The sublime is at the heart of our dealings with our environment, defined by a paradoxical combination of ecstasy and dread, it is a sensation occasioned by anything which triggers an awareness of ones own impotency, followed by what eighteenth century philosopher Edmund Burke termed ‘delight’[1] in the knowledge of safety from the source. It is a sensation, ‘Deeply bound up with our instinct for self-preservation.’ [2] As such, it describes one of the most innate aesthetic judgements, which is core to our understanding of human frailty.
As a key aesthetic judgement it has experienced redefinition within the hands of multiple theorists and through time. It was Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant’s re-workings in the eighteenth century, which cemented it within western cultural theory. However, due to shifts within our landscape and the cultural means of expression, the sublime has come under new focus. Key to Kant’s definition of the sensation is the premise that it can only be experienced through a direct interaction with the environment, and that environment must be purely natural.[3] In Kantian terms, the very fact that the process hinges on an awakening to ones own human frailty means it cannot be generated by anything ‘directed, defined, and artificially created,’[4] by man.
The post-modern theorist, Jean-Francois Lyotard has since stripped down the notion of the sublime into the basic cognitive process of making meaning [5]. The stage of being overwhelmed during the sublime sensation, is within Leotard’s theory, transferred to a crisis of communication. He describes it as that which exists outside the human lexicon, and therefore out of our powers to express. Threatened by its infinitude, we attempt to reassert power by recreating it within human means. Translated to the creative process, the representation of the sublime becomes about presenting ‘the unpresentable in presentation itself.’[6] The sublime becomes key to understanding artistic representation of the environment. It is simultaneously the motivation to create, and the desired effect on the viewer.
Leotard’s theory also questions Kant’s limitation, by identifying the mental sphere as the site of the sublime, and therefore the subjective nature of it. The stimulus of the sublime becomes even more negotiable when it is applied to the contemporary art climate, where technology has transformed the boundaries between real and artificial. The photographic landscape can be navigated mentally like the real, and yet is composed, and manipulated by human hand. This has brought about a deconstruction of Kant’s indictments on the power of artifice to generate the sensation. I intend to begin my investigation by tracing how the introduction of photography with its implicit connection to the real has affected the power of the image to generate the sensation.
The environment itself has also undergone transformation since the time of Kant and Burke. The divisions between man and nature have become much more blurred, and therefore the possibility for an interaction with the completely natural that Kant speaks of, increasingly impossible. The advancement of our species in terms of globalisation has manifested itself in processes such as, mining, and waste disposal.[7] The earth becomes the quarry and dumping ground for the more finely tuned technological and architectural processes that define our capitalist world. The photographers Andreas Gursky and Edward Burtynsky have made these processes of globalisation their subject matter, using photographic and in Gursky’s case, digital manipulation to strengthen and magnify the sublime within them.
Technological advancements such as the Internet, television and the phone have also transferred our notion of the environment into the realms of the metaphysical. Once the sphere of the divine, we are now presented with the unknowable and sublime within human creation.[8] This is the sublime which German photographer, Andreas Gursky seeks to create in his images of huge spaces such as stock exchanges, factories, and shopping centres, places which symbolise the vast incomprehensible network of globalization. The people in his images are dwarfed by their surroundings, revealing our own relationship with the abstract territories of our world. The contemporary sublime is defined no longer by the unity of a confrontation with a natural force, it has become branched into the areas of the ‘ecological sublime’[9] and the ‘technological sublime’[10]. This division is presented in the subject matter of the work of Andreas Gursky and Edward Burtynsky.
Edward Burtansky tackles the sublime of the physical interactions between man and the planet in his ‘Manufactured Landscapes’,[11] focusing on shipyards, quarries, and recycling plants. In some images, like Gursky he reveals the human element, the cogs in the system that perpetuate the processes. In others, only human creation is visible, often through destruction of the natural elements. In both photographers work, the disquieting magnitude of man’s constructs is incongruous with the beauty of the image surface. The viewer experiences the duality that defines the sublime sensation through the oppositional qualities of the reality and appearance of it within the photograph.
The urgency with which the aesthetic theory is being reconfigured is evident in its being a theme for many projects and recent literature, a cultural adjustment which stems from the very recent clamour to re-evaluate our physical interactions with the environment. In particular the increasing extent of human involvement within those processes such as climate change, a process which once epitomised the sublime power of the natural. The Tate recently underwent a three - year investigation into cultural interpretation of the concept of the sublime, the most recent project involving a documented voyage to Greenland, a landscape on the forefront of environmental change. Scientific research has now indicated a certainty in man's activities being responsible for the acceleration of global warming[12] in light of which discussion of the environment has assumed an increasingly moral shape. The notion of the sublime has been revisioned as a powerful tool within the photography of our environment. At such a time when the earth's health is under threat, there is a perceived responsibility for image-makers to generate a sublime that holds veracity with the contemporary environment.
[1] Edmund Burke. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. United States: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 34
[2] Edmund Burke. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. p. 47
[3] According to Christopher Hitt. ‘Towards an Ecological Sublime’, New Literary History, vol. 30, no. 3, p. 603
[4] Andrew Wilson. ‘Making the Viewer Present’, Art and Design, vol.10, may/june 1995, p. 31
[5] Lyotard’s theory explained by by Andrew Wilson. ‘Making the Viewer Present’, p. 34
[6] Hans Bertens. The Idea of the Postmodern: A History. London: Routledge, 1995, p. 127
[7] The idea of interactions between man and nature as a series of processes explored by Marrianne Krogh Jense. ‘Remarks on Nature, super-ecology, life, production, position and other negotiations.’ http://weboeliasson.dyndns.info:8080/PDF/Remarks_on_nature.pdf -consulted may 2007
[8] The idea of the technological sublime and divine explored by Alix Ohlin. ‘Andreas Gursky and the Contemporary Sublime,’ Art Journal, vol. 61, no. 4, 2002, pp. 23-35
[9] A term used by Christopher Hitt. ‘Towards an Ecological Sublime’, p. 603
[10] A term used by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe. Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime. New York: Alworth, 1999, p. 125
[11] The title of the book by Lori, Pauli (ed).Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky. National Gallery of Canada in association with Yale Press, 2003
[12] Information provided by ‘Climate Change- Science: State of Knowledge’ http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/stateofknowledge.html consulted 23 september 2007
