Apocalypse - Now & Then

Many-headed beasts attacking angels on horseback.  Flaming sunsets over erupting volcanoes. Golds, browns, blacks.  In the first room the pictures were all Medieval or Victorian. 

There was a low fence a few feet away from the walls upon which the paintings were hung, and it felt such an obstruction to Charles that he just stepped over it.  A young woman stood behind him, watched him do it, but made no attempt to prevent him.  He had moved with such deliberate intention.  She studied him.

An Attempt To Illustrate The Opening Of The Sixth Seal, 1830
Francis Danby 1793- 1861

Charles stood examining Danby’s An Attempt to Illustrate the Opening of the Sixth Seal for several minutes, his nose inches from the dark canvas.  Tortured bodies on shelves of rock.  Thunderous clouds.  Spears of brilliant white light.  Then an attendant came into the room and explained officiously that if he did not step back then he would be ejected from the exhibition.

“The artist did not want his work protected from the viewer,” Charles blurted out,  “he created art to touch the viewer, to reach into his soul and provoke a feeling, a reaction, a response.  You galleries have a duty to the artist, for Christ’s sake, and you do nothing but put obstacles in the way of its true message.  You soften it until it becomes meaningless, vapid pap!”

“Nevertheless, sir.  Visitors to the gallery are required to stay behind the wire at all times.  We don’t want the pictures to be damaged.  Do we?”

Only when Charles had returned to the main floor area was the attendant satisfied.  If he had been looking he would have seen the official turn to regard the young woman, too, a look full of moment, before he returned to his chair in the corridor.  Charles drifted belligerently into the next room.

The young woman who had continued her own promenade around the exhibition followed him through a few seconds later.

“I’m not sure that they are really protecting the paintings from the visitors,” she said quietly, urgently.  “I think it’s actually the other way around.”

Charles grunted.

“These works, some of them,” she said, “are just too dangerous.  Political.  If the viewer really engaged with them they would not be able to take the emotional and spiritual overload.  They would burn their tiny minds.”

Charles said nothing although he fundamentally agreed with her.

“Have you seen the contemporary pieces yet?” she asked.

Charles still would not respond.

“There’s one you might like, Ifnotnowwhen?, I think it’s remarkable.”

Charles grunted again and drifted away having immediately taken against it.

He wearied of depictions of the Islamic concept of Mahdi and finally found himself in the furthest room.  Contemporaries.

He was simply irritated by most of them. 

Tell me it is just the day that’s dying was, to his view, a vacuous photographic exploration of HIV as a millennial “Sign”.  Black become the sun’s beams was a clichéd video installation attempting to depict environmental disaster in the post nuclear age with reference to Norse mythology – Charles of course recognised the title.

And then there it was, Ifnotnowwhen?  But he was not impressed.  Again the gallery’s controls and constraints on the viewer wound him up.  Did the artist have no say as to how the piece was to be displayed?

Ifnotnowwhen? comprised a plinth upon which was piled a mound of sand and upon that was placed a tiny plastic bomb marked BOMB!  Another low fence circled the plinth but outside it was a second smaller plinth with a detonator marked PLUNGE ME!  And underneath the plunger was the title of the piece Ifnotnowwhen?

Charles’ bile rose again at the sign next to the name label

DO NOT TOUCH THE EXHIBIT

His hand itched.

The bomb gave a disappointing pop rather than a bang but Charles saw the sand beneath it was trickling into a small black hole that had appeared in the top of the mound.  The hole gradually enlarged and the bomb itself suddenly disappeared.  A certain surprised satisfaction spread across his face.  What he had not noticed was the alarm sounding somewhere in the building.

The hole continued to enlarge draining more and more of the sand.  It started to whirlpool.  He was transfixed while staff and other visitors were keen to make their way to the exits.  No-one bothered him.  The young woman came to stand beside him to watch the event although she was watching him more than the dissolving artwork.

Suddenly all the sand had gone and the plinth itself began to collapse.  Then the surrounding floor.  Still the hole grew.  He smiled as the wire fence went and was about to move back from the growing abyss when the young woman, by forcefully seizing his hand, insisted that he stood perfectly still.

“I felt I could rely on you!” she whispered.

It was some days before the two bodies were recovered from the sewers.