Adepts, magicians, tourists of the sublime and not really
Near, near, near, muses the woman in a trance, every second nearer the millennium, the millennium that presents itself as a mirage of a clean slate, that proposes itself as a new beginning, the promise of a beginning, near the edge towards the unknown, near the dream of beginning from zero. And yet, the impossibility of beginning from zero. The impossibility of a clean slate. The plutonium weight of history. Of a history philosophers tell us has ended, as if things could begin or end just like that, when everything carries on its shoulders its ghostly trace, the despair of the given, of what is already always there, for better or for worse; near a millennium, muses the woman, that in computer terms translates itself into a double zero that becomes a time bomb simultaneously presenting an oscillation: the promise of a clean slate, of a quantum leap into the infinitude of a new millennium and the impossibility of beginning from zero.
It is the woman wandering around the Al Shuwaihiyeen area that thinks these thoughts. The woman is a western woman, for she wears western clothes. She wears sunglasses to protect her irises from the chromed sun. It is December, it is winter and the chrome sun in Shariah is eternal. The woman is walking towards the art area. Towards the art museum. She stops and gazes at the architecture, she likes the simplicity of lines, minimally Arab. She likes this concept of space. She continues to walk towards the museum. Towards the exhibition called Near. She is excited because it is the first exhibition of this type of western contemporary art in the Arabian Peninsula. You could say it is an event. She has heard the exhibition partly deals with the sublime, a "new sublime" she has heard. She thinks the sublime is such a monumental concept, so ambiguous. She is carrying a leaflet in her hand.
Before this vertiginous infinitude of the new millennium, of the terror and jubilation its vastness provokes, perhaps a denial the woman thinks, a disavowal of terror through the sublime. A sublime that has always been with us, this time a bit changed, a new sublime as the leaflet she is carrying in her hand says. A new sublime? The woman is suspicious of generalisations, of words, specially ambiguous ones, although at the same time, in as far as labels are an attempt to make sense of the current diversity, this new sublime might be a convenient label to name some of the art work in the exhibition, for she has heard it is the contemplative that borderlines with the sublime that characterises much of its art work. But a new sublime? The woman thinks about all our pores being incessantly invaded by the mass media, about this savage invasion creating a new empire of senselessness, about its resulting impotence before the sublime, as if we could only get now a faint photocopy of the sublime. Perhaps the only possible strategy to prevent sublime impotence would be to dosify our ignorance by protecting our pores from this savagely renewed avalanche of numbing media messages so as to still be able to inhabit the experience of wonder, the woman thinks. Perhaps these artists know about this, about the vulnerability of the sublime. The woman crosses the road. It is then that she comes to the museum s square, it is then that she sees three familiar looking bird sculptures and it is then that she smiles and goes towards them. Each one of them is painted in a primary colour: blue, red and yellow. The outlines of these birds are so simple, and yet they are so funny But what strikes her is their familiarity, the feeling of dejà-vu. She sits on a bench. And she then picks up the leaflet to see who has made them. She finds out that it is a joint sculpture, a collaboration of Peter Fillingham and Anthony Heywood which makes modernism jump on its feet for the birds are on springs, a simulated piece, a replica of a Brancusi piece that only differs in the material employed: fibreglass. The leaflet says: "If simulation and appropriation has been present in postmodernism as a tool of irony and distancing, in this Brancusi piece, simulation comes from a love of the original work, a recreated love that the beholder can savour as refreshing". The woman waves the bird sculptures an invisible goodbye.
The woman slides her sunglasses to the top of her head, she is now in front of the building, the building is made out of coral stone. She takes her shoes off, leaves them in the main entrance, and now enters the museum. A long corridor stands before her, with aisles either side, arches dividing each aisle, the glistening white making her feel dazed. The first thing the woman sees is a whole lot of golden bricks ritually spaced out on the floor on her right, a candle on a table on her left and a plant on a screen further on. It is then that the woman gets lost in thought. She wonders what the sublime really is. She attempts to define it but definitions flee. She then realises that the sublime is unspeakable. That perhaps what she feels and thinks is her own private experience rather than a universal one. That moreover, the sublime is always an educated experience. Nevertheless she tries clumsily to speak the sublime. Perhaps, she says to herself, the sublime is that which expands the lungs and oxygenates the brain making her feel taller in a moment outside time and space, that is to say, the feeling of serene effervescence she gets before infinitude, be it the incommensurability of nature - above all open spaces: the desert, starry skies, the sea; but also the monumentality of natural catastrophes, of weird weather, of storms - or of her own complex self; it is definitely, she says to herself, that which belongs to the axis of the transcendental, the radiant, the melancholic, the profound,
the noble, the majestic; and also that which momentarily makes ego boundaries disappear, that which makes her feel at one with the world, and thus reconciled with the world. She then decides that there is no sublime, there are only sublimes. And the sublime in art? What would then be the sublime in art? Perhaps, she thinks, the sublime in art would be that which perpetually attempts to reproduce/ represent this extraordinary experience of totality but often only manages to come back with a humble fragment of it, pointing to a loss, to a discontinuity, the discontinuity of that which cannot be spoken, that which cannot be represented, that which cannot be fully articulated outside the self, the representation of the sublime always taking place inside oneself, a chemical rarity. It is thus the artist attempts to conjure up the ineffable, the unrepresentable.
