It’s been written that gunpowder is the ‘explosive that changed the world’ and whilst that phrase is more of a reference to gunpowder’s militaristic uses it is also true that without it the world would have been denied one of its most astounding forms of art: the firework display.
Controlled colorful explosions in the sky have been giving mesmerized audiences a crick in the proverbial neck for centuries. The ability of fireworks to captivate was recorded for posterity in George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead (2004) in which fireworks, or ‘sunflowers’, were depicted as a great way to distract zombies, arguably a symbolic component of the film’s tongue-in-cheek critique of the masses. In the wake of the Commonwealth Games closing ceremony held recently in Melbourne, Australia, the city hasn’t stopped talking about the amazing display that capped off the night. And of course tradition foretells that large-scale pyrotechnics displays will produce a similar response in the US public around Independence Day.
Nobody knows exactly when gunpowder was invented but one of the great ironies regarding its history is that it was used to entertain long before it became an agent of death. The legend goes that sometime around the second century B.C. a Chinese chef happened to mix three common kitchen ingredients, – saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal – which exploded when ignited. This mixture is what we now refer to as gunpowder and quickly became an integral part of Chinese festivities once it was realized that gunpowder inserted into a bamboo stick would explode in fire. Although the Chinese developed the world’s first firecracker and other crude forms of fireworks, the artistry we now associate with epic professional displays commemorating important occasions was developed in Italy.
Nowadays professional firework artists, led by the likes of Pierre Alain Hubert and Cai Guo-Qiang, not only create incredible public displays but are also experimenting with new ways of using gunpowder to create artworks away from the display setting.
The ephemeral nature of fireworks has inspired artists working in other media to attempt to capture both the form and feelings conjured by displays. The Fireworks! Four Centuries of Pyrotechnics in Prints and Drawings exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2000 featured over 100 artworks collected representing more than 400 years of artistic endeavour.
In spite of the dangers associated with fireworks, fireworks displays have become synonymous with joyous occasions all over the world. So much so that in the aftermath of the tsunami that swept across the Indian Ocean in December 2004 several Italian pyrotechnics companies were nearly put out of business when governments and councillors opted to ‘tone down’ the scale of New Years celebrations out of respect for the dead. The inference seems to be that fireworks are so wonderful that a display will inevitably invoke rapture in even the most sombre audience.
Fireworks are so potent that even the wrappers they come in have begun to excite collectors. With many American and European manufacturers no longer operating original ‘firework art’ has become the object of admiration and significant online trading. Which just goes to show that there must have been a lot of people out there who ignored their mother’s advice not to play with fire. And luckily for the millions who love fireworks, they didn’t take heed.
