When the raft was eventually rescued after 13 days, only fifteen men remained alive. Dead or dying, the figures cut a horrifying scene as they are thrown about on the turbulent West African sea. The enormous canvas, almost 23 by 16 feet, depicts the survivors and less fortunate occupants of a life raft that had been cut adrift from a stricken French navy frigate, sunk by an incompetent captain. Many consider this gory and chilling work to be Géricault's magnum opus, and it changed the direction of modern art. Whether with eco-tourism or an exhibition spectacle at a museum, people increasingly pay for a sublime experience, and some would argue that the contamination of the experience by capital subverts the original ideas of the sublime. The politicization and commodification of sublime spectacle has led recent scholarship to look more closely at the sublime and its relation to capitalism and how experiences of nature and technology are sold to consumers.Human technology now captures the imagination and controls much of our life, and what began as an enthusiastic embrace of how technology can enrich our world has in many cases turned into a fear of the technological sublime. In the 20 th century, artists interested in the sublime often turned to machines, technology, and factories to find the extraordinary and overwhelming.Even in secular contexts, the sublime conjures something awe-inspiring and reminds us that humans are not necessarily at the center of the world.
So often the sublime evokes a sense of what is beyond us that we cannot comprehend, and for this reason it has long been associated with religion, spirituality, and transcendence.Most influentially, Emmanuel Kant located the sublime in humans' incapacity to understand terrifying vastness and because of this we recognize our own smallness and limitations. In order to understand human feeling and passions, writers attempted to systematically interrogate the sources of said feelings. Modern evocations of the sublime took root in the philosophical writings of the 17 th and 18 th centuries.Artists employ the sublime to comment not only on our relationship with nature, but the fast-changing pace of technology as well as troubling contemporary events of war and violence. Because the experience of the sublime is relational - we feel ourselves in relation to something larger than ourselves - artists interested in the sublime use myriad methods and mediums - from color and perspective to immersive installations and sound - to create an experience that engages the viewer's senses and brings him or her into the work. Through its various definitions and interpretations, at its base, the sublime is a feeling rooted in humans' relationships to the world, to nature, and what lies beyond that help us to formulate an understanding of ourselves.
Theorized as early as the 1 st century, the sublime has captivated writers, philosophers, and artists alike. Feelings of terror, awe, infinity, and minuteness swirl and course through an experience of the sublime in nature, and for centuries, artists from Donatello to Bill Viola have attempted to recreate that experience in their paintings, sculptures, and video projections.
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