For the opening of the exhibition Turner versus Martin at the Laing Art Gallery, AV Festival 10 asked Moore and musician Stephen O'Malley (Sunn O))), KTL, Gravetemple) to create something together. Alan Moore wrote and performed a new text in the gallery responding to the energy of the two paintings: John Martin's The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (1852) and JMW Turner's Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1812) from the Tate Collection.
Stephen O'Malley created a new accompanying ambient soundscape, sonically melting in the radiance of the paintings.
The complete performance is available HERE.
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| JMW Turner's Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps |
Alan Moore: [...] This is as far north as the Romans ever got, with their Mediterranean tans, thin tunics and short skirts, freezing their arses off at Wallsend, Segedunum, thus commencing a tradition. The precarious margin of their territory scares them, alien and elemental, liminal and filled with unknown hazard, too close to the Arctic for their skimpily dressed gods to follow and watch over them. They need a local hand to mediate between them and a savage landscape, and, at the wall's other end in Benwell, Condericum, they erect their temple to a borrowed native deity, Antenociticus, god of the antler-fringed brow and therefore a horned one, a Cernunnos. [...] Called the greatest and the best, Antenociticus is clearly on a par with Jupiter, the wielder of the lightning whose dominion extended turned to all things, to the storm, an' avalanche, an' hunted boar, god of a hostile universe that lay beyond their world's Hyperborean rim, upon whose whim survival rested. Beautifully fashioned in the Celtic style, his psychopathic pin-prick eyes are merciless, omnipotent, mad with divinity, a Pagan gaze that promises the end of cities, a condition that seems far away back in the tumult of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when modern industry still gurgles in its infancy, in its gun-metal cot, or at least, further than it seems today. [...]
Though painted forty years apart by men of widely different temperament and age and style, both Turner's Hannibal and Martin's Sodom and Gomorrah possess many similarities, and have the stamp of catastrophic times upon them. Turner's piece is executed during 1812, while John Martin is hanging his first painting, Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion, in the Royal Academy. Just a year previously Napoleon has tried to invade Italy across the Alps, Hannibal style, defeated by the stark realities of weather and terrain. Turner conceives a warning, a reminder of the shattering and gigantic forces of the Earth that wait to wipe away our kingdoms, our republics, our delirious ambitions, a tribunal that brooks no appeal. He steals a murderous Yorkshire sky from over Farnley Hall in Otley, revels in the drama of the Northern Lights. John Martin's levelling of the Cities of the Plain, painted in 1852 with Martin in his early sixties, has the same regional atmospherics, has the furnace glow of his Newcastle youth deployed to similar ends. It shares with Turner's painting an enormity of scale and moment, tiny Bruegel figures only there to illustrate the vastness of destruction that surrounds them, the futility and insignificance of human grandeurs faced with natural disaster, faced with carpet bombing from the angels. Both works have the same intention, a critique of overreaching national arrogance couched in a language that is classical or biblical. Most strikingly they share a composition: rocky terrain in the lower foreground, rising on the right, where miniaturist figures cower, Lot and his daughters, Hannibal's doomed soldiers. Over all this in the upper background's whirl and spectacle, Martin and Turner both depict the same annihilating vortex, one with flame and one with smoke. Some say the world will end in fire, some in ice, but both functions in the debate agree that it will end. Rome's wall, Napoleon's, Gomorrah, the industry warmed world that we inhabit, straining at the end of their respective tethers, facing the same whirlpool of demise. This is a terror of the world's edge. It's the vertigo of an accelerated culture. Out beyond the lights of every city, every town and every century, this is the abyss that abides. These lethal vortices are each ellipses, one that sears and one that freezes. At the Roman garrisons hunching against the rain in Westgate Road beside Hadrian's Wall, these are the terminal configurations of civilisation's margins, other forces outside that must be appeased. In 2010 at this unique convergence, hanging side by side together the twin maelstroms of extinction can't help but suggest an optical arrangement. These storm sockets, cauled with hail and magma and eradication. We stand at the precipice of ourselves and look down into the gaze that has not blinked or wavered since before we were, and would not notice if we were no longer. At these snowblind precincts of our empire, at this limit of our possibilities, we stare into the cold eyes of Antenociticus.
The complete performance is available HERE.
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