The art historian Anna Zika explains aspects of the aesthetic category of the sublime in the photographs of Marcus Wildelau.

Transcending all understanding –

The Sublime in the pictures of the Baltic Sea by Marcus Wildelau

Text by Anna Zika, FH Bielefeld

The paintings of Greifswald's Caspar David Friedrich are considered by many to be the epitome, even the "invention" of romanticism. Hardly a view of the wide sea or high mountains that would not be measured by his pictures. The fact that we experience these looks as "beautiful" is indeed an invention of the time around 1800. Until then, the open sea, whose ends did not appear anywhere, was considered devouring and threatening, inhabited by evil-willed sea monsters; high mountains, e.g. the Alps, were perceived as an accident of creation and so thought of as so ugly that some travelers preferred to close the curtains of their carriage windows rather than expose themselves to this visual imposition. Hardly imaginable from today's point of view, these are popular tourist destinations which - according to the advertisement for them - promise relaxation and health, strength and joy. But when and how did the senses and sensual perception change?

Since the second half of the 18th century, philosophers have been trying to explain why the fearsome and abysmal, the conspicuous and the uncontrollable also exert great attraction on us. For example, a "pleasant horror" consists of the heart muscle contracting in shock and then relaxing again. This experience is just as possible when observing the forces of nature - thunderstorms, avalanches, thunderstorms or volcanic eruptions as well as roaring gorges - as when looking at their images. The prerequisite was the save distance to such impressions and the exhilarating feeling of being "raised" above the danger and to be "dismissed with strengthened self-confidence".1

Her first users borrowed the term "sublime" from rhetoric: there the sublime marked the moment of great shock and emotion. In English and French, the corresponding "sublime" describes something beyond the limits of our perception (and imagination). The mental effort to process the aesthetic charm with mind and soul is implied in each case.

For centuries, "beauty" has always been "good", i.e. ethically flawless, morally integer, functional and endearing. Conversely, the evil, the false had necessarily to appear as ugly, i.e. as the opposite of well-formed, smooth, luminous, cute, pleasant for eye and ear. Were rules essential for the production and construction of beauty, such as the compliance with proportions, the effect of ugliness mainly came about through its absence. However, flawlessness always runs the risk of causing boredom and ultimately weariness when viewed over a longer period of time. The normative aesthetic, which only kept the beautiful and rejected everything else as discarded, was extended by the "mixed sensation" of the sublime to a "double aesthetic”. This represented a decisive modernization boost in the thinking of western people2. Here the sublime asserted itself either as a contrast to beauty, as its preliminary stage or as an enhancement and finally - precisely in the Romantic - as the beauty itself3, as a truthfulness whose abysses can (at any time) turn into horror.

The filmmaker and photographer Marcus Wildelau treads this fine line between beauty and astonished horror with his Images along the German, Estonian, Swedish and Finnish Baltic coast. At first glance, they resemble the images with which the tourism industry advertises the Baltic Sea as a mind-German place of longing more intensively than ever before. But while visual propaganda shamefully conceals what the waves hold, Wildelau confronts us with this very freight: hardly any sea is as poisoned by war- and industrial waste as the Mare Balticum. The neighboring states carelessly disposed of chemical warfare agents from both world wars, long-term radiant nuclear waste, nitrogen and other poisons from mechanized agriculture.

We get into the dilemma of wanting to find the photographs "beautiful" because our valuation patterns originate from art and its traditional theory. The longing for beauty is satisfied by the "recognition" of pictorial compositions, the impression of soft colors and atmospheric lighting moods; but now the knowledge of the devastation of motives opposes this. Moreover, Wildelau once again reminds us that "landscape" is not the recreational space given by nature, which we may experience as pleasurable; rather, "landscape" is consciously (albeit without hesitation) created and prepared by man according to his needs, right up to the destructive exploitation of resources.

The historical theory of the "sublime" requires that man must be at a safe distance from catastrophe in order to enjoy it as a sensory spectacle. The pleasant feeling of not being exposed to any real danger proves to be deceptive today, because the safety distance is no longer given! Marcus Wildelau urges us to expand the aesthetic dimension of the "sublime" by an intellectual dimension: Contamination and environmental destruction are to be thought of, even felt, where we cannot (yet) see them. This sounds difficult, but it is possible: the sea is wide and deep - it is naturally beyond our full coverage. Therefore, it offers a projection screen for beauty and terrifying Things at the same time against the background of a "double aesthetic"! In the widened view the sensual and the mental horizon widen. "We know what we can't see" (M. Wildelau). And in the end, we thus see what we know. The realization of the total endangerment of our beloved "beauty" leads to an insight into the - self-inflicted - threat to our own existence and into the urgency to finally act differently.

Anna Zika

1Hubertus Gassner, zum Geleit, in: same (Ed.), Caspar David Friedrich. Die Erfindung der Romantik (Kat. to the exhibition at the Museum Folkwang Essen and the Hamburger Kunsthalle), München 2006, p. 11-17, here p. 11.

2Compare in more detail Carsten Zelle, Schönheit und Erhabenheit. Der Anfang doppelter Ästhetik bei Boileau, Dennis, Bodmer und Breitinger, in Christine Pries (Ed.), Das Erhabene. Zwischen Grenzerfahrung und Größenwahn. Weinheim 1989, p. 55-73.

3Compare Christine Pries, Introduction. In: Pries 1989, a.a.O., p. 1-32, here p. 3.