JANE PICKERSGILL

The Art of the Sublime - Tate (2012)

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In 2008 (coincidentally the year of the global financial crisis) Tate initiated a research project to investigate the use of the term in relation to contemporary art. It resulted in several papers published from 2012 onwards.

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The term originates in Greek discussion of literature but in Latin, sub meaning below or up to and limen meaning limit or boundary but also lintel (the supporting beam of a door or window). By about 1700 sublime was being debated as an experience which was outside of normal conduct or understanding.

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The sublime has long been associated with religion or a superior being though its post-modern meaning has less to do with transcendence and has moved towards ideas of immanence. In more recent times it has come to be associated with ideas of a terrible beauty, something ‘on the edge’. Abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman’s essay ‘The Sublime is Now’ (1948) talked of the struggle of creating sublime art when American artists were denying the very idea that art is concerned with beauty.

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Tate's essays on the 'contemporary sublime' include discourse by Julian Bell and Luke White. The latter focuses on Damien Hirst’s use of the shark in his artworks - this fish being a trope for capitalism. White talks about the continued or renewed relevance of the sublime at a moment in our history when we are becoming aware of the ‘aesthetic of terrible nature …. with growing fears about environmental catastrophe, which even threatens to destroy us. Such representations of nature may be intimately bound with anxieties about capitalism….and the transfiguration of the natural world’.

 

For Bell mankind is now in perpetual conflict over our capitulation to a seemingly unstoppable global system. He points out that the Tate exhibited Edward Burtynsky’s epic Oil Spill photographs whilst being sponsored by BP, the very company responsible for the biggest marine disaster in history.  

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