The interpretation of nature as spiritual content in painting

Investigates the interpretation of spiritual content in painting. Pt. 1 defines aspects of spirituality and explores the authors concerns of despiritualization. Pt. 2 parallels concerns with the Romantic movement & explores the notion of the sublime in relation to spiritual interpretation. Pt. 3 links the documented research to the body of studio work. The printings and drawings explore the authors concerns through the visual expression of concepts which suggest nature as a spiritual source.

Sublime Wong Kar-wai

In the films of Wong Kar-wai one finds a double or parallel sensing of the sublime. Numerous characters are seen to experience perceptual moments of unbounded terror, where they are faced with the weight, enormity or formlessness of objects, things, and natural phenomena that they cannot initially or fully comprehend. These ‘textual’ sublime moments are simultaneously rendered receptively, experientially sublime through the way Wong Kar-wai conjures up a series of refracted, defamiliarised images of heightened intensity, such as bejeweled juke boxes, incandescent lampshades, thick waterfalls, and wispy cigarette smoke rising. Such awesome images are of artifice and nature, conjoined, blurred, or delineated, so that the sublime moment is of the postmodern moment, irrational and irregular, and ‘monstrous’ because of it. In the films of Wong Kar-wai, character and viewer become aligned in a process of identification in which each recognizes their mortality, and inadequacy, in the face of such dazzling, incomprehensible moments that trace across the retina of the eye. The pleasure and the pain of this is something that I will explore in this paper, using such sublime films as Fallen Angels, Chungking Express, Happy Together, In the Mood for Love, 2046, and Blueberry Nights, to illustrate my arguments.

Sleeping with the enemy : creative writing and theory in the academy

This paper will contend that as literary studies elevates creative writing to the highest level, by studying and analysing creative texts; creative writing is similarly enhanced when it is underpinned by theory. This flies in the face of the view that theory has no relevance to the needs of contemporary writers. This paper will examine the way in which theoretical insights and their applications are essential to the creative writing process and propose that without theory, creative writing classes might be at risk of constantly going over the same ground, with no way of being elevated to the next level.
Without the study of literary theory in creative writing, writers are in danger of producing imitations of acclaimed literature. Similarly, without studying creativity in literary studies, writers are at risk of imitating the language of French theorists in translation and failing to harness imaginative ways to create new ideas and theories. This paper encourages new ways of thinking about the union of literary studies and creative writing by focusing on theories and poetry of the sublime. This can assist creative and analytical writers with the anxiety of the blank page and the problem of the ineffable, through an examination of the role of imagination and reason in this process. Creative writing and theory should be studied simultaneously; they invigorate one another and this paper focuses on this important reciprocal relationship.

Sublime: process and mediation

The Sublime: Process and Mediation expounds on the concept of a 'Material Sublime' as relevant to the development of artistic practice. The author maintains that the creative process is generative, highlighting the connection between nature, the body, and latent forms of knowledge as revealed through material interaction significant in the activity of painting.  She argues for a co-emergence maintaining the sublime experience traverses a liminal space wherein binary oppositions such as the distinction between mind and matter are negotiated.   

Artworks : Water Table and Rain Table : presented as part of the Periscope Exhibition, Castlemaine State Festival

Rain Table and Water Table: Delicate splashes and droplets of water act like primitive lenses bringing transparency to the diffused images of celestial bodies. These two installation pieces are inspired by the beauty of the night sky and invite the viewer to consider the cosmos in relation to ones self and to contemplate the discoveries which have changed our understanding of the universe. Water Table and Rain Table are the two works being presented as part of Periscope. Through the form of the science bench or museum cabinet, luminous and projected images play against glass and water invoking the sublime sense of wonder that we have when we look to the starry night sky. Water Table - In 1912 the astronomer, Vesto Slipher made the discovery that “Nebula” were moving at incredible velocities due to the expansion of space itself. This discovery revealed these “Nebula” to be vastly remote and independent galaxies. Water Table speculates on the understanding that when we look into deep space, we also look into deep time. Rain Table is a new work produced for the festival and makes reference to the first telescopic observations of the Moon made by the mathematician, philosopher and astronomer, Galileo Galilei in 1610. The implication of Galileo’s observations gave rise to a radical new understanding of the heavens and our place in it and the final acceptance that the Earth was not the centre of the Universe.

