END/ times speculation, catastrophe, & the cosmos in contemporary art
isabel ruiz cano|may 2020|ARH297
INTRODUCTION In Art & The Anthropocene, Heather Davis boldly claims that “civilizational collapse...is no longer a matter of fanaticism or apocalypse, but a casual fait accompli” (10). Climate change and escalating political tensions seem to have accelerated the countdown to Armageddon. Now, with a global pandemic on the rise exposing the frailty of our planet’s man-made systems, the questions of endtimes looms over our heads. Is this how the world ends? With half of us under lockdown and the other half forced into a cycle of eternal displacement? When all of this is over, what will the world look like? Where will we go?
This micro-catalog/art publication turns to contemporary art to begin formulating answers to these questions. The artists presented here engage with their practice as a way to speculate and formulate about the future in the face of catastrophe and crisis. Their chronology begins with exploring the impact of the Cold War’s Space Race, continues onto the imaginary of the anthropocene, and culminates in eco-futurist fantasies. Their aesthetics align somewhere along Donna Haraway’s SF, “which rehearses the terms of an aesthetic techno-organic hybridity” (Demos). When the end is nigh, we turn, instinctively, to the cosmos. The sky—space—that space of limitless possibility—of expansion—of potential—of being able to leave the disaster we started and start anew. But what if the cosmos were already here? What if we were the very meteor to bring our species to extinction?
1. PAST
“In the arts, [the] technological duality” of the Cold War “resonated in the West in a re-enactment of the notion of the sublime in terms of the tension between the absolute greatness of nuclear power and the threat it represented, readily controlled by reason.” —Gabrielle Decamous, “Nuclear Activities and Modern Catastrophes: Art Faces the Radioactive Waves,” 126
DURING THE COLD WAR, the Space Race promised to find out, once and
for all, which of the two silently warring hemispheres was technologically superior. If they could conquer the moon, conquering the world would be no problem. And, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the threat of nuclear extinction was fresh in everyone’s mind: this technological sublime which promised power and disaster at once.
Simón Vega. Sputnik NY-Z. Object. 120 cms. Metal, plastic, found wood, aluminum, found materials. 2012. Installation at Socrates Sculpture Park for El Museo del Barrio’s “The S-Files” Biennial, New York.
Simón Vega. Mosquito Beach Hostal. 110 x 110 cms. Acrylic and acrylic marker on canvas. 2015.
Those in the Third World were caught in this battle, suspicious of modernity’s promise—and suffered the worst. Salvadoran artist Simón Vega creates sculptural installations, part of his tropical space proyectos, that use the material culture of contemporary Salvadoran slums (plastic objects, scrap metal, chicken wire, colorful hammocks) to create replicas of Space Race spacecraft. Vega’s ironic reproductions have a certain element of camp that call attention to the reality of the Third World. Promised new (first?) worlds and egalitarian futures, instead they were forced to dive into the scraps.
Ilya Kabakov. The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment. Installation. 1985. Collection Musée National D’Art Moderne—Centre de création industrielle, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, since August 1989.
On the other side of the Curtain, Ilya Kabakov’s installation/ short story The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment (1986) tells the story of a Soviet man who, plagued with visions of overpopulation as a result of his living in communal apartments, decides to catapult himself into space. Kabakov himself explains the symbolism of this piece best: “In the Russian tradition, settling in the cosmos was interpreted as settling in paradise...On Earth, people are divided by governments, cities, and apartments, but the cosmos is transnational. And everyone will live like one family” (Kabakov, 336).
Seeking to escape his bleak surroundings and prospects in the Soviet Union, Kabakov’s character exhibits a disillusionment with the promises of collectivity. There are visual and ideological parallels with Simón Vega’s tropical dumpster spacecraft and the found-object, messy installation of The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment. As both East/West lose their power in the contemporary imaginary, what alternatives will be left? What kind of worlds can we create?
Ilya Kabakov. The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment. Installation plan. 1985.
2. PRESENT
“The war against nature, against humanity’s very substance, will be won by creating utterly simulacral ecologies in order to inhabit completely artificial capsule environments.”
—Eva Díaz, “Art of the New Space Age,” 160
ONE OF THE MOST PRESSING, AND MOST POSSIBLE, OF
APOCALYPSES IS THAT OF THE CURRENT CLIMATE EMERGENCY. With profit and progress at the center of the anthropocene, our planet pays the price. The following two artists look to the sky to engage with modernity and the anthropocene’s cataclysmic effect on the present.
Connie Samaras’s photography series Spaceport America (2010-2011) documents the building of “the world’s first hub purposed for commercial space travel and business.”
Connie Samaras. View From Air Fire Rescue Facility. Archival inkjet print from film. 2010.
