Granville Lythe Interdisciplinary Art and Design Level 4 Essay Enlightment and the Mythologies of Modernity The sublime exists within the world of nature to describe awe-inspiring effects overwhelming in scale, drama and wildness. Artists of the romantic sublime want us to continue to experience these inspiring effects through their work. This essay will question the survival of the romantic sublime within contemporary art with particular references to Mariele Neudecker, and the more traditional work of Casper David Freidrich. The two artists differ widely in their approaches and yet their work links expressing the ideals of the romantic sublime. “One of the great themes of nineteenth-century Romantic painting was the interplay between the world and the spirit: the search for images of those states of mind, embodied in nature, that exists beyond or below our conscious control. On the one hand, there was the scale of the world, seen as a place sanctified by its own grandeur, itself a reflection of the grandeur of God-the panoply of crags, storms, plains, oceans, fire at sea and in the sky, moonlight, and the vitality of plants, which gave Casper David Friedrich, Turner, Samuel Palmer, Albert Bierstadt, and Frederick Edwin Church their subjects.”(Hughes, 1991, p.269). The word ‘Romanticism’ derives from the English “romantic” and started at the beginning of the nineteenth century in Europe, primarily in England, Germany and France. Artists belonging to the movement were greatly inspired and showed intense personal expression in their work. The movement was not united, each country developed its own individual characteristics with differing results. Germany produced spiritual religious art, England created visionary images while The French artists transformed the reality of the revolution and other narratives. The Romanticists wanted to inspire through using the power of nature and isolation: this notion deeply contrasted with the growing metropolis of the time and the spread of industrialisation. The Industrial Revolution, which had begun in England around the mid 18th Century, changed the way in which society functioned. Industrialisation and urbanisation transformed what was once an agrarian, artisan based culture into a culture of collective workers.
Granville Lythe Interdisciplinary Art and Design Level 4 Essay The growth of the city changed people’s emotional outlook towards the land, their country and their role in society. The German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote in his essay The Metropolis and Mental Life about the permanent transformation of the mind as a result of the effects of the metropolis on the individual. “Instead of reacting emotionally, the metropolitan type reacts primarily in a rational manner, thus creating a mental predominance through the intensification of consciousness, which in turn is caused by it. Thus the reaction of the metropolitan person to those events is moved to a sphere of mental activity which is least sensitive and which is furthest removed from the depths of personality” (Simmel, 1971, p.12). Simmel’s Metropolitan Theory highlighted the resistance of the individual to being levelled, swallowed up in social- technological mechanism. "When one en- quires about the products of the specifically modern aspects of contemporary life with reference to their inner meaning ± when, so to speak, one examines the body of culture with reference to the soul, as I am to do concerning the metropolis today ± the answer will require the investigation of the relationship which such a social struc- ture promotes between the individual aspects of life and those which transcend the existence of single individuals. It will require the investigation of the adaptations made by the personality in its adjustment to the forces that lie outside of it. (Simmel, G. 1971, p.1). The Romantic trend was a reaction to Neo-classicism (a more formal art movement) and it was a way of rediscovering the irrational. It made the efforts of man look futile against the forces of nature. Many of the notions behind Romanticism were in direct contrast to the cosmopolitan rationalism of the Enlightenment period. The German Enlightenment philosopher, Immanuel Kant said: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when it
Granville Lythe Interdisciplinary Art and Design Level 4 Essay comes not from the lack of understanding, but from lack of determination and courage to use [one’s intelligence] without outside guidance. Sapere Aude! [Dare to know!]-that was the motto of the Enlightenment. It has been said that Romanticism was concerned not by rules decided by others but by the individual and their own particular sensibilities” (Honour and Fleming, 2005, p. 640). The Romantic sublime expressed grief, danger and the menacing power of nature in opposition to a beautiful ideal, with the main theorist of the sublime being the philosopher Edmund Burke, who wrote A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (Oxford University Press, 1990). The sublime was conceived as an aesthetic category, a form of beauty within Romanticism. Burke noted: “When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they…are delightful, as we everyday experience” (Burke, 1990, p. 36). Casper David Freidrich's work changed the way a landscape was painted into a psychological spiritual story. He included himself within the landscape as a lone figure seen from behind a divide that invites the viewer, to look beyond at the world through his eyes. Casper David Freidrich’s (1818) The Wanderer Above the Sea and the Fog (fig1) is an oil painting that evokes the very essence of the Romantic sublime in its approach. Friedrich adapted conventional landscape to make a point for his own self-expression. Friedrich chose to make himself more than an "artist" of nature; his work was a personal encounter of the individual with nature. Indeed, he was captivated by nature and solitude, on the edge of the sea, or as in this painting, on the top of a mountain, which was as far away as possible from urban civilisation of Europe. Friedrich's will stressed an idea of "self-expression" which could be associated with both a physical and a spiritual form of isolation. Romantics believed that any artist who wanted to explore their emotions, had to stand outside of money-making, politics, and urban noise, in order to assert themselves.
