What does a 185-year-old painting say about the attack on the Capitol Building?

Like many people, I was horrified by the events early this month at the US Capitol Building in Washington, when armed protestors broke into the building and members of Congress were forced to hide in fear for their lives. Images of the Capitol Building covered in smoke, surrounded by chaos, filled the world’s TV screens and social media feeds for days afterward. Days later an image came to my mind that encapsulated what had happened. It wasn’t a photo from the day, but a painting made 185 years ago.

The painting is called Destruction and was painted by Anglo-American artist Thomas Cole in 1836. Cole couldn’t have foreseen our age of internet conspiracy theories or a time where the President of the United States would use Twitter to encourage people claiming to be patriots to attack the very seat of the American government, (I have been living through the last four years and I couldn’t have predicted this would happen - although perhaps I should have), however, his painting tells us a lot about how we got into this situation.

The Course of Empire

Take a look at the painting. Destruction is obviously apt to describe last week’s events, but the painting is relevant not just because it depicts a neo-classical capital city being disrupted by an uprising, but because of what Cole intended to communicate when he painted it.

Destruction is part of a series of paintings called The Course of Empire. In these paintings, Cole outlines the rise and fall of a fictional civilisation, according to a popular view at the time that history was a series of civilisations rising and falling. The five paintings show the complete life cycle of a civilisation, its rise from a nomadic existence, to a great culture that builds huge grand cities, to its destruction and then finally becoming abandoned ruins.

The fourth painting in the sequence, Destruction, shows the fall of the great civilisation as it is engulfed in either a civil war or an outside invasion. Although the paintings don’t depict any particular civilisation, they do show a classical civilisation in the model of Ancient Greece or Rome. The paintings make the argument that this is an inevitable trajectory for all civilisations: if you rise you will fall.

Pastoral America

For Cole, the second painting in the series, The Arcadian or Pastoral State, which represented pastoralism was the ideal state. This is where humanity is at peace with the land, farming it but living in harmony with it. Cole didn’t want America to lose touch with nature and become an urban, complex society as this would lead to America progressing along the expected trajectory of all civilisations and, ultimately, to its downfall. If America left pastoralism behind it would lead to the ruin shown in the 5th painting, Desolation.

The third painting in the sequence, The Consummation of Empire, shows a society at the height of its power, a society with a refined culture that has built great monuments to itself. However, the seeds of its downfall have already been sowed as a demagogue is shown riding to power on the back of waves of popular elation: this civilisation has found its Caesar.

These paintings have something to tell us about what happened in America last week. It’s telling that the society painted by Cole was brought down by a demagogue, loved by his people, who destabilised his society. However, what’s more instructive is Cole’s idea behind making the paintings: that the signs of civilisation or metropolitan living, as summed up in The Consummation of Empire, are in themselves a sign that America has lost its way and is headed for destruction.

Against civil society

Many Americans want America to be as Cole saw it: a pastoral, rural society. One free of complex things like modern governments, metropolitan culture and a plurality of ethnicities. It’s not that these people, many of whom support Donald Trump, think that Joe Biden or the Democrats are their enemies; it’s that they see the whole idea of American civil society as their enemy.

Being opposed to the peaceful transition of power after your leader loses an election equals being opposed to civil society. Leaving fact behind, and living in an alternative reality where Trump won the election and the Democrats are part of a satanic pedophile ring, is to set yourself against the common truth that make civil society possible. To hate cities and believe that everyone should live in small, rural communities is against civil society.

Cole’s paintings show that this resistance to civil society (not shown at all in the first painting, The Savage State, which shows a hunter-gatherer society, or the second painting, The Arcadian or Pastoral State) has been part of the American mindset from the beginning. Trump didn’t turn the people against civil society (although he certainly made them angrier with it) and getting rid of Trump will not change the fundamental view, held by many Americans, that their society has been on the wrong course since the time of Cole.

The real threat to America

Many Americans are still fighting to stop America from moving away from its pastoral roots. America needs to find some way to address the fact that a large number of Americans see their own civil society as against them, if the country is to move beyond its current state of being hopelessly divided, riven and at its own throats.

Take another look at Thomas Cole’s Destruction. It’s the ideas behind Cole’s paintings that, imbedded deep within the American consciousness, might lead to its destruction; not its progress along a mythical road to becoming metropolitan civilisation. The resistance to this process is more likely to destroy America than embrace it. That’s what we saw last week.

