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The politics of imagining the US’s downfall has always been inconclusive; even as it is obliterated, these visions continue to place America centre stage. Dreams of the centre falling, after all, confirm where the centre of the world is, investing it with power even as it symbolically collapses. masks, latex gloves and an expanded insurance plan – but workers continue to get sick. By the time the government starts to panic, implementing a ban on Chinese imports, it’s far too late. Shen Fever is everywhere, and the apocalypse unfolds. Two years ago, when Severance was published, Ma’s premise was implausible. If anything, her Shen Fever scenario was an outlier vision – operating best as black humour, as social critique – and the novel was classed as an of ice satire. Nobody is laughing now. As we live through what she imagined, today Severance can only be read with a mixture of fear, excitement and awe. Was the pandemic really so predictable? Clearly it was foreseeable from an Asian worldview. Now located in the US, Ma herself was born in Fujian, the province in China where the bird lu epidemic of 2003 emerged. And Ma was not alone in her vision of an apocalyptic sickness originating in China: Larissa Lai’s scienceiction novel The Tiger Flu, published the same year as Severance, follows a mysterious animal lu as it ravages an Asianised Canada of the future. Ma takes an intense pleasure in writing New York’s death, a city she dismantles across the novel, just as Vō destroys the lag. Candace documents the fall; inexplicably immune from the fever, she remains at her desk even as the apocalypse unfolds. During her lunch breaks, she gazes down on Time Square. At irst, tourists arrive, taking advantage of drastically reduced airfares, but soon they disappear, along with the city’s entire populace. When her work dries up, Candace begins to wander a deserted city, publishing photographs of what she sees on her blog, NY Ghost, snapping the entrances to looded subways where candy bars and corpses swirl together; the ghetto-palms already sprouting from the pavements; the smashed boutique windows, spilling terry-cloth and velour; the ominous security guards and shrines. That New York exists as an image, a fantasy, as much as a physical location means that in order for it to be destroyed its destruction needs to be captured and circulated, and occur on the level of the image. Candace knows this implicitly; visitors to her blog click on, enraptured. ‘It was as if they still couldn’t believe New York was breaking down, and needed con irmation,’ Candace reports. ‘Everywhere else could fall apart, but not New York. Its glossy, re lective surfaces and moneyed environments seemed invincible.’ Ma captures the cycles of empire as Candace gazes down on the city, like the last emperor. ‘Looking out Ed Ruscha, The Old Tool & Die Building, 2004, Gagosian the windows, I imagined the future as a time-lapse video, spanning the years it takes for Time Square to be overrun by ghetto palms, wetland vegetation, and wildlife,’ Candace ruminates. ‘Or maybe I was actually conjuring up the past, the pine- and hickory-forested island that the Dutch irst glimpsed upon arriving, populated with black bears and wolves, foxes and weasels, bobcats and mountain lions, ducks and geese in every stream.’ This vantage on history echoes a text that accompanied Vō’s show, a timeline stretching from 330BC to 1945 (accessible via a QR code), which listed the sacking of Ancient Macedonia, the fall of Rome, the collapse of the Qing Dynasty and the bombing of Japan – a litany of 22 Chicxulubs, where the mighty fall. The politics of imagining the US’s downfall has always been inconclusive; even as it is obliterated, these visions continue to place America centre stage. Dreams of the centre falling, a er all, con irm where the centre of the world is, investing it with power even as it symbolically collapses. Thomas Cole’s saccharine and once-beloved series of paintings ‘The Course of Empire’, 1833–36, is a case in point. Over ive canvases, Cole charts the rise and fall of a great city, which, like