Trabalhos
PLANET B: CLIMATE CHANGE & THE NEW SUBLIME (2ND ACT)
20 de abril a 27 de novembro de 2022
Palazzo Bollani
Veneza, Itália
The awareness of climate change modified our collective relation
to the earth in many ways, but it also impacted the human gaze. If
humankind used to consider the planet as a simple background for
its activities, a setting — an environment — they now feel
immersed in it, fully enclosed within an atmosphere and a network
of soils and oceans that have become potential threats.
Within this context, the old notion of the sublime has been given
a new lease on life in art today. In the 18th century, it was
defined by Edmund Burke as a “feeling of aesthetic pleasure
tainted with fear, or the proximity with danger”. If the “delight”
felt by the viewer is nuanced by a sensation of terror, it is
because it is too far away to threaten us directly. A few decades
later, Emmanuel Kant refined the definition: the sublime is what
exceeds the power of representation, what cannot be conceptualized
or even shaped. It is limitless. The sublime is linked with
disorienting sensations like emptiness, silence, and darkness. It
is about the loss of control.
In Germany, Caspar David Friedrich, or William Turner in England,
could be seen as paradigmatic of this “Romantic sublime”, with
their off-scale pictorial spaces showing immense landscapes or
atmospheric catastrophes.
In the twentieth century, this notion was linked to abstract art,
to the unknowable and the shapeless, and Mark Rothko or Barnett
Newman (who published his text “The Sublime is Now” in 1948) are
often associated with it. According to Jean-François Lyotard,
modernist painting falls under the notion of the sublime when it
“presents the unpresentable”, when it shows the impossibility of
showing, or deals with ideas that cannot be given shape.
Today, climate change provides very concrete images of the danger
threatening us. The enemies are invisible but very present, like
viruses, or degrees of temperature leading to rising waters. And
the “delight associated with terror” described by Edmund Burke
seems to apply to all the artistic practices considering our
reality as a globality, depicting the world as a net of
inter-connected spheres, or considering artistic practice as an
exploration of newly appeared kinds of off-scale spaces, darkness,
terror, and voids. This contemporary sublime conveys the feeling
of humankind’s loss of control over the planet.
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créditos das imagens: Radicants/Andrea Avezzù
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