. . .on the sublime. . .
 
The other day someone asked me for a definition of the sublime. Without reflecting, I suggested that the sublime is an experience resembling what Swedish skier and television sportscaster Gunde Svan used to refer to as »hairs standing on end« - what is usually referred to as »goose pimples.« It is a complex feeling of pleasure and discomfort at the same time. But the sublime is hardly an invention of Gunde Svan's. It is an aesthetic category that may be traced to antiquity, documented by Longinus already in the first century AD. His treatise On the Sublime makes a clear distinction between Beauty and the Sublime. According to Longinus, Beauty was to be found in small, everyday matters, while the Sublime was found in the magnificent, the irregular, the hidden, and the superhuman.

It was, however, the 18th century philosophers who incorporated the Sublime as a central part of the modern notion of art. In his 1719 Essay on the Whole Art of Criticism as it Relates to Painting, etc., Jonathan Richardson maintains that the frightening is a central aspect of the sublime, and therefore a worthy subject for painting, provided you yourself are safe. It states that the sublime is an aesthetic category unrelated to »real life«. In his book A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 1756-57, Edmund Burke takes up the theories of both Longinus and Richardson. Like Longinus, he distinguishes between the beautiful and the sublime. The beautiful concerns harmony, a perfection which arises out of a synthesis of reason and knowledge, while the sublime represents chaos, breakdown and anti-aesthetics. In the pre-Romantic representational world, Nature serves as a spatial reference against which Man is able to measure himself. Compared to the smallness of Man, Nature appears infinite. This applies to the height of a mountain, the vastness of the desert, or the power of a tempest at sea. It is, however, more than merely a matter of size. Nature no longer appears as something ordered, created by God, but seems filled with illogical and frightening forces beyond the control of Man, The same »smallness« may be felt in the presence of mighty cultural monuments such as temples or pyramids. It is a vertiginous feeling where time may appear infinite or eternal compared to human life. This sense of a dizzying perspective of time may also contain a fascinating, but also incomprehensible or frightening aspect. The experience relates to the brevity of human life and is thereby ultimately an awareness of death.

Robert Rosenblum's book Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition sets forth the guidelines for a tradition with its roots in the late 1700's ­ a landscape painting of grand perspectives, also found in 19th century American landscape painting with its predilection for grandiose and wild scenery. Rosenblum finds support for this tradition of the sublime in several pre-modernists such as van Gogh and Hodler, but also in modernists like Mondrian and Kandinsky. He tracks the tradition up to the abstract expressionism of the 1950's. Several of the abstract expressionists' gigantic canvases contain not just a position to the grandiosity of American landscape painting, but also a position vis-à-vis culture, colored by a deeply pessimistic philosophy, an immense tragedy tied to the loss of the original, unspoiled society and to the growth of urban and capitalist America.

Interest in the sublime is maybe most clearly manifested in The Sublime is Now, an essay written by Barnett Newman in 1948. In it, he does not describe the sublime as something spatially or temporally grandiose of generous perspectives. In fact, Newman maintains quite the opposite - that the sublime is »here and now.« It is, in other words, in the immediate present and in physical space that the sublime may be perceived. The collective wisdom of human experience is contained within the limited spatiality of the potential of art. In the case of Newman, this comprised the span between Jewish mysticism and the Holocaust, to him the nadir of human history. The sum total of the artist's individual experience was contained within formalism. It was an authentic experience of our time which was not only an aesthetic category, but an aesthetic with its roots in outside reality.

Unlike the large-scale artistic subjects of abstract expressionism, Newman downplayed his own role down to a modest minimum. Even so he is very much present. Anders Widoff, in his work Untitled (and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain) (1995), uses the floor of his own studio which he has broken up and then reassembled into a horizontal raft. Here are manifested all the traces of the artist's actions, not in the form of a painterly statement, but in the form of the temporary random patterns. But is it actually possible to step on the traces of authentic artistry? It is a space in the present, that carries traces of the past.

Håkan Rehnberg's work The Sealed Studio (1998) harks back to the choice of materials and reductive idiom of late modernism, but also to the ambivalent identity of different art forms characteristic of the period. What is it that we are encountering? Is it a sculpture or is it an architectural space? The absence of illusion has been a central aspect of modernist space. Rather, it has been up to the work to define its own space. Håkan Rehnberg is working with the absence of an artistic presence - void as an absolute. His work may be a comment on the late modernist view of the sublime as an absolute void, verging on the spiritual.

The point of departure for Gabriel Orozco's sculpture suite Pinched Star I-VIII (1997) is still the imprint of the human hand and the ability of the fingers to create a specific human idiom. Orozco has used wax that he forms in his closed hand or between his finger-tips into an idiom that may at times be seen as post-minimalist in its anthropomorphism. In the transfer process, when it is cast in aluminum, the human scale is lost through enlargement, which lend the sculptures an abstract dimension that turns its back on their origin. They become independent artifacts, traceable neither to nature nor to culture. They have become totally abstract artifacts from nowhere. It is the absence of time and space that renders them sublime.

