SUBLIME
Sublime
Sublime! A Symposium to mark the 250th Anniversary of the Publication of Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry
Friday 19 & Saturday 20 October 2007 (forthcoming)
JMW Turner, The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons, 1810, Oil on Canvas, 90×120 cm. Tate Gallery, London
INTRODUCTION
Though, by the mid 18th century, the word ‘sublime’ had long been in use to describe an aesthetic of incommensurability, it was the publication in 1757 of Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful that cemented the importance of the Sublime for art and philosophical aesthetics in the next two and half centuries. The sesquicentennial in 2007 of the publication of Burke’s essay offers an opportunity to reappraise the usefulness of and renascent interest in this aesthetic category. Since the 1980s, the notion of the sublime has received a new lease of life, enjoying attention from major writers as diverse as Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida, Paul De Man, Jean-François Lyotard, and Fredric Jameson, and warranting interpretations in (quite aside from the expected fields of art and aesthetics) literary history, feminism, post-colonial theory, psychoanalysis, political theory and international relations, to name just a few. Why the Sublime now? What is its legacy for us today? In what ways has the Sublime acquired an added urgency in our new millennium? To what extent is this concept a useful or dangerous tool for the understanding of contemporary culture and history? To what uses can and should it be put?
These questions will be explored through a major interdisciplinary symposium supported by the London Consortium, Middlesex University, Tate Britain and the Sublime Object research programme, funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council.
Tate Britain auditorium, 19 – 20 October 2007
ONLINE BOOKING £35 (£25 concessions)
PROGRAMME
Friday 19 October, 18.30-20.00
• THE ECOLOGICAL SUBLIME
This session examines the persistence of the sublime (or otherwise) in contemporary conceptions of nature. It will provide an opportunity to reflect on the sublime as a culturally privileged aesthetic disposition towards nature (in post-Kantian times at least), but also to think about alternatives to the sublime, especially in light of what the ongoing environmental crisis is teaching us about the human relationship with nature, with non-human matter and non-human forces.
SESSION CONVENORS: Luke White / Eu Jin Chua
CHAIR: Claire Pajaczkowska, Middlesex University
SPEAKERS: Jane Bennett, Johns Hopkins University; Esther Leslie, Birkbeck, University of London; Cornelia Parker, artist
Saturday 20 October, 10.00-18.00
INTRODUCTION: Peter de Bolla, King’s College Cambridge, “The Sublime Now.”
• EXPERIENCING THE SUBLIME
Burke’s title, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime…, provides the starting point for this session. Such an enquiry addresses the experience of the sublime, a strong emotional response to a sense perception of the phenomenal world; for Burke a feeling of terror. Does this experience create a link between interiority and exteriority? Does it point to a transcendental world? Or is the experience of the sublime a confirmation of the immanence of subject and world? Are the external occurrences that are declared to trigger the experience of the sublime historically and geographically contingent? If so, is there an underlying denominator that makes these ideas about the experience of the sublime relevant to us? What is the relationship between our ideas regarding the experience of the sublime and our ideas on art and aesthetics? Does the experience of the sublime relate to ethics?
SESSION CONVENOR/CHAIR/RESPONDENT: Bettina Reiber
SPEAKERS: Cornelia Klinger, Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna; Jan Rosiek, University of Copenhagen
• THE DESIGN OF SIGHS: SPIRATION, SINGING AND THE SUBLIME, sonic works presented by Rob Stone, Middlesex University
• SUBLIME BODIES
A desire to transcend the material, animal (and often feminine) conditions of embodiment pervades the canonical formulations of the sublime, and yet the contemporary sublime is often staged as an encounter with precisely these conditions: from the blood-stained sidewalks of Baghdad to the corporeal spectacles of postmodern art, film and performance. This session will focus on the politics of exhibiting – and looking at – bodies; particularly those that disturb the notional boundaries between art and science, between medical and religious iconography, fact and fantasy, education and ‘cheap’ thrills, desire and contemplation. The bodies, and body parts, of contemporary visual culture may provoke a Burkean shudder of ‘delightful horror’, but they rarely confirm his faith in the redemptive value of the sublime. Instead, they exploit the sublime’s uncomfortable proximity to other, less ‘elevating’ feelings: voyeuristic fascination, sexual arousal, ecstasy, disgust, shame. Using Burke as a point of departure, the session will pose the following questions. What is the relationship between the sublime and the spectacular? Is the sublime an effect (and affect) of particular objects, spaces or institutions? How is it, or could it be, exploited, framed, and questioned by curators, artists and audiences? How have artists and curators reinterpreted the sublime, or revealed its affective entanglements and exclusions?
