Tauba Auerbach (pronoun 'they') reminds us of how important craft is to an understanding of how the world works. At one point, when they were younger, they worked as a sign writer and this experience highlighted for them the importance of hand skills and how the body builds up knowledge about how materials work and how to be sensitive to them. Auerbach also has a long commitment to unravelling a parallel scientific understanding of the world and questions how we really understand the world we live in. Is it through an activity such as science, or is it through the way we encounter the world through the materials we use? Auerbach suggests that in shaping materials as craftspeople, we understand the world in a deeply embodied way, they then use this embodied understanding of craft, to revisit certain scientific principles and to rethink them as material structures. The craft of drawing is central to this process and they remind us of how vital an awareness of body control is to the making of any image.
There is a particular set of crafts associated with bead construction and this is associated with religious objects, such as prayer beads and also, the visualisation of atomic forms, whereby atoms are grouped into certain configurations which can be modelled by using beads. Auerbach has learnt the skills of bead construction from someone who had been making these scientific models for some time and has then gone on to create her own models using the skills learnt. We have looked at these issues before; Daina Taimina for instance used crochet as a way of modelling hyperbolic space. She taught herself crochet and in doing so her levels of understanding geometry were raised, as it was much easier to see how a line, generated by a fold, could operate in hyperbolic space; especially when you saw these structures develop as a result of a series of hand movements.
Tauba Auerbach: Ligature: 2019
Ligature is a drawing done with a large chisel tip felt pen. It is a type of meditative drawing controlled by an underlying grid. This is something anyone can try. Simply use some graph paper or draw out a grid and then after practicing hand movements and how to hold the felt tip pen, you should be able to eventually control your hand / arm movement to make an image not unlike the one Auerbach has produced. This is about smooth, continuous movement and keeping the same pressure and consistent angle as you move the pen. It relates to the sort of hand movements you need when undertaking the writing out of calligraphic script. This is another craft and one usually associated with the Islamic religion, but on a more quotidian level, signwriters have to be able to achieve a similar consistency of application in their everyday work. The grid helps a pattern form and patterns are often found in nature to underpin the way that forms are structured. These images remind me of the work of Marian Zazeela an artist who worked in the 1960s and onwards, but who was always in the shadow of the composer La Monte Young, a link that reminds me of the entangled interconnections between musical notation and the representation of vibration and other rhythmic constructions such as lines of force.
Marian Zazeela
Lines of force illustrating electromagnetic action
Auerbach's revisiting craft techniques includes marbling. You might have done this yourself because people often do this to make endpapers for books. A very basic way to do this is to float oily inks onto water and to develop patterns by touching the ink drops with a stick or a broken comb. Auerbach makes marbled surfaces on a much larger scale than the normal amateur would, (see this video link) and makes a connection back to scientific principles in relation to the material interactions involved.
What is interesting here is that some of the crafts Auerbach is using have a history of association with amateur crafts and outsider art making. They remind us that everything is up for grabs when it comes to developing ideas, especially areas of endeavour that are usually dismissed as being naff or not very creative. Perhaps browse through the crafts section of your local bookstore and look at that wide range of activities that includes everything from crochet to knitting, via marbling to mosaic, and papier-mâche to decoupage. Look at how Zsófia Keresztes takes the idea of using mosaic to cover an object and elevates it from a craft into art. Keresztes had an impressive exhibition of her sculptures at the last Venice Biennale, all of which had a surface finish using the same type of mosaic techniques that we might find forming some sort of street decoration.
Zsófia Keresztes
Mosaic bollards Glasgow
Kathy Prescott Parker
Finally perhaps relook at those objects we have ignored in the past as being non-art or kitsch and then after reconsidering, might they actually be much more interesting than we initially thought. I have been making some hybrid objects myself lately and now when I look at them they don't seem that far away aesthetically from the work of artist's such as Kathy Prescott Parker, who on her online profile says she deals with, 'All things colorful, smile-inducing and inspirational'.
