Audio guide commentary

back to
Ban the Bomb

  Audio Guide Transcript

Leopard Skin Nuclear Bomber No. 2 is a mutant hybrid: part predatory animal, part warplane. Colin Self made it in 1963 whilst still a student at the Slade School of Art in London and it displays the anxiety and menace, felt by many in his generation, of a world threatened by nuclear destruction. He'd suffered what he's described as "nuclear dry heaves" since seeing Robert Oppenheimer - the scientific mastermind behind the nuclear bomb - on television in the 1950s. "It was as if there was nowhere to hide", he's said.

This work was also made in the recent shadow of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 - the nuclear stand-off between America and Russia that had brought the world closer to nuclear oblivion than ever before.

Colin Self believed that it was the duty of art to address the realities of "life in the Cold War". In the summer of 1959, he'd stayed on a Norfolk farm, near enough to an American air base that housed intercontinental ballistic missiles that at night he could hear the guard dogs howling - "like wolves", as he's described it. This work is similarly about animal and military aggression: it's essentially an American bomber made from a wooden core, with the wings of a model aircraft - one bearing the insignia of the US Airforce. Self covered the fuselage in leopardskin and made the tail look disturbingly phallic, painting it in flesh pink.

Dur: approx. 1'10"