Contemporary Sublime: Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate (original) (raw)

Anish Kapoor Sculptures as an Abstract Organism in Posthuman Constellations

Anish Kapoor: Sculptures as an Abstract Organism in Posthuman Constellations, in: Anish Kapoor, D.Monkiewicz (ed.), Centrum Rzeźby Polskiej w Orońsku, 2022. (in Polish and English) , 2022

Among the monumental sculptures selected for Anish Kapoor's exhibition at the Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, biomorphic forms dominate. The Briton's art can be perceived as abstraction that evokes human-often female-shapes charged with sensual or openly erotic potential. In this essay, I would like to leave this latter interpretation open, while taking note of the possibility of an alternative reading of the corporeality and organicity of these works. It is precisely their organic quality that guides my reflections towards a world of posthuman nature and biology, transgressing the human perspective and emphasizing other life-forms present in nature, whether animate or not, terrestrial or not. What I am interested in, essentially, is how, being so stable, Kapoor's stone sculptures are also liquid and processual, and how they break boundaries on many levels. Let us look at the wonderful monument of pulsating life, the stone Imminence (2000, p. 118), made of onyx. The first thing that comes to mind are maternal connotations: an impregnated womb, the belly of a pregnant woman. Yet, adopting a posthumanist vantage, one can see this sculpture quite differently indeed-as a biological germinal form that grows, sprouting, trying to get out of an organic body, potentially that of a plant or animal. The possibilities of natural-world connotations here are endless. It is the limitlessness of the evoked meanings and emotions that makes this spectacular stone monument what it is.

The Transcendental Sublime in Contemporary Art

The Transcendental Sublime in Contemporary Art, 2015

In Robert Rosenblum’s book "Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko", Rosenblum traces a continuing tradition in art from the 18th century to the 1960s, which centres upon the term ‘sublime’. In the past many artists (amongst them Caspar David Friedrich, Turner, Wassily Kandinsky, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman) and theorists (amongst them Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Jean-Francois Lyotard) have explored the transcendental nature of the sublime in art. Today we live in an age that prides itself on the loss of illusion. Ideas of transcendence in art are often seen as sentimental and viewed with skepticism. The word sublime seems to be stripped down to “the shock of the new” (often centered on horror). This essay explores how the transcendental sublime is situated in contemporary art. The ‘transcendental sublime’ will here refer to how looking at a work of art can enable one to be transported, going beyond the given limits to a place of accessing one’s spiritual side.

Sublime Art, Towards an Aesthetics of the Future

Sublime Art, Towards an Aesthetics of the Future, 2017

This book has been a long time coming and many people have helped me in what has sometimes been a difficult process. Most practically, my sincere thanks to

The Sublime Experience in Film And Installation

This practice based MRes project examines the physiological terror-sublime proposed by Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Using the Enquiry as a manual for artistic production, and employing word charts to map the territory, this project looks to embody ideas of the Burkean sublime in contemporary practice. Simon Morley, in the introduction to The Sublime, broadly describes the subject as ‘…fundamentally transformative, about the relationship between disorder and order, and the disruption of the stable coordinates of time and space…in looking at the relevance of the concept to contemporary art, we are also addressing an experience with implications that go far beyond aesthetics… Awe and wonder can quickly blur into terror, giving rise to a darker aspect of the sublime experience, when the exhilarating feeling of delight metamorphoses into a flirtation with dissolution and the ‘daemonic’’ (Morley, 2010:12) This project uses Burke’s Enquiry as the premise for the creation of gallery-based film and installation, alongside a written comparative analysis of relevant literature and artworks, in order to identify a proposed nihilistic turn in the Burkean terror sublime. In the sublime experience, the reveal of an external annihilating power, a shift in perception or a realisation of great depth or distance, leaves us newly aware of our physical limits and the limits of our rational capacities. The possibility of art to discuss an experience at the edge, where conventional language falters, has resulted in a range of artwork, across mediums, which can be identified with the sublime. Distinct from beauty and containing feelings of awe and reverence, the rush of the sublime can be discerned in the installations of Finnish duo IC-98, Anish Kapoor’s deep, dark voids and Bruce Conner’s apocalyptic Crossroads (1976). Through a process of making and reflection focusing on the dynamics of the Burkean sublime, and with reference to contemporary writing on the subject in both aesthetics and philosophy, this MRes asks - how is the sublime in Burke’s Enquiry distinct from the Kantian transcendent sublime, what is the pleasurable terror at the heart of the Enquiry and, by addressing Burke’s ideas through the artistic process, can a pessimism at the heart of Burke’s system be traced?

The Sublime Conditions of Contemporary Art

Deleuze's relationship to Kant is intricate and fundamental, given that Deleuze develops his transcendental philosophy of difference in large part out of Kant's work. In doing so he utilises the moment of the sublime from the third Critique as the genetic model for the irruption of the faculties beyond their capture within common sense. In this sense, the sublime offers the model not only for transcendental genesis but also for aesthetic experience unleashed from any conditions of possibility. As a result, sensation in both its wider and more specifically artistic senses (senses that become increasingly entwined in Deleuze's work) will explode the clichés of human perception, and continually reinvent the history of art without recourse to representation. In tracing Deleuze's 'aesthetics' from Kant we are therefore returned to the viciously anti-human (and Nietzschean) trajectory of Deleuze's work, while simultaneously being forced to address the extent of its remaining Idealism. Both of these elements play an important part in relation to Deleuze's 'modernism', and to the discussion of his possible relevance to contemporary artistic practices.

The Sublime and its Connection to Spirituality in Modern and Postmodern Philosophy and Visual Arts

Sophia Philosophical Review, 2017

This article reviews the notion of the sublime as it is regarded in a few of the most influential texts in Western philosophy. Modern sublime that is elaborated in the works of Edmund Burke and Kant is influenced by the ancient text Peri Hypsous. Later, Lyotard takes up the sublime to interpret Modern and Postmodern visual art. The sublime is necessarily linked to art. It is the notion that presents existential (spiritual) questions such as existence of God and meaning of human life. Art has been the realm where such questions are tackled. Sublime is the artistic way to spirituality, and works of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko display that.