![]() ![]() 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”’. ![]() ![]() 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’. 3 The sublime was activated in the relation between the viewer and the painting. 2 Discussing Newman’s Onement I 1948, Crowther argues that ‘here Newman could express humanity’s 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’. 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’. ![]() The relationship between these ‘zips’ (Newman’s term) and the background colour fields can be posited as a relational difference between immanence and transcendence. 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 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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