The Sublimist Manifesto
This manifesto was published in Dec, 2023 in “Sublimism: An introduction”, co-authored with Raphael Chloé.
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“Art is the sublimation of Life; the means by which Life discovers its own sublimity.”
Art and Truth are today everywhere dirempt, divorced, torn asunder. The “holy dread” Nietzsche felt in the face of this discordance is, in the twenty-first century, fully justified. After more than a century of aesthetic vagabondism, it is high time that we find our way back to ourselves. Sublimism will show us this way.
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Art is Truth. The Truth of Art is higher than any other, for it is a Truth that transcends the mundane and material, and is ineffable and inarticulable. We shall for this reason call this Truth, ‘Sublime’.
The Sublime, Art’s telos
Kant and others associated the Sublime with the physically vast – the night sky, the ocean, the Giza pyramids, etc – but we shall now see the Sublime as the poets see it: as pervading all things, from the most microscopic to the immensest. Reality is teaming with the Sublime, and it is the artist’s job to unveil it.
The Sublime involves “a flight beyond the determinateness of appearance” – these are Hegel’s words. But this can happen with any phenomenon that the artist cares to observe. Even something as small and tender as a rose petal may be sublime, as Raphael Chloé shows us in Emøcean. Sublime is any transcendent Truth, however small or large, that is, any Truth which transcends appearance and is ‘superphenomenal’. All Art is sublime, since it all prompts, by its very nature, the mind’s flight beyond appearances toward the transcendent. The Sublime is art’s telos.
Sublimism, a new and old Art movement
All Art is sublime, yes, but not all Art is sublime to the same extent and in the same way. Here, we pass from ontology to typology, from being to quality. We shall now lay out our idea of sublimist Art, which alone is able to fully capture the Sublime in all its depth, richness and complexity.
Sublimism is an entirely new and an entirely old way of creating Art, one in which tradition is married most meaningfully to the contemporary spirit, in which the finite and infinite intermingle to form perfect harmony, and by which the latent Sublimity of Life is disclosed with incomparable power.
Sublimism has no race, ethnicity, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, religion, nationality or politics. It is no institution, entity, establishment, government or body. It is unequivocally panhuman. It is all people, and open equally to all people, for Art – and the Sublime – are a universal human experience. The higher Truth of all people – whether black, brown, white or yellow; highborn or low; affluent or homeless; straight or queer; man, woman or non-binary; cis or transgendered; christian, atheist, spiritual, jew, muslim, buddhist or hindu – is equally Sublime. The only anti-sublimist ‘truth’ is bigotry.
Sublimism is high-minded and high-spirited, but non-élitist.
Tenets of Sublimism
§ A perfect synthesis between the finite and the infinite. Any artwork is a synthesis of its finite and the infinite aspects. Its finite aspect consists of the material, everything we see, hear, touch and read: sounds, colours, shapes, words, sentences, bodily movements. The infinite is the immaterial, that which lies beyond appearances and is denoted by them: idea, form, value, meaning. Sublimism demands a perfect marriage between the two; neither one may overwhelm the other.
The very definition of a sublimist masterpiece, in fact, may be worded thus: “A work embodying 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 sublime depth and complexity of the latter.” Here, we align ourselves with Benedetto Croce.
§ A wilful orientation toward the Sublime. The Sublimist work must embody a perfect synthesis between its finite and infinite aspects, yes, but the finite aspect must be wilfully employed in the service of its infinite Truth or Truths, not merely for its own sake, so that the latter are always the endgoal. For this reason, an exclusively realist or mimetic work cannot be sublimist; it is too heavily tilted toward the finite.
§ A conscious intention to denote the Sublime as their infinite endgoal is required on the part of the artist. Without this, the sublime Truth may never be fully conveyed, and may even be left to be stumbled upon by accident. All finite choices must be oriented toward the attainment of this infinite goal. This is what distinguishes our movement from all others which may have had something of the sublimist in them: our conscious and explicit wilfulness and intentionality to aim for the Sublime. For this reason, no aleatory or indeterminate type of Art can qualify as sublimist: it lacks the necessary intentional element.
