A Brief and Terribly Incomplete History of The End of the (Art) World
By Matthew Rose
“…Everybody knows the war is over, everybody knows the good guys lost.” – Leonard Cohen.
Most endings signal a lack of imagination, and the dinosaurs probably didn’t have much time to imagine theirs when an extinction-level comet thwacked the planet, ushering in the first of several dark ages. The coronavirus, more recently, reminded us of another (potential) extinction event. Regardless of the genius of our art and architecture, science and technology, we find ourselves swimming towards midnight as the Doomsday Clock tick-tocks us towards ruination – with only 89 seconds to go.
The End of the World has been with us since the beginning of the world, and mankind has spent eons illustrating it, singing about it, reveling in it, fearing it, and dreaming and scheming about it. The apocalypse is the stuff of stardust, and our sad truth: We are born, we live, and we die. Death is our end point in history, or at best, our consciousness of it. Humans will surprise you, though, with their aspirations, especially the believers and the artists.
Deadly Dialectics
“Everyone wants closure,” a novelist friend told me about the end of art, among other endings. “But there is no closure — just more signs, more dialectics, more synthesis, more antithesis, more new syntheses.” Closure, the end times, is a simulacrum – smoke and mirrors – something that, according to Jean Baudrillard, replaces reality with its representation.
Notions of armageddon, cataclysm, catastrophe, devastation and the day of reckoning (and revelation) populate the literary and aesthetic battlefield. The vocabulary for the end of the world is extensive because the final curtain call features a deep bench of prophets, prognosticators, charlatans and out-and-out believers, as well as armies of artisans and craftsmen. With their crystal balls, parchment scrolls, heavy leather-bound books, songs, or altar pieces, they serve up deep-dive explanations for the faithful or the wanton about the Big Bang 2.0. I doubt there’s a more popular subject in art (or life).
Binge-worthy visual and cinematic end-of-the-world consumables number in the thousands. Planet of the Apes, Terminator, The Matrix, Don’t Look Up, Melancholia, Silo, Paradise, The Road, Snowpiercer, Blade Runner, Mad Max, Station Eleven are some you might know. The increasing tide of celluloid pulp on the apocalypse film page on Wiki–shows that investment in global bloodbath is a winner.
Wasteland fiction, around since Genesis and, more famously, since Dante, celebrate post-apocalyptic lifestyles with fascist turns; yarns like Fahrenheit 451, 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, Neuromancer and others merge religious fervor with military dystopia. Nickel Creek, the bluegrass trio, turned the “21st of May” into a hit about that spring day as the end of the line.
Survivors (spoiler alert!) star in this myth making, with good guys tucked cleverly in the stories for a dose of hopium. Superman, a survivor himself, is a hero in thousands of pop art works. Having escaped from Krypton, a greenish planet that exploded spectacularly in another space and time, the man of steel helps satisfy the collective hunger for happy, though illusory, endings. Twilight Zone supernovas, biolab screw ups, and real and emotional volcanoes are the disaster anthems of our lives. Have you seen Roberto Rossellini’s film Stromboli recently?
“The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” (1818) by Caspar David Friedrich shows us a man surveying the frozen planet; he is alone and not properly dressed. This romantic take on humanity against all odds is heartbreakingly pessimistic (to me). Lascaux cave artists’ renditions of wild beast sightings and where to find said protein, by contrast, were optimistic, encouraging their audiences to increase their odds of survival with another day on the hunt. These prehistoric sketches, meat-section Instagrams for a crowd of grunting shoppers, find themselves millenia later cloaked in darkness to better preserve and protect them from French graffiti taggers—another group of artists who would like their names inscribed in the historical record. Tourist throngs visiting the caves see only good-enough reproductions of the origins of the art instinct.
Sin City
Dutch fantasist Hieronymus Bosch relentlessly and comically showed off the rich supply chain of judgment and annihilation in his surreal end times altarpieces – “The Temptation of Saint Anthony” (1501) and “The Garden of Earthly Delights” (1490-1500). Hell and hellfire never looked so awe inspiring. Théodore Géricault’s “The Raft of the Medusa” (1818) presents a more realistic portrait of hell and the struggle against starvation, cannibalism and death, a metaphor for the art project itself.
