Page 31 - Nada temas, dice ella

The Lineage of Those Who Are Ambitious
I.
‘The Sublime is Now.’ This was the title of a short though famous essay pub- lished in 1948 by American painter Barnett Newman in which he declared his faith in a mystical art that he himself, along with Mark Rothko and Clifford Still, practiced during the years that followed the Second World War. What he meant was that it was time for the sublime, the time for a transcendent art. He was referring to a ‘modern sublime’, removed from the structure of conventions erected by tradition, though in the wake of a lineage of ambitious explorers of the Absolute: Michelangelo and Rembrandt, Friedrich and Turner, or in the twenti- eth century, Malevich, Rothko and Smithson. ‘We are reasserting man’s natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship to the absolute emo- tions. We do not need the obsolete props of an outmoded and antiquated leg- end. We are creating images whose reality is self-evident and which are devoid of the props and crutches that evoke associations with outmoded images, both sublime and beautiful. We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the de- vices of Western European painting. Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or “life,” we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.’1 With this programme, Newman situated art on a contemplative path, whose mission was to topple the orthodox tower of beauty and replace it with that other metaphysical, suprasensuous and intensely introspective universe that he materialised in large ethereal fields of colour made of pure pigment and pulverised light in an untraceable, barren and uniform space.
Throughout history, artists have informally addressed divine issues with a familiarity denied most human beings. In spite of the historical and theoretical complexity that this implies, moving between shadows and light over the cen- turies they have discovered subtle answers when speaking of an unknown and unutterable beyond.
Yet although the religious element has occupied an essential position in the de- velopment of artistic activities, any homogeneous view of this fact would be naïve, and is in fact hindered by the artistic breaks that have altered the relationship be- tween art and transcendence, by technological-political mutations and by changes in collective sensitivity.2 Let’s begin by remembering that even Christianity was born under a taxative theological aversion to the magic of images, to bodies and