D e c o d i n g t h e U n r e p r e s e n t a b l e : A Techno-Sublime
By Virginia K. Adams, PhD.*
The artworks presented in "Sublime Structure" converge in the realms of scientific, technological and linguistic investigations. Irrespective of artistic medium--whether drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, video, or combinations of formal approach--the works reveal studies of natural phenomena as well as of technological processes themselves. The five artists have created works referencing invisible structures, including microscopic organisms, chemical formulations, analogue images, and cosmological formations. In decoding and displaying information about the world that cannot normally be seen, they have offered texts and digital codes that cannot be translated. These artistic transformations leave much to the imagination.
Effie Halivopoulou's works from her series "Timeless Tales" allude to the human body and biotechnology through a pastiche of codes. On a support of heavy paper mounted on fabric attached to a wood frame, the Athens-based artist creates collages of acrylic paint, resin, photographs, medical scans, texts and symbols. Halivopoulou has made an independent study of genetics, inspired in part by the Human Genome Project, visiting laboratories and gathering images from electron microscopes and magnetic resonance scanners. In The First Time I Am Possible II, for example, the constellation of rounded shapes in the upper left corner is comprised of images of drosophilae cells in mutation. (Drosophilae are small, two-winged flies used in genetic research.) In the lower left is an MRI of a human brain. Sandglass Bending refers to the passage and measurement of time, with the maze in the upper left symbolizing life cycles, while the two white lines that meander across the surface suggest the shape of an hourglass.
Halivopoulou incorporates texts in her work, including fragments of an ancient Greek language known as "Linear B" that are thought to be parts of ancient lyrical poems, but cannot be translated. The adhesive films annexed to the rectangular panels on the wall are imprinted with these linguistic fragments, in addition to genetic codes and poetry, thus presenting to the viewer a combination of symbols designed to be read, yet frustrating any possible reading.
Transgenic Trauma is a video that starts with an image of the artist with her mouth wide open in agony, followed by an endoscopic journey into her esophagus and beyond. Along the way, texts, codes and images from the collaged works float up and down, and a needle brutally probes bodily tissue in an apparent attempt at an implantation. A surreal passage shows rubber-gloved hands moving disembodied eyeballs around as if playing a game, a possible reference to the sliced eyeball scene from the 1929 film Le Chien Andalou. Thus, this video sequence offers torture as a layer of experience connected to the scientific study of the body. Still images of the artist's face from the video, as well as enlargements of details borrowed from the larger works, circle back on medallions attached to the wall. In sum, Halivopoulou offers the viewer a multiplicity of codes, symbols and images of linguistic and biological structures underlying human existence and communication in formats that beg to be read as well as viewed.
...................................................................
The elements of reality that the five artists have investigated and, in turn, presented in their artworks in such complex formulations would seem to satisfy the use of the word "structure" in the exhibition title. But what of the sublime?
One cannot use the term "sublime" in connection with art without jettisoning the baggage of everyday meanings such as "terrific" or "wonderful" as applied to everything from dessert to shoes. The term has a complex lineage that one must consider in deciding whether it can be ascribed to a contemporary work.
The concept of the sublime is historically associated with characteristics of literary or artistic works that evoke intense emotions such as awe or terror in their readers, listeners or viewers. A first-century Greek writer known as Longinus wrote what is considered the Ur- text on the sublime, in which he advised rhetoricians on a variety of means of expression that would elevate the souls of listeners. Distinguishing the sublime from the beautiful, Longinus described the sublime as the passionate presentation of an image of vastness or an event of terror, such as a horrifying storm, in language that amplified the effect with just the right degree of intensity.
The concept of the sublime was applied to visual art in the Eighteenth Century in the writings of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. Following Longinus, Burke associated the sublime with terror that could be evoked by images of majesty, vastness, infinity, great scale, darkness, solitude or power: "Indeed terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently the ruling principle of the sublime." The sublime should evoke an emotion so overwhelming, that it was not subject to the forces of reason or comprehension, whereas, in contrast, the beautiful was associated with form and limits. While experiencing the sublime, however, the terrified receiver might feel a "delightful horror," secure in the knowledge that the source of the terror in a work of art could not actually do harm; delight in this instance was considered a pleasure that turns on pain.
