4.2 Nebulous Landscapes – Desire
I analyse the role the technical processes of studio glass can play in creating forms that give viewers possible access to the pinnacle of Romanticism – the sublime. In doing this, I explain how forces of our desire generate forms that give us aesthetic experience of the unpresentable.
Artist/educator Stephen Procter saw there is limitation to engagement in materiality alone: “If we see or use something purely materially and not recognise it for its spiritual quality, it will be lost to us. It is lost because everything material is temporary and limited … if you can see the spiritual meaning behind the experience, then it makes sense”.[1]
This moves engagement beyond any mundane conception of the world. This engagement is something that emerges not from what we see, or from what we show through mimesis, but from something we feel. There is a romantic yearning for the spiritual. There are deeply engaging situations where we sense what we sense because we desire to do so. At a psychological level, the inanimate can be bonded to us by our desire. Driven by attraction or revulsion, desire is a powerful element in our aesthetic response to the world. Our desire can shape or deform our perception because our desire, as a reflection of our psyche, becomes a context for interpretation. In more profound cases our desire flows from our deep yearning to be open to some greater yet unknown existence. Within the physical qualities of glass, in relationship to light, with its resultant ambiguity and luminosity, and through the processes we use to exploit those qualities, we can access the potential of glass to extend our experience far beyond the ordinary. In this extension we harmonise the material and spiritual worlds.
Aching for the Intangible
Romantic work often reflects longing and incompleteness. As it was for Casper David Friedrich nearly two hundred years and half a world away, if we ache for something intangible, something that is beyond comprehension, we might seek it in viewing the magnificence of a sunset, or in watching the tempestuous sea. We feel that same ache in the void between words, or in the formlessness within a visual form. The problem facing Romantic sculpture was to express the infinite through the finite. The intangible, as something felt, appears as a recurring theme amongst contemporary glass artists. As a glass artist I strive to create something immaterial using glass, and glass does provide its viewer with the means to experience the intangible. Transparency makes the void a companion to glass in the interplay of positive and negative. Richard Whiteley sees the void as a “powerful, but invisible space”[2] that it is not anchored in representation. Kirstie Rea speaks of a liminal space that you feel stepping through a threshold; then, having entered, the moment is gone. [3] This is a space that is momentary and unknown. Rea says she has this experience in the Australian landscape, and it is this response she seeks to her work. That is, Rea seeks to give the viewers of her work an aesthetic experience of something that is otherwise intangible.
Two Paradigms
Exploring the nature of triggers and responses to the intangible can raise the exemplars of concept and perception, or discourse and aesthetics, which have long been recognised as our domains of understanding. Like Apollo and Dionysus, discourse and aesthetics are seen to represent discrete approaches to dealing with the world. Discourse deals with the movement to completion, aesthetics is fluid and open to distortion by forces untamed by logic. D. N. Rodowick writes of the figural.[4] Rodowick believed that whether their apex is reached within the ideal or within the sublime, both Modern and Post-modern art are concerned with representing the unpresentable. In its adoption of the Platonic ideal, Modern art argues the existence of the unpresentable; however it is Post-modern art that actually strives to present it. So we return to the above-mentioned forces. Post-modern approaches use experimentation and forsake rigid preplanning and control by the maker, and this approach releases libidinal energies into the material. These energies form the ambiguities that become the playground of the figural.
The Figural
Paraphrasing Rodowick’s outline in explaining the concept of the figural, I start by stating what he says the figural is not. It is not figuration and it is not figure, although it is grounded in the human body as a phenomenal field. The figural is not a structure. It is anti-structure. It deforms structures. Reason and logic are distorted by it, so the figural moves across both language and aesthetics, operating at a depth where the “ontological distinction between linguistic and plastic representation breaks down”.[5] The figural becomes the sensual experience of emotion and desire. The figural exists as the pull of difference, rather than within the oppositions of the discursive. It is a disruptive force that never stabilises, is never final, and is always open. In the context of interpretation, the figural is a force projected against the representations of language and aesthetics, and it distorts those representations. The figural is evidence of desire, which is felt from below any concept and is seeded in the depths of the unconscious.
