t need that kind of structure in my life.

But I somehow persevered with said book (although I might of skipped twenty pages) to the beauty section seeing as I thought that’s where art and painting would be mentioned again.  It’s not mentioned again till pg 108, I fell asleep twice trying to get there.

 Originating with Longinus, the Sublime was fervently explored in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and recurs constantly in the aesthetics of such writers as Burke, Reynolds, Kant, Deidot and Delacroix. [why is the author name dropping again? what even is the point of this? The only one I could think of is that these are big names everyone knows of them even if you don’t like theory but it’s just not necessary, honestly.] For them and for their contemporaries, the Sublime provided a flexible semantic container for the murky new Romantic experiences of awe, terror, boundlessness and divinity that began to rupture the decorous confines of earlier aesthetic systems. As imprecise and irrational as the feeling it tried to name, the Sublime could be extended to art as well as to nature. One of it’s major expressions, in fact, was the painting of sublime landscapes. pg108. - literally the only reason I typed up this paragraph is to introduce the theory of sublime landscapes we finally got there, that is essentially what a matte painting is, if you think about it romantically. (or a metropolis but that comes a bit later in the book.. )

A case in point is the dwarfing immensity of Gordale Scar, a natural wonder [personally wouldn’t go that far but that’s subjective] of Yorkshire and a goal of many Romantic Tourists [HA! It’s no Paris.] Re-created on canvas between 1811 and 1815 by the British painter James Ward (1769-1855), Gordale Scar is meant to stun the spectator into an experience of the Sublime that may well be unparalleled in painting until a work like Clifford Still’s 1957-D. In the words of Edmund Burke, whose ‘Philosophical Enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful' (1757) was the most influential analysis of such feelings, ‘Greatness of dimension is a powerful cause of the Sublime.’ [OKAY FINALLY, this is where I want to apply it to Matte Painting, so what I’ve come to realise from doing my research into Matte Paintings is how large they all are. When they were traditionally done, they weren’t small pieces of work, if you look back at by timeline of Matte Paintings you can see the artists stood next to them that’s what makes them sublime. And even with the digital matte’s the actual canvas size is gigantic to what’s compressed that’s why they always look so detailed even though they actually aren’t. I think this is what I need to do with my practical work. I need to go bigger than the glass matte’s I’ve been working on. so the end of the paragraph…] Indeed, in both the Ward and the Still, the spectator is first awed by the sheer magnitude of the sight before him. (Wards canvas is 131” by 166 inches; Still’s 113 by 159 inches.) [Okay so maybe this is a bit extreme, I can’t decide if including this theory into the academic writing is going to be too pulling teeth, I don’t want my paper to just tick boxes for the sake of it, I want it to represent me.] At the same time, his breath is held by the dizzy drop to the pit of an abyss; and then, shuddering like Moore at the bottom of Niagara, he can only look up with what sense are left him [is it just me or does this part of the sentence not make sense? Are left him. Poor writing - even by my standards.] and gasp before something akin to divinity.

The next part of the text goes on to exaggerate dramatically on the ‘dumbfounding size’ and the spectators gaze and other bullshit to be quite frank. I mean the page ends with this sentence: ‘As the Romantics discovered, all the subliminally of God can be found in the simplest natural phenomena, whether a blade of grass or an expanse of sky.’ I take it that wasn’t the eighties new romantics he was on about here. You’ve lost me dear author. He continues to babble on about how certain objects in the painting can be sublime too. I think this could be applied to compositions of matte paintings, because you literally do have the power to create the most perfect reality, if you put the elements (objects) in the right place, to make it sublime. It’s at the artists discretion, but it is all very subjective. 

The chapter then continues with Turner’s paintings, ‘If the Sublime can be attained by saturating such limitless expanses with a luminous, hushed stillness, it can also be reached inversely by filling this void with a teeming, unleashed power. Turner’s art, for one, presents both of these Sublime extremes. In his ‘Snowstorm’ of 1842, the infinities are dynamic rather that static, and the most extravagant of nature’s phenomena are sought out as metaphors for this experience of cosmic energy. 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. And if the immeasurable spaces and incalculable energies of a such a Turner evoke the elemental power of creation, other works of the period grapple even more literally with these primordial forces.’ 

What I like most about this quote is that even though over half of it is gibberish, the way I interoperate it, is that the power is the atmosphere. And that’s what I’ve noticed in a lot of digital matte paintings, especially in the modern ones, the most successful ones are the paintings with the most atmosphere. Well the atmosphere in Turner’s painting are created by the textures of the brushes - which I know isn’t what creates it in the matte painting’s (please see blog post on painting by matte painter’s quote), it’s the lighting that second creates this empowerment. So it’s seems like the techniques that makes these landscape paintings sublime is the same thing that makes matte painting’s successful in the eyes of Ellenshaw. 