Ma’s Manhattan, rises from the pastures and returns to dust. The third and central painting, The Consummation of Empire, conjures a scene of urban decadence, a great metropolis replete with elephants, glittering columns, festive crowds and slaves, which has grown out of the swamp. But the capital is soon ravaged by wars and storms until little of it remains; the inal scene, Desolation, is an echo of the irst: a pastoral landscape of yore, only this time littered with ruins. Cole’s Romantic rapture over the empire’s fall, where Manhattan is allegorised as Rome, advances a cautionary and popular tale in which imperial greed is punished. Yet, ironically, rather than inspiring anti-colonial sentiments, as Cole hoped, these paintings also fed the colonial imagination. More than 150 years later, Ed Ruscha restaged Cole’s series with his own ‘Course of Empire’, exhibited in the American Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale. Ruscha’s ten paintings show the broken suburbs of LA and the ruins brought about by thoughtless consumer culture, where regional workshops are replaced by epic warehouses for imported goods. Those goods are made in special economic zones (ie, in gothic conditions) such as the Northern Mariana Islands, territories administered by the US since 1947 and, as Immerwahr describes, used to pilot the modern sweatshop. From Cole to Ruscha to Hollywood: time and time again America gazes at its navel and wrings its hands. Has the US been a good leader, spreading the good capitalist gospel, or a slave-trading, imperialist, racist empire, with blood on its hands? That is the problem with staging the death of the US; so o en it feeds American narcissism, giving an audience to the nation’s psychodrama as it lies back on the couch. In his 2012 short story Certain Fathoms in the Earth, Chris Sharp examines the US as a culture obsessed with images of its own decline. His narrator is a future Chicxulub survivor, si ing through America’s ruins 12 Art Monthly no. 442, December 2020 – January 2021
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and piecing together its inal decades. ‘All of their energy seemed to go into the production, accumulation and indiscriminate distribution of images,’ the narrator reports. ‘Nothing, no form of image, it is said, thrilled them more than those of their own end. They produced them by the thousands, possibly the millions. Legend has it that an entire culture evolved around this end-ism … nothing intoxicated them more than the complete and total annihilation of the great New York.’ America’s narcissism continues. The latest episode in the apocalyptic drama is the presidential election, for which the US staged its death yet again. In the run up to 2 November, as Vō’s lag dwindled and burned, US commentators began to sound the Chicxulub alarm. In an article titled ‘The end of democracy?’, the Washington Post predicted doom, whatever the electoral outcome. The event played out far better than CNN or Fox News could have hoped, in six days of riveting, nail-biting television – with Trump’s false declaration of victory followed by night a er night of vote-counting, the igures updated on some news sites every 15 seconds. It had the lavour of a game show combined with the juiciest reality TV, with all cameras on Trump, its practised, monstrous star. Has democracy died? Was the election really so different to the last one? More likely it is as Vō suggests: that Chicxulub is a repeated event, one that has previously recurred across various colonised countries, outside the news feed, and is now happening, on screen, in the US. The difference is that, unlike those invasions in Vietnam or Iraq, when the US stages its own death it happens on the level of the image – not so much a death blow as a box-of ice hit. The US watches itself die its intoxicating image-death, ‘symbolically destroyed time and time again’, as Sharp writes, ‘in a paroxysm of apocalyptic ecstasy.’ Izabella Scott is a writer and researcher based in London. She is an editor at The White Review. Danh Vō, Untitled, 2020 Art Monthly no. 442, December 2020 – January 2021 13

