Perhaps no other philosophical category is better suited to \u00adtheorizing aesthetic inadequacy than the sublime. Not surprisingly, the advent of postmodernism proper is concatenate with a renewed \u00adinterest in this concept, and particularly as it was articulated by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Judgement <\/em>(1790). Unlike previous works on the \u00adsubject, Kant\u2019s Analytic of the Sublime<\/em> contended that the sublime did not occur in nature or in \u201cany sensuous form,\u201d but instead \u201cconcerned the ideas of reason.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement<\/em>, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 92. <\/span> It was therefore an elusive event, a feeling<\/em> that occurred only within the spectator. In contrast to the beautiful, which produces a pleasing and harmonious balance of faculties, the Kantian sublime results from a mental rift, a cleaving of the mind in which reason thinks the almost unthinkable\u2014infinity, death, limitlessness, disaster\u2014and imagination fails to provide it with a commensurate image. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Forced to \u201cthe limits of what it can present,\u201d imagination does \u201c\u00adviolence to itself in order to present what it can no longer present.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime<\/em>, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 55.<\/span> The \u00adsublime, as such, is literally the unimaginable, and it can only be \u00advisualized \u00adnegatively as a failure to present the unpresentable. Ironically, it is through this very frailty\u2014this \u201csinking into insignificance before the Ideas of reason\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Kant, 105.<\/span>\u2014that imagination unexpectedly acquires the \u00adwherewithal to \u201ccome back to itself.\u201d6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting<\/em>, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 142.<\/span> One of the many paradoxes \u00adinherent to the sublime is its \u00adability to imbue states of fragility and failure with a sudden and \u00adunforeseen strength, a reversal of fortune in which reason appears like an \u00adimbalanced tyrant, and fractured imagination like a heroic \u00adsurvivor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Inasmuch as large portions of contemporary existence continue to escape adequate representation, particularly within the dominant modes of cultural expression, artists remain committed to \u00adexploring the limits of the presentable, whether it is according to modern, postmodern, or some other yet-to-be-defined set of aesthetic principles. In recent years, a \u00adnumber of strategies have come to the fore, in many cases \u00adelaborating \u00adprevious approaches and subjects, a significant \u00adnumber of which may be \u00adassociated with proto-modern periods such as the Renaissance and Baroque. Although both these eras were riven with paradox and \u00adcontradiction, the former is the stranger, more disjointed of the two, a \u00adcrucible in which the volatile elements of industrialism, capitalism, \u00adcolonialism, and modernity fomented. Fragility, the vanity of human \u00adexistence, and end of all things were common tropes within the Renaissance\u2019s intricate web of \u00ad\u201crevolutions,\u201d and not surprisingly \u00adhistorians continue to debate the proper definition and validity of this historical period.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Within the relatively vast sphere of Renaissance art, an entire genre of painting was tellingly devoted to presenting material pleasure as a fragile, vain pursuit in comparison with the sublime and eternal \u201cglory of God.\u201d Employing a complex lexicon of negative symbols\u2014skulls, \u00adrotting fruit, time-pieces, bubbles, flies, flowers, slain animals\u2014vanitas<\/em> still lifes (from the Latin word for vanity) were intended to pique the \u00adconscience of Renaissance entrepreneurs made wealthy by industrialization, \u00adagricultural advancement, and expanded trade routes. The contents of these \u00adpaintings\u2014lush and painstakingly rendered man-made or natural objects laced with a hint of purification\u2014were supposed to evoke in the viewer sublime Ideas of death, morality and the hereafter. Ironically, vanitas<\/em> still lifes quickly became desirable objects in themselves, sought after by wealthy collectors with an avarice that contradicted the painting\u2019s original moral message.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Vanitas<\/em> still life employed a negative form of presentation \u00adeasily \u00adassociated with the Kantian sublime. According to Kant, although the Ideas of reason \u201ccannot be contained in any sensuous form,\u201d they could be \u201cexcited or called to mind by that very inadequacy itself.\u201d7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Kant, 92.<\/span> As such, a still life depicting the tender flesh of a peach slowly rotting beneath the shadow of an insect \u201cinadequately presents the infinite in the finite,\u201d8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Derrida, 131.<\/span> or in other words, it shows us what we \u201cpermanently thrust aside in order to live\u201d morally.9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - \u201cAbjection, on the other hand, is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady.