arts and design

Ai Weiwei: History of Bombs review – high-impact reminder of our insatiable desire for destruction

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The bomb reproduced in a life-sized 3D image on the floor of the Imperial War Museum seems almost comical – so big and clumsy, like something out of an old film of a Jules Verne story. Surely this monster was never used. But the Soviet Union’s Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created, was once detonated. Suspended beneath a bomber because it was too big to fit inside, it was dropped over the Barents Sea and exploded with a force of 57 megatonnes, more than 1,500 times the combined strength of the two atomic bombs America dropped on Japan.

Ai Weiwei’s History of Bombs is an artwork about incalculable destruction in the form of an encyclopaedic collection of bombs and missiles, depicted with clinical precision across the floor of the Imperial War Museum’s central hall and flowing up a staircase. At a time when the world is quaking from a natural pandemic, he reminds us of our mind-boggling capacity to obliterate ourselves. It’s a mesmerising piece of popular history that shows in detail how the human race has accumulated a murderous arsenal since the early 20th century, when the invention of flight unleashed explosive new possibilities in warfare. There was barely more than a decade’s leap between the Wright Brothers taking off at Kitty Hawk and aerial bombing. The earliest weapons here are small enough to be chucked from a biplane.

If the surreal textbook depictions of bombs and missiles Ai has laid over the floor and plastered up a staircase appear unreal, then you only have to look up to be reminded that people really have built and used such horrors. There soars the museum’s V2 rocket, a surviving specimen of the Nazi guided missiles built by slave workers from Buchenwald and fired on London, killing 2,724 Britons, in the last years of the second world war.

Surreal textbook depictions bombs and missiles ... Ai Weiwei.
Surreal textbook depictions bombs and missiles … Ai Weiwei. Photograph: Courtesy Lisson Gallery. Photography by Gao Yuan

Move closer and look at the pictures of bombs Ai has placed under the rocket’s dark green tail fins. Little Boy, looking like a torpedo crossed with a hot-water boiler, is depicted on one side of Hitler’s secret weapon. Fat Man, ludicrously bulbous, lies opposite. These are the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

It’s like being in a visual version of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow, which explores the disturbing links between Nazi science and US rocket technology. Ai makes you see something else, though. The V2 was a scientific experiment by a regime that was also experimenting with making soap and leather from human corpses. But what are Little Boy and Fat Man? Even more effective experiments. It is at first funny to see the prototype clumsiness of their designs, as if the Manhattan Project brought in cartoonist Tex Avery alongside its physicists to design the weapons’ appearance. But then you see how the two take different design approaches. Why were such different prototypes deployed? Apparently to get the maximum experimental knowledge from the destruction of two Japanese cities.

For the lesson this gigantic Janes Guide to Bombs lays out across the Imperial War Museum floor is that munitions have multiplied monstrously since 1945. The worst weapons of the cold war were only ever used in tests but their massed potential killing power defeats understanding. Other horrible feats of ingenuity were and are deployed. The BLU-82B Daisy Cutter, a weird conjunction of a cooking pot, a cone and a long aerial, got its nickname because it was designed for the US air force to clear helicopter landing places in the Vietnam jungle. In Afghanistan this century it was used for anti-personnel attacks until it was made obsolete by a bigger bomb in 2008.

These bombs are terribly beautiful. All glistening and brand new – even the oldest – they are fetishised weapons that parody the fascination of the Imperial War Museum’s real hoard of killing machines.

This is not an art gallery and the brilliance of this intervention lies in the fact that you don’t need to know it’s art to find it interesting. A 10-year-old could learn a lot from comparing these pieces of hardware. History of Bombs delivers what it promises – a history of the clever ways we kill one another. The coronavirus has a long way to go before it rivals the catastrophic impacts amassed here.

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