Apocalyptic Sublime Research Articles

False Religion and Hypocrisy in Signorelli's Antichrist

This article discusses the iconography of Luca Signorelli's Sermon and Deeds of the Antichrist (c.1502–3) in the Cappella Nuova at the cathedral of Orvieto. A combined investigation of the Antichrist's subject matter, Signorelli's literary and visual sources, as well as his discarded drawings for the entire fresco decoration of the Cappella Nuova, brings fresh insights to the thematic intentions of the artist and his advisers. Signorelli's entire view of eschatology marked a renewed interest of Italian artists in the apocalyptic sublime. It also signified a revival of the medieval tradition of the Antichrist as the arch-hypocrite, and his reign as an apocalyptic age of hypocrisy. At the same time, the artist's treatment of the subject matter indicates an ambiguous stance toward religious hypocrisy characterized by a suppression of the anti-clerical and millenarian aspects of the Antichrist myth.

Monastic Sinscapes, the Bird’s-Eye View, and Oppressive Silences

While the modern photographer and filmmaker relies upon cranes and planes--products of modern technology-- for the purpose of gaining a more comprehensive and larger-than-life perspective, monastic thinkers have relied on spiritual and rhetorical strategies to create and authenticate similarly broad and objective frames of vision. Such strategies play a crucial role in the construction of the monastic sinscapes against which monks demonstrate their virtue. Saint Antony of Egypt, for instance, attributed the veracity of the prophecies of some pagan seers to the ability of the demons who informed such seers to travel at such great speed that they could relate what had just happened to those they informed much quicker than the news would travel to everyone else. The ability to see such demons at work, in turn, verified Antony’s holiness and access to divine knowledge. John Cassian similarly demonstrated the sanctity and discernment of a certain monk by confirming that the report of another monk’s fall, which this saintly monk happened to overhear demons discussing, had indeed occurred on the very night it was being discussed. Again, the monk’s ability to see demons at work attested to the monk’s understanding of the world at large, which resulted from his freedom from the entanglements that blinded others. Cassian, by telling many such stories, in turn, appears to be omniscient in his knowledge of the goings on in both the furthest reaches of the desert and the deepest reaches of the soul. The popular medieval didactic poem, The Pilgrimage of Human Life, on the other hand, posits that the soul cannot see clearly no matter how hard it tries as long as it is trapped in the fleshly body and overwhelmed by that body’s impulses and desires. In this fourteenth-century work, the soul only experiences clear vision for the very brief time that grace frees it from its body to alleviate its despair at its own ability to embrace virtue and avoid vice. This paper brings the modern bird’s-eye view represented by Edward Burtynsky’s depictions of the apocalyptic sublime through his large-scale aerial photos and films of environmental destruction into dialogue with monastic attempts to see beyond the limits of the situated body and the devastating sinscapes such attempts reveal. I argue that a productive tension arises when the criticisms leveled at Burtynsky for the way his bird’s eye view collapses into the background the people who live and work among the environmental disasters he frames are read in dialogue with the people and systems collapsed into monastic sinscapes. This tension allows us to ask what understanding of individuals, nature, and human environments may be gained from interviewing the inhabitants and constructs of the sincapes produced by monastic strategies for authenticating virtue and vision.

Poe and the Apocalyptic Sublime

AbstractThis essay examines “The Masque of the Read Death,” one of Poe’s most allusive tales, as a striking example of the aesthetics of the apocalyptic sublime. Combining several key ideas from Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful with numerous motifs from biblical apocalyptic symbolism, Poe’s “Masque” was specifically designed to create an effect of sublime terror in the reader. Basing his image of mass death on the cholera pandemic of 1832, which killed thousands of individuals in Europe and America, Poe created a historically grounded parable of apocalyptic extinction with a myriad of connections with literary, biblical, and artistic tradition. Poe’s tale echoes many of Burke’s remarks on the nature and sources of sublime and beautiful effects while conveying a biblically based vision of human mortality.

Self-tracking cycling data as representations of landscape

ABSTRACTThe representation of landscape has changed considerably in the arts since the nineteenth century. From the grand and sometimes fantastical paintings of the apocalyptic sublime, to the more topographically correct contemplative sublime; from the concern for light over form in impressionism, to the intensity of colour saturation in post-impressionism; from emotive expressionism to the fractured abstraction of cubism; from its evaporation in abstract expressionism and dematerialisation in conceptual art to its reclamation in walking art; from photographs taken on journeys, to objects found along the way; from words that capture a sense of place, to films that immerse us in those places; from room sized panoramas to virtual reality CAVEs. This paper aims to map out a contemporary typology of landscape representation. Specifically, it attempts to locate self-tracking data art as a new form of landscape representation, one that traverses a spectrum of imagery, from isomorphic representations of real places, through objective mapping of experience and on into the realm of abstracted subjectivity. In doing so it positions the author’s own work within this wider context along side other artists that are engaged is similar practices.

