NOV. 2022 Research Journal
Unpacking Sublime
Nov.2 2022
A small exercise trying to unpack my understanding of sublime via a few paragraphs within a page. It reminds me of some good time spent with Scheri in landscape theory class at RISD and some memorable field trips to Bloedel Reserve and Gas Work Park in Seattle.
Below I define and describe the concept of sublime via four aspects: where does sublime occur and its major characters, when and how does this process happen, what does sublime may feel like, and why does it matter.
First of all, sublime in spatial experience is not a content contained by objects or places. It’s an emotional process felt by both the body and the mind, upon the conjured qualities inherent in both the observed and the observer. In the Oxford English dictionary, sublime is described as “affecting the mind with a sense of overwhelming grandeur or irresistible power; calculated to inspire awe, deep reverence, or lofty emotion, by reason of its beauty, vastness, or grandeur.” Similarly, Elizabeth K Meyer and Edmund Burke both argue that sublime involves “an aesthetic that vacillates between beauty and horror” that inspires awe, pleasure, and an appropriate amount of fear. Therefore, sublime do not emerge from an agreeable interaction yet a challenging one.
Conventionally, this intimidating feeling occurs when humans confront the vastness of scale or the power of natural forces that are presented as too large to be controlled or even comprehended. In contrast, sublime in modern or postmodern context arises when depth of time is revealed by its temporality and intensity and is perceived simultaneously by the subject. For example, in Bloedel Reserve, juxtaposed events or dynamics in a landscape (the historic and the present, or the glacial and the temporal) evoke the same unsettling-yet-pleasurable response that signifies sublime. Therefore, I will add that sublime is about revealing the essence and authenticity by “conceiving the invisible - the reciprocity and interdependence of human life and natural processes.” We are pushed to comprehend something that defies simple observation or understanding.
Postmodern sublime could be a transformative experience. Immediately we are astonished or confused, which tears down our illusions of our capability and brings us back to the truth that transcends the mundane or the steady, challenges sensory pleasure, and beyond language. Then the mixture of sorrowfulness and joyfulness hits us when we realize that we are able to perceive this overwhelmingly richness without comprehension toward this infinite depth of present. Kant describe this as, “the ecstasy of terror, a recognition of the thin line between infinity and self.“ This process resonates with what Heidegger called attunement - how someone finds herself already to be, as one of three key components of the dasein. It may evoke contemplations about meaning and being, from which we carry this sublimeness into our daily life, as Meyer says, “works that move as well as intrigue, that touch as well as mean.”
Individually, sublime moves our attention beyond the visible form towards the invisible. The construction of sublime speaks to the core of “phenomenological and hermeneutical theories’ dependence on the body immersion in place, and subjectivity.” Collectively, it’s “one of the most powerful human emotions, when experienced by large groups, the sublime can weld society together. In moments of sublimity, human beings temporarily disregard divisions among elements of the community. The sublime taps into fundamental hopes and fears.” Beauty may call upon our internal aesthetics world which diverge, while sublime guides our gaze up toward the external eternity that unifies.
Reference:
The Beautiful
1757 – Edmund Burke. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful
“By Beauty, as distinguished from the Sublime, I mean that quality or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion analogous to it. I distinguish love, or the satisfaction which arises to the mind upon contemplating anything beautiful, from
desire, which is an energy of the mind that hurries us on to the possession of certain objects.”
1790 – Immanuel Kant. The Critique of Judgment
(The beautiful) “…is connected with the form of the object, which consists in having definite boundaries.”
The Picturesque
1794 - William Gilpin. Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty
“Disputes about beauty might perhaps be involved in less confusion, if a distinction were established, which certainly exists, between such objects as are beautiful, and such as are picturesque—between those, which please the eye in their natural state;
and those, which please from some quality, capable of being illustrated by painting.”
1794 - Uvedale Price. Essay on the Picturesque, As Compared with the Sublime and The Beautiful.
“Picturesqueness, therefore, appears to hold a station between beauty and sublimity… where an object, or a set of objects, is without smoothness or grandeur, but from its intricacy, its sudden and irregular deviations, its variety of forms, tints, and lights and
shadows are interesting to a cultivated eye, it is simply picturesque.”
