The sublime is perhaps one of the most criticized aspects of Modern art. The combination of awe and aesthetic appreciation, favored as a descriptive term by the modernist critic Clemant Greenberg, has been cast out of the vocabulary of art-criticism in favor of discourse sensitive phrases that avoid any overarching formalist narratives. To experience the sublime one must be driven out-side oneself by both terror and beauty, into a moment of pure perception unburdened by the weight of subjective awareness. Modern art finds it impetus in the logic of the sublime. The sublime must register the absolute in such a way as to cause the imagination to fail to perform the image.
Modern art attempts to present the fact that the unpresentable exists.
Postmodernism in its simplest form as dialectical opposition to modernism can be viewed as a negative articulation of the sublime. The photographs in the Everson Biennial offer us a fragmentary text through which we read overlapping discourses. Maria Alos' Come and Play No.3 enframes the overproduction of desire created by a society haunted by the spectacular drive of commodification. This simply constructed triptych bears glossy duratrans images that radiate a cold neon light from within their antiseptic plexiglas boxes. Two Monster Mouth Candy Tongues thrust forward and threaten to penetrate the banal central image of a frosted cookie in the shape of a garishly dressed girl.