THE SUBLIME
Many male human beings – men with a small h – have expressed their views on the concept and its definition. Overall, nature’s sublime, more imposing than man, leaves him outraged. Compared to lightning by Longinus (IIIe century AD), it was reduced to a persuasive device. In the 18the century, Edmund Burke said of the sublime that it produces a singular emotion: a “delicious terror which he contrasts with the sweetness felt in the experience of beauty. Kant refines this distinction, defining it as “that which is absolutely great”.. He can be mathematical, like the starry sky, or dynamic, like a storm on a glacier. But because it doesn’t destroy us, the sublime inspires a feeling of respect. It therefore seems to encourage our moral awakening. In contact with it, the human being is revealed as a spiritual being.
This notion was reflected in the representation of landscapes from the early 18th century onwards. Nature, because it provokes in us the strength that is our own, to regard as small the things we worry about, is appreciated as sublime. Once again, this analysis is based on a transcendental vision: the sublime landscape is a landscape of the soul, a source of pain, satisfaction and introspection in its contemplation.
How can we explain the human domination of nature that gave rise to this awe-inspiring sublime? How have humans transferred this relationship of domination through shock and violence?
It was enough for Nietzsche to challenge this moralization of an experience he likened to a lightening of the senses. Recovering the chemical meaning of sublimation, the passage from solid to gaseous state, the sublime is for him an “artistic taming of the horrible”. With its content of violence and absoluteness, it seems to take us into a trance-like state. It becomes a tool for a being struggling against its instinctive needs and desires to tame its emotions and feelings, to master everything around it and above all... itself.
Freud clearly sees this as a detour of sexual impulses. More than an aesthetic category, the sublime is a borderline experience that transforms the subject. The link has been made: what is sublime is what man creates through his deviated sexual impulses – or rather – deviating everything around him with an objectifying gaze. The desire legitimized in the aesthetic relationship of the sublime is posited as a fulfillment of patriarchy, particularly in art.
Wednesday, July 17, 1985, at Serge July’s request for Libération, appears on three pages the famous text by Marguerite Duras, presented as literary fiction, dealing with the Vologne affair that has been in the media spotlight for 273 days and entitled: “Marguerite Duras: sublime, inevitably sublime Christine V.”.
The article ends as follows:
“I’m talking about the crime committed against the child, which is now complete, but I’m also talking about the crime committed against her, the mother. And that’s my business. She is still alone in solitude, where the women of the depths of the earth still are, in the dark, so that they remain as they were before, relegated to the materiality of matter. Christine V. is sublime. Inevitably sublime. The sublime here proves to be seen for what it is: the systemic violence of our society on those it dominates. The sublime is the despair and distress of this woman, of this child, ofevery compassionate spectator. Does this violence come from our nature? Is the sublime determined within us? Where do we force the workings of life so that our essence dominates?
From the Latin sublimis: “suspended in the air”, “which goes upwards”, the term sublime more or less fits the posture of the man and the patriarchal system. Going up, coming to make a border of control, of respect for a social order. Man has never put up with an ounce of determinism standing in his way. He had to work to gently enter the air we call the Anthropocene, and to cleanse his honor in the face of this nature that had made him turn away from himself for a moment or plunge too deeply into it.
The conceptual movement of the sublime moves from a violent meditation on human humility to a technique for dominating that which frightens us. What frightened man was the sublime. Shortly afterwards, what enables him to tame these fears is to master that which is beyond him, to sublimate.
Could the origin of the Anthropocene be this transfer of the production of the sublime from nature to man?
Will contemporary art always be more violent as long as we rely solely on the sublime to express ourselves?
Where is the sublime? is an attempt to redefine the idea, an opening to the contemplation of a world we are destroying. It is a quest for reunion with the inner instinct that we have learned to dominate, to stifle. This concept links of course with the idea of the immanent goddess of the Eco-feminist movement. The sublime, part of each of us, links us to an eco-system that exceeds us, immerses us in the empathy of the living.
The work is part of the global artistic practice of the artist Aimée Fleury. Its Eco-manifestos have already taken the form of individual demonstrations in kind to defend the concept of Auto-muse and the pursuit of the sublime during the first containment of 2020. Using the drone to make photographic traces of past actions, the approach is here, while assimilating to the movement of the glue girls, to make reappear a militant art in the institutionalized contemporary sphere, to give its aesthetic value to the feminist and environmentalist struggle.
AIMÉE FLEURY – BIO
Aimée Fleury was born in Paris in 1998. Having received a rigorous education at a single-sex Jesuit school, she took her first steps at the Pavillon Bosio, the art and design school in Monaco.
Always more tormented by a repressive, regressive, violent, paternalistic, moralizing, egocentric, expansionist and neurotic society, Aimée builds a sanctuary, a Rilkean solitude between her and the others, comparable to a no man’s land. She launches, like javelins, increasingly paradoxical works in this space of doubts, conflicts and judgments.
It is in the face of this sad observation that the artist begins to approach a more atmospheric, conceptual and societal work. Seeking an aesthetic of gentleness to convey calls for help, his raw material is none other than the sensitive substance of the individuals around him. His protocol always seems to start from a sampling of the disturbing agent. The resulting work is too “literary” to show the tales of the Anthropocene. Living since always in the paradoxes of his time, the desolation which results from it makes matter to the sublimation. As disarmed as you are in the face of the images she conjures up, the artist has chosen to laugh rather than cry about them.
Gathering in a two-engine psycho, making a retreat/escape to nature and heightened activism seemed the least futile move in light of the world around him. With her impostor complex holding her back, Aimée slowly became a kind of myth by her absence.
The personal state of consciousness or unconsciousness of the artist Aimée Fleury having been lacking lately, we do not promise her return in an imminent way.
If he gave the impression that his departure was definitive, then we will keep you informed before his rating rises exponentially.
To follow his evolution, follow his instagram via the link below:
https://www.instagram.com/aimeefleury/?hl=fr
He wouldn’t be the first artist to have lost his footing in the face of criticism and outside scrutiny. If this story has touched you, take responsibility. Get away from the passivity of the lambda spectator. Show your support, no matter how big or small, because every detail makes a difference.
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