Crawford College of Art and Design
Seminar Paper 2017
Olafur Eliasson and The Sublime
By Roisin Everard (R00112098)
Word count: 3610
Submitted: Thursday 6th April 2017
1
Table of Contents
Introduction
p.3
Body of Text
p.4-12
Conclusion
p.13
Illustrations
p.14-15
Bibliography
p.16-17
2
Introduction
‘The essential claim of the sublime is that man can, in feeling and speech, transcend the
human. What, if anything, lies beyond the human – Gods or the gods, the daemon or Nature –
is matter for great disagreement.’1 Using the treatises of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant
this essay will explore the origins of ‘The Sublime’, through Romantic traditions which have
been reenvisaged in a contemporary art context. I will be using Olafur Eliasson’s The
Mediated Motion (2001), to discuss the contemporary sublime and to highlight the shift in the
preoccupations of contemporary art towards engagement with modern sciences and
technologies and their complexities of scale. In order to understand this shift a focus must
first be placed on the pioneering development of ‘the sublime’ during the Romantic Period.
Through examination of the devices implemented by the Romantics I aim to map out
Eliasson’s ability to bring the sublime moment back to the consciousness of the spectator in
the gallery space, whilst concurrently referencing traditions of depicting the vastness of
nature. Using the treatise of Kant to explore Eliasson’s device of slightly removing the
individual from everyday nature and how it can introduce sublimity into the representation of
nature and our faculty of reason. The paper will make the leap from Romantic sublime
straight to the contemporary sublime in order to examine the shift in fundamental concerns in
large part by technical advances. It will also bring attention to how the same devices are used
by Eliasson over two hundred years later. Through this it will show how sublimity within
nature remains as overwhelming and awe inspiring regardless of if it is presented in the
contemporary art gallery. It will lead the reader through the installation floor by floor, each
floor bringing them closer to their cleaning of understanding and reason.
1
Weiskel Thomas, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence, Baltimore:
John Hopkins University Press, 1976, 3
3
To understand ‘the Sublime’ we must first look at the 1757 treatise by Edmund Burke, A
Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, which
Simon Morley among others assert was the first complete philosophical exploration
separating the Beautiful and the Sublime into their own categories. Morley cites that Burke
declared that ‘‘the sublime’ was ‘the strongest passion’2, and he belittled the importance of
the beautiful, claiming that it was merely an instance of prettiness. The sublime experience,
on the other hand, had the power to transform the self. He was interested in what happened
when the individual was confronted with something overwhelming and threatening to their
own existence and how this fear could be pleasurable. Making reference to the overlap
between pain and pleasure in moments of terror, Burke writes that this ‘always produces
delight when it does not press close.’3 Phillips described this in the introduction to Burke, he
suggested, ‘This kind of ‘delight’, in a dubious distinction, is not exactly a pleasure because it
‘turns on pain’; delight is produced when ‘the idea of pain and danger’ is staged, thereby
providing the sufficient distance.’4
In 1790 Immanuel Kant looked to expand on theories previously explored by Burke. Phillips
affirmed that both treatises ‘share what was to become a fundamental modern preoccupation;
for Burke and Kant the Sublime was a way of thinking about excess as the key to a new kind
of subjectivity.’5 Although Kant shifted his focus on our consciousness and our negative
experiences of limits through sublime moments. Kant writes:
The feeling of the sublime is at once a feeling of displeasure, arising from the
inadequacy of imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude to attain to
its estimation of reason, and a simultaneous awakened pleasure, arising from
2
Morley Simon, The Sublime, MIT Press, 2010, 15
Burke Edmund, A philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757,.xxi
4
Phillips Adam, Edmund Burke: A philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful, Oxford University Press, 1990, xxi
5
Phillips Adam, Edmund Burke: A philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful, Oxford University Press, 1990, ix
3
4
this very judgement of the inadequacy of sense of being in accord with ideas
of reason, so far as the effort to attain to these is for us a law.6
In his treatise, The Critique of Judgement (1790), Kant defines aesthetic judgements as
subjective including both taste and pleasure; the beautiful and judgements of cognitive and
rational; the sublime. Placing the focus point on where reason reaches its limits, as Morley
affirms, ‘He thereby shifted the analysis towards the impact and consequence of the sublime
was essentially about a negative experience of limits.’7 Kul-Want references this same point
as he argues that ‘Kant’s theory of the sublime...:it proposes that the experience exceeds
thought, and that there are no adequate concept in the subject’s understanding for synthesis
with the unpresentable.’ 8 Like Burke, Kant firmly separates the Beautiful from the Sublime,
although Kant’s focus is firmly placed on cognition and the recognition of limits of the mind.
