VISUAL CULTURE
Suzannah Biernoff: Projects
Friday 19 & Saturday 20 October 2007 (forthcoming)
Tate Britain, 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 1857 of Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Inquiry 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 and Tate Britain. The two-day event will include keynote addresses, panel discussions, presentations and film screenings on the following themes:
- The ecological sublime
- Globalisation, capitalism and the sublime
- Sublime bodies
- Experiencing the sublime
- The pedestrian sublime
- The sublime in war, from ‘shock and awe’ to the politics of terror
PROJECT GROUP
- Dr Suzannah Biernoff, Middlesex University
- Eu Jin Chua, The London Consortium, University of London
- William McDonald, Middlesex University
- Colette Meacher, Features Editor, Latest Art magazine
- Dr Claire Pajaczkowska, Middlesex University
- Sandra Plummer, The London Consortium, University of London
- Bettina Reiber, University of the Arts London
- Luke White, Middlesex University
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (London: Palgrave, 2002) ISBN 033396120X
’The Corporeal Sublime’, in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, special issue on Affect and Sensation, Vol 2.2, 3.1,2001-02, pp 61-75.
Abstract: Kant’s theory of the sublime is about transcendence: of the everyday, the transient, the feminine, of sensual pleasures and passing concerns. It represents the redemptive capacity of human understanding. Applied to art and literature (Romantic and modern), the sublime has often been associated with the iconoclastic and transcendental impulses in the Judeo-Christian tradition. This paper makes the case for an alternative genealogy of the sublime through an analysis of corporeal and affective trends in pre-modern and post-modern art. In the later Middle Ages the crucified body of Christ was sublime: the limits of the self were negotiated in and through the flesh of God. There are resonances of this carnal sublimity in performance and body art of the last 30 years (much of which reinterprets the iconography and ritual of the Christian church): in this instance I will focus on the work of Stuart Brisley and Orlan. Viewed historically – rather than as a general aesthetic category – the sublime is fundamentally about frontiers. Where do we – individually and socially – locate our limits (the limits of self, society, civilization, humanity)? What is unthinkable? Nineteenth-century explorers and Romantic painters found the sublime in ‘wild’ nature; our frontiers arguably lie elsewhere. The question of humanity and human nature has become a question of bodies, and specifically their proliferating interfaces with technology. The sublime – a shifting but enduring phenomenon – is encountered precisely on these unstable borders of our imaginary, physical and political lives.
’Carnal relations: Embodied sight in Merleau-Ponty, Roger Bacon and St Francis’ , in the Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 4.1, April 2005
Abstract: This essay attempts a medieval Christian re-reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s enigmatic and unfinished text, The Visible and the Invisible. Along the way, it complicates current notions of ocularcentrism, as well as the idea of an embodied gaze. The privileged term in these historical fragments is flesh: in Merleau-Ponty and in medieval Christianity, a carnal presence insinuates itself into the relations between bodies, between things and thoughts, self and world. In the end, the speculative encounter between the two central studies offers a new perspective on debates about the historiography of vision and the peculiar potency of the visual world.
Key words: body schema; embodied vision; flesh; gaze; incarnation; ocularcentrism; optics
We can imagine a disembodied mind having visual experiences but not tactile ones. Sight does not require our being part of the material world in the way in which feeling by touching does. – G. N. A. Vesey, ‘Vision’, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy True philosophy consists in re-learning to look at the world, and in this sense a historical account can give meaning to the world quite as ‘deeply’ as a philosophical treatise. – Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception xx
Vision is often imagined (L. imaginare, ‘to picture to oneself’) as an intellectual act, and ocular metaphors dominate our accounts of knowledge and understanding. I’ll say ‘I see what you mean’ if I’ve understood you, or I might question the clarity of your ideas (from the Greek idein, ‘to see’). Seeing and knowing are linguistically and symbolically entwined in Indo-European cultures (Tyler 1984). The mind has its own ‘eye’ with which to inspect and to speculate (L. specere, ‘to look at or observe’) and I can try with this interior ‘eye’ to put things ‘in perspective’: to take a step back, remove myself from the scene, and survey the situation more ‘objectively’.
The final version of this paper is published in the Journal of Visual Culture, vol 4(1) April 2005, Sage Publications Ltd, all rights reserved. © Sage Publications Ltd, 2005
