Artists keep imagining Doomsday
It’s getting harder to escape doomsday. Popular literature, big-budget movies, your favorite home-streaming service — wherever you turn, someone has found nasty new ways to imagine the future of the human race. It’s a trend typically attributed to seismic shifts in political, technological and social norms, and it can stress a ticket-buyer out.
Since times of upheaval are nothing new, we can surely learn a thing or two from earlier generations about coping. That’s how I approached two exhibitions now on view at Marquette University’s Haggerty Museum of Art. One repurposes images from turbulent times of yore to comment on the turbulent now. The other explores a particular moment of history that inspired its own outpouring of dystopian angst.
“The World Turned Upside Down: Apocalyptic Imagery in England, 1750-1850” focuses on a specific place and era experiencing its own then-seismic shifts. Revolutions in colonial America and France were challenging age-old monarchies. Science and secularism were on the rise, religious authority under question. The agrarian way of life was giving way to industrial development.
Sarah Schaefer, a visiting assistant professor from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, has curated a collection of prints, book plates, paintings and other works to give us a sense of the skittish atmosphere that reigned at this time, and the debates that raged. Historians will find much to comment on here, but I was curious about the creative impulses this period produced. How did thinkers and artists react to a confounding new world, looming threats of war, and long-standing institutions at risk?
With a very familiar embrace of calamity and disaster, it turns out.
The exhibit is a creative assortment of misery, death, damnation and ruin. Depictions are rooted in Christian symbolism and in particular the Book of Revelation, which foretells the coming of the Apocalypse. Political figures and heads of state are lampooned. Winged devils, wigged skeletons, crowned skulls, cherubs in revolutionary caps, and beheaded hordes — there’s a profusion of gore, agony, and dread. The artists of this time pulled no punches.
Caricature was coming into its own. But this era also produced the concept of the “sublime,” which in art was manifested in dizzying, awe-inspiring landscapes, an approach well suited to scenes of foreboding. Nature is ominously sharp-angled and overwhelms human figures. Light struggles to make inroads against the dark.
Two mezzotints by John Martin struck me in particular in the way they depict menacing forces descending from dark skies. “The Opening of the Seventh Seal” (ca. 1837) and “The Destroying Angel” (1836) haunt with all the impact of modern science-fiction. In Martin’s day, it was God sending unspeakable judgment from the heavens. Today, it would be aliens with horrifyingly advanced technology.
The overall impact is one of gloom, turbulence, and the promise of a very bad ending, not so different from a typical lineup of premium-channel shows today. And, much as dramas and sitcoms co-exist with news programs, we also see some wicked satire and caricature. Some carries all the zing of a lively Twitter exchange.
“Mr. Burke’s Pair of Spectacles for short sighted Politicians” (1791) mocks politicians, philosophers and preachers who made opposing, and often hyperbolic, predictions about the French revolution. British Prime Minister William Pitt is depicted as Death itself in James Gillray’s “Presages of the Millenium” (1795) and as fanning the flames of war — in the guise of a building on fire — in “The Times,” after William Hogarth.
“Upside Down” invites us to consider a bygone period of disruption with the benefit of distance and perspective. By contrast, “The Refugee Trilogy,” on view in adjacent galleries, adds distance to a present-day tragedy. Moved by images of the Syrian refugee crisis, artist Rick Shaefer responded by creating three large-scale charcoal drawings that depict the universal story of refugees. Produced between 2015 and 2016, they are titled “Border Crossing,” “Water Crossing,” and “Land Crossing.” Each uses imagery from the Baroque era to create monumental scenes of struggle and anguish.
Shaefer has copied and rearranged human figures, animal figures, landscapes and other details from Old Master paintings (primarily Rubens) to give us epic, cinematic scenes of roiling figures muscled and robed, battling and expiring. They’re skillfully executed, and they make a point about the recurring cruelty of the diaspora experience. But applying a centuries-old, European aesthetic to a global tragedy unfolding in real time seems too tidy a package. It lets us off the hook, emotionally.
The next time I watch an episode of “The Walking Dead,” I might take some solace in knowing that apocalyptic doomsayers have let their imaginations run wild before and we’re still here to talk about it. But then again we’re still talking about it. There’s little solace in that.
“The World Turned Upside Down” and “The Refugee Trilogy” are on view through Jan. 14 at the Haggerty Museum of Art on the Marquette University campus. Visit www.marquette.edu/ haggerty.