A while ago I posted on the tear and its implications, the split is very similar in terms of visual language but there are subtle differences. I first came across the split as an idea in the work of Gordon Matta-Clark. He had made a series of works he called “cuttings,” in which he opened up buildings by slicing shapes into their walls and floors. InSplitting(1974), he bisected a building and laid it open. The building used, like Rachael Whiteread's 'House', was about to be demolished and he took a slice from the centre of it, undermined its foundations and removed the four corners of the eaves. His approach was methodical and deliberate, it feels as if the house has been cut by a huge knife into two parts.
Fall III by John Stezaker, 1993-94
John Stezaker has made numerous collages based on the formal idea of the split. His images are literally split in two. In the case above he has been able to comment on the male / female split, recombining the two into a new form. His work echoes an ancient idea of splitting and a desire for recombination.
Creation is itself often understood as a type of splitting. According to the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation epic, the Goddess Tiamat was destroyed in battle by the god Marduk, who then split her body in half “like a dried fish.” He placed one part above to become the heavens, the other half below to become the earth. Marduk used tremendous power to pull apart the Goddesses body, not that dissimilar perhaps to the energy released when we split an atom, an energy release that reminds us of the initial 'Big Bang', an event that supposedly initiated the creation of everything. But humans are mainly focused on another form of creation, one that relies on close coupling and because of this another set of creation myths were born, ones that also rely on the idea of the split. In Greek myth, one day Hermaphrodite the beautiful son of Hermes and Aphrodite, bathed in the lake of Carie, the watery home of the naiad Salmacis. Salmacis is inflamed by his beauty and takes advantage of his bathing in her spring, dragging him down to the bottom of the water, and vowing to never release him. She then prays to the gods not to separate them and mystical powers are used to fuse their bodies together into one that is now both man and woman. This is a tale told most vividly in Ovid's poetic epic, The Metamorphoses. Hermaphrodite, after the for him traumatic event, demanding his parents signify what had happened by making sure all others entering the lake of Carie in future will, as he puts it, 'lose half their sex'. “Deities whose name I bear, you authors of my days, grant me the grace I implore! that all who come after me to bathe in these waters may lose half their sex!” (Metamorphoses IV, 310)
Plato in the Symposium reminds us of an even older Greek myth based on an idea of splitting, humans were he states, 'originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves'. This description fits the 1550 image of androgyny below.
Northern School, ca. 1550 Androgyny
The painting above by an anonymous 16th century artist from Northern Europe, can be linked to certain old Bible commentaries. Samuel ben Nahman was a rabbi who lived in the land that is now Israel during the 3rd century. Ben Nahman was renowned for his commentaries on what Christians now call the Old Testament but which are in fact a slightly different collection of Jewish texts called the Tanakh. This is what he had to say about the creation of humans. “When the Holy One, blessed be He, created the first Adam, He created him with two faces, then split him and made him two backs – a back for each side.” (Genesis Rabbah 8:1) The Northern School image could well be an illustration of this "primal androgyne". A similar description can be found in Leviticus Rabbah 14:1 where it is stated: “When man was created, he was created with two body-fronts, and He [God] sawed him in two, so that two backs resulted, one back for the male and another for the female.” The myth of the primal androgen was well-known in Jewish and Christian Platonic circles in the Middle Ages. This is explained in the book 'Carnal Israel' by Daniel Boyarin, a book that rethinks the unequal distribution of power that characterised relations between the sexes in most post-Christian societies. Boyarin argues that the male construction and treatment of women in rabbinic Judaism did not rest on a loathing of the female body, as has often been previously stated. Without ignoring accounts of sexual domination that can be found in Talmudic texts, Boyarin insists that the rabbinic account of human sexuality, is very different to that of Hellenistic Judaism and Pauline Christianity and he offers possible alternative readings, ones that are derived from ben Nahman's description of the splitting of Adam into two, whereby the two halves are not only equal in value, but that they are always seeking to recombine as a new whole.