Western art, long self-obsessed with its own demise, has designed its implosion with a view to a splendid singularity. From wall-length Veronese history tableaux and soaring Renaissance dramas, to more scientific, paint- and process-obsessed impressionist canvases, the subject of art became art itself, a race to reduction. The shift shocked the art public with a peak under the skirts, showing bare canvas (think Manet); this rawness upended the morality of the bourgeoisie…for about a nanosecond. The monied class soon found its own endgame could replace church patronage; “culture” blossomed. Merchants bought artworks and prints; collecting became fashionable and soon enough, investment grade. Captains of industry led the romp; the new was favored over the old. Foppish country gentlemen hunters, romantic vistas and bible dramas gave way to sexier strategies like “Dejeuner sur L’herbe” (1862) from Manet, plastic fruit from Cezanne, and the trashing of Renaissance space thanks to experiments by Picasso, Braque, and Duchamp.
Twentieth-century abstractionists like Kandinsky, Klee, Kokoschka, and other Europeans piled on with cerebral, acid-colored landscapes and characters. Between the World Wars, Dadaists upped the ante with out-and-out burn-it-all down theater. The direction was internal, psychological, and the subjects were the mind, philosophy and science. You could just smell the conceptualism beginning to ooze into the salons.
With bigger visual shocks came bigger players and bigger payouts; beyond Russian princes and American robber barons, intellectual travelers like Gertrude and Leo Stein in the early 1920s began hand-selecting abstractions, favoring movement, bold color, material and materialism, and a fresher, more surreal world, discarding the one people were living through. Simultaneously, photography blew the windows open to the good, the bad and the ugly, while – at least in the West – Art with a capital A seemed to take out its anger and disappointment from industrialization, war and poverty on the canvas and the material itself.
What seemed to please people only 100 years prior yielded to full-on abstraction; in the bleeding out of the postwar era, visionaries like Jackson Pollock with his drips, and Willem de Kooning and his signature slashes reinvented the end game. Abstract expressionism helped bury the visual picture plane in an emotional hostage crisis; it also helped corner the market for American art (perhaps by political coup), and opened the barn door to an all-inclusive baroque era. Everything from John Cage’s “Silent Concert” 4:33 (1952) to Allan Kaprow “Happenings,” stricter, flatter, minimalist efforts, mechanical Warholian death-mask productions and market-savvy baubles like Koons’ banal balloon poodles and Damien Hirst’s cherry blossom idiocies all found a home–and a market. Reflecting the world (or just the rich collectors) was fashionable; illustrating the vapidness of the people living in a sad world dominated by conspicuous consumption was marketable. This melancholy of abundance seemed to have a point: drive a stake into the heart of meaning and let marketplace blood and plastic body parts replace it.
Technology flooded in, too: computer art, digital art, and plotter art. Paris-based American Joseph Nechvatal, an East Village icon, makes virus-based canvases with a computer program eating away at the digital images. Wade Guyton’s computer-aided inkjet wallpapers found their market in the 2000s. Brit art star Martin Creed won the Turner Prize in 2001 for “The Lights Going On and Off” (2000), a piece in which lights were automatically flipped on and off. Burlesque hit a new high.
Earth, Wind & Money
Running out of stone, metal, canvas or irony, some artists went after Earth itself. The intrepid ones chased the sky or its glow, like the shaman of light, James Turrell. Hitting the ground with picks and shovels, earthmovers like Michael Heizer excavated tons of dirt, creating vast holes and craters in places few people ever venture. His removals and rock impositions emphasized negative spaces, as in “Levitated Mass” (2011-2012), a boulder placed atop a passage to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Andy Goldsworthy climbed mountains and came down like Moses with handfuls of Mother Nature’s manna – snow and dirt; Richard Long scored a line in an empty field with his heel. Robert Smithson and his Spiral Jetty (1970) pioneered the land art movement with a design that shaped a spit of land into a spiral jetty (what you see is what you get) at Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah. Climate change and the drying of the lake mark this landmark of land art for extinction.
