Anarchy & Order

Musings on the state of beauty and the sublime.

“Beauty is your sure bet that desire, unmolested, is going to make you feel around. The Sublime is your failure to feel anything around the beautiful, knowing well it’s there.” —Faheem Haider

“Reports that say there's -- that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things that we know that we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know.” —Donald Rumsfeld, United States Secretary of Defense (2002)

We are living in a time filled with visions of the apocalypse while simultaneously denying its near eventuality. Climate change is upon us. Officially or not we’re firmly seated in the Anthropocene. We will not meet our demise by way of alien space craft, zombie invasions, thermonuclear war or even the Terminator. Instead we have started a war with the planet itself and that war will more than likely going to end poorly for the human race. The concept of the entire world’s climate changing, melting polar ice sheets, the release of trapped CO2 in the tundra and a shift in global weather patterns inevitably triggering irreversible changes is more than most human beings can wrap their minds around. This is the dilemma of beauty and the sublime.

The assassination of John Lennon in 1980 and the inauguration of Ronald Reagan precisely a month later, marked the end of an era in American renewal. Ideals bound in the sublime, freedom chief among them. For a time we used our post-war prosperity to grow the cultural infusion we received prior to the war from those fleeing fascism. Lennon, another expat who chose to live in New York, was a symbol of what a culture might achieve when holding a firm grasp on the sublime. Reagan on the other hand, a Hollywood fantasy, preferred the Norman Rockwell portrait to the Pollock landscape. To Reagan any notion of the sublime was to be feared and freedom lived firmly in the real, not the abstract. Of course, that real was grounded in the tradition of rich, white men. Since then we’ve seen an accelerating erosion of abstract ideas and a continual, exponential embrace of certainty. This has led to a rise in fundamentalism, absurdist political frames like Ayn Rand Libertarianism, and a fanatical adherence to antiquated, dangerous ideas guaranteed to solidify the onslaught of climate change.

Beauty sits firmly in the Now of desire. It is tactile, emotional and lives within the boundaries of the body and our biology. The sublime fractures the Now, leaving us fumbling in the dark for the certainty of beauty. This dynamic which makes both concepts more powerful and recognizable, has been consumed by fear. The shiny culture of corporate production and our desire for the outcomes of that production—Nike shoes, BMW cars, the latest Beyoncé album—is now what stands in for beauty. It’s a deception. It has no place in the Now, only in the future. In parallel to consumerist beauty, and its replacement of democratic freedom, lies our idea of technological beauty. American fundamentalists drive automobiles and use smartphones that require a level of technological sophistication far exceeding their understanding. Yet they deny science because the science that led to the technology that provides them their comfort requires an embrace of the sublime that terrifies them far more than the certainty of an angry god.

The cognitive dissonance between technology and religion is a failure of imagination. Art is failing us and as a result our imaginations a left to fester on memetic replications of layered ironies. The inside joke of regurgitated culture is the only idea persisted, with few exceptions. Our art isn’t telling any new stories. It offers no real form of beauty because it has no stomach for the sublime. Just as technology cannot exist without the pursuit of pure science, beauty cannot exist without the sublime. The unknown unknowns are critical in our dialectic as they lead to inquiries bound by deep imagination. Art production is bound by intellectual curiosity not by talent and right now we’re sorely lacking in intellectual-aesthetic curiosity. Artists aren’t interested in redefining art, they think art-making is simply burning down the house of aesthetics in and of itself. I’m specifically thinking of Richard Prince, Tracy Emin and a cadre of followers and mimickers who pretend at art-making because they offer no real dialogue between beauty and the sublime. Prince’s effete riffs on pulp fiction book covers and Marlboro ads took whatever integrity was left in Warhol’s dialogue and flattened it into a dull plane of aesthetic purgatory. The artists who followed like Emin, et. al. have merely punctuated the effort in a pedantic ballet of aesthetic scatology.

We need a new definition for beauty and aesthetics. We have long since outgrown Plato, Kant and yes, even Heidegger but we are left with no new outline. The sublime is narrowly defined by the fear of terror. The terror of 9/11 seemed sublime because our art has been so narrow, plastic and ironic for so long. There is nothing sublime about a president standing on rubble and encouraging people to get back out there and shop.

