Images and Issues, September/October 1982

The Atomic Salon

On June 12 between 3,000 and 4,000 individuals marched behind the banner of “Visual Artists for Nuclear Disarmament” as part of the larger New York City demonstration by over 750,000 people, grouped by profession, organization, neighborhood, and nationality. The mobilization of the art communities in New York stems from the continued work of Artists for Nuclear Disarmament (AND), Artists Against Nuclear Madness and Artists Against Nuclear Arms (who are responsible for the full-page ads in Artforum and the Sunday New York Times). Concurrently, the Ronald Feldman Gallery, on short notice and in cooperation with the Village Voice, mounted a comprehensive exhibition entitled “The Atomic Salon.”

The Village Voice originally approached Ronald Feldman Fine Arts to house an exhibition cocurated by Feldman and Village Voice critic Carrie Rickey in conjunction with their special issue on nuclear disarmament. The art exhibited in the gallery was reproduced in the publication.

“The Atomic Salon” encompassed many media and artists from various galleries with work produced from 1966 to 1982. In the installation, pattern, figurative, and sculptural art was interspersed with information-oriented pieces. Visual strength made for direct communication.

At the risk of sounding maudlin or mundane, I must say that the installation Hypocenter: South Bronx, 1981-82, Drawings by Twenty Kids from the South Bronx with Tim Rollins was one of the most powerful messages in the show. Anyone who thinks children cannot possibly conceive of the effects of nuclear fallout should see I Look at My Arms, My Skin Burned Off by Christina Marie Arsula. Had enough? How about Every House Blows up Blood by Adelaida Santiageo or My Uncles Turn into Monsters by Juan Soto. “Ironically, Juan’s concept of the heads comes from Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of grotesques.)

Granted, the imagery lacks sophistication and technical finesse, but you can’t argue with the grasp of subject matter. Conceptual artist Tim Rollins works with these thirteen-and fourteen-year-olds from the South Bronx, using his role as art teacher to orchestrate art from nonartists for nonart audiences. He does not feel that what the students have to say is particularly profound; he maintains, instead, that the intensity results from the fact that concerns are not filtered through art-world ideology. The students were not even aware of the meaning of the black and yellow bomb shelter signs posted in their school. Rollins took the kids down into the shelter (still intact, with cots and cracker barrels) and questioned them to discover their knowledge of atomic weapons. The students’ conceptual leap from “radioactivated” Marvel comics heroes to the scientific realities of nuclear weapons was self-evident in the collaboration.

Thank God all was not completely heavy or purely scientific in the show. Feldman and Rickey discreetly mixed lighter, decorative work both for visual variety and for emotional relief. (It would be hard to walk through the entire show on your knees.) After the children’s art, Chris Burden’s Atomic Alphabet lent a moment of auditory sadism to the scene, in the form of a Sesame Street-style recitation of the ABCs. Beside the chartlike print of the illustrated letters, the viewer could tune in to Burden shouting his alphabet for thirty-one seconds—a track from Revolutions per Minute (The Art Record), 1982. The world-map album cover proposal precociously designates bomb sites with spiraled letters: “H for Holocaust,” “O for Obliterate,” and so on. While Burden plays off the instructional modes of charts and records in his prerequisite bad-boy manner, he has surely met his match in the twenty kids from the South Bronx. Sorry, Chris!

Burden’s alphabet pointed, literally and figuratively, to Barbara Kruger’s untitled work (Your Manias Become Science). Her black-and-white photograph continued what the map began, forming visual language from Burden’s alphabet. Kruger’s format, while couched in junior high school science-project poster presentation, does not mince words. She’s obviously transposing the word science from the camp of the white hats to that of the black hats. The photograph takes the nuclear issue off the mythic map and throws the physical reality and intellectual blame for the bomb’s existence into our laps like the proverbial hot potato. Compositional issues of word as image are overshadowed by the cold documentation of the dreaded mushroom cloud.

John Alexander’s I’ve Been Living in a Hydrogen Bomb is a panoramic apocalypse of Bosch-like propensity depicted in pen and ink. American Indians, nude women, fish with crowns, cats, and mutants all battle the bomb blast. Alexander gives us a linear heaven and hell in which the boundaries are lost amid visual confusion and spiky diagonal patterns of ground missiles. These missiles turn into tepees next to the Alamo, which stands as a historic relic. The smaller battle within the nuclear bombardment recalls a bygone brand of warfare in which individuals still mattered, and wars were containable. We realized here that all the patriotism we could muster would not help us in the event of a nuclear attack. Even John Wayne is believed to have contracted his fatal cancer after filming near the early nuclear testing sites in Nevada.

“The Atomic Salon” demonstrates that art can still be a potent forum for individual and collective expressions that are of more than academic concern. The comprehensively orchestrated images portraying the consequences of nuclear attack are impossible to judge solely on aesthetic merit. While some of the art would not normally generate such impact beyond this context, the images project a sense of urgent optimism as they become powerful arguments for the survival of mankind.

KATHERINE HOWE