The Sublime (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art)
"In the nineteenth century, the sublime coupled awe with fear of nature, as well as fear of the bogeyman that was the Industrial Revolution. Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Emily Brontë, Thomas Hardy and Edgar Allen Poe responded. In the twentieth century, two world wars and the two atomic bombs must have had something to do with the sublime pathos of Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Francis Bacon and the poetry of Wallace Stevens. In this anthology, Simon Morley looks to the twenty-first century, to our sublime. Nothing could be more relevant--socially, morally or aesthetically." --Bill Beckley, artist and editor of Sticky SublimeThe sublime is spectacularly envisioned by the artists in this book, and gracefully articulated by its authors.The contributors show us that the world can still be transformed. Many of these works and texts perform the contemporary sublime. They open a schism between expectation and sensation, expanding the horizon between the known territories of the real and our capacity to imagine otherwise. They show us that we may still be taken by surprise by scenes of wonder. Aesthetic experience at the brink of our senses removes the familiar ground on which we know and experience the existential condition of being. Johanna Drucker, Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies, University of California at Los Angeles(Johanna Drucker)"The sublime is spectacularly envisioned by the artists in this book, and gracefully articulated by its authors. The contributors show us that the world can still be transformed. Many of these works and texts perform the contemporary sublime. They open a schism between expectation and sensation, expanding the horizon between the known territories of the real and our capacity to imagine otherwise. They show us that we may still be taken by surprise by scenes of wonder. Aesthetic experience at the brink of our senses removes the familiar ground on which we know and experience the existential condition of being." Johanna Drucker, Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies, University of California, Los Angeles