The Sublime and The Pleasures of Regret

A Shipwreck in Stormy Seas, Vernet (public domain)

The September screening of the CPA’s films The Sublime and The Pleasures of Regret held in The Bakery – a small, artist-run gallery in the wobbly streets of Camden Passage, Islington – saw a diverse group of students, professionals, and academics gather round, plastic cups in hand, to spend an evening talking about art. The atmosphere is relaxed and intimate; Dr Vanessa Brassey, whose collaboration with the National Gallery we’re about to see is sitting on the ground cross-legged. Behind her, the concentric circles of chairs, and ahead, a rectangle of wall, freshly freed of paintings of her own. As the seats fill up and the lights tone down, her pick falls on a video-essay narrated by Professor Sasha Golob.

Aligning with the topic of the evening, the film is concerned with how art conveys emotion. Focusing on the ‘Sublime’, the viewer is led through what initially seems a notion of oppositions and inconsistencies. The ‘Sublime’, as per Edmund Burke’s 1757 treatise, is the aesthetic complementer of beauty. Whereas beauty is harmonious, static, and pleasing – exemplar of what in a Nietzschean terminology would be called Apollonian – the Sublime is fearful, powerful and moving – or for Nietzsche, Dionysian. The Sublime carries in it a sense of the ungraspable and infinite, and in doing so reminds its human viewer of his own finiteness. An example raised by the movie, Vernet’s A Shipwreck in Stormy Seas, calls forth these feelings exactly; the terror of the sailor at the sight of a raging sea, inseverable from his awe for a sight of a power so vast and godlike.

The emergence of Romanticism, and the inherent narcissism of its artists was visible not only in the ever-the-larger canvases they chose to paint on. The Romantics’ attitudes towards nature may have been immortalised by Rousseau, the audacity, however, with which they sat on its imaginary throne hasn’t. The early nineteenth century saw both a radicalisation and a spiritual turn in the view of the Sublime, one where the threatening force of nature, rather than something to be feared, became something to be overrode. Turner’s Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus depicts Ulysses sailing through the Pillars of Hercules, the edge of the known world. His hubristic eagerness to understand what lies beyond tames and transforms the Sublime. In this depiction, the sea is calm with the orange glow of a sunset. It is as if Nature itself was subjected to Ulysses. The Sublime quality comes not from the threatening force of the unknown, but from the man who subdued it.

As the first film finishes, an informal conversation sparks up. Vanessa asks if anyone knew of the Sublime before, and all murmur and nod in unison when a practising artist says; ‘I think you use it without knowing it’. A light discussion follows about whether Hegel is right in thinking that observing art should aid one in feeling at home in the world, or if the exact opposite is true and it is indeed the pleasure of being provoked by the ‘Other’ – as in the case of the Sublime – that leaves a lasting impression. No agreement is reached, and the lights tone down once again.

The second film deals with the intersection of pain and pleasure; regret. Conjoining these opposites, regret is a sweet sorrow, for it carries in itself a seductive aura of possibility. Not only can there be undeniable pleasure in one’s artistic abilities to capture and convey regret, but also in the immense power those abilities entail; vivifying a past long gone. Regret opens up the space for a temporal-evaluative perspective of the past, one that is not without pain, but what in its engagement with what can never again be also contains a flicker of pleasure.

Self Portrait at the Age of 63, Rembrandt (public domain)

The first of the paintings discussed – a self-portrait by Rembrandt dating to 164? – renders him a gaze uncompromising both in realism and emotive depth. As if a halo of past loss haunted the present, this gaze testifies to something unamenably broken. Rembrandt painted the portrait some months after her daughter, Saskia’s death, and the eyes reveal all the pain of this tragic event. Yet, there is something else there besides the evident sorrow and residual regret. A gleam of light that signifies, if not pleasure, then perhaps some faint satisfaction with the artist’s own moral standpoint; Saskia’s death could not have been prevented, it did not ensue from a moral failure of Rembrandt’s. This feeling is conveyed to the observer in a curious interplay of torment and self-security, challenging, in this way, the idea that regret must qua be separate from all positive affects in its connotation. The second example, one of Monet’s Waterlilies paintings, also follows in this trajectory. In a painting without narrative clues, however, the sense of regret is manifest in stylistic choices. Here it is the use of colour – darker, earthy pigments overshadowing the light green and pink of the lilies – and composition – the once cultivated lake left to be reclaimed by nature, that attests to a bittersweet state of being. Resisting closure, this work mourns a happier time. Perceptible to the sight only, it still offers a way, not to relive, but to remember.

The second film having ended, we decide on continuing the evening with conversation. Listening to the talks of the newly formed little groups, it is evident that the evening sparked many ideas. Some talk about their thoughts when painting, while a couple circle back to discussing the Sublime. As the night slowly comes to and end, the participants return home not only with newfound thoughts, but also with a sense of belonging; to this impromptu community, to the art world at large, to those that made it happen. A must-see program series for all.