Given the range of manifestations of the sublime, to apply it to a contemporary discourse requires focusing on a particular context. In relation to the artists and their works discussed in this essay, I appropriate the sublime in its philosophical context, based on Kant’s seminal work, Analytic of the Sublime (Kant & McCanless, 1995). Whereas Burke’s account describes sublimity as intensity, Kant conceives it as elevation and places the ‘human at the centre of the experience of the sublime’ (White, 2009, p. 108). The sublime has become a ‘signifier of cutting-edge observation and cultural production’ (Reiber, 2009), allowing us to consider meaning in our lives, overcoming postmodern nihilism. Reiber considers how meaning is manifested in our decision, avoiding self-contradictory decisions that ‘threaten our identity’, quoting Heidegger (1962) who regards this orientation towards meaning as ‘part of a human being’s being alive’ (1962, p. 35). Despite this, Reiber expresses surprise in how the question of meaning is bracketed from contemporary academic discourse. The challenge for the sublime is to fulfil this promise of meaning which postmodernism denies through its views of modernism - espoused by Lyotard (Reiber, 2009) - that meta-narratives cannot claim objective validity, nor provide meaning. Reiber is optimistic in regarding the sublime as the solution to the impossible situation we find ourselves in, whereby modernism’s meta-narrative and its meaning has been lost in postmodernism and hence we are forced to make decisions in life which are potentially meaningless. Kant in his Critique of the Power of Judgement contends that aesthetic judgement, although different from rational judgements of knowledge, is nonetheless connected to reason and therefore ‘entitles us to demand everyone’s assent’ although we have no power to force that assent by way of proof (Reiber, 2008, p. 75). Kant’s aesthetic judgement, which includes the sublime, is therefore universal and it is this universality that qualifies it as providing certainty and meaning through a connection of the subjectivity of the individual to universality. This connection is key to Kant’s experiences of the sublime, which he classifies as the mathematical sublime and the dynamic sublime (Reiber, 2009). The former occurs when we understand infinity of space with our reason, which our imagination cannot grasp.
Man with Yellow Pants, Michelangelo Pistoletto
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