A Call for 'Sublimism' in Art
ARTICLE
In this article I lay out the general profile of ‘Sublimism’, an Art movement that is in a sense entirely new, but in another, ancient. In it, I put forth the idea that, in order to be truly great, an artwork must be technically proficient and metaphysically rich in equal measure, and that it must wilfully seek to convey the higher Truth of Life, or the ‘Sublime’. This article was published in Dec, 2023, as a chapter in “Sublimism: An introduction”, co-authored with Raphael Chloé.
The Sublime is inherent to all Art. It is Art’s inescapable telos. And what we mean by ‘Sublime’ is something different to what its other great philosophers have intended, yet at the same time, we build on their formidable tradition. In its most basic form, we will take the Sublime to mean – in Hegel’s words – “a flight beyond the determinateness of appearance”, and take it to mean this merely. And I say merely not to diminish it in any way, but rather so that we may expand it far beyond all its previous iterations.
Sublime is any Truth so grand that it exceeds the capacity of our senses or understanding to directly and fully grasp it.
This Truth itself needn’t be a vast one — as Kant would have us believe. That is, it needn’t be the immense truth of the night sky, a vast ocean, a Himalayan peak, or an Egyptian pyramid. These all have a quality of the Sublime, certainly. But the small, the middling, even the tiny can all be sublime, so long as the idea they convey exceeds its sensorial and perceptive object, transcends the realm of physical and logical particulars, and becomes primarily a question of abstract and universal form. So, just as we can have the sublimely vast and immense, so too we can have the sublimely sweet and tender, the sublimely sad or joyful, the sublimely heroic, the sublimely ephemeral and fragile, the sublimely tragic, the sublimely good and even the sublimely evil. Any object can be sublime which has a fathomless quality, that is, necessarily prompts our minds away from the immediacy of a concrete appearance toward an inarticulable essence. As Raphael Chloé shows us in Emøcean, a fallen petal can be sublime for the ineffable tristesse of its evanescent beauty, and it is neither vast nor immense.
All Art must have this transcendent quality. For, to argue otherwise would be to limit Art’s role to the solely imitative, the mimetic, and we know well that Art’s function is always greater than this. This is a point that Plato missed, who was needlessly wary of Art’s potential to deceive. In Nietzsche’s incisive words: “Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but rather a metaphysical supplement to it”. For, even if Art were to set out to replicate nature, even if this were possible – which it isn’t – such an enterprise would be futile, since nature herself has already done her job more than adequately, and her mindless parroting through Art would add nothing new or useful to her opus. In the aesthetic representation of nature we find a softer form of mimesis, that is, the imitation of reality not as it is but as it appears to the artist. Charles Batteux calls this belle nature: nature aestheticized, reduced by the artist to just proportion. This is far sounder. And yet, if we were to stop even here, we would miss Art’s grander raison d’être, one that goes beyond even this softer conception of mimesis to something far metaphysically richer.
When we contemplate the marble sculpture of a rampant lion, we appreciate the anatomical precision with which the artist was able to capture the musculature of the beast’s legs, his protracted claws and borne teeth. We perceive these phenomena, collate them, and conclude from their aggregate that it is indeed a lion we behold. We understand, also, that when we say, ‘lion’, we mean not a flesh-and-blood animal, but a representation thereof, and that this representation is not a literal replication. Rather, it is a lion such as might exist in belle nature, since the sculpture captures but the briefest of instants in the lion’s life, excludes parts like his internal organs, and reproduces not the smell nor the touch of the lion’s coat, nor the sound of its roar. We might even understand, based on his hostile pose, that he is engaged in battle, and might even intuit that his opponent is a fellow lion. These are all essential observations, but if we were to stop here, we would be cutting ourselves off from the most important and noblest part of the aesthetic experience, one available to us only when we engage with art symbolically. For, beyond the animal, there is a striving, a ferocity, a formidable strength; there is the fierceness of the survival instinct, the ineffable power of nature, and our deep kinship with it. Without this ‘superphenomenal’ aspect, Art would not be Art, but a catalogue of appearances and physical particulars. And while this latter is the noble domain of science, it is resolutely not that of Art. In Art, the appearance should always be a means, never an end; a gateway to that which lies beyond it, to the Sublime.
Art must fly beyond the merely phenomenal in order to be Art – beyond the phenomenal toward the abstract and the universal. This ‘flight’ is not specific to one kind of Art, but common to all Art. In fact, it is the inescapable telos of Art that it prompt a ‘flight beyond appearance’ by symbolically representing the abstract, universal Truth of Life. And the Truth whereof we speak is none other than the Sublime.
All Art is Sublime, for Art is the sublimation of life and the artist is the Sublime’s midwife.
‘Very well’, we may object, ‘but then is there not also the important question of degree and quality? For, although all art conveys sublime Truth, surely not all Art does so to the same extent and in the same way.’ This is perfectly correct. When we move through the history of Western Art, we see this clearly. Across the various epochs, we note different privileges given to the two opposed aspects of Art, the finite and the infinite, each yielding a different synthesis, and quite often different syntheses in the same epoch. By the finite we mean everything in an artwork that is external and phenomenal, that which can be perceived by the senses and cognised by the understanding. By the infinite, we mean the contrary: that which, as we have seen, lies beyond appearances and cannot be directly comprehended by means of them. Heidegger called these Art’s ‘thingly’ and ‘unthingly’ aspects; Hegel, ‘expression’ and ‘meaning’; Danto, ‘meaning’ and ‘embodiment’. In essence, it is the difference between a symbol and the idea it symbolises. Each artwork is a synthesis between these two: the ‘outer’ aspect or symbol used to convey a truth, and the ‘inner’ meaning or truth conveyed. When creating an artwork, the artist is faced with many choices, but the most critical and fundamental is how she chooses to embody this synthesis. For, if she tweaks it too far in either one direction or another, she will risk losing her equilibrium. If she forsakes meaning entirely for expression, focussing excessively on the artwork’s thingly aspect, then she ends up with a work that is technically accomplished but metaphysically deficient, one that is more body than soul. If she goes down the opposite path, we get the opposite result; an eerily disembodied artwork, whose noble truth has not found itself concretised in an adequate expression.
The ideal balance between these two is what we shall call Sublimism. And this may at first appear unintuitive to those who would imagine Sublimism to be an overwhelming orientation toward the infinite, that is, a privileging of the metaphysical at the expense of the thingly. This is not the case; history has taught us that no such synthesis can be sublimist. In Medieval art, for instance the paintings of Cimabue or Giotto, we see a metaphysic that has totally taken over, and reduced the thingly to its basic function. We see, in other words, that technique is completely overshadowed by the truth of a godly omnipotence, but ironically betrays the very same in the process for its incapacity to adequately capture it. In Classicism, we have the opposite shortfall: an undue emphasis on the outer at the expense of the inner, an excessive preoccupation with phenomenal precision that serves ultimately to distract from the metaphysical depth it is meant to denote. Only in Sublimism do we see the perfect synthesis between these two elements: a finite aspect that is not intended as an end but as a means, whose sophistication serves to point toward the complex truth it captures, and all the while retaining a dignity and completion of its own. And yet the Sublimity that emerges is all the more triumphant and grand as a result.
We see proto-sublimist works scattered through Western history, since they are somewhat independent of epoch, metaphysic or movement. Among them we enumerate: the tragedies of Sophocles, the late symphonies of Mozart and Beethoven, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Dostoevsky’s Karamazov Brothers, Proust’s Recherche, Musil’s Man without Qualities, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the expressionistic and impressionistic masterworks of Munch, Monet and Frida Kahlo — just to name a few. What is common to these is not the metaphysic they embody, clearly, since among them we find everything from the nihilistic to the theistic, and even the abstract and valueless. Rather, it is their synthetic balance, their perfect reconciling and harmonising of Art’s finite aspect with its infinite. We may, in fact, follow Benedetto Croce and define a sublimist masterpiece thus: An artwork that embodies a perfect synthesis between Art’s finite and infinite aspects such that the great sophistication of the former directly enables, rather than impedes, the fullest expression of the latter in all its depth and complexity.
We understand that intended thus, Sublimism is, far from a rigid dogma, rather flexible and infinitely permutational. For, since it is a mere category or synthetic profile, it is open to the widest variety of stylistic and metaphysical approaches. The terrifying truth of a godless universe can be disclosed just as sublimistically by means of swirling expressionistic forms as the perfect order of a godly one by strictly metered verse. The common element among the two is clearly not form, genre, metaphysic or idiom. It is, rather, their synthetic modality. In both we find a sophisticated thingly presentation – which we can call technique – that services an equally complex form or idea – which we call sublime truth. The truth conveyed in both couldn’t be more dissimilar, and yet both convey their respective truths equally masterfully.
In our own time, we will find that Sublimism is present, though altogether too uncommon. It can be heard in the mournful and superbly crafted songs of Frank Ocean; in such metaphysically penetrating films as Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, and in Raphael Chloé’s masterful and poetic fiction. I say it isn’t common because our contemporary aesthetic does not allow it to be. For, although Sublimism balances the finite and infinite, it all the same places the pursuit of higher Truth front and centre; it understands that the Sublime is Art’s telos, and wilfully constructs its Art on this basis. This lies somewhat at odds with the Postmodern aesthetic, since this latter denies the existence of Truth — sublime or otherwise — and in fact often sets out to expressly negate it. Here, we find either superbly constructed pieces that clutch for a slippery truth they never manage to seize, like Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, or others, like Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, that abandon the pursuit of metaphysical depth almost entirely for an orgy of superficial postures and gimmicks. Any postmodern artist seeking to be relevant and sublimist is thus faced with an added challenge, one that amounts to an uphill climb against a gale-force headwind. His own metaphysic is working against him, and so his trek is all the more belaboured. This is, of course, not to say that it is impossible; simply more challenging. And yet I will be so bold as to say this: that, if we are to retain Art’s noble purpose, we must persevere in clambering up the mountainside, and press on against the battering winds toward the summit. We must take what has been merely implicit in past masterpieces and bring it to the fore, make it intentional and conscious; we must lay it at Art’s basis, and found a new movement, the movement of Sublimism. For it is only by means of sublimist works that Art’s true power can be fully unleashed.
