"Signs of the Apocalypse / Rapture" (Front Forty Press: 284 pp., $65) is one of the strangest projects I've ever come across, an oversized art book, featuring text, images and two CDS of music (by Sonic Youth and others), dedicated to an aesthetic/intellectual consideration of the end of the world. Or no, not the end of the world -- at least, not in standard millenarian terms -- but something more elusive, more difficult to pin down.
"There is an end to be sure," writes Doug Fogelson, one of the "curators" of this volume, in an introduction, "but depending on one's belief there may be something after the end . . . perhaps." The work here, then, is an attempt to navigate the idea of rapture or apocalypse, not as literal prediction but as a metaphor for transformation, whether positive or negative.
