William Daniels
Last and First Men

History is a cruel trick of evolution. Humans, only dimly cognisant that all living organisms change at an imperceptible pace, narrate arbitrary watersheds into sequential timelines. If the dinosaurs were a formation in archaeological time, so were homo erectus, Medieval peasants, and men of the twentieth century. Even the apex species, in other words, is no more capable of understanding its longitudinal progress than a single-cell organism.

In Last and First Men, the painter and graphic artist William Daniels breaks the spell of historical time. Following Olaf Stapledon’s sci-fi novel of the same title, Daniels collapses the birth of planetary systems, multiple generations of mankind, and evolutionary revolutions into the stuff they are all made of: primordial image matter.

Stapledon’s 1930 text is structured like an escalator; the cult novel projects the emergence of successive new breeds of men, describing their physical and mental attributes in today’s language of science and psychology, as if such taxonomies would survive extinctions, rebellions, substitutions, and planetary migrations. 

Daniels dwells in the transhistorical language of the image, developing a technique contingent on found, everpresent textures and art historical precedent. His new series of monoblock prints, created using found wood surfaces and semi-translucent cut-outs, places all his subject matter in equal contention. UFOs, Napoleonic conquests, Alaskan masks, and screenshots from the late-night doomscroll emerge as though from the ice record. Will the human brain cells which are already today playing Doom in a lab Petri dish look any different?

Stapledon’s story, in which the next hundred thousand years may as well be tomorrow, relies not on the imagination but a commitment to the consequences of present reality. We do not need to, for example, wait to evolve a sixth finger, as Stapledon’s “third men” would, because we can already see ourselves in this form through the evolutionary hallucinations of artificial intelligence. We may be bemused to read that only the distant “eighteenth men”, a race of artists and philosophers, will be immune to all disease, their minds will be networked, and their society will be morally and sexually permissive.

Not all adaptations serve the species’ interests, and even what those are is a point of contention. Two paintings by Daniels made in 2019 in the pictorial tear-up style for which the artist became known, included in Last and First Men, poignantly reframe any human attempt to speed up the work of natural selection as a folly. These images, like Stapledon’s descriptions of his “men” are obsessively anatomical. Avoiding the limits of flesh proved futile even for “eighteenth men”, who resorted to cannibalism and suicide, before becoming consumed by a supernova explosion. Left behind them will be a virus, dispersed between the grains of Daniels’s wood plates, from which next generations may eventually evolve.

Last and First Men is curated by Anna Sebastian.