The Apocalyptic Sublime: Anthropocene Representation and Environmental Agency in Hollywood Action‐Adventure Cli‐Fi Films

The Apocalyptic Sublime: Anthropocene Representation and Environmental Agency in Hollywood Action-Adventure Cli-Fi Films

Visual climate change art 2005–2015: discourse and practice

During the last decade (2005–2015), artists from all over the world have taken on climate change as the subject matter of their work. Encouraged by activists (most notably BillMcKibben), artists have appropriated climate change as a social problem and decided that they too, alongside journalists, scientists, and activists, were called upon to engage with this issue. Dozens of noteworthy exhibitions, most notably in Boulder (2007), London and Copenhagen (2009), Paris (2012), New York (2013), Boston (2014), and Melbourne (2015), have placed climate change art on the map as a new and timely genre, displaying relevant artworks both alongside climate negotiations and in dedicated gallery spaces such as the Barbican in London. I argue that much progress has been made in appropriating climate change art as an essentially artistic, rather than propagandistic or activist practice. Although caught in the net of many criticisms, climate change art plays a crucial role in allowing the public to rethink the role of human beings’ everyday activities in irrevocably altering the climate system. In effect, climate change art makes the Anthropocene a cultural reality. However, the review points out a strong artistic trend toward the imagery of apocalyptic sublime, which results in art that may be poignant, but falls out of step with the self‐professed motivations of artists and curators alike.WIREs Clim Change2016, 7:501–516. doi: 10.1002/wcc.400This article is categorized under:Trans‐Disciplinary Perspectives > Humanities and the Creative Arts

Black Rain: The Apocalyptic Aesthetic and the Spectator's Ethical Challenge in (Israeli) Theater

Black Rain:The Apocalyptic Aesthetic and the Spectator's Ethical Challenge in (Israeli) Theater Zahava Caspi (bio) One feature that classical apocalyptic writings commonly share is their eschatological dimension, their "sense of an ending"1—the end of the world, of time, of humanity. But whereas traditional apocalyptic texts were for the most part utopian, their tales of destruction followed by narratives of redemption, modern secular apocalyptic literature is largely dystopian, ending in pure devastation. According to some scholars, the very arrival of modernity, beginning with Cartesian philosophy and its inherent doubt, was apocalyptic in nature. In the twentieth century, as Thomas Altizer has argued, no central literary work—from Rilke to Kafka and from Joyce to Beckett—managed to eschew the apocalyptic.2 Today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, with the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 haunting many as a "ghost shadow of apocalypse," apocalyptic fears, hopes, and dreams of redemption are no less ubiquitous (Cook, 21). Whatever their differences, however, utopia and dystopia both point, as Douglas Robinson has argued, towards people's real-world choices between good and evil; though utopias describe ideally just societies, dystopias immoral ones, both types of apocalyptic genre belong to an ethical hermeneutics and, as such, demand to be discussed ethically (Robinson, 367)—a demand inherently and inextricably related to the "political" ambitions of apocalyptic art—its goal of effecting change in the real world. At the same time, the allure cast by the spectacular finality of apocalyptic art and by the aesthetic of evil often present in it tends to captivate the audience, all too frequently making us forget the work's ethical and political significance. The present article will examine this constant tension between the dangerously seductive power of the apocalyptic aesthetic, on the one hand, and the inherently ethical intent of apocalyptic art, on the other. At the heart of the discussion stand the following two questions: How does the audience advance from a predominantly aesthetic view of the "apocalyptic sublime" to the establishment of an ethical or political stance? And can the two categories, the aesthetic and the ethical-political, coexist? To answer these questions, I will use as my paradigmatic example the [End Page 141] play Black Rain, written by Shimon Buzaglo and originally staged by the Herzliya Ensemble (under the direction of Ophira Hoenig) in June 2007 as part of the Israel Festival. Emmanuel Levinas's theory of the ethical will provide the central theoretical background. Before I explore these themes, however, let me present a brief overview of apocalyptic plays in our time. Most scholars agree that the significant increase in apocalyptic writing in the West since the mid-twentieth century (and in recent decades in Israel as well) is explained by the specific historical circumstances of World War II and its aftermath, which made destruction on an apocalyptic scale a real possibility. Dystopian dramas had begun to proliferate on European stages as early as the post-traumatic period immediately following World War I—their visions of the world's imminent end influenced, no doubt, by the Great War's pioneering use of weapons of mass destruction. Thus, for example, in the second and third parts of Georg Kaiser's Gas trilogy (1918-20), the technology originally created to benefit humankind becomes a source of recurring disaster, exploitation, and suffering. The dystopian imagination took off, however, after World War II, in the wake of the atrocities of the Holocaust and the emergence of nuclear warfare. Dramas envisioning catastrophe were written in increasing numbers in the post-war decades. Some of these, such as Dürrenmatt's The Physicists (1962), focused on scientists and the destructive power of their innovations. Others, for example Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade (1964), examined the anticipated disasters of the future through the prism of historical paradigms (in this case, the French Revolution and its decadent aftermath). A later dystopian play, Arthur Kopit's End of the World (1984), is especially pessimistic, leaving humanity no exit from an explosion that brings the world to an end (Klaic, 84-100). Charles A. Carpenter has found a clear correlation between historical levels of nuclear anxiety in society and the...

