Research
The core of my artistic and academic research is the sublime.1 To illuminate my engagement, I will elaborate on the history and theory of the sublime. While the term has had a long life full of passionate relationships with philosophers and artists who have attempted to reveal its essence, that has not led to a unified definition of its meaning.
GETTING TO KNOW THE UNKNOWABLE AS BOTH WONDERFUL AND TERRIBLE
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF THE SUBLIME
What is the sublime? It does not appear to have been defined. Is it a figure of speech? Does it spring from figures, or at least from some figures of speech? Does the sublime enter into all kinds of writings, or are grand subjects only fit for it?
The Characters
Jean de La Bruyère, 16882
The first mention of the sublime is found in writings of Longinus, the Greek rhetorician and philosopher of the Neoplatonic school. In On the Sublime3, which is thought to have been written between the third and first century AD, Longinus discussed the sublime as something great, elevated, or lofty that manifests itself in what is beautiful. In the seventeenth century, British philosophers such as Joseph Addison, Anthony Ashley Cooper, and John Dennis expanded Longinus’ definition by introducing horror as an additional aesthetic quality that can create the sublime. After embarking on a journey across the Alps to Italy John Dennis described the term as “delight that is consistent with reason,“ and “pleasure to the eye as music is to the ear,” but also “mingled with Horrours, and sometimes almost with despair.”4
Several years later, British statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke proclaimed that horror is not only another potential source of the sublime, but the most potent one. In 1756 he published A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.5 In Part I, Section VII, Burke wrote: “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, 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 emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” In Part II, Section II: “Terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime.”
Prominent German philosopher Immanuel Kant followed Burke’s enquiry in 1790 by writing a theory of aesthetics that was published in Critique of Judgment.6 In the chapter Analytic of the Beautiful, Kant disassociated the beautiful from the sublime. While the beautiful is concrete, he explained “it is connected with the form of the object.” And, the sublime is intangible, “it is to be found in a formless object.” Beauty can be reasoned, but to experience the sublime it is necessary to go beyond reason and employ sensibility and imagination. The ability to transcend reason by fusing it with the nature of senses is the vehicle of the sublime that Kant called a “supersensible substrate.” He associated this ability with individuals who pose both superior mindfulness and superior sensibility of the body.
The magnitude of a natural object on which the imagination fruitlessly spends its whole faculty of comprehension must carry our concept of nature to a supersensible substrate (übersinnliche Substrat) (which lies at its basis and also at the basis of our faculty of thought). As this, however, is great beyond all standards of sense, it makes us judge as sublime, not so much the object, as our own state of mind in the estimation of it.
Critique of Judgment
Immanuel Kant, 1790
For Kant sublime is not an object—it is a state of mind we must enter that enables us the experience. We experience the sublime when our imagination fails to conceive the greatness of events solely by means of reason but compensates for this failure with pleasurable sensations that can be manifested through synthesis of senses with virtue of reason. Sublime as an experience is independent of any conceptualization or perception by the human mind. It is a thing-in-itself that Kant called the noumenon, postulated by practical reason but existing in a condition which is in principle unknowable. Gilles Deleuze paraphrases Kant: “It is not the body that realizes, but it is in the body that something is realized, through which the body itself becomes real and substantial.”7
Kant’s theory prompted even more vivid discussion about the nature of the sublime, which created new possible frameworks for the subject. None of these were accepted as a unique model of the concept through which they demonstrated the impossibility to frame the sublime. This only confirmed Kant’s definition of it as the unknowable. So essentially if what we experience is unknowable, the question is how do we experience the unknowable. All the previous theories depicted it as a dichotomic experience that is both wonderful and terrible.
The feeling of the sublime is a mixed feeling. It is a composition of melancholy, which at its utmost is manifested in a shudder, and of joyousness which can mount to rapture and, even if it is not actually pleasure, is far preferred by refined souls to all pleasure. This combination of two contradictory perceptions in a single feeling demonstrates our moral independence in an irrefutable manner. For since it is absolutely impossible for the very same object to be related to us in two different ways, it therefore follows that we ourselves are related to the object in two different ways; furthermore, two opposed natures must be united in us, each of which is interested in diametrically opposed ways in the perception of the object. By means of the feeling for the sublime, therefore, we discover that the state of our minds is not necessarily determined by the state of our sensations, that the laws of nature are not necessarily our own, and that we possess a principle proper to ourselves that is independent of all sensuous affects.
On the Sublime
Friedrich Schiller, 18018
Multiplicity of that experience, the dichotomy between bliss and horror, beauty and ugliness, pleasure and pain, comfort and torment, divine and hell as distinct instances of the single sublime that can be experienced through integration of cognitive and sensory ability is the most persistent in religious mythology. Religions that promote transcendence through light and darkness have illustrated the sublime as the crossing point towards the numinous, the presence of a divinity.
