Steps, Ladders, Stairs in Art. Volume 1 - страница 3

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.

Infinity is an integral characteristic of the “stairway to heaven”. This is central to Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s installation (V1: 260). Since the 1960s, a primary theme of Kusama’s work has been numerous repetitions and reflections. Here it takes the form of a luminous road with no beginning or end, of which the viewer encounters only a small segment. An optical illusion makes the construction – a steel ladder wrapped with fiber-optic cable and two large round mirrors placed above and below it – appear endless, leading upwards to meta-space.

A different point of view on the heavenly ladder (V2: 278) is offered by Fabrice Samyn, depicting it from the opposite perspective with a wide base and steps narrowing as they get higher. Turning the iconographic symbol of man’s connection with God upside down, the artist transforms it into an instrument created by God for communication with man. The installation’s title, “You are the salt of the earth”, also suggests this interpretation. It is a reference to the Sermon on the Mount, recorded in the Gospel (Matthew 5: 13,14), in which Christ speaks of the great strength of spirit a person needs in order to travel the path of self-improvement and resist the forces of evil.

Stairs were used to represent the dialogue between the earthly and the divine long before the birth of Christian culture, in ancient architectural forms such as the Babylonian ziggurat and the Egyptian pyramid (markedly in the step pyramid of Djoser), symbolizing the ascent from various elements of nature to a common divine whole. The Dogon people’s stairs (V1: 217) are both a manifestation of the hierarchic nature of the cosmic world order, and in addition to their ritual character have a utilitarian function. The long, winding sandstone stairs, with graded steps and forked peaks, allow the inhabitants of the area around the Rocks of Mali to get to and from their homes.

Some Biblical scholars have noted the connection of the heavenly stairway with the Egyptian Ladder of Hathor, along which the souls of the dead ascend to heaven. Based on texts inscribed on the walls of corridors and pyramid chambers, Egyptologists concluded that the inhabitants of Ancient Egypt believed that they could reach the world of the dead only by climbing this ladder, and that deities guarding it (Horus and Set) assisted the deceased, turning the ladder into a path to heaven. During the Ancient and Middle Kingdoms, a wooden model of the ladder would often be placed in tombs; later, priests would draw a ladder on papyrus to illustrate texts from the Book of the Dead.

Stairs and ladders as ritual symbols have developed into a familiar metaphor for the passage out of the world of the living. In this context, a ladder appears in the finale of Slava Polunin’s lyrical show “Chu”. The show tells the story of a group of old clowns, who have only one thing left to do as their lives near their end: to leave on time. A ladder decorated with gold funereal tassels, lowered from “heaven”, indicates the solemnity of the moment; but it is not the ladder that predicts the clowns’ departure. At the appointed hour, an angelic guide comes for the hero, who is late, and punches his one-way ticket, thus marking the end…