CONSTRUCTING DESTRUCTION
This exhibition directs our attention to the perceptual space
revealed, transformed, and constructed by the twentieth
century's most emblematic technology. As deus ex machina,
the atomic bomb transformed the global political landscape,
in turn
altering our perceptions of power, scale, and time. It
inaugurated a space in which destruction is domesticated,
where the microscopic
fissure of atoms eliminates an entire city, and where networks
that once promised apocalypse can now provide the vital
infrastructure to sustain contemporary society. Engaging
this new terrain,
the works in this exhibition shift attention from the bomb's
destructive force to its ability to transform.
"The H-bomb, that’s the ultimate sculpture."
—
Michael Heizer in Bertram Gabriel, "Works of Earth," Horizon
Magazine, 1982
July 16, 1945 was marked by the first atomic bomb test,
in the Jornada del Muerte ("Journey of Death"), a desert
in New Mexico. Twelve years ago this fall, the United States
concluded the last of these experiments. In the interim years,
the US alone detonated over 1,054 nuclear bombs. They included
the two officially used in combat, against Hiroshima (15 kilotons)
on August 6, 1945 and Nagasaki (21 kilotons), three days later.
These were — compared to the detonations on American
soil — early-model weapons. Considered tests, the
Japanese bombs accompanied a vast urban-planning and photographic-reconnaissance
project. The goal: to learn what would happen if such an
attack were made on Western cities.
In many ways, the atomic bomb was less the result of a
war between ideologies in the East and West than a conflict
between
the city and the landscape, between the center and its
periphery. A century earlier, technology (from the rifle
to the surveyor's
cartography) had laid claim to the natural and indigenous
West. The atomic bomb was the technology that ultimately
conquered
the desert's cataleptic landscape. While Hiroshima and
Nagasaki were made into wastelands, the desert — from the American
West to the Algerian Sahara (in which the French conducted
their own colonial-era atomic tests) — embodied this
desire for an absence of inhabitation.
In the 1960s, a handful of New York artists reacted against
the commercial art world — and more importantly,
against the very space of the gallery. Many of the Earthworks
artists
found themselves drawn to the voids of the West, their
works referencing the military's measures against the landscape.
Inextricable from the geography of the atomic bomb, Land
artists set up camp around the negative spaces
of the
Western testing grounds. The desert represented an inversion
of urban life. As such, it proposed new and sometimes radical
practices of inhabitation, material
usage, ecologies, and scale. Nuclear tests and art alike
involved a paradox of human intervention against the screen
of long-term
and often-times imperceptible consequences.
"A whole city will be raised from the earth and fall back in
ashes…" — Marguerite Duras, screenplay
for the film Hiroshima mon amour (1959)
Though born at the fringes of civilization, the bomb's primary
target was the city and its everyday practices. While Tokyo
and other major Japanese cities existed in
a state of
emergency following a devastating aerial campaign of fire
raids, life in Hiroshima was routinely domestic, nearly untouched
by the war. In North America,
the geography
of the bomb would significantly impact post-war spatial
logic. Supporting a trend towards decentralization of urban
infrastructure, the nuclear events in Japan anticipated
a similar strike on American cities.
A vast, spatialized undertaking, the Manhattan Project
and its vestiges fostered the atomization brought by Postmodern
urbanism. The bomb's creation was, in a bizarre twist,
America's
most important public-works project. Alongside the wartime
networks of the Strategic Air Command and the Air Defense
Command came Eisenhower's
1956
National Highway Defense Act, creating America's interstate-highway
system. Decentralization privileged the growth of suburbia
and satellite town planning,
and created a sophisticated and dispersed communications
network. Post-bomb urbanism and spatial production echoed
the bomb's
reliance upon anti-hierarchical organization.
Sites of Exception
Many of the works in this exhibition explore the
psychology of space, revealing hidden places and the power
that existed within them. These are the visually peripheral
sites of extraordinary events, forgotten spaces in which
civilization's future was determined. While the bomb remains
a threat to this
day, these architectures have become our modern-day ruins.
Their demise came not as the result of a singular event
like those that destroyed Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but the
more unwieldy
and invisible forces of time and obsolescence.
Organizations like the Society for Industrial Archaeology
and the Bureau of Atomic Tourism (www.atomictourist.com),
and recent
books like Tom Vanderbilt's Survival City (2002) and photographer
Richard Ross' Waiting for the End of the World (2004),
have refigured the Classical ruins of the Romantics into
Modernity's post-war leftovers. Against this Romanticist
classicism
towers the Sublime, of which the atomic bomb may be its
greatest example:
at once immeasurable, limitless, extreme.
Andreas Magdanz and Peter Marlow's photographic mementos
of that era's monumental architecture are the contemporary
incarnation
of the Grand Tour. Proxy spaces in which strategists drafted
out doomsday scenarios on sheets of Plexiglas and television
monitors, the bunkers they photograph are filled with kitschy,
abstracted references to the "outside world." These
underground cities, eulogized by journals like the short-lived
Underground
Space (1976–85), revealed a new architectural idealism,
in which both dystopia and utopia were imploded into one.
