Martin Myrone's John Martin: The Trend is Nigh? post on Tate Blog poses some questions of interest for the Apocalypse Now session I will be leading at the Exploring Spirituality day in St Albans Diocese on 22nd October:
"I see from Sanjiv Bhattacharya’s interview with Ewan McGregor in the Observer Magazine this weekend (http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/oct/02/ewan-mcgregor-interview-perfect-sense) that ‘the end of the world’ is ‘a trending topic this year – the end has seldom been so nigh’. The article is picking up on McGregor’s new film, Perfect Sense, and the slew of other apocalyptic movies coming out this year – including Lars von Trier’s Melancholia which is being reviewed all over the place right now. Elsewhere in the same magazine I spotted a pigeon-based headdress sported by Lady Gaga being described as ‘post-apocalyptic’.
So I guess that those of us in the team behind John Martin: Apocalypse can feel smugly prescient? After all, one of the key paintings in the show, The Great Day of his Wrath has made it onto the most recent Private Eye cover (http://www.private-eye.co.uk/covers.php?showme=1298). And the brilliant cinematic trailer for the exhibition grafts a very contemporary vision of apocalypse with the same painting by John Martin pretty seamlessly (24,000 hits on YouTube to date, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=814ll2oPevo). Do John Martin’s images of volcanic eruptions, divine retribution, and the chaos of empires falling touch a nerve today? Are we really on the brink of societal collapse, facing a terrible new world where thugs in Viking helmets ride round on motorcycles, ready to battle over an out-of-date tin of baked beans?"
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bob Dylan - Shelter From The Storm.
No comments:
Post a Comment