'The Technological Sublime': Combining Art and Archaeology in Documenting Change at the Former RAF Coltishall (Norfolk, UK)

Since at least the 1990s, archaeologists and artists have been documenting military installations following the withdrawal of service personnel. They have usually embarked on these recording opportunities separately, experiencing these sites as derelict, lifeless places, with stripped buildings devoid of much of their meaning after their occupants have left. Archaeologists have typically created maps and made photographs. Artists have also taken photographs, but in addition made films and created soundworks. Wherever the medium and the motivation, the assumption is usually made that only those closely familiar with the rhythms and rituals of service life can begin to understand the emptiness of what remains. And being secretive military installations, creating a record during their occupation is never an option. Uniquely, in the months leading to the closure of RAF Coltishall (Norfolk) in 2006, the RAF granted the authors unprecedented access to record the base's drawdown and closure. The project brought artists and archaeologists together to see what could be achieved in unison, while still maintaining some degree of research independence. In undertaking this survey, three related themes emerged: the role of art as heritage practice, new thinking on what constitutes landscape, and the notion of a 'technological sublime'. Following an earlier publication, we now reflect again on those themes. In doing so, we offer this collaboration between art and archaeology (traditionally considered two distinct ways of seeing and recording) as an innovative methodology for documentation, not least after the closure and abandonment of such military and industrial landscapes, where occupational communities had once lived. In this article, the words represent our ideas; the images and films are an example of the result.

The Technological Sublime: Metropolis (1927)

Metropolis displays a deeply conflicting attitude toward industrial modernity. Conceived and marketed as a marvel of film technology, the film pursued the techno-romantic project of transcending material reality through technological means. What is more, the goal was to capture the unfathomability of technology itself. Metropolis simultaneously portrays technology as an agent of tyranny and dehumanization and flaunts it as spectacle. Special effects facilitate encounters with overpowering technological environments and omnipotent machines, which give rise to sentiments that are best described in terms of a “technological sublime.” The sublime characterizes experiences that go beyond the earthly and finite, to attain a spiritual dimension. In attributing transcendent qualities to mechanical objects, the technological sublime embodies the technoromantic paradigm.

Transatlantic Topographies

This first chapter explores the geographical and historical sweep of the modernist vertical imagination in both Europe and the Americas. It begins with comparisons between Franz Kafka’s imagined Amerika and Max Weber’s writings on the “spirit of capitalism” after traveling to the United States, as well as W.E.B. Du Bois’ conceptions of racial stratification and uplift after studying in Germany. From here, it considers the rise of American empire and capitalist culture in terms of industrial scale, vertical elevation, and the “technological sublime.” Key examples include Eugene Jolas’ Verticalist movement in relation to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in relation to the rise of New York City; major writings by Vicente Huidobro, Jorge Luis Borges, Hart Crane, George Oppen, and Claude McKay; and conceptions of racial stratification, uplift, and solidarity in Richard Wright’s Native Son, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land.

Landscape and Its Double: The Technological Sublime

The essay inquires about the historical condition of representation in our present while invoking the modern experience of the sublime and landscape as the medium of that experience. Can the sublime as the experience of the subject confronted with the very limits of representation be extended to our late capitalist conditions of mediatized representations? What constitutes “a landscape” as the site of the experience of the sublime in late capitalism? The essay addresses these questions through a renewed discussion of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility” (1936) by focusing on the discussion of the aura and the decay of the aura in relation to landscape. In the wake of the failure of a transformative praxis to bring about a new social order, the technologically hyper-mediated engagement of man with nature under the conditions of extreme alienation and reification results in the production of the aesthetics of destruction experienced as “supreme pleasure”. In the age of the atomic bomb and technological hyper-mediation, the singularity of the moment of the experience of the sublime is multiply reproduced. The essay ends with an analysis of Werner Herzog’s 1992 film Lessons of Darkness as an example of rendering cinematically the aura’s survival under the conditions of its decay in the burning oil fields of Kuwait. Capitalism’s “desert of the real”, as the vast desert in Kuwait in Herzog’s film, is precisely the landscape in relation to which the subject attempts to represent that which evades representation (the event, nature, capitalism, and so on).

The Fearlessness of Vitality: Transforming the Sublime in Painting of the 2000s

The article is devoted to vitality in the art of the twentieth century, interpreted as the Sublime. Vitality manifests itself in art in a very diverse way. The dramatic attitude of the world, suffering, and pain are often synonymous with “vitality” today. But the art of oblivion is also permeated with vitality, “intoxicating”, helping to overcome the horror of existence; as well as art, attaching to the metaphysical source of being. It can be defined as sacred optimism and the ancient art and the art of the avant-garde are especially vividly evidence of it. In this case vitality is in direct contact with the Sublime. Seeking out the “other world”, overcoming the limitations of the mortal and suffering world is carried out through the transformation of the Sublime. Today the subject of the Sublime in art is at the peak of research interest. This is evidenced by the project The Art of the Sublime, launched in 2008 by the Tate Modern gallery (London, UK), dedicated to the study of this phenomenon from the Baroque era to the present day. It touches upon all types of visual art from painting to installation. Research shows how evolution goes from the natural Sublime, realized in the depiction of rare and impressive natural phenomena, to the technological Sublime, which declared itself in the second half of the twentieth century, to the distinction between the Sublime and the beautiful. In modern Moscow painting, we meet the implementation of the principle of the Sublime in the work of the artist Vladimir Matveev. Relying on the sacred art of Russian icons, and the avant-garde, the color discoveries of post-impressionism and the energetic abstraction of neo-expressionism, he creates his version of the Sublime in contemporary painting. In his large-format canvases, the artist expresses the essence of the vital as the Sublime, metaphysical and mental principles with the help of rich color and sharp juxtaposi- tion of abstract and natural forms.

Futuramas and Atom Bombs

This chapter shifts away from geographical landscapes to focus on technology during the period. Not only does the chapter examine debates over the “technological sublime” at the 1939/40 New York World’s Fair, it examines ways that science fiction authors use the “sf grotesque” to highlight the potentially devastating environmental and social consequences of uncritical forms of technological progress. The early work of Ray Bradbury and Judith Merril calls attention to the apocalyptic threat of the atom bomb by exposing its effects on the natural world as well as on human communities and bodies. Merril and George Schuyler also call attention to ways that ideologies associated with Western notions of science and progress have been used to support gender and racial inequality. In Black Empire (1938), Schuyler envisions innovative forms of renewable energy created by Black scientists that allow them to establish independence from Euro-American control.