Freed by the open suggestiveness of a work, the figural is not visual form. It distorts form to replace it with simulacra that are the constructions of our own desire. Powered by desire, the figural utilises the potential of ambiguity to satisfy our search for the unpresentable. In ambiguity the figural finds the means to present that which is unpresentable, and although we might appear to be close to experiencing the unpresentable, we inevitably fall short, and we are left feeling disturbed by our yearning.
Ambiguity is the playground of the figural, and glass through its physical ambiguity has the potential to offer itself up as that playground. Having raised this issue of a yearning after the unpresentable I return to Romanticism with the sublime. In Romanticism, the infinite unknown induces feelings of the sublime. For the viewer that unknown held a dire mixture of extreme attraction and repulsion, however the sublime is a mysterious and elating experience. By employing examples from Australian studio glass I will validate the relevance of the sublime to our current engagement with glass.
Invisible Craft and the Sublime
The atmospheric indistinctness and the mystical effects of light in the landscape work of the English Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner fascinate us. Turner was painting not the objects of nature as much as he was creating the medium through which they could be felt.[6] The Romantics used this form of impressionistic painting as a way of ‘touching’ the Divine. Such ‘touch’ is dependant on Turner’s ability to trigger a subjective response in the viewer, but the triggering is made possible by technical skill and precision. When Christopher Allen wrote of the sublime in his article on the 2010 Wynne and Sulman Prizes,[7] he expressed the opinion that “precisely because it is an experience of the infinite and the amorphous, it cannot be expressed through formless painting” and he went on to state that to be a master within this topic required the artist to be “meticulously precise”. Extrapolated into Australian contemporary glass this precision lies not in the nineteenth century representational skills that Allen was referencing, but in the glass artist’s invisible craft; that is, in their mastery of their technique as they give voice to formlessness within form.
If it is the glass artist’s invisible craft that enables them to come close to presenting the sublime, then as Donald Kuspit writes, craft again is at a premium, because it enables concept to be embodied in the object through its material, thus creating a path to aesthetic transcendence. [8] This is why makers like Jessica Loughlin choose to create their pieces with immaculate craft. It is not to exhibit their skill, but because they strive to leave no obstruction between the work and the viewer’s illusion. Loughlin says she wants any emotive response to be to her work, rather than to the material of which it was made, or to who made it, or how it was made.
Loughlin’s choice of glass is calculated – it is the material that best generates the effect she is seeking. Loughlin uses glass because of its visual qualities and its elemental nature. With glass, her work draws the viewer into a virtual place that opens as what she calls “a space of contemplation”.[9] These are the effects of breathless tranquillity found in Romanticism.[10] This is not the intellectual and reductionist convergence of Minimalism, but a stripping down to an essence that exposes the viewer to the raw and evolving experience of her concept.
The Relevance of Romanticism to My Casting
My cast work harnesses glass and the results of its technical processes to create meaning. Nebulous Landscapes is about my search for evidence of the figural in forms that exist as the result of the liminal force of desire acting upon ambiguity. I move through the paradox that the tangible object can be the source of an experience that expands into a profound, intangible aesthetic response.
Reaching for the liminal, I extend into that deep level of experience where my act of creation sources the rhythms of my existence. I flow beneath the logic of linguistics or the touch of aesthetics, to subsume both in the dynamic act of being, to experience genuinely my existence in the world through my deep engagement with the artwork and the processes of its forming. It then follows that my artwork might have the potential to provide the same experience to its viewers.
[1] Christine Procter and Itzell Tazzyman, Lines Through Light, 18.
[2] Richard Whiteley, personal interview, 10/12/09, 5.
[3] Kristi Rea, personal interview, 19/03/09, 4.
[4] D.N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural, or Philosophy After the New Media, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001.
[5] Ibid., 2.
[6] Blayney Brown, Romanticim, 160.
[7] The Weekend Australian, May 1-2, 2010.
[8] Kuspit, The End of Art, 183.
[9] Jessica Loughlin, personal Interview, 19/10/09, 2.
