Situationists and the Nuclear Question (original) (raw)
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Nuclear Activities and Modern Catastrophes: Art Faces the Radioactive Waves
Nuclear-related artworks provide a favorable terrain for investigation of our contemporary epoch, for they relate to a science whose applications are highly political and that is spreading beyond the Western world. In times of global warming, indeed, the prospect of nuclear energy reappears as the latest sought-after modern technology. But after Hiroshima and Chernobyl, and given the dualistic civilian and military use of the atom, how do artists react to nuclear activities and their inherent politics? Can art provide an effective counterpractice to global nuclear politics? The author argues that art and science share the same project—the modernist project—and that art, like science, has to question its modern heritage.
In public discourse the nuclear usually oscillates between the uncanny and the sublime, that is, the shockingly close (e.g. radioactive particles inside my body) and the mightily distant (e.g. a nuclear explosion). To designate the middle ground, the " space of care " as the curator of the show Ele Carpenter puts it, and perhaps find a language to speak about the title-giving perpetual uncertainty that governs this space, is the objective that was set for this exhibition. If we want to better understand the nuclear condition that we are all part of, we also need to address political, social, aesthetic questions, because science doesn't have all the answers
The Times of Caring in a Nuclear World: Sculpture, Contamination and Stillness
Arts
Care takes time. Caring, whether with, for, or about a living being or entity that is more-than-human, disrupts expectations of how a linear, human time should progress. To practice care for the contaminated, the lands, waters, and animate life altered by human industry, is to extend that indeterminacy into distant, deeper time. Aesthetic representation of the affective and ethical dimensions of care, in this extreme, offers an experience that can transfer the arguments about nuclear contamination into more nuanced and sensed responses and contributes to current thinking about care in the arts worlds. I was commissioned to make a sculpture exhibition in 2020 as part of an anthropological study into the future of the Sellafield nuclear site in West Cumbria, UK. The exhibition, ‘x = 2140. In the coming 120 years, how can humans decide to dismantle, remember and repair the lands called Sellafield?’, consisted of three sculptural ‘fonts’ which engaged with ideas of knowledge production,...
The Smoke of Nuclear Modernity Drifts through the Anthropocene
2016
Working with the nuclear economy and nuclear aesthetics is a complex ethical process, one that twists and turns through spirals of technical jargon, nuclear utopianism and deep psychic fear. In this culture of extremes, artists engaging with contemporary nuclear culture walk a political tightrope interrogating how nuclear aesthetics are reproduced whilst avoiding the simplifying tropes of industry and activism. In parallel to artistic practices, this essay explores some of the constructions of nuclear modernity, and the means of escape and betrayal, which contribute to rethinking nuclear aesthetics in the early twentieth century.
“Insignificant” Lives and the Power of the Arts after Fukushima
Afterimagefterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, UC Press, Vol. 46 No. 3, September 2019; (pp. 15-24), 2019
From October 6, 2018, to January 20, 2019, the exhibition Catastrophe and the Power of Art was on view at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. The exhibition, curated by Kondo Kenichi, was notable for the choice of topic and the display of relevant pieces created by international artists. Moreover, it coincided with the fifteenth anniversary of the museum (...) At first, I intended to write a simple review of the exhibition, but while finishing my first version, protests began at the Whitney Museum of American Art against a trustee, Warren B. Kanders, whose company Safariland produces military and law enforcement supplies such as tear gas, believed to have been used on hundreds of migrants at the United States/Mexican border. Not long before, protests were held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim (...) 10.1525/aft.2019.463003 https://afterimage.ucpress.edu/content/46/3/15?fbclid=IwAR0KsrLPmtxyoEbgtr8Ph\_N8ruVdLXP7\_r34JFijqJEnwcEPCpmdX6KKz68
2011
Whereas at the end of the twentieth century societies had to work through the traumatic effects of a century of political extremism and found the drive to rebuild society in the prospect of a better future, it is now, at the beginning of this new century, the fear of an inevitable and complete catastrophe that reigns. Worst-case scenarios have always played a role in the way our culture has imagined the future. The impending depletion of the world's oil resources, the devastating effects of climate change, steep population growth, the breakdown of the economic system, pandemics and the threat of international terrorism have made catastrophe into a crucial notion to understand our relation with our time today. More than ever before, the expectation of catastrophe shapes our notion and experience of temporality and influences our ability to act in the present. This book wants to question the present future of calamity by focusing on the imagining of catastrophe, in art, architecture and philosophy. It collects some of the most inspiring contributions of the conference TICKLE YOUR CATASTROPHE! and reflects the interdisciplinary approach of this meeting. The first part entitled "Ruin value" addresses the motif of the ruin in visual art and urban planning. The second section "State of Emergency" gathers texts on catastrophism in philosophy and literature. The contributions of "Media Disaster" focus on how images of catastrophe are mediated and mediatized in film, painting, the news and the performing arts. Subsequently, the final section "Worst-case Scenarios" considers the method of scenario thinking as a common strategy in the political discourse on global warming, the military, artistic interventions and urban planning.