Granville Lythe Interdisciplinary Art and Design Level 4 Essay The Romantics developed an inner and an outer spiritual experience through their view of art. Mariele Neudecker’s fabricated tank worlds recreate simulated weather conditions and atmosphere which could promised an imaginary sublime moment in our minds. These small worlds are based on the Romantic landscape painting of Casper David Friedrich. The tanks open the viewer’s mind, for example, in Things Can Change in a Day’, the viewer is encouraged to look beyond the illusion of the forest and to use the imagination to visualize what is behind the illusion. Neudecker ‘s work is a reminder of the creepy spine chilling quality of a silent forest and that deeper into the forest it becomes both beautiful and creepy at the same time, with its contents of half-dead trees rotting on the damp earth of the forest floor
With Things Can Change in a Day (2001) (Fig.2) Mariele Neudecker explores a relationship with the forest, through the title she expresses a connection with time and its transformations. Her work suggests how the vision of nature has many subconscious associations, such as half forgotten stories or distant memories; this fragment of forest is trapped behind glass and has been distorted in a precise and yet imperfect way. “Neudecker work plays with illusion; she wants the illusion to fail. While her tanks objectify the work of Freidrich, they soon become mysterious and unknown.” Brown and Young (2004, p.12). One might say that immensity is a philosophical category of daydream. The daydream feeds on all kinds of sites, but through a sort of natural inclination, it contemplates grandeur. And this contemplation produces an attitude that is so unlike any other, that the daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity. In analysing images of immensity, we should realise within ourselves the pure being of pure imagination. It then becomes clear that works of art are the by-products of this existentialism of the imaginary being. In this direction of daydreams of
Granville Lythe Interdisciplinary Art and Design Level 4 Essay immensity, the real product is consciousness of enlargement. People feel that they have been returned to the dignity of the admiring being. Immensity is intrinsic to a person’s being, it allows an of expansion of being, which life sometimes curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense. Although at first glance, the two works appear very different in terms of the materials used they do have many similar qualities that lead people to reflect upon the romantic sublime. Freiderich uses a landscape oil painting in a grand way, inviting the viewer to see the world through his eyes and to focus attention from his gaze upon a world where people are made to feel helpless and insignificant against a backdrop of sea and fog. Neudecker’s Vitrine Tank uses a three dimensional view of a forest floor landscape that also controls the viewer’s perspective and feelings in much the same way as Freiderich’s painting does in The Wanderer Above the Sea and the Fog. Her work encourages a deeper gaze into a world of nature that cannot be fully understood or controlled; a world of half dead things of darkness, a recreated world that makes people feel uncomfortable or out of control perhaps. Neudecker’s work allows people to engage with nature in a way that tempts but never gives a feeling of safety or a feeling that a full understanding has been achieved.
In conclusion, the romantic sublime has survived and is seen today in contemporary art. The work of Mariele Neudecker has continued the survival of the romantic sublime, as her work continues to make people reflect on ideas of awe-inspiring nature, overwhelming danger and threat . Her work carries the idea of decay and corruption into the inevitable and uncontrollable realms of the sublime.
Granville Lythe Interdisciplinary Art and Design Level 4 Essay
(Fig.1) Mariele Neudecker (2001) Things can change in a day
(Fig.2) Casper David Freidrich (1818) The wanderrer above the sea and the fog