Sublimity pertained mostly to literature, architecture or garden design, and rarely, if at all, the visual arts, since they were tied to representational roles and were also formally limited. Beauty was the object. It is therefore of little surprise that when the avant-garde strove to turn the old ideals on their head, beauty was the object of the attack. Kant had also concluded, in Critique of Judgement, that one of the two sentiments which could not perceive any aesthetic assessment at all was disgust or distaste, which is, in fact, a perversion of taste or the beautiful; and the other, the ridiculous, which, correspondingly, is a perversion of the sublime. From this perspective it is also clear the degree to which Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley, or other »abjectal art« functions precisely within this inversion of beauty. The significance of the converse of beauty has had a clear and well-defined role in the history of modern art regarding how the production of art has been redefined, from one that refers to a disinterested aesthetic occupied with beauty, to one that, one could say, is an engaging reflection of art. But although this shift in focus has been written as a contrast between beauty and distaste, it can be appropriate, here, to view it as a shift in focus from a ridiculous perspective, that is to say, to see how the question of the sublime has been dealt with from an inside-out perspective.

»The sublime« has always been an imposing force to tango with. This is very clear in the art of the Romantic Caspar David Friedrich, where it quickly becomes obvious what the artist wants. But although these works are meant to draw the viewer up into the realm of the sublime, this is not as simple to experience as it is to understand. These are essentially the same circumstances that applied much later with respect to Barnett Newman's »zip paintings«: it is necessary to be in the groove in order to experience the feeling. We learned this long ago from Kant, since aesthetic discernment relates to the subject's imaginative powers, not the object's formal properties. This notion that aesthetic assessments relate to imaginative powers was, moreover, Kant's most important contribution to aesthetic philosophy. The effect of Kant's transcendental and deductive method with regard to the subject of »the sublime«, which was so discussed during his time, seems first and foremost to have led to the conclusion that something sublime can exist only as a subjective conception, which is to say that any sort of formally based art criticism similar to that which was practiced from Longinus to Burke should be rejected. Some decades earlier, Burke had stated that the sublime was determined by certain formal qualities within a work of art: beauty was round, soft, pleasant, and preferably pastel colors; the sublime was sharp, hard, large and dark, and stark contrasting colors.

For one reason or another, the question regarding »the sublime« reappeared in art circles in 1948, when Barnett Newman wrote a text entitled The Sublime is Now, and then three years later painted Vir heroicus sublimis. One condition for the renewed interest in the sublime likely stemmed from the gradual rejection of painting's representational role, along with, of course, a certain feeling that »here in America, some of us, free from the weight of European culture«, could instead focus on the exalted: assembly-line principles, the Grand Canyon, skyscrapers, and similar trans-Atlantic phenomena. And so it was that Jean-François Lyotard, abetted with a parallel reading of Newman and Kant, came to reflect further over the idea of the sublime in modern art (1.).

In brief, it can be said that Lyotard differs from Kant in that he does not attribute the sublime to some transcendental representational conditions between the object and one's capacity to reason but to the inherent physical properties of a painting. A view more radical than that of Kant's, the sublime is now an absolute entity without any antinomy. For Lyotard, the sublime is an effect of the »absolute feeling« that has haunted modernism from Malevich to Newman. The sublime is understood in Newman as well as in Lyotard as »here« or »now« phenomena, which differ radically from everything outside themselves, and is also a transition from something »not here« or »not now« to an absolute presence, both spatially and temporally, and not divisible by degrees. Furthermore, there no longer exists something which stands in opposition to the absolute since for both Newman and Lyotard the sublime has no dimension in height, or expansion in volume, or increase in weight, but can equally be considered infinitesimal as well as infinite, and should be considered infinitesimal as well as infinite, and both present and absent at the same time.

In Lyotard's text, the sublime is never defined in opposition to something. But five years before Lyotard gave his lecture Le sublime et l'avant-garde in Berlin, he wrote an essay entitled La peinture du secret à l'ère postmoderne. Baruchello (2.). This essay analyzes the apathetic relationship to the object that Lyotard has read in Baruchello's writings, and, in my opinion, can be understood as a continuation of his 1975 publication De l'apathie théorique (3.).

