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On Art & Apocalypse

By Doireann Ní Ghríofa.

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I am sitting on a bench, gazing at the displays in Dublin’s Natural History Museum – the soft hide of an antelope, a series of small skulls, a pair of taxidermy owls, glass eyes behind glass. The spectacle of this museum, so familiar in childhood, feels somehow cosy still. Despite the fact that everything here is allusive of death, of extinction, to view these displays remains comforting. But the almost nostalgic tranquility of the scene is distorted, because I am not, in fact, sitting in the Natural History Museum. I am peering at this scene from a great distance, from an art gallery many miles away, and as I look, I am slowly realising that this museum has filled with water. I begin to understand that I am watching the aftermath of a catastrophic disaster. Despite the implication of a recent cataclysm, the scene itself is somehow peaceful; the water here lulls us, as it always does.

The Geometry Blinked Ruin Unimaginable

‘I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries and when morals catch up there’ll be no need for any of it.’ – Harry S Truman

‘The killing machine has a gender, and it is male.’ – Susan Sontag

A 1962 newspaper photograph of a plane crash led Andy Warhol to produce a series which tackled catastrophes and gruesome events. ‘I guess it was the big plane crash picture, the front page of a newspaper: 129 die. I was also painting the Marilyns. I realised that everything I was doing must have been death. It was Christmas or Labor day—a holiday—and every time you turned on the radio they said something like ‘four million are going to die.’ That started it.’

‘Death and Disaster,’ Warhol’s mechanical reproductions¹ and repetitions of suicides, car crashes, the atomic bomb, the electric chair, race riots, and earthquakes are memento mori that turn death into a deliberately remote event. Warhol’s 1965 painting Atomic Bomb is not so much a protest, more a description, a silkscreened snapshot of a mushroom cloud in black surrounded by a deep red—it’s aggregated, apolitical, and banal. His negation of experience is taken to its most disturbing point in White Car Burning: an overturned car burns in the foreground, the driver impaled on a pole, arms extending downward and head bent forward, while a pedestrian casually walks away. ‘When you see a gruesome picture over and over again it doesn’t really have any effect.’

Whale in the Moon When It’s Clear

American artist, illustrator and adventurer Rockwell Kent wrote that Glenlough, County Donegal was ‘a place never to be forgotten – a place, indeed, to be remembered with nostalgia.’¹ Kent sojourned there in 1926, ‘painting in a remote and all but inaccessible coastal valley … lived there in a tiny one-room house, painted the surrounding countryside and the great cliffs that dropped almost a sheer thousand feet into the sea.’ It was in Dan Ward’s² converted cow barn he completed some of what are now considered to be his best paintings: ‘And Women Must Weep,’ ‘Annie McGinley,’ ‘Dan Ward’s Stack.’ was also in this year that Kent was approached that year to produce an illustrated edition of Moby-Dick.

A failure on publication in 1851³, Melville’s magnum opus was enjoying something of a comeback with ex-pats in twenties’ Europe (and Kent’s handsome edition, published in 1930 with its two-hundred-and-eighty woodcuts, assured Moby-Dick’s rebirth). Moby-Dick, says Nathaniel Philbrick,⁴ ‘in its wilful refusal to follow the usual conventions of nineteenth-century fiction, … possessed the experimental swagger that so many authors were attempting to capture in the years after World War I,’ and D.H. Lawrence was an enthusiastic admirer: ‘[Melville] was a futurist long before futurism found paint.’ ‘At first you are put off by the style,’ Lawrence concedes. ‘It reads like journalism. seems spurious. You feel Melville is trying to put something over you. It won’t do. And Melville really is a bit sententious: aware of himself, self-conscious, putting something over even himself. But then it’s not easy to get into the swing of a piece of deep mysticism when you just set out with a story.’

A Form of Surrender to a Hallucinatory World

An interview with Lee Rourke by Liam Jones.

Lee Rourke’s work is difficult to summarise, because to summarise it would be to misrepresent it. By exposing the fissure in reality Rourke demonstrates the fallibility of language. Language in Rourke’s novels always seems like an effacement of reality. Despite this his work articulates with clarity a certain loss of meaning in contemporary neoliberal culture. His debut novel, The Canal, deals with boredom and the affect it produces. His latest, Vulgar Things, plays out like a mystery as the protagonist searches for coherency in the life of a relative. It is through this lens we glimpse at the futility of a search for meaning. Influenced as much by theory as he is by fiction, Rourke forces us to question the limits of human understanding and productivity through his narratives. This interview took place via email, between July 2014 and July 2015, with Rourke responding to a list of questions I sent to him.

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Liam Jones: Repetition seems to play a key role in Vulgar Things. It can be seen most obviously through Uncle Rey’s character but also in Jon, how he also goes into the shed to look at Saturn or listens to the same Dr Feelgood records. When writing did you see repetition as a key way to move the plot and characterisation forwards?

Lee Rourke: Repetition is essentially humour played out through drama (drama in the original Greek sense/meaning of the word: ‘to do,’ ‘an act,’ ‘the thing done’—or, as I like to think of it: a goal): the more we repeat something, the funnier it gets. The aim is to reach that point of comedy. I think it was Hegel who said this (or it might have been Bergson). If we take this into account pretty much anything can be funny—I’m thinking (as I always do) of Beckett’s ‘nothing is funnier than unhappiness’ here. We essentially reach a point where all of this stuff—no matter how miserable, or mundane—becomes funny. It is this exact point, through the repetition of all our petty dramas, we are striving to reach: a point of glorious, maddening humour that helps us to defeat all of the bad stuff. Kafka was all over this premise.

The Asian Woman

By Adrian Nathan West.

In Philadelphia, on New Year’s Day, it is customary for working class men, who have received money to this end from the city government, to dress themselves in women’s clothes or as harlequins and march or ride floats down Broad Street while making noises that are reciprocated by the throngs of people on the sidewalk. It is therefore necessary, if you want a bit of peace and quiet, to go to places you do not usually frequent; and this is what I did on the first day of 2009, walking fifteen or so blocks from my apartment to a Starbucks on Ninth and South streets, thinking there to read a book I had bought myself for Christmas, La mauvaise conscience, by Vladimir Jankélévitch, in the Spanish translation, and to make notes on that book for an anthology of ideas on ethical philosophy that I had been compiling at home to no foreseeable purpose, and also to think back over the course of the preceding year with its many disappointments. I ordered a hot chocolate at the register and took a place at the counter beside an Asian woman in her forties who was wearing a burgundy down coat with a fur-lined hood and a pair of what seemed to me very fashionable boots, with squared toes and a zipper running up their back side. I laid my books, journals, and pens before me.