Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
January 1977, the contents of a red-hot lava lake flowed rapidly
down the mountain, overwhelming villages and killing thousands
of people. It is impossible to imagine the constant emotional
pressures of living on the side of a mountain with such a terrible
burden at its peak, like a pot of boiling water lodged just above
an opening door. The high speed of the flow down Nyiragongo
was because the lava in that volcano has a low silica content and
is thus not as sticky as the lava from, for example, Vesuvius,
which travels at a far more stately but no less devastating pace.
Halut's painting, with the spirits of the volcano rising up within
its cloud, takes us directly to the heart of the disaster as the
terrible red tongue of fire slips down the hillside and destroys
his village.The immediacy of the painting is comparable to Gut-
tuso's Flight from Etna , and conveys so much more humanity
than the nineteenth-century constructs of Schopin or Poynter.
Given the intense worldwide scrutiny by volcanologists of
volcanic 'hotspots', eruptions from the mid-twentieth century
have been constantly filmed and assessed even as the first flow of
lava appears above the crater's edge. We have immediate aerial
film of the proceedings - often with a light plane's wingtip
moving evocatively in and out of shot, and the over-excited com-
mentary of a press reporter who is safe and secure in the cockpit.
This is of course wholly different from the nineteenth century,
when artists were the first accurate witnesses of such events,
and from the widespread eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
practice of embellishing reports of eruptions for dramatic and
narrative purposes. We can seriously doubt Schopin, but we
cannot doubt Halut.
Detachment, transformation, terror, imaginative invention
and cool analysis: these are the qualities that artists brought in
the latter years of the twentieth century to volcanic subjects.
Dieter Roth (1930-1998), a German artist who lived in Iceland
from 1957, used a well-known aerial photograph taken in 1963
of the birth of Surtsey to make a series of eighteen collotype
prints as a demonstration of print-making techniques.² Raised
up on a platter, and set on a fetching check tablecloth against
a sea view, Surtsey is shown to us as a delicious or possibly a
Search WWH ::




Custom Search