der paintings, gunpowder drawings and explosion events) force
135
us to consider the urgent problem of today’s flood of images. I will come back to this at the end of this article in order to make clear where the current relevance of a historical perspective might lie.
II. In the 17th century, the firework occupied a prominent position in a theatrical event space that was in the process of a radical upheaval. This upheaval wasn’t simply a matter of new ways of creating increasingly dynamic stage spaces, mobile forms of festival architecture, and stage-based instrumentalisations of the human body and voice. It was also a case of an all-encompassing theatricalisation of the public realm under the growing influence of printing technologies. This 2 The term theatrum europaeum primarily refers here to the cultural, political and geographic space of Europe, though also with allusions to the twenty-onevolume work that had traits of a magazine-like periodical and was therefore, in its own way, highly symptomatic of the newly emerging form of public space. Cf. Theatrum Europaeum Oder /Ausführliche und Warhafftige Beschreibung aller und jeder denckwürdiger Geschichten.
medium was what made it possible
3 Cf. Gerd Bergfleth: Theorie der Verschwendung. Einführung in Georges Batailles Antiökonomie. The term “art of expenditure“ should be examined further in relation to the firework in the 17th century and should help to shed light on the complex economic implications. Bergfleth’s considerations of Bataille’s work in this area offer, in my view, important points of reference.
beyond the actual event, spectacular
for something like a Theatrum Europaeum2 to emerge as a representative echo of local public spheres, which brings to light in a quite specific way the practical meaning of fireworks. As a form of demonstrative expenditure, whose economic symbolism, in the form of printed images, extended far Lust-Feuerwerke or recreational fireworks emerged as refined instruments for maintaining the cartographic status quo. At the same time, however, they functioned as a precautionary reminder of the border-shifting violence of the so-called Ernst-Feuerwerke
– fireworks of war. Not only the symbolic violence of recreational displays, but also the physical violence of the newest weapon technologies became the focus of a spectacular “art of expenditure.”3 Only under the sign of this emerging relationship between recreational firework displays and pyrotechnic theatres of war is it possible to properly understand the immense importance of fireworks in the 17th century. The firework as a lavish memory theatre should be positioned directly at the centre of a cultural
9_A2.indb 135
3/2/09 4:58 PM