Our culture and our art is trapped in an adolescent understanding of beauty and the sublime. A true imagining of the sublime is to ponder what lies beyond the infinite, to be so overwhelmed by the breakdown of physicality and the Now, that we are paralyzed. We attach words to these experiences but they all fall woefully short—altered states, the uncanny, transcendence, the infinite—are all our weak attempts to add context to that which has none. The failing in this is its lack of recognition that the sublime is not ‘out there’ in the intangible ether, but lives inside all of us in the form of consciousness. The voice inside our head as we interact in the Now, fractures the nature of any form of tangible reality. As Daniel Dennett says,

“The salmon swimming upstream to spawn may be wily in a hundred ways, but she cannot even contemplate the prospect of abandoning her reproductive project and deciding instead to live out her days studying coastal geography or trying to learn Portuguese. The creation of a panoply of new standpoints is, to my mind, the most striking product of the euprimatic revolution.”

Grasping the infinity of available ideas is what makes us human.

Viewing images of the Hubble telescope’s view of the cosmos is an aesthetic experience that marries beauty and the sublime. The images of giant gas clouds millions of light years across our galaxy can be seen as physically beautiful. Recognizing the origins and time/space dimensions of those gas clouds disrupts their aesthetic value and seats them in the sublime. Our cultural cult of personality teaches us that beauty is precious, pretentious, and idealistic. The art world’s reaction to this admiration of the plastic-pretty with classical ugliness. A didactic and equally immature response to the current realities of our world. Entering the realm of the sublime gives shape to beauty precisely because it suddenly becomes precious against the abandon of the former. Art isn’t a response to anything, when it works. At its best it provides us a slim grasp of the Now in order to allow access to the infinite. Robert Hughes said it best during the apex of Reaganism,

“What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.”

Ontology of the Sublime

“The question that now arises is how if we are living in a time without legend or mythos that can be called sublime, if we refuse to admit any exaltation in pure relations, if we refuse to live in the abstract, how can we be creating a sublime art?”  —Barnett Newman

I’ve been considering the sublime a lot lately. This concept of observation that invokes awe. I recently completed Ross King’s book Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling, an excellent, and detailed account of the painting of the Sistine Chapel that took the artists from 1508 to 1512 to complete. During the celebration of All Saints Day, that October 31^st, 1512 when the ceiling was finally unveiled in its entirety, did the cardinals, attendants, dignitaries and indeed Pope Julius II himself, look up at Michelangelo Buonarroti’s ceiling and find it sublime as many of us do today? I ask this question because it appears, that for all practical purposes, as Barnett Newman said in the 1960’s, that we have lost our ability to create the sublime.

Sublime is something altogether different. Sublime, I believe requires abstraction, as Newman said. By this I mean using our imaginations in combination with our knowledge and experience to construct manifestations of what we observe beyond the simplicity of what are eyes are telling us (or any of the other senses for that matter.) Newman’s presumption, that we have lacked since the sixties this ability to abstract, might be argued in much of what is found in galleries and museums today. It would appear an ability to abstract is preventing us from producing, and in turn observing much that could be considered the sublime in art. However, I find myself surprisingly in disagreement with Newman’s comment, despite seeming overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I believe our capacity for abstraction has never been greater in human history and we are simply living in a natural in-between art state. A state that is percolating old ideas and mashing them against our current circumstances until we re-imagine the profound, the sublime, in a new way.

Here we are where one out of every seven people globally owns a smartphone and two-thirds of the planet has at least a mobile phone. Google’s search engine processes 24 petabytes (24m gigabytes) of data a day. We have sequenced the entire human genome. We have sent a probe beyond our universe and landed multiple crafts on Mars now roaming its surface, sending back data. We can look up any snippet of information in less than a quarter of second. We have looked back into time/space with telescopes to the edge of the Big Bang and visited the deepest ocean trench in the world. On the surface it appears this enormous amount of data is overwhelming us, rendering us not in awe but in a state of complacency. Much of the art being sold commercially and displayed in museums is recycling ironic gestures like a turgid whirlpool of endless self-referencing banality. The art world remains largely and firmly planted in traditions that no longer comment on our current reality let alone re-imagine a future one. “Art is either plagiarism or revolution” as Gauguin said, and today we are seeing a great deal of plagiarism, but I believe that is not cause for alarm. I think we are experiencing another fallow time in the history of art, similar to the Middle Ages in Europe, but on a much more compressed scale.

