The Horizontal Sublime in Post-apartheid Gothic Landscape

Abstract

This article examines how the sublime, as a form, operates in landscape from the post-apartheid period. Starting from the traditional view of landscape as genre at the turn of the twentieth century, and moving through W. J. T. Mitchell’s assertion of landscape as medium in the transitional phase, I move to demonstrate how landscape operates as verb in post-apartheid visual art, following Jill Casid’s notion of performative space. Casid’s “landscaping” connotes embodied action, whereby human beings enact the landscape and are acted upon by the landscape. Consequently, the relationships between persons, and also persons and “the environment”, are revealed, disentangled, and potentially reimagined. Immanuel Kant’s sublime operates where meaning fails, and where form gives over to formlessness. This loss of meaning presents itself as stasis and melancholia, which I will relate to the sublime. I consider this incarnation of the sublime as horizontal. The landscape interpretations discussed do not present the sublime as height, depth, and weight; rather, it is characterised by vastness and emptiness that point to transcendental desire and a spiritual connection with place and others. These landscapes incorporate gothic elements that speak to loss, anticipation, and the ambiguous features of place. The spiritual aspects of landscape are best revealed in performance and installation works where artists approach landscape as a verb in the activation, making, and reinterpretation of natural and manmade spaces that have a bearing on individual and collective identities.