ANAT EBGIBig, Small and the Last Days
Written by: Peter Ireland
March 21, 2012

THERMOSTAT GALLERY
Palmerston North
Angela Lane
A Sequence of Events

9 March - 29 March 2012

As any engineer can tell you - and there are enough of them with cause to be doing it right now- any structure will succumb to stress at its weakest point. This physical principle can apply tosocial structures too. When stress accumulates in the social order folks are apt to go a bit stircrazy. Commonly-held beliefs start fraying at the edges, creating a space for snake oil salesmento flourish, and contracts go out for extensions to what Malcolm Muggeridge once described as“reservoirs of credulity”.
C K Chesterton also observed that once belief in an Almighty Being dissolved it wasn’t thatpeople believed nothing; they believed anything. But, that’s enough quoting of Christianapologists, even though some Christian-influenced history must be mined here. It’s always beena problem for scholars of the New Testament to explain away a clear and intense conviction inmembers of the early Church that the “Last Days” were nigh, that within a relatively short timethey’d experience Christ’s “Second Coming”, the world would end and the faithful enjoy
whatever “heaven” turned out to be. Well, we’re still here, waiting.

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ANAT EBGIOver the last two thousand years there has been a certain congruence between times of social
stress and an upsurge in predictions of imminent Last Days. The problematic final part of theNew Testament, the Book of Revelation, a highly symbolic, poetic and obscure tome, can fuelany avenue of speculation, particularly as to “the signs” indicating the proximity of what, inAmerica, is commonly called The Rapture, as if Revelations had been written by Wilhelm Reichor Alex Comfort rather than St John the Divine.
The advent of the first Millennium witnessed a particularly fervent and widespread outbreak ofprophesying the Last Days, yet another numbers’ game that failed to deliver. Throughout thelater Middle Ages predictions revived regularly in sync with famine, plague and war. Of course,not everyone was destined for heaven. To work socially, the concept needed a hell to threaten
those for whom boring “goodness” wasn’t sufficiently attractive in itself. The art of the time wasrich in hellfire, the end of the world and the Last Judgment.
Fifteenth and early sixteenth-century Netherlandish painting is interestingly at the cross-roads ofthe late Medieval period and the Modern age, when the unearthly belief system dominating
Western culture since whenever began to give way to respect for physical facts in an embryonicscientific method. As this grew and asserted itself over the following couple of centuries,depictions of the Last Days, unsurprisingly, tailed off.
The Romantic period, itself a reaction to growing rationalism, had its own taste for catastropheand violent spectacle, but those artists such as John Martin who still messed with Biblicalsubjects inspired not so much dread as Cecil B de Mille. This director who handled big themes
in a way that came to define the magic of Hollywood was probably motivated by providing
excitement and awe rather than fear. The later genre of (intentional) disaster movie, though,may satisfy an apparent human need for stimulation through fear - along with bungy-jumping,roller-coaster riding and attending New Zealand First rallies - but it could be that Hollywood’s
fiction may have subverted a necessary sense of fear to the point that we can no longer
recognize, in time, a looming, real catastrophe.

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ANAT EBGI

Depicting a man’s anxious face barely above the water’s surface, Angela Lane’s painting A fearof drowning may be only 77mm in diameter but it tackles head on a very big topic, as do theother seven works in this show, the largest of which is merely 250mm across. There’s noalternative to looking closely, and while you’re being drawn in there’s almost the sound of a gate
clicking shut behind you. Like it or not, you find yourself trapped in these portentous miniatures
retailing their post-apocalyptic news: ravaged landscapes with ruined buildings, shattered trees
and smoke-laden skies speak not of a Fall of Man but of a despoiled, exhausted planet, a Hellthis side of death.
Her inspiration’s those same Netherlandish paintings, picking up where they left off, but leaving
aside their often calm foregrounds of Christ’s Baptism and nursing Madonnas to concentrate on
their more turbulent backgrounds which more than hint at the pitfalls and sufferings of earthly
existence. All this, nonetheless, painted by masters such as Simon Marmion, Joachim Patinirand Jan van Eyck with care and even delight, delineating growing cities with pride, illustrating
developments in agricultural technology, revelling in the plasticity of the new oil medium, and,above all, rejoicing in the cool, clear light of those Northern skies.
All that’s just a memory in Lane’s updating, but remains integral to this show, not called
Sequence of Events for nothing. Narratives with a moral may have fallen from favour since
Victorian times (although there are some recent exceptions: Megan Jenkinson’s mid-‘90s’ series
The Virtues, for instance), and any mention of “morality” these days tends to call up its opposite
in the sexual sphere, much to the public interest - the name Dominque Strauss-Kahn saying itall. However, its popular sense seems to be widening in the wake of recent Wall Street
shenanigans and the consequent growth of the Occupy movement. Parents and teachers tell
kids that “actions have consequences”. Well, it’s the grown-ups’ time now, being called toaccount for their sequence of events. In her recent work Lane has taken this accountability to
panoramic widths, involving us all without exception. That gate has clicked firmly behind us
forever.

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ANAT EBGI

Lane’s Burial of the wood, like the other works in the show, looks forward by looking back. But
its retrospection could be more recent, the mass of fire on the horizon to the left harking back tothe series of four Turner paintings depicting dramatically the 1834 inferno destroying themedieval Palace of Westminster, the seat of parliament. The artist was recording a great event,certainly, but these vivid images have a greater symbolic import as well. In the previous half
century Britain’s social stability had been undermined by the industrial revolution, and its
political survival by the effects of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. As if thisweren’t enough, conservatives predicted the Reform Act of 1832 would precipitate an English
Revolution, with the spectre of its own subsequent Terror. So, when two years later, parliament
went up, it seemed the embodiment of their worst fears. Just four years after that, a group called
Chartists formed - virtually the first organized trade union - another perceived harbinger of theLast Days for those in power.
A Sequence of Events is itself part of this sequence of looking back to look forward. None ofthese intricately painted vignettes issues any specific prophesy, but that all add up to a definite
warning about the consequences of seas rising, cyclones increasing and food becoming
scarcer. It’s not personal spiritual crises this time but a chilling prospect of widespread social
chaos. The face of the man drowning in the tiny painting registers surprise. For us there is nosuch luxury. There’s nothing domestically cosy about these works painted on second-hand,familiar wooden objects like coasters and breadboards. That’s just part of Lane’s trap. They’regreat to look at, but they’re made to decorate our walls and our consciousness.

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