The Disappointing Apocalypse: Visualising Climate in Art Since the 1960s

Much of Andrew Patrizio’s recent writing and teaching has promoted the value of art history to represent and resist the climate crisis. His work, alongside a rising number of other scholars and artists, seeks to mobilise the discipline to make visible and tangible the conditions of the Anthropocene.

This talk is based on a work-in-progress chapter exploring the complex relationship between the idea of eco-apocalypse and visual art practice since 1960. It will offer a picture of the current apocalyptic condition as deeply undramatic and, in that sense, disappointing.

‘Apocalypse’ has been depicted by numerous artists globally (from medieval manuscript illuminators to the Romantics), first as a visualisation of Christian doctrinal warning and then more generally as a cultural trope for a variety of apocalyptic forms (nuclear war, migration, racial tension, famine). Climate collapse, global warming, pollution, toxicity and plastic proliferation, genetic mutation and viral spread are recently ecologically-framed manifestations on a similar register. These formations are worked on by artists, particularly those employing systemic, critical, relational and conceptual approaches. The disaster is now materially unfolding and seems disappointingly unconcerned with redemption and human futures, whilst being at the same time entirely caused by industrialised humans (expressed through resource depletion, rising waters and mass extinction). It is now difficult to imagine in the visual arts the notion of apocalypse without registering the material presence of climate crisis.

Among the art practices discussed will be Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison, The Lagoon Cycle (1974-1986), Ursula Biemann, Black Sea Files (2005), Trevor Paglen, The Last Pictures (2012), Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho, El Fin del Mundo (The End of the World) (2012) and Margaret Wertheim and Christine Wertheim, Crochet Coral Reef (2005-ongoing).

Image caption: Crochet Coral Reef by Christine Wertheim and Margaret Wertheim and the Institute For Figuring (2009). Photo © IFF by Alyssa Gorelick.