Ideas of beauty conventionalised
What do we mean when we toss these terms around - beauty, sublime, pretty
In classical times the male form that embodied beauty - shifted during renaissance. Incarnation of beauty was placed onto the female form. Endless row of female nudes in our galleries
If our idea of beauty can shift from male to female can it shift from human to something else?
Aesthetics: not just about what we feel through our senses, not just a physical satisfaction has to go through the mind
Connection between beautiful and the sublime:
English obssession with gardens and countryside
other european countries do not share the same obsession
Does the sublime have it's origins in nature or the mind?
Longinus, On Sublimity - unteachable, related to genius, domination - masuline traits, although it originate in nature it is only in art it can be given its shape. Only possible through the work of genius.
Can it exist without language?
John Martin, The Great Day of His Wrath, 1853
pleasures of the imagination
mountains, wilderness, things that are infinite
Burke: not about spirituality, does not link the sublime with God. The sublime embodies this contradiction between pleasure and horror
Sublime is formless, beauty is bounded/framed
Beauty is what submits to us. Beauty associated with the female, conformed to ideas about women and feminity at the time, the sublime is masculine.
Immanuel Kant, The Analytic of the Sublime, 1790:
beauty: harmony, good proportions, perfection and appeals to senses.
sublime: is both rational and imaginative and appeals to the mind.
Cannot experience the sublime if you are female. have to be genius and male
Abstract concepts are gendered: the can be nothing female or effeminate about the sublime or genius
Sublime: you look at the sublime you are not in it
The symbiotic relationship between genius and the sublime:
James Turrell, Houghton Hall, 2015
Bill Viola, The Crossing, 1996
If the sublime is gendered where does that leave women artists?
Can we find a way to achieve the sublime? what a feminine sublime would look like?
Or do we go complete opposite to that and go anti sublime?
Helen Chadwick, Meat Abstract, 1989
Who tells us what is taste what is beautiful
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