From the Mountain to the Sea

The sinking of the sublime object

by Pierre D'Alancaisez

It's a little like this: there are lines in the air next to your head, next to your glance zones for the detention of your eyes, your smell, your taste, that is to say you're going around with your limits outside and you can't get beyond that limit when you think you've caught anything fully, just like an iceberg the thing has a small piece outside and shows it to you, and the enormous rest of it is beyond your limits and that's why the Titanic went down.

Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch, 1963

Around 2008, the contemporary art world was obsessed with ‘the sublime’. As critical paradigms go, it was a fertile one: what is art for if not pondering nature’s awe-inspiring yet unrepresentable majesty and monumentality? Critics compared looking at Damien Hirst’s shark to being inside Paradise Lost. Photographers like Edward Burtynsky kept the mystical-pictorial tradition vital for the 21^st century. Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog reigned supreme. 

But this critical sensibility was all gone by the time the Titan submersible sank in June and, to steal a quip from Karlheinz Stockhausen, became 2023’s greatest work of art. For all the media frenzy in reporting Titanic film director James Cameron’s hunch about the fate of the expedition, nobody paused to wonder at its promise of an experience like no other. We learned about the failings of the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) treaty but were not once asked why people routinely risk their lives in search of truth at the bottom of oceans and the top of mountains. The way the story was reported marks a fundamental change in how we approach the incomprehensible. It also heralds the abolition of nature as an authority on natural knowledge.