Nuclear Aesthetics: Technology, Corporeality, and the Politics of Nuclear Weapons Testing
In the following paper, I will attempt to add the existent literature of nuclear aesthetics by analyzing how we might, under a traditional Kantian aesthetic framework, aesthetically appreciate devices that are often seen as purely negative and destructive; nuclear weapons. Specifically, I will examine the relationship between the body and nuclear weapons during the different " regimes " of nuclear testing. To do so, I will first examine the American relationship to nuclear weapons beginning with the detonation of the first device in 1945, all the way through the fear of nuclear war during the Cold War and the current climate of nuclear weapons testing. I will then draw upon the Kantian notion of the sublime and examine how the concepts of mathematical and dynamical sublimity apply to aboveground testing, underground testing, and so-called science-based stockpile stewardship with a focus on the body as the site of the nuclear experience. Finally, I will briefly consider the psychic implications of a post-nuclear world devoid of physical nuclear tests and, ultimately, propose a solution to rekindle a nuclear technoaesthetic experience.
British Art in the Nuclear Age (ed. C. Jolivette), 2014
This book chapter investigates the ways in which nuclear science and technology figured in a variety of sculptural forms in early Cold-War Britain. First it shows how in the 1930s and 1940s constructivist sculptors, such as Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo, referenced atomic science in their work, encouraged by contact with the crystallographer J.D. Bernal. Through works alluding to the geometry of crystal structures they signified optimistic hope for increased human understanding in a future Socialist society. The chapter then examines how the creation and use of atomic weapons led surrealist and social-realist sculptors, such as Henry Moore and Peter Peri, to make ambivalent or critical works about nuclear science and technology, exemplified in sculptural representations of nuclear arms and the disarmament campaign (in which several sculptors and critics were active). Lastly, the chapter considers the extent to which the expressionist sculpture of a younger generation of British sculptors, such as Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick and Bernard Meadows, has also been understood to reflect fears of nuclear warfare, despite an absence of explicit ‘nuclear’ signification. As this now familiar interpretation of their imagery has invariably been supported by Herbert Read’s famous characterization of it as an expression of ‘the geometry of fear’, the chapter interrogates the intended meaning of his epithet and how and when it became associated with the nuclear threat. Throughout the chapter, interpretations by sculptors and contemporary critics of these disparate sculptural engagements with nuclear science and technology are scrutinized, alongside analysis of how they related to the aesthetic and ideological oppositions of the Cold War.
Paolo Soleri's Nuclear Revelation and the Scale of Apocalypse
Apocalyptica, 2023
Created against the backdrop of an imminent nuclear confrontation, the architectural drawings and narratives authored by architect Paolo Soleri offer unique insights into the relationship between apocalyptic imagination, the invention of atomic weapons, and radical visions of future architecture. This paper examines Soleri’s architectural representations — including his less-known works created towards the end of the Cold War — theoretical writings, intellectual influences, personal letters and geography of operation, and places those within the nexus of a strictly American nuclear eschatology. Examined through this lens, Soleri’s visions do not offer a promised future for a humanity at stake. Rather, they expose the limits of architectural imagination in face of the unimaginable, and reveal the complicity of architecture, however speculative, in bringing about the end of the world.