Here, Lyotard's aim is to reign in the question of whether it is possible »to find an alternative to the sublime which is not romantic«. Throughout the text, Lyotard seems rather pressed to establish the Italian artist Gianfranco Baruchello as an exponent for the sublime in line with Kant's analytical method, while still in a more or less uncertain and half-developed relation with a Freudian emancipatory position. The variances between how the »heretic« Lyotard understood »the sublime« via Freud, and how Freud interpreted it via Kant is, for me, more than just a difference of degrees: they correspond almost completely to Kant's opposition between sublimity and the ridiculous; between a theory of instincts with its involuntariness (Freud) and a philosophy of feeling with its freedoms (Kant). And they further implicate this displacement of a transition from an »unmodern« referential and representational painting, with its small tale-initiators, to a modern immanent painting, with its physical intensities and nuances. However, Lyotard concedes that what Baruchello does is far from just applying Kant's ideas about the sublime to painting, but that he »treats the sublime postmodernly, in an Italian manner«. The question then is: What does such an »Italian manner« mean?

Italian linguistic principles are, according to Lyotard, babbling; they are polyglottal and live off of rather than in contrast to some Babel-ish confusion. They are not silent, like the Jewish proscription against graven images, but abound with images and tongues. Lyotard cites Stendahl here (Rome, Naples et Florence, 1826) as saying »that there is no philosophy available for the way that Italians approach objects,« rather that it is a »laxative for the overweight philosophy«.

An effective laxative is the near-sighted stupidity. Naturally, the fool can not bear any titanic greatness, nor any creative mandate like the romantic or late romantic artist-type. His hair does not stand on end but is ordered in a neat side part. Correspondingly, the images are gray, neat, slow, and pertinent. Painting will take the form of a bureaucratic inventory, a »very confused documentation of what is taking place, feelings in particular, love, anxiety, loneliness. Not neurosis«. Notaries and bureaucrats are well known to be near-sighted. That is undoubtedly also why it is necessary to paint on a small scale; they »should be viewed very closely, for a long time«. Of course, the myopic is always more or less confused. For him, the world usually reveals itself in a fog, unless he places himself, like the notary, »very close, for a long time«.

The objects are also near-sighted; they are miniatures. According to Lyotard, miniaturizing symbolizes an idealism in the Kantian sense. Miniaturized pictures are typical, that is, they build on the same principles as the old typos: the seal that imprints. Such an impression can never refer to the senses' perceptions, but always refers to a selection and a distinction. It does not refer to some aesthetic relationship, rather to a »diatribic« one, that is, to a reflective meandering. The miniature, in contrast to the monumental, is portable and transportable, evacuates nothing, has no momentum on any time axis but, rather, is something that can be carried inside the vest, like a vade mecum for fatigue and obesity.

When Lyotard compares Kant and Freud with regard to the sublime, an essential difference is forged between freedom and compulsion: whereas Kant's definition of the sublime refers to a deprivation of the imaginative power's freedom through itself, Freud's definition of the sublime, as understood by Lyotard, is a sublimation, a suppression of desires, which pop up in dreams, symptoms, or lapses as involuntary or compulsive fascinations or events. These are illegible rebuses »without a fixed vocabulary or a regular syntax«. Freud likened the deciphering process to that of Champollion's, who often admitted with resignation that the deciphering work was »impracticable«.

It is impracticable and impossible to finish since it is »a lot to tell from a monogram«. Lyotard asks: »How to begin?« The laxative artist naturally has no mandate, no authority to begin, since beginnings concern freedoms and desires. The question is also: How to end? The point of departure, the »Fiat« that God uttered, like the verdict that fell on the Judgement Day, is, of course, sublime judgements from the most elevated position precisely not imaginable. The outer points on the tiny narrative banks of fog can not be differentiated from one another. The historiettes are so small that the beginning can not be discerned from the end. All story telling is as surplus, an excess of the narrative end point, and the historiette will inevitably meander into infinity, where only the story teller's perseverance or the listener's lack of patience set other irrelevant ­ at least for the historiette-limits.

These restrictive banks of fog are made up of monograms. Lyotard defines these as crystallized small events, narrative prisms without beginning or end. The monograms are not about symbols or concepts. Instead, they represent »layers of narrative energy: small tale-initiators« and, as such, can not be recovered or retold, but produce creations and developments. They are not pure colors or forms but are half-representative and half-sleeping, the contradiction between presence and representation nullified in a sort of absent-minded dissemination of information. So, Baruchello describes such monograms as »floating drawings between different experiences« and »inimitable models of possible empirical situations«.