§ Method. The sublimist endgoal may be achieved in a variety of different ways, and we will thereby find that there are several distinct sublimist modes or species:
· Episodic Sublimism: In the narrative arts, like fiction, screenwriting and playwriting, the Sublime will be denoted more often than not episodically. That is, there will be sublimist episodes in a work, and these will be interspersed with more realistic ones, whose purpose is mainly finite, that is, mimetic, representational, expositional, declarative, narrative, descriptive, etc. The artist may use much license here; the interweaving of the two styles need not be clear-cut, episodes may be long or short, and are subjectable to permutation. The sublimist episodes will serve as metaphysical commentary on the action, the emotional state of the characters, on human nature or the nature of reality in general – much like the aria in Opera. Barry Jenkins’ film, Moonlight does this well, as well as Raphael’s Chloé’s novella, Emøcean. Both these works may be considered important sublimist forerunners.
· Comprehensive Sublimism: In rather more innately sublime forms like music and poetry, that is, those that already by their essence tend more toward the abstract, the sublimist element will likely be more extensive, encompassing a greater part of the aesthetic, perhaps even all of it. A narrative or spatial artwork may be comprehensively sublimist only at its own risk, lest it become metaphysically oversaturated and neglect its finite exigencies (narration, character development, form, composition, mimesis, description, depiction, etc). Frank Ocean’s music is often comprehensively sublime; take his song, Self Control. Here, we find yet another imminent sublimist forerunner.
· Combinatorial Sublimism: In spatial and visual media like painting and sculpture, in which the temporal element is lacking, we may find this species of Sublimism. Here, the sublime and the mimetic may be juxtaposed against one another spatially, or completely superimposed onto one another. The first amounts to a spatial episodism; the second, to a spatial comprehensiveness.
· Mixed-mode Sublimism: This is a sublimist mode that sees a more monolithic alternation between the above species, a larger-scale, more ‘massive’ movement from any one of these to the other, depending on section, movement, chapter, volume. The species selected by the artist will depend on the particular exigencies of the section in question. In the multimedia arts, like theatre, musicals, opera, ballet, installation, this will also depend on the particular medium called upon — whether visual, choreographic, musical or textual. This is different to episodic Sublimism, because here, the sublime passages are longer, as are the ones which separate them, or variously distributed among different media. Here, close attention must be made to maintain overall stylistic cohesiveness between sections and media, for…
§ Sublimism is not a polystylism. That is, aesthetic cohesiveness is a necessary trait of Sublimism. The artist must have a clear and unified aesthetic vision in mind. This is not to say that varied techniques may not be drawn upon in a sublimist work – they may and, indeed, should wherever it serves the artist’s intention well – but this should never happen at the expense of overall cohesion. Two sets of stylistic devices chosen by the artist should never be so discrepant that they create a jarring disunity. They must, at the very least, be ‘softened’ to blend in with one another.
§ Metaphysical unity and complexity:
· Unity of sublime Truth: Here, we see that the above is impossible unless the artist has a clear and unified metaphysical vision in mind to begin with. They must ask themselves: “What sublime Truth or Truths do I wish to convey in my artwork?”, and this Truth must be so clear to them before they start, that it informs every aspect of their execution, their every creative choice, and every aspect of their aesthetic on the whole.
· Complexity of sublime Truth: The more complex, the richer and more elevated the sublime truth, the greater the sublimist result. Likewise, the more metaphysically suitable the subject matter chosen for treatment, the higher the sublime Truth likely to be denoted. Having said this, no infinite Truth is in theory ineligible for sublimist treatment, no matter how ‘petit’, and even a great sublime Truth – the agonising and ineffable beauty of romantic love, for instance – may be extracted by the keen artist from even the most mundane of finite circumstances: a stroll in the woods, an MDMA trip, a listless afternoon at the office, a bathhouse hook-up, a dive-bar encounter, a scroll through Instagram, a spilt coffee cup, a glistening window pane, a crackhouse, a whorehouse, a nunnery, a seminary, etc. As Heidegger put it: “…art lies everywhere hidden in nature; he who can wrest it from her, has it.”
