Landscape and the Sublime-week 6
'Untitled' (2002) Richard Misrach
Richard Misrach's photography reflects the concept of the Sublime, from the Enlightenment.
Research Misrach's work by reading about his intentions, and also by looking at the work. Then answer the following questions;
1 The characteristics of the Enlightenment are a scepticism towards the doctrines of the church, individualism, a belief in science and the experimental method, the use of reason, that education could be a catalyst of social change and the demand for political representation. Its main social and political consequence was the French revolution.
The core period of the Enlightenment was second half of the eighteenth century. The thinkers associated with the Enlightenment include d'Holbach (1723-89) and the Encyclopedists in France, David Hume (1711-76) in Scotland and Kant in Germany. To understand the Enlightenment we have to look at what preceded it.
ttp://www.philosopher.org.uk/enl.htm
2 Is when something has the quality of greatness, whether being physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic . It can also be described as something that has that certain wow factor in which nothing can ever compare to.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublime_(philosophy)
3 The concept of the sublime came out in the enlightenment period as the artists of the time had a new set of values. One being the new found recognition of the beauty in nature. Seeing the beauty British writers, taking the 'GrandTour' in the 17th and 18th centuries, first used the sublime to describe objects of nature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublime_(philosophy)
Richard Misrach has enjoyed a reputation as a trailblazer in contemporary photography since the 1970s. He was one of the first artists to explore the possibilities of large-scale color prints and one of the first to focus his politicized art on modern society’s irresponsible behavior toward our natural environment. The combination of these innovations led to his longest standing project, the beautiful and angry "Desert Cantos" series, which has engaged him for practically his entire career.
His “cultural landscape” art, as it is often termed, has taken on military despoliation of nature (in 1986–87’s "Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West") and industrial pollution (in "Cancer Alley," which he made in 1998) with palpable social engagement. His newest book, the 20-by-16-inch technical tour-de-force On the Beach, recently published by Aperture, heralds a rather more complex vision of humankind’s place in the natural order. Pictured on the cusp of beach and ocean, the individuals in Misrach’s latest images seem every bit as vulnerable as the world that they occupy. The work is at once more urgent and more poetic as a consequence.
http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/26514/richard-misrach/?page=2
