I recently visited the exhibition Mariner a painted ship upon a painted ocean at Plymouth’s Lewinsky Gallery.  Timed to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower’s launch for the United States, the exhibition takes as its starting point the Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and interprets it for modern times.  In this context, the exhibition covers such themes as marine pollution, climate change, overseas human migration and human vulnerability.

The work of two artists seemed to be particularly relevant to this point in my studies.  Nadav Kander is a British photographer born in Israel who won the Prix Pictet award in 2009 for his work Yangtze – The Long River.  The two works on display, Water II and Water XVIII are both taken from Shoeburyness as part of his studies of the Thames Estuary, studying the transition between river and sea.  The result are atmospheric black and white works of the churning waters and distant horizons.

Kander’s works are long and tall, positioned very low on the gallery wall, giving the viewer the sense that they can step into the image, as I have previously observed in Mark Rothko’s work.  The large scale swirling water appears sculptural, almost solid as if it were made of plaster, giving a sense of three dimensionality and uncertainty which, along with the minimal composition and distant horizon creates the feeling of the sublime.

Tacita Dean is a British artist working mainly in the medium of film.  Her work Disappearance at Sea was based on the story of British businessman and amateur sailor David Crowhurst (1932-1969) who died at sea attempting a single handed, around the world yacht race after falsifying records of his whereabouts in an attempt to appear as though he had completed circumnavigation.

The work is an excellent example of modern interpretation of the sublime, with the viewer initially walking into a black room, so dark as to be disorientating.  Although the screen is running the film, the room is still so dark that the eyes never adjust fully.  In the meantime,  the screen alternates between following a lighthouse bulb on its rotation and looking out to sea.  As the lighthouse bulb rotates the viewer becomes more disorientated until the view shifts to the sea, where the light from the bulb can be seen crossing the landscape as though searching for the missing yachtsman as dusk descends into night.

References:

www.nadavkander.com [Accessed 27 December 2019]

www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/dean-disappearance-at-sea-t0745 [Accessed 28 December 2019}

In Simon Morley’s essay Staring into the Contemporary Abyss he discusses how contemporary artists have approached the the sublime.

He explains that the eighteenth century Romantic painters sought to depict ‘extreme aspects of nature – mountains, oceans, deserts’ whereas the Abstract Espressionists looked to create art that possessed a ‘depth and profundity European art failed to provide’.  It was not until the 1970s that the concept of the Sublime was reestablished.

The ‘staged landscapes’ of Dafna Talmor consist of cut and montaged strips of negatives featuring landscape scenes.  In particular, her series Constructed Landscapes II feature shifting perspectives that serve to disorientate the viewer; the ground appearing to slide back and forth and slope first one way then another.  To use Morley’s terms, there is no ‘comforting sense of place’ for the viewer in this destabilising landscape.

Talmor’s work often features visible negative space, gaps of white and strips of black like rents in the landscape providing glimpses into a void beyond.  Morley talks of ‘a sense of void – of being on a borderline or edge where we can no longer codify experience …… serving to mediate between being and nothingness’.  In Talmor’s images the viewer is still in the zone of being but is threatened by the nothingness beyond.

The tears remind me of the crack in space and time in the TV show Doctor Who that wipes out events and leaks time energy that can eradicate people’s very existence.

This window to the beyond, which could be non-existence, something transcendental or something otherworldly, this non-space gives the sense of danger that Morley refers to: quoting Edmund Burke he talks of the ‘heightened and perversely exalted feeling we often get from being threatened by something beyond our control or understanding’; and also Joseph Addison’s description of the sublime as something that ‘fills the mind with and agreeable kind of horror.’

http://www.dafnatalmor.co.uk/constructed-landscapes-ii.html

In the glossary of Liz Wells’ book Photography a Critical Introduction the sublime is defined as “That which is grand, noble or outstanding.  In art the Sublime is associated with awe, deep emotional response, and even pain.”

When considering the Sublime in general I think of the ocean: inviting on a calm day; a place of great wonder and beauty; but simultaneously vast and dangerous.  Similarly, as a child I was constantly to be found sitting by the open fire, enthralled by the glorious glow of the captivating flames yet also in awe of its capacity to cause great devastation.

I often think of colour when I think of the Sublime; colour often evokes emotion for me and sometimes I can taste it too.  It is this emotional connection that makes me think of the Sublime when I see poppies: that intense red stirs a sense of pain in me that such a colour is impossible to capture, either by artificial recreation which never seems to be a true likeness, or in cutting the flower itself for viewing indoors; the delicate petals being so fragile that they barely survive the trip to the vase.  The association with loss of life in battle only intensifies what is already there.

Returning to art, I feel the same emotional connection to colour when viewing a Mark Rothko painting.  In the Tate series The Art of the Sublime, Philip Shaw describes how visitors to the 2009 Rothko exhibition at Tate Liverpool ‘observed the paintings with rapt attention’ and how they ‘may have been praying.’  He may well have seen me there, standing close to one of the paintings, its huge scale extending almost to the floor, inviting me to step into its swirling depths like a lake made purely of colour.  It is no surprise to me that there exists a chapel of Rothko paintings.  There is a simultaneously a sense of the sinister in the sombre reds, maroons and blacks alongside the feeling that despite the danger one could be numbly lured in by the intense beauty to calmly float away and be taken from the trials of modern life.

Light Red Over Black (1957)

References

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime [accessed 26 December 2019]

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/philip-shaw-modernism-and-the-sublime-r1109219 [accessed 26 December 2019]