Image credit: Thomas Cole, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

2001 captures the sublime in space

The sublime is a difficult feeling to articulate. Broadly, it’s a mixture of beauty and terror. It’s a sensation of beauty that has nothing to be with prettiness. The sublime is not found in cuteness or quaintness, but in scenes that inspire awe and wonder. It’s a beauty that is hard to look at, even hard to comprehend, but also hard to turn away from.

What is the sublime?

The 18th-century clergyman and Whig politician Edmund Burke , who has the dubious honour of being the founder of modern conservatism, said that: “No passion effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as terror. And whatever is terrible in refuse to sight is sublime.” Burke believed that the sublime and beauty were mutually exclusive. He found the sublime in the poetry of John Milton, but not in the paintings of his day.

For a more modern commentary on the sublime, we need to look to Jonathan Meades, writer, documentary filmmaker, surrealist artist and the former Times restaurant critic. Meades said that: “The witness to the sublime is overwhelmed by vastness, by awe, by wonder, by terror. The sublime is crushing.”

Meades identified the sublime with nature in seething oceans, basalt columns, waterfalls and the screaming wind. “Forces beyond human control”. He also identified the sublime with the painting of J. M. W. Turner, Caspar David Friedrich and John Martin, the latter of which he said his: “Every waking day was a molten apocalypse.”

Meades makes a crucial distinction that: “Paintings which attempt to capture the sublime are not themselves sublime. Maybe any form of representation precludes sensation of sublimity.” He identified the sublime more with architecture. Not with a particular architecture movement or style, but with military installations, pylons, dams, oil refineries, power stations and gigantic chimneys. These structures challenge the forces of nature. Meades said: “Mankind usurped god. Mankind has, to put it mildly, augmented the inventory of the sublime, not through literary or pictorial representation, not by making art about it, but by matching it.”

I would add to Meades’s list that the sublime can be found in the painting of Mark Rothko - especially his composition for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building on Park Avenue, New York, which is now resident in the Tate Modern - and in the films of Nicolas Winding Refen. The sensation of beauty mixed with terror can be directly experienced through the strange, artful delicacy that Refen uses when depicting a model slicing their own chest open to remove the toxic pieces of another model they have killed and eaten.

I would disagree with Meades that art which seeks to represent the sublime is not itself sublime. The immersive nature of cinema is ideal for depicting the sublime. Especially science fiction films. Burke defined the sublime’s characteristics as ruggedness, lack of clarity, infinity and darkness. Darkness and the infinite bring to mind the complete darkness and endlessness of space.

The sublime in space

Many artistic works that attempt to represent space capture this sense of the sublime. The beauty of extraterrestrial phenomenon can be mixed with the terror that comes from their sheer scale of heavenly bodies, the huge power behind the physics that creates and destroys worlds, the apparent lifelessness of the cosmos, the crushing danger of the void and the fear of the unknown that darkness brings.

A good example is the photography of NASA and ESA probes, especially those gathered together for the 2016 Natural History Museum exhibition Otherworlds: Visions of our Solar System, but it can be found in the works of Iain M. Banks and the better episodes of Dr Who.

It is the vastness of space that stirs terror in us, which is ironic because the hard vacuum of space is very dangerous. Alien is scarier than Gravity because the thought of something terrible coming out the darkness is scarier than the idea of an accident in a hostile environment.

Space has the quality of being sublime, partly due to the universe's supreme scale but also because in the mind of science fiction writers it can inspire hope. The hope of a better world just beyond our reach or the hope that a spirit of adventure and discovery can unite people and inspire us to something greater. Hope is the beauty and space itself is the terror.

Nowhere is the hope better summed up than in the spirit of the 1960s space exploration and the utopian science fiction it inspired. Novels such as Frank Herbert’s Dune showed the possibilities of space and how dangerous other worlds could be. The best example of cinema science fiction from this period that captures the sublime in space is Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The film was made during the height of the Cold War. Kubrick began work on it in 1964, just two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world had been a hair’s breadth away from complete annihilation by new technological marvels of unparalleled destructive power. Meades also identified the sublime with the explosion of atomic bombs. The fear of nuclear war mixed with the sheer power of modern technology is another way in which 1960s science fiction captures the sublime.

Hope for the future

Hope in 2001 is shown through its optimism about space travel. It was released 14 months before the moon landing and its main theme is the possibility of space travel. Kubrick envisioned the film partly as a presentation about futurism and, in his own words, to: “Inform, intrigue and normalise ideas of technological progress and space travel.”

This film is a study of how people at the time imagined space exploration would progress. Scientists from NASA were invited to submit their ideas of what space travel would be like in 30 years’ time and painstaking detail was taken to be as scientifically accurate as possible. Ironically what the scientists failed to predict was the stagnation in space technology of the following decades.

