The apocalyptic seems to be in the air these days as artists contemplate the unthinkable. (Robert Clarke, The Guardian, February 11th, 2012)
‘Apocalypse’, the title of the John Martin exhibition, is clearly intended to speak to a contemporary audience acculturated to global disaster. As the above reviewer notes, environmental concerns have become a dominant preoccupation in contemporary art practice. It is, then, not surprising that Martin's work should be enjoying renewed public attention. Martin (1789-1854) is an artist who has been deeply out of fashion for much of the last century, only going on public display in the mid 1970s. Viewed as a technically crude maker of populist subject matter, he was far more widely known in his time than Turner, but was quickly forgotten until his ‘rediscovery’ as just the man for our twenty first century ecological crisis.
Martin was part of the Terrible Sublime, producing apocalyptic images which have been connected in the exhibition catalogue to a whole host of popular media representations, including disaster movies. Fully restored to a position of cultural intelligibility, he now speaks to contemporary sensibilities. It is easy to see why he has suddenly been elevated into the public domain after years of obscurity. Whilst climate change was completely unknown in the nineteenth century, Martin's art does speak to concerns about the impact of urban industrialisation on the environment. His paintings show civilization being annihilated by biblical scale ‘natural’ disasters, operating as metaphors for anxiety about the pace of industrial change, seen through the narratives of the Old Testament.
The idea of the sublime was to instil in the spectator a powerful affective experience whereby man's smallness and insignificance is felt in
relation to the greatness of God's creation, represented by nature. Sublime paintings employ some key pictorial devices to give the viewer the sublime experience of awe, a sense of being overwhelmed and transported by nature. These include scale, elevated view points, spatial distance from the event, lateral extension and increased spatial depth to create vastness.
John Martin's images operated as a ritualistic catharsis. The viewers were not the victims, but observers of peril; free, at an elevated distance, they are positioned safely above the catastrophes and misfortune of natural disasters caused by god's wrath at the sins of man. These paintings functioned as a fetish object in that they worked to both remind and defend against the knowledge of the sinful moral decline of industrialised capitalism.
The following quotation from Kant's Critique of Judgment (Milani 2009: 9) captures very well how nature was viewed and how well John Martin's work reflects this view (see for example ‘The Destruction of Pompeii’)
Bold overhanging and, as it were threatening, rocks; clouds piled up in the sky, moving with lighting flashes and thunder peals; volcanoes in all their violence of destruction, hurricanes with their track of devastation, the boundless ocean in a state of tumult, the lofty waterfall of a mighty river, and suchlike- these exhibit our faculty of resistance as insignificantly small in comparison with their might. But, the sight of them is more attractive, the more fearful it is; provided only that we are in security; and we willingly call these objects sublime, because they raise the energies of the soul above their accustomed height and discover in us a faculty of resistance of a quite different kind, which gives us courage to measure ourselves against the apparent almightiness of nature.
The sublime proved to be both a popular and influential European tradition that inspired the emergence of the American Sublime in the 1820s. The vast and wild continent of America, a ‘naturally’ sublime landscape, proved to be a very fertile site for the production of sublime
paintings. The new world artists explored the American interior, taking long arduous expeditions to document and produce images of this newly discovered territory and contributing to the development of a new genre of ‘wilderness’.
