Sublime

THE SUBLIME SUBLIME THE

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t seems a shame that we have been so restricted by Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Fog (1818). We have been convinced, by repetition, that it is the archetypal expression of the sublime in visual culture, the culmination of a distinct philosophical moment. Yet the submissions we received have brilliantly challenged this outdated conception; deftly traversing interdisciplinary boundaries, the sublime has been identified in a variety of unusual sources. The sublime is reimagined.

A.C. Grayling’s introductory contribution examines philosophy’s relationship with the sublime, tracing how its definition has been reshaped over the course of the Common Era. Grayling identifies Kant’s conception – the idea that sublimity is terrifying as well as beautiful – and concurs with the German philosopher. His suggestion that we should seek to ‘detect sublimity in more things more often’ and ‘find beauty in [the] common and mundane’ though, seems an optimistic extension of Kant’s distinction. Phoebe Braithwaite heeds Grayling’s words, finding that artists in Light Show (Hayward Gallery) are able to manipulate the mundane ubiquity of light to reveal the sublime.

Tony Seaton discovers a personalised definition of the sublime in the aesthetics of Mary-Anne Schimmelpenninck. He notes that beyond philosophical–aesthetic theorising, the experience of the individual fundamentally shapes notions of sublimity. Fattori McKenna is equally concerned with the role of the individual; her article on Yellowism , the movement that violates renowned artworks for quasi-intellectual ends, explores the rationale behind the average viewer’s disgust at such intervention. McKenna describes Yellowism’s supposed motive as the ‘flattening of culture’; the destruction of systems of reverence that have elevated the artwork beyond its intrinsic value. Eliza Easton’s article is similar in questioning the purpose of art for the individual in an atheistic society.

She examines Fry’s struggle to firmly determine the spiritual significance of art for the non-believer. Liz Bradshaw documents the photographer’s relationship with the sublime, arguing that a process of displacement allows viewers to master the terror of the sublime whilst simultaneously denying them the ability to forget trauma.

Katherine Ann Fender’s essay on the figure of the Welsh bard examines a rare source of the sublime in visual and literary culture. Fender argues that the figure of the bard has been imaginatively reconstructed to affectively relieve national trauma. Equally negatively expressed is Neal Shasore’s article, which reimagines Broadcasting House as a manifestation of the ungainly sublime. Shasore notes the building’s coherence and aesthetic sensibility but ultimately highlights its overbearing ‘masculine scariness’. By contrast, Reg Gadney’s account of Constable’s Hay Wain is unabashedly exaltory, providing an effective reminder of the enduring brilliance of the artist’s masterpiece. Examining Constable’s command of the brush and the influence of Peter Paul Rubens, Gadney identifies the sublime in a painting threatened by adulatory overexposure.

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SUBLIME

n t h e s u b li

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CONTENTS

8.

A pageant of illuminations

12.

Yellowism: an attack on the sublime

14.

Didactic identities and the travesties of the sublime

19.

Mateo Revillo Imbernon 2 Sublime nearly finished.indd 4

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Is a s ther ub e s lim till e?

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24.The

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bardic and the Welsh sublime

18.

Emma Papworth

: se ou n gH tin iatha as dc e lev oa Br ublim as

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20.

Image overleaf: Richard Wilson 20:50; used sump and steel; dimensions variable © Richard Wilson; Image courtesy of the Saatchi Gallery, London.

SUBLIME

32.

28.

‘The Hay Wain’ and the sublime

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A common response to this discussion of the sublime is a fixation on the concept’s historical interpretations. While undoubtedly valid, the distinctly physical, sensory aspects of a sublime experience should not be understated. Such a bodily sensation is effectively evoked in the Saatchi Gallery in West London, where Richard Wilson’s enigmatic 20:50 (pictured) resides. The only permanent installation in the gallery since its inception in 1991, 20:50 is magnificent; Wilson has submerged the floor of an entire room in thick black sump oil, creating an overwhelmingly affecting experience that is both wondrous and intimidating. Delving into the lowly basement where the work is situated, one is struck by the sheer repugnance of the smell. Where the paintings and sculptures of the floors above sit passively, inviting considered contemplation, 20:50 violently confronts us, rejecting the polite traditions of the white cube gallery with its unforgiving visceral quality.

At first, we suspect that what we see is a mirror, not a liquid. Our realisation is both a sublime and deeply morbid experience; we are simultaneously mesmerised by the perfect stillness of the oil and frightened by its newly nebulous, ominous quality.

Disarmingly suggestive of infinity, the blackness affects the loss of any sense of cool autonomy; we become awed by the terrifying, beautiful presence of an untameable form. Such emotions are the staple of sublime experiences. What follows in this journal are essentially accounts of those experiences, channelled through widely varying historical moments and ideas.

Richard Wilson’s 20:50 is an attempt to contain the boundlessness of sublime experience; but ultimately the sublime escapes, providing the fruit for the stories which make up these pages.

AT & DHW

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e owe to Longinus, writing in the first century of the common era, identification of the idea that one kind of rhetorical power lies in the elevation of the sentiment it expresses. The idea of grandeur as an aesthetic quality distinct from beauty received its fullest expression in the eighteenth century at the hands of Addison, Shaftesbury, Kant and Burke. Whereas the two first were amenable to the idea that among the pleasures of the imagination are its responses to sublimity, Burke was emphatic in regarding beauty and the sublime as exclusive: in his opinion, whereas clarity of view and enjoyment attend beauty, it is darkness, and with it confusion and horror, that more typically define sublimity.

As one would expect, Kant had additional distinctions to draw.