Like a lesser-known New Testament scribbler, Walter de Maria’s large-scale land art emptiness, “Lightning Field” (1977) in Catron County, New Mexico, tackled meaning, purpose and experience in novel ways inviting people to wait for the wind to blow, lightning to strike and the cacti to grow. His “The Broken Kilometer” (1979) in Soho, New York, features 500 two-meter long brass rods marking time quietly in a room – the static wonder of a precision death. He went full-funeral with his “The Vertical Earth Kilometer” (1977), a one-kilometer brass rod buried in a one-kilometer shaft at the Dia Art Foundation in Kassel, Germany. The top sliver is visible–just barely. A brass circle in the dirt. There’s a grave marker for you.
More compact reductions of the minimalist discipline include Carl Andre’s piles of bricks and Robert Ryman’s endless series of white canvases, aspirations to formal purity, a different kind of Nirvana. The sound of one hand clapping. Sol Lewitt gave away the canvas and preferred to draw directly on the wall like his caveman ancestors. Frank Stella’s early 1960s efforts to objectify the canvas with his own brand of minimalism employing overt geometry–stripes inside shaped canvases in paint-can grays and blacks–were dry and dutiful. His subsequent betrayal of that impulse from his Princeton days towards a maximalist factory “contraption” aesthetic marked his last few decades and showed how hard it is to put the nail in the coffin when there’s money involved.
Joseph Kosuth’s “One and Three Chairs” (1965) is emblematic of this attempt to win the art world obit grand prize. Like James Joyce’s bid to end the novel with Ulysses, Kosuth sought to take down the entire art project much like Duchamp tried 50 years prior with a urinal and a wink. Typically dressed in mortuary black, Kosuth offered up an ordinary chair, a silkscreened dictionary definition of a chair, and a photograph of said chair. The artist has gone on to make umpteen editions of the legendary work and then to fill galleries with neon sentences in French, German, English, and other languages he doesn’t speak in an effort to map out a reality he feels is important. Yet the object, like a residue, persists. The endeavor has a whiff of neurotic nihilism: everyone chasing the perfect epitaph.
Like Kosuth, others ended up knocking out doleful martini-lounge-sign-odes to the Austrian language philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. These artists imbued words with enough electricity to boot up the subjectivity of consciousness into pure mind vaporware. Lawrence Weiner, Jenny Holzer, Christopher Wool, the Guerilla Girls, and to some extent, Barbara Kruger, all turned to text to pry open a literal can of brain worms. Their projects bear-hug the “sign” as harbinger of the end as a way to define existence, emotion, and the conundrums of our age. Kruger’s “I SHOP THERE FOR I AM” resonates still, does it not, Jeff Bezos? Words are the pathway to all things aesthetic, the shortest route from your mind to the nothingness that most closely reflects reality. Even minimalist light artist Dan Flavin printed up official certificates (and installation instructions) for his works to accompany his Home Depot light fixtures.
Other practitioners whose dream was reducing reality to language included Fluxus artists, an unwieldy movement of creators who produced reams of somewhat incoherent “scores,” Haiku-like directions for short ironic performances.
We live in an era when the universe swings from art star to art star in snuffling yawns. It makes you wonder what responsibility, if any, artists take on for their work when it’s debatable whether art has any power whatsoever to change the course of humans – or the planet. But know this: Nature doesn’t care about your Picasso drawing, not even the preparatory ones for Guernica (1937)–a serious work showing what man-made end times look like, and it’s pretty awful. The screams in black and white and grey are audible, too, in the earthquakes in Turkey and Japan; the tsunamis in Sri Lanka and India; the fires in Los Angeles; and the bombings in Kyiv and Gaza.
Fantastic Failures
There are so many ways to get to the end of the (art) world, but once there, what do we find? A Ray Johnson “nothing” performance of people milling about in an empty church then shuffling off home? Or something else? Fantastic failures? Perhaps Facteur Cheval’s “Palais Idéal” (1879-1912), brutally-produced constructions, point more honestly to the gateway off the planet. “Outsider” artists’ dreamworlds illustrate the escape routes in ballpoint, broken plates or matchstick soot; for some they have become holy relics and religious destinations in themselves. These creators are typically blind or deaf or both, or simply, wonderfully, peacefully mad. The French postman, Facteur Cheval accumulated hundreds of thousands of stones and cemented them together in his own glorious backyard Church of Madness in a town south of Lyon, France. Taking some 33 years to construct (all by his lonesome) reminded me of the insanely beautiful temple Angkor Wat in Cambodia or the Simon Rodia “Watts Towers.”
