|
April 19, 2009
In Total Recall:Contested depictions of the Romantic Tradition in the first edition of Second Nature Professor Peter James Smith argues that the legacy of the sublime in German Romantic Painting is alive and well in the late postmodern period of our time, post-9/11. Smith's paper gives contemporary instances of the sublime.
My interpretation of the sublime from my recent trip in New Zealand:
Smith argues that the interpretation of the sublime in the Romantic Tradition has become a contested site of representation in contemporary art and design practice, and that the currency of the Romantic Tradition has substance beyond a shallow focus on nostalgia.
An example of nostagia is Peter Dombrovskis' Rock Island Bend, Franklin River, South West Tasmania. Smith says that this photographic image has escaped deconstruction and remained intact as an icon of the wilderness movement, and adds:
Perhaps it could be said that it is for this very reason that wilderness photography has never reached the top of the pantheon in contemporary art circles. From an art world vantage point, there is a perceived danger that the image could be interpreted as quaintly "nostalgic", and hence the impact bubble of the political clout is deflated. It is better for wilderness photography to be binned in an entirely separate category of image making—out there on its own, to be used for a specific political purpose. And this is precisely a place where the general public can see it, appreciate it, value it, and keep it . Dombrovskis' image now has an iconic status: it is still famous today, 25 years after it was taken and 25 years after it was in full sight of the public and media.
He says:
This questioning over how a contemporary artist might represent the world based on a real experience of it, has impacted on how I view other contemporary artists' representations of landscape and still life and, of course, how I configure my own representations both as a visual artist and practice-based researcher. The inclusion of design practice here is to acknowledge that sublime representations are used to sell cars, movies, tourist destinations and the environmental movement.
The sublime is everywhere these post-colonial days. Smith adds that:
The Post-Modernists would point to the deficits of Romantic painting as a mannered artificial construct, insisting that the manner of the artifice is readily seen through, and that the audience, while initially experiencing uplift at the sight of an image by Friedrich, later feels disappointment when the artificiality of the image becomes apparent. To the Post-Modernist, a painting of reality is simply text to be "read" and is therefore very different from reality itself. However, the practice of painting, of making visual images that represent our environment in a convincing way, seems to run counter to this Post-Modernist stance. This is especially so if a contemporary artist wishes to make a political lobby or conservation point about the environment.
Though reading an image as a text is problematic as it implies literary as opposed to image), it is odd to argue against the insight that a painting or a photo is very different from reality itself. Though a part of as an image visual cultural, it is a representation of reality.
Smith argues that the contemporary sublime is not a let-down, pause, interruption, nor interrogation of banality: it is still a territory of uplift that feeds the positive drivers of the human psyche.
|
A familiar preoccupying problem for colonial writers and painters was how to cope with the sense of distance or strangeness of the new place. The words and conventions with which they had to figure the new world did not quite fit. One solution was to emphasise the sublimity of the landscape.