Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
There is a Hollywood look to Antin's photographs, and this
inevitably leads them to being read as film stills. However, like
the nineteenth-century paintings that they emulate, they are
detached moments in the story of the days before the cataclysm,
and as such are visually and literally direct heirs to paintings like
Schopin's
Last Day of Pompeii
and Poynter's
Faithful unto Death
.
The only thing that distinguishes them from the nineteenth-
century works is that they are photographs and the others are oil
paint on canvas. Each is an imaginative and as far as possible
faithful interpretation of their shared subject, and each within the
artistic practices of the time, used hired people as models. The
coincidence that the piece was finished only two and a half weeks
before 9/11 gives added poignancy and an unwanted further
layer of meaning. In the very same way that we cannot now look
at pictures of the Twin Towers without remembering 9/11, so we
cannot look at images entitled
The Last Days of Pompeii
without
recalling the eruption of Vesuvius.
Decades before Eleanor Antin used Hollywood as an inspir -
ation for her
Last Days of Pompeii
, Hollywood let itself loose
on the subject of volcanoes, big time. What better a theme for a
disaster movie than a volcano? Hollywood has given us a tower-
ing inferno and a disoriented Great White Shark, and so true
to form we have also had
Krakatoa - East of Java
(dir. Bernard K.
Kowalski, 1969) in wrap-around Cinerama,
Volcano
(dir. Mick
Jackson, 1997), featuring a volcano erupting under Los Angeles,
Disaster Zone: Volcano in New York
(dir. Robert Lee, 2006), in
which New York gets a visit from the wandering lava, and
2012
(dir. Roland Emmerich, 2009), the year the world faces the
eruption of the Yellowstone caldera. There have been six movie
versions of
The Last Days of Pompeii
, three of them Italian, three
American, and no doubt there are more to come. Geographically
sensitive readers will have noticed that Krakatoa is actually west
of Java, but when has an erroneous compass point or a misspelling
ever hampered a film publicist's career? Moving swiftly to opera,
Patrick Leigh Fermor's novel was the source of Malcolm William -
son's opera
The Violins of Saint-Jacques
, produced at Sadler's Wells
in London in 1966.
Georgia Papageorge,
Kilimanjaro - Southern
Glaciers 1898
, mixed
media on canvas with
inkjet print taken
from the earliest
known photograph
of the glaciers, and
poured ash from
Kilimanjaro, 2010.