The split as an idea, is often accompanied by the opposite idea of a possible fusion between differences. For instance in the Jasper Johns 'Painting with two balls', two real balls prise his painting apart, but it is visually fused together by his handling of the paint in such a way that the image can be read as a coherent whole.
Jasper Johns: 'Painting with two balls'
Jasper Johns: Drawing: 'Painting with two balls'
The drawing of the painting is a hybrid form. The balls in the original painting reveal the fact that the canvas is stretched over a wooden frame, one that can easily be warped or bent. These are material issues essential to a painter's craft and ones many young painters have had to deal with, as stretchers often warp and distort because of poor quality wood or a damp studio. Johns makes a positive out of what for many painters is usually a negative. The drawing has a visual split but not a physical one. The charcoal surface is also a representation, the image fading out at the bottom edge but becoming a tightly controlled illusion when it comes to depicting the two balls and the split. The split in this case also being one between drawing as representation and drawing as non figurative markmaking. (Also perhaps a sort of split from the then, very controlling ideas of Greenberg). As always there is another interpretation, one that reminds us of the ballsy nature of much abstract expressionist work. The macho culture surrounding an art form that was all about emotive expression, was something a young gay artist like Jasper Johns, would have loved to poke fun at. Yes, his painting has balls too.
The split can also be a metaphor for how we do things. We can divide a log in two different ways, we can cut it with a saw or split it with an axe. When we cut it with a saw we cut across and through the wood grain, but when we split it with an axe we go with the wood grain, using its very nature to help split it apart.
Against the grain
With the grain
You could argue that 'A painting with two balls' is a split that works with the grain, a warped or bent stretcher frame being not something unfamiliar in an artist's studio, and it being a natural consequence of the way wood is. Whilst the drawing 'Painting with two balls' works against the grain, it begins with a lie in its title, it should be called 'Drawing of a painting with two balls'. Semantic nitpicking I know, but words are words and they shape thoughts.
Barnett Newman's work was often split into two by a line. But this line was one that was seen as a spatial split and to emphasise this it was often referred to as a 'zip'.
Barnett Newman: Onement, I 1948
Onement was a painting where for the first time the artist used a vertical band to define the spatial structure of his work. This line of paint or band, later dubbed a "zip," became Newman's signature mark. He had applied the light orange line on top of a strip of masking tape with a palette knife and as soon as he stepped back to look at the effect, he realised that this thick, irregular band laid through the smooth field of Brownish Indian Red, simultaneously split into two and united his composition.
Barnett Newman
The zip opens into space
The thing about a zip is that it can be easily opened to reveal what lies beneath. Newman's work was at one time theorised as belonging to 'The Abstract Sublime' and it was argued that the 'zip' could be opened to a space that was cosmic in effect.
This is what the critic Robert Rosenblum wrote in In the February 1961 issue of ARTnews
Originating with Longinus, the Sublime was fervently explored in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and recurs constantly in the aesthetics of such writers as Burke, Reynolds, Kant, Diderot and Delacroix. For them and for their contemporaries, the Sublime provided a flexible semantic container for the murky Romantic experiences of awe, terror, boundlessness and divinity that began to rupture the decorous confines of earlier aesthetic systems. As imprecise and irrational as the feelings it tried to name, the Sublime could be extended to art as well as nature. One of its major expressions, in fact, was the painting of sublime landscapes.
Clyfford Still: 1956-D
A case in point is the dwarfing intensity of Gordale Scar, a natural wonder of Yorkshire and a goal of many Romantic tourists. Re-created on canvas between 1811 and 1815 by the British painter James Ward (1769–1855), Gordale Scar is meant to stun the spectator into an experience of the Sublime that went unparalleled in painting until a work like Clyfford Still's 1956-D. In the words of Edmund Burke, whose Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) was the most influential analysis of such feelings, “Greatness of dimension is a powerful cause of the Sublime.” Indeed, in both the Ward and the Still, the spectator is first awed by the sheer magnitude of the sight before him. (Ward’s canvas is 131 by 166 inches; Still’s, 144-1/2 by 160 inches.) At the same time, his breath is held by the dizzy drop to the pit of an abyss; and then, shuddering like Moore at the bottom of Niagra, he can only look up with what senses are left him and gasp before something akin to divinity.
