Imperial War Museum, London These site-specific paintings on the museum grounds show in terrifying detail the dreadful ingenuity of the weapons we innovate to kill us. It’s a nightmare.
The bomb reproduced in a life-size three-dimensional symbol on the floor of the Imperial War Museum is extremely comical, as giant and clumsy, like anything from an old jules Verne story movie. Actually, this monster has never been used. But the Soviet Union’s Bomb Tsar, the toughest nuclear weapon ever created, has already exploded. Suspended under a bomber because it was too large to have compatibility inside, it fell over the Barents Sea and exploded with a force of 57 megatons, more than 1500 times the combined force of the two atomic bombs that the United States dropped on Japan.
The history of Ai Weiwei’s bombs is an art painting on the incalculable destruction in the form of an encyclopedic collection of bombs and missiles, represented with clinical precision on the floor of the central corridor of the Imperial War Museum and climbing a ladder. At a time when the world is shaking up by an herb pandemic, it reminds us of our mind-blowing ability to erase ourselves. It is a desirable piece of popular history that shows in detail how the human race has amassed a murderous arsenal since the early 20th century, when the invention of theft opened up new explosive probabilities in the war. There is just over a decade of jumps between the Wright brothers’ takeoff in Kitty Hawk and the aerial bombardment. The first weapons here are small enough to be thrown from a biplane.
If the surreal representations of bombs and missiles that Ai planted on the floor and plastered on a ladder seem unreal, you just have to look up so as not to forget that other people have actually built and used such horrors. There, the museum’s V2 rocket, a surviving specimen of Nazi guided missiles built through Buchenwald’s slaves and fired at London, killing 2,724 Britons, the last years of World War II.
Come and look at the pictures of the bombs Ai placed on the rocket’s dark green rear fins. Little Boy, which resembles a torpedo crossover with a hot water boiler, is depicted in one aspect of Hitler’s secret weapon. Fat Man, ridiculously bulbous, is across the street. These are the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
It’s like being in a visual edition of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow, which explores the troubling links between Nazi science and American rocket technology. However, I’ve made you see something else. V2 a clinical experiment conducted through a regimen that also experimented with the manufacture of soap and leather from human corpses. But what are Little Boy and Fat Man? Even more effective experiments. First, it’s fun to see the awkwardness of the prototype of his designs, as if the Manhattan commission had taken designer Tex Avery along with his physicists to design the appearance of the weapons. But then you see the two take other design approaches. Why have these other prototypes been deployed? Apparently, to obtain the ultimate experimental wisdom of the destruction of two Japanese cities.
For the lesson that this gigantic Janes bomb consultant exhibits in the imperial war grounds, munitions have multiplied monstrously since 1945. The worst weapons of the Cold War have only been used in testing, but their prospective force for mass destruction is understanding. Other horrific exploits of wit have unfolded and are unfolding. The BLU-82B daisy cutter, a conjunction of a pot, cone and long antenna, received its nickname because it was designed to allow the U.S. Air Force to transparent helicopter landing sites in the jungle of Vietnam. In Afghanistan this century, it was used for anti-personnel attacks until it became obsolete through a larger bomb in 2008.
These bombs are extraordinarily beautiful. All the bright new, even the oldest, are fetish weapons that parody the imperial War Museum’s fascination with the treasure trove of killing machines.
This is not an art gallery and the genius of this intervention lies in the fact that you do not want to know the art to make it interesting. It is possible that a 10-year-old boy will be very informed by comparing the elements of the curtains. Hitale of Bombs helps keep your promises: a story of smart tactics to kill others. Coronavirus still has a long way to go before competing with the catastrophic effects accumulated here.
Ai Weiwei: History of Bombs is located at the Imperial War Museum in London from 1 August to 24 May.