Kant elaborated on the aesthetic categories of the sublime and the beautiful, analyzing their sources and their disparate effects on the viewer of visual art (and their force as guides to conduct) and allowing that, despite their evocation of different responses, they could be present in the same work. The sublime, however, continued its association with awe, terror, the defiance of limits and formlessness.
The sublime resurfaced in quite a different guise after World War II. In the abstract expressionist works of Barnett Newman, the artist presented not the boundless forces of nature, but sublimity present within himself. Newman articulated a theory of what has come to be called the "abstract sublime" in a 1948 essay titled "The Sublime is Now." In concert with other Abstract Expressionists, Newman was seeking not just a supremely American art, but one that was "sublime" without depending on myths, legends or geometric formalisms which characterized European art. While acknowledging the historical formulations of the sublime, Newman promulgated an internal standard:
We are reasserting man's natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship to the absolute emotions....We are creating images whose reality is self-evident and which are devoid of the props and crutches that evoke associations with outmoded images, both sublime and beautiful.... Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or 'life,' we are making [them] out of ourselves, out of our own feelings.
The works in "Sublime Structure" do not participate in any notion of the sublime as it had been formulated through the end of Modernism. They are decidedly postmodern in their foregrounding of process, application of multiple mediums, layered uses of pastiche, references to obsolete artistic modes, and their complex indecipherability. They do not inspire terror, even in combination with delight, and they do not project an inner emotion communicated by a boundless expansion of ground or space that has eclipsed figuration. The question arises, then, whether the sublime can be conceptualized in a way that is relevant today, or whether, given so many historic, cultural and economic shifts since the post-war period, the term retains any meaning or utility.
A contemporary concept of the sublime has to be commensurate with a world in which human subjectivity is understood as a constantly reinvented construct shaped by ever-changing experiences and ubiquitous images that often cannot be distinguished from the "real:" Baudrillard's simulacrum, if you will. In this late-capitalist, postindustrial society in which historic categories of knowledge and even national borders are no longer seen as inviolate or inevitable, we lack agreed-upon symbols and formulas to represent the world in the way it once could be depicted in classical perspective.
Accordingly, the artists whose work is included in "Sublime Structure" have not given us pictures or "represented" nature in its traditional guises of ocean, sky and shipwreck, or even in an abstraction that stands for internal feelings. They have used scientific, technological and linguistic tools to produce unique amalgams of codes, symbols, texts, maps, graphs, scans and networks to present data about nature. The human body is recognizable only in fragments or in the outmoded form of the blurred analogue photograph.
The terror, shock and awe historically associated with the notion of the sublime have weakened, perhaps, to feelings of unease at confronting indecipherable translations of the imperceptible. Images of nature have mutated from the erupting volcanoes and storms at sea of the Romantics and the monochromes of the Modernists, to data produced by mining molecular, subatomic and cosmic levels of reality, and can be viewed only when transcribed as codes. The works of art here show us the abyss of the postmodern world: the ambiguity and the indecipherability of multiple texts generated by technologies. If there is a postmodern sublime, it is this techno-version.
____________________________________
1Longinus, "On the Sublime," in Longinus On the Sublime and Reynolds Discourses in Art, trans. Benedict Einarson (Chicago: Packard, 1945), 3-90.
2Ibid., 23-25.
3Edmund Burke, "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful," in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2008), 58.
4Tracey Bashkoff, Introduction to On the Sublime: Mark Rothko, Yves Klein, James Turrell (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2001), 23.
5Works of the Romantic period that illustrate the eighteenth-century concept of the sublime are paintings by Caspar David Friedrich showing small figures contemplating the vastness of the sea and sky and one's relative powerlessness in the face of natural forces, and by J.M.W. Turner in which ships at sea are swallowed in storms.
6An obvious example is Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950-51), of which Newman said, "In titles I try to evoke the emotional complex that I was under: for example, with one of the paintings, which I call Vir Heroicus Sublimis, that man can be or is sublime in his relation to his sense of being aware." Barnett Newman, "Interview with David Sylvester," in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John O'Neill (New York: Knopf, 1990), 258.
7Newman, "The Sublime is Now," in Barnett Newman, 170-73.
