The End of the World

One hand twirling a cognac, the other rummaging through the pages of his itinerary, the Club-Class traveller noticed he was late. Missing a Press Lunch might seem trivial to you or me, but when it inaugurates The Last Days even the world-weariest correspondent might feel he'd missed a scoop. Speeding South, the plane bumped a time zone and headed for the millennium. Had the trumpet sounded without him? Gulping his 10 year-old Torres, he scanned the atmosphere for the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, high above the planes of Castille.

Arriving in Seville at Easter, during the Semana Santa, the innocent abroad might well believe that the unimaginable had already happened - the street crowded with hooded penitents, cavalcades of flagellants, a procession of floats and catafalques bearing Virgins and gory Christs, crucified. There is much soulful wailing and weeping, and a gnashing of teeth.

But I was too late for that. The taxi dropped me at the hotel just as the last unrisen Christ was carried into the Cathedral by the final costalero (I caught the scene on video later). For all those Last Days I was either late or in the wrong place - too late to get my girlfriend into the opening of EXPO, too late for tickets to the bullfight and too late for the orange-blossom. When they released flocks of doves and decorated the sky with multi-coloured smoke-bombs we found ourselves stumbling around a building-site in the shadows of an unfinished hotel, on a futile errand. When the billion peseta firework display exploded over the city we were in a windowless restaurant. Sometimes I was even the wrong person - at one party at the End of the World people kept introducing me as Harold Zeeman, and when I caught the rumour that my idol, the flamenco star El Cameran, was singing somewhere in Seville, they were only telling me that Dan Cameron was in town. The mad-dog Englishman sweating his noonday way towards the Alcazar arrived to find it closed. But I did bump into the King, and his lovely wife - nearly - twice.

Over on the island on the Guadalquivir they've started running the cable cars and monorail which run between the pavilions of EXPO, animating the skyline of towers, minarets and bunkers, a fitful melange of 50s futuristic, Mussolini Modernist, Disney Vernacular, Neo-Oil-Refinery and World Bank Pantheist architectural styles. They're still clearing up the mess of the two pavilions that have burnt down and feverishly bodging the finishing touches of the ones that haven't. In the British Pavilion someone is preparing the Marks and Spencer display, even though Seville has a perfectly good M&S already, and on another part of the island an enterprising Spanish brewery has set up an ersatz German Bierkeller. An inflatable lager lout, clad in lederhosen and holding a foaming stein hangs in the evening sky, hoisted above this unreal city. EXPO is a city that never sleeps - at night vast projections are thrown onto the sides of buildings, and they're rehearsing the firework displays at 4 am. All this for what is being touted as the 'party of the century'; we dance to the end of time, to the sound of muzak. God help us all, these desperate last days. The world ends not with a bang or a whimper, but with a theme park.

Gallery hospitality usually expresses a suppressed hostility, yet the buffet at the inauguration of the Spanish Pavilion would make you die all the way from the coral-pink Beluga to the dark Iberian ham, from the first glass of chilled Fino to the last gin and tonic. I became convivial with artists and curators, elbow eminent politicians aside to get at the canapes and smile at a cruising bishop. Finally I run into Dan Cameron, and we do our Dr-Livingstone-I-Presume routine. Perhaps in protest at all this conspicuous consumption, bonhomie and networking the sculptor Pello Irazu wears a shirt emblazoned with the CND peace symbol. Within the segments of this laudable logo are silk-screened images; a monk immolating himself, a starving African, the infamous shot of a child running in agony along a Vietnamese highway, having just been napalmed. Maybe it's an advert for Benetton; either way, this obscene garment tells me its time to leave, unless an involuntary siesta catches up with me first.

The main Spanish Pavilion at EXPO is both a temple to artistic heritage and a shop-window for what might be conceived as the country's most exportable living artists. Under an opulent suspended canopy of gold-leaf a sequence of cavernous salons is hung with masterpieces from the past thousand years, from an anonymous Romanesque monastic carving to Picasso's Night Fishing at Antibes. De Morales, El Greco, Ribera, Zurbaran, Velasquez, Murillo, Goya... Picasso, Gris, Julio Gonzales, Miro - a convoy of exemplary and often breathtaking works from the canonical list of the Great Spanish Artists. Bringing up the rear is a Salvador Dali Crucifixion, a syrupy, de-luxe icon from the soporific old iconoclast. After Greco's Baptism of Christ and Ribera's unbearably erotic Saint Sebastian late Dali is annoying and superfluous. Ribera's Sebastian, always a good excuse for a spot of S&M, is an ecstatic swoon, while Saint Irene probes around his insides with the arrow she's supposedly extracting from under his armpit. With her look of pleasurable concentration she's clearly loving every moment of her devoted, excruciating ministrations.