“Serra’s interpretation of Smithson’s remarks is passed on one of the commonplaces of the theory of the picturesque garden: not to force nature, but to reveal the “capacities” of the site, while magnifying their variety and singularity.” p. 34
“What does Smithson say? That the picturesque park is not the transcription of the land of a compositional pattern previously fixed in the mind, that its effects cannot be determined a priori, that is presupposes a stroller, someone who trusts more in the real
movement of his legs than in the fictive movement of his gaze.” p. 36
Smithson, Robert. "Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape”
“The picturesque, far from being an inner movement of the mind, is based on real land; it precedes the mind in its material external existence...A park can no longer be seen as “a thing-in-itself,” but rather as a process of ongoing relationships existing in a physical
region – the park becomes a “thing-for-us.” p. 160
The Sublime
1757 – Edmund Burke. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful
“The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature is astonishment, and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. The mind is so entirely filled with its object that it cannot entertain any other, nor reason on that object which fills it. Astonishment is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree…No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its power of acting and reasoning as terror; and whatever is terrible with regard to sight, is sublime.”
1790 – Immanuel Kant. The Critique of Judgment
“Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt”
1989 - Meyer, Elizabeth K
“Each site exhibits the interplay between the forces of human settlement and technological progress, such as power and timber production, and the agents of natural processes, in particular the hydrologic cycle.”
“These design interventions within disturbed sites created places of formal and visual presence that pushed me through the borders of beauty into into an excess of form and experience that was not agreeable, but pleasurably painful. I have come to understand
this experience as a postmodern form of the sublime.”
“an aesthetic that vacillates between beauty and horror”, “the elusiveness and tangibility of the natural world is inscribed in the thin membranes (reflection pool)”
“Natural sublime,Technological sublime, eco-technological sublime”
“Sublime’s ability to destroy form (key given landscape’s embeddedness in the world); the representation of the invisible (parallel to recent interest in making site processes and histories visible and spatial), and the central role of the viewer in the construction of the sublime (recalling phenomenological and hermeneutical theories’ dependence on the body immersion in place, and subjectivity)”
The American technological sublime,xiii. David Nye: “one of the most powerful human emotions, when experienced by large groups, the sublime can weld society together. In moments of sublimity, human beings temporarily disregard divisions among elements of the community. The sublime taps into fundamental hopes and fears. It is not a social residue, created by economic and political forces, though both caninflext its meaning.”
Oxford English dictionary: affecting the mind with a sense of overwhelming grandeur or irresistible power; calculated to inspire awe, deep reverence, or lofty emotion, by reason of its beauty, vastness, or grandeur.”
“Temporal scalelessness”
“Conceive of the invisible- the reciprocity and interdependence of human life and natural processes”
Bibliography:
Bois, Yve-Alain. “A Picturesque Stroll Around Clara-Clara,” in Richard Serra, trans. by John Shepley, ed. Ernst-Gerhard Güse (New York: Rizzoli, 1988), pp. 40 - 59.
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. London : George Bell, 1889.
Gilpin, William. Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty. London: printed for R. Blamire, 1792.
Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987.
Meyer, Elizabeth K. “Seized by Sublime Sentiments,” in Richard Haag: Bloedel Reserve and Gas Works Park, William Saunders, ed. (Princeton Architectural Press, 1998) pp. 6 – 28
Price, Sir Uvedale Price. “An Essay on the picturesque, as compared with the sublime and beautiful.” The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory. Ashfield,
Andrew & De Bolla, Peter eds. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. pp. 271-275.
Smithson, Robert. "Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape," in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 157-171.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 1982. “Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime.” ArtForum, v.20 no. 8 (April). Meyer, Elizabeth K. 1998. “Seized by Sublime Sentiments.” In Richard Haag: Bloedel Reserve and Gas Works Park, edited by William S. Saunders, 5-28. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
The Tate. n.d. Collected essays on the ‘The Art of the Sublime’ particularly articles listed in ‘The Romantic Sublime’ and ‘The Modern Sublime.’ http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime