Jon McCormack Universal Zoologies (detail)
1998/99 Installation

During question time at the Byte Me Forum, a slightly peeved audience member charged the panel with "trying to communicate the uncommunicable". Prosaic and a tad pejorative though her comment certainly was, there was also something of the sublime in her accusation: "Presenting the Unpresentable" is how the French philosopher Jean-Francios Lyotard describes the sublimity of the avant-garde. For him, the beautiful art object is staid, reactionary and stultifying. Sublime aesthetics, on the other hand, offer the chance for a radical social critique.