Art in the Apocalypse

I wondered will it be like the seventies again, when we were poor? Then I remembered that we are still poor. Will I need to get in a supply of candles for the power cuts? We will have big snow once more and will there be a massive drought? 

Will students come to class each day to announce that their Dad had just been made redundant ( they already have been)? Will there be bomb scares? And riots? Will popular music become stark raving bonkers (Glam Rock, Punk, Disco, Country Ballard’s)?

Apart from the fact that I like candle light, I could find nothing positive in the election results. In a smouldering despair I began to write the darkest piece of work I have ever crafted. It will soon be complete and I will share with those that dare to read it. Saturday there was a call for writers on the theme of The Apocalyptic, HA. I laughed a bitter laugh, THIS IS THE Apocalypse. I did get that down. I even decided to move to Germany instead, whilst we can still move freely in the EU. 

My husband lived there, it looks nice, it’s also where we find German Expressionism and I especially like that, I like its darkness. German Expressionism was an artistic revolutionary response to the horrors; the rise of Fascism, the war the Apocalypse. 

http://www.moma.org/explore/collection/ge/

Brilliant art can sprout from disillusionment even despair; consider the raw genius of pessimism in Franz Kafa’s The Trial, the knowing innocence of Huckleberry Finn borne in America’s Deep Depression and of course the harsh beauty of that turtle trying to turn himself the right way up, in the burning heat, in the dust bowl of California through the craft of John Steinbeck. Let’s not forget tragedy and catastrophe has not only given birth to powerful words and images (I’m thinking here of Picasso’s Guernica.) But also to moving images, The Deer Hunter and Taxi Driver are two striking works of cinematography conceived in an unimaginable hell.

 

What of the music? Jazz as medicine to fight the horrors of the Great War, followed, by Rock and Roll as the defiant drug of the young, un-dead and free, and Punk Rock;  the ultimate musical rebellion.

What would happen if we were to bring these art forms together like they did in another German artistic movement; The Bauhaus? What if we enabled viewers to participate and even shape the narrative of that art form? We would have computer games. What shape will they now take? What will terrified independent developers do with this art form? Yes this situation is terrifying. How will the art community respond, what revolution can we expect? Because there will be one, perhaps not on the streets and maybe it won’t be televised but viewed on Twitch.

They said the election was going to be interesting, it wasn’t, I felt like a lobster being slowly brought to the boil. The interesting things, the hopeful things, they will come from the people and from their art.