Digital shimmer: popular music and the intimate nexus between fan and star

Conception of ‘star performance’ through popular music is stratified which generates diverse and often contradictory forms of thought. For example, stars and celebrities plausibly act as a ‘culture medium’ in which, through imagination, one’s identity is assembled, realised or constructed. What to become and how to be are questions we individually and collectively contend with throughout our lives to varying degrees (Maslow, 1954; 1968). Predominant use of digital technologies has seen the delivery of sound much altered. Music, be it Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata or Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast, once sourced via analogue legacy devices such as ‘old-school’ tape cassette or vinyl record is now a series of zero and one digits. Advocates argue that the key benefit of digitalisation is the ability to compress data because sound generates large files of information. The discourse of digitalisation begs the question of how a series of ones and zeros, albeit in a plethora of configurations, registers with listening bodies and affects ‘the sublime’. It is without doubt that some musical experiences afford indescribable, unlocatable sensation—even enchantment (as defined by Bennett, 2001: 5 and called forth by Redmond: 2014: 126). Such musical experiences might be in the presence of the performer or in their absence such as in the case of recorded music. In this context, any sense of ’real’ space and place is less definitive allowing for ‘special encounters’ to be imagined and felt. For these reasons, music and all that the use of the word might convey, the proposed notion of phaino-ken here, acts as the lens through which to examine the meaning and value of celebrity and star embodiment.

O Sublime Nanotecnológico

The nano convergence is a historic event, similar to the advent of cyberspace, which has equal potential disruption. As well as the aesthetics of communication Mario Costa has a technological sublime mediated through imaging techniques, we propose in this work the emergence of an aesthetic of nanocomunicasio, which, in turn, proposes a nanotechnological sublime mediated through technological individuation. While the technological sublime Mario Costa is entirely based on the Kantian sublime, the sublime nanotechnology is inspired by the sublime transimanente Schopenhauer. If the technological sublime Mario Costa is connected to virtuality and reproducibility of digital imaging techniques, we have the sublime nanotechnology refers instead to the materiality and autorreprodutibilidade the principle of individuation.

Imbricações entre Goethe e Kant: Arte, Natureza e Sublime

Este ensaio aborda afinidades entre Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) e Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), principalmente em relação à Crítica da Faculdade do juízo kantiana. Investiga-se assim o diálogo teórico que implícita ou explicitamente permeia o texto goethiano e a obra do filósofo de Königsberg envolvendo temas, tais como Arte, Natureza e Sublime.

A arte de educar entre a mimese e o sublime: considerações a partir de Theodor W. Adorno e Jean François Lyotard

Pós-graduação em Educação - FFC

A poesia de Adélia Prado: expressão feminina do cotidiano e do sublime

This work aims to locate Adélia Prado’s poetry in the scenery of the contemporary Brazilian literature in order to comprehend some issues that are part of the manner how the poet constructs her poems and which may elucidate, through the lyric speaker, the relation of her poetry with the historical and cultural moment in which her work is placed. In this sense, the purpose of this study is to analyze Adélia Prado’s poetic construction by emphasizing the female voice of her lyric speaker and the superposition of elements from the semantic fields of the prosaic and the sublime, since we have identified these aspects as basic ones for the development of an interpretation on this poetry. This way, we have tried to comprehend the connection that the poet establishes between the material and the spiritual, the erotic and the religious, the immanent and the transcendent and we have concluded that, for the poet, everything can be subject to poetry. For this work, we used the volume Poesia reunida (1995) for it provides a wider view over Adélia Prado’s poetry

O sublime e o problema da modernidade em Pedro Kilkerry

Current paper discusses manifestations of the sublime in Pedro Kilkerry´s poetry as one of the distinguishing characteristics within the Parnassian orientations predominant in his cultural context. The particular way that Kilkerry employs the sublime´s expedients demonstrates the dialogue of his poetry with Romantic ideals, whose traits in his lyrical stance are directly linked to Symbolist influence, far from traditional Parnassian models. The sublime in Kilkerry develops through an elliptical and suggestive language that demonstrates the impossibility of the ideal being directly expressed and shows the affinity of his poetic work with the idealist crisis that marks post-Romantic poetry and provides the basis on which the poetics of Modernity is structured. The poetry of Pedro Kilkerry develops within a complex zone of convergence between the models provided by the Parnassian aesthetic, Romantic idealism with an atavic presence to Symbolism, and the search for new answers to old idealistic concerns. The meeting of these three conflictive currents, perceptible in the manifestations of the sublime in Pedro Kilkerry´s poetry, demonstrates his lyrical sensitivity to the trends of Modernity.