I know some people are of opinion, that no awe, no degree of terror, accompanies the idea of power; and have hazarded to affirm, that we can contemplate the idea of God himself without any such emotion. I purposely avoided, when I first considered this subject, to introduce the idea of that great and tremendous Being, as an example in an argument so light as this; though it frequently occurred to me, not as an objection to, but as a strong confirmation of, my notions in this matter.
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
Edmund Burke, 1756
According to the German theologian Rudolf Otto9, crossing the bridge of the sublime is encouraged both by mysterium tremendum et fascinans (“fearful and fascinating mystery”), the pains and terrors overwhelming those who have arrived affront of God, and “nostalgia for paradise,” aching desire to reach the abode of perfection. In Christianity, the God is light, but the God is also darkness.
And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
John 1:5
King James Version of the Bible, 161110
Myths of heaven and hell have functioned to interpret the world and its counterparts, but also to entice the audience into experiencing its parts. The enticement into the fearful and blissful mystery is where the art comes in. Postmodern French philosopher and literary theorist Jean-François Lyotard recognized avant-garde art as a novel opportunity for accessing the sublime. He argued that the nature of avant-garde modern art has the unique potential to manipulate the balance of senses, reason, and emotion in a manner that results in a sensation of pleasurable pain. My further investigation is in practice of art that carefully entices senses, reason, and emotion in a way that results in an experience of the unknowable.
Thought must ‘linger,’ must suspend its adherence to what it thinks it knows. It must remain open to what will orientate its critical examination: a feeling.
Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
Jean-François Lyotard, 198411
PURSUING THE UNKNOWABLE THROUGH TRANSFORMATIVE SPACES
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work is about changing the perception of space in function of art. Therefore, the subjects of my work are perception, space and, art. To change perception, I study sensation, experience, and phenomenology. To create spatial situations, I practice designing spaces, fabricating structures, manipulating materials, and integrating lighting and audiovisual systems. The core of my artistic research is the pursuit of the unknowable— the sublime.
The sublime has been a subject in philosophy and art since circa 1200 B.C. when the sage Veda Vyasa described it as a mystery in the sacred Hindu scripture Bhagavad-Gita.12 Since then, the meaning of the term has been vigorously debated, but it remains indefinable. My interest is not to define the sublime. Critical history has proven that the sublime cannot be precisely put into words, just as the meaning of life is inherently unknowable.
The Sun Must Bear No Name
Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
The inconceivable idea of the sun.You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it.Never suppose an inventing mind as source
Of this idea nor for that mind compose
A voluminous master folded in his fire.How clean the sun when seen in its idea,
Washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven
That has expelled us and our images . . .The death of one god is the death of all.
Let purple Phoebus lie in umber harvest,
Let Phoebus slumber and die in autumn umber,Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was
A name for something that never could be named.
There was a project for the sun and is.There is a project for the sun. The sun
Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be
In the difficulty of what it is to be.Notes toward a supreme fiction
Wallace Stevens, 194213
Nineteenth century Danish philosopher, theologian, and psychologist Søren Kierkegaard argued that logic of the objective knowledge and rational belief is unimportant to existence. If the deity could rationally be argued, existence of the supernatural being would be unimportant to humans. It is because God cannot rationally be proven that his existence is essential. Kierkegaard wrote, “Without risk there is no faith. Faith is precisely the contradiction between the infinite passion of the individual’s inwardness and the objective uncertainty. If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.”14
The sublime, as an agnostic term, cannot be made into an object of knowledge through language, reasoning, logic, and concepts. But it can be experienced. Since it is unknowable but can be experienced, it is profoundly valuable to experience it. My interest is in the experience of the inherently unknowable sublime. This experience has been described both as awe and terror. Variations of the experience include the dark and the light, the beautiful and the ugly, the bliss and the horror, the true and the false, the sacred and the profane, the good and the evil, the pleasure and the pain, and so forth. My interest is in the division and range between two mutually exclusive, opposed, or contradictory sensations as distinct instances of the single sublime. Therein lies the opportunity for the multiplicity of an experience, which can than also be created in art.