Gordale Scar: James Ward
Rosenblum has this to say about Newman: Newman bravely abandons the securities of familiar pictorial geometries in favour of the risks of untested pictorial intuitions; and like them, he produces awesomely simple mysteries that evoke the primeval moment of creation. His very titles (Onement, The Beginning, Pagan Void, Death of Euclid, Adam, Day One) attest to this sublime intention. Indeed, a quartet of the largest canvases by Newman, Still, Rothko and Pollock might well be interpreted as a post-World-War-II myth of Genesis. During the Romantic era, the sublimities of nature gave proof of the divine; today, such supernatural experiences are conveyed through the abstract medium of paint alone. What used to be pantheism has now become a kind of “paint-theism.”
Gordale Scar is indeed another 'split', this time a geological one and one that reminds us of cosmic splits; cracks in the fabric of spacetime that we are told still exist; old remnants of a time shortly after the Big Bang, when an older, high-energy state was left over as newer cooling regions met and didn't perfectly fit together.
The crack in cosmic space-time as it appeared in Doctor Who
The 'split' in the Abstract Sublime goes cosmic. It is always fascinating to see where ideas go; you can of course develop a sort of word flow of an idea simply by going to a thesaurus, which in this case gives us the split, the crack, the fault-line, breach, gap, chasm, crack, division, fissure, rift, rupture, slash, cleft... all various lines of disjuncture, but where we have a division we can also have a repairing or joining, a closing or the forming of junctures and as you put an image together using a visual split, you could equally be opening or closing an idea.
Spatial Concept, Waiting: Lucio Fontana 1960
The cut above was made with a single gesture using a sharp blade, and the canvas was then backed with strong black gauze in order to give the appearance of a void behind. It is a slit rather than a split. What Fontana alludes to is the cosmic significance of a slit in the fabric of the universe, something that he metaphorically acts out within the controlled arena of a taut canvas. The slitting of the canvas being a type of rehearsal for life, one that gives us a glimpse of what might lie behind the curtain.
The split may of course refer to ourselves, a split personality suggests that at times we are not who we think we are. I will return to the split and its more psychological implications at another time, perhaps bringing into the debate one of my occasional guest bloggers who has more expertise in these things.
Sometimes an externalised thought reveals itself as just that, a thought structured by being embedded in things that sit outside of yourself. So how does it work? In order to show how a complex series of associations are constructed I'm going to follow an entangled thought and see where it connects. This blog is about drawing and so I shall start with one.
In the UK during the cold war period of the 1950s someone, somewhere began drawing visualisations of what was code-named 'The Blue Danube'. These drawings were for Britain's first atomic bomb and as the bomb had to be carried inside a casing, the look of the bomb was decided upon by the casing's design. In the 1950s the allure of space travel captured the imagination of what was called at the time, the developed world. In particular popular science fiction magazines vied with each other in the depiction of what things would be like in the future.
Streamlining and smooth curves were often a sign of futurity
1950s cars began to develop fins
So did 1950s designs for spaceships
A typical 1950s space rocket
A certain rocket shape became the fictional norm, one that owed a lot to the shape of the German V2 rocket bomb that was used during 1944 and 45 air raids on London.
V2 Rocket bomb
But I suspect it was the fictional form that was the driving force behind the fact that even cars developed fins in the 1950s, and that therefore the underlying visual template for the final shape of the Blue Danube was as much a fantasy as an aerodynamic necessity.
