This ekphrastic response to Andy Warhol’s Atomic Bomb, 1965, was written as an exercise for my Writing from History course on the MA. It draws on ideas from Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, 1936 (Illuminations, Ed. Hannah Arendt, 1968), and is also influenced by this reading of Warhol’s image in The Guardian.
I was particularly interested in ideas of repetition and reproduction, the dialectics of sequential images in time and space, and the suggestion that the nuclear bomb’s potential for destruction has already had the effect of creating a new world in its image: a post-apocalyptic age.
Look out for further developments on this theme in relation to my work on utopian poetics.
