Malcolm McLaren, photographed by Bob Gruen in NYC,
jumping in front of a Richard Hambleton Shadowman,
whilst an amused Andrea Linz looks on (1983) [1]
I.
I have to admit, for a long time I was one of those people who (mistakenly) believed that the human death shadows left behind at Hiroshima were due to the vaporisation of bodies after the Americans detonated an atomic bomb over the city on 6 August, 1945, killing tens of thousands of people (mostly civilians).
I now know, however, that the shadows are not the vaporised remains of the dead, but were caused, rather, by the flash bleaching of the surrounding area behind the bodies located directly in the path of the blast and that, as a matter of fact, it would take a huge amount of energy to instantly vaporise a living body (far more energy even than released by Little Boy) [2].
Nevertheless, this doesn't rob them of their macabre interest and poignancy.
II.
I don't know if the Canadian artist Richard Hambleton was thinking of the above when he came up with his idea of the Shadowman, but when I look at his work I'm certainly reminded of what happened in Japan (just as when viewing the Human Shadow Etched in Stone exhibition at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, I can't help thinking of Hambleton's work).
Along with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Hambling emerged out of the vibrant NYC art scene in the 1980s, although he considered himself a conceptual artist rather than merely a street artist, even if he often graffitied his images on to the walls of public buildings.
Early work includes his notorious series of Mass Murder images (1976-78), in which he painted what appeared to be a chalk outline around bodies of volunteers pretending to be homicide victims and then splashed some red paint around to complete the bloody crime scene. These scenes were reproduced on the streets of numerous cities across the US and Canada and would often startle passersby.
But it's the mysterious (somewhat scary) Shadowman paintings for which he is now best remembered [3]; each one a life-sized figure splashed with black paint on hundreds of buildings and other structures across New York City (and, later, other cities, including London, Paris, Berlin, and Rome).
Again, Hambleton often selected locations calculated to have maximum impact on those who encountered a Shadowman - frightening some and delighting the imagination of others; including Malcolm McLaren, who persuaded the artist to license a design for his and Vivienne Westwood's final collaboration together: Witches [4].
It was during this duck rocking period that I first met McLaren and I vaguely remember him telling me that 'shadows are the means by which bodies display their form' (though I've since discovered that he was, in fact, quoting Leonardo da Vinci).
Notes
[1] The photo of Mclaren, his talented muse Andrea Linz, and Hambleton's Shadowman was taken by the American photographer Bob Gruen on Bethune Street, in the West Village, in April 1983. This and many other photos of Malcolm can be found (and purchased) on Gruen's website: click here.
[2] On the morning of August 6, 1945, the Little Boy atomic bomb was
detonated at an altitude of 1,800 feet over the city
of Hiroshima, exploding with an energy of approximately 15 kilotons of TNT.
Among its other effects, it subjected the ground area to an extremely high
radiant temperature for several seconds; high enough to set clothing alight and cause extensive damage to human flesh, but not high enough to vaporise a body so that no physical traces (such as carbonised tissue and bones) would remain. Nevertheless, the belief has persisted that the shadows are the traces (or even the souls) of people killed, quite literally, in a flash.
[3] I say remembered for rather than known for as Hambleton died on 29 October 2017, aged 65.
[4] A Shadowman design was used on a roll top jersey skirt that formed part of the McLaren-Westwood Witches collection (A/W 1983): click here to view on Etsy.
This post is for Andrea.