For him the sublime might be what is noble, and what is splendid, but neither of these have to be what sublimity can also be, which is terrifying. The classic image for Burke as for Kant in the third of these moods was the mountaineer at a summit, standing before dizzying precipices

It would be good to detect sublimity in more things more often, just as it is good to find beauty in common and mundane things

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SUBLIME and awesome chasms, with the elements raging among the peaks about him, and dark clouds swirling at his feet.

As such images suggest, theoreticians of the sublime sometimes forget the strictures laid by Longinus on Aeschylus: ‘since even in tragedy, which is in its very nature stately and prone to bombast, tasteless tumidity is unpardonable… Altogether, tumidity seems particularly hard to avoid. The explanation is that all who aim at elevation are so anxious to escape the reproach of being weak and dry that they are carried, as by some strange law of nature, into the opposite extreme.’

Even in sublimity, he is saying, restraint and appropriateness are desiderata: one chasm

and a prospect of peaks would do; a chasm does not also need storm clouds and gales for its power to move.

I am with those who think that beauty can be sublime, but sublimity need not be beautiful. What can move us, induce awe in us, stagger us, present us with superlative examples of what the mind in neutral thinks is unachievable in nature or in art, defines sublimity; none of these have to be absent from our responses to beauty, but probably in a different key and at a steadier rate. The one difference is that response to beauty is almost certain to be pleasurable, whereas response to the sublime is a far more mixed and not inevitably pleasurable experience.

Longinus again: ‘[epic poetry has] a tendency to exaggeration in the way of the fabulous and transcends the credible, but in oratorical imagery the best feature is always its reality and truth.’ We are presented with a striking suggestion here: that in what has the capacity to raise, stagger and amaze us in the sublime is the larger truth it represents: the merely fantastical cannot do it. Beauty can be fantastical, but sublimity has to be annexed to reality, though reality dressed in its greater powers.

There is doubtless something individual in the taste that finds a given source of experience sublime – nature and music are not uncommon such sources, but some find the spectacle of war, or the flash of blast furnaces on the night, or the thunder of a passing express train, at least suggestive of it.

It would be good to detect sublimity in more things more often, just as it is good to find beauty in common and mundane things, though of course it would be well if it were nobility and splendor, rather than terror, that we thus found.

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SUBLIME

A PAGEANT OF ILLUMINATIONS LIGHT SHOW AT THE HAYWARD GALLEY

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he Hayward Gallery’s latest show has attracted swarms of visitors, as is customary when shiny things are on display. And Light Show is indeed very shiny.

Dazzling from start to finish, the exhibition shows us how light has been manipulated by artists since the early 1960s; from rose-light to moonlight, strobe light to tube light, it’s all here to behold in the Hayward’s new pageant of illuminations.

This show is nothing if not beautiful. It can’t help but be. Lights ranging from the transcendent to the bathetic are showcased.

(Ceal Floyer’s Throw for instance, shows a splat of light projected on the floor like a broken egg). Indeed, what brought the exhibition alive was the careful interspersal of colourful installations with darker displays and white light pieces. Moving from the placidity of Katie Paterson’s Light bulb to Simulate Moonlight – in which a single bulb is hung from the ceiling of a darkened room – into Carlos Cruz-Diez’s Chromosaturation – a white space emblazoned with blue, green and red – is an experience which urges a sense of the modern sublime.

“Since the retina usually perceives a wide range of colours simultaneously, experiencing these monochromatic situations causes disturbances” he explains; this experience is particularly emphatic when one is plunged from darkness into Technicolor light.

Edmund Burke associates the sublime more with darkness than with light, though he admits that “extreme light, by overcoming the organs of sight, obliterates all objects, so as in its effects exactly to resemble darkness.” Overwhelming the senses is the effect achieved by Cruz-Diez with Chromosaturation, and a feeling of utter immersion is achieved.

Since the retina usually perceives a wide range of colours simultaneously, experiencing these monochromatic situations causes disturbances Anthony McCall’s You and I, Horizontal sees a spiral of light projected onto an opposite wall in a darkened room, creating a cylindrical wall of illumination that’s made to appear solid by the use of a haze machine.

The gallery-goers are divided into those inside the cone of light and those outside; from within, the zone of light encompasses one’s view, whereas from without those immersed in the light are shrouded in misty and ethereal rays.

During my visit, a woman entered the darkened room with a baby on her shoulders, who discovered the joy of crossing the light barrier and the accompanying shift in one’s perception of the space. With every transgression of the light boundary, the baby would giggle as it gazed into the bright source of the light. Submerged in the almost-black together, others in the room laughed in response to the baby, lifted on high. As the child went from darkness to illumination, peals of laughter filled the room as though it were a call and response.

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The exhibition is at the height of its powers when it manages to contrast the resplendent with the understated The particular magic of this experience was coincidental, but the extraordinary physicality of the installation made it possible; that was no fluke.

There is a point in the midst of Light Show, however, where one begins to wonder if there is something missing. Passing from spectacle to spectacle, the eyes are confounded by unabashed intensity, growing accustomed to the simplicity of this incandescence; by the end of the show some of its novelty has worn off. Laura Cumming, writing in The Observer contends that “you could not say that this show actually deepens or develops... And perhaps that is true of light art in itself.”

Such a view seems an unfair indictment of the art form. You and I, Horizontal is enchanting in a lasting way, and so is Cerith Wyn Evans’ S=U=P=E=R=S=T=R=U=C=T =U=R=E, which has an abiding artistic presence amongst these works. It is a series of sequentially illuminated columns and is accompanied by an epithet from an epic poem constituted of phrases from séances by James Merrill. The quotation runs: “Trace me back to some loud, shallow, chill, underlying motive’s overspill”. This taps into the primordial nature of our relation and response to light – how inherently euphoric it can seem. It also brings into focus how far this relationship has come, even so far as to

become a toy with which we play.

