Jean-Francois Lyotard: Presenting the Unpresentable

 

Jean-François Lyotard’s theory of the sublime in contemporary art focuses on his claim that such art ‘presents’ the unpresentable, and tracing its origins in Kant’s account of the sublime. Lyotard identifies a difficulty concerning Kant’s account: to understand why the disparate elements in the experience of the sublime should be combined to then form that experience. How can you present the absolute in a non-absolute, sensibly perceivable object or artwork – that can be understood to drive avant-garde artistic experimentation.

One element of the sublime, especially in contemporary understanding, is the idea that it is “unpresentable.” The sublime exceeds human understanding, and defies any attempts to represent it in any medium; it’s inconceivable and therefore impossible to depict or describe. Unrepresentability is an abstract concept, and art that addresses it tends to be abstract. Lyotard writes that “one cannot represent the absolute, but one can demonstrate that the absolute exists — through ’negative representation’, which Kant called the ‘abstract’.

A romantic landscape painting, with gloomy, craggy mountains or crashing waves, is an attempt to represent its “sublime” object and the threatening greatness in nature. In other media: writers can rely on abstract language to discuss the sublime. But this is something different from abstraction in painting; abstract language allows a writer to describe an unvisualizable concept more or less directly.

Lyotard makes the definition of the sublime seem simple: you cannot demonstrate or present the absolute, for example space or humanity or the notion of 'nostalgia' if I am to relate this back to my project. Representing these things will make them relative to the restrictions of representation. But Lyotard argues that you can 'negatively represent' an abstraction through the demonstration it exists. This is why things we can not directly make out or visualise or grasp as a whole or comprehensible entity are rendered as abstract. The definition of sublime may be of 'excellent beauty', but it's the sense of the ungraspable- the unbelievable- not the beauty, that truly defines the sublime.  

Artists and designers are always seeking to present what was previously deemed unpresentable, or simply not presented in that manner. It is the nature of creating, to seek out 'the sublime', not necessarily in the sense of beauty but more in pure wonderment. In order to present the unpresentable you need to believe the unbelievable, or at the very least envision it in someway within the boundaries of human imagination (which is vast, none the less). 

The Sublime edited by Simon Morley

Documents of Contemporary Art

London: The MIT Press/ Whitechapel Gallery (2010)