The 'third master’ of the sublime landscape painting in the eyes of this book is Jackson Pollock, and the author has lost me here. This is too far. See picture. I feel like no comment from me is necessary here. 

I quite liked this quote:

‘With the computer, and brought together in the telematic embrace, we can hope to glimpse the unseeable, to grasp the ineffable chaos of the becoming, the secret order of the disorder. And as we come to see more, we shall see the computer less and less. It will become invisible in its immanence.’ 

Roy Ascott, ‘Is there love in the Telematic Embrace?’ 1990.

I’m not entirely sure what the telematic embrace is, I’d be tempted to look up this book if I find a place for the Sublime in my dissertation. What I liked about it is that it kinda sounds like a poetic way of how the industry changed in matte painting, when the matte artists got pushed out the door and the computers were brought in and those that persevered had to learn the secrets of the computer to keep there jobs and then as the industry progressed they didn’t need to be technicians anymore it was back to being artists as the use of computers is mainly second nature to everyone. 

So the rest of the book carried onto being wordy and so on, but there was one paragraph that really stood out to me. It kind brought contrast between the transition from traditional to digital matte painting, like the transition from painting to photography. But photography freed painters, they no longer had to paint in a photorealistic style they were free for fabulous colours and weird perspectives, but matte painters were forced to become more photorealistic. I thought this was an interesting realisation I had. I don’t know what use it is at this stage.

Painters had already set themselves to the task of documentation (one thinks here of Gustave Courbet, of Edouard Manet), but they were quickly overtaken in this. Their procedures could not compete: slow professional learning processes, costly materials, lengthy production periods, difficult objects to manage - in short, the cost of the whole endeavour was high compared to the relatively minimal total cost of making a photograph. Later, Marcel Duchamp concluded that it was no longer a time to paint. [rubbish he was biased because he was a master of photography of course he would say that, love his photographs though.] With photography, the idea of the industrial readymade had arrived. Those painters who persisted had to confront photography’s challenge, and so they engaged in the dialectic of the avant-garde which had at stake the question ‘What is Painting?’ Painting became a philosophical activity: [really? are you high? yeah sure it could be sometimes, but lots of times it isn’t, the queen still commission’s painting and have you not seen that amazing new tv show the next great landscape artist, it’s like america’s next top model but for painter’s and it’s fantastic and I’m pretty sure they aren’t in a philosophical state of mind when they are competing they get super stressy. This author is bonkers.] previously defined rules governing the formation of pictorial images were not enacted and applied automatically. Rather, painting’s rule became the re-evaluation of those pictorial rules, as philosophy re-evaluates philosophical syntax.  [from here on the author goes off on one, which i can’t appreciate but I like the start of this paragraph, he just seems to have very different idea’s on how it developed as an art form in comparison to how history documents it.]

The final quote I liked from this book which I won’t use in my dissertation but I want to share it with you because it’s poetic and I think it’s like you know the saying, a painting says a thousand words, from this little poem I have the painting in my head, and I thought this kind of philosophy is the kind of thought provoking thing this module had in mind for us creatives:

‘A sea memory, I am quite sure that it’s a memory of the sea. Not a cloud in the sky, a sharp-edged horizon, waves surging in endlessly from beyond. When I saw that vista, it was as if something in my infant consciousness awakened from a long dream. I looked around at my hands and feet. And then I seemed to be looking down on myself from above. As if I were there merged into that seascape.’

Hiroshi Sugimoto, ‘Noh such thing as time’, 2002.


NB: After a revisitation to this text, I have come to the conclusion that it is not the author's fault, yet the fact that there's so many other pieces of text's like this that would spur on such a way of writing. I mean look at this, this is all his reference's for the introduction. Bravo so well informed.

N OTES

 1 Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) 3. 

2 Philip Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘Sublime Truth (Part 1)’, Cultural Critique (Spring 1991) 26; reprinted in Jean-François Courtine, ed., Of the Sublime: Presence in Question (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993). 

3 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) Part II, Sections I–II; ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) 53–4.

4 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790); trans. J.J. Meredith (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) 106. 

5 Friedrich Schiller, On the Sublime (1801); trans. Julius Elias (New York: Ungar, 1966). 

6 G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (c. 1818–26; transcripts by one of his students, Heinrich Gustav Hotho, published posthumously in 1835 and 1842); trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).

7 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (1819) vol. III; trans. Jill Berman (London: Everyman, 1995). 

8 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872); trans. Shaun Whiteside (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994). 

9 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (1930); trans David McLintock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002) chapter 4. 

10 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936); in Illuminations , ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968) 217–51. 11 Carl Jung, in Jung on Alchemy, ed. Nathan Schwartz-Salant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 

12 Georges Bataille, Inner Experience (1954); trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988) 12.