Elsewhere, Leo Villereal’s Cylinder II is an enormous, glittering, iron column of 19,600 LED lights which are programmed never to repeat their sequence. The lights sparkle in elaborate schemes which mimic the movements of various natural phenomena; waterfalls, thunderstorms, meteor showers and flocking birds are each imitated.

Beautiful and astonishing, Villereal’s work brings to bear what appears to be amongst the show’s central themes: man’s relationship to light in a world capable of more overpowering illumination than ever.

The meditative quality in these examples offers a refreshingly modest contrast from the spectacular nature of many of the works. And the exhibition is at the height of his powers when it manages to contrast the resplendent with the understated. By the end of the journey my eyes were tired; glad however to have seen such sights.

Phoebe Braithwaite 11

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Yellowism: an attack on the sublime 1914: Mary Richardson, a Velasquez and a meat cleaver 1987: Robert Cambridge, a Da Vinci and a shotgun 2000: Hans Joachim-Bohlmann, a Dürer and a tin of sulphuric acid 2012: Vladimir Umanets, a Rothko and a marker pen

I

n an art-world where everything is permitted and nothing is sacred, it seems there remains one last taboo. Violation; what is it about this that gets the public, even non-gallery attendees, so riled up?

When I asked Marcin Lodyga, Umanets’ co-founder of ‘Yellowism’, why he thought people were so disgusted by his partner’s act of defacing Rothko’s Black on Maroon (1958) in the name of their self-propagating philosophical movement, he replied “It is the love, I guess”

This answer was far removed from the quasi-intellectual justification they are accustomed to giving to journalists (“we are establishing a new intellectual and physical field”… “this is about anti-human perception”… “the human mind is not ready for this”) and instead calls into doubt the legitimacy, and even sanity, of their argument.

You can outright brand Yellowism as an anti-art movement, but Umanets and Lodyga ardently claim it is not. You can condemn them as thugs, vandals, attention-seekers, claims they once again refute. Perhaps we should stop asking them questions and instead pose one to ourselves – what is it that offends us so? What values does art possess that gives it so much weight and elevates it to the sublime? And why does the canvas occupy this higher level of worth ahead of any other blank surface?

The potential criteria are as follows: i) Fiscal value? Sotheby’s estimated ‘Black on Maroon’ was worth up to £9 million

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SUBLIME before the inscription. As much as we try to ignore the economically-centralised art world, we cannot conceive of a recognised piece in history that has not been inflated to over a million. But fiscal value by no means determines how we rank objects aesthetically... ii) Time dedicated to the work? As viewers we feel a certain distress to think of the infringement of an artist’s craft. It is an act of disrespect when so much time, skill and effort has been invested in it. But artists throw out their work all the time; a sketch disregarded by Leonardo would be almost invaluable today. Accordingly we can ask, what is it about the monotype that hierarchically devalues it from the work straight from the artist’s hand? iii) A thing of aesthetic pleasure for the viewer? Perhaps.

This leads us to conclude that value, demonstrated as non-instrumental in the first two proposed criteria, must be something innate in the piece itself, conceived at the point at which the artist’s hand finally leaves the canvas. However, we as viewers have artificially assigned intrinsic worth to specific objects over time, labelling them as ‘Art’, as in the case of Warhol’s Brillo Box (1964); to do so is a contradiction in terms.

For worth to be intrinsic it must be independent of human activity and yet, if we were to be removed from the equation there would be no case of art in the first place.

Perhaps it is not a question of worth but of meaning. A level above primary qualities (secured by the object’s existence, independent of the observer) and secondary qualities (dependent upon and producing sensations in the observer), the tertiary

quality of meaning is something all aesthetic objects possess. For Nietzsche, access to this tertiary level enables man, in a corporeal-psychical unity, the transcendence of nature itself into the realm of the Sublime and art brings meaning as a respite to life, “like the luminous cloud reflected upon the dark surface of a lake of sorrow”.

Can we accredit a tertiary quality to Yellowism? Lodyga certainly thinks so – for him, Yellowism is a total flattening of culture, in the hope of establishing a new intellectual field where everything that was once art is no longer art, and everything that was once reality is no longer reality; the natural progression of the aesthetic.

Aside from Umanets’ contentious action, Yellowism feels hard to accept, even on a conceptual level, because it is so irrelevant to the everyday. Truthfully so, art too bears little relevance to when we switch on a kettle or iron a shirt. It is but an indulgence.

In our secular world, where the Byzantine altarpiece has paralleled value in the eyes of the 21st Century atheist as to the 13th Century Orthodox, the only thing that is left sacred is art itself. But, as Salmon Rushdie puts it, “To revere the sacred unquestioningly is to be paralysed by it”; accordingly art becomes institutionalised.

This is difficult for us to admit, especially when we think we’re all so post-post-modern. So perhaps Lodyga’s statement, putting aside all you may think about Yellowism, is correct – it is the love, I guess.

Fattori McKenna 13

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SUBLIME

DIDACTIC IDENTIES

& THE TRAVESTIES OF THE SUBLIME

NOTES ON THE AESTHETICS OF MARY ANNE SCHIMMELPENNINCK 14 Sublime nearly finished.indd 16

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SUBLIME

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he ‘Principles of Beauty as Manifested in Nature, Art, and Human Character: with a Classification of Deformities’

by Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck (17781856) is not a text on aesthetics that has attracted the attention of many art historians.