As these artists ‘discovered’ and showed the great American landscape to the public, this landscape was already being developed, industrialised and exploited. It was a great irony of the American sublime that the landscapes they brought to the public attention, hastened their destruction and encouraged their exploitation. It was frequently the case that the artists work was funded by a patron who was also destroying the very landscape being painted through gold extraction, deforestation and the fur trade. Conversely, the sublime movement also contributed to the ‘saving’ of nature. The photographer Carlton Watkins, working within the sublime aesthetic, completed a three year expedition in 1861 to photograph the Yosemite Valley. These compelling images moved Lincoln to establish this region as the first national park, where nature was ‘fenced off’ to protect it from rapacious capitalism and ironically from the native Americans who had quite sustainably lived there
The terrible sublime and the American sublime produced a particular kind of landscape. Whilst it was one where a flood of affect swamped the capacity for representation, it was still deliberate as a representational form; as we read in Kant above, it domesticated the overwhelming. The spectator may have been diminished, but they were not destroyed. However, as Goethe (Milani 2009: 27) suggested, the excesses of scale that the sublime used could also work against achieving a sublime experience. Rather than feeling awed, but safe, the spectator could feel impotent and obliterated. Goethe was describing a site of anguish and disorientation; rather than safely situated to enjoy the spectacle, the subject was radically depositioned. Infinite nature was too much. As an aesthetic the terrible sublime intimated a new ideology, a future world where scale and vastness went beyond the pleasures of excess to be replaced by the impotent subject of capitalism. One might argue that Martin's work is documenting a world that has already gone. However, as this exhibition demonstrates, he was also very entangled in the newly industrialised culture, particularly around reforms of its excessive practices.
Anxiety and alarm accompanied the spread of industrialised capitalism which was at its most intense in the growing cities of Europe. London in particular had the largest population of any European city of the time and a site of ambivalence for Martin who both admired it as a great achievement but also saw as a later day Babylon. Babylon was a very important description for the time, expressing growing concerns about pollution, population growth and moral decline. Between 1827 to 1850 Martin published pamphlets which included improving the polluted air of metropolis to address the dense smog caused by the burning of coal.
A curious feature of the Martin show is the detailed engineering drawing s for his design for embanking and improving London's water supply and sewage collection. It is extremely strange to encounter these drawings in an exhibition of large romantic landscape images. One reading of their inclusion is to see Martin as wanting to reform the destructive excesses of industrialisation. However, Martin's reforming zeal has to be framed within religious terms. His paintings represent a moral universe where industrialisation is a sin against God; Man is destroying God's nature and God will destroy man as a punishment for his greed and rapaciousness. The catalogue written for the contemporary viewer suggests these drawings represent Martin as a modern man with ecological concerns. However Martin would not recognise the word let alone himself in this description—the science of ecology only started to seriously develop after the Second World War. What I believe we are looking at is a man who did not know what he was in, but who is now being conveniently co-opted into the service of contemporary concerns.
Looking at the John Martin exhibition is interesting because there is a collision of two worlds, an old immutable world of religion and nature and the new changing world of secularisation and industrialisation. Deleuze's (2005) discussion of Antonioni is helpful here. For Antonioni, ideologylies hidden in the natural and only becomes a conscious cultural concern after it is already obsolete. This obsolesce is manifested by an energetic drive to shore up and establish the already redundant values. Martin's work clearly emerged within an earlier value system that was fast passing. The contemporary framing of this artist raises some interesting questions about our current relationship to the ecological
crisis. Does this foregrounding of the Apocalyptic suggest that our position regarding the planet is already obsolete? Does this fascination with the sublime landscape speak to a terrible nostalgia for some imagined uncontaminated ‘nature’, to which we may still return?
This sense that we can still either go back or save ourselves, drives a lot of contemporary Hollywood film making. We are, I would argue, still living in Martin's Terrible Sublime. In the disaster film, ‘The Day After Tomorrow’, Dennis Quaid is shown crouched in a tent after a perfect storm has struck to devastating effect, causing another ice age. As the howling blizzard outside tears at the flimsy shelter, Quaid tells us we have had ice ages in the past but man has always survived them. It is a spectacle where the viewer, at a safe and elevated distance, observes the events and feels reassured and complacent. This is the Hollywood sublime, where catastrophe is domesticated and nothing needs to change.
John Martin's paintings are strange objects. This is not just due to their subject matter and iconography, which we could see as curios and naive. There is also physicality of form and making to be seen in the marks, pictorial space, paint skin and directions of vision that modulate the speed at which we look at them and the time we need to spend in front of them. These rhythmic modulations give us an experience of time and a way of being which is now past. As products of an extinct subjectivity, these paintings also show us a past relationship to nature. Through an engagement with these images we can glimpse both what has changed in us and a certain longing for a lost way of being.