In Lars Nilsson's work When I Died (1999) you confront a work with sculpturalqualities, consisting of a group of similarly clothed, headless mannequins. The characteristically frontal character of the work has been accomplished with the aid of a glass plate, which blurs the distinction between picture and sculpture. Unlike a sculpture it lacks a multiplicity of viewpoints. It seems as if Nilsson has sought to create a hybrid, something in-between, possessing the physical reality of a sculpture but also the illusionist possibilities of a picture. The result is a theatrical tableau suggesting a dream world that, in its distanced and trendy elegance, touches on one of the most fascinating and terrifying states of our culture - death.

In Cindy Sherman's feature film Office Killer (1997) - unlike the real time of video art - we do not find ourselves in an exhibition space where we are aware of our own bodies and therefore the context of the exhibition space. Sherman appears to have chosen film as her medium because it is in film, totally surrounded by darkness, that we find ourselves in a fictional space in which the film develops its own logic without any clear links to outside reality. Even though Sherman's film takes place in the immediate proximity of our own time, it is easy to find a link to the fascination with the 19th century Gothic novel with its grotesque and the frightening aspects, where even death may be regarded as sublime. What is frightening about Cindy Sherman's film is not the fictional aspect of the story, however, but its terrifying resemblance to reality. In his famous treatise on »the uncanny«, in which Freud not only divided the human psyche into different levels of consciousness, he also ascribed to man unknown levels which comprised the unfathomable. In our own time, it is not the infinite universe of nature that terrify us the most. Man has shown himself both grander and more terrifying than nature - something clearly borne out by the history of our century.

Liesbeth Bik's and Jos van der Pol's work Capsule Hotels for Information, Dreams, Brilliant Thoughts, and Other Things (1999) contains no private representation of the sublime. Instead, they have attempted to create a library in which they have established a variety of sources on the sublime, taken from different periods. Here you may also find accounts of the sublime recorded by friends and colleagues who sent them to these archives. The physical form of the library emphasizes the sublime as a concept or idea that may be found in a number of sources. It also appears that the sublime is no absolute experience, but a diversified multiplicity of experiences. It is not only the abstract character of the sublime that is highlighted. A number of specially designed study cells|capsules clearly suggest that the sublime is associated with a special experience where it is possible for the spectator to arrive at his or her own conclusion on the nature of the sublime.

Ann Veronica Janssens' installation brings nature into the museum by creating an indoor artificial fog. Romanticism had great faith in spatiality expressed as a vast landscape or fog, which is difficult to define. Fog is a spatial state of strong emotional nature, regarded by the Romantics as poetic and frightening at the same time. The absence of spatial coordinates made fog something in which to loose oneself totally - a state that represented both a kind of desirable oneness with nature and something terrifying - and thus possessing all the characteristics of a sublime experience. The aim of Ann Veronica Janssens' installation is evidently not to recreate the Romantic feeling indoors, however. By integrating street sounds, which cut through the installation, the work is instantly brought back to our own time.

The two works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres represented in the exhibition are based on two different spatialities. Untitled (Loverboy) (1989) consists of a curtain arrangement located on the periphery of the exhibition space. The curtains serve to separate inside and outside, art and society. The sheer, blue curtains create a blue, melancholy light that gives rise to an emotional state that is decidedly »blue«. His other work, Untitled (1995), belongs in the social space by its utilization of already existing billboards. But the message that Gonzalez-Torres seeks to convey is not a commercial one. In fact, it is just the opposite. In a black and white photographic image of a bird in infinite space we find ourselves in an expanded spatiality that carries no trace of Man, but maybe only his soul, which, in keeping with the images of mythological, soars into post-mortal super-space in the form of a bird.

Hiroshi Sugimoto's work consists of a series of seascapes that offer no hint of personal interpretation. The photographs are matter-of-fact, the balance between sky and sea lending formal strictness; in which nature becomes a piece of culture, dependent on our view of perspective. We may perceive the infinite perspective as something eternal, a picture that could have been taken at any point in human history. You are swiftly brought back to a geographical position, however: a notation of time and place suggest the documentary nature of the photograph. Is it not this oscillating movement between infinity and proximity that may be called sublime?

Mike Kelley's work The Sublime (1984|98) - a series of color prints, most of them based on photographs - disavows the notion that there is only one sublime feeling. Kelley produces an inventory of various phenomena that might be perceived as sublime. In his series, the sublime seems to be more than an authentic experience. The media have the ability to expand our field of experience by means of sublime experiences. His inventory clearly shows that the sublime belongs not only to the exalted sphere of grand experiences, but that it also touches on the low sphere of kitsch. The low-sublime is a category described already by Burke in the mid-1770's.