\u201d Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection<\/em>, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Contemporary artists working in the genre take this subtle form of \u00adabjection to greater lengths, replacing delicate Renaissance symbols of emptiness and futility with aestheticized images of consumer waste, \u00adgarbage, or partially consumed processed food. Where once a \u00admeticulously painted scull symbolized death and the dangers of \u00admaterial indulgence, plastic packages and refuse now stand in for new ideas of hell and human weakness, including the global social inequality brought on by capitalism, the environmental destruction of the planet, and the wars and displacement resulting from both. While the aesthetic strategy remains one of inadequacy\u2014\u201cinadequation presented in its own \u00adyawning gap\u201d10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Derrida, 132.<\/span>\u2014there is a noteworthy shift from a narrative of exquisite self-sacrifice to one of wanton self-destruction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is possible to distinguish at least two different methods of \u00adinvoking vanitas<\/em> still life in a contemporary context: one that quotes, at times almost directly, from the historical canon of these paintings; and another that takes a more pop art, ready-made approach. Laura Letinsky\u2019s series of photographic still lifes falls within the former category. Depicting the haunting remnants of meals scattered across pale, minimalist tabletops, her images\u2019 spare, elegant aesthetic recalls the intimacy of a Chardin painting. The subtle inclusion of mass-produced items\u2014a half-eaten red lollypop, a crushed pop can, an empty carton\u2014shifts the work from poetic to critical, however, conjuring the desultory effects of \u00adconsumerism, both social and ecological, as well as the failure of grand narratives such as \u00adprogress. In a related vein, Montreal photographer Louis Joncas \u00adcreates visually lush still lifes from his own garbage, evoking a similar sense of human fragility and weakness. Neatly arranged on the pristine white \u00adbackground of commercial product photography, his Detritus<\/em> series \u00adpresents a \u00adchanging array of refuse linked to common addictions\u2014sex, drugs, nicotine, junk food\u2014diversions that many use to assuage or silence their fears of failure and death. Unlike traditional vanitas<\/em> still lifes, \u00adhowever, the work of both artists focuses on the moment after \u00adconsumption, thus fostering a profound sense of ambivalence and even meaninglessness. In these photographs one sees that material desire has not been resisted, but it has also not been entirely fulfilled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Working more in the spirit of Andy Warhol or Claus Oldenburg, Toronto photographer Colwyn Griffith exemplifies the second \u00adcontemporary approach to vanitas<\/em> still life. Photographing products culled from a sea of consumer knock-offs available in Dollar Stores all over North America, Griffith plays upon and confuses the conventions of \u00adcommercial \u00adphotography and still life. Podium<\/em> (2006), a work devoted to an array of consumer products whose brand-names superlatives (Top Notch, Premier, Spice Supreme, etc.) invoke the myth of modern value, ironically reduces modern grand narratives to cheap rhetoric. Also constructed from groups of Dollar-Store products, Apple<\/em> (2006) and Orange<\/em> (2006) depict a \u00adconsumer vision of the natural world in which an endless array of \u00adproducts serves to eulogize an environment destroyed by consumerism. While Renaissance vanitas<\/em> still life used the delicate frailty of the natural world to symbolize mortality, the plastic versions in Griffith\u2019s photographs are disposable but do not decay. Instead of reminding a greedy populace of the inevitability of death, these images offer a new, more disturbing form of vanity. In the words of Jean Baudrillard, \u201cIf objects no longer grow old when you touch them, you must be dead.\u201d11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End<\/em>, trans. Chris Turner (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 101.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Although many contemporary artists are dealing with similar ideas and socio-political issues in their work, like the artists above they also remain engaged in an aesthetic practice. In many ways, this \u00adfloating between art and politics encapsulates the current atmosphere of \u00adcontemporary art. In its worst manifestations, art theory appears to have reached the end of a great banquet of ideas, and, like an addict, has begun flailing nervously for just one more course. The side effect is a kind of stuttering: post-post-modern, neo-modern, double aftermath, first past the post…the list of possible names for the last supper goes on. And yet, we are still surrounded by the aesthetics of inadequacy. Indeed, this may be its most important moment. Perhaps all that is required at this point is simply a conscious experience of this insufficiency, this failure of \u00adimagination. Although the distance between contemporary art and Renaissance still life is vast, their lessons remain largely the same: without taking a moment to quietly realize the limits of material existence reason quickly turns to madness and imagination becomes its slave.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/65_DO01_Falvey_Letinsky_48_pink-scaled.jpg\")
photos\u202f: permission de l\u2019artiste | courtesy of the artist & Yancey Richardson Gallery <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/65_DO01_Falvey_Letinsky_114_Gourmet.jpg\")
photo\u202f: permission de l\u2019artiste | courtesy of the artist & Yancey Richardson Gallery <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/65_DO01_Falvey_Griffith_ORANGE-scaled.jpg\")
photo\u202f: permission de l\u2019artiste | courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n