8Ibid., 173. Later iterations of the abstract sublime include environmental displays of color, light and space by an artist such as James Turell that play on the viewer's self-awareness in a seemingly boundless space, and Yves Klein's works that enlist the "void." Consider La Vide (1958), in which Iris Clert's Paris gallery was left empty, and Leap into the Void (1961), the altered photograph of Klein leaping into space. See Thomas McEvilley, "Yves Klein and the Double-Edged Sublime," in On the Sublime, 63-83.
9There have been attempts to define a postmodern sublime, all of which enlist technology as foundational. See Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime," Artforum 20, no. 8 (April 1982): 64-69, in which Lyotard, in a critique of Neo-Expressionism, argued that in this "postindustrial techno-scientific world" painters should address the "nondemonstrable" and not "reinstate a make-believe reality." See, also, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, "The Visible Post-Human in the Technological Sublime," in Gilbert-Rolfe, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime (New York: Allworth, 1999), 125-44, in which he described a "post-human" condition in which technology exceeds human intellectual capacity and is therefore "terrifying in the limitless unknowability of its potential." In effect, technology has become the creator of future technology, eclipsing the requirement of human thought or agency. But see Thomas McEvilley, "Turned Upside Down and Torn Apart," in Stickey Sublime, ed. Bill Beckley (New York: Allworth, 2001), 57-83, who argues that the concept of a postmodern sublime is an oxymoron, as it mixes concepts from the Enlightenment and postmodernity, eras in which human consciousness and subjectivity are constructs of entirely different worlds. In McEvilley's view, the ideas of the sublime and the beautiful have become hopelessly confused, the meanings of danger have shifted and the sublime has been tamed. If there is a sublime today, it can be found only in the unknowable vastness of the continuing spread of global capitalism, and the concomitant losses of national identities, cultures and languages.
Virginia K. Adams Ph.D. is an art historian specializing in modern and contemporary art history, with an emphasis on the relationships and theoretical connections among photography, painting, film in the postmodern period. She received her Ph.D. in the History of Art at the University of Maryland, College Park, and has taught art history at that university and at Loyola College. Adams currently teaches modern and contemporary art history at Maryland Institute College of Art.
By Virginia K. Adams, PhD.*
The artworks presented in "Sublime Structure" converge in the realms of scientific, technological and linguistic investigations. Irrespective of artistic medium--whether drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, video, or combinations of formal approach--the works reveal studies of natural phenomena as well as of technological processes themselves. The five artists have created works referencing invisible structures, including microscopic organisms, chemical formulations, analogue images, and cosmological formations. In decoding and displaying information about the world that cannot normally be seen, they have offered texts and digital codes that cannot be translated. These artistic transformations leave much to the imagination.
Effie Halivopoulou's works from her series "Timeless Tales" allude to the human body and biotechnology through a pastiche of codes. On a support of heavy paper mounted on fabric attached to a wood frame, the Athens-based artist creates collages of acrylic paint, resin, photographs, medical scans, texts and symbols. Halivopoulou has made an independent study of genetics, inspired in part by the Human Genome Project, visiting laboratories and gathering images from electron microscopes and magnetic resonance scanners. In The First Time I Am Possible II, for example, the constellation of rounded shapes in the upper left corner is comprised of images of drosophilae cells in mutation. (Drosophilae are small, two-winged flies used in genetic research.) In the lower left is an MRI of a human brain. Sandglass Bending refers to the passage and measurement of time, with the maze in the upper left symbolizing life cycles, while the two white lines that meander across the surface suggest the shape of an hourglass.
Halivopoulou incorporates texts in her work, including fragments of an ancient Greek language known as "Linear B" that are thought to be parts of ancient lyrical poems, but cannot be translated. The adhesive films annexed to the rectangular panels on the wall are imprinted with these linguistic fragments, in addition to genetic codes and poetry, thus presenting to the viewer a combination of symbols designed to be read, yet frustrating any possible reading.