The drawing of the Blue Danube bomb represents a perfect fusion between drawing as a objective plan or idea and drawing as an emotive focus. It is a 20th century technical drawing that I think could be used as a focus for a political concept in a similar way to how the Diagram of the 'Brookes' slave ship was used in the 18th century. The 18th century plan drawing helped galvanise the abolition of slavery movement and I wonder whether or not the Blue Danube image might have enough emotive and conceptual traction to re-energise the long running campaign for nuclear disarmament. As part of the process of adding context, I have converted the original Blue Danube technical drawing into a blueprint. In the book 'A Canticle for Liebowitz' by Walter M. Miller, a post nuclear war Earth is envisioned, whereby after many years Earth is slowly recovering and science is being rediscovered. This process is secretly nourished by cloistered monks dedicated to the study and preservation of knowledge and rediscovered blueprints have now become religious documents and are preserved and copied as if they were relics associated with the scientist saints of long ago. The book reminds us of how science is a force that can be put to use for both good and evil intent and that human beings are actually superstitious creatures rather than the logical thinkers that they believe they are. Perhaps the bomb's blueprint can be used to remind us that we are not the best creatures to handle the dangerous products that can emerge from scientific advances.
Technical drawings help us to visualise possibilities, a process that was called during the Renaissance 'disegno'; an old term, one that describes practices that use drawing as a problem solving or planning tool. However, a technical drawing can also be an emotive image.I am fascinated by the various patent offices' large collections of drawn ideas, many of which never made it into production, but many of which did. There are in the USA certain things that you can't patent, indeed 42 U.S. Code § 2181 entitled 'Inventions relating to atomic weapons, and filing of reports'; states, 'No patent shall hereafter be granted for any invention or discovery which is useful solely in the utilisation of special nuclear material or atomic energy in an atomic weapon'. In the UK we are less strategic, our patent definition states that once you write out your concept or draw a diagram, then copyright should automatically be able to protect your idea. I.e. in the UK an idea is not patentable, but as soon as you write it down or make a drawing of it, it becomes more 'real' and is therefore in a form that can be patented. The technical drawing of the Blue Danube is like all drawings a materially or physically visualised thought, an idea that can therefore be shared with others. There had been a related patent taken out 20 years beforehand. On September 12, 1932, within seven months of the discovery of the neutron, and more than six years before the discovery of fission, the then living in Britain, self exiled Hungarian, Leo Szilard conceived of the possibility of a controlled release of atomic power through a multiplying neutron chain reaction, and he also realised that if such a reaction could be found, then a bomb could be built using it. On July 4, 1934 Szilard filed a UK patent and in his application, Szilard described not only the basic concept of using neutron induced chain reactions to create explosions, but also the key concept of the critical mass. The patent was awarded to him, making Leo Szilard the legally recognised inventor of the atomic bomb. However just because something is patented doesn't mean it will work.
Helene Adelaide Shelby: Apparatus for obtaining criminal confessions
Helene Adelaide Shelby's diagram is also for an accepted and registered patent. The idea was to have criminals interrogated by a skeleton that had glowing red eyes and a spectral voice, its operator being hidden behind a wall. Frightening yes, but not as frightening as the ideas associated with the Blue Danube atomic bomb. The one idea was never realised and the other never used. However some ideas have become realities and they are sometimes twinned with ideas that are fictions.
Prior to conceiving the nuclear chain reaction, in 1932 Szilard had read H. G. Wells' 'The World Set Free', a book describing explosives which Wells termed "atomic bombs". Szilard wrote in his memoirs that the book had made "a very great impression on me." When Szilard assigned his patent to the Admiralty to keep the news from reaching the notice of the wider scientific community, he wrote, "Knowing what this [a chain reaction] would mean—and I knew it because I had read H. G. Wells—I did not want this patent to become public." Wells was certainly prescient, as he put it, ... 'it seems now that nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands [...] All through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the amount of energy that men were able to command was continually increasing. Applied to warfare that meant that the power to inflict a blow, the power to destroy, was continually increasing [...]There was no increase whatever in the ability to escape [...]Destruction was becoming so facile that any little body of malcontents could use it [...]Before the last war began it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city.'
In Wells' book, eventually after disastrous wars the world is brought to its knees and its senses, and humanity creates a Utopian order, similar to a socialist state. Atomic energy solves the problem of work and in the new order "the majority of the population consists of artists."
