Metropolitan Sublimes

This seminar asks: How can the sublime recast a notion of the urban subject and the technologies of experience in relation with the environment? The course is divided into three interdependent threads which are central to the metropolitan sublime. First, questioning naturalism and the formation of modern dichotomies (subject/object, nature/culture, etc.) that constitute the framework for the sublime. Second, reinterpreting the pictorial traditions set by the Hudson River School of painting, as they expanded to include the representation of landscapes, buildings, and engineered artifacts, through the notion of the infrastructural sublime. Third, exploring alternative paradigms of art practices—assemblages, sculpture, landscape—that weave together heterogeneous elements in time and space, to re-position architecture. These practices include: surrealism, environmental art, conceptual art, installations.