'Bringers of the New Dawn' Oil, ashes and charcoal on burned panel
The above image is of a bombed out building somewhere in
Syria. The title is ‘Bringers of the New
Dawn’ which is a play on a new age book by a similar name called ‘Bringers of
the Dawn.’ My fascination with new age
material, politics and religion are mixed together in this image. On the right is a list of all the dates that
were prophesized for the end of the world.
The list is broken up into dates that are specific down to the day they
were to occur and dates that are more ambiguous, usually just a year, meaning
that the prophecy was to become true sometime in that year. What is interesting is that there are
centuries where prophecies of the end of the world were more common, for
example in the 17th century, when the year 1666 was
approaching. The obvious reason for this
is that in Christian mythology the number of the beast from Revelation is 666.
The closer to our time the dates get, the more specific they get. For one reason or another, modern science and
the enlightenment seems to have had influence on the way that the end of the
world was calculated. With the more
rational side of humanity coming to the fore, Christianity found it necessary
to become more specific even in its prophecies. Not only this, the prophecies increased,
to something like double in the 20th century, especially toward the
end of the century and close to the year 2012.
On his own, Harold Camping was responsible for at least 4-6 prophecies
of the end.
What the image brings together is a type of anxiety about
the future. Where in the past this
anxiety was produced and assuaged by religion and the priesthood, with the age
of reason and enlightenment, anxiety about what is uncertain became entwined
with the new belief system in progress.
Progress itself created the conditions under which uncertainty increased
and so did anxiety about what would happen next. This proved to be a fertile ground for the
imaginings of the future by people that wanted to control it. These ‘Bringers of the New Dawn’ are tied to
the neo-conservative and neo-liberal movements, each wanting to control the
destiny of a whole society in their own specific way, usually through economics
and ideology. More specifically, at the
end of the 20th century, the neo-conservatives drafted and put
together a think tank The Project for a New American Century (PNAC). This think tank produced a publication in
which it outlined the way in which the US was to become the major player in
global politics and economics through perpetual warfare. Though already decades in the process, the
PNAC sought to destabilize the Middle-East and draw an alliance with Israel,
based on an ancient prophecy of the second coming of Christ. According to the prophecy, the second coming
would occur only if a number of key events happened, one of which was the
establishment of the homeland of the Israelites, another of which was the
destruction of the Isrealites themselves.
With many of the bullet point on the prophecy list checked off, the PNAC
wanted to speed up the process by fomenting wars and pitting neighbors against
each other in the Middle-East. Eternal
paradise would be achieved only through a process of war and suffering. This is of course eerily similar to the
prophecies of the Thousand Year Reich that the Nazis wanted to create in the
wake of a hostile war for world domination. Fantasies of life without
suffering, in which only the best and the brightest are allowed to live and breed,
are always wrapped in a mythology of heroic deeds, trials and tribulations.
They are meant to be life lessons, but in reality they take on sinister
dimensions of violence fueled by fundamentalist misunderstanding of the texts. Fundamentalists almost always believe that
what they are doing is right and just, no matter what the means and at what
cost to others surrounding them. They
believe that they are the true inheritors of knowledge and power and thus the ‘Bringers
of the New Dawn.’