As scholar Eva Díaz notes, “not only is it expensive to propel things and people out of the Earth’s atmosphere, it exacts a huge ecological cost, one implied by the desolate barrenness of the Spaceport America site” (152). The expansive horizons of Samaras’s photography series reference classic science fiction landscapes and lunar colonization concepts. Thus, she exposes the irony behind Spaceport America. In search of new vistas, humans engage in destructive practices and forget the beauty that can be found in their very own planet. Are Samaras’s photographs visions of an abandoned project, the result of an apocalyptic drought, or of the progress to come?
Connie Samaras. Terminal Entry. Archival inkjet print from film. 2010.
Amy Balkin Public Smog. 2004+.
Amy Balkin’s conceptual project Public Smog does not directly engage with futurity—rather, it unmasks the dystopian reality of our present. Public Smog is “a park in the atmosphere that fluctuates in location and scale,” built through “purchasing and retiring emission offsets in regulated emissions markets, making them inaccessible to polluting industries” (Balkin in Davis, 342).
Benoit Mangin (photographer), Guillaume Astaix (contributor), Amy Balkin (artist). Public Smog/Douala. 2009.
Balkin has supplemented her park with documentation via billboards. Through the billboards’ clear skies and cryptic messages, Public Smog creates a sense of paranoia that uncovers the uncanny irreality of legislation surrounding air pollution. Is air a part of the human commons, or is it just another commodity? How tangible is this effort—and for how long will it last?
3. future
Multiple mock futures serve the quite different function of transforming our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come.
—Frederick Jameson, Archaeologies of the future: the desire called utopia and other science fictions, 288
In their 5-channel video installation Between the Waves, Waves Tejal Shah turns to trash to imagine another alternate future. Curator Daria Khan describes
“a promise of a long-anticipated post-gender and post-anthropocene world of care, cooperation and love, and on the other hand, a premonition of an environmental dystopia where the air became a suffocating mist and the soil and water are composed of waste. A family of the installation as
hybrid creatures are engaged in a ritual trying to preserve what’s left” (3). Using a visual language similar to Samaras’s photography, in which they alienate the human landscape through a use of wide-lense angles, Shah finds a sense of liberation in the impending pollution crisis that projects like Public Smog detail.
Tejal Shah. Between the Waves. Stills from Channel II, “Landfill Dance.” 2012.
Himali Singh Soin. we are opposites like that. Digital video stills. 2019.
Finally, in her video/series we are opposite like that (2019), Himali Singh Soin mixes archival material documenting the Victorian anxiety of an impending ice age with a performance as an ancient, alien ice being re-awakening in a melting, receding home. In the words of the artist, we
“beckons the ghosts hidden in landscapes and turns them into echoes, listening in on the resonances of potential futures.� The Victorian sensibilities in we are opposite like that
are opposite like that
share the same sense of irony as tropical space proyectos; they discount the prophetic visions of the past, in favor of a North/South collapse. The true apocalypse, as Singh Soin hints at, comes not from freezing, but from melting. And there might be something freeing in that.
conclusion “Apocalypse is the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal.” —Lawrence Buell, The environmental imagination: Thoreau, nature writing, and the formation of American culture, 285
Perhaps all of this is a call to action. The artists here rewrite pasts, create presents, and imagine futures to demonstrate the catastrophic potential that humanity has for itself and for the planet. They create speculative apocalyptic aesthetics that play into the ominous. How can all of this speculation serve us? As Lawrence Buell writes, “The rhetoric of apocalypticism implies that the fate of the world hinges on the arousal of the imagination to a sense of crisis� (285). It can serve as a warning:
This is what has happened. This is what is happening. This is what will happen. Whether the end comes from outer space or whether it comes from the Arctic or from the factories we’ve relentlessly built, ultimately, does not matter. Planet Earth is, after all, a part of the cosmos. Under crisis, the human turns alien and the alien just might seem more human.
bibliography Buell, Lawrence. 1996. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press. Decamous, Gabrielle. 2011. “Nuclear Activities and Modern Catastrophes: Art Faces the Radioactive Waves.” Leonardo 44 (2): 125–40. Demos, T.J. 2012. “Gardens Beyond Eden: Bio-Aesthetics, Eco-Futurism, and Dystopia at DOCUMENTA (13).” The Brooklyn Rail, October. https://brooklynrail. org/2012/10/art/gardens-beyond-eden-bio-aesthetics-eco-futur ism-and-dystopia-at-documenta-13.
Díaz, Eva. 2018. “Art of the New Space Age.” New Left Review 112 (August). Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso. Kabakov, Ilya. 2000. The text as the basis of visual expression. Köln: Oktagon. Khan, Daria. 2018. “Tejal Shah: As It Is (Press Release).” Mimosa House UK. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a1d61349f 07f57a59258fe5/t/5aeb4047575d1f538a8c6957/1525366856894/ TEJAL+SHAH+FINAL+.pdf. “Public Smog.” n.d. Accessed May 8, 2020. http://www.publicsmog.org/. Turpin, Etienne, and Heather Davis. 2015. Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies. Open Humanities Press.