Art and fire share a long history. In Burning Issues: Fire in Art and the Social Imagination, Alan Krell, who teaches at the University of New South Wales, examines the process of fire with an almost Cubist-like determination to examine every possible facet of his subject. There is fire that warms the hands; fire that illuminates text by candlelight; fire that regenerates the bush through lightning strikes; fire that kills in Treblinka, Dresden, and Vietnam. As Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore drawls in Apocalypse Now, ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning … the smell you know that gasoline smell … Smells like … Victory.’

What makes this brilliant book so important is not so much its subject matter as its methodology. Single subject books have been written on all kinds of topics, from tears to oysters to earwax. Many profess to be global and exhaustively encyclopedic. What sets Burning Issues apart is its author’s determination to deliver on that promise, a rigour which we first encountered in his previous book, The Devil’s Rope: A Cultural History of Barbed Wire (2002).

We read about the Great Fire of London (1666), the Great Fire of Chicago (1871), and the less notorious Great Fire of Edinburgh (1824). The author, who has visited all these places, has done his research impeccably.

One of the main themes of Situationist Guy Debord’s philosophy was ‘the society of the spectacle’. Few spectacles have gathered crowds more over the years than a blazing fire. I remember our neighbourhood school in Glasgow burning down thirty years ago. The good burghers of Hyndland came out, some with thermos flasks, to watch with all the enthusiasm and good cheer of a Guy Fawkes bonfire celebration.

From Chicago, Alan Krell brings us this vivid quote from Elias Colbert and Everett Chamberlin’s Chicago and the Great Conflagration, published one year after the Great Fire:

The sensation conveyed to the spectator of this unparalleled event, either through the eyes, the ear, or other senses or sympathies cannot be adequately described, and any attempt to do it but shows the poverty of language … The people were mad … they stumbled over broken furniture and fell, and were trampled under foot … liquor flowed like water, for the saloons were broken open and despoiled, and men on all sides were to be seen frenzied with drink … Women, hollow-eyed and brazen-faced, with foul drapery tied over their heads, their dresses half-torn from their skinny bosoms … laughing with one another at some particularly ‘splendid’ gush of flame or ‘beautiful’ falling-in of a roof.

At every turn, Krell brings fire’s harming and helpful processes – the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk, El Greco’s An allegory (Fábula) – back to visual language and apposite metaphor. For the Chicago fire, he chooses the following quote, from the same text: ‘Fire was a strong painter and dealt in weird effects, using only black and red, and laying them boldly on.’ From Edinburgh, on Monday 15 November 1824, he brings us this eyewitness account which is equally visual. ‘The night was calm and serene, and the sparks sent forth by the flames rose high into the air, like embers from the crater of a volcano. Their appearance was like the thickest drift of a snowstorm.’ And the writer of this narrative, Krell tells us, was particularly amused by hearing a native of Aberdeenshire exclaim, ‘See the red snaw.’

Two pages further on, we are introduced to Clive James’s poem ‘Fires Burning, Fires Burning’, which takes us from Hamburg to Tokyo to New York on 9/11:

When burning a lot of bodies, the SS
found
The thing to do was to put down a layer
Of women’s bodies first.
They had more fat in them.

In the final stanza, James stands by his mother’s coffin and gives thanks that ‘she would shortly meet a different kind of fire, having died first, and in due time’.

The book, structured around four themed chapters, ends with a postscript on ‘A Dreadful Prankster’, which sees the world of fire from both sides of the Promethean myth. There is Susan Hiller’s Belshazzar’s Feast, The Writing on Your Wall (1983–84), an installation which shows ‘a single television monitor in a meticulously arranged “modern” domestic setting with low-lit table lamps. Screened on the monitor … is a compilation of constantly changing images of fire.’ A few pages later, we have a selection of images of ‘controlled fires’ from the Sydney Morning Herald which mentally flick us back to the book’s first chapter and to its recounting of recent apocalyptic bushfires in several Australian states.

Throughout this book, visual narratives from Australia, Africa, and South America are interwoven with northern hemisphere exemplars to give us that rare thing, a truly global investigation that continually focuses on the local. But there are other reasons to be excited about this book, which constantly shows us Phoenix rising with both hope and purpose from all sorts of charred ashes. We have Ronnie Tjampitjinpa’s Tingari Bushfire Dreaming (2003), reproduced opposite Eugene von Guérard’s Bushfire between Mount Elephant and Timboon, March 1857 (1859). The shared colours of these two works, irrespective of their similar content, are a highly intelligent and evocatively emotional choice, which spans, effortlessly, one hundred and fifty years.

Some fires nurture, some destroy; we can graft these human qualities on to what is, after all, just a process of nature. We could do the same with water, whether in a flood that drowns or the baptism of a new life. We are also reminded constantly of the scale of fires, large and small. Thus we witness Ed Ruscha’s painting Los Angeles County Museum on Fire (1965–68) and, a few pages later, Mike Parr’s Have a burning match dropped on your bare chest (Wound by Measurement 4) (1973), and are put in mind of how the tiniest burn can sometimes evoke as much pain as a full-blown conflagration.