Upstairs there's a Joy of Paint room - Tapies, Saura, Rafols Casemada et al, an unrelieved 'celebration' of what art school teachers endearingly call the 'sheer stuff' of painting. Lumpy painting reluctantly gives way - after a few regurgitated paellas by Barcello - to a sequence of corridors occupied by avant-gardists, latter-day ironists and Basque sculptors, signposted by a couple of Joan Brossa's object poems which have been cunningly positioned so as to signal that mental activity can recommence. However good much of this work is it looks like a hurried postscript to the main body of the exhibition, a rumpus-room for the unruly and difficult post-Franco generations. They've grown up now, and deserve rather better that this. Yes, and I ran through the Valley of the Shadow, and out into the sunblasted plazas and the aching heat, where the first I-LOVE-EXPO cardboard sombreros were coming into their own. Turning a corner of the pavilion I come face to face with one of Juan Muñoz's figures, leaning into the blank wall, listening. And high on the wall around the next corner, a sculpture by Pepe Espaliú. When the artist originally sited the work here the wall was blank, but now the sculpture (a kind of dysfunctional sedan-chair) has had an 'entrance' sign slapped beneath it, and wires from a security camera which has yet to be installed dangle next to it, destroying its presence. A Susana Solano sculpture skulks nearby. These works all look as if they're in hiding, waiting for their chance to escape. I could do nothing for them, but paid my respects and hurried on, dragging my boxed-set, full-colour, two-volume catalogue with me.

There's a catalogue for The Last Days, too. It is a grey affair, printed on grainy paper, its poverty-chic, black and white illustrations casting everything in an atmospheric Tarkovskian gloom. The whole thing has a Samizdat feel - as though the printer who worked on it subsisted on recycled paper and second-hand ink. It opens with a full-page shot of the carnage on the road to Bazra during the last days of the Gulf War, followed by the now obligatory pages of quotations citing, amongst others, Karl Krauss, Nietzsche, Luckas, Panero, Benjamin, Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen, proving that though The Last Days are no laughing matter they're also kinda cool. The essays are fittingly doom-laden, from curator Jose Luis Brea's exhilarating political rant (Brea is good at rage and old-fashioned bile and invective), which deals with the artists in the exhibition in a single, sprinted paragraph (it is the only look-in they get, in all the essays), to a piece by Dan Cameron with the very New York loft subtitle Art at the Brink of the Millennial Zone, which tells us that the End, far from being nigh, has been around even longer than The Grateful Dead, and that things are particularly bleak in 1992. There are some longer, more philosophical think-pieces (which might either be hugely informed and intelligent or maddeningly pretentious - I couldn't tell), an essay by Manel Clot which questions, and dismisses, any discernable, intrinsic quality of 'Spanishness' in contemporary art (a good rejoinder to aspirations of that blessed pavilion on Cartuja Island), and a text, with the daunting title The Exhibition, the Subject, the Eye and Death from Juan Vicente Aliaga which ends with the demand for an art with more life, bite, emotion and lucidity.

Music plays to the assembled guests in the splendid new galleries of the Salas del Arenal. I'm nervous - I keep expecting Vincent Price to appear, as he did in The Masque of The Red Death, followed in by a grim reaper. Instead there's lovely, sombre music from Gavin Bryars and two violinists: Music For The Last Days...

Behind the musicians, two rooms beckon. One has been papered with Robert Gober's Male and Female Genital Wallpaper, repeat patterns of cocks, cunts, spread legs and bums. In the centre of the room, is a little plexiglass cube on a plinth, a bag of doughnuts. Ventilating lugs punctuate the wallpaper. A public room which ought to be private, its very hygiene invites you to defile it, and those little valves in the wall hint that you are being monitored, or that sex-smells will be wafted-out and stored somewhere if you dare to make a move for your groin. Anyhow, the images decorating the walls are a total turn-off, a design student's polite inversion of lavatory graffiti. Once, the late Tom Baker (before his sudden death, art columnist on The Face) wrote a spoof Martin Amis story which began with a line that went something like 'The three-minute Nuclear Warning sounded and I wondered if I had time for a hand-job.' This would be exactly the kind of antiseptic chamber assigned for the purpose. I wonder if there'd be time for a doughnut afterwards? It is a truism of our lumbering times that the Last Days are always upon us. Sex is still possible but there's no longer any remission fro utter self-conscious dread. You could jerk-off forever here and never come.

The next room makes you feel like a house-guest caught rifling through your host or hostess's bedroom drawers. Jordi Colomer has 'constructed' (I say this advisedly - they're built as though by a theatrical prop-maker in an exceptionally uncooperative mood) a series of tall, closed, wardrobe-like boxes, nightmarishly austere models of a private domain in which the details, the minutiae and clutter of the personal are reduced to surrogates - the word 'detail' printed on a series of blank boxes, or the word 'photograph' stuck behind a clear plastic sheet which stands-in for a mirror. On top of one wardrobe are a mis-matched pair of worn high-heel shoes. One belongs to Colomer's lover, an actress, the other to his dealer. When he asked Juana de Aizpuru, his gallerist, for a shoe she gave him twenty. I mention this because the sculptures, hinting so strongly of glimpses of someone else's domestic life, beg stories and anecdotes that the viewer is forced to supply.