The woman has all along been in front of the golden bricks but at the same time she has been elsewhere. She now comes back to the golden bricks, they are called Apparently Gold and the artist is called Torie Begg. And the woman realises that the unrepresentable might be embodied in the conviction of the absolute affective pictorial power of colour, of its poetic potential, as it is the case in this artists apparent colours, where colour and space speak of an unconditional belief in the healing power of the monochrome. Or the unrepresentable might also be embodied in the subliminal archaeology of Edward Chell's paintings where a passion for the classical Greek ruin ends up through photocopying and photomontage, each time more fragmented, in fact fragmenting the already fragmented, recuperating that which is about to disappear, accelerating its process of disappearance until it becomes a fictional calligraphy floating in a huge field of vision, perhaps not unlike ancient history, as inaugurated by the father of history and therefore the father of lies, Herodotus.
Perhaps these artists are dealing with what could be called a "minimal sublime" the woman thinks, the sublime of simplicity, such as the simplicity of the candle on a rough table she now sees. The candle on the table is by Charles Kriel the label says and now she hears a slight music, perhaps the music made by time, the time the flame consumes. The flames s plasma acts as an amorphous vehicle for sound through the modulation of electrical currents, a sound that translates itself into peaceful, dreamy music with chaotic undertones, a visually primitive piece that whispers about a desire for the eternal, the contemplation of the flickering flame entering her retina to offer her the serene state she associates with the eternal.
Or the "minimal sublime" might be best embodied in the lowest of the lowest horizons, the horizon being the sublime landscape incarnate, always pointing to infinitude, to limitlessness, to something greater: the cathartic vastness - cathartic because of its proximity to terror and its precarious resolution - of the apparently uniform, the apparently empty, the apparently immense. The woman is looking at the paintings of Peter Lewis, where the terror within the sublime is stretched foreclosing the possibility of easy escape. His is a sublime that slides towards the terror-tilted sublime. These artists are adepts of the sublime, the woman tells herself, magicians. Then the woman walks along to the next aisle, gazes at the hypnotic sea on a screen, hears a tune being clumsily hummed and bursts in laughter Perhaps she is mad this woman. But no. This new sublime is a polymorphous sublime, acquiring different hues, guises, configurations, and the woman thinks that if she had to give a name to this sublime she would call it, yes, "the oscillating sublime". Oscillating because while athrming the experience of the sublime it simultaneously suspends or problematizes belief in itself, thus becoming a kind of tourism of the sublime. It is the absurdity of the personal sublime, gazing at the hypnotic sea filmed in a mesmerizing manner, while clumsily humming away a bucolic tune, that punctures the grandeur of the sublime proper in Mike Marshall's videopiece, where sound and vision, laughter and the Iyricism of the sea do not merge but sway in a ping-pong rhetoric, the sea hypnotising her senses while the humming grounds her in the most earthy of experiences: laughter It is a sublime with laughter. As is the work of Mark Wright before which the woman also smiles, where the effervescent beauty of the paintings, titled appropriately Separation, Flux, Trace, borderline kitsch, oscillating between expectations about the beautiful and their shimmering rebuke. One of the configurations this new sublime persists with is that of terror, a terror-tilted sublime. Terror invoked through the strongest of instincts, self-preservation, which is intimately connected to the most monumental of fears, the fear of death. When the woman was trying to speak the sublime she forgot about the experience of delight she gets from terror Entranced, the woman is now in front of a cave, where an old wise man gazes into the outside. It is installation called The Theory of an Idea, where John Isaacs presents a contemplative scenario, a poetic, philosophical cave that looks out into bright nature, which with close inspection, when she sees the broken test-tubes and the violence on the laboratory garment, changes itself into the scientific possibility of a post-catastrophe moment, leaving the woman suspended between her joining the old man in his moment of contemplation and the worrying question of the moment after: but what happened before? what has he done? did he genetically engineer the landscape he is looking into? is he a time traveller? The woman leaves the cave full of unsettling questions attracted by the alerting sound of a very human sound: breathlessness. She looks for the breathlessness. And she finds it. It comes from a huge projection of four eyes, an image where each eyelash, each dot in the iris, are celebrated in their uniqueness. Her eyes meet four eyes, two men are fighting, the tension is breathtaking, nerve-racking, their eyes are transmitted on the screen, the woman feels the impact of each blow, she shivers with each blow, it is a struggle of forces, a powerful metaphor for what it is like to be human, the breathlessness, the sustained effort, stamina and conviction with which the contendants fight echoed in the eye's pulse, a powerful battle of wills that has a physical effect on her, an existential sublime, a terror-tilted sublime where terror is invoked through the strongest of instincts, self-preservation, which is intimately connected to the most monumental of fears, the fear of death. The projection is in black and white, it is called Struggle and it is by Derek Ogbourne, who uses technology as an extension of the body, moreover as a transmission of that most precise of visual technologies: the eyes.
