Description
The sublime has been noted as an outmoded concept, particularly in relation to contemporary art theory. Yet discourses around the sublime still exist today and are mediated by museums, galleries, curators, and philosophers who critique art that seek to emulate the psychological experience. The sublime is still a recognizable experience in current society, yet it is not attributed as such. It is therefore dispossessed of its meaningful and essential associationsabout the state of human condition, life and existence. Thus, the central questions of this research are how is the sublime articulated in contemporary visual art and how does it reflect the values of contemporary culture and society? To answer these questions, I am using theories by Jean-François Lyotard in The Sublime and the Avant-Garde and in Tsang Lap-Chuen’s The Sublime: Groundwork Towards a Theory in analyzing my artifacts. I am investigating works by contemporary artists, namely Matthew Albanese’s Wildfire andFighting Tides, Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project, and Mariele Neudecker’s Over and Over, Again and Again. In addition, I will be utilizing the seminal eighteenth-century treatises on the sublime namely, Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and Immanuel Kant’s The Critique of Judgement with the postmodern interpretations by Lyotard and Tsang. My argument is that the concept of the sublime is still relevant in the contemporary period, and has been articulated more prominently through sophisticated, complex, experiential art that reflect society’s need for transcendence and the sublime experience.
