Apocalytic Art

// November 3rd, 2011 // Uncategorized // Katherine Sola

Currently showing at the Tate Britain is an exhibition of John Martin’s work with the blunt name of Apocalypse. Martin was a melodramatic Victorian painter with engineering aspirations best known for his epic depictions of God wreaking havoc in the mortal world. This is one of his most famous paintings: The Great Day of His Wrath from 1851.

It shows the actual end of the world, and very scary it is too. There’s an unnaturally powerful gravity at work here, and it’s actually sucking the landscape and all the people into that abyss at the bottom of the painting. The abyss is the visual centre here, all the lines of the picture draw the eye towards it, and crucially it’s in complete darkness. We don’t know what’s in there or how it’s pulling everything in, and I think you’ll agree that that’s disturbing.

This depiction of forces beyond the scope of human experience forms part of ‘sublime’ painting. The word ‘sublime’ is frequently bandied about, but it’s actually a fairly complex philosophical idea. The first thing you have to know is that anything that’s so big you can’t see the beginning or the end of it is inherently frightening. That’s because when we can’t see the boundaries of something, our eye imagines that it’s infinite. If parts of this big object are hidden by strong light or deep darkness, then it’s even more frightening because it makes it even harder to imagine the boundaries. In the same way, very powerful forces are horrifying because they’re just so much bigger than us. Extreme forces and dimensions like this can be called sublime, and they’re generally only found in the natural world.

The idea is that when we see something with these sublime characteristics we’re frightened which sets off our feelings of self-preservation. As you probably know, the self-preservation instinct is the strongest we have, and when we realise that this terrifying thing we’re looking at is not actually directly threatening us, we feel a kind of delight at being safe, and this delight is also the sublime.

It might surprise you to learn that when people saw this painting in the 19^th century their sublime feelings were so strong that they actually fainted, and had panic attacks and were carried out with smelling salts. I don’t imagine that’s happened to any of you, and that’s because you’ve seen far more realistic images than these in cinemas. The Tate exhibition draws links between Martin’s fantastical apocalyptic images and the taste for destruction we see in modern cinema. Apparently, Martin deeply influenced the video games, science fiction and special effects we take for granted today. So, the Tate’s showing disaster movies like The Towering Inferno and The Day after Tomorrow in conjunction with the exhibition.

Interestingly, we wouldn’t consider those two films as great examples of the art of filmmaking. Similarly, Victorian critics dismissed Martin’s paintings as populist and overly dramatic. They were promoted in much the same way as today’s blockbusters, with hysterical advertising, gaslight showings and discounted tickets. Perhaps today’s trashy movies are tomorrow’s artworks. And if you care to ruminate on your own mortality with an apocalyptic piece of art, brief the Exchange!