This juxtaposition between the works of Colomer and Gober proposes, as we move between them, the invention of an anxious narrative which has nothing whatever to do with stylistic affinities or 'Spanishness' (Colomer is Catalan, anyhow, and there is a growing nationalist sentiment that Catalonia is not Spain.) Here the works belong together in a way which conspicuously ignores the pecking-order of artistic reputation and fame, and indeed the nit-picking exigencies of artistic 'discourse'. The viewer - as in all the best art - is implicated. If only the rest of the show were so apposite, its alignments so sharp and full of bite.

It has become a cliche of international theme shows that if the brief is vague enough, anything goes, and that formal alliterations and the most nebulous associations will hold the whole thing together; it's all down to the curator's nimble-footedness and perspicacity. Perhaps this is an inevitable result of the collapse of the grand narratives and shared values (now there's a theme, if there ever was one.) What we have here instead, by and large - and it is almost enough - are a number of haunting moments. The rest just makes the right kind of noises.

Fleeting glimpses: Jeff Wall's Movie Audience, staring upward at an invisible, absent screen. My own reflection trapped behind glass in the yawning black recesses of an excavated desk-top by Reinhard Mucha. Whilst wandering between the bookshelf-arrangements of Simeón Saiz Ruiz (books on World War II stacked on shelves arranged in the shape of a swastika) I came across a photographer in front of a crucifix shaped shelving-unit stuffed with religious tracts. The photographer wants a shot of someone in it to give a sense of scale so I sink down to my knees and pretend to pray, lifting my eyes in supplication towards a Cross which, however you look at it, is both iconologically dumb and an impractical way to arrange your library. Rodney Graham's vast project concerning the auditions Humperdink made to Wagner's Parsifal is an exercise in fake musicological scholarship, which really concerns itself with time, extrapolating a brief intermezzo beyond the point at which the sun runs out of energy and the solar system collapses in on itself. A perfect project for The Last Days, Graham's number-crunching calculations point to an essential arbitrariness in the way in which we calibrate the passing of time - all we know is that it passes.

Difficult, haunted spaces. The space behind the walls of blank canvases in Pep Agut's Mausoleum, the dark imprisonment of Colomer's sealed wardrobes. The uncomfortable corners you wedge yourself into between the shunted walls of cement and resin in Christina Iglesias's homeless architectures. The colonnade occupied by a figure wearing a dunce's cap in Juan Muñoz's I saw it in Verona. The dark space which enshrouds a woman cloaked only in her own, ankle-length mane of hair, and which envelops the imperial figure of a man who is already wrapped in his own, magnificent cape. We feel like intruders, less present than the works themselves, subjects on the verge of disappearance. Grasping these momentary, fragmented glimpses is itself an act of displacement - it is our imaginary doubles who must trace the outlines of these apparitions.

Talking to Pepe Espaliú about the title he has given to most of his new work, Carrying, he often slips on the word and says 'caring' instead. A meaningful slip. The Carrying sculptures are derived from the form of the sedan chair, a box-like cabin suspended between two poles which functioned as a kind of primitive, pedestrian taxi. If you were an 18th Century aristocrat, or were lazy and had a spot of cash, or infirm, the sedan was a good way to get about - a minion fore and aft carried you around. Espaliú's sedans are strictly dysfunctional. They are impossibly heavy, made of iron. The central cabin is windowless, closed, sometimes cut in two or (like the work he has installed at EXPO) turned at right-angles on itself. It doesn't seem to fit the human body. Yet the sculpture maintains the associations that the luxuries of the sedan afforded - mobility, protection, comfort. In the sedan the passenger was quite literally singled-out, and the means of passage publicly denoted the occupant's wealth and class, or that they were ill. Whilst being carried the passenger was in the hands of others and, paradoxically, immobilised. The chair signalled apartness, isolation, difference.

And Espaliú sedan is very like a coffin. In the Salas del Arenal Espaliú has suspended one of the Carrying sculptures from its poles in a circular well which rises between the floors of the building. The base of the shaft is a circular vestibule, and sculpture hangs above our heads as we pass through it. From below, the work looks like a funerary urn. The supporting poles pierce the walls, to appear a few inches above the carpet on the floor above. Espaliú writes, in a poem

I await in the opaque threshold

of this no man's house

a damp and long call

... the last days.

Like a few artists in Spain of his generation (Muñoz is another) Espaliú writes extraordinarily well, and just as exceptionally, the writing illuminated the blackness of his sculpture. Standing in the shadow of this sullen weight is an image of mortality; the cask encloses a lament behind its iron walls.

At the end, something real. 'I have seen the future,' Delmore Schwarz once said, 'and I'm not going.' The party on the island can go on without me, with its light-shows and party hats and false images, its fake ebullience and pathetic nationalisms, its faintings and cardiac arrests in the burning heat.

Last Days? You should've been there.