The New York Times, June 18, 1982

“The Atomic Salon”

“The Atomic Salon” show opens with a statement by Buckminster Fuller proposing that atomic holocaust can be prevented “only by individual humans demonstrating uncompromising integrity in all matters.” How true. The trouble is, however, that one person’s integrity so often looks like another’s opportunism. Besides, it seems as if modernism is so mired in flipness, irony and self-centeredness as to be unable to address itself seriously to the end of the world, a subject that admittedly is as hard to grasp as eternity itself.

In short, the “Salon” consists of artists, many of them celebrities, going on record as being against nuclear war, while in most cases continuing to do their thing. Accordingly, it’s hard to picture anyone in favor of Armageddon being converted by Robert Morris’s bed with pillows bearing information about the problems of distributing fallout evenly around the globe or, for that matter, by Chris Burden’s “Atomic Alphabet.” Rather, the effect is like that of an actor’s benefit for a good cause.

Sandy Skoglund’s photograph of what appears to be a sculptured tableau involving an elderly couple and a swarm of supposedly radioactive cats is amusing enough, but for those who relish gallows humor, one of Ben Sakoguchi’s paintings mimicking orange-crate labels will be an absolute scream. It depicts a Vietnam veteran with all limbs amputated save the arm that encircles the beauty queen beside him. There are drawings by Bronx schoolchildren, for whom war can scarcely be any more real than television, and there are nine different-colored skulls by Andy Warhol. Art, even that by the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is simply not equal to this occasion. For this observer, the most memorable pieces are barely noticeable in this display of creative solidarity – Roger Brown’s map showing where the dumps for nuclear and other toxic wastes are situated in New York State and a small, ghostly drawing about devastation by Joseph Nechvatal, an artist as preoccupied with the continued existence of stockpiles as he is by their use. Interestingly, Mr. Nechvatal had a show last year in a gallery in Hartford supported in part by United Technologies, a manufacturer of military hardware.

VIVIEN RAYNOR