What? An atomic bomb in Cork?

A real atomic bomb is part of an exhibition at the Crawford gallery which juxtaposes sublime romanticism with the technologies of terror, exploring art in an age of uncertainty

IF YOU'RE thinking of putting together an atomic bomb, a good starting point might be the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork. There, as part of the exhibition Terror and the Sublime, you will find American artist Jim Sanborn's installation Critical Assembly, first made in 2003. It consists of a room-sized array of technological equipment. All the apparatus is said to be a very convincing reconstruction of the laboratory at Los Alamos in 1944-1945, where the first atomic bombs were put together. Remarkably, in fact, much of what we see, including the two halves of the metallic sphere intended to hold plutonium and uranium, is real. And it looks it.

We know what this fairly anonymous, even bland-looking setup led to both in the short and the long term – from the horrors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the Cold War and the continuing, global ramifications of the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Sanborn’s installation is presented as a contemporary example of a work of art that evokes the sublime, a prospect that so exceeds our powers of comprehension that we regard it in a state of giddy terror.

The sublime in that sense first entered general discourse from the end of the 17th century in Europe. Terror and the Sublimelooks at the way it found its way into Irish art throughout the following two centuries, and the way the idea continues to resonate in the Irish and international art of our own uncertain time.

NOT SURPRISINGLY, perhaps, the show hinges on one of Edmund Burke's few forays into philosophical theory, his 1757 essay A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.As Peter Murray and William Laffan detail, in substantial essays in the show's richly illustrated catalogue, the affluent, politically astute and socially influential Burke delivered what is in many ways a prescriptive rather than a descriptive aesthetic treatise in his enquiry, rather in the manner of a Clement Greenberg of his day. "But art," Burke observed in his essay, "can never give the rules that make an art." So he formulated some rules for artists of his time.

Typically, sublime subjects are vertiginous Alpine gorges, tempests and sea storms, and vast spatial expanses that reduce the hapless human subject to abject irrelevance. Yet, as those who make horror and disaster movies well know, for the spectator there’s pleasure in the apprehension of danger or horror at a safe remove.

There’s also another, transcendent aspect to the sublime, in the glimpse it offers of an overarching divinity. Burke included a sociopolitical dimension, with the image of individuals desperately struggling against the odds. His friend James Barry actually depicted himself and Burke in just such a predicament in a mythical allegory.

Burke was friendly with several Irish artists, and facilitated patronage and contacts for some of them. He knew George Barrett as well as Barry, who at least read the enquiry; as William Laffan notes, direct evidence that individual artists did so – as opposed to responded to the general prevalence of ideas of the sublime, often derived from Kant – is scant.

Such is the case with the successful Irish painter James Forrester, who was based in Rome, and whose dramatic, darkly lit compositions certainly fit the sublime bill. They are also, however, a little awkward technically, and generally inferior to work by Barrett and some of the others.

Those others mostly came later, and accord more closely with mainstream Romanticism. The sublime is generally associated with the shift of intellectual gear from the Enlightenment to the unfettered subjectivity of the Romantic era. Although no one quite seems to agree on what Romanticism is and when it began, everyone knows it when they encounter it. In art and ideas, it favoured the subjective over the objective, emotion over rationality, and produced the romantic idea of the creative individual, the artist, as an impassioned genius, a tortured spirit and a bit of an outsider – a Van Gogh or a Gauguin, for example – something that still, probably in too many respects, holds sway in the popular imagination.

Among the later artists close to Burke's own time, although taking us well into the 19th century, is the landscape painter James Arthur O'Connor, whose work looks outstanding in context. Francis Danby is best known for his dramatically charged The Opening of the Sixth Seal, but there are quieter, impressive pieces here, in the mould of Casper David Friedrich. Others include George Petrie and the strikingly odd Samuel Forde whose The Fall of the Rebel Angelsis an Avatar-style fantasy.

And so to the sublime in our own era. Several works on view self-consciously refer to artistic antecedents. Paul Winstanley's painting Two Figures on the Shorerecalls Friedrich in the same way that Danby's work does. There's a less direct echo in Theresa Nanigian's fine, startling photographic work featuring a lone figure in a clear-felled forestry landscape. As Clare Langan's terrific film trilogy, set in several different post-apocalyptic environments, makes clear, the introduction of a human, mechanical agency of environmental degradation is relevant to any treatment of the sublime in the 21st century.

In fact, in the 1960s in the US, Leo Marx and Perry Miller were instrumental in developing the idea of the “technological sublime”, something consolidated, explored and elaborated in a 1994 book by David Nye. Not only, goes the argument, did European settlers find ample scope for the natural sublime in the epic American landscape but, as the 19th century progressed, the notion was extended to the man-made landscape, to huge technological feats, including such engineering feats as the Brooklyn Bridge, and to aspects of science and technology in themselves, as manifest in electrification, for example, or manned spaceflight or, indeed, the building of the atomic bomb.

The notion of the technological sublime is implicit in much of the contemporary work on view, but generally the emphasis in the catalogue commentary is on Burke’s 18th-century conception of the sublime. His idea of a figure faced with unspecified though deadly adversity is evident in pieces by Cecily Brennan and Nigel Rolfe. The prospect of a limitless space overwhelming our imaginative capacities is there, strangely enough, in Andreas Gursky’s photograph of the façade of an apartment block, and in Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Rothko-like photograph of the ocean or Sean Shanahan’s monochrome painting.

The abiding implication of Terror and the Sublimeis that, far from being merely a specific art-historical category, the sublime is always with us. The show's subtitle, Art in an Age of Anxiety, points to the fact that every age is anxious. Peter Murray argues that we are still, in many respects, in the Romantic period, an era of irrationality in which the Enlightenment promises of increasing knowledge and progress have not been realised, and may never be.

Looked at under the label of sublimity, the works in this big, ambitious exhibition, throw out lots of ideas and expand on Burke’s main insight about art and rules: in order to stay relevant, art must make its own rules.

Terror and the Sublime: Art in an Age of Anxietyis at Crawford Art Gallery, Emmet Place, Cork, until Feb 27. Tel: 021-4805042.

On Wed, Feb 3, six of the artists in the exhibition – Nigel Rolfe, Aideen Barry, Michelle Deignan, Theresa Nanigian, Sean Shanahan and Cecily Brennan – will take part in an evening of presentations and discussion at the gallery from 6pm-8.30pm. Admission is free.