I believe that here in America, some of us, free from the weight of European culture, are finding the answer, by completely denying that art has any concern with the problem of beauty and where to find it. The time without a legend or mythos that can be called sublime, if we refuse to admit any exaltation in pure relations, if we refuse to live in the abstract, how can we be creating a sublime art?

- Barnet Newman, The Sublime Is Now, 1948

At a time when concern for a 'socially engaged art practice' seems to have come to dominate discussions about contemporary art and its audiences, Afterall number 2 serves as a kind of mild palliative. This third issue covers the work of five artists whose activities, while certainly recognising the contribution of the audience, do so more as a group of perceptive individuals rather than as a constituency to be represented or served. Indeed, perception - as in the initial encounter with a work of art - is emphasised by the five artists in terms that come close to Newman's notion (via Kant and Burke) of the sublime as unbeautiful and a measure of the inexpressible exaltation of our relationship to the phenomenal world.

The sublime has traditionally been associated with romanticism, as an emotion invested with both terror and wonder simultaneously. In The Sublime and the Avant Garde (1989), Jean-François Lyotard proposes to ask the question whether it is possible 'to find an alternative to the sublime which is not romantic'. We might interpret his task as accepting a challenge offered by those experiences that fall outside rational and measurable encounters with daily