[10] Honour, Romanticism, 83.
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I analyse the role the technical processes of studio glass can play in creating forms that give viewers possible access to the pinnacle of Romanticism – the sublime. In doing this, I explain how forces of our desire generate forms that give us aesthetic experience of the unpresentable.
Artist/educator Stephen Procter saw there is limitation to engagement in materiality alone: “If we see or use something purely materially and not recognise it for its spiritual quality, it will be lost to us. It is lost because everything material is temporary and limited … if you can see the spiritual meaning behind the experience, then it makes sense”.[1]
This moves engagement beyond any mundane conception of the world. This engagement is something that emerges not from what we see, or from what we show through mimesis, but from something we feel. There is a romantic yearning for the spiritual. There are deeply engaging situations where we sense what we sense because we desire to do so. At a psychological level, the inanimate can be bonded to us by our desire. Driven by attraction or revulsion, desire is a powerful element in our aesthetic response to the world. Our desire can shape or deform our perception because our desire, as a reflection of our psyche, becomes a context for interpretation. In more profound cases our desire flows from our deep yearning to be open to some greater yet unknown existence. Within the physical qualities of glass, in relationship to light, with its resultant ambiguity and luminosity, and through the processes we use to exploit those qualities, we can access the potential of glass to extend our experience far beyond the ordinary. In this extension we harmonise the material and spiritual worlds.
Aching for the Intangible
Romantic work often reflects longing and incompleteness. As it was for Casper David Friedrich nearly two hundred years and half a world away, if we ache for something intangible, something that is beyond comprehension, we might seek it in viewing the magnificence of a sunset, or in watching the tempestuous sea. We feel that same ache in the void between words, or in the formlessness within a visual form. The problem facing Romantic sculpture was to express the infinite through the finite. The intangible, as something felt, appears as a recurring theme amongst contemporary glass artists. As a glass artist I strive to create something immaterial using glass, and glass does provide its viewer with the means to experience the intangible. Transparency makes the void a companion to glass in the interplay of positive and negative. Richard Whiteley sees the void as a “powerful, but invisible space”[2] that it is not anchored in representation. Kirstie Rea speaks of a liminal space that you feel stepping through a threshold; then, having entered, the moment is gone. [3] This is a space that is momentary and unknown. Rea says she has this experience in the Australian landscape, and it is this response she seeks to her work. That is, Rea seeks to give the viewers of her work an aesthetic experience of something that is otherwise intangible.
Two Paradigms
Exploring the nature of triggers and responses to the intangible can raise the exemplars of concept and perception, or discourse and aesthetics, which have long been recognised as our domains of understanding. Like Apollo and Dionysus, discourse and aesthetics are seen to represent discrete approaches to dealing with the world. Discourse deals with the movement to completion, aesthetics is fluid and open to distortion by forces untamed by logic. D. N. Rodowick writes of the figural.[4] Rodowick believed that whether their apex is reached within the ideal or within the sublime, both Modern and Post-modern art are concerned with representing the unpresentable. In its adoption of the Platonic ideal, Modern art argues the existence of the unpresentable; however it is Post-modern art that actually strives to present it. So we return to the above-mentioned forces. Post-modern approaches use experimentation and forsake rigid preplanning and control by the maker, and this approach releases libidinal energies into the material. These energies form the ambiguities that become the playground of the figural.
The Figural
Paraphrasing Rodowick’s outline in explaining the concept of the figural, I start by stating what he says the figural is not. It is not figuration and it is not figure, although it is grounded in the human body as a phenomenal field. The figural is not a structure. It is anti-structure. It deforms structures. Reason and logic are distorted by it, so the figural moves across both language and aesthetics, operating at a depth where the “ontological distinction between linguistic and plastic representation breaks down”.[5] The figural becomes the sensual experience of emotion and desire. The figural exists as the pull of difference, rather than within the oppositions of the discursive. It is a disruptive force that never stabilises, is never final, and is always open. In the context of interpretation, the figural is a force projected against the representations of language and aesthetics, and it distorts those representations. The figural is evidence of desire, which is felt from below any concept and is seeded in the depths of the unconscious.