Immersed in thoughts, images, sounds, sensations, traces, the woman comes across Jason Brooks' hyperrealist portraits. She finds that this terror-tilted sublime could also be at stake in these paintings, for they remind her that realism does not throw light on the enigma of reality, in fact, by posing itself as its dubious duplicate it only phantasmagorizes the real further A phantasmagoric that also appears, in a very different guise, in Anna Mossmans's photographic investigations. Confession, that exposure to the other, that catholic institution updated in the psychoanalytical chair as a way of juicing knowledge about the subject, is the subject-matter of her works, the photographic exposure lasting the time of the verbal exposure, that is to say, the time of the confession. If sometimes the exposures will turn the subjects in the penumbra, red with shame or dark passion, the truth becomes fainter and fainter in White Lies. And the fainting, the fading, the phantasmagoric also makes an apparition in Runa Islam's games of heaviness and lightness where 16mm him is used in a photographic way to talk about the painful intangibility of memory, the haunting traces of dead visual moments as recaptured in a flickering flash, the extremely beautiful, the gaze, the urge of the other, the materiality of film, the negative and the after image as a mental pristine positive.
The woman will wander around the rest of the exhibition accompanied by these ghosts, by an after image. These ghosts will in turn summon her own ghosts. Of course, ponders the woman I could stretch the sublime itself into infinity until it becomes an exact map of my games with the sublime. But not all the art work in this exhibition deals with the sublime. Not all the artists are adepts, magicians, not even tourists of the sublime. Not really! In fact, it could be argued that most of the works do not deal with the sublime. In fact, she is so obstinate she now invents an absurd term: "the sublime not". The art collective BANK would most definitely embody the sublime not. She laughs. This is mad. BANK, the unconscious of the art world, specially the London art world, perhaps its abject, in as far as it sets out to defeat borders, frontiers, the rules of the game and in as far as its work prevents digestion into the art system, if by art system we understand that which is legitimised in order to be sold, is present with a collectively made expressionist painting, where relevant individual memories are depicted by the group in an attempt at empathy If these paintings could be seen as a further joke by this collective, she remembers now that sometimes jokes are about stating through humour what will not be taken seriously if stated in a serious manner, and in this way the paintings oscillate both between the possibility of the genuine and the joke, for currently there is a tacit prohibition on anything remotely expressionist. But now two young men appear from nowhere. They are real, they are not ghosts. The woman has been so immersed in thoughts, images, sounds, sensations, traces, that she thought she was alone in the museum. The men are wearing white robes and they are murmuring in Arabic. She does not understand what they are saying, for she does not speak Arabic. The men are in front of a piece called Hitori Solo by Gary Perkins. Some artists have an intricate obsession with shrinking the world, with playing with scale, with controlling the world through making a miniature version of it, perhaps a perverse revenge. The men look closely at the tiny spaceships, at the minute but compact sci-fi scenario. Perhaps the men are talking about model making activity, about the dream to escape physicality, a physicality that the artist must have put to the test while working on such small scale. The younger man points out at what used to be a paper cup, now an engine, at an ex-shampoo bottle promoted now to cock pit status, perhaps they are recounting childhood adventures. The spaceships are minute metaphors for the internal, for that which is at once a microcosmos and a macrocosmos, the psyche. The woman wonders whether the artist is dealing with some kind of sublime hidden logic, some kind of microscopic sublime reasoning? Probably not. It is probably a case of "the sublime not". The men are now absorbed with a small sculpture where a man projected on a cylinder tapes out conscientiously a rounded fence. The projected man turns slowly around, the real is recreated in a different scale, the sculpture is a little mock up of something that is real. The men in white robes circle around the fence with the projected man, then they go up to the wall and read the name on the label. The name of the artist is Paul Gray The men have now moved towards an exercise bike that functions also as irrigation equipment for the rural poor Ah! The woman remembers, this is Mark Hosking. He makes agricultural implements designed for the poor that look like Caros modernist sculptures and that pump water from the desert. The memory of the agricultural implement -they are politically cruel these sculptures - transports the woman to a strange story she once heard about camels holding such enormous quantities of water in their stomachs that thirsty travellers in the desert would slaughter their camels in order to extract fresh water from them. It is a story She remembers the story was set in Egypt.