The designers of The Blue Danube I'm sure had in the back of their minds 1950s images of streamlined future rockets, and memories of the V2. As you can see in the photograph of the atom bomb below, its more rounded contour is more like the rocket ships as envisioned in science fiction magazines than the more narrow V2. No doubt before finalising the shape models would have been made.
The Blue Danube
As a boy I also had a model bomb to play with, one that I could put explosive caps into and which was weighted by having metal parts inserted into the front section, which meant it always fell point first.
Royal Tot S-4 Space Bomb Cap Toy 1950's
1950s cap bomb and spaceship combination
You inserted an explosive cap into the space beneath the metal plunger by unscrewing the top section, which held in place the plunger and a spring. The spring pushed the bottom of the plunger down onto the cap and when the thrown rocket hit the floor, the impact drove the plunger further down into the explosive cap and 'BANG!'. I wonder how many of the Blue Danube designers had children that played with those then ubiquitous toys? Training for the future begins at an early age; training to be a boy included various ways of becoming familiarised with weaponry.
Thankfully the Blue Danube was never used in anger; unlike 'The Fat Man' which had been detonated over the Japanese city of Nagasaki or 'The Little Boy' which was detonated over Hiroshima. Such innocuous names for terrifying killing machines. In the 1950s the sound of the 'bang/crack' of a cap, was either coming from a toy bomb or a toy gun and neither was seen as an issue. I can still remember the smell of sulphur that remained after the caps had exploded, either emanating from the explosive chemicals or from the smiling Devil that was watching the future being constructed.
The Blue Danube waltz was originally written as a choral work. Strauss was commissioned to write a piece for the Vienna Men's Choral Society to uplift the people of Vienna who were feeling disconsolate after losing the Austro-Prussian War. This was a war that saw the rise of Prussia as a military force and the focusing of associated ambitions of a Prussian leadership under which the unification of Germany would result. One it would seem very insignificant consequence of the Kingdom of Prussia's military advances, was therefore a musical composition designed to raise a people's spirits after they had lost a war, a composition that would however eventually give the name to a bomb designed to destroy an enemy based in Eastern Europe, an enemy that had been forged in the heat of battles that had finally resulted in the idea of German expansionism being buried beneath the rubble of two world war defeats.
In the 1960s, 100 years after its composition, the Blue Danube waltz was used as the soundtrack to the docking sequence in Stanley Kubrick's science fiction film '2001: A Space Odyssey'. By releasing the music from its original context, Kubrick opens out a much more cosmic understanding of the music's underlying intent. The Blue Danube bomb was decommissioned in early 1962, just before the Cuban Missile Crisis. A crisis that was a direct and dangerous confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union; the moment when the two superpowers came closest to nuclear conflict. It was a traumatic event I remember very clearly, at one point sitting with my father watching the news and waiting to see whether or not the conflict would escalate into a full blown war and if it did, both of us were convinced that within days our civilisation would be blown away. You cant hide in an air raid shelter from a nuclear attack. This was a situation that Stanley Kubrick would in 1964 recreate as the darkly tragic film comedy Doctor Strangelove. Four years later, it was as if the world had moved on, Kubrick's 1968 vision of a space station took us back to the Germanic origins of the word waltz, a derivative of the German 'walzen', to revolve. In space there is no sound because it can't travel through a vacuum, but a film is first and foremost an idea and ideas can have sound, so if a space station is revolving what else would it 'dance' to, but a waltz? Kubrick was a very astute sound / vision mixer, often using a disjuncture between sound and vision to create effect, as in his use at the end of Doctor Strangelove of Vera Lynn's plaintive second world war associated ballad 'We'll meet again'. We would in the terrifying science fiction Alien films of the 1970s be again reminded, "In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream." Perhaps in the near future it will be the story of Hal, the spaceship's rogue computer that signals the most salient warning within this post, a reminder about a reliance on technology to make decisions for us, especially if we have no control over it.
