Dark Days

What is the point of art in a world with no future? Revisiting Ellie Harrison's Dark Days.

Five days after 9/11, composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was asked how the Twin Towers attack had affected him. He replied that it was “the greatest work of art that has ever existed.”¹

For Stockhausen, art is not just what happens in the gallery or the opera house; there is an aesthetic dimension to life, one where a terrorist attack could be considered a spectacular concert, despite the tragic side-effect of killing most of the audience.

Statements like this still have the power to shock. No matter how mediated our reality becomes, contemplating it as art feels unseemly. Indeed, many artists now take the opposite stance and demand that real life and all its attendant political baggage be brought into the gallery.

Last year's Turner Prize winner, Jasleen Kaur, made this clear when receiving her award, saying: "I want the separation between the expression of politics in the gallery and the practice of politics in life to disappear." It's no longer acceptable to treat the white cube gallery as a safe space where the privileged can forget about the atrocities going on outside.

The problem with this approach is that we end up with what Dean Kissick calls The Painted Protest—an art world where politics takes centre stage but the work is so boring that no one wants to visit the museum.

Well, maybe they won't have a choice. When people say things are bad now, I think: "Sure, but they could be much worse." We can watch the footage from Gaza or LA with horror but then return to our everyday distractions. But what if the whole world burned? What good is it to be an artist on an unlivable planet?

A panorama of Dark Days at GoMA

In 2015, the artist and activist Ellie Harrison² invited almost 100 people to spend the night in Glasgow's Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in a piece called Dark Days (a term from theatre to describe the gap between shows). She wanted to see what might happen if a cataclysmic event forced people to seek refuge in museums. How would we make decisions? What tensions would arise?

I was one of the participants ten years ago and wrote about my experiences. Suffice it to say, that it was a fun, fascinating experiment but I was glad it only went on for one night.

Last Saturday (15 February 2025), Ellie gave a talk at GOMA to mark a decade since Dark Days. She talked about the project’s backstory, invited participants to reflect on the experience, and gave those who weren't there an opportunity to see what happened.

Most participants remembered it fondly. Laura’s recently published diary of Dark Days captures how odd the night was. However, those who hadn't been there found it impossible to imagine it happening now. There would be too much anxiety around spending the night with strangers. The curators at GOMA were likewise perplexed about how they would get around the regulatory impositions.

One of the main topics of conversation was about whether the participants were representative enough—were they too middle class or too white? This turned into handwringing over how much they struggled to get anyone to visit the gallery. Should they do more outreach? How do they make the space welcoming? It didn't occur to them that people might not be interested in what they have on display.

Before Dark Days, Ellie had invited people to spend the night in Talbot Rice Gallery on the night of the Scottish Independence Referendum. Rather than imagining a post-apocalyptic scenario, this piece asked who would clean up the mess, after a revolution. In an interview from the time, Ellie stated that she didn't think art could change the world and that she would be concentrating at least half her energies on activism.³

Indeed, this week saw the AGM for Get Glasgow Moving, a grassroots campaign to improve public transport that Ellie co-founded. There was a hope in the room that hadn't been present at the Dark Days talk.

One vision of what happens to art in a world with no future is Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006). When asked why he keeps art in a secure compound despite the state of the world outside, the protagonist’s brother replies: “I just don't think about it.” But for me, thinking is the reason I still go to galleries—these artificial spaces for aesthetic contemplation. It’s a space to think—and feel—about beauty, life, and even the end of the world.

1. The quote is worth reading in full. Here is a Google Translation produced from a document that was on a previous version of his website:

“Hm. So what happened there is of course—now you all have to re-arrange your brains—the greatest work of art that has ever existed. That spirits accomplish something in one act that we could never dream of in music, that people practice like crazy, totally fanatically, for ten years for a concert. And then die. [Hesitates.] And that is the greatest work of art that there is for the whole cosmos. Just imagine what happened there. So these are people who are so focused on this one, on this one performance, and then five thousand people are chased into resurrection.”

Wikipedia has a slightly different translation.

2. Full disclosure: Ellie is a close friend. Check out my interview with her from the very earliest days of this Substack.

Do art and culture have the power to elicit political change?

I don’t think art has much power in eliciting political change. That is why I split my time between direct activism (mainly campaigning for the public ownership of our public transport system with Bring Back British Rail, which I founded in 2009), and creating frivolous artworld spectacles that simply draw attention to my areas of concern in playful and engaging ways.

This latter role provides an essential release from the soul destroying slog of trying to change the world for the better and ameliorate all the damage caused by free-market capitalism. Artists, unlike politicians, are allowed to make fools of themselves, to be silly and fail. They can be ambiguous and pose questions rather than have all the solutions meticulously planned out. That’s why I keep coming back to it!

3. Source: ellieharrison.com