Kelley's inventory clearly demonstrates that the most common point of departure for a sublime experience is still nature, even though it may no longer be a pure nature experience it is still heavily colored by cultural notions. In Wolfgang Tillman's geographic landscape of London, the Concorde is an exciting bird, the product of the miracles of the era of high technology. It is not, however, the technological advancements per se that may be perceived as grand. It is rather the ability to transport human beings into a new era where they are able to fly faster than sound; to surpass nature with the aid of contemporary technology. It is to negate time and space - which has to be a sublime experience in and of itself.

In our day, time and space are no longer something grand, bordering on the illusory, or something concrete. Time and space are no longer definable quantities which may be pinpointed. The present, the past, different spatialities turn themselves inside out, as in hyperspace, where space at the same time, is both expanding and imploding. It also suggests that there is no universal notion of the sublime. The sublime appears as a multifaceted form of experience that transcends the borders between nature and culture, grand experiences - the lowliness of kitsch, life and death. In other words, the sublime of our time appears to escape all definition - or is it precisely the inexplicable at the heart of the sublime that is the defining factor? It is this awareness that has led us to print the sublime in lower case common terms and to ­ thus leaving the field open for speculation.

You often hear about the absolute power wielded by the curator over an exhibition. This is based on the misconception that the curator functions as a supervising director, using the works as pawns in a game where the outcome is already known. Exhibitions of that kind are not related to real intellectual inquiry, however. It is in the work surrounding an exhibition - not just in the initial phases but also those that follow and in the act of installation - that knowledge is crystallized. Throughout this process, there is an ongoing dialogue with the artists. Each new work further complicates the exhibition, as its multifaceted departure points refuse to allow themselves to be reduced into a one-dimensional statement in order to fit within the overall theme. In addition to the meaning of the works, the dialogue with the artists concerns material and practical matters, as well as how the works are best to be installed. I therefore want to convey my heartfelt thanks to all the artists represented, who have been indefatigable in carrying on this dialogue from the initial idea to concrete reality.

It is not only the artists who leave their imprint on an exhibition, but also the gallery-owners who often take on the practical work. These gallery-owners often come to function as the right arm of the artists by becoming the safekeepers of their heritage. This is especially true of Andrea Rosen of the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York, who has played a crucial part, in the absence of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. In this exhibition as in many others, her experience of his artistry has been invaluable in executing the two works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The close relationship between gallery and artist is also seen in the interaction between Hiroshi Sugimoto and Antonio Homem at Sonnabend Gallery in New York. I would also like to thank Robin Vousden at Anthony d'Offay Gallery in London for their generous loan of Gabriel Orozco's Pinched Star I-VIII. My sincere thanks also to Wendy Chang of Patrick Painter Editions for the loan of Mike Kelley's series The Sublime, and to Mattias Nohrborg of Triangelfilm who placed Cindy Sherman's work at our disposal. I would also like to thank Chantal Crousel in Paris, who has been an invaluable source of knowledge concerning the art of Gabriel Orozco.

An exhibition consists of more than just the works displayed, however. The catalogue also plays an important part in imparting meaning to the exhibition. This is especially true of the catalogue essays by Carsten Juhl and Jan Bäcklund that shed light on central issues of the sublime. The excellent work of the translators aids in the interpretation - in this case from Danish to Swedish by Peter Carlsson, from Danish to English by John Kendal (in both cases the text by Carsten Juhl). The translation of Swedish into English by Kathryn Boyer (text by Jan Bäcklund) and Kjersti Board (text by Bo Nilsson) evidences the usual linguistic accuracy. The printed texts are not the only thing paralleling the exhibition, however, but also by the form of the catalogue. In her graphic design, Marja Pennanen has been especially sensitive to the tensions within the complex concept constituted by the sublime. The graphic form of the printing has been managed by Jacob Olsheden of Trydells tryckeri in Laholm. We also convey our heartfelt thanks to Transart AB in Varberg for their generous contribution of free transportation within Sweden.

Within the Rooseum, too, work is conducted as an ever ongoing dialogue in which assistant curator Magnus Jensner has coordinated the practical installation work and the catalogue with the able assistance of Camilla Ericsson. Jaana Järretorp has been in charge of distributing both printed and digital information.

In such a complex interplay, it is difficult to claim that the curator wields absolute power over an exhibition. I would maintain, in fact, that the work surrounding an exhibition is an extremely dynamic act of communication. And not only that! It is you, dear visitor, that will ultimately have the last word in your encounter with the exhibition, for it is up to you to imbue the works with meaning.

Bo Nilsson
Museum Director