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| Sean Lynch Social Sculpture, 2004 photographic print |
Greg McCartney selected the ‘gothic’ and the ‘sublime’ for their correspondences to contemporary urban cultures. The morbid, dark ‘gothic’ has nothing to do with his reference in the press release to Vasari, who aimed at a distinction between those who did and did not know antiquity. Instead, it has everything to do with the eighteenthcentury novel and the gothic elements in the baroque style. The maze-like path for the display of the exhibits on the partitioning stud walls, one carrying a CCTV camera, forged an atmosphere of entrapment, of metaphorical imprisonment, and not just because of the curatorial control.
The sublime comes in different modes and kinds. It is one of the four ubiquitous aesthetic categories; it is multifarious and centrally tied to emotions. Where Edmund Burke speaks of pain being stronger than pleasure, and death stronger than pain, in order to explain the power of the sublime, he also emphasises the necessary delight obtained by a “certain distance.” Immanuel Kant also thinks of a distance; the delight in his view is obtained because of the inadequacy of imagination, aiming at presenting the unpresentable, in relation to reason. The sublime is a result of a subjective encounter with either an absolute greatness, or an absolute menace. Jean- François Lyotard ponders how it is possible to make visible that which is impossible to see. He postulates that the arts should devote themselves to combinations which are astonishing, unusual, shocking even.
The daylight life of Derry is dislocated by night in long exposures of streets that appear depopulated. Anyone walking past Denzil Browne’s camera was moving too fast to be recorded: “They are there; it’s just that you can’t see them.” Even the pretty green and orange colours exhale the dangers of a ‘2am weekend scenario’. Danger of another kind, of watching violent video games, permeates the five images of Conditioned, 2003, by George Bolster. The uncanny use of a game console as part of the face, covering the eyes, was inspired by looking for a Christmas present for a boy whose desire was to watch a particular video game – a re-enacted massacre. The paradox between the ‘angelic’ and ‘satanic’ connects the image to the sublime, particularly as we read over the boy’s shoulder an SMS: “u r dead aftr skool u bstrd.”
Gabbling can be regarded as a way of achieving the sublime in literature. I find a parallel in the fast spin of fragments of a city environment in Theresa Nanigian’s Threshold, 2004. In Peripherie,1997 – 2004, animated photographs taken during her residency in Weimar by Amanda Dunsmore represent a slow decay of a site used, in turn, by the Nazis, the Soviet Army, and the communist regime. The power base is literary littered with litter.
The comic sublime sounds to me like a contradiction in terms; however, it has appeared in literature, before Ruth Rogers introduced it here. Humour permeates a set of advertisements for fruit, food and furniture with white Tippex drawings of eyes and mouths. The correcting fluid changes the meaning – the photographed objects look like humans caught in the dramatic events, eg in Rush hour bomb pomegranates become human faces piled up high. Politics, control, and the rituals of a city take on an apocalyptic air in all three photographs, Social sculpture, 2005, by Sean Lynch. The crowd-control barriers are stacked up for potential use. The people ignore the silent threat.
Departing from the expected, Fiona Larkin placed a gift-wrapped parcel on the pavements of Belfast. The resulting photographs, The kindness of strangers, 2005, recorded the ensuing encounters. After printing, the parcel in the image was covered by a larger cut-out of wrapping paper. The handmade addition to a lens-based medium unsettles the norm. The mismatch between the gaze of the persons and the now-larger object successfully forges the existential sublime.
Another powerful take on the uncanny I find in the paintings by James Lumsden. Two hues in subtle tonal changes present little circles, like lights in the darkness, in the polyptych Fascination. He explains that they are fascia. These were the bundles of – originally – flogging rods, later torches, symbols of Italian fascism. The oscillation between background knowledge and perception supports both Burke and Lyotard, on the relationship of the verbal and the visual, and the sublime and abstraction. Nevertheless, Revelation, an abstract ode to light and imagination, is more mesmerising.
Slavka Sverakova is a freelance writer on visual art.
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