From Stanley Kubrick: 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I don't know if Kubrick was aware that the Blue Danube was the code name for the British atom bomb, but we do know that his Dr. Strangelove character was based on rocket scientist Werner von Braun, a central figure in Nazi Germany's rocket development program, who had been recruited to the US after the war. Von Braun had helped design and co-develop the V2 Rocket bomb.
Slim Pickens as B-52 Bomber pilot Air Force Maj. T. J. "King" Kong.
In the final scene of Doctor Strangelove, Air Force Maj. T. J. "King" Kong, rides a nuclear bomb as it falls from a plane, as the beginning of mutually assured destruction unfolds, and we glimpse from far above a land due to face imminent atomic destruction. At the time the film was made much of Central and Southeastern Europe was part of the Soviet block, which would have been the land glimpsed below the raving mad King Kong as he rode the bomb to his and everyone else's atomic doom. Central Europe was also the geographical area that the Danube, in all its many colours, flowed through; carrying water all the way from the Black Forest to the Black Sea. Originating in Germany, the Danube flows southeast for 2,850 km, passing through or bordering Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova and Ukraine, most of which were at one time part of the USSR, and understood as lands behind the Iron Curtain, a territory that as we now know, is still in some Russian minds, seen as part of a once and still glorious Russian Empire.
The path of the Danube
We are again threatened by the possibility of nuclear war. Vladimir Putin recently delivering a warning to the West over its support for Ukraine, by suspending a landmark nuclear arms control treaty, announcing that new strategic systems had been put on combat duty, and threatening to resume nuclear tests. A consequence in my own more domestic world being that for the past year we have been housing Ukrainians, offering respite to refugees from a conflict few would have believed possible just two years ago.
History has a strange way of repeating itself. If you look at the design of Elon Musk's contemporary rocket ship, it sits within the same family of form as the 1950s rocket ships we were looking at earlier and the emblazoned stars and stripes flag painted onto its side, is an indication that nationalism and all that it entails is still a potent threat to world peace. The space race is now back on, this time it is the competing ambitions of China and the US that are fuelling it.
Elon Musk's rocket ship
The Japanese film 'King Kong versus Godzilla' was also released in 1962, Godzilla being a mythic creature that seemed to have evolved out of the post nuclear aftermath of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bomb attacks. The franchise has been revisited as recently as 2021, the film 'Godzilla vs. Kong' now advertised as a place where 'Legends collide'. The fictional characters King Kong and Godzilla, now achieving a historical gravitas that feels as truthful as any archaeological 'reality'; the myths of Egypt or Greece having a similar status in our collective imaginations as these more recently invented monsters.
The old bomb store that used to house the Blue Danube bomb had at some time been bought by a farmer and converted into a mushroom farm, but he has more recently realised its historical importance and the site has been reopened for visitors and a full scale model of the Blue Danube atomic bomb is now in place so that visitors can take selfies. The entertainment industries embracing both mythical and real histories, a nuclear fusion of narratives from reality and fiction, the aesthetics of cinema, the dream factory, now unifying both.
Hopefully readers will see an idea emerging, one that reminds us how easy it is to accept a dangerous situation, and that the longer we live with it, the more it becomes the stuff of myth rather than reality. Ideas reside within the various connections made between things, they are material concepts, in this case ones made of fictional and real rockets, of music and of human stupidity as well as human invention. Finally a reminder that this bringing together of memories and reflections is another sort of drawing, a drawing together of ideas that would be impossible without access to a computer that is plugged into an ever hungry Internet and that needs a mind that has memories that are triggered by association, to 'draw' all these threads together.
'The Fat Man' mushroom cloud over Nagasaki 1945
Early CND badge
The CND symbol was designed in 1958 by Gerald Holtom, an artist and graduate of the Royal College of Art, who during the Second World War had been a conscientious objector. His symbol incorporated the semaphore letters N(uclear) and D(isarmament). This is how he explained the genesis of his idea; ‘I was in despair. Deep despair. I drew myself: the representative of an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya’s peasant before the firing squad. I formalised the drawing into a line and put a circle around it’.