First published in 1815, it was radically revised throughout her lifetime and published posthumously in 1859. Despite its idiosyncratic and original theorising of the Sublime, it has eluded scrutiny in recent studies of gender and the Sublime and has only received detailed scrutiny from those whose interest has been primarily theological.

The book’s origins derived from its author’s isolation as a child when her adored mother developed a mysterious illness that required withdrawal and absolute quiet. Left alone for long periods Mary-Anne was supplied by her rich, Quaker parents with expensive books of prints that included images of architectural antiquities, ancient statues, costume and geography, and, crucially, the French edition of Lavater’s works with its illustrations of physiognomical types. This early exposure to grand, visual representations, produced an obsession with issues of beauty and ugliness which lasted into adulthood and

culminated in a book that attempted to map an iconography of the common perceptual effects of power, strength, weakness, virtue, evil, produced by different phenomena in the created world – animal, human and physical.

The Sublime in its benign forms was, according to Schimmelpenninck, the name given to an “impression of power beyond our control, and of which the cause transcends our conceptions”. It had two faces –an Active and Passive: “…the one, as the central energy; the other as the central rest. One as immortal resistless vitality and power; the other, as eternal immutability…faithfulness, and truth. Both equally tell of the supreme majesty of the Father of spirits, the God of hosts, the King of kings, and Lord of lords ” The energising vitality and resistless force of the Active Sublime was experienced in natural phenomena – the volcano, earthquake, whirlwind and thunderstorm. The Passive Sublime comprised “eternal and impregnable permanence, endurance”, exemplified in “expanses of tranquil ocean, vast, silent, illimitable heavens...and …glorious but solemn sunset”.

These ideas owed something to Burke’s equation of the Sublime with violent forces in nature, except that he did not differenti-

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SUBLIME ate between an Active and Passive Sublime.

Nor did he include the further notion she introduced, that the Sublime, in both its Active and Passive manifestations, had both benificent and pathological dimensions. The latter she called “travesties”.

Travesties of the Active Sublime represented the dark side of sublime power, she variously named: the Violent, the Horrible, the Ghastly – the Morne. In religious experience, the Morne could be rebellion against God; in human relations it was tyranny and cruelty between people. Both kinds of travesty she saw as the result of substituting the will of self for the will of God. In attempting to communicate these ideas, she adopted an idiosyncratic kind of analogical bricollage that permeates her book, drawing on images from heterogeneous, discursive fields – geometry, history, geography and literature – to convey their emotional and intellectual force. Travesties of the Active Sublime comprised: “Radical forms of the Violent ... sharpened by increase of the number of rectangles, in proportion to the continuity of right lines.

In animate objects the muscular play is increased and the strength diminished.”

And later, by a similar conflation of tropes, a travesty of the Active became: “ … abject fear which the mysterious excites which does not bear the signature of the unsearchable designs of God ..

Its radical forms are long straight lines, uninflected by angles…To this class of literature belong dark supernatural tales, ghost-stories, unearthly visions, and works like Godwin’s Caleb Williams or St Leon.

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Early exposure to grand, visual representations, produced an obsession with issues of beauty and ugliness Historical characters (comprise)... Joanna, mother of Charles V, and… Philip II of Spain.”

The Passive Sublime was composed, according to Schimmelpenninck, of two kinds of travesty, the Vapid and the Porcine.

The Vapid was an inertia of self- absorption, manifested in pride in, “self, antiquity, family, station, or riches disunited from worth”.

All these she saw as morally mean preoccupations that tended to “excite ennui”: “(The Vapid) borrows from the Passive Sublime its permanence and unimpressibility but instead of calmness of repose it exhibits the paralysis and imperturbability of death...like corpses in the Ancient Mariner, automatically fulfilling a round of soulless observances” Pursuing this gothic trope she personified the Vapid as: “ …a person unbending: in attitude sitting bolt upright, with arms formally crossed, never reclining… The Vapid is announced by the rustling of its whistling silks, or the thrown-open door and lowbending of the obsequious attendant….The smile of the Vapid is...like the last wintry sun on late autumnal flowers; joyless as a watery

December sunbeam faintly gleaming on a cold marble monumental stone” The second travesty of the Passive Sublime, the Porcine, more elliptic and elusive, is characterised as: “...preponderance of flesh over spirit. Radical form is circular, containing the greatest quantity of matter in a given space, yet owing to its want of breadth of base, it is without the expression of strength; its outline is unmarked by variety or inflection, and there is no constriction of muscle. (It resembles) the walrus, hippo or dodo.”

The religiosity and gothic imaginings in Schimmelpenninck’s Sublime are idiosyncratic and original, a product of her reading, reflections, and a Quaker upbringing, followed by conversion to the ecstatic premonitions of the Moravian Brethren.

They reveal something left out of more rigorous philosophical-aesthetic theorising – how personal experience and evolving identity may shape ideas of the Sublime. And the strange, geometric tropes in her visual imaginings may seem faintly to anticipate Edgar Wind’s interest in the mathematical basis of art.

Tony Seaton 17

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EMMA PAPWORTH 18 Sublime nearly finished.indd 20

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MATEO REVILLO IMBERNON

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f we reduce the word sublime it to its Latin elements, sub and limen, it can be translated as ‘pushing up towards the beam which holds the weight of a doorway’. The word is essentially active. It has since been absorbed into a complex aesthetic discourse, but its aspirational quality has been maintained, and in Art History it is often used to describe the attempt by both audience and artist to reach something beyond our normal comprehension.

If we imagine a sublime natural landscape it is not one of calm. We stand on a precipice (whether literal or figurative) uncomfortable, obscured and deprived by our vast environment.