He states: ‘‘For the feeling of the Sublime brings with it as its characteristic feature
a movement of the mind bound up with the judging of the object, while in the case of the
Beautiful taste presupposes and maintains the mind in restful contemplation.’9On this point
Kul-Want affirms that, ‘…. Kant suggested that the world is an indeterminate reality
consisting of no more than a projection of our own thoughts and categorise.’10 The emphasis
on Kant’s success in the ability to categories and analyse the unpresentable; the sublime, was
key to the development to further studies of aesthetics as well as objectivity.
One of the canonical applications of ‘the sublime’ in the Romantic period, Caspar David
Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) (fig. 1), affirms Gorra, ‘seems to
encapsulate the whole of European Romanticism; an image of the Kantian sublime, as if in
6
Kant Immanuel, Critique of Judgement ,1790; trans. J.J Meredith, Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 1973, 106
7
Morley Simon, The Sublime, MIT Press, 2010, 16
8
Kul- Want Christopher, Philosophers on Art from Kant to the Poster modernists; A Critical Readers, Columbia
University Press, 2007, 4
9
Kant Immanuel, The Critique of Judgement, 1790; trans. J.J Meredith, Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 1973, 101-105
10
Kul-Want Christopher, Philosophers on Art from Kant to the Poster modernists; A Critical Readers, Columbia
University Press, 2007, 4
5
gazing out at this white and formless haze the wanderer were peering into the murky deep of
his own mind.’11 The sense of unease created by the jagged rocks and the wanderer standing
on the edge of a high peak, gives the viewer the implication of a sharp, long, fatal drop. Using
Rückenfigur Friedrich allows the viewer to place themselves in the position of the wanderer,
allowing them to contemplate the vastness and expanse of nature and their own limitations as
human. Kant referred to moment of realisation of the sublimity within nature as the moment:
The mind feels itself *moved* in the representation of the Sublime in nature;
whilst in the aesthetical judgments about the Beautiful it is in *restful*
contemplation…. in the immensity of nature, we find our own limitation…
making us recognize our own physical impotence, as beings of nature… yet it
discloses to us… faculty of judging independently of, and superior to,
nature… It is man who shrinks from nothing, who fears nothing, and therefore
does not yield to danger, but rather goes to face it vigorously with the most
complete deliberation12
The rolling fog engulfing the jagged mountainous landscape as quickly as it releases them,
shows the power of nature in all its elements. The viewer is brought to a point (the end of the
road) and can only watch on as they realise, as Weiskel explains:
Either mind or object is suddenly in excess—and then both are, since their
relation has become radically indeterminate…. the mind recovers the balance
of outer and inner by constituting a fresh relation between itself and the object
such that the very indeterminacy which erupted…’ in the moment of
sublimity, ‘is taken as symbolising the mind’s relation to a transcendent
order.13
The role of the sublime within Romanticism, ‘emerged as a response to the disillusionment
with the Enlightenment values of reason and order in the aftermath of the French Revolution
of 1789.’14 Weiskel stated that, ‘Locke had removed the soul from the circuit of analogical
11
Gorra Michael, The Bells in Their Silence: Travels Through Germany, Princeton University Press 2009, xxi
Kant Immanuel, The Critique of Judgement, 1790; trans. J.J Meredith, Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1973, 24
13
Weiskel Thomas, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence, KeatsShelley Association of America Inc., 1978, 23
14
The Met Museum: Romanticism, Accessed 19/03/2017,
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/roma/hd_roma.htm
12
6
relations in which it had been installed, thereby decisively displacing the locus of order.’,
arguing the case of empiricism. Therefore, the natural sublime asserts Weiskel, ‘was a
response to the darker implications of Locke’s psychology and what that psychology
represented of changes in perception.’15 This became the key point of reference and escape
for artists during the Romantic period, dealing with ideas around ‘the sublime’.
