‘Wrong From the Start’

Modernism and the Sublime

Clore Auditorium, Tate Britain

Monday 30 November 2009

Beginning with Ezra Pound's rejection of ‘“the sublime” / In the old

sense. Wrong from the start’ (‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, 1920), this
one-day interdisciplinary symposium invites participants to consider
modernism’s vexed relationship with the concept of the sublime.
What does modernism put forward in place of the sublime? Is this
solely a narrative of rejection or is there any sense of a dialogue
with Romantic notions of the vast, the great and the terrifying?
These and other, related questions will form the focus of our
discussion.

Schedule

10.15–10.30 Introduction
Philip Shaw (University of Leicester)

10.30–11.00 ‘Behold the Buffoon’: Dada, Nietzsche’s Ecce

Homo and the Sublime
Christine Battersby (University of Warwick)

11.00–11.30 Break

11.30–12.00 Intensity or Excess: The Waste Land’s ‘Criterion of

“Sublimity”’
Steven Vine (Swansea University)

12.00–12.30 ‘Waste dominion’, ‘white warfare’, and Antarctic

Modernism
Mark Rawlinson (University of Leicester)

12.30–1.00 Discussion

1.00–2.00 Break

2.00–2.30 Magritte: The Uncanny and the Sublime

Scott Freer (University of Leicester)

2.30–3.00 Wild Geese Over the Mountains: Melodrama and the

Sublime in the English Imaginary 1933–1939
Ian Patterson (University of Cambridge)

3.00–3.30 Break
3.30–4.00 The Gleam of the Sublime in The Tiger’s Eye: Newman,
Surrealism, Bataille
Gavin Parkinson (Courtauld Institute of Art)

4.00–4.30 Psychosis and the Sublime in American Art: Smithson

with Rothko
Timothy D. Martin (De Montfort University)

4.30–5.00 Discussion

Abstracts

‘Behold the Buffoon’: Dada, Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo and the Sublime
Christine Battersby (University of Warwick)

Parodic humour was integral to dada, and the influence of Nietzsche

on dada is well known. However, the connections between
buffoonery, Nietzsche and the anti-sublime in dada have remained
underexplored. This paper links key dadaists in Berlin and Zürich to
Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, and to the Hanswurst – a tradition of
German buffoonery – which Nietzsche deploys to counter the
Schopenhauerian sublime.

Magritte: The Uncanny Sublime

Scott Freer (University of Leicester)

This paper challenges the view that René Magritte’s surrealist work
should be seen as ‘anti-sublime’. Scott Freer instead argues that
Magritte’s surrealist paintings visualise an uncanny aesthetic of the
sublime which derives from a post-religious context that is not
dependent on the absolute sublime. For, while opposing the
deflating of the extraordinary, Magritte sustains an uncanny sublime
through a continuous dialectic that is relative to the known.

Psychosis and the Sublime in American Art: Smithson with Rothko

Timothy D. Martin (De Monfort University)

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) and Robert Smithson (1938–1973) tend to

come high on the list of American artists of the modernist sublime.
With reference to them, and to Lacan and to Kant, the paper
discusses how the sublime can take a psychotic turn. It argues that
Kant’s categorical imperative, for all its attempts to exclude the self
interest and pathological aspects of the hypothetical imperative,
nevertheless establishes a frame not only for sublime aesthetic
experience but also for psychotic delusion, and that the command of
reason may prefigure the emergence of the Thing in the Real. The
paper concludes that Rothko became increasingly desubjectivised
by the categorical imperative, whereas Smithson sought to set its
limits even in the Real, and in so doing turned from a practice of the
sublime to a practice of the picturesque.

The Gleam of the Sublime in The Tiger’s Eye: Newman, Surrealism,

Bataille
Gavin Parkinson (Courtauld Institute of Art)

In the spirit of sublimity, my paper was composed of what were

really three separate sub-papers on aspects of the sublime in art
and writing in the twentieth century, ending with some remarks on
why the category of the sublime has some value for art historians
today. The shared factor was the special ‘Sublime Issue’ of the US
art journal The Tiger’s Eye, which appeared in December 1948. That
is where Barnett Newman’s short essay ‘The Sublime is Now’ was
first published, a well-known piece of writing due partly to the
attention it received from Jean-François Lyotard. As well as a
discussion of Newman’s essay and Lyotard’s response to it, I
extended the enigmatic reference Newman makes to surrealism to
see how we might imagine a surrealist sublime; but I went beyond
that to give a context of ‘sublimity’ to the writing of Georges
Bataille, which again is justified by reference to the ‘Sublime Issue’
of The Tiger’s Eye, because extracts from Bataille’s book Inner
Experience appeared there for the first time in English translation.

Wild Geese Over the Mountains: Melodrama and the Sublime in the
English Imaginary 1933–1939
Ian Patterson (University of Cambridge)

The paper traces the frequency with which familiar tropes of the
sublime are used in the writing and painting of the 1930s. Crowds,
boundaries, mountains, theatricality, and death all carry a legacy of
ideas of the sublime, but tend to be treated allegorically rather than
in their own right. Looking at paintings by Wyndham Lewis, Paul
Nash and Edward Burra, and written works by Stephen Spender and
Rex Warner, among others, I argue that the way the idea of History
is conceptualised in the urgent melodramatic politics of the decade
creates a different sort of sublime, one in which the inexpressible,
the void, is located within time itself. Time, allegorised under the
pressure of the intensity of political anxiety, becomes an uncanny
sublimation of the Sublime.

‘Waste dominion’, ‘white warfare’, and Antarctic Modernism

Mark Rawlinson (University of Leicester)

This paper considers the historical coincidence of modernism and

the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. In particular, it
contextualises allusions to representations of Antarctic journeys in
Henry James and T.S. Eliot, and reflects on the way these bear on
the fate of the sublime in the twentieth century.
Intensity or Excess: The Waste Land’s ‘Criterion of “Sublimity”’
Steve Vine (Swansea University)

Addressing The Waste Land 1922 and other works by T.S. Eliot, the
talk argues that Eliot presents an abridged version of the sublime
that falls short of the restorative moment found in the Kantian and
Romantic sublimes: while the ‘negative’ or privative moment of the
sublime is preserved, any countervailing gesture at the level of
reason (Kant) or imagination (Romanticism) is cancelled. Instead of
the sublime being found in the reasoning or imagining self, as in
Kant and the Romantics, Eliot locates the sublime contradictorily in
the ‘intensity’ of modernist aesthetic form and the ‘excess’ of
modernity. Redirecting Maud Ellmann’s account of ‘abjection’ in the
poem (The Poetics of Impersonality, 1987), the talk employs
Kristeva’s comment that ‘the abject is edged with the sublime’ in
Powers of Horror (1982) to argue that The Waste Land’s sublime is
poised perilously on the border between detritus and meaning,
excess and intensity – in both a courting of and a resistance to
symbolic collapse.

Part of The Sublime Object: Nature, Art and Language research

project