Historiunculae: Naturally, these little stories stand in glaring contrast to what we have gotten used to from modernist painting with Cézanne and Impressionism up to, if not today, at least to late modernism's monochrome abstractions, where the question, »What is it supposed to be?« has come to be understood as the incarnation for low-browed, uncivilized, and bourgeois aesthetic incompetence. »What is it supposed to be?« Instead of being a dumb bourgeois question, queries of this sort are very welcome to the laxative artist. Every time someone asks him this question, he is always glad to tell the story, a story, a little story.

Discretion. The laxative erotic is fundamentally idiotic and, as such, private; but with a notarial conduct it is given a certain discretion which stands apathetically strong toward creative obscenities and its swelling pathos. The office, in which this idiotic eroticism takes place, is fundamentally made up of a system of drawers, lists, boxes, and cabinets, in which these forms and messages are packed to be preserved. But that which is preserved is seldom »worth being preserved«; and even if they are »secret«, the secrets are not in any way grand but, rather, trivial, perhaps the same way that all secrets are trivial.

As the rebus is trivial, since it naturally is the graphic form of a riddle, simulated or not simulated, it is indifferent; it is related to the Renaissance's »emblematic«, and like it, tied to the language, to the phoneme. The images are not clear, they are too little, coded, insinuations to openings that they do not themselves give, intelligible only to the near-sighted. The images are not present in themselves but only refer to something »there« or »then«.

The rebus always has a double meaning. And like painting's signs and meanings which do not allow themselves to be captured in a thematic or motif grouping, the rebus acts like the Greek herms, or the Latin's »Janus«-door. The reading depends on which direction one approaches from. The theme is old, and answers to the fool's reflection of the face (mouth, eyes) with the anus, the elevated with the low and dirty. His task is the watchman's and messenger's, but also to conceal and to gossip. Perhaps also to empty, reveal, and, one could almost say ­ laxate. Hermes lives on in medieval and Renaissance fools, but Lyotard makes him ­ perceptively, I believe ­ slightly more obscene: »Every monogram /... / is a little door that opens and closes itself around the undefined. A little Janus, a little anus«.

Italian manner in other words: constellations of »small tale-initiators« which have as a purpose to function as »laxatives for the overweight philosophy«. One quickly realizes that it is, in principle, impossible to discern between any subject and any object with regard to its effect, and that there is no longer any meaning in discerning the subject's imaginative powers from the object's formal representation, which was precisely Kant's critical project: riddles are in principle both subjective as well as formal. Or more exact, it is impossible to catch sight of any acting subject; it is as if the subject has disappeared from the system. Possibly a passage of text can clarify why we can not identify any acting subject: »A fractured me is a non-me. The archive, the catalogue, the monogram, the painting, or the box, equally many non-me's. The 'clear' is neither me nor its works«. It is here that I believe Lyotard's »Freudian sublimation« comes into play in opposition to the »elevated Kant«; and one may remain apathetic-affirmative to its effect. Or, as Lyotard wrote on Baruchello: a »very confused documentation of what is taking place, feelings in particular, love, anxiety, loneliness. Not neurosis.« ­ and: so, feelings in particular, by no means any »absolute feeling«.

This connection to Freud points, for me, to a completely different understanding of the sublime for Lyotard. If one compares the inarticulate and direct Newman- and Heidegger-inspired view of the event [l'événement; das Ereignis] of the later Lyotard, with the Freudian Lyotard of the latter 1970s, the event here has an entirely different status. For the earlier Lyotard, the event is likened to »a blind spot«, »a dissociated event, a departure,« which sets forth a meandering about in the form of day dreams, thoughts, and fantasies. The wanderer who carries these daydreams, thoughts, and fantasies is, concludes Lyotard, »an apathetic«. But rather than that such an apathetic is a zen-buddist non-me, it seems to be more like a non-willing subject, a subject precisely subjected to the objects' and the events' inevitability. Kant had a name for this frame of mind; it was called irregular rapture and was so far from the elevated as is imaginable, »since it was ridiculous«. At any rate, it is with the help of this »theoretic apathy« that Lyotard sees a remedy for »theoretic pathos«. And the thought here is, of course, that would not such a ridiculous modality be an excellent laxative for a lot of artistic self-affirmation as well as art's broad affirmation of itself.
 
 
Jan Bäcklund