If we truly stand in the landscape – on the edge of Niagara Falls, or even the bow of a boat – we take a step back, perhaps breathe a little more quickly and hesitantly peer over the edge. An artwork allows us to experience the sublime in a protected environment, without the fear of falling, or the thinning of the air. The artist Roger Fry described this detachment as our “imaginative life”.

This, he believed, was the purpose of art – to allow us to experience an event in a ‘true’ way, indulging our emotions, but not clouding them with physicality. Fry struggled with the importance we placed on this ‘imaginative life’. He looked to the thirteenth century to exemplify both a time of barbarity and cruelty and one of imaginative power, reasoning that men had acted less ethically and suggesting that “the average business man would be in every way a more admirable, more respectable being” if his imaginative life resembled those who had lived in the thirteenth century.

Fry did not consider himself a religious man, but his belief that art allows us to transcend the bounds of normal experience echoed the work of Ruskin, who believed that contemplation and creation of art allows us to reach a higher plane of morality.

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SUBLIME

Eliza Easton

and the

Without a religious text to fall back upon, however, Fry’s ‘imaginative life’ fulfilled cloudier criteria. If there is no God, what does this, albeit detached, contemplation of nature give us? Nietzsche interpreted the sublime as a human tendency. He believed that we imagine away individual differences and aspects of nature to create the symbol, a perfect “X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us”. In the work of Cezanne, there is an attempt to create a nature of these prime elements. In his blocked houses and linear trees he strived to remove the distinction between the symbol and what actually exists on the page, depicting the object in its most base and exalted form.

But still we are looking for something spiritual, this time in the nature itself. There is no point to the sublime, to the stretching of the mind, in a truly atheistic culture. What are we pushing against if there is nothing beyond what we see? The question was eternal for Fry, and he never solved it. There is no apparent practical use to these objects, and yet humans have created them as if they had a purpose.

Fry chose to believe that art did have a purpose – but that this, ironically, was just beyond his reach – there in history but not in logic; not quite conceivable to the human mind.

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SUBLIMITY IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION

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f the sublime requires a conceptual mastery of the experience of terror/awe when confronted with the image, how then might we understand the operation of the sublime through the image that replaces the memory of the event?

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SUBLIME We rely on the indexicality of photography and assume, even while aware of the ease with which we manipulate the digital image, that there remains a functional representational value to the photographic document. At the same time we conveniently forget Barthes notion of the photograph supplanting the memory it represents (Camera Lucida, 1980). Barthes was describing the portrait of the face of the beloved in the first instance, but extrapolated his theory of photography and memory from that analysis. If this aura of photography still holds and can be expanded to include cultural not just personal images – and if the sublime can still be experienced through representation – then at the intersection of cultural memory and the image lies a complex process of displacement. So much so that historical images come to stand in for the trauma they document, and simultaneously cover over their complex cultural meanings. This order of representation – the historical, perhaps cultural – sublime, allows us to master our terror, but simultaneously, by its continued circulation, to experience an unbearable forgetting. The images become a collective stand that allows us to master the horror for which they are the mnemonic.

If we consider the photographic image of the Hiroshima or Nagasaki A-bomb cloud; or the films from the liberation of the concentration camps amongst several others of the same order, they become through their cultural saturation a kind of short hand for far more complex and far more frightening histories because we prioritise the experience of mastery: it makes history bearable.

The constant televisual projection of the twin towers falling is of another order I think, and the marker of a change in era. Its relentless transmission means it has entered

Historical images come to stand in for the trauma they document, and cover over their complex cultural meanings a Western, perhaps global, domain alongside the historical sublime. This order of photography and its intensity constructs images through which we as a culture attempt to master not just our terror, but our individual and collective powerlessness, and not through an experience of the sublime, but through the replacing of the memory of the event with an image.

In this compulsion to repeat, actually or symbolically, we are served by ever more efficient 24 hour digital flows of images and information: as Wark has argued these flows are not the same in all times & places, and this in turn privileges and silences, exposes and hides, just as previous forms of information circulation have done (Telethesia: Communication, Culture & Class Polity Press, 2012).

This sleight of hand creates a politicised hierarchy of images: and therefore a hierarchy of terror. Systems of representation, and transmission; and our consumption of images and media, mean we cannot but collude in this hierarchical structuring; attempting to keep those that are unbearable at arms length, and adjudicating their meaning in the process. It is no coincidence that this intense visuality of the event comes about at the same time as a turn in the nature of politics, whether conventional politics of the governmental kind, or the politics of representation in all its forms.

Liz Bradshaw 23

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ources of sublimity – like definitions of it – are complex and varied. From the obscure, wild and dark to the dazzlingly bright, from the awe-inspiringly vast to the incomprehensibly miniscule, various forms of terrible beauty were identified as sources of burgeoning aesthetic fascination in artistic and poetic circles of the eighteenth century, the heyday of sublimity. Representations of landscape, richly imbued with myths, histories and spectres of the past, as well as natural beauty, were key to both artists and poets as a catalyst for imaginative activity. A sublime scene would typically depict mountains, castle ruins, the obscured and the ancient, framed by dark, apocalyptic clouds punctured by a blinding, almost divine light – and often foregrounded a solemn, solitary wanderer: a tradition which finally culminated in Caspar David Friedrich’s infamous image of Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer in 1818. But one cultural and mytho-historical resource, deeply influential to British artists, poets, writers and thinkers of the eighteenth-century, has

One may relive the terror of bardic demise, mitigated by the distance of time, as well as delight in the inevitable return that the bards themselves prophesise

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SUBLIME been almost entirely overlooked in scholarship to date; the figure of the bard, and the landscape of Romantic Wales he embodies.

