Explosions in art

Andy Warhol tackled the subject of the explosion in various ways. His series “Death and Disaster” includes the work “Atomic Bomb” from the year 1965. It shows newspaper photographs of a mushroom cloud repeated 28 times in black and red. He thus tackled the theme of the Cold War in more direct fashion than his colleague Lichtenstein. A series of multimedia performances, which Warhol created in 1966-7 together with the rock band The Velvet Underground and its singer Nico, bears the name “Exploding Plastic Inevitable”. During the performance the artists bombarded their audience with aggressive music, bright light, psychedelic images and wild dancing. In addition to this, with his 1985 work “Vesuvius” Warhol joined the long line of artists who had depicted the erupting volcano Vesuvius in Italy.

Japanese photographer Naoya Hatakeyama has been photographing Japan’s limestone quarrying since the early 1980s. He actually grew up near the quarry areas and his father worked in a limestone factory. Since 1995 Hatakeyama has also been photographing the blasting operations close up, and has published them in his “Blast” series. In order to create these risky shots, the artist worked closely with an explosives expert, who calculated precisely where the fragments would fly. The result shows the human capacity to alter nature. Hatakeyama perceives this destruction as something natural. After all, everything changes, even nature: the corals, for example, that lived in the warm equatorial ocean between 200 and 400 million years ago, became limestone and this now becomes concrete.

Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang “draws” with explosion and combustion. The emergence of the enormous drawings is in itself a happening, as for example in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London in 2003. Japanese paper is laid out on the floor as the basis for the image, which Cai Guo-Qiang covers with stencils and with up to 15 different sorts of gunpowder in order to create images through traces of powder and burn marks. The artist lights the fuse and in seconds the work disappears under a huge cloud of smoke. The resulting composition is a combination of planning and chance. In China, explosions are part of everyday life, as Cai Guo-Qiang explains: Every significant social event, be it good or bad – a wedding or a funeral – is accompanied by fireworks.

Halley has been using the subject of the explosion since as far back as 1983. It can be seen for the first time in his animated video work “Exploding Cell”, which is on display in the SCHIRN. The video shows a cell that is in the process of change – and is filled with gas until it explodes. During the 1980s Halley dealt with the themes of the Cold War and atomic bombs. The exploding cell was originally linked to the negative association of destruction. The theme became a key element in Halley’s oeuvre, although it lost its historical reference and the artist became more and more interested in the symbolic nature of explosiveness. The explosion is in contrast with another important subject in Halley’s oeuvre: geometric shapes. While the geometric forms represent confinement and an unchanging order, the explosion can be read as a symbol of change or transformation.