Freed by the open suggestiveness of a work, the figural is not visual form. It distorts form to replace it with simulacra that are the constructions of our own desire. Powered by desire, the figural utilises the potential of ambiguity to satisfy our search for the unpresentable. In ambiguity the figural finds the means to present that which is unpresentable, and although we might appear to be close to experiencing the unpresentable, we inevitably fall short, and we are left feeling disturbed by our yearning.
Ambiguity is the playground of the figural, and glass through its physical ambiguity has the potential to offer itself up as that playground. Having raised this issue of a yearning after the unpresentable I return to Romanticism with the sublime. In Romanticism, the infinite unknown induces feelings of the sublime. For the viewer that unknown held a dire mixture of extreme attraction and repulsion, however the sublime is a mysterious and elating experience. By employing examples from Australian studio glass I will validate the relevance of the sublime to our current engagement with glass.
Invisible Craft and the Sublime
The atmospheric indistinctness and the mystical effects of light in the landscape work of the English Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner fascinate us. Turner was painting not the objects of nature as much as he was creating the medium through which they could be felt.[6] The Romantics used this form of impressionistic painting as a way of ‘touching’ the Divine. Such ‘touch’ is dependant on Turner’s ability to trigger a subjective response in the viewer, but the triggering is made possible by technical skill and precision. When Christopher Allen wrote of the sublime in his article on the 2010 Wynne and Sulman Prizes,[7] he expressed the opinion that “precisely because it is an experience of the infinite and the amorphous, it cannot be expressed through formless painting” and he went on to state that to be a master within this topic required the artist to be “meticulously precise”. Extrapolated into Australian contemporary glass this precision lies not in the nineteenth century representational skills that Allen was referencing, but in the glass artist’s invisible craft; that is, in their mastery of their technique as they give voice to formlessness within form.
If it is the glass artist’s invisible craft that enables them to come close to presenting the sublime, then as Donald Kuspit writes, craft again is at a premium, because it enables concept to be embodied in the object through its material, thus creating a path to aesthetic transcendence. [8] This is why makers like Jessica Loughlin choose to create their pieces with immaculate craft. It is not to exhibit their skill, but because they strive to leave no obstruction between the work and the viewer’s illusion. Loughlin says she wants any emotive response to be to her work, rather than to the material of which it was made, or to who made it, or how it was made.
Loughlin’s choice of glass is calculated – it is the material that best generates the effect she is seeking. Loughlin uses glass because of its visual qualities and its elemental nature. With glass, her work draws the viewer into a virtual place that opens as what she calls “a space of contemplation”.[9] These are the effects of breathless tranquillity found in Romanticism.[10] This is not the intellectual and reductionist convergence of Minimalism, but a stripping down to an essence that exposes the viewer to the raw and evolving experience of her concept.
The Relevance of Romanticism to My Casting
My cast work harnesses glass and the results of its technical processes to create meaning. Nebulous Landscapes is about my search for evidence of the figural in forms that exist as the result of the liminal force of desire acting upon ambiguity. I move through the paradox that the tangible object can be the source of an experience that expands into a profound, intangible aesthetic response.
Reaching for the liminal, I extend into that deep level of experience where my act of creation sources the rhythms of my existence. I flow beneath the logic of linguistics or the touch of aesthetics, to subsume both in the dynamic act of being, to experience genuinely my existence in the world through my deep engagement with the artwork and the processes of its forming. It then follows that my artwork might have the potential to provide the same experience to its viewers.
[1] Christine Procter and Itzell Tazzyman, Lines Through Light, 18.
[2] Richard Whiteley, personal interview, 10/12/09, 5.
[3] Kristi Rea, personal interview, 19/03/09, 4.
[4] D.N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural, or Philosophy After the New Media, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001.
[5] Ibid., 2.
[6] Blayney Brown, Romanticim, 160.
[7] The Weekend Australian, May 1-2, 2010.
[8] Kuspit, The End of Art, 183.
[9] Jessica Loughlin, personal Interview, 19/10/09, 2.
[10] Honour, Romanticism, 83.
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