What place does the sublime have in contemporary and modern art?

Within this thesis through the close reading of ‘A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)’ I intend to investigate the theories of the philosopher Edmund Burke as well as Jean-Francis Lyotard and Immanuel Kant. In ‘The Postmodern Condition (1979)’, Lyotard showed how the sublime is “the incommensurability of reality to the concept which is implied in the Kantian philosophy of the sublime.” It cannot be expressed in representation and relies on the language of abstraction and the intangible to give it form. Ultimately, I will argue that it is expressed negatively, such as through the dissolution of form or the presence of voids. Similar to that of Malevich’s ‘Black Square (1915)’. The structure of this thesis will be centred around the artworks of Kazimir Malevich, Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor. It is the performative nature and the staging of the ideas of voids that can make the artwork sublime, it is the bodily and mental negotiations that engage with the audience that are sublime.