Transgenic Trauma is a video that starts with an image of the artist with her mouth wide open in agony, followed by an endoscopic journey into her esophagus and beyond. Along the way, texts, codes and images from the collaged works float up and down, and a needle brutally probes bodily tissue in an apparent attempt at an implantation. A surreal passage shows rubber-gloved hands moving disembodied eyeballs around as if playing a game, a possible reference to the sliced eyeball scene from the 1929 film Le Chien Andalou. Thus, this video sequence offers torture as a layer of experience connected to the scientific study of the body. Still images of the artist's face from the video, as well as enlargements of details borrowed from the larger works, circle back on medallions attached to the wall. In sum, Halivopoulou offers the viewer a multiplicity of codes, symbols and images of linguistic and biological structures underlying human existence and communication in formats that beg to be read as well as viewed.
...................................................................
The elements of reality that the five artists have investigated and, in turn, presented in their artworks in such complex formulations would seem to satisfy the use of the word "structure" in the exhibition title. But what of the sublime?
One cannot use the term "sublime" in connection with art without jettisoning the baggage of everyday meanings such as "terrific" or "wonderful" as applied to everything from dessert to shoes. The term has a complex lineage that one must consider in deciding whether it can be ascribed to a contemporary work.
The concept of the sublime is historically associated with characteristics of literary or artistic works that evoke intense emotions such as awe or terror in their readers, listeners or viewers. A first-century Greek writer known as Longinus wrote what is considered the Ur- text on the sublime, in which he advised rhetoricians on a variety of means of expression that would elevate the souls of listeners. Distinguishing the sublime from the beautiful, Longinus described the sublime as the passionate presentation of an image of vastness or an event of terror, such as a horrifying storm, in language that amplified the effect with just the right degree of intensity.
The concept of the sublime was applied to visual art in the Eighteenth Century in the writings of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. Following Longinus, Burke associated the sublime with terror that could be evoked by images of majesty, vastness, infinity, great scale, darkness, solitude or power: "Indeed terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently the ruling principle of the sublime." The sublime should evoke an emotion so overwhelming, that it was not subject to the forces of reason or comprehension, whereas, in contrast, the beautiful was associated with form and limits. While experiencing the sublime, however, the terrified receiver might feel a "delightful horror," secure in the knowledge that the source of the terror in a work of art could not actually do harm; delight in this instance was considered a pleasure that turns on pain.
Kant elaborated on the aesthetic categories of the sublime and the beautiful, analyzing their sources and their disparate effects on the viewer of visual art (and their force as guides to conduct) and allowing that, despite their evocation of different responses, they could be present in the same work. The sublime, however, continued its association with awe, terror, the defiance of limits and formlessness.
The sublime resurfaced in quite a different guise after World War II. In the abstract expressionist works of Barnett Newman, the artist presented not the boundless forces of nature, but sublimity present within himself. Newman articulated a theory of what has come to be called the "abstract sublime" in a 1948 essay titled "The Sublime is Now." In concert with other Abstract Expressionists, Newman was seeking not just a supremely American art, but one that was "sublime" without depending on myths, legends or geometric formalisms which characterized European art. While acknowledging the historical formulations of the sublime, Newman promulgated an internal standard:
We are reasserting man's natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship to the absolute emotions....We are creating images whose reality is self-evident and which are devoid of the props and crutches that evoke associations with outmoded images, both sublime and beautiful.... Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or 'life,' we are making [them] out of ourselves, out of our own feelings.
The works in "Sublime Structure" do not participate in any notion of the sublime as it had been formulated through the end of Modernism. They are decidedly postmodern in their foregrounding of process, application of multiple mediums, layered uses of pastiche, references to obsolete artistic modes, and their complex indecipherability. They do not inspire terror, even in combination with delight, and they do not project an inner emotion communicated by a boundless expansion of ground or space that has eclipsed figuration. The question arises, then, whether the sublime can be conceptualized in a way that is relevant today, or whether, given so many historic, cultural and economic shifts since the post-war period, the term retains any meaning or utility.
A contemporary concept of the sublime has to be commensurate with a world in which human subjectivity is understood as a constantly reinvented construct shaped by ever-changing experiences and ubiquitous images that often cannot be distinguished from the "real:" Baudrillard's simulacrum, if you will. In this late-capitalist, postindustrial society in which historic categories of knowledge and even national borders are no longer seen as inviolate or inevitable, we lack agreed-upon symbols and formulas to represent the world in the way it once could be depicted in classical perspective.