Goya: 3rd of May
Goya's peasant is in Holtom's sketch of himself in distress, remembered with arms outstretched downwards. It therefore made sense when the 'ND' semaphore message was embedded into the form of the symbol. If he had remembered the image correctly it would have been a different matter. UD, perhaps 'utter destruction'.
Semaphore 'U'
The Semaphore letters N and D
Nothing is straightforward and many groups in the USA in particular but also in the UK, would argue that it is only because we have a nuclear deterrent that we have been able to maintain world peace. The paradox being that in many areas of the world people have never known peace and that conflict continues to re-emerge constantly.
The fact that a B52 bomber is formally similar to the peace symbol allows it to be used to support another idea, the entangled nature of these connections now becoming even more twisted. The clarity of the CND symbol does lend itself to many uses, one of which is to use it as a sort of cross on which to break other symbols, as in the image below.
And so back to the drawing board and the blueprint
The interesting thing about a ramble through a range of connections is that it both demonstrates how interconnected everything is and how an initial thinking process that simply connects one thing to another, eventually leads to an idea, or range of ideas. A performance piece might begin with a group of performers signalling with flags from the top of a particular building, perhaps signalling the details of a non proliferation peace treaty that has recently been broken, or details of people still after all these years affected by nuclear fallout. Other juxtapositions might be found for Strauss' music, Kubrick's films might be revisited for their sculptural potential, blueprints represented as religious icons, toys returned to by yourself as an adult and the implications of revisiting the memes of childhood as a grown up. It was the incongruity of naming that first of all drew me to this series of thoughts, a 19th century waltz becoming the name for a 20th century atomic bomb. This piece of everyday Surrealism reminding me that there is nothing more strange than reality.
Any artwork is of course media specific. In this case the blueprint of a broken bomb embedded into and broken across an image of the CND symbol is a digital one. One media specific nature of digital images is that they are pixilated, and in this case the bomb drawing was developed from a low resolution image capture of an online article about the history of the Blue Danube bomb. Therefore you can never get close enough to read any text, in fact as soon as you increase the size of the image it begins to go out of focus and as you do this the image dissolves into abstract patterns. This aspect of digital screen based images for myself is a deep metaphor, one that relates to the cosmic reality that lies beneath all apparently solid things. If we look closely at matter, the greater the magnification, the stranger it becomes. Eventually in the world of the electron microscope we arrive at what we think of as atoms, by their very name indivisible units, but as we get even closer, we find them dissolved into neutrons, protons and electrons and then as magnification increases we step into the strange world of quarks, mesons, bosons and hadrons and eventually we lose sight of particles of matter altogether and all we find are interconnections of vibrating waves of various energy fields. Electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear and gravitational fields, appear to vibrate into and out of existence, they form the possibilities for various universes, realities that also exist in dimensions far beyond our very narrow experience of the four dimensions we are used to. The digital screen world as a specific medium is thus a magical one, one that exists as a phantom. Its surface appearance is a constructed ghost, each pixel position a reflection of a code beneath a code, an object-orientated system of code and data intertwined to produce something we treat as a reality but which is in fact a digital dance. As I walk through my adopted home city of Leeds, everywhere I look I see people gazing at digital screens, locked into phantom worlds, glued to dance partners that are to them as real as their own flesh and blood. I type these words on another screen, I am also partnered with an inanimate but animate object, living with a new religion that is a reconstruction of the very old one of animism. Just as I embed this object with a thought, my ancestors communed with plants, other animals and the landscapes they inhabited. For thousands of years they believed in the dreamtime of a beginning that never ended, holding, as the aboriginal peoples of Australia still do, a belief that the Dreamtime is a continuum of past, present and future. The idea of the atom bomb is an idea predicated upon a particular understanding of how matter and energy are woven together. Their forceful separation is a type of transformation, matter transforming into energy and as it does it unleashes a nuclear force that transforms all realities within its immediate vicinity; mimicking a moment from the beginning of time, the moment of a vibration's first fluctuation, a gravitational wave that still waves to us from a past, that is also our present and our future.
