PUBLIC LECTURE: Apocalyptic Skies and the Decay of Public Symbolism

Do representations of clouds in Western art and architecture bear out Foucault’s claim of a split in the stable relations of words and images after the seventeenth century with drastic consequences to shared public meanings? This talk offers an answer to this question through an environmentalist survey of the changing significance of clouds in the art and architecture of many cultures over several centuries. From a predominantly religious significance in ancient art, the meaning of clouds shifts towards science in the era of industrial progress and global warming. Thus from clouds as premonitions of an ideal after-life, the man-made clouds of industrial pollution and nuclear warfare create a paradoxical restoration of shared meaning through bleak nostalgia for uncontaminated skies and terror of cloudless ones. The lecture will conclude with a discussion of a Lars Von Triers’ movie Melancholia (2011), invite discussion of An Te Liu’s Cloud (2008) installation and report some responses to the lecture when it was recently delivered in Ekaterinburg and Perm, Russia.