The Mathematical Sublime

  This piece is as much a comment on my work as it is an interrogation of ideas found in Kant and Burke. I don’t know that the contrast between the “beautiful” and the “sublime” has the same force it once had, but there is a satisfying self-referentiality in this non-dialectical binary. Intuitively, I seem to recognize the difference between beauty and the sublime, at least when I (mis) translate transcendental philosophy into the vulgar language of sexuality and desire. Beauty is love. Steady. Binding. The sublime is carnal, lustful, the aching desire for what is just beyond my grasp—a desire more constituting than constitutional, a desire that overcomes, sometimes through madness. What beauty builds, the sublime ruins. I don’t know that such sublime desire exists. I suspect that mad desire is a product of our fictions and narratives, compelling enough to create behaviors that emulate the trope’s mythological structure. As my college anthropology professor used to say, "the myth is more real than the reality." Whether the sublime exists as we imagine, or whether we’ve imagined its existence, there’s something to Kant’s argument that the self feels finitude and inadequacy (and thus recognizes the possibility of death) when confronted with magnitude. Magnitude, in turn, depends upon imagination, and upon the relation to the observer. To experience magnitude,-- as inescapable, threatening, unstable, fearsome, and thus charged with attraction--we must also imagine (ours or another’s) diminution.  

Sources: Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (Routledge, 1958); Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement (Hackett, 1987). 

July 2024

Mixed materials: cyanotype, wood, silver gelatin paper, images from large format negatives.

16"x16"x2"