The bard is, I argue, one of the most sublime figures to permeate British poetry and artwork of the eighteenth-century.

Represented in paintings like Thomas Jones’ (1774), Benjamin West’s (1778), William Blake’s (1785) and John Martin’s (1817) – pieces which themselves adopt, adapt and influence poetic depictions of and allusions to the bardic by poets like Gray, Macpherson, Evans, Stukeley, Wordsworth and Blake, in his own verse – the bard embodies the transcendental, mystical spirit of the sublime. Figures of pathos, bards were legendary poets of the past, killed by Edward I in 1282 in fear of their prophetic power and in the belief that they would incite national rebellion as cultural symbols in the face of England’s conquest of Wales. But “even as the bard sings about the end of poetry, he and his poem attest its survival”; the bard is a unifying force, reconciling the tripartite

Paintings and poetry of the period played an equally important, mutually influential role in perpetuating and reimagining conceptions of sublimity

temporal scheme of past, present and future. The Welsh Sublime – a model based on depictions of or allusions to Welsh landscape in art and verse, which induce the reimagining of cultural memory in the present, underpinned by a prophetic confidence in cultural resurgence – imparts a similar effect.

Paintings and poetry of the period played an equally important, mutually influential role in perpetuating and reimagining conceptions of sublimity. Each of the aforementioned paintings bear obvious testament to Thomas Gray’s ‘The Bard: A Pindaric Ode’ (1755-1757), a poem which was praised by Gray’s contemporaries for its “excellent application of the obscure”. Such a quality was identified as integral to the sublime in Edmund Burke’s seminal ‘A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful’ (1757); Burke illustrated this himself with a description of the ancient druids with whom bards are associated. Little is known about the history of the druids and the bards; the mysticism and obscurity surrounding them, together with the trauma of the 1282 Edwardian bardicide in Welsh cultural memory, renders allusions to the bardic a sublime source of cultural reimagining to cathartic effect.

One may relive the terror of bardic demise, mitigated by the distance of time, as well as delight in the inevitable return that the bards themselves prophesise. In this sense, the bard embodies the pleasure and pain of sublime terror as Burke defines it: Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger...whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest

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SUBLIME emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the strongest emotion, because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure…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 may be, and they are, delightful, as we every day experience.

The bardic fulfils Burke’s definition of the sublime in offering an ancient, distant symbol which one may imaginatively reconstruct to affectively relieve national trauma.

Moreover, the bardic predicates this relief on a national tradition which is at once elegiac and optimistically prophetic in spirit. Jones’ painting, for instance, foregrounds the despairing figure of the last bard amidst the sublime Welsh landscape. He clutches his harp, about to jump to his death, the corpses of his fellow bards and the stone circle (suggestive of Stonehenge) of the druids visible in the background.

Jones’ work captures the moment which precedes the sublime demise of the bard -– itself reminiscent of the sublime fall through Chaos of Milton’s antihero Satan in Paradise Lost – that Gray describes: He spoke, and headlong from the mountain’s height Deep in the roaring tide he plung’d to endless night.

bolises sublime terror at its best.

The Welsh Sublime paintings of the eighteenth century are integral to understanding the use of bardic imagery in the Romantic verse of Blake, Morganwg, Southey and Wordsworth (to name but a few), for they offer insights into a model which has more than national, and literary implications. The Welsh Sublime is a mode that reconciles the affective, political, revolutionary and spiritual concerns which characterise Romanticism as a philosophy; and drives the perpetual reimagining of sublimity in art and literature thereafter.

Katherine Ann Fender

Jones’ bard does, of course, bear remarkable resemblance to Blake’s portrayals of Urizen that follow in the 1790s: a bearded, wretched, solitary figure of both pathos and tyranny. While Urizen offers a character through which Blake can articulate his wider holistic religio-aesthetic vision, he also sym-

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BROADCASTING HOUSE

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I

n the public consciousness, the architecture of interwar Britain is ‘Art Deco’. Think of the lightness and gait of the Hoover Building on Western Avenue (familiar to anyone who takes the Oxford Tube into London as the Tesco Headquarters). And then there are the buildings of the International Style. Modernist buildings such as the Peter Jones Store at Sloane Square, or the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill on Sea, buildings with clean white lines and flat roofs. Buildings few and far between in Britain, with a strong continental air, but which nonetheless are indelibly associated with the visual and architectural culture of the 1920s and 30s. Neither, however, are really representative of the mainstream of architectural output of the period. The large building projects of the ‘Establishment’ (government, big business, public and semi-public institutions), which constitute the mainstream, are altogether grubbier, grittier affairs. Think of Battersea Power Station, the New Bodleian Library on Parks Road, Senate House in Bloomsbury and the BBC’s Broadcasting House on Portland Place It is this grittiness and grubbiness, as well as massiveness and monumentality that give these buildings a sublime quality. The sublime is not a term common in architectural criticism of the time, rather it is tentatively being proposed here as an area of investigation. One case study, Broadcasting House, will hopefully suffice in showing its potential.

Reaching 112ft into the sky, Broadcasting House was, at the time of its completion in 1932, one of the tallest buildings in London. It was purpose-built for the recently founded, but rapidly expanding, British Broadcasting Corporation, the only broad-

caster at that time, funded by the Post Office and a license fee for consumers, for its main broadcast and administrative operations.

The building was designed by a pedestrian commercial, architect, Lieutenant-Colonel George Val Myer. It had an airless and windowless brick tower as its core (artificially lit and ventilated) for sound insulation, and a wide corridor separated the studio tower from the office accommodation for the same reason. It was also a steel-frame construction, a relatively recent constructional technique which allowed for buildings to be built bigger for less money and more quickly than ever before, and clad in Portland Stone, the unofficial standard building material for important civic projects, for instance Wren’s St. Paul’s Cathedral.

