Abstract
The history of landscape painting envisions ways of valuing and devaluing the natural world. The aesthetic category of the sublime introduced a modern conceptualization of nature to this genre as an inaccessible and awe inspiring other. The romantic sublime’s tropes have informed ideas of wilderness, fueled unfettered development and notions of “progress,” and animated manifest destiny. “The Reparative Sublime: Embodied Ecological Thinking” proposes an ecologically minded relationship to the romantic sublime’s affective valences of wonder and awe. Rather than considering these affective orientations as distantiating and bewildering, the reparative sublime envisions and embodies connective and entangled relationships to the natural world. This presentation will examine select, historic landscape paintings that represent the romantic sublime ethos while bearing witness to environmental concerns. These works’ intimation of care through concern will provide historic context for a proposed aesthetic subcategory, the reparative sublime. Contemporary thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Karen Barad and Isabella Stengers inform consideration of frameworks for the reparative sublime and work by contemporary visual artists and pigment experts, including Heidi Gustafson, John Sabraw, and the Wāhine Māori art collective demonstrate this aesthetic through their work and research.
Presenters
Elise RichmanProfessor, Art and Art History, University of Puget Sound, Washington, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Ecology, Environment, Aesthetics, Painting, Pigment, Sublime