Two hundred years later these same preoccupations and devices are used by Olafur Elaisson
within the contemporary art gallery. ‘In the 1980’s a new wave of postmodernist sublimity
swept over the art world, largely provoked by a general dissatisfaction with the potential
trivialization of art in the Pop aesthetic, on one hand, and on the other, its overintellectualization in Minimal art and conceptualism.’16 The shift allowed artist to turn the
focus of vastness within nature towards the vastness of technology systems while still
applying the psychoanalytic theories of Burke and Kant. To expand upon experiments of the
postmodernist Morley asserts contemporary artists working around notions of the sublime,
’…seek to describe what takes hold of us when reason falters and certainties begin to
crumble.’17 The contemporary understanding of the sublime allowed artists to explore the
earlier traditions used by the Romantics, whilst bringing modern science and technology into
the conversation. On the Tate website it sites that contemporary artists ‘…have located the
sublime in not only the vastness of nature as represented in modern science but also the aweinspiring complexity and scale of the capitalist-industrial system and in technology.’18 In
their observation of the work of Eliasson, Uta and Burkhard declare that, ‘Olafur Eliasson’s
work is focused on natural elements and the conditions under which they are experienced.
15
Weiskel Thomas, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence, The John
Hopkins University Press, 1976, 14
16
Morley Simon, Sublime, MIT Press, 2010, 13
17
Morley Simon, Sublime, MIT Press, 2010, 12
18
The Art of The Sublime: The contemporary Sublime, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/thesublime/the-contemporary-sublime-r1109224, Accessed 10/03/2017.
7
Water, light, moss, ice, steam and rainbows are among the phenomena that have been central
to his sculptural installations.’19 The viewer is integral in experiencing ‘the sublime’ within
the work and on this point Eliasson states that, ‘Exercising the integration of the spectator, or
rather, the spectating act itself, as part of the museum’s undertaking has shifted the weight
from the thing experienced to the experience itself.’20 In Eliasson’s 2001 installation, The
Mediated Motion viewers had to navigate the building four floors as the installation stated by
Grynsztejn, ‘...used natural materials and distinctive transitions to elicit unsteady physical
states...’21 Elaisson explains:
The spaces are mediated with a garden-like structure, combining wood with
mushrooms; a wooden parcours across a small pond filled with growing
duckweed; a sloped plane of contaminated earth; and finally, a smoky room
with a hanging bridge. Each floor, with the stairs between them, presented a
different platform on which to move. This is mediated motion.22
The viewer enters the ground floor of the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria and is confronted by a
row of shitake mushrooms (figure. 2) growing on logs of wood. This installation almost
hinting at the beauty but also the sublimity in these asymmetrical mushrooms growing on the
dead, in a sense a taster of what Eliasson is present to the spectator as they move through the
building. The origin of our collective satisfaction in these objects is explained by Kant:
Here it is remarkable that, although we have no interest whatever in an Object,
—i.e. its existence is indifferent to us, —yet its mere size, even if it is
considered as formless, may bring a satisfaction with it that is universally
communicable, and that consequently involves the consciousness of a
subjective purposiveness in the use of our cognitive faculty. This is not indeed
a satisfaction in the Object (because it may be formless), as in the case of the
Beautiful, in which the reflective Judgement finds itself purposively
determined in reference to cognition in general; but [a satisfaction] in the
extension of the Imagination by itself.23
19
Grosenick Uta and Riemschneider Burkhard, Art Now, Taschen, 2002, 132
Eliasson Olafur, Olafur Eliasson , Phaidon, 2002, 127
21
Grynsztejn Madeleine, Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, Thames and Hudson, 2007, 121
22
Eliasson Olafur, Olafur Eliasson, Phaidon, 2002, 137
23
Kant Immanuel, The Critique of Judgement, 1790; trans. J.J Meredith, Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1973, 106-110
20
8
In order to ascend to the next floor of the exhibition the viewer must use the spiral wooden
staircases. This gap between one floor and the next brings the focus back to the individual
moving through these separate experiences. Commenting on the experience of the exhibition
Eliasson states:
It takes a while to walk up to the third floor; to get there you must pass
through every single exhibition space in the building. Experiencing these
