Arts Magazine, April 1982

“War Games”: Of Arms and Men

“War Games” has brought into a major downtown gallery the kind of collective vocabulary that has been seen in certain alternative spaces and events for the last two years, what I would call the progressive wing of Colab-type art: images and ideas, not provoked by any specific political issue, but manifesting a broader sense of impending upheaval and dislocation, a new pessimism about social deterioration, ecological disaster, and global war, and cynicism about political change.

Whenever art with explicit social or political content is exhibited, two refrains usually sound. From one side is heard the rhetorical “But does it succeed as art?” as if this were a neutral, value-free question. From the left comes the objection that a gallery context renders the work ineffective, that it is complicit with a mode of passive aesthetic consumption and a market of art commodities. We’ve heard both responses in connection with the “War Games” show at the Ronald Feldman Gallery, an exhibitionof nine artists loosely organized around the multiple connotations of the show’s title. But as important as the efficacy or merits of individual works is the very fact of the show as an event and the larger context in which it occurred.

Clearly, it did not take place in a vacuum but in an international environment of intensifying concern about the danger of war and demand for disarmament. “War Games” has brought into a major downtown gallery the kind of collective vocabulary that has been seen in certain alternative spaces and events for the last two years, what I would call the progressive wing of Colab-type art: images and ideas, not provoked by any specific political issue, but manifesting a broader sense of impending upheaval and dislocation, a new pessimism about social deterioration, ecological disaster, and global war, and cynicism about political change. John Alexander’s piece, Korporate Klansman, exhibited in the gallery’s front window, made clear that the show was concerned with more than military matters. Alexander dressed a mannequin in impeccably tailored gray-pinstripe Ku Klux Klan robes and hood. In a sense, a one liner, but nonetheless it is a potent, resonant image in its jolting amalgamation and equation, of two sign systems.

Chris Burden’s Tale of Two Cities also ties into some of the new wave science fiction, disaster, and mass culture imagery. It is an extravagant installation of over 3000 war toys arrayed in one confrontation of two huge armies with castles, spaceships, modern cities, factories, robots and mountains. Around this large roped-off area were pairs of binoculars for the viewer to assume the distanced stance of military commander surveying the scene. In this piece war is explicitly only a game, a fiction based on obsolete but still operative notions of territory, of politics. The work is the flip side of another Burden exhibition in New York, The Reason for the Neutron Bomb (1979), in which thousands of nickels were arranged in an immense grid on a gallery floor with the head of a kitchen match placed on each coin. This was the structural reality underlying the toy fantasy: an intersection of economic wealth and the totalizing, controlling power of the grid. Scientific rationality and capital are are preconditions of something like the neutron bomb, and in this piece they generated a volatile field on the brink of conflagration. But the toys are also another kind of social underpinning of modern war, objects through which the surfaces of war are culturized, familiarized.

Eleanor Antin’s continuing elaboration of her Angel of Mercy took on an added set of meanings within the frame of the exhibition. A tableau of painted masonite figures stood witnessing a field hospital operation, while bloody, amputated limbs were strewn on the floor around the surgical bed. On the walls around her installation were photographs imitating 19th century images of the Crimean War; hazy, beautifully toned prints, as if mocking the way in which such pictures of war are dehistoricized and transformed into purely aesthetic artifacts. Antin also exhibited a new videotape, another chapter in her bildusgsroman of Eleanor the Nurse. Again her education is about the realities of class and power that made possible an event like the Crimean War.

The most engrossing work in the show was Nancy Buchanan’s Fallout from the Nuclear Family, a portrait of her scientist father, Louis N. Ridenour, composed out of a vast collection of documents, letters, photographs, memorabilia organized in display cases and ten black volumes chained to a long shelf in the gallery. One experiences the piece as an archivist, sifting documentary material, perusing the paper debris and flotsam of a life. It is a daughter’s unflinching confrontation with a father who died in her early adolescence, a father who was the victim of a larger kind of patriarchal structure.

Louis Ridenour was a nuclear physicist who, by his mid-thirties, had an international reputation. He was active in weapons development but after the war became involved in efforts to limit the arms race and keep nuclear research out of military control. What makes the piece so compelling in an art context is the clarity whith which it presents the dilemma of the creative individual in modern society, the difficulty of intellectual or artistic independence. The tragedy of Ridenour’s life is the twisting and destruction of his youthful aspirations, the wasting of his scientific brilliance, his descent from a vocal and impassioned member of the scientic community to an ineffectual bureaucrat at Lockheed Corporation.

Buchanan has assembled a social portrait of the late Forties and Fifties in terms of her father’s passage through those years. At the war’s end there is his pride at being among the scientist to whom the world is looking for guidance in an atomic age. He sounds like a One Worlder, corresponds with A. J. Muste, fights against nuclear secrecy, writes often for Saturday Review. But his political and moral thinking is slightly vacuous. Slowly we see his language adapt to changing times, and by the late Forties he engages in subtle red-baiting and “better dea than red” rhetoric. In 1950 he proposes a new weapon of radioactive poisons, “death sands” that will kill civilians but leave cities intact, a neutron bomb avant la letter. He ludicrously defends it as “a humane weapon”: “It was probably more unpleasant to be disemboweled by the eighteen inch sword of the Roman soldier than to vanish in the flash of nuclear reaction.”

By the onset of the Fifties Ridenour’s scientific activism is over. He becomes caught up in get-rich schemes, dreams of his scientific genius leading to success in venture capitalism. In 1952 he concocts a plan for a cable TV system and forms his own corporation with other investors. He operates in that Pynchon-like world of the emerging electronics and defense industries in California, exploring computers and semiconductors. A darker side of the Fifties comes through. Letters to his father, hurried notes to his wife from long business trips reveal brief glimpses of a family, of two daughters and their alcoholic mother who is seeing “an expensive head shrinker,” of Ridenour’s growing debts, his mortgage payments. He is dealt his final hand when he takes a job at Lockheed in their missile systems division. We see a piercing photo of him at his corporate desk: paunchy, face sagging, smiling, beaten. He dies in a Washington D.C. hotel room, only 48 years old. Most poignant in the show were Ridenour’s high school and college papers: literary efforts, utopian short stories, a lyrical essay about scientific intuition. And from early on there is line-by-line translation from a section of The Aeneid. So much for the humanizing effect of the Humanities; from Virgil to Doomsday weapons.

Ridenour’s failure was ultimately one of critical intelligence, of a willful blindness to the powerful network of institutions in which he was immersed and which crushed him. Buchanan’s archive awesomely lays bare the seamless, interlocking texture of the military, academic, and corporate entities through which Ridenour circulated, all the time voicing his belief in the autonomy and incorruptibility of the scientist, the artist is also susceptible to illusions of autonomy and independence.

No all the work in the show is equally compelling, formally or intellectually. But most of the artisst stake out a related critical stance of engaging in a process of unmasking and sabotaging the ideological foundations of dominant languages, institutions, symbols, practices: as in Rudolf Baranik’s entry from a 24th century dictionary of war-related words and phrases; in Conrad Atkinson’s photos of familiar American patriotic icons juxtaposed with the images and words of Hiroshima survivors; in Antin’s narrative unfolding of the social units supporting an imperial government; in John Alexander’s disruptive semiotics; in Buchanan’s documentary portrait. It is all art implicitly