the body of water: contested sights

from : Total Recall

Contested depictions of the Romantic Tradition

Professor Peter James Smith

A second instance of take-up of The Sublime by the general public involves Australian national identity. On a recent trip to the "Red Centre of Australia", to Uluru, the spiritual, sacred and nationalistic heart of Australia, I experienced the traffic jams at this famous rock as thousands of people arrived by car to view the sunset. It is a long journey to reach Uluru, from any corner of the country. On any given day, at sunset, hundreds of cars line up as if in the parking lot of a shrine, the occupants spilling out into deck chairs and vantage points to watch a religious spectacle of fading light across the rock face. Since this massive rock is 348m in height, it remains sunlit even after the sun has dropped below the horizon, almost into the period of astronomical twilight. The occasion is quiet and solemn. The parking lot holds vehicles with Australian flags draped across their windows. Is this is a different sense of nationalistic identity from Neudecker's apparent undercutting of German Romantic traditions? There is an air of serious homage at Uluru as people seek a transcendent and authentic viewing experience. Although this is a sacred place for the Pitjantjatjara Aboriginal people, and is protected by their custody, it would seem to represent the spiritual heart of all Australians. Unlike Neudecker's mountains, it is a place of pilgrimage, where we are drawn to a completely memorable and sublime experience.

Conclusion

In the late postmodern period of our time, post-9/11, The Sublime is alive and well. This paper gives contemporary instances to suggest that the interpretation of the Romantic Tradition is heavily contested. I have argued that the currency of the Romantic Tradition has substance beyond a shallow focus on nostalgia.

If, in her diorama manufacture, Neudecker is singing the German tradition of Romanticism and at the same time being wary of German nationalism and history, then the response must be that her work is received on a whole world scale. It is received in far-flung places such as Australia and New Zealand, where a reading may be informed by post-colonialism. In the same places, other readings may be informed by the commercial imperatives of advertising and the clarity of communication that this requires. Still in Australasia, readings of the romantic tradition are through both an Aboriginal and a European filter. For example, the local lessons from famous Europeans such as Mattias Zurbriggen are etched with naming rites onto the slopes of Aoraki Mt Cook in New Zealand: the Zurbriggen summit route on Aoraki Mt Cook is recallable indeed to those who have experienced it.

I have argued that the Contemporary Sublime is not a let-down, pause, interruption, nor interrogation of banality: it is still a territory of uplift that feeds the positive drivers of the human psyche. It is the line-up of cars at the Uluru sunset. It is the Tasmanian wilderness photograph. The positive psyche reveals itself in film, contemporary art, documentary photography, mountaineering, advertising, and in the 3D digital realm. Just as David Caspar Friedrich foregrounded human figures and human motifs in his vast sublime landscapes, so scale still implies majesty and is conveyed with helicopters on icebergs, ships in bottles, falcons in clifftop sunsets, carparks at Uluru, and battle stations in digital warcraft. As a contemporary landscape artist, I question how to capture the engagement that the public has with sunset at Uluru. I can identify a need to paint that which draws us all to the spiritual heart of this place, but the image of Uluru remains profoundly local in a profoundly international contemporary art market. Even so, contemporary creative practitioners are indeed working with this material: the viewer is invited to reconnect with the past, to satisfy a yearning, or a longing for something better in the future, and to take action now. Clarity of recollection ascribes importance to some events over others, and helps guide us in what we keep. At best, it affords the stubbornness of a residual lift that takes your breath away.