SESSION CONVENORS: Suzannah Biernoff / William McDonald
PRESENTATION: Marina Wallace, Artakt, Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design
PANEL: k r buxey, artist; Jamal Jumá, poet
• THE SUBLIME AND THE POLITICS OF TERROR
It has often been commented that there is a complex and ambivalent link between Burke’s and Kant’s theories of the sublime and their attempts to understand the French Revolution and its attendant terrors. This panel will aim to explore this link between the aesthetics of the sublime and particularly modern forms of the political mobilisation of spectacularised power, terror, horror and awe. It is an issue which the panel will set out to address in the context of the aftermath of 9-11 and with the declaration of an infinite ‘war on terror,’ events which seem to make these pressing issues. Do theories of the sublime help us understand these forms and uses of political terror and war in modern cultures? Do these politics themselves rely on the mechanisms of the sublime?
SESSION CONVENORS: Suzannah Biernoff / Luke White
CHAIR: Esther Leslie, Birkbeck, University of London
SPEAKERS: Gene Ray, critic and theorist; Iain Boal, University of California, Berkeley
• SCREENING Isaac Julien, True North
• PANEL DISCUSSION CHAIRED BY Adrian Rifkin, Middlesex University
PROJECT GROUP
- Dr Suzannah Biernoff, Birkbeck, University of London
- Eu Jin Chua, The London Consortium, University of London
- William McDonald, Middlesex University
- Dr Claire Pajaczkowska, Middlesex University
- Sandra Plummer, The London Consortium, University of London
- Bettina Reiber, University of the Arts London
- Luke White, Middlesex University
PARTICIPANTS
Jane Bennett is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, and a founding member of the journal theory & event. She is the author of The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001), Thoreau’s Nature (2002), and Unthinking Faith and Enlightenment (1987). Her current project, tentatively entitled Vital Material: The Political Life of Things, seeks to bear witness to the force of ‘things’ – e.g. stem-cells, food, electricity, and trash – in public life, of entities and energies that are crucial to politics but whose power and agentic capacities tend to get effaced by all the attention paid to the actions of human persons.
Iain Boal is a social historian of science and technics, and associated with Retort, a Bay Area group of artisans, writers, and artists. He is a co-author of Retort’s Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (2006), and of the broadside All Quiet on the Eastern Front, part of Retort’s installation at the 2006/7 Seville Biennial. In The Geography of Sacrifice he excavated the history of Henry Moore’s sculptural commemoration of Fermi’s secret experiment inaugurating the Manhattan Project; this research formed the basis of Tate Modern’s 2000 exhibit on Moore and CND, curated by Chris Stevens. He teaches at the University of California; in 2005/6 he was a Guggenheim Fellow in science and technology.
k r buxey Born in the UK during the ‘Summer of Love,’ k r buxey graduated from Brighton School of Art in 1999 and received her MA from Goldsmiths in 2001. Her shows have included new contemporaries ’99, EAST 2001, and Reality Check (2003). Buxey has exhibited internationally at Locust Projects in Miami, The Rudolfinium in Prague, W139 in Amsterdam and at the ICA and Ibid Projects in London in addition to other spaces from Hong Kong and Paris to Krakow, Ontario, Ljubljana and Barcelona. Her video works address the complex dynamics of desire and representation and in doing so articulate a number of challenging questions.
Peter de Bolla is Reader in Cultural History and Aesthetics in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of King’s College. He is the author of seven books including The Fourth of July and the Founding of America (Profile, 2007), The Education of the Eye (Stanford, 2003), Art Matters (Harvard, 2001) and The Discourse of the Sublime (Blackwell, 1989). He currently holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship and is working on the origin of the concept of human rights in the eighteenth century.