Dealing in representations and
abstractions,
nuclear bunkers manipulated built space that was at once
Foucaldian and Piranesian.
These architectures of the ground created visual ephemera
unlike any other. Against the urban phenomenon of fireworks,
translating the multitude of the city into the night sky,
the atomic flash and its resulting mushroom
cloud celebrated
the desert's lack of inhabitation. In Dominic McGill's
massive diorama, a South Pacific atoll sits within the
hollowed-out
core of an early-model atomic bomb, literally poised to
blow the island sky-high. The hierarchy of scale between
cause and
effect is inverted or, as it might be, corrected. The very
material and subject of destruction is the land itself.
Nodes and Hubs
In 1948, the Douglas Aircraft Company in Santa Monica,
California, spun off the RAND (Research and Development)
Corporation
to provide the military-industrial complex with "Objective
Analysis, Effective Solutions." Founded in 1994, a
few miles away in Culver City, The Center for Land Use
Interpretation
exists somewhere between this model of independent research
think-tank and artistic interventionists, "dedicated
to the increase and diffusion of information about how
the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized, and
perceived." The
Center's publications appear sterilized of judgment, cloaked
in officiality, and institutionally objective. Culled from
a large online database of human interventions on the land,
the Center's interactive guide to the Nevada Test Site
is a virtual tour, pointing out speculative features for
those
unlikely
visitors to a tightly-guarded, nearly inaccessible terrain.
Their concern is the perception of a place, which is often
more important than its true history.
The Internet itself was an accidental result of the nuclear-era
decision to construct a network (the Arpanet) for communication,
control, and command. In the online work of the Seoul-based
collective Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries,
a doomsday narrative calmly scrolls along the screen in
a
single font, keeping time with a soundtrack of jazzy riffs.
This apocalyptic
story of urbacide tells of Seoul’s destruction by
its northern neighbor Pyongyang, and of nuclear bombs pointlessly
lobbed at Los Angeles. Governed by the logic of geographic
coordinates, the tale is a blend of likelihood and hyperbole.
It is a war made by nodes and hubs of information in which
the digital has foreshadowed what might be real.
Radical Archivists
In The Savage Mind (1962), Claude Lévi-Strauss described
the bricoleur, who reassembles "the residues of previous
construction and destruction." For World Power Systems,
which builds sonic landscapes into old scientific apparatuses,
bricolage is both a conceptual operation and an artistic
trope. Obsolete devices once used for gauging radiation
and flux are
reinvented as topographic prosthetics for measuring the
new landscape and its changing meaning.
The bricoleur is also at hard work in the archive. Like
the atomic blast-proof shelter in which the Mormon church
recently
assembled a vast database of genealogical bio-data on microfiche,
the Atomic Archive preserves data rather than people, documentation
of the past and present rather than agency over the future.
Culled from the archive, digitized, and altered, video
artist Beryl Korot's use of computer technology places
the footage in her video opera Three Tales (2002), somewhere
between historic and contemporary.
The
footage of atomic tests on which she draws is a curious
twist of the
Debordian "spectacle": existing only to be recorded
and measured by electronic media, but purposely hidden
from the public eye. At the same time, composer and collaborator
Steve Reich loops and layers sounds mined from the archives,
investigating chance in the steady countdown
of archaic machines and metronomes.
100 Suns (2003), Mike Light's book of archival
nuclear-test images, is geared towards the coffee-table
market. Like
the Flemish vanitas still-life — a domestic composition
intended for the living room, rendering with photographic
realism the
lacy transparency of bug-eaten leaves — Light's re-presentation
of archival images fills the function of a modern momento
mori. It is a reminder of the proximity
and inevitability of death, a warning against hubris. At
the same
time, the uniformity of atomic light and the generic code
names of the blasts (Ivy, Ranger, Teapot, etc.) seek to
eliminate any sense of place, the tests themselves radically
reshaping the land.
Good Bombs, Evil Nations
During the Cold War the world had five declared nuclear
nations. Today, there are more than 22,000 nuclear warheads
stockpiled
around the world. With so many bombs, the issue is no longer
proliferation, but distribution. In this sense, the bomb's
decentralization and its network of networks — rather
than the weapon’s individual destructive force — has
created the lasting danger. Non-state actors no longer
need the state apparatus once required to kill on a massive
scale.
Over the past year a complex nuclear geography has revealed
the "Islam Bomb" in Pakistan,
Libya and Iran. North Korea has a couple of its own. Sundry
other characters do as well, among them both governments
and individuals. Even artist Gregory Green has his own
home-made nuclear bombs, constructed out of materials from
children's toys and drug shops, using information available
on the Internet. Though inert, his works radically alter
the space of the gallery. They, like many of the
works in this exhibition, place us face-to-face with a
technology
that has spent a decade hidden behind seductive mushroom-cloud
imagery, post-war consumer clichés,
Dr. Strangelove tragedy, and daily color-coded alerts.
Christian Stayner
Cambridge, Massachusetts © August 2004
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