The year of the film’s title is based on the scientists who advised the film’s belief that there would be a round trip to Mars by the 1980s and that a crewed mission to Jupiter would follow at the turn of the millennium.

The film did not just imagine a bold future for space travel. Companies like IBM contributed speculative designs for the computers of tomorrow, which informed the AI Hal, and Ford supplied the design of a future car that appears in a news clip that is watched during the sequence when Dr Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) arrives on the moon.

Designers submitted ideas for what men’s clothing would look like in 35 years’ time. According to the film, the future will resemble Edwardian business suits, which keeps the film’s style from dating too obviously. Kubrick said: “The problem is to find something that looks different, and that might reflect new developments in fabrics, but isn’t so far out to be distracting.” Buttons, for example, are not present on the film’s costumes.

Lots of consideration was put into what the ships and space stations would be like or what life on the moon would be like. Beautifully intricate models were made to show the audience the technological possibilities of the near future. Thought was put into very minute detail, such as making accurate animations for the display screens that appear when space ships are coming into dock in the moon arrival sequence or on the display screens that Dr Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Dr Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) observe in the Discovery One.

Fear in space

There are contradictions in what appears at first to be a positive vision of the future in this film. The satellites that are shown orbiting the Earth immediately after the Dawn of Man sequence are military satellites. This creates an obvious parallel between the first weapons we see being used by the apes in the Dawn of Man sequence and their much more powerful descendants orbiting the Earth.

Details from narration that was originally included in the script, but was dropped from the film, said that these were nuclear weapons from all the world’s great powers. It also said that the weapon system was like an airline with a perfect safety record, no one expected it to last forever. The 1960s fear of nuclear annihilation is translated into space.

Despite the militarisation of space, 2001 also depicts American and Russian scientists having a friendly chat on the space station. I prefer this more optimistic vision of people coming together to explore space, which is found in other great works of 1960s science fiction like the original series of Star Trek. The future of 2001 is a little less optimistic, but does mix ideas of unity between nations in the exploration of space and conflict between nations with the weaponisation of space. These two concepts together capture the sense of beautiful hope, but also terrible destruction that make up the sublime.

Sublime alien encounters

2001 best captures the sublime through the humans’ and proto-humans’ encounters with the alien monolith. An object that matches Meades definition of the sublime as being a force beyond mankind’s control and Burke’s definition of something possessing darkness and the infinite. In the final of the film’s four distinct sequences, the monolith is literally a portal to “Beyond the Infinite.”

The mix of beauty and terror that the monolith inspires in the audience can be found in the use of Hungarian composer György Ligeti’s Requiem, a haunting piece of music that has no discernable individual voice, but instead a formless expression that is both beautiful and terrifying.

This music accompanies the scene where Bowman is transported through the monolith. As Bowman travels we see a blur of abstract images that bring to mind paintings of Wassily Kandinsky, whose attempts to express intangible emotions are sublime in themselves.

The sublime and the Kuleshov Effect

The footage of the alien world that Bowman travels over after his transportation is of Scotland and Monument Valley, with the colour of the film adjusted. This brings out feelings of the sublime by taking something that is familiar and juxtaposing it with the abstract images from Bowman’s transportation to give the feeling a strange alien world.

In cinema this is known as the Kuleshov Effect named after Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, who discovered it. Kuleshov Effect shows that viewers get more information from the interactions of different shots than from individual shots. Complex sensations, such as that of the sublime, can be created through the interactions of footage of different objects.

Thus the combination of footage of ordinary landscapes such Scotland and Monument Valley, with the colour adjusted, can be transformed into bizarre alien worlds that engender sensations of the sublime, via the Kuleshov Effect that occurs when the viewer watches this sequence. The sublime itself is also an emotional Kuleshov Effect as its sensation comes from the juxtaposing of beauty and terror.

Unknowable aliens

The aliens in 2001 are unknowable with their strange landscape and of bizarre structures such as the diamonds that appear floating above the infinite horizon during Bowman’s transportation. The former is reminiscent of way that Turner painted light in his later works and the latter brings to mind the sublime geometric abstractions of Piet Mondrian. Original versions of the script included cities made out geometric shapes that would have given a hint at the architecture of these unknowable aliens.

The film ends with a climax that sums up the sublime with Bowman leaving physical form behind to be reborn as a Starbaby, a creature of pure energy and light. The film ends with the Starbaby floating above the Earth, Bowman having transcended the humanity that that we saw awakened in the Dawn of Man sequence. Older versions of the script, as well as Arthur C Clark’s novelisation of the film, end with the Starbaby simultaneously detonating the nuclear devices that circle the Earth. The sublimity of transcendence and the infinite identified by Burke is linked with the sublimity of nuclear explosions identified by Meades.

