I visited the\u00a0State of Emergency<\/em>\u00a0exhibit a few minutes ago, and it was very interesting. I thought that the exhibit with the legal pads inscribed with lines which were actually tiny lines of text was fascinating, as was the exhibit on fracking.<\/p>\n The piece that spoke to me the most was the on e entitled “London 1940, Bloomsbury, Clerkenwell, Southwark, Waterloo.” Here, the artist used pages of a book that takes place in World War 2 London, and then built a replica of some of London neighborhoods out of that paper. He then burnt the paper in order to show the devastation of the bombings, using maps of London that had data on where bombs had fallen and the destruction that they had caused.<\/p>\n It is one thing to read about the bombing of a city, and to learn the number of bombs dropped, their explosive power in megatons of TNT, the number of deaths, the cost of the damage, the historic sites which were destroyed, or the other endless statistics. A story might do such a situation more justice, and I think that is what Kurt Vonnegut attempted to do in\u00a0Slaughterhouse Five,\u00a0<\/em>where Billy Pilgrim wheels dead bodies into piles in the streets of Dresden after spending the night in the basement of a slaughterhouse.<\/p>\n Yet, neither literary nor historical works capture the visceral nature of something like a disaster in the same way that artwork can. Seeing the model of London laid out, I could see the empty spaces where walls and buildings had been, and it felt much more real than ever before, even though I knew previously that London had been ravaged by German bombing. It’s probably something that you can’t understand unless you’ve been there; but I felt closer to it than I did before. I tried to imagine what it was like to have that burn, that bomb, break down that wall across the street, or to walk down a street and see through to the next one, or the one after that, because the buildings in between had been leveled. I thought about what the smoldering edges of burnt paper looked like when the artist was working, and what the wreckage of destroyed buildings looked like after the bombs detonated. Viewing this piece, it made the whole city feel awfully fragile; likely no more fragile than the residents of London felt their homes were when the bombs tore through walls and leveled sturdy buildings.<\/p>\n The decision to use paper on which a story taking place in wartime London was brilliant. The lives and stories which existed on the paper are untold, as were the stories that were cut short or drastically changed by World War Two.<\/p>\n History is so often an examination of human lives and experiences in an unemotional way. This intellectualization is, of course, useful. By distancing ourselves, we can think well about the situation, and therefore, about future situations. If we truly felt the horror of most disasters, we could likely never process enough to contemplate what we could do to avert future possible similar disasters. Yet, part of understanding a disaster (or any situation) is understanding what it felt like to be there. Art has the ability to connect us in a way that academic literature cannot, in a way that even talented fiction writers often do not achieve. “London 1940” is a great example of this: it connected me, at an emotional, visceral, real level with the destruction of London, and helped me to see a sliver of a disaster through which I did not live, but which I would certainly like to understand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I visited the\u00a0State of Emergency\u00a0exhibit a few minutes ago, and it was very interesting. I thought that the exhibit with the legal pads inscribed with lines which were actually tiny lines of text was fascinating, as was the exhibit on fracking. The piece that spoke to me the most was the on e entitled “London … <\/p>\n