Each year, a handful of new releases in pop culture reminds us that public fascination with apocalyptic events will survive even the most stubborn tropes of the genre. The zombies of “The Walking Dead” from 2010, for example, are more terrifying when reimagined as erratic, fungal-infected hosts like in “The Last of Us.” Or, in Alex Garland’s Civil War, a new premise for apocalyptic disaster is the fiction of a modern, ravaging civil war in contemporary America.
We can revamp conventional apocalyptic narratives, but the appetite for imagining what future disasters might look like hasn’t waned at all. It seems only to proliferate. For Art History Professor Jennifer Pruitt, that collective intrigue is an obsession worth studying.
Pruitt is the Howard and Ellen Louise Schwartz Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture, whose research has largely focused on the architecture of the medieval Egyptian Fatimid dynasty in the 10th and 11th centuries. Her course “Art History 103: The End of the World,” which she’s teaching in the fall semester, has admittedly little to do with her own research. But she hopes it will anchor students to a broader thematic focus, one which also happens to touch on the individual allure of the end of the world.
“I’m really thinking of this class as an intro to art history, an intro to the humanities,” Pruitt says. “The reason I centered it around the theme of the end of the world is that personally, I’ve been really obsessed with apocalyptic novels and TV shows.”
By opening her target to a broader cross-section of art history, Pruitt also wants to expand the geographical scope of apocalyptic art throughout the centuries to gather cross-cultural “samples.”
“We’ll certainly be looking at Western European and Islamic traditions,” Pruitt says, “but we also have faculty who work on art spanning much of the Asian world — comparing and contrasting how apocalyptic art has been envisioned in various cultures and times.”
This means looking, for example, at pre-modern Christian art in the West like Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment in which the conventional view of apocalypse is a judgment from God that destroys the world. In the Hindu and Buddhist tradition, however, the end of times is only one periodical ending to a constant cycle of destruction and renewal. The common depiction can be found in metal sculptures of the Hindu god Shiva, a dancing figure in a halo of fire.
In addition to chronicling the history of apocalyptic art, Pruitt also hopes to look at fictional conceptions of the post-apocalyptic world.
“I really want to look at dystopian imaginaries,” Pruitt says. “Ones that are set in our world in the near future where society’s been denuded of people.”
Shows like “Fallout” and “The Last of Us” are notable examples for Pruitt, depicting bleak worlds depopulated by nuclear war or pandemics. However, she also hopes to incorporate other mediums into the course, including Damian Duffy’s graphic-novel adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower as well as the original video-game counterparts from which “Fallout” and “The Last of Us” were adapted. Pruitt hopes that including these will engage students in more familiar or contemporary modes of narrative.
To chronicle the history of apocalyptic art is to thread together various historical moments when apocalyptic anxiety was especially charged — moments when the world “really did fall apart,” as Pruitt says. It also requires a glimpse at “what happens to art during and after moments of major cataclysm.” In other words, how art burgeoned out of apocalypse.
“Think about events like the plague or World War II or the invention of the atomic bomb,” Pruitt says.
For instance, five years after American atomic bombs decimated the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese artists Iri and Toshi Maruki began a series of folding screen paintings composed over the span of 30 years memorializing the atomic devastation. In the second composition of their Hiroshima Panels, a long sprawl of blackened, anguished bodies stretch across the screen, awash in red paint. But even decades later, the cataclysmic objects which brought the end of one world still survived and brought new fears.
“My parents spent their childhoods doing atomic bomb drills, hiding under desks,” Pruitt recounts of the Cold War and its anxieties permeating ordinary lives.
Today, people experience these new, heightened anxieties in unprecedented moments, as well. “Climate change,” Pruitt says, “is not something you can dial back. It’s something that is very distinct from other periods, from which we could see a unique kind of apocalypse.”
News consumption also amplifies those fears. It is now a form of constant exposure to information flooding into our private lives and Instagram feeds. “The way we consume news is so different,” Pruitt says. “We’re inundated with horrors in the palm of our hands. It feels like it encompasses us, even while we’re safe in our own homes.”
But something must follow even the bleakest apocalypse.
During the Mongol conquests, “history was completely upended,” Pruitt says. “Millions of people were slaughtered.”
She adds: “But two generations later, there was an artistic renaissance.” The rise of the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty in China and the Ilkhanids in Iran, for example, saw a period of formal innovation in painting and composition.
This, she says, is the conceptual tension in the study of apocalyptic art. While it begins in tremendous anxiety, violence and upheaval, the art also offers panacea and reconstruction, whether from the remains of the dead or the living. In other words, “with each world that’s destroyed, a new world is created.”
What separates contemporary apocalyptic paranoia from that of our forebears is the luxury of foresight.
“We have the benefit of knowing the world did not end at that moment even if people thought it was going to,” Pruitt says. “These are things that people have been anxious about forever.… It actually gives me hope to have a historical perspective, that the world has actually ended many times and still, humanity finds a way to persevere.”