Apocalypse Now: An Interview with Joy Garnett

Apocalypse Now: An Interview with Joy Garnett

The Slum Pastoral: Helicopter Visuality and Koolhaas’s Lagos

This article explores issues of aerial visuality through Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas’s recent work on urban planning in Lagos, Nigeria. In particular, it focuses on the prevalence of the low-oblique plane of vision in Koolhaas’s helicopter-based photographs of the immense, sprawling complexity of Lagos. This essay also examines the inherent political economy of such an aerial plane of vision. Furthermore, it raises the question of to what extent this representational strategy promotes a fidelity to the subject matter, in this case the citizens and the city of Lagos, by portraying a city through an aesthetics of immensity and the apocalyptic sublime.

On the apocalyptic columbine

In this essay we argue that mass media coverage of crises has begun to adopt an emerging social form or subgenre of theological discourse that we term the “apocalyptic sublime.” The apocalyptic sublime is characterized by the forwarding of an immanent temporality without promise of relief and by the promotion of an unstable subjectivity (in this case, a disoriented spectator) that is fruitfully described as an experience of sublimity. Our exemplar is the coverage of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, which has yet to fall from public view. The essay proceeds by first describing the apocalyptic sublime in relationship to technologies of representation and the logics of perception that they create. Then, both broadcast and online representations of the massacre are analyzed. We conclude by arguing that mass media versions of the apocalyptic sublime are ideally suited to the logics of late or “millennial” capitalism.

On the apocalyptic sublime

In this essay we argue that an eschatological discourse we term the “apocalyptic sublime” has emerged, as the postmodern alternative to traditional apocalyptic rhetoric. Drawing on the work of Frank Kermode and Jean Baudrillard, the essay isolates two key features of the apocalyptic sublime as (a) a reliance on non‐linear temporality and (b) a kind of destabilized subjectivity characteristic of that described in the sublime theories of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. The apocalyptic sublime is then used to explain the rhetorical dimensions of the project for a Critical Rhetoric begun by Raymie McKerrow in the late 1980s.

A Certain Hermeneutic Slant: Sublime Allegories in Contemporary English Fiction

ecent criticism published on contemporary English fiction has laid special emphasis on the historiographic and intertextual dominant of novels struggling to come to terms with a failing sense of historical congruence. Little has been said about the revival of allegory and the almost coincidental emergence of a postmodernist form of the sublime in the works of such writers as Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, D. M. Thomas, and Jeanette Winterson. Yet an exploration of this paradoxical polarity may allow us to reconsider the metafictional interrogation of these novelists on the exhaustion of representation and on the aporia stemming from the sometimes paralyzing knowledge that transparency has been radically put into question. Acknowledging this lack of transparency is but the initial step in the reassessment of the fictional agenda, as, for many English writers, the ensuing self-referentiality does not make allowance for two crucial elements of fiction: transience and loss. I would like to suggest here that although they are aware that, in Mihai Spariosu's words, all language is 'allegorical,' being an infinite network of deferments, displacements, and substitutions that point to and stand in for an absent, perhaps imaginary, referent or (60), many contemporary English writers still insist on staring this same absent origin in the face, even if the literary price to pay for this crime of lese postmodernism is the speechless terror of an apocalyptic sublime.

TURNER: ACTION, WORD AND IMAGE

J. M. W. Turner: ‘A Wonderful Range of Mind’ by John Gage, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987, 262 pp., 150 b & w ills, 170 colour plates, £19.95The Apocalyptic Sublime by Morton D. Paley, New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1986, 196 pp., 85 b & w ills, 7 colour plates, £30Turner in his Time by Andrew Wilton, London: Thames & Hudson, 1987, 256 pp., 308 ills including 65 in colour, £25