Other works of science fiction

No science fiction film so perfectly evokes the wondrous beauty and mind-numbing terror of the great expanse of nothing that lies beyond the heavens as 2001: A Space Odyssey. Other works of science fiction capture the sublime, such as the works of Iain M. Banks, whose novels contain creatures of pure thought and energy who inhabit a plane of existence known as the Sublime.

The writing of NK Jemisin captures the awesome and terrifying power of nature that is associated with the sublime. In her novels, the forces that in our world are beyond human control can be controlled by people, which only makes earthquakes and volcanoes more terrifying when they can be created by human anger or pain.

Ada Palmer’s novels capture the beautiful diversity of humanity and contrast that against the merciless sweeping of time. People are nothing next to the majesty of the philosophies that have shaped the world and they are sublime in their power and how people are consumed by them.

Terry Pratchett made characters of gods and death that were beautifully human whilst still maintaining their awesomeness and their terrible indifference to humanity. He could evoke the sublime and, unusually, combine it with warmth and humour.

Experiencing the sublime

Science fiction as a gene is uniquely suited for depicting the sublime as space is filled with both beauty and terror. Transporting the audience to a world where the wonder and awe of the most powerful forces in the universe can be experienced not only depicts the sublime, but creates feelings of sublimity amongst the viewer.

Both Meades and Burk believed that certain works of art could be sublime of themselves by imbuing the forces that are beyond human understanding or control. They have found the sublime in art forms from painting to architecture. I have sought to make the case that certain works of science fiction should be added to the inventory of the sublime.

It is through creating great works of art that humanity strives to match the awesomeness of nature. Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is such a work that goes beyond depicting the sublime, but is sublime. It is rare that works of art both reach for something greater than depiction and lets us reach for something greater ourselves, but 2001: A Space Odyssey is such a work of art.

The look of Warhammer 40,000: from medieval Salisbury to the grim darkness of the far future

When I used to play Warhammer 40,000, one thing I loved as much as the game itself was the design of the models. They were beautiful evocations of the game’s aesthetic, representing a dark and violent future. This was best summed up in the illustrations included in the rule book and the different faction’s codexes. Between pages filled with character statistics there would be a moody tableau of scenes from Warhammer history rendered in ink as beautiful as a woodcut by Albrecht Dürer.

Theses picture were possessed by a morbid gloominess that made them slightly scary. The bodies they depicted were adjacent to reality. Space Marines had an intricate dieselpunk design that were baffling in their apparent needless complexity. There were monstrous Orks or twisted chaos figures, sick parodies of their Space Marine opposites. I could stare for hours at these science fiction nightmares.

Years later I discovered that these images were heavily influenced by the neo-Gothic art style, sometimes called the Gothic Revival. In Britain this style was popular during the reign of Queen Victoria, specifically in the 1850s and 1860s. Although the neo-Gothic touched literature and other art forms, its best remembered for the architecture movement that produced stunning achievements of Victorian design such as The Palace of Westminster and Strawberry Hill House.

The neo-Gothic emphasises an exaggerated, slightly mythologised version of medieval Gothic buildings such as Salisbury Cathedral. Design features include sprites, gargoyles, ornamentation of every kind and a Victorian enthusiasm for unselfconsciously piling more on top of more. For me these buildings represent a link between the present and British history as they are relatively recent (compared to medieval castles) but are older than my grandparents, the oldest people I have ever known.

The reason that the neo-Gothic images of Warhammer 40k appealed to me is that they were very different to every other vision of the future I had seen through science fiction. Most sci-fi futures appear to have been designed by Apple. Their aesthetic is sleek, minimalist and modernist. The smooth surfaces and dramatic curves of the Starship Enterprise epitomise the modernist view of a perfectly engineered future. To paraphrase the great modernist architect, Le Corbusier: “a spaceship is a machine for living in”.

Warhammer 40k pays no such homage to the optimistic science fiction of the 1960s or sleek modernism of the 1930s. It looks instead to the Victorians with their morbid obsession and industrial vigor to paint a picture of a future that is pessimistic and bloody.

Having a style that consciously evokes a period in the past, rather than a contemporary view of the future, prevents Warhammer 40k’s vision of the future from dating. The complete dominance of modernist design elements in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey looks as dated as the idea that we would live on the moon at the turn of the millennium. The design of Warhammer 40k remains immune from ageing.

