Periodic Tales: The Curious Lives of the Elements by Aldersey-Williams Hugh

Author:Aldersey-Williams, Hugh [Aldersey-Williams, Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780141041452
Goodreads: 13479964
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

The profound and contradictory meanings of lead–fortune and fate, creativity and destruction, humour and seriousness, love and death–have led a number of contemporary artists to employ it in their work. Not many are drawn to such an unfashionable and humble material, perhaps, but the few who have been are among the most reputed. The British sculptor Antony Gormley and the German artist Anselm Kiefer, for example, use lead in ways that exploit contrasting aspects of its nature.

Kiefer works with an unusual range of basic, one might say primal, media including ash, chalk, straw and fingernails. Lead, which is regarded in alchemical and Cabalistic thought as primordial matter, has been important for Kiefer for more than thirty years, chosen for practical reasons of workability–it is one of the most malleable of metals–but also, more importantly, for its multiple cultural echoes. It is, he says, ‘a material for ideas’.

In 1989, as East and West Germans began to chip away at the Berlin Wall, Kiefer was finishing a major work modelled on a modern bomber aircraft. Kiefer’s plane is made not of aluminium, the lightest practical metal, but of lead, the heaviest. Its patchwork lead sheets are bent and folded into shape, and finished off with a crude parody of the bright rivets that we depend upon to carry us safely aloft. I see the work at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, a place of harmony between land and sea, architecture and art, where it delivers a violent jolt like an injured bird seen on a country walk. In one sense, it is an hilarious proposition, a plane that could never fly. Like the lead axes made by the Romans it would be useless as a weapon of war. And, like the miniature lead boats that have been found on the Greek island of Naxos dating back to the Cycladic period 5,000 years ago, it is going nowhere. It promises flights of fancy yet remains heavily earthbound. Even its long wings and fuselage seem to slump, the spindly undercarriage barely able to resist the inexorable pull of gravity. The work is called Jason. In the Greek myth, Jason and the Argonauts, whom he recruits to sail with him in search of the Golden Fleece, build a ship, the Argo, but find that it is too heavy to launch. It requires the magical intervention of Orpheus, who has joined the crew, before their voyage can begin.

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