School of Art - Theses
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ItemEnd of days: religious imaging in millennialist America( 2016)Michel Foucault once commented that: “Religious beliefs prepare a kind of landscape of images, an illusory milieu favorable to every hallucination and every delirium.”1 This thesis seeks to determine what drives certain contemporary artists to deliver implicitly religious imagery within a ‘secular’ context. Particularly, how religious heritage and language have impacted upon contemporary American culture to partake in an aesthetic of apocalypticism that underwrites it. By analysing contemporary American art and literature, this thesis investigates recent millennial imaging. Filtered through analysis of the work of the sculptor, performance artist and filmmaker Matthew Barney, the author Ben Marcus, the cinema of David Lynch and Christopher Nolan and others, End of days: Religious imaging in Millennialist America scrutinises an aesthetic or sensibility of apocalyptic thinking in contemporary American culture. The thesis argues that this may be characterised as ‘schizophrenic’ — a hyperbolic secularism rancid with chthonic religious imaging. Such imagery, derived from mutational variations of Mormonism, Judaism and Christianity (especially Catholic), articulate a series of translations, transformations, mutations and mutilations of these traditions. The results are near heretical permutations of orthodoxy fixated on apocalyptic imaginings and rendered most vibrantly in these artist’s works. The thesis examines the dialects of pathological America where the end of the world is forever immanent, but never arrives — or has already arrived.