As time went by, I discovered that there were other alternatives to the perfectly engineered modernist science fiction, such as cyberpunk with its gloomy, rain-soaked, film noir aesthetic. This is best summed up by Blade Runner, a film I loved from the moment I saw it, but is also summed up by games such as Cyberpunk 2077 or the superb anime Ghost in the Shell.

Other visions of the future include Mad Max’s post-apocalyptic hellscape, which I find frightening as they show humans uninhibited by any laws created by states or social norms. As Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang has said, Max Max is the perfect neo-liberal society, one where individuals and markets have complete freedom, and it is disturbing. 

Warhammer 40k’s use of the neo-Gothic also inspired fear of the constant presence of violence in me. The aesthetic of a society that was pious and fearful of death, perfectly suits a future human society that is consumed by constant war. A future where humanity is beset by terrifying aliens like the Tyranids or frightening creatures from beyond space and sanity, such as the Chaos Demons. The Warhammer 40k universe is scary to look at because it's scary to live in.

Battlefleet Gothic was perhaps the best incarnation of this aesthetic. The ships were salutes to Victorian cathedrals complete with spires and flying buttresses. It looks as if the great age of steam had taken off into space to fire broadside cannons the size of houses the horrors that descend on humanity from the stars. It specifically reminds me of the neo-Gothic cathedral at Cologne; a huge black form, covered in buttresses, gargoyles and spires that was once the tallest building in the world.

 The popularity of the neo-Gothic aesthetic of Warhammer 40k is surprising because of how unpopular it was in Britain for many years. Today we treasure buildings such as the Palace of Westminster, our national symbol, and curse the short-sightedness that wanted to turn St Pancras station into a concrete cube like Euston. However, throughout most of the 20th century, the neo-Gothic was hated for being gaudy, ugly, monstrous in proportions and symbolic of the self-righteous piety that tolerated enormous poverty and squalor.

Buildings such as The Cookridge Street Baths in Leeds were torn down, sometimes to make way for modernist buildings that were hated in their own turn. When a bomb fell on the Palace of Westminster during the Blitz, allegedly one of the people who scrambled to extinguish the flames shouted: “Save the [Medieval Westminster] Hall but left the gothic monstrosity burn.”

Now we have reverence for the neo-Gothic, which should offer a warning from history about how we treat other much-maligned architectural styles such as Brutalism. Brutalism has been hated for the same reasons as the neo-Gothic; considered monstrous in proportions, ugly and in poor taste. Brutalism reminds me of a different science fiction vision of the future, that of early 1970s Dr Who adventures such as Frontier In Space, which was partly filmed on the Brutalist Heywood Gallery in London.

I believe that Brutalism is disliked because of its association with post-war council housing schemes, which were left underfunded to decay into sink estates. Building such as Trelick Tower in Kensal Green, the notorious Tower of Terror, or Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar became synonymous with the failures of postwar housing. They became a synonym for high crime, poor education, drug addiction, unemployment, teenage pregnancy and a whole host of other stereotypes about the poor.

Brutalism painted a vision of the future associated that I associate with the optimism of the post-war consensus. When we see Brutalist buildings in the science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s, it reminds us of the hopes of those periods. Hopes that were destroyed when that consensus was dismantled in the 1980s. 

The neo-Gothic was hated because of the perceived hypocrisy of the Victorians with their strong Christian morality that still tolerated squalor, child poverty and the workhouses. Brutalism has also been hated due to the perceived hypocrisy of postwar council housing that sought to provide modern homes for the poor that quickly became poverty traps. During the 1980s, when there was a backlash against postwar state intervention, people turned on Brutalism and the estates that bore that aesthetic. Ironically this was when people began to embrace the neo-Gothic as beautiful.

A generation that came of age in the 1980s rehabilitated the neo-Gothic, which is evidenced by its use in Warhammer 40ks. Now my generation is seeking to rehabilitate Brutalism and the estates made in this style. I appreciate the ambition of Brutalism, just as I appreciate the ambition of the neo-Gothic. In the future, we may find these buildings to be beautiful and consider the razing of The Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth as the destruction of our cultural heritage, just as we do for the leveling of Euston Station’s Doric Arch.

It was through playing Warhammer 40k that I came to appreciate the neo-Gothic and the feelings that it invoked. Appreciating the neo-Gothic opened my minds to appreciating other controversial architecture styles such as Brutalism. Warhammer 40k added to my understanding of architectural history because it spiked my interest by being different to everything else that I had come to understand as science fiction. This deep appreciation all came from those dark, ink drawings found in Warhammer 40k rulebooks.