Drone and Apocalypse is an exhibit catalog for a retrospective of twenty-first-century art. Its narrator, Cynthia Wey, is a failed artist convinced that apocalypse is imminent. She writes critical essays delineating apocalyptic tendencies in drone music and contemporary art. Interspersed amid these essays are “speculative artworks”, Wey’s term for descriptions of artworks she never constructs that center around the extinction of humanity. Wey’s favorite musicians are drone artists like William Basinski, Celer, Thomas Köner, Les Rallizes Dénudés, and Éliane Radigue, and her essays relate their works to moments of ineffability in Herodotus, Aristotle, Plato, Pliny the Elder, Isidore of Seville, Robert Burton, Hegel, and Dostoyevsky. Well after Wey’s demise, the apocalypse never arrives, but Wey’s journal is discovered. Curators fascinated with twenty-first-century culture use her writings as the basis for their exhibit “Commentaries on the Apocalypse”, which realizes Wey’s speculative artworks as photographs, collages, and sound/video installations. Joanna Demers is associate professor of musicology at the University of Southern California's Thornton School of Music, where she specializes in post-1945 popular and art music. Drone and Apocalypse An Exhibit Catalog for the End of the World By Joanna Demers John Hunt Publishing Ltd. Copyright © 2014 Joanna Demers All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-78279-994-8 Contents Preface, CATALOG FOR "COMMENTARIES ON THE APOCALYPSE", AN EXHIBIT OF ESSAYS AND SPECULATIVE ARTWORKS BY CYNTHIA WEY, Curators' Introduction, "Commentaries on the Apocalypse", an essay, "The End of Happiness, The End of the World", an essay, "The Big Bang", a speculative artwork, "Manifest", an essay, "Photojournalism of the Fall", a speculative artwork, "Radigue's Wager", an essay, "Pump Cam / Debt Clock", a speculative artwork, "Apocalyptic Desire", an essay, "The Chelyabinsk meteoroid", a speculative artwork, "After Apocalypse", an essay, Endnotes, Bibliography, Discography and Videography, CHAPTER 1 "Commentaries on the Apocalypse" An essay "Apocalypse" means unveiling. It is a revelation of the greatest import. Most religions and mythologies have used "apocalypse" to mean revelation of the end of the world, so much so that apocalypse today has become synonymous with the end itself: of civilization, humanity, life itself. But "apocalypse" can also mean the literary genre that communicates prophecy of the end of the world. Such commentaries were prevalent in Judaism and early Christianity. A typical apocalypse-commentary quotes scriptural prophesy and adds exegesis. Although apocalypse-commentaries necessarily contain text, they are often the showplace of great art as well. In Western Christianity, one of the more famous such writings is Beatus of Liebana's "Commentary on the Apocalypse", composed in eighth-century CE Spain. This was a compilation of Biblical prophecy alongside writings of Augustine of Hippo, Ambrose of Milan, Isidore of Seville, and other Christian theologians. The monk Beatus proclaimed that the end of the world would occur around the year 800, and linked the strange visions of St. John in the Book of Revelation to clashes between Muslims and Christians in Cordoba. The Beatus Apocalypse was copied in several editions, many of which feature impossibly vibrant colors and vivid depictions of St. John's hallucinatory predictions. The edition of the Beatus copied for Ferdinand I of Castile and Leon, for instance, renders matter-of-factly many-headed beasts and the woman clothed in the sun. These are not fantasies. There is no attempt to normalize, to distance through irony. There is no disclaimer that we are speaking only figuratively. I once heard a Catholic priest joke about his Protestant friends' conviction that the Rapture was an imminent possibility. He could perhaps believe that any of his socks that disappeared in the dryer had been "raptured" away (his word!), but he gently laughed at any stronger claim that the elect would be spirited away. And of course he felt this way, for many neoliberal Catholics have a hard time with the Book of Revelation. The editors of the New American Bible, the Bible most American Catholics use, have this to say in the Introduction to the Book of Revelation: This much, however, is certain: symbolic descriptions are not to be taken as literal descriptions, nor is the symbolism meant to be pictured realistically [...] The Book of Revelation cannot be adequately understood except against the historical background that occasioned its writing. Like Daniel and other apocalypses, it was composed as resistance literature to meet a crisis. The editors here take pains to explain away the Apocalypse in historical and materialist terms – as an expression, a figure of speech. This pragmatism is strange, coming from the same people who believe in the Virgin birth. I prefer art historian Otto Pächt's words on the