The sublime seems a useful way of describing some particular formal, but not stylistic, features of the building. As has been mentioned it was, at the time of its completion, one of the tallest buildings in London, and Val Myer used a common design feature of ‘setting-back’ – as you go up the building, the upper storeys are pushed back further and further. This has two effects: firstly it gives the building a ‘cliff-like’ quality, that immediately associates it with the vastness of nature, in particular mountains, so often associated with the sublime; secondly, the setting back makes it very difficult for the

The sublime in this instance is being used almost in opposition to the beautiful 29

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SUBLIME viewer on the street to see where exactly the building ends, this gives the building a kind of limitlessness, again a feature often involved in the discourse of the sublime.

Broadcasting House effectively sits at the top of Regent Street, a roadway set out in the first quarter of the eighteenth century

by John Nash, which was largely rebuilt in the first quarter of the twentieth. Nash’s great genius is town planning has a kind of picturesque quality: as you walk up Regent Street from Piccadilly Circus, the sweeping curve of the quadrant conceals the extent of the street round the corner. Similarly as you reach Oxford Circus and walk up Upper Regent Street you are met with Nash’s All Souls Church on Langham Place, which acts as a kind of pivot connected to Portland Place.

There again, the curve conceals the vast bulk of Broadcasting House besides it. Broadcasting House itself bulges, so that its broadside (the building has often been compared to a battleship) also seems limitless or endless in its curve. Thus the building’s horizontal and vertical ends, upon first inspection, are almost impossible to grasp.

It is that sense of ungainly bigness that has disturbed critics and lay visitors to the

The building has been called variously ‘Leviathan’, ‘monstrous’, ‘portentous’; the Observer, in 1931, likened it to an ‘iceberg’

building since its completion. The building has been called variously ‘Leviathan’, ‘monstrous’, ‘portentous’, The Observer, in 1931, likened it to an ‘iceberg’, with powerful external massing, and ‘cliff-like faces of the walls’, to offer just a few examples.

This way of describing public monumental architecture appears over and over again in specialised and non-specialised criticism.

They are clearly hyperbolic reactions to the building – one cannot imagine the architectural correspondent of The Times or The Observer literally quaking in their boots in the shadow of Broadcasting House. Their recurrent criticisms do however suggest an unease or worry about the size and scale of public buildings for august and patriarchical institutions and corporations, albeit indirectly. Bigness is not unquestioningly celebrated.

Finally, I would like to suggest that Eric Gill’s Prospero and Ariel above the main entrance to the building reflects a sublime sensibility in Val Myer’s design. The theme of Ariel for the external sculptural decoration had been selected by a member of the Board of Governors for its homonymous association with the aerial of radio receives and transmitters (‘Very clever of the BBC to hit at the idea, Ariel and aerial. Ha! Ha!’ reflected Gill, sarcastically), rather than any particularly sophisticated Shakespearian quotation. Dissatisfied with the BBC’s weak punmanship, Gill invested the figures with a deep religiosity, transforming them, in his words, into God the Father and God the Son. Ariel levitates naked with his arms held up, one grasping his pipes, leaning back into the gigantic cloaked figure of Prospero.

The two figures are depicted deliberately breaking out of the niche, Prospero sending Ariel forth into the world, both stand atop

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SUBLIME a sphere. The invocation of God the Father and God the Son and the reticence of Ariel to step out into the infinite void – if we are to take the sphere as a globe in our reading – again hint at sublimeness. Gill, a sceptic of the BBC, was perhaps making a subversive comment on the public role and the public face of the organisation through this rather grandiose sculptural group.

Broadcasting House, certainly in its exterior, is a representative public monumental building of the period. The category of the sublime here is being used to grasp at what might loosely be called ‘architectural effect’, the reception and mediation of architecture, rather than the technicalities of its planning and design. That allows broader cultural res-

onances of these buildings to be unpacked.

The sublime in this instance is being used almost in opposition to the beautiful.

These buildings have a kind of coherence and aesthetic sensibility, but a masculine scariness and overbearingness, rather than a feminine beauty (that distinction is often made within the discourse of the sublime).

In this respect they are two sides of the same coin. The possibility of thinking afresh and using the sublime to harness what can be elusive aspects of the design and reception of public monumental architecture in Britain between the wars seems one deserving of further investigation.

Neal Shasore

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Constable’s painting connects us with his vision of the natural world and has lost none of its power to inspire awe

A THE HAY WAIN AND THE SUBLIME

lmost sixty years have passed since Kenneth Clark reckoned that The Hay Wain (1821) by John Constable had survived the ‘destructive popularity . . . of a hundred thousand calendars . . . and remains an eternally moving expression of serenity and optimism.’

Nonetheless, revisiting the painting in the National Gallery on a chill February morning to seek evidence of the sublime in Constable’s masterpiece was in some ways a melancholy experience. The painting in Room 34, measuring 130 cm x 185 cm, is set against grey faded fabric you might expect to find in the breakfast room of a seaside boarding house; a long pale scar in the wood

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flooring seems to point to the painting and stale air suggests unidentifiable foodstuffs or the exigencies of rodent control. Seated before it for an hour I counted only four people give the painting a second glance.