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The politics of imagining the US’s downfall has always been inconclusive; even as it is obliterated, these visions continue to place America centre stage. Dreams of the centre falling, after all, confirm where the centre of the world is, investing it with power even as it symbolically collapses.

masks, latex gloves and an expanded insurance plan – but workers continue to get sick. By the time the government starts to panic, implementing a ban on Chinese imports, it’s far too late. Shen Fever is everywhere, and the apocalypse unfolds.

Two years ago, when Severance was published, Ma’s premise was implausible. If anything, her Shen Fever scenario was an outlier vision – operating best as black humour, as social critique – and the novel was classed as an of ice satire. Nobody is laughing now. As we live through what she imagined, today Severance can only be read with a mixture of fear, excitement and awe. Was the pandemic really so predictable? Clearly it was foreseeable from an Asian worldview. Now located in the US, Ma herself was born in Fujian, the province in China where the bird lu epidemic of 2003 emerged. And Ma was not alone in her vision of an apocalyptic sickness originating in China: Larissa Lai’s scienceiction novel The Tiger Flu, published the same year as Severance, follows a mysterious animal lu as it ravages an Asianised Canada of the future.

Ma takes an intense pleasure in writing New York’s death, a city she dismantles across the novel, just as Vō destroys the lag. Candace documents the fall; inexplicably immune from the fever, she remains at her desk even as the apocalypse unfolds. During her lunch breaks, she gazes down on Time Square. At irst, tourists arrive, taking advantage of drastically reduced airfares, but soon they disappear, along with the city’s entire populace. When her work dries up, Candace begins to wander a deserted city, publishing photographs of what she sees on her blog, NY Ghost, snapping the entrances to looded subways where candy bars and corpses swirl together; the ghetto-palms already sprouting from the pavements; the smashed boutique windows, spilling terry-cloth and velour; the ominous security guards and shrines.

That New York exists as an image, a fantasy, as much as a physical location means that in order for it to be destroyed its destruction needs to be captured and circulated, and occur on the level of the image. Candace knows this implicitly; visitors to her blog click on, enraptured. ‘It was as if they still couldn’t believe New York was breaking down, and needed con irmation,’ Candace reports. ‘Everywhere else could fall apart, but not New York. Its glossy, re lective surfaces and moneyed environments seemed invincible.’

Ma captures the cycles of empire as Candace gazes down on the city, like the last emperor. ‘Looking out

Ed Ruscha, The Old Tool & Die Building, 2004, Gagosian the windows, I imagined the future as a time-lapse video, spanning the years it takes for Time Square to be overrun by ghetto palms, wetland vegetation, and wildlife,’ Candace ruminates. ‘Or maybe I was actually conjuring up the past, the pine- and hickory-forested island that the Dutch irst glimpsed upon arriving, populated with black bears and wolves, foxes and weasels, bobcats and mountain lions, ducks and geese in every stream.’ This vantage on history echoes a text that accompanied Vō’s show, a timeline stretching from 330BC to 1945 (accessible via a QR code), which listed the sacking of Ancient Macedonia, the fall of Rome, the collapse of the Qing Dynasty and the bombing of Japan – a litany of 22 Chicxulubs, where the mighty fall.

The politics of imagining the US’s downfall has always been inconclusive; even as it is obliterated, these visions continue to place America centre stage. Dreams of the centre falling, a er all, con irm where the centre of the world is, investing it with power even as it symbolically collapses.

Thomas Cole’s saccharine and once-beloved series of paintings ‘The Course of Empire’, 1833–36, is a case in point. Over ive canvases, Cole charts the rise and fall of a great city, which, like Ma’s Manhattan, rises from the pastures and returns to dust. The third and central painting, The Consummation of Empire, conjures a scene of urban decadence, a great metropolis replete with elephants, glittering columns, festive crowds and slaves, which has grown out of the swamp. But the capital is soon ravaged by wars and storms until little of it remains; the inal scene, Desolation, is an echo of the irst: a pastoral landscape of yore, only this time littered with ruins. Cole’s Romantic rapture over the empire’s fall, where Manhattan is allegorised as Rome, advances a cautionary and popular tale in which imperial greed is punished. Yet, ironically, rather than inspiring anti-colonial sentiments, as Cole hoped, these paintings also fed the colonial imagination.

More than 150 years later, Ed Ruscha restaged Cole’s series with his own ‘Course of Empire’, exhibited in the American Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale. Ruscha’s ten paintings show the broken suburbs of LA and the ruins brought about by thoughtless consumer culture, where regional workshops are replaced by epic warehouses for imported goods. Those goods are made in special economic zones (ie, in gothic conditions) such as the Northern Mariana Islands, territories administered by the US since 1947 and, as Immerwahr describes, used to pilot the modern sweatshop. From Cole to Ruscha to Hollywood: time and time again America gazes at its navel and wrings its hands. Has the US been a good leader, spreading the good capitalist gospel, or a slave-trading, imperialist, racist empire, with blood on its hands? That is the problem with staging the death of the US; so o en it feeds American narcissism, giving an audience to the nation’s psychodrama as it lies back on the couch.

In his 2012 short story Certain Fathoms in the Earth, Chris Sharp examines the US as a culture obsessed with images of its own decline. His narrator is a future Chicxulub survivor, si ing through America’s ruins

12

Art Monthly no. 442, December 2020 – January 2021

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