The outsider itch is often erected in monumental installations—Earthships whose mission it is, if not to spirit the maker away, then at least to hide him or herself away. Howard Finster, the American outsider artist, created his own “Paradise Garden” (1970) in Summerville, Georgia. The folk art haven is a major tourist attraction with an ample souvenir shop of books, puzzles, and gallery items. Finster gained additional renown with his R.E.M. and Talking Heads album art. His naive aesthetic, featuring faces pockmarked with admonitory religious texts, decays gently in his garden, a soft reminder of the ordinary aims of the humble, obsessive servant. Finster’s junk, implanted on a substantial plot of acreage, came about because he had a calling from God, a compelling, manifestly mission-critical art project. Outsiders see and live the end of the world in ways other artists involved in the buying and selling of objects, images, and ideas, do not.
Extinction as Art Form
In the West, we’ve flipped the meaning of the end of the world from a religious admonition to a theatrical joke, and it can be terrifying–witness Rudolf Schwarzkogler and Hermann Nitsch’s violent, bloody self-harm art forms. Or, it can be something more conceptual. A broken presidential nose on Mount Rushmore or the idea of it; or just a broken heart? Maybe it’s a book we’ve never read (the Bible?), a doorbell ringing, the wind blowing, a trout swimming upstream, children selling pot brownies at a roadside bake sale, a gun firing in a field (or a school), or a cat choking on a chicken bone. Trump’s tariffs? Sharpie-signed pardons? Bankruptcies?
How about living in poverty? A protester with a “The End is Near” sign on a street corner. The Internet offering up 404 Not Found pages and the world telephoning someone about it, on hold for hours. Well, the comet is on its way, the conspiracy has gone viral and the “concept of a plan” is loose. Performance art would have the avenues split open and thousands of Teslas and drivers disappearing into the gaps. People could cheer. Maybe the high point of endgame art in our era is poisoned food or water or air? Possibly. New York City Subway and its rats? Mass murder?
To be sure nature wouldn’t care if humanity were to end. Some 45,000 years ago, more than 85% of Australia’s mammals, birds, and reptiles went extinct shortly after the arrival of the first humans, according to Sci News. What makes us so special? Nukes?
Mass extinction, just to cheer you up, occurs when biodiversity plummets. There have been at least five extinction events during the last 540 million years. We are currently in the midst of the sixth – the Holocene Extinction — thanks to man-made activities. To focus the mind, of the estimated eight million species of plants and animals on earth, a million could go extinct within a decade. Some 73 genera (the larger taxonomic classification of species) of animals have disappeared since 1500. For perspective, the Lascaux Cave paintings were produced some 17,000 years ago. So here we are—still making art, believing in…what exactly?
Today’s real (and last) artists might be the non-artists: the old men and women puttering about and protesting the Ukraine war in Russia’s public squares, holding up blank sheets of paper and getting thrown in jail for it. That’s the end of their world.
Art making as a philosophical inquiry with consequences seems to have collapsed under our feet as we’ve been busy, out window shopping. The art of our times in our “dare I eat a peach?” epoch is more perfectly expressed in simply watching it all happen—rising waters drowning cities, the Gulf of America ablaze in a flaming oil spill, nuclear winter snowing on your cornfield—all live on your iPhone. Staggering, unexpected beauty. Has Art come to save us or merely enlighten us about how it all ends? Can an artwork even signal such a thing? Probably not.
After we’ve tossed our Schnabels in the chasm, what do we do? Giggle along with Banksy sitting atop a pile of worthless Bitcoins? The Buddhists among us might zen out and contemplate the lost-in-space vibe of Ad Reinhardt’s black voids, seeing the truth in the muddle—a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.
It seems that Art knocked on our cave doors long ago with the purpose to scare the bejesus out of us, give us a hearty chortle and a couple of stupid-look selfie souvenirs of our astonished kissers just as we woke up, rubbed our eyes, ready to meet our maker.
About the Author
Matthew Rose is an artist, writer and pessimist living and working in Paris, France. He mounted a 2008 exhibition entitled “The End of the World,” an overdose of hundreds of strange objects, collage works and prints plastered edge to edge, floor to ceiling in Atlanta, Georgia. Instagram @mistahcoughdrop_official
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