#danholdsworth

The concept of Sublime is becoming more and more complex alongside the evolution of technologies and media. 

The traditional conception of Sublime is maybe defined for the first time by the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke, who in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) tried to give a name to the feelings that the self experiences when confronted with something incommensurable, threatening, terrifying. Therefore, Burke sees the Sublime as a characteristic intrinsic of natural elements such as stormy seas, huge mountains, deep nights...

A little later Kant, in his Critique of Judgement (1790), shifts the focus from the external elements to the ones in within the human body. For him, the sublime was a way of describing what happens when the subject is confronted with something which cannot be explained by the reason. When a subject realises that what he is seeing is something bigger then himself and therefore finds himself unable to give it an explanation, then he is made aware of his incapacities, his limited powers and the limitations of his own mind. 

With the evolution of new technolgies, man started to be confronted with many different realities. The ‘invention’ of photography, especially, shifted quite quickly from a medium of faithful reproduction of reality, to artistic medium. 

During the first half of the 20th century, thanks to the lively artistic movements that developed (New Objectivity, Conceptualism) the role of photography has been reinscribed into many different aestethics. With the New Topographic show in 1974, landscape photography particularly, took a turn towards a conception of sublime defined as ‘mathematical’. This, related to reproduction of images of huge numbers and scale, grew quickly thanks to the industrial developements flourishing then. 

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Public Relations:

Dan Holdsworth / Martin Parr / Sarah Pickering / Paul Shambroom

Safle - Public Art Wales & St Davids2. 2012

Curated and edited by Russell Roberts & Emma Price Public Relations is a series of four commissions that explore different pulses of Cardiff and its urban sprawl in response to the building of the St Davids2 shopping centre. Each of the artists/photographers involved - Dan Holdsworth, Martin Parr, Sarah Pickering and Paul Shambroom – have been drawn to range of situations loaded with the historical weight of the City, its sites of memory, myth, future fantasies, community lives and other expressions of belonging and citizenship. Public Relations exists as a limited edition book-work consisting of posters and newspapers; it offers four alternative accounts of a city at a particular moment animated by increased consumption.