Drowning in the Sublime | Adrian Hatfield | TEDxWayneStateU

[Music] how do you depict something that you can't truly comprehend throughout my career I've attempted to do just that make art about subjects that I don't really fully understand I came by this pursuit honestly I was raised by scientists my mother is a microbiologist and my father's a geologist when I was growing up they did a great job of sharing their fascination with the natural world with me my father especially loved challenging me with really huge concepts so evolution the infinite universe consciousness just to name a few it was later in life that I realized these ideas were related to the philosophical idea of the sublime now in casual conversation we use the term sublime to mean something that's really great and we might use it to describe an especially delicious piece of cheesecake for example in philosophy sublime refers to a greatness beyond measure sebuah sublime subjects are by definition beyond human comprehension or adequate description when in the presence of the sublime we may feel a pleasurable sense of wonder but it can also be terrifying and make us feel insignificant a classic example is being on a ship during a raging storm at sea so when we witness is sublime our individuality falls away but we may feel a oneness with the universe as we recognize so we are a tiny fragment of an incredibly unimaginably unimaginably vast reality because the sublime subjects are literally beyond human comprehension if we're going to try to talk about them we need to create a simplified stand-in in place of the actual concept now my father when I was growing up delighted and blindsiding me with these simplified explanations of huge scientific concepts so for example 10 year-old me might be at the dinner table talking about dinosaurs as I was known to do and my father would say you know speaking about dinosaurs the earth is about four and a half billion years old and that's a really long time but if you took that four and a half billion years and compressed it to one calendar year the earth and the rest of the solar system is created on January 1st the dinosaurs don't go extinct until almost a full year later on December 26 humans show up on December 31st at 11:36 p.m. and Jesus lived and died eight seconds ago so I'm sitting there with my mind thoroughly blown and he sits back feeling pretty good about himself so these simplified examples of vast subjects are staples of scientific education and their beautiful ways that you can present a sublime subject in a way that we can digest now being an artist I'm especially interested in the visual ones so Ernst Haeckel was the nineteenth century naturalist who made a number of evolutionary tree illustrations this one called the pedigree of man is meant to show how every organism that has ever lived on the planet is interrelated now that is no small task and it was even harder when that idea was relatively new and it had completely changed the way that we thought about the world and our place in it now science isn't the only field where people have attempted to depict incomprehensible huge events or ideas in this religious painting by 15th century Italian painter Giovanni de pollo he shows us the creation of the universe in it the universe is presented as a globe with the earth at the center of the globe surrounded by a series of concentric circles they represent first the four elements than the known planets the Sun and finally the constellations of the zodiac presiding over the scene is God the Father he's carried by angels and bathed in a divine light it's a lovely image and it's one of my favorite paintings but it's really really weird now when I've attempted to depict equally vast subject matter I try to use I've commonly tried to use the symbolic narrative of religious imagery with the explanatory techniques of science so in this piece called Katie in the Second Coming I've used the visual language of diorama to depict the most famous mass extinction of all time the KT extinction event happened when a six-mile-wide asteroid smashed into the earth at forty five thousand miles an hour this created an explosion more powerful than the explosion that would be created if every nuclear weapon that currently exists on the planet were to detonate simultaneously now try to wrap your mind around that for a second I don't know if I can truly even imagine a single nuclear detonation I mean when I try I go to some old newsreels and a scene from Terminator 2 and like that's about the best I can do so this Manhattan sized chunk of rock and ice smashes into the earth at amazing speeds and it throws up so much debris that it encircles the planet and blocks out the Sun for years this killed all of the non-avian dinosaurs and more than half the species on the planet the ecosystem was absolutely devastated but every mass extinction is followed by an explosive period of creative evolution as the survivors adapt morph and rush in to fill the niches that were vacated by the recently departed in my diorama the asteroid is played by a taxidermy chicken who is simultaneously playing the role of destroyer creator and omen of the future the chicken is literally one of the wonders that the dinosaurs evolved into now recently I've been focusing on just one sublime event there have been five mass extinctions in the history of the planet and many scientists believe that we're currently in the beginning of a sixth mass extinction what distinguishes this mass extinction is that it's caused by human activity now that is a terrifying prospect but the lovely silver lining you'll remember is that every mass extinction is followed by an explosive period of creative evolution so thinking about how all the new species evolved from the survivors of the past era I've been sampling snippets from art history primarily from paintings that were done around the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and recombining and recontextualizing them into new sparse landscapes so in this painting Yan winix is hair and Zhu Barnes Lamb of God have merged into a single creature that's monstrous yet powerless it hangs suspended in an amorphous environment that is still yet to find its equilibrium in this painting I've transformed one of Martin Johnson heeds hummingbirds into an aberration that's crowned with a dozen useless beaks so I want these creatures to be disturbing absurd maybe funny but definitely sympathetic this is not one of my paintings you might recognize it as fragonard's to swing it's a rokoko masterpiece of hedonistic decadence where the shoe of one clandestine lover is lost in the heat of passion in my painting the people and the lush forests are gone and only the shoe remains I think out of context the shoe takes on a darkly humorous tone after I finish this whenever I look at it I imagine the sound of a cartoon car crash so in this painting by date loo Blanc a surprisingly adorable nightmare sits on the chest of a sleeping woman in my painting the last one I'm going to show tonight Blanc's rabbit headed imp doesn't have any more innocent sleepers to terrify so he sits crestfallen on the back of a headless crocodile so I want these paintings to be absurd and sad but it's also oddly beautiful and strangely hopeful because they're not only about the terrible and unnecessary loss that we may experience but also about the vast and unknowable wonder of what is yet to come thank you very much [Applause] you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 1,390

Rating: 4.9230771 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Art, Ideas, Life, Nature

Id: mTv6wHlX8ls

Length: 10min 4sec (604 seconds)

Published: Mon May 21 2018