spaces, moving through them, allows you to sense the passing of time, I
believe, and allows you to sense your own presence- you’re having a bodywhen moving in and engaging with your surroundings. This sense is,
eventually, what constitutes a space (and you in it)24
Arriving on the first floor the spectator is presented with a large body of still water with
duckweed floating on the surface (fig.3), spanning the entire space and a wooden walkway
allowing them to move through the space. The duckweed growing and changing during the
course of the exhibition, again bringing the idea of time to the forefront. Mieke Bal
referenced Eliasson’s use of water, he argues, ‘Rather than soliciting the experience of the
sublime, then, Eliasson’s installation brings water closer to humans. There is no imminent
danger, no sense of self-inflicted doom, yet the work is powerfully political.’25 The spectator
must mediate this body of water in a contemporary art gallery setting, as Morley claims ‘The
sublime experience is fundamentally transformative, about the relationship between disorder
and order, and the disruption of the stable coordinates of time and space.’ 26 Eliasson is also
playing on the ideas of Kant, the feeling of reaching one’s limitations, but by introducing
technology as a means to generate the sublime experience the spectator most confront the role
of technology in everyday life. As Eliasson states, ‘Technology looks at how to a large extent
24
Eliasson Olafur, Olafur Eliasson, Phaidon, 2002, 137
Bal Mieke, Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2007, 155
26
Morley Simon, Sublime, MIT Press, 2010, 12
25
9
it is now the man-made world of machines that produces in us many of the kinds of
emotional states once associated with nature.’27 Birnabaum references this whilst
interviewing Eliasson, ‘One could say that some of your pieces initially lure the spectator into
a romantic position of believing in something, or rather of being part of an overwhelming
almost natural experience, only to find a few seconds later that it was part of a machine?’28
As the viewer makes their way to the next floor they are once again forced to ascend a
staircase, Grynsztejn asserts that ‘…one flight was built over the existing steps and brought
the spectator uncomfortably close to the ceiling.’29 The disorientated spectator is again
confronted by a new object of nature, a room with a subtly inclined floor of compressed,
contaminated earth. There is reference to the Romantics paintings, in particular Wanderer
Above a Sea of Fog, which becomes more apparent as the viewer is moving up through the
gallery space as though it was a mountain, being confront by the sublimity of nature at each
point. The contaminated earth (fig. 4) creating a strong sense of unease along with the
inclined floor, the viewer is now fully immersed in the experience as the room is dry, hot, and
barren. By creating a floor of earth that viewers must walk across Eliasson is playing with the
representation of earth, in particular contaminated earth which normally would be avoided.
Brining the viewer physically and mentally close to danger leads them question their
cognitive constructs, Eliasson claims, ‘In fact there is nothing ‘real’ outside us, only cultural
constructs.’30 As this room contains nothing but the earth on the ground the viewer is made
aware of themselves in this space and their relationship with space and time, similar to the
use of Rückenfigur, although as the viewer is experiencing the installation amongst other
spectators Eliasson is playing with the collective experience. This hint to the collective causes
27
Morley Simon, Sublime, MIT Press, 2010, 20
Birnbaum Daniel, Olafur Eliasson, Phaidon, 2007, 10
29
Grynsztejn Madeleine, Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, Thames and Hudson, 2007, 121
30
Eliasson Olafur, Sublime, MIT Press, 2010, 123
28
10
the viewer to look at themselves as an individual and brings the realisation back to the
predominance of cultural constructs around nature. As Birnabaum claims, ‘His work inspires
a reflective stance, reminding the viewer of his or her position as an experiencing, bodily
being and of the subjective condition of all interactions with the world (and with other
embodied subjects).’31
On the final floor the spectator is greeted by a room of dense fog concealing a suspension
bridge spanning the length of the gallery space (fig. 5). As the viewers traverse the bridge the
fog engulfs the ground, the ceiling, to the point where the spectator can but see a few feet
ahead of them, placing them in the unknown. For Elaisson this is crucial at this final stage of
the installation as the spectator floor by floor is confronted it by the overwhelming,
culminating at the top of the building, as if at the top of the highest peak of the mountain.
