I took the dogs for a bit of a burn around the city streets whilst I took some photographs of the funkiness of the urban world of the south east corner of the CBD that I live in:

Gary Sauer-Thompson, garage door, Adelaide CBD, 2007

However, I'm looking for the urban sublime even though I'm not sure what it would mean. In its classic Kantian formulation the sublime is used primarily in relation to the aesthetic experience of the awesomeness of nature. Can we not experimentally extend the category to encompass the scale of human artefacts in the landscape such as machines, buildings and vast industrial installations.

It could be said that the sublime, when contrasted to the category of the beautiful becomes an aesthetic of immensity, excess and disproportion, whilst the beautiful is an aesthetic of harmony and proportion.

However, I'm thinking that the contemporary resonance of the sublime arises from the intellectual disjuncture between our aesthetic and cognitive abilities to read these kinds of unfamiliar landscapes. This part of Adelaide is not the city beautiful:

Gary Sauer-Thompson, House, Adelaide CBD, 2007

Can we not read these urban and industrial landscapes — both real and imagined — in terms of their mysterious qualities in which the realm of a sublime aesthetic lies at the boundary of human conceptual comprehension.That gestures towards Lyotard, who positions the sublime as that which invokes the unpresentable.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, 5 figures, Adelaide CBD, 2007

Lyotard suggests that the postmodern sublime invokes the unpresentable in presentation, that which refuses the consolation of correct forms, refuses the consensus of taste, permitting a common experience of nostalgia for the impossible, and inquiries into new presentations – not to take pleasure in them but to better produce the feeling that there is something unpresentable.