The register of the artist

ABSTRACT

Central to art was once its relationship to the imaginative interior of the artist. The legacy of romanticism and the sublime has been systematically eroded throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Although for some not entirely lost. Contemporary discourses around the posthuman have played their part in the erasure of the artist, through the breakdown of the centrality of our bodily self in the world, and correspondingly, our imaginative interior as previously conceived has been jettisoned. Through the rise of the anthropocene, attention is now paid to the more or other-than-human, and even for those who take the person as part of this schema, the body is no longer closed, its interior bracketed off from the world, but part of a wider nexus, where fundamentally for the posthuman, the body-mind of the artist is not necessarily the originating source for creativity. This paper seeks to consider the material embodiments of these developments through exploring the working practice of artist Katie Paterson. Multidisciplinary and cross-medium, her work is concerned with immensity and particularity; her material is the stuff of the world, through which she tells the story of nature’s elusive phenomena. The artist is quelled and transformed in Paterson’s work through a re-articulation of the structures and processes normally hidden from us. In this way the register of the artist shifts and the subjective self is dispersed and reconstructed through alternative frames of reference, most notably geological time and the space of the cosmos. Heir to the romantic sublime, her work offers a reappraisal of the place of artistic subjectivity in the era of the posthuman. In so doing her work reveals the potential for a new posthuman sublime.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropocene
• posthuman
• sublime
• technology
• nature
• subjectivity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The genesis of the posthuman, for Wolfe, orientates with systems theory. First articulated in the late 1950s by Gregory Bateson, Warren McCullouch, Norbert Wiener (see Wolfe 2010).

2. Images of Katie Paterson’s work can be viewed on her website: http://katiepaterson.org.

3. The idiom of the sublime has been a category that has been in flux since classical antiquity. First articulated by the first-century Greek writer Longinus, in Peri Hupsous, who limited to a literary style (see Guerlac 1985), it rose to prominence in the 18^th century with Edmund Burke in his treatise on the subject A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and following that, Immanuel Kant’s The Critique of judgment (1790).

4. Romanticism was instrumental in shaping the figure of the artist-genius, which saw a transformation from the artisan craftsman in the 18th and 19th century. An early text that instigated these ideas is Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition from 1759. As Parker and Pollock state “these developing notions reached new heights with the genesis of the Romantic myth of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the artist not only inherited the mantle of priests and became the revealer of divine truths but assumed a semi-divine status as an heir to the original ‘creator’ himself” (1981). And as they go on to suggest “today, to be an artist is to be born a special person; creativity lies in the person not in what is made” (ibid.). Thus, the concept of the genius for the romantic sublime ensured that the artist was subjectively linked to the work they produced. And whilst this trend has both continued apace into the 20^th century with artists who are closely aligned with the traditions of this movement, there are artists that pushed back against the romantic sublime. Paterson is directly heir to this lineage, and so the role of artistic subjectivity and how she works with and against it is directly relevant to her practice. For an overview of the legacy on romanticism more broadly for modernism see Cavell (1979). There are also scholars that suggest that romanticism has had a lasting influence on postmodernism through its blurring of the distinction between the real and the imagined, and their focus on the fragmentary nature of experience (see Bowie 1990).

5. See the Tate’s research project, The Sublime Object: Nature, Art and Language, which held a summative symposium in 2007 at Tate Britain. In addition, some key exhibitions include: “The Sublime Void”, Musée des Beaux Arts, Brussels (1993); “The Big Nothing”, the ICA in Philadelphia (2004); “On the Sublime”, Guggenheim, Berlin (2007); “Various Voids: A Retrospective”, Centre Pompidou (2009).

6. For further literature on the cosmos in art see Clair (1999).