Mapping the Sublime: Reframing Landscape in the 21st Century
April 2, 2022 – June 11, 2022
2022 PANEL DISCUSSION, “The Landscape Ahead: A Conversation” moderated by Shayna Nys Dambrot with guest artists Liz Miller Kovacs, Guillermo Galindo, Lawrence Gipe, Constance Mallinson, Deborah Oropallo and Andy Rappaport in conjunction with the exhibition Mapping the Sublime, Brand Library and Art Gallery, Glendale, CA
Los Angeles-based artists Lawrence Gipe and Beth Davila Waldman organized this survey of a diverse group of 19 artists that challenge our culture’s entrenched conceptions regarding landscape, critically re-examining the genre as a mediated view of nature and a construction of centuries of aesthetic processing, demarcation and colonial expansion. The works persuade the viewer to consider the landscape genre anew, with traditional notions of the Sublime reevaluated to reflect contemporary issues of climate change and the Anthropocene. The artists featured have made compelling cases, over decades of practice and passion, for an issue that needs to be faced with ever-growing urgency.
Artists:
Luciana Abait - Kim Abeles - Fatemeh Burnes - Linda Connor - Rodney Ewing
Guillermo Galindo - Lawrence Gipe - Dimitri Kozyrev - Ann Le - Constance Mallinson
Ryan McIntosh - Liz Miller Kovacs - Deborah Oropallo & Andy Rappaport - Kit Radford
Aili Schmeltz - Alex Turner - Beth Davila Waldman - Rodrigo Valenzuela - Amir Zaki
Mapping the Sublime
by Constance Mallinson
Concepts of the sublime gained importance in the eighteenth century as Romanticism aroused a passionate contemplation of nature as landscape artists grappled with their subjects. Articulated primarily by Edmund Burke (1729-1797), the sublime experience was animated in the presence of dramatic snowcapped mountains, thundering waterfalls, stormy seas, bottomless abysses, or the limitless starry heavens with terror, shock and awe being the “ruling principle of the sublime.” Any delight in these natural wonders soon metamorphosized into horrified feelings of destabilization or even dissolution in the viewer. According to Burke, an essentially controlled encounter with the uncontrollable, resulting in a standing on an existential brink and then a pulling away, had the power to ennoble, strengthen and ultimately transform the self. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) similarly observed that nature’s grandeur and boundlessness exceeds our human imagination to control or comprehend it. Because the sublime encounter caused an awareness of excess, we could then transform this recognition of our limitations and insufficiencies positively into enhanced reasoning powers. For numerous landscapists of the time, the sublime perspective often entailed religious or spiritual renewal.
Equally important to understanding this phenomenon is reckoning with the sublime’s constant companion, landscape painting and photography. Landscape imagery in all its forms from the mythical, documentary, to the symbolic has historically been used, sometimes nefariously, as an agent of social, economic, artistic and political change, with the ideologies and operative powers embedded in landscape rarely discussed. For example, landscape painting in the nineteenth century was closely allied with promoting Manifest Destiny in the United States and colonial expansion by both European and American interests. Magisterial scenes of glistening flowing waters, fertile valleys, and mineral rich mountain ranges rendered in lush seductive detail by painters like Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran enticed settlers with their promises of plentitude and freedom. The railroads could push west with popular support, plunder
resources and decimate native populations. This alignment of artists and industry helped facilitate the Age of Exuberance and continued until the country was fully settled, and artists were swayed by the Modernist project of defining a different intention for art in the late nineteenth century.
The current revival of the landscape genre as an important area of artistic exploration is reflective of postmodern attitudes toward critically examining the hidden motives in cultural productions as well as the urgency of climate change. Like the historical landscape painters, many contemporary artists identify nature as the primary source of the sublime, adhering to the romantic notions of sublimity but with less emphasis on spiritual transcendence and escapist balm and with a greater concern in shaping an evolving experience of sublimity. A photograph of melting oceanic glaciers today has wider implications than does Caspar David Friedrich’s nineteenth century painting of craggy ice flows. While both are firmly rooted in sublime ideas of immanent collapse and implications of mortality, a current image of arctic ice adrift alludes to the role of homo colossus in hastening extinction while the latter suggests merely what the forces of nature can wreak upon us. The Age of the Anthropocene has greatly broadened the parameters of the sublime experience. “Ultimately the sublime”, Simon Morley writes, “is an experience looking for a context.” Many categories of sublimity have emerged: the abstract, technological, industrial, capitalistic, social, natural, territorial sublime to name a few. There are no neutral landscape representations. To suggest that we can “map” what formerly was deemed too vast, unpresentable and indeterminate or lying beyond our perceptual limits for us to comprehend, seems to directly contradict the original definitions of the term. Rather, this mapping refers to how we will negotiate the wild terrain of climate change and an ungovernable technology. Whereas in previous centuries viewers could theoretically psychologically distance themselves from feelings of self annihilation while confronting a threatening natural spectacle, today humanity is unable to extricate itself physically or mentally from the immanent destruction wrought by global warming. Human hubris and stubborn progressive/utopian narratives still support the belief that technology can save us from climate catastrophe. However, think of the endless loop that has been created when science contributes to overpopulating the planet with life saving drugs and abundant food thus hastening the end of the planet’s carrying capacity.
The contemporary landscapists in this exhibition are taking a different tack. They are focusing instead on remaining with these threshold experiences to examine our complicated and conflicted relationship to the landscape in contrast to removing our gaze or spectatorship upon terrifying situations. Boundaries are increasingly dissolved between subject and object, challenging the position of the viewer to become part of a constantly expanding field of engagement. Perhaps it’s closer to learning to “think like a mountain” as Aldo Leopold wrote. The approach is less reliant on scientific acumen and more concerned with “staying with the trouble” eco writer Donna Haraway tells us.
The artists in “Mapping the Sublime”, then, are working with this acknowledgement of living with extreme precarity unassuaged by comforting thoughts of retreating to one’s living room to nourish thoughts of transcendence and transformation. They are bearing witness to a planet that is traumatized -- oceans and lands that are poisoned with plastic, toxins fouling the air, aggressions into crucial biospheres that cannot heal quickly if ever. Their artworks do not shy away from confronting future realities that result from climate change: wars, hyper surveillance, displacements, racial and ethnic tensions, pollution, pandemics, and shortages. Acutely attuned to the fact that we will have to coexist with the results of our behaviors, they are imaginatively mapping the way, often enlisting beauty as an ally. “Art is a thought from the future” eco philosopher Timothy Morton writes, and a critical means for understanding the period he describes as “the beginning after the end”. We have met the sublime, and it is us.