James Turrell and the Northern romantic tradition

"This paper discusses the work of contemporary artist James Turrell as framed by the philosophy of the sublime. Focusing on the artist’s use of the medium of light, it addresses Turrell’s scientific approach to creating artworks and discusses his resolution of the problematic relationship between science and spirituality. This relationship is discussed through the examination of the artist’s use of total visual fields known as ganzfelden and other perceptual phenomena, such as those encountered while piloting aircraft"

The Harvard classics /

Vols. 1-49 indexed in The Idexicon.

Original sin: divine and symbolic violence in the turn to the Apostle Paul

When we take a step back from the imposing figure of physical violence, it becomes possible to examine other structurally violent forces that constantly shape our cultural and political landscapes. One of the driving interests in the “turn to Paul” in recent continental philosophy stems from wrestling with questions about the real nature of contemporary violence. Paul is positioned as a thinker whose messianic experience began to cut through the violent masquerade of the existing order. The crucifixion and resurrection of the Messiah (a slave and a God co-existing in one body) exposed the empty grounding upon which power resided. The Christ-event signifies a moment of violent interruption in the existing order which Paul enjoins the Gentiles to participate in through a dedication of love for the neighbour. This divine violence aims to reveal and subvert the “powers,” epitomised in the Roman Empire, in order to fulfil the labour of the Messianic now-time which had arrived. The impetus behind this research comes from a typically enigmatic and provocative section of text by the Slovene philosopher, cultural critic, and Christian atheist Slavoj Žižek. He claims that 'the notion of love should be given here all its Paulinian weight: the domain of pure violence… is the domain of love' (2008a, 173). In this move he links Paul’s idea of love to that of Walter Benjamin’s divine violence; the sublime and the cataclysmic come together in this seemingly perverse notion. At stake here is the way in which uncovering violent forces in the “zero-level” of our narrative worldviews aids the diagnosis of contemporary political and ethical issues. It is not enough to imagine Paul’s encounter with the Christ-event as non-violent. This Jewish apocalyptic movement was engaged in a violent struggle within an existing order that God’s wrath will soon dismantle. Paul’s weak violence, inspired by his fidelity to the Christ-event, places all responsibility over creation in the role of the individual within the collective body. The centre piece of this re-imagined construction of the Pauline narrative comes in Romans 13: the violent dedication to love understood in the radical nature of the now-time. 3 This research examines the role that narratives play in the creation and diagnosis of these violent forces. In order to construct a new genealogy of violence in Christianity it is crucial to understand the role of the slave of Christ (the revolutionary messianic subject). This turn in the Symbolic is examined through creating a literary structure in which we can approach a radical Nietzschean shift in Pauline thought. The claim here, a claim which is also central to Paul’s letters, is that when the symbolic violence which manipulates our worldviews is undone by a divine violence, if even for a moment, new possibilities are created in the opening for a transvaluation of values. Through this we uncover the nature of original sin: the consequences of the interconnected reality of our actions. The role of literature is vital in the construction of this narrative; starting with Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, and continuing through works such as Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, this thesis draws upon the power of literature in the shaping of our narrative worlds. Typical of the continental philosophy at the heart of this work, a diverse range of illustrations and inspirations from fiction is pulled into its narrative to reflect the symbolic universe that this work was forged through. What this work attempts to do is give this theory a greater grounding in Paul’s letters by demonstrating this radical kenotic power at the heart of the Christ-event. Romans 13 reveals, in a way that has not yet been picked up by Critchley, Žižek, and others, that Paul opposed the biopolitical power of the Roman Empire through the weak violence of love that is the labour of the slaves of Christ on the “now-time” that had arrived.

La estética de lo sublime, un camino para entender el arte posmoderno desde Jean-François Lyotard

El presente trabajo de investigación está orientado a comprender el arte posmoderno desde la perspectiva estética de Jean François Lyotard.La categoría principal que abordamos es lo sublime y su vinculación con la producción artística. Para esto realizamos un breve estudio histórico de esta categoría, hasta el pensamiento del filósofo francés. Luego ahondamos en la posmodernidad según Lyotard, pues es el contexto de sus reflexiones. El germen de lo que hoy se conoce como mundo posmoderno, fue identificado por Lyotard en la década de los setenta. Llamó condición posmoderna a la deslegitimación de los metarrelatos modernos y al auge de las tecnologías como un apoyo al capitalismo. En su conceptualización recurriría a lo sublime y establecería una relación con las artes de las vanguardias, de aquí se desprenden dos acepciones: lo sublime moderno y lo sublime posmoderno.