An animated essay woven around quotations from Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and Robert Oppenheimer; and graphic representations from early science and alchemy. A mythologised narrative which describes the progress of experimental science is interrupted by a series of apocalyptic 'marvels', which are presented as reports of real events given by telephone, radio, or word of mouth. These events are related within formalised, domestic interiors which repeatedly yield their solidity to reveal historical and elemental layers.
Revised transcript of artist's presentation in Arrows of Desire seminar
Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, November 1992
In the closing passages of Aids and its Metaphors Susan Sontag cites 'the readiness of so many to envisage the most far-reaching catastrophes' 1 and says that 'anything in history that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as leading towards catastrophe.' At one point she sums up with the phrase 'apocalypse looms... and it doesn't occur' 2 suggesting that we live in a culture of predicted but continually postponed catastrophe. Apocalyptic metaphors become attached to various scenarios quite early in the genesis of a crisis, whether economic, ecological, medical... etc.
A History of Disaster with Marvels evokes specific strands of history, but it does involve the underlying idea that the idea of apocalypse, or predicted apocalypse, may have more to do with desire than with actual events: a nostalgic desire for a simple fatalism; for certainty; for profound or violent transformation; for death.
The tape was developed during a period in 1991 when the Gulf War was constantly on the verge of happening, and the form which this particular apocalypse might take obsessed the mass media. Excitement at the prospect of war was discernible (more muted than in the prelude to the Falklands War in 1983). In this atmosphere of uneasiness three texts were developed from the transcripts of particularly strong personal dreams. The texts began to draw in archival material from Renaissance science and alchemy, and the portents of doom associated with mediaeval comets acquired a renewed urgency with the constant radio coverage of events in the Middle East.
The tape takes many visual quotations from 15th - 17th century documents, and some from early 20th century science and astronomy books: allegorical engravings, cosmological diagrams, anatomies combining observations from nature with idiosyncratic conjecture and errors of transcription. They trace a struggle between religious dogma and an emerging humanism with its roots in anatomy, astronomy, and the experimental method espoused especially by Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Several quotations from Bacon are incorporated into the image, which often takes the form of an illuminated text.
Bacon initiated his 'Great Instauration' to reform the sciences with a proselytising zeal for experimental method. His ambitions were gradually eclipsed by the sheer mass of detail which became involved. His vision prefigures the modern scenario of thousands of specialisms founded on the collection of accurate data, yet his expectation of being able to embrace all knowledge in one project was still that of the Renaissance Man. 3
Bacon's relationship to Nature 4 also shares its tone with modern scientific utopianism. 1940s and 50s nuclear physics gave rise to much heroic rhetoric about harnessing the power of the atom and the life-giving energy of the sun, nevertheless interwoven with the moral dilemmas of war, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and radioactive contamination 5 . The final quotation in A History of Disaster... is from Robert Oppenheimer, lead scientist on the Manhattan Project which developed the bombs to be exploded over Japanese cities. 6
The tape plays on the notion that intrinsic to the human condition is an oscillation between an exaggerated sense of manipulative control (often augmented by science and technology) and an inevitable acceptance of frailty. The desire to resolve these two extremes finds expression in the idea of revelation. A rolling panoramic frieze employed in one scene includes many representational and allegorical figures whose eyes have been altered so that they all watch the skies as the room around this document burns orange and red.
Several scenes in A History of Disaster... are set in formalised domestic interiors. Now that the hearth fire has been replaced by the television, the traditional sense of security associated with this setting is regularly disrupted by staged or reported events which enter it via the screen. There is no television in domestic interior of A History... but it repeatedly loses its solidity as reports of celestial catastrophe are heard, and the protagonists and supplicants of history appear in the walls and windows.
The threatened apocalypse never quite breaks through (formally, the effects of framing hold it in check) and a final scene suggests a kind of epiphany. A girl describes a miraculous apparition of doppelgangers, whose transcendental potential just barely eludes a crowd of penitential observers.
1 'Illness as Metaphor and Aids and its Metaphors' by Susan Sontag. Penguin Books 1991. p.168
2 Ibid. p175/p173
3 'New Atlantis and The Great Instauration - Bacon' Ed. Jerry Weinberger. Crofts Classics 1989
and 'Man and nature in the Renaissance' by Allen G. Debus. Cambridge University Press 1981. pp 102-105 and passim.
4 'Witch Hunting, Magic and the New Philosophy' by Brian Easlea. Harvester Press 1980. Passim
and 'Fathering the Unthinkable' by Brian Easlea. Pluto Press 1983
5 see 'Multiple Exposures' by Catherine Caufield. Secker and Warburg 1989
6 see 'Fathering the Unthinkable' by Brian Easlea
Funding and production information
A History of Disaster with Marvels was commissioned for broadcast on Channel 4 Television by the Arts Council of Great Britain in association with Channel 4. Funded through the Arts Council's IIth Hour scheme.
Voices: Shirley MacWilliam, Hanna Sherwood, Andrew Stones
Assistant Editors: Clive Gillman and Frances Hegarty
Crew: Graham Gaunt, George Giles, John Colreavy, Clare Donnelly, Joan Woods, Alison McCleod, Jo Spreckley, Kiaran Saunders
Channel 4 commissioning editor: Rod Stoneman. Arts Council officer: David Curtis.
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