The Hay Wain shows Constable at the peak of his ability. He may have sought consciously or otherwise to match the brilliant, indeed sublime A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning (1636) by Rubens with which he was familiar. Constable’s painting connects us with his vision of the natural world and has lost none of its power to inspire awe. The handling of paint; the arrangement of diagonals set against the curve of the water, the horizontality of its reflections;

the verticality of the sunlight illuminating the trees: all are flawless. The contrast of light and dark, the sense of settled natural features, the fair-weather clouds, the rise of smoke from the chimney: all combine to convey a sense of perfect balance at noon on a summer’s day. What Constable called ‘the chiaroscuro of nature’ – by which he meant this drama of contrasted light and shade – is perhaps the essence of the painting: peace and calm contrasted with the working landscape in which, rarely mentioned, more than half a dozen figures can be seen wondering inconspicuously in the distance.

‘The sound of water escaping from mill-dams, willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brick work, I love such things.’

Constable wrote. ‘These scenes made me a painter, and I am grateful.’

Who knows? He might very well have agreed with Thomas Traherne: ‘You never enjoy the word aright, till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars . . . yet further, and you never enjoy the world aright, till you so love the beauty of enjoying it that you are covetous and earnest to persuade others to enjoy it...’

One might add that there was something about Constable’s modesty that suggests the pursuit of the sublime is possibly a simpler matter than we think: ‘I shall endeavour,’ he wrote, ‘to get a pure and unaffected manner of representing the scenes that may employ me.’ Even in its twenty-first century final resting place the Hay Wain remains a sublime creation.

Reg Gadney 33

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CONTRIBUTORS Anthony Grayling, MA, DPhil (Oxon) FRSL, FRSA is Master of the New College of the Humanities, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. Until 2011 he was Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has written and edited over thirty books on philosophy and other subjects; among his most recent are ‘The Good Book’, ‘Ideas That Matter’, ‘Liberty in the Age of Terror’ and ‘To Set Prometheus Free’.

Phoebe Braithwaite is a second year English student at Balliol.

Tony Seaton is the McNally Professor of Travel History at the University of Limerick, Ireland. His piece is a sketch of the work he is carrying out for his biography on Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck.

Eliza Easton is a finalist art historian at Christ Church, she is currently writing her dissertation on the Omega Workshops.

Fattori McKenna is a first year art historian from Christ Church.

Mateo Revillon and Emma Papworth are both first year students at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. Liz Bradshaw is a practicing fine artist who teaches both fine art and visual studies at Suffolk New College, Ipswich. Her piece on photography and the sublime is part of a larger project on art, politics and the end of postmodernity.

Katherine Ann Fender is a first year DPhil candidate in English literature and language at St John’s.

Neal Shasore is currently pursuing a DPhil on Public Architecture in Interwar Britain, having previously studied for both his BA and MSt at Wadham. Neal was one of the founding members of the Edgar Wind society and edited the first journal.

Reg Gadney studied English, Fine Art and Architecture at St. Catherine’s College, Cambridge. In 1972, he was made Senior Tutor, Fellow and the youngest Pro-Rector in history at the Royal College of Art and is a specialist on the work of John Constable. He has written an award-winning TV series and is now a writer, having published eleven novels.

Grace Warde-Aldam is a second year student at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art.

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Pug Life by Grace Warde-Aldam

Editors: Dylan Holmes Williams and Alexandra Talbott Creatives: Emma McKinlay and Daniella Shreir The Edgar Wind Journal is generously sponsored by the Meller Merceux Gallery.

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MELLER MERCEUX G A L L E R Y Greetings from the Meller Merceux Gallery Meller Merceux specialises in modern and contemporary art. With exhibition spaces in Oxford and Witney, we have the pleasure of catering to a wide national and international clientele. Offering collectors an exciting range of investment pieces, we have recently exhibited works by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore and Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí. The galleries are directed by Aidan Meller, who comes from a collector’s background and is regarded as an expert in this field. We look forward to welcoming you to view our collections.

Seth Bernstein Oxford Gallery, until March 30th

Meller Merceux’s Oxford gallery hosts an arresting blend of art by modernist greats and talented living artists. Currently on display are the tactile paintings of two Oxfordshire artists who work together under the name Seth Bernstein.

Drawing on the legacy of modernist artists such as Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, Berstein’s new work explores what happens when the body is viewed as a stylised, sculptural presence amid refracting colour fields.

The artists’ approach to the human form was also influenced

by Olmec statuary; figures that evoke a tantalising glimpse at distant histories. Like Moore, Bernstein relates this feeling of discovery to ideas of the unconscious mind: there is something familiar and resonant about these works, even though we may be unable to pinpoint precisely why.

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P R I Z E F O R A RT C R I T I C I S M Call for submissions Meller Merceux Gallery is pleased to invite submissions to its second Prize for Art Criticism. Open to undergraduate and postgraduate members of Oxford University, the Prize celebrates excellence in new critical writing.

We invite submissions of original articles of 500 to 800 words. Your entry must be a review of a currently running (or soon to open) exhibition of work by a twentieth century or contemporary artist. The best of these will be selected for publication in The Art Collector magazine, which is produced by Meller Merceux and sent out to a wide national readership.

The overall winner will be announced at the end of Michaelmas term 2013, and will receive a prize of ÂŁ500.

The judges are especially keen to reward work which demonstrates some or all of the following characteristics: creative thinking, originality of argument and subject matter, understanding of the cultural and historical contexts of artistic phenomena; imaginative use of critical theory.

They are eager to recognise critics who write with clear and distinctive voices and who exhibit a persuasive, uent writing style.

Meller Merceux Gallery 105 High Street Oxford OX1 4BW Tel: 01865 727996 oxford@mellermerceux.com Meller Merceux Gallery 46 High Street Witney OX28 6HQ Tel: 01993 708606 witney@mellermerceux.com www.mellermerceux.com

Submissions should be made electronically in MS Word format and sent to curator@mellermerceux.com

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