Cornelia Klinger is a Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna (Austria) and Professor of Philosophy at Tübingen University (Germany). Her research areas include aesthetics, especially romanticism and modernism, gender studies and political philosophy. She is author of Die Erfindung des Subjekts (forthcoming), Flucht – Trost – Revolte. Die Moderne und ihre ästhe¬tischen Gegenwelten (1995), and co-editor of Das Jahrhundert der Avantgarden (2004) and of Continental Philosophy in Feminist Perspective: Re-Reading the Canon in German (2000).
Jamal Jumá An Iraqi poet, born in Baghdad, Jamal Jumá received his academic education in Copenhagen, where he has lived since 1984. He has published several collections of poetry, including Book of the Book, Diary of the Sleepwalker, and A Handshake in the Dark, which was set to music by Michael Nyman and premiered with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in the Barbican Hall, March 2007. His erotic works– including manuscripts based on The Perfumed Garden and The Forbidden Texts – have infuriated some religious and political establishments around the Arab World, resulting in the confiscation and banning of these books in some Arab countries. www.jamaljuma.com
Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion, 2005), Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-garde (Verso, 2002) and Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (Pluto, 2000). She is on the editorial boards of the journals Historical Materialism, Radical Philosophy and Revolutionary History. Together with Ben Watson, she runs a website of polemics, rants and pictures called Militant Esthetix.
Gene Ray is a critic and theorist living in Berlin. He is the author of Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory (2005) and the editor of Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy (2001). His essays appear in Third Text, Left Curve, Analyse & Kritik and the webjournal Transversal. His current work revisits classic critiques of the capitalist art system and reflects on the possibilities for radical cultural practices that contribute effectively to social movements and struggles.
Bettina Reiber is a practising artist, curator and Associate Lecturer at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London. She has published a number of articles on modernist art theory and aesthetics and another essay is forthcoming in Psyche and the Arts to be published by Routledge in 2008. Her interest lies predominantly in reintroducing the Kantian notion of aesthetic experience into debates within contemporary art theory and practice.
Adrian Rifkin is Professor of Visual Culture at Middlesex University, and author of Street Noises: Parisian Pleasure 1900 – 1940 (1993) and Ingres then, and Now (2000). He has edited the journal Art History. His work ranges widely in cultural and art history, from popular music and opera to Kantian aesthetics and gay subjectivities. He is currently preparing a series of studies under the title of ‘Hyperventilation, the search for a banal beauty’, which will evolve a queer Lacanianism. He also writes on contemporary artists and is working on a series of articles on Richard Wagner and other musical questions, including Wagner’s techno heritage. His website is http://www.gai-savoir.net.
Jan Rosiek is Professor for Nordic Studies and Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen. He is currently completing a book on intertextuality, which explores the various types of interaction between Danish and international literature. His other research interests include modern poetry and poetics, narrative theory, ethical criticism, literary criticism and philosophy. He is the author of Figures of Failure. Paul de Man’s Criticism 1953-1970 (1992); Maintaining the Sublime. Heidegger and Adorno (2000); Andre spor. Studier i moderne dansk lyrik [Other Traces. Studies in Modern Danish Poetry] (2003).
Rob Stone is Senior Research Fellow with the Visual Culture Research Group at Middlesex University. He writes about the often unseizable, sociable relationships between sound and architecture. His forthcoming book Auditions: Architecture and Aurality will be published by MIT Press soon.
Marina Wallace is the Director of Artakt at The Innovation Centre, Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, and co-director with Martin Kemp of the Universal Leonardo. She is closely engaged with contemporary art and design on many levels, as an art historian, writer, lecturer, curator and artist. She is widely published in the fields of contemporary art and art and science, and regularly contributes essays for artists catalogues and anthologies. She has curated a number of international exhibitions including Spectacular Bodies: the Art and Science of the Human Body, from Leonardo to Now, Hayward Gallery (2000/1); Head On, Art with the Brain in Mind, Science Museum, London (2002), and Mendel, The Genius of Genetics, Brno, (2003).
Supported by The London Consortium, Middlesex University, Tate Britain and the Sublime Object research programme, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Tate Britain auditorium, 19 – 20 October 2007
ONLINE BOOKING £35 (£25 concessions)