The sublime object is of a dual sort. We refer it either to our power of apprehension and are defeated in the attempt to form an image of its concept; or we refer it to our vital power and view it as a power against which our own dwindles to nothing. But even if, in the first case or the second, it is the Occasion of a painful awareness of our limitations, still we do not run away from it, but rather are drawn to it by an irresistible force. Would this be even possible if the limits of our imagination were at the same time the limits of our power of apprehension? Would we so gladly accede to the reminder of the overwhelming power of natural forces if we did not possess something else in reserve which need not fall prey to those forces? We delight in the sensuously infinite because we are able to think what the senses can no longer apprehend and the understanding can no longer comprehend. We are ravished by the terrifying because we are able to will that which our sensuous impulses are appalled by, and can reject what they desire. We gladly permit the imagination to meet its master in the realm of appearances because ultimately it is only a sensuous faculty that triumphs over other sensuous faculties; but nature in her entire boundlessness cannot impinge upon the absolute greatness within ourselves. We gladly subordinate our well-being and our existence to physical necessity, for we are reminded thereby that it cannot command our principles. Man is in its hands, but man’s will is in his own hands.
On the Sublime
Friedrich Schiller, 180115
Contradictions of the sublime have been depicted in art since the beginning of art history. The range from hell, through purgatory, to heaven can be traced in the Sumerian myth of Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, Egyptian Book of the Dead, Bible, Homer’s The Odyssey, Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Illuminated manuscript, Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, Luca Signorelli’s fresco of the Apocalypse and the Last Judgment in Orvieto Cathedral, Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Gustav Mahler’s The Symphony No. 8, and so forth.
These works differ in a degree of simulating and emulating the experience of the sublime. For example, Dante’s The Divine Comedy uses the narrative to create a representation of soul’s journey through Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.16 It simulates, projects the idea, of experiencing Dante the Pilgrim’s journey. To a degree, it also emulates the actual feeling of being on a path from hell to heaven. It can make a reader experience the poem as if they were the first person of the poem. But it is predominantly a representational narrative of the sublime simulated in an afterlife of any everyday sinner.
My interest is in works of art that predominantly emulate the experience of the sublime, which aligns with twentieth century French philosophy that includes the thinking of Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan. Their work is in the domain of post-structuralism that views the structural relationship between the signifier and signified as inseparable but not united. In the artistic discourse the structure creates nonlinear meaning, and the audience replaces the author as the primary subject of inquiry. These ideas extend to the philosophical concept of phenomenology that focus on the “first person” viewpoint, which can then be examined as phenomena that not only appears to “my” consciousness, but to all consciousnesses. According to German philosopher Edmund Husserl, the synthesized experience is what constitutes total human knowledge.17
One of the first artists exploring the phenomenological experience of the sublime was English Romantic landscape painter Joseph Mallord William Turner. His most notable painting, the Snowstorm: Steamboat Off a Harbour’s Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water (1842) portrays a ship in distress off the English coast with a high degree abstraction, asymmetrical composition, and monochromatic palette. The painting documents the ship caught in the storm by depicting the experience of witnessing the ship in the storm, instead of merely realistically reproducing the look of the scene. The painting not only informs us about what happened to the steamboat at the Harbour’s Mouth during the snowstorm, but it also physically immerses us in the event. It is a beautiful and terrifying visceral experience, creating an example of the sublime in painting.
Snow Storm—Steam Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead
Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1842
Oil on canvas; 36 in x 48 in
Tate Britain, London, Turner Bequest
Several centuries after Turner, vision as the highest in the historical hierarchy of senses was slowly making space for other senses—and a fuller sensory experience. Artists including Anish Kapoor, Mark Rothko, Bill Viola, and James Turrell marked the twentieth century as an age of expanding our sensing apparatus to experience the sublime. Through their abstract but integrated use of materials, space, color, light, and image, they excite our senses and intrigue our minds to the point of reaching the essence of the unknowable.
The postmodern would be that which in the modern invokes the unpresentable in presentation itself, that which refuses the consolation of correct forms, refuses the consensus of taste permitting common experience of nostalgia for the impossible, and inquires into new presentations—not to take pleasure in them, but to better produce the feeling that there is something unpresentable.
The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence, 1982-1985
Jean-François Lyotard, 199318
Svayambh
Anish Kapoor 2007
213 foot long railway across the Royal Academy of Arts in London, UK
Installation in motorized wax blocks
© Anish Kapoor
Four Darks in Red
Mark Rothko,1958
Oil on canvas, 102 in × 116 in
© Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 1998
Stations
Bill Viola, 1994
Five-channel video (color, sound), five granite slabs, and five projection screens,
Overall 20 in x 50 in x 50 in
© 2010 Bill Viola
Bridget’s Bardo (Ganzfeld Piece)
James Turrell, 2009
Light installation for the Wolfsburg Project Kunstmuseum in Wolfsburg, Germany
Overall 7500 square feet
© James Turrell, photo: Florian Holzherr, 2009
Anish Kapoor works in a large-scale sculpture with a variety of materials and color, which combines senses of sight and touch into a sense of space. Mark Rothko applied complex technical procedures in abstract painting to use color and surface for creating a sense of space. Bill Viola integrates moving image and sound at specific sites to fuse the senses and change the experiential topology of those spaces. James Turrell uses light and architecture of the space to create a perceptive shift from being in the physical reality to the metaphysical reality of the space.
