The Village Voice, June 22, 1982

An exhibition which gives the word ecumenical new meaning and proves that extreme diversity does not mean fragmentation is “The Atomic Salon.” Curated by Ronald Feldman and Carrie Rickey, times to coincide with the present antinuclear protests, and named, I presume, partly in honor of the antinuke film The Atomic Café, this exhibition includes the work of over 50 artists of varying and often opposing aesthetic persuasions. Some of the art is stringently political (Conrad Atkinson, Komar & Melamid); most mixes some form of political content with personal and aesthetic concerns (Robert Morris, Tom Otterness, Kim MacConnel, Roget Grown, Nancy Spero, Oyvind Fahlstrom); and sometimes subsurface political import is irrevocably brought out by this context (Warhol, Guston). For example: Atkinson presents typewritten facts about nuclear war on sheets of pink paper with a big heart, drawn around them on the wall; Morris displays bed linens (on bed) which, with his characteristic creepy ostentation, represent total thermonuclear wipeout; and Guston’s Ravine, a bumptiously desolate mudslide populated with clambering bugs, suddenly represents life after the bomb. Particularly terrific and holding its own with the grown-ups is Tim Rollins’s orchestration of watercolors and handwritten captions on the subject of nuclear war by 20 children from the South Bronx. Carefully selected, thoughtfully installed, the show turns into a ricocheting argument about the relationship of art to politics. This show emphasizes that the second inheres almost automatically in the first when an artist means what he or she says and says it well. The shared opposition to nuclear weapons gives this show an undeniable weight but finally it is the quality and the diversity of the work itself which makes this opposition so powerful.

ROBERTA SMITH