Accordingly, the artists whose work is included in "Sublime Structure" have not given us pictures or "represented" nature in its traditional guises of ocean, sky and shipwreck, or even in an abstraction that stands for internal feelings. They have used scientific, technological and linguistic tools to produce unique amalgams of codes, symbols, texts, maps, graphs, scans and networks to present data about nature. The human body is recognizable only in fragments or in the outmoded form of the blurred analogue photograph.
The terror, shock and awe historically associated with the notion of the sublime have weakened, perhaps, to feelings of unease at confronting indecipherable translations of the imperceptible. Images of nature have mutated from the erupting volcanoes and storms at sea of the Romantics and the monochromes of the Modernists, to data produced by mining molecular, subatomic and cosmic levels of reality, and can be viewed only when transcribed as codes. The works of art here show us the abyss of the postmodern world: the ambiguity and the indecipherability of multiple texts generated by technologies. If there is a postmodern sublime, it is this techno-version.
____________________________________
1Longinus, "On the Sublime," in Longinus On the Sublime and Reynolds Discourses in Art, trans. Benedict Einarson (Chicago: Packard, 1945), 3-90.
2Ibid., 23-25.
3Edmund Burke, "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful," in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2008), 58.
4Tracey Bashkoff, Introduction to On the Sublime: Mark Rothko, Yves Klein, James Turrell (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2001), 23.
5Works of the Romantic period that illustrate the eighteenth-century concept of the sublime are paintings by Caspar David Friedrich showing small figures contemplating the vastness of the sea and sky and one's relative powerlessness in the face of natural forces, and by J.M.W. Turner in which ships at sea are swallowed in storms.
6An obvious example is Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950-51), of which Newman said, "In titles I try to evoke the emotional complex that I was under: for example, with one of the paintings, which I call Vir Heroicus Sublimis, that man can be or is sublime in his relation to his sense of being aware." Barnett Newman, "Interview with David Sylvester," in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John O'Neill (New York: Knopf, 1990), 258.
7Newman, "The Sublime is Now," in Barnett Newman, 170-73.
8Ibid., 173. Later iterations of the abstract sublime include environmental displays of color, light and space by an artist such as James Turell that play on the viewer's self-awareness in a seemingly boundless space, and Yves Klein's works that enlist the "void." Consider La Vide (1958), in which Iris Clert's Paris gallery was left empty, and Leap into the Void (1961), the altered photograph of Klein leaping into space. See Thomas McEvilley, "Yves Klein and the Double-Edged Sublime," in On the Sublime, 63-83.
9There have been attempts to define a postmodern sublime, all of which enlist technology as foundational. See Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime," Artforum 20, no. 8 (April 1982): 64-69, in which Lyotard, in a critique of Neo-Expressionism, argued that in this "postindustrial techno-scientific world" painters should address the "nondemonstrable" and not "reinstate a make-believe reality." See, also, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, "The Visible Post-Human in the Technological Sublime," in Gilbert-Rolfe, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime (New York: Allworth, 1999), 125-44, in which he described a "post-human" condition in which technology exceeds human intellectual capacity and is therefore "terrifying in the limitless unknowability of its potential." In effect, technology has become the creator of future technology, eclipsing the requirement of human thought or agency. But see Thomas McEvilley, "Turned Upside Down and Torn Apart," in Stickey Sublime, ed. Bill Beckley (New York: Allworth, 2001), 57-83, who argues that the concept of a postmodern sublime is an oxymoron, as it mixes concepts from the Enlightenment and postmodernity, eras in which human consciousness and subjectivity are constructs of entirely different worlds. In McEvilley's view, the ideas of the sublime and the beautiful have become hopelessly confused, the meanings of danger have shifted and the sublime has been tamed. If there is a sublime today, it can be found only in the unknowable vastness of the continuing spread of global capitalism, and the concomitant losses of national identities, cultures and languages.
Virginia K. Adams Ph.D. is an art historian specializing in modern and contemporary art history, with an emphasis on the relationships and theoretical connections among photography, painting, film in the postmodern period. She received her Ph.D. in the History of Art at the University of Maryland, College Park, and has taught art history at that university and at Loyola College. Adams currently teaches modern and contemporary art history at Maryland Institute College of Art.
