Week Two: Getting Lost

Getting Lost

• Juddy.hopper@gmail.com• www.jackdawshivers.com• @oldweirdalbion– #TateWanderlust

Getting Lost: Objectives

• To discuss Nature, Wildness, the Sublime and the Eerie.

• To become lost as to what is, and what is not, Wild.

• To imagine ways in which art can allow us to be subsumed by The Wild.

• To use gallery artworks to refine our language of Wildness, Nature, the Sublime and the Eerie.

Writing Exercise #2: Artwork Sketch

• Choose an artwork that interests you• Sketch it, as you did your landscape, with

words; fragments; sentences– Divide into sensory and non-sensory lists

• Map where your two sketches intersect– Are there obvious sensory similarities?– What similarities exist in memory, emotion,

history or myth?

Getting Lost

• Our task today is to lose ourselves.• To become muddled of the mind, and allow

ourselves to be subsumed by nature.• The contemporary ‘sublime’ and notions of

Wildness, Nature, the Natural.• Edmund Burke, 1756, “A Philosophical Inquiry

into the Origin of Our Ideas of The Sublime and Beautiful”

WHATEVER is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling … (Burke)

THE PASSION caused by the great and sublime in nature … is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that, far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force. (Burke)

Sublime

Sublime

Getting Lost

• The Wild, Wildness: A new ‘sublime’.• Jay Griffiths, Robert Macfarlane: Botanizers of

The Wild.• Yearning for Wildness.• A search for an ‘other’? Or a reaching out to

self?

Getting Lost

• Death to dualism!• Natural vs. Un-natural in the Anthropocene• “… [N]ature is not natural and can never be

naturalized, even when human beings are far from the scene.” – Graham Harman, Guerilla Metaphysics

• Sites not connected to ‘Wilderness’ scoured for ‘Wildness’: Edgelands.

Edgelands: Political

Edgelands: Liminal Space

Edgelands: Night

Edgelands: Night

Getting Lost

• One new term: The Eerie• Mark Fisher, Justin Barton, On Vanishing Land• Landscape intentionality• Unknown motives• M.R. James, Nigel Kneale, Picnic at Hanging

Rock• The unknown and incomprehensible Wild

The Eerie