New York Magazine, June 21, 1982

Those still passionate about the threat of nuclear war (and maybe more passionate after the demonstrations this past week) would take their friends to the Ron Feldman Gallery to see what 50-odd artists have to say about atomic holocaust.

Here’s a snippet of data typed onto red paper in Conrad Atkinson’s piece: “The British Secretary of State for Defence in response to the question, ‘How many megatons of attacking missiles would be likely to be needed to destroy cruise missiles in Britain on the assumption that they have been dispersed?’ answered ‘it is very broadly estimated that more than one thousand megatons would be required.’ One thousand megatons are the equivalent of eight thousand Hiroshima bombs.”

Since a number of the artists are survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – their drawings are now Japanese national treasures – the horror of 8,000 Hiroshima bombs becomes a visceral memory. American and British artists are more abstract. Tom Otterness makes a droll Lead Raincoat. Robert Morris offers a bed with linen printed in scenes of destruction, suggesting there will be no place to rest one’s head. California artist Larry Fuente opens up Pandora’s Box, and out come irradiated mutants glowing under ultraviolet light. Texan John Alexander (Julian Schnabel’s teacher) splinters reality into a firestorm in his ink drawing and surrounds it with a frame of charred black wood.

From Ida Applebroog and William Wegman to Roger Brown, Arakawa, Andy Warhol, Chris Burden, Sandy Skogland, Les Levine, Joe Lewis, Ben Sakoguchi, Joseph Beuys, Laurie Anderson, and William Burroughs, artists of our era have discovered that atomic angst is unavoidable. And whatever is unavoidable inevitably turns up in art. Their plea is summed up by Buckminster Fuller’s introductory text, Integrity: “With all the space of the universe to work with,” he writes, “nature found 92 million miles to be the minimum safe remoteness of biological protoplasm from atomic radiation generators.”

KAY LARSON