Steps, Ladders, Stairs in Art. Volume 1 - страница 6
“For some, ruins are the end, but if there are ruins, you can always start over again.”[2]
In Ilya Kabakov’s installation “Red Wagon”, the ladders leading up from the city invite the viewer to make a bold leap into the future, promising liberation to everyone who dares to climb them. Its complex, constructivist form alludes to Tatlin’s “Tower of the Third International”, the Babylonian tower of Communism, embodying the utopianism of the idea itself.
“This is an image of the path along which the viewer should go, having experienced the beginning, middle and end. Having experienced the inability to climb the stairs to heaven, experiencing the painful boredom of eternal expectation and being among a pile of dirt, debris and petty nonsense.“[3]
Nonetheless, in another work, “How to Meet an Angel”, Kabakov gives us hope: if a person manages to climb the steps of the ladder 3600 feet toward the sky, an angel will fly to him. And here the ladder represents not only the path to another world, but also a chance to see a miracle with one’s own eyes. In this context, the bronze installation of “How to Meet an Angel” on the façade of a clinic for the mentally ill in Amsterdam can be interpreted as a symbol of hope for salvation.
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, How to Meet an Angel, installation on the facade of the Mentrum Clinic, 2009, Amsterdam, photo by Emilia Kabakova
Many artists have created largescale works on the “stairway to heaven” motif. The Chinese artist Yu Hong’s twentyfoot painting of the same name (V1: 99) was inspired by the 12thcentury icon “The Ladder of Divine Ascent” (V1: 98) in St Catherine’s monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai in Egypt. In Hong’s interpretation, men and women of different ages climb up or fall from a ladder that has no end or beginning. The dynamic poses and the characteristic details of their clothing of each character reveal their respective social status. This lends the work a theatrical-satirical tone and distances it from the sacred and sublime original.
A compatriot of Hong, Cai Guo-Qiang, created a truly evanescent “stairway to heaven”, a fleeting (2.5 minutes) but vivid performance using modern pyrotechnics. This enchanting display literally rose up over Huiyu Harbor in Quanzhou (V2: 351), in the artist’s homeland, early in the morning: a 1650-foot fiery ladder, which Guo-Qiang dedicated to his creative path, appeared in the sky. Its fiery, explosive nature, as a universal symbol of divine power, adds the theme of the duality of experience. In most cosmological texts, fire and flame are associated with both the creation of the world and the apocalypse, i. e. with uncontrollable forces of nature bearing both creation and destruction.