Elaisson states:
….it is crucial not only to acknowledge that the experience itself is part of the
process, but more importantly, that experience must be presented undisguised
to the spectator. Otherwise, our ability to see ourselves seeing, to evaluate and
criticize ourselves and our relation to space, has failed, and thus so has the
museum’s socializing potential.32
Grynsztejn asserts that, ‘The journey came to an abrupt end at the far side of the bridge,
where a dead end forced the visitor to turn around and descend.’33 In this moment Eliasson is
physically referencing limitations, as the end of the bridge is physically where the spectator
can continue no further. The bridge is the representation of human consciousness reaching its
limits. As the viewer travels back down through each floor they are filled with a sense of
failure, of reaching the ceiling of reason and understanding and forced to look at their
relationship to both nature and the space and time it occupies. Eliasson speaks of his
31
Birnabaum Daniel, Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, Hudson and Thames, 2007, 136
Eliasson Olafur, Olafur Eliasson, Phaidon, 2002, 127
33
Grynsztejn Madeleine, Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, Thames and Hudson, 2007, 121
32
11
experience of sublimity, ‘Looking at nature, I find nothing, only my own relationship to the
spaces, or aspects of my relationship to them.’34
34
Eliasson Olafur, Olafur Eliasson, Phaidon, 2002, 127
12
Conclusion
The sublime dramatized the rhythm of transcendence in its extreme and purest
form, for the sublime began where the conventional systems, readings of
landscapes of text, broke down, and it found in that very collapse the
foundation for another order of meaning.35
Mediated Motion brought notions of the sublime, explored in the treatises of Immanuel Kant
and Edmund Burke and in practice by Romantic artists into a contemporary context, through
generating nature with the use of modern technology. Elaisson like Friedrich brings the
viewer to the edge of the mountain (edge of reason) allowing them a moment to contemplate,
as Kant argues, ‘it is in restful contemplation…in the immensity of nature, we find our own
limitations…making us recognize our own physical impotence, as beings of nature.’36
Although Elaisson does this is the contemporary art gallery, which brings the focus firmly of
the devices of modern technology that are at play. Like other artists of his time, such as
Walter De Maria and Robert Smithson, Elaisson brings the conversation around nature’s
sublimity into a contemporary context. Eliasson shifts the focus onto the technology systems
and their similarities to nature, as overwhelming, uncontrollable systems with the ability to
transform the self. Using Kant’s theories of sublimity as a means for the spectator to
experience the feeling reaching the ceiling of their understanding and reason, Eliasson
physically brings the viewer to the end of a bridge. At this point Eliasson forces the spectator
to walk back through the exhibition, making them contemplate what it was that inspired
feeling of both awe and failure within themselves. This allows Eliasson to bring attention
back to the spectator and their consciousness as the catalyst for the sublime experience.
35
Weiskel Thomas, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence, The John
Hopkins University Press, 1976, 22
36
Kant Immanuel, The Critique of Judgement, 1790; trans. J.J Meredith, Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1973, 101-105
13
Illustrations
Figure 1
Caspar David Friedrich,
Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818),
oil on canvas,
Hamburg, Germany
Taken From; www.artble.com, Accessed 04/04/2017
Figure 2
Olafur Eliasson,
Mediated Motion (2001),
Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria
Taken From: Taken from: www.olafurelaisson.net, Accessed 04/04/2017
Figure 3
Olafur Eliasson,
Mediated Motion (2001),
Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria
Taken From: Taken from: www.olafurelaisson.net, Accessed 04/04/201
14
Figure 4
Olafur Eliasson,
Mediated Motion (2001),
Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria
Taken from: www.olafurelaisson.net, Accessed 04/04/2017
Figure 5
Olafur Eliasson.
Mediated Motion (2001)
Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria
Taken from: www.olafurelaisson.net, Accessed 04/04/2017
15
Bibliography
BAL, Mieke
Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art,2007.
BURKE, Edmund
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime
and Beautiful, 1757.
BIRNBAUM, Danie Olafur Eliasson, Phaidon, 2007.
ELIASSON, Olafur
Olafur Eliasson, Phaidon, 2002.
GORRA, Michael
The Bells in Their Silence: Travels Through Germany, Princeton
University Press, 2009.
GROSENICK, Uta and
RIEMSCHNEIDER,
Burkhard
GRYNSZTEJN,
Madeleine
KANT, Immanuel
KUL- WANT,
Readers,
Christopher
MORLEY, Simon
PHILLIPS, Adam
WEISKEL, Thomas
BELL, Julian
Art Now, Taschen, 2002.
Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, Thames and Hudson, 2007.
Critique of Judgement ,1790; trans. J.J Meredith, Oxford and New
York:
Oxford University Press, 1973.
Philosophers on Art from Kant to the Poster modernists; A Critical
Columbia University Press, 2007.
The Sublime, MIT Press, 2010.
Edmund Burke: A philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful, Oxford University Press, 1990.
The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of
Transcendence Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976.
The Art of The Sublime: The contemporary Sublime,
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/the-contemporarysublime-r1109224, Accessed 10/03/2017.
CALLEY GALITZ, The Met Museum: Romanticism, Accessed 19/03/2017,
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/roma/hd_roma.htm.
Kathryn
16
All the images in this paper have been sourced from the following web
pages:
Figure 1 - Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818), oil on canvas, 95 cm x
75 cm Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany
Taken From; www.artble.com, Accessed 04/04/2017
Figure 2-5 - Olafur Eliasson, The Mediated Motion (2001), Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria
Taken from: www.olafurelaisson.net, Accessed 04/04/2017
17