The success of their work is in experimental manipulation of senses through which the space is experienced cognitively and emotionally. Their innovative use of materials that engage sight, hearing, touch, smell, emotion, memory, and imagination transforms the spaces that they work in into places that demonstrate the existence of the unpresentable.
The technological age is allowing for more multisensory engagement. My interest is in exploiting those technological advancements that can fuse perception of senses and add to the phenomenological experience of my artistic intention of presenting the presence of the unpresentable.
My perception is [therefore] not a sum of visual, tactile, and audible givens: I perceive in a total way with my whole being: I grasp a unique structure of the thing, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once.
Phenomenology of Perception
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 196219
To be fully present in the world, one needs to use all available senses and intimately interact with the environment using their eyes, nose, ears, and skin. Only through receptiveness of the entire sensing mechanism is it possible to have a profound sensation of the place that can then be emotionally and cognitively processed into a meaningful experience. In the context of art, maximized engagement of the senses can direct memory and imagination into a place where the sublime can be experienced.
The phenomenological approach of the artist implies a pure looking at the essence of things, unburdened by convention or intellectualized explanation. All artists, including film directors, are phenomenologists in the sense that they present things as if they were objects of human observation for the first time. Architecture re-mythologizes space and gives back its pantheistic and animistic essence. Poetry returns the reader back to an oral reality, in which words are still seeking their meanings. Art articulates the boundary surface between the mind and the world.
The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema
Juhani Pallasmaa, 200120
My approach combines traditional and progressive principles of spatial design (composition, computational simulations, engineering, model making), fabrication (cutting and milling of wood, metal and plastics, rapid prototyping), lighting design (composition, daylighting analysis, lighting metrics, computational lighting analysis, electric lighting technology, programmable LED lighting, computer modeling, fixture design), audiovisual systems (photography, graphics, motion graphics, animation, video, sound, music), and multisensory devices (mechanical and electrical engineering, interactive environments, responsive lighting and audiovisual systems). By utilizing technological advancement in traditional mediums and untraditional integration of those mediums I aim to discover, interpret, and develop novel body of knowledge for enhancing the multisensory spatial experience that provides access to the sublime in the purpose of art.
1 From Middle French sublime, from Latin sublīmis (“‘high’”), from sub- (“‘up to”, “upwards’”) + uncertain, often identified with Latin līmis, ablative singular of līmus (“‘oblique’”) or līmen (“‘threshold”, “entrance”, “lintel’”)
2 La Bruyère, Jean de, and Henri Van Laun. Characters. The Oxford library of French classics. London: Oxford University Press, 1963.
3 Longinus, and William Smith. Dionysius Longinus On the sublime. London: Printed for William Sandby, 1742.
4 Pack, Richardson, and John Dennis. The whole works of Major Richardson Pack late of Bury St. Edmonds in the county of Suffolk; in prose and verse. London: Printed for E. Curll, 1729.
5 Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London: Routledge and Paul, 1958.
6 Kant, Immanuel, and J. H. Bernard. Critique of judgment. New York: Hafner Pub. Co,1951.
7 Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
8 Schiller, Friedrich, and Julius A. Elias. Naive and Sentimental Poetry; and, On the Sublime: Two Essays. Milestones of thought. New York: Ungar, 1966.
9 Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923.
10 Bible. The Holy Bible ; containing the Old and New Testaments. Translated out of the original tongues and with the former translations diligently compared and revised. Authorized King James verson. Cleveland: World Pub. Co, 1970s. 11 Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Theory and history of literature, v. 10. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
12 Sivananda. The Bhagavad Gita. Sivanandanagar: Divine Life Society, 1969.
13 Stevens, Wallace. Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction. Cummington: The Cummington Press, 1943.
14 Auden, W H, and Søren Kierkegaard. The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard. The living thoughts library. New York: D. McKay, 1952.
15 Schiller, Friedrich, and Julius A. Elias. Naive and Sentimental Poetry; and, On the Sublime: Two Essays. Milestones of thought. New York: Ungar, 1966.
16 Alighieri, Dante and M. Gustave Doré. The Divine Comedy. New York: Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co, 1890.
17 Gallagher, Shaun, and Dan Zahavi. The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. London: Routledge, 2008.
18 Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence, 1982-1985. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
19 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Humanities Press, 1962.
20 Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema. Helsinki: Rakennustieto, 2001