The Renaissance was a time of concentrated wealth whose expression was quantified in expanding culture based on classical ideas found in ancient Greece and the Roman empire. Although a time of corruption, war, plague and pestilence it was also a time of growing science and technology. Religion, not technology formed the center of the growth in the European Renaissance and indeed supplied the wealth that provided for much of the greatness that lasts today in terms of artistic production. Julius II commissioned extraordinary artists (considered great craftsmen at the time) such as Michelangelo and Raphael. There were vast numbers of ignorant people living in relative squalor and then there were the elite who had access not just to better living standards, food and sanitation but knowledge. Michelangelo was well schooled in Latin, the Greek classics, and was carefully tutored in advanced methods of sculpture, fresco, painting and architecture as well as mathematics beginning at 15. He had access to the finest Florentine crafted pigments, some so rare their ingredients came as far away as Iran and cost their weight in gold. Michelangelo might not have had cell phones and the internet, but he had that periods equivalent. His assistants in the making of the ceiling were the finest in Europe, all masters in their craft and knowledge in their own right. So, then as now, a great separation existed between the have and the have nots, between technology and ignorance. It is precisely out this sort of mixture that great art is born.

We are emerging from a brief middle ages of culture, where the clock was briefly turned back out of ignorance fear and mostly out of greed. But from the ashes of that fading, impotent ideology, will emerge a new generation of artists who were born into the dynamics of our technologically centric world. This new generation of artists will circumvent old ideas directly by leveraging the technology that is second nature to them. Ideas on communication, human interaction, perception and even the very nature of reality will be upended and greatness will be born. The ironic loop is one of diminishing returns and we have yet to experience the full measure of art in the 21^st century and with it new forms of sublime. As Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe said in his book, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime; 

Technology is produced by capitalism in order to consolidate and extend capitalism’s interest, which include the latter’s constant transformation, because capitalism’s persistence depends on its being the source, so that the product is also the producer as thinking is thought’s producer and product. I have suggested that the sublime becomes identified with the idea and image of technology, appears within it and adopts its appearance, at the point where the origin of technology is found in earlier technological functions rather than anything ever done or thought by a human—which is to say, where the technological is seen to have become the origin of, that which makes possible, a kind of thought and a kind of body which wasn’t there before.

When Pope Julius II gazed upon the chapel ceiling during the final reveal by Michelangelo, he was excited and thrilled and he asked for more gold. The Pope did not encounter the sublime that day anymore than he did when he gazed upon the three frescos of Raphael’s in his private chambers. His ego and the context of power would not permit it. Michelangelo may have been the greatest living artist of the time, but he was still a craftsman, and artisan who drafted stories for the masses. The sublime experience was intended for those who came to the chapel for mass, not for those in power. Then, like today, art served in parallel to technological advancement as a gateway to the sublime. The third law of Arthur C. Clarke’s applies then and now, to both art and technology; “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This is precisely why we haven’t yet seen the next generation of great art. Artists need to construct a kind of magic, that will reveal the underpinnings of a deeper knowledge and we will once again experience the sublime. The magic in Michelangelo was in his interpretation of often obscure bible passages and characters using an extremely difficult technique to master combined with some of the finest foreshortening and drafting techniques ever rendered by hand. Imagine painting something into wet plaster (intonaco) with a badger hair brush using pigments that have been hand-ground by monks in Florence on a curved surface 60 feet above the ground and representing perfect perspective in a contorted figure that is twice life size. The intonaco dries within one day, so you can’t paint the figure all at once but must break it into Giornate’s (the famous figure of Adam on the ceiling took just four.) That would indeed seem like magic.