No Art that wilfully renounces or negates the metaphysical may be deemed sublimist — i.e., ‘musique concrète’ or total serialism — nor much less any artwork that is aesthetically or metaphysically nihilistic — that is, ‘Postmodern’ in the most conventional sense of the term.
§ Technical sophistication: The more sophisticated the technique employed, the more effective the result. Here, a total mastery of technique is a necessary prerequisite, whether it be of prose, verse, paints, sculpture, tonality, or direction. No Art that is technically impoverished or haphazard may be considered sublimist. Sublimism is therefore incompatible with all forms of Art Brut and all ‘ready-made’ Art, like Duchamp’s Fountain. Here, we must also exclude most so-called conceptual art and Fluxus-style ‘happenings’. Abstract visual art may indeed be sublimist, provided that it satisfies this criterion.
The creative act must also be original, that is, not replicative, and must not simply repropose the work of another, or a mundane object, as do Warhol’s Brillo Boxes.
§ Finite-infinite alignment: There must be a total alignment and correspondence between metaphysical Truth and the stylistic choices used to denote it, such that the former serves most effectively to denote with precision the latter. That is, all metaphors, allegories, harmonies, melodies, themes, subject matter, colours, shapes, forms, characterizations, plot, shots, staging, lighting, etc — all these need to be selected by the artist with the imperative of this alignment in mind.
§ Symbol: Such an alignment is effective when it is symbolic, not merely referential, since with the Sublime we are dealing with an abstract rather than concrete Truth; that which can be denoted but never directly stated. In addition to the finite, which is mimetic (imitative) and representational, Art’s function is also infinite, that is, it must go beyond the merely imitative and also convey a higher or superphenomenal Truth. It does this best symbolically. So, the intelligent and sophisticated use of symbols in Sublimism is imperative.
A marriage of old and new
Sublimism is plainly not a modernism. It is, in other words, not an impetuous disavowal of the old. Nor, however, is it a reactionary ‘neo-ism’. It is both rooted in our shared Art history and keenly tuned in to the contemporary spirit. Thus, any literal rehashing of old styles – however compelling they may be – cannot be considered sublimist; nor, however, could ever qualify as sublimist any artwork which blithely disregards tradition — thus no form of radical experimentalism can be sublimist. When an artwork ignores the past, it is rootless and vacuous; when it ignores the present, it is dead and lifeless. All the greatest art ever created – without any exception – gave us something new WHILE building on the old. We can therefore call sublimist only those artworks that are relevant and contemporary, while taking tradition fully into account.
The sublimist would thus do well to study closely all the masterworks conceived in their form, across all eras, periods, styles and movements, from the ancients to the medievals, from the enlightened to the romantics and the moderns, absorb their influences, appropriate them, and sublimate them into something fresh and new.
Sublimism as a means to reconcile Art and Truth
As transcendent, superphenomenal Truth, the Sublime is the common element to Life and Art. Art serves as the means to reveal a Sublimity that is already there, latent in Nature’s phenomena. Life’s Sublimity relies on Art for its teasing-out, its disclosure. In Yeats’ words: “Poetry removes the veil from the hidden beauty of life”.
We have denied Art her Truth for too long; and there is now everywhere a silent and raging hunger for it. It is, finally, time to deliver it back unto Her. By disclosing the deep and eternal kinship that exists between the two — Art and Truth — Sublimism will prove to be the means by which we will do so.
Art is the sublimation of Life; that by means of which alone Life discovers its own sublimity, and is transfigured as Sublime.
