This week's news in the arts
With 700 flights grounded in Britain thanks to Icelandic ash, you might be forgiven for thinking that volcanos are only ever bad news. But that's not always the case: look at their rich showing in the arts.
Between 1852 and 1858, Japanese artist Ando Hiroshige made a series of influential woodblock prints of his local volcano, 36 Views of Mount Fuji. The snow-capped peak looms in the background of all 36, sometimes grey, sometimes pink-lit, always ravishing ? but then it was dormant.
It's a long way from Siouxsie and the Banshees' brilliant 1985 track Cities in Dust. Here, with unsparing if overwrought imagery, the singer remembers the thousands who perished at Pompeii: "Hot and burning in your nostrils/ Pouring down your gaping mouth/ Your molten bodies blankets of cinders". The accompanying video is equally unnerving, featuring dancing skeletons, lava, and a worrying amount of (highly flammable) hairspray.
Volcanos wreak similar havoc in the films Dante's Peak and Volcano, both, coincidentally, released in 1997. In the former, Pierce Brosnan plays a volcanologist who has days to convince the inhabitants of a small US town that their charming neighbourhood volcano is about to blow. The latter stars Tommy Lee Jones as an "emergency management director", whose department is thrown into chaos when a volcano pops up in the middle of LA. Both are heavy on the pre-CGI pyrotechnics, but Dante's Peak edges it for a disturbing scene in which Brosnan attempts to cross a lake of acid in a very thin boat.
Susan Sontag's 1992 novel The Volcano Lover takes the more considered approach. The narrative centres on William Hamilton, English ambassador to Naples in the 1700s, and part of one of the most notorious love triangles in history: his wife Emma became Nelson's mistress. The presence of Vesuvius, to which Hamilton dedicates years of study, becomes a metaphor for his frustrated desires. So take note, Grimsv�tn in Iceland ? you're nothing until you're a metaphor.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/may/25/culture-flash-volcanoes
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