The idea at the heart of chaos theory that the fluttering of a butterfly in Peking today can cause a storm in New York next month suggests a terror-tilted sublime, where wonder is dissolved in terror, where the terror of the idea is not apprehended rationally, but poetically The woman loves this idea. She is in front of a video-screen. And the contents of the video-screen suddenly change. If the fluttering of a butterfly in Peking today can cause a storm in New York next month, during the duration of the exhibition, a slight breeze in Hoxton Square in London will set a video screen to change its content in the museum of Shariah, the interference being an exact recording of the erratic movement that has taken place. Such is the idea for a video piece by Chris Grottick, where the butterfly effect is made, through state of the art technology, instantaneous and .... electronically shocking? But now some disco lights flash intermittently the name Elvis, and the woman dances towards them. From the outside it looks like she is walking, but in reality she is dancing. She is dancing in her thoughts. The lights are placed on a table and there is a warm blanket, a reference to Joseph Beuys? The woman goes around the table and she then realises that it says "Elvs" not "Elvis", and that it is her willingness to make sense of perception, to fill in the gaps, that has added an extra "i" to the word. It is an enigmatic piece and the woman picks up the leaflet and reads: "In Elvs, post-conceptual artist Peter Fillingham attempts to make a piece that stands outside systems of knowledge, the difficulty of placing the work being the subject of the work. A meditation table, while the disco lights flash a perhaps meaningless name that at first seems Elvis, with a heated blanket and a muted tape of disco music, the whole piece is a celebration of the oblique, the tangential, that which defies western systems of meaning .
Expansion, that added feeling, is best represented by growth, growth as homage and with growth, time, and with time, allowing things to be in their own time, their own pace, as a way towards understanding. Jasone Miranda Bilbao's video-piece, a fern growing in real time over a period of four hours, a fast growing plant for all that, and yet its growth is so slow that the woman s eyes cannot perceive movement unless she returns to it after a while. Before the screen, the woman muses on growth as a process, a time-bound process, on the current tendency to interfere with natural rhythm, to equate the natural with the slow, to speed everything up, perhaps as a consequence of the way television works as a medium by synthesising long time sequences into the instantaneous. A musing on growth that will take her on a different path when she sees Tim Baley's offspring of that potentially virulent weed tree, the sycamore. The offspring comes from the tree against which Mark Bolan, a pop star of the seventies, crashed, a tree which grieving fans have fetishised, converting it into an anthropological place, a palimpsest, constantly rewriting itself as shown in the colourful visual documentation that comes with it of floral offerings, of memorial miscellanea. Transplanted at the Shariah museum, the sycamore offspring suggests ideas about cultural exchange, inkction and its survival and the woman will tell herself a private silly joke when she comes across it: this is a real cultural product about idolatree! From plant to weed and from weed to tree, the woman is now visually attacked by the incandescent beauty of small bright red spirals. From the sheer intensity of the red emanates awe-some energy that makes her retina vibrate. The woman is in front of Yew, a photographic piece by Daro Montag. This piece also takes its point of departure from the natural, from the oldest tree in Europe, the yow tree. If film contains the possibility of colour, the colour of this piece is revealed by microorganic activity, by the yew tree berries with which the photographer buries the film, the berries condensing the essence of the yow tree and therefore of time, decomposing on the film to create the sheer intensity of red, the most joyful and dreadful colour in the universe. The woman walks away wondering whether these organic red intensities are photographs of microscopic life or of spectacular supernovas represented in small scale. It is then that she hears the men in white robes leave the museum. She does not see them. She only hears them. Her perception is intensely heightened.
Adepts, magicians, tourists of the sublime and not really, the breathlessness has subsided, the ghosts have disappeared, but thoughts, images, sounds, sensations, traces, sublimes and sublimes not are still hovering above the woman's head. The woman is now in the cafeteria sipping a coffee. She is here and now, outside time and space. The coffee is very light, it is an ochre liquid and she can see her reflection on its still surface. Enraptured, she penetrates deep into the cup of coffee. She gets lost in it. And slowly the cup of coffee delivers a whole lot of meditations on what it means to be alive at the very end of the millennium bending over the unrepresentable vastness of a new one. Or perhaps it is the exhibition that delivers these meditations. Her mood is contemplative, quiet, so concentrated as to crackle almost visibly in the air The woman has given in to the fascination and mystery of every work. She has given each work the wonder it is due. And she has emerged regenerated from the unknown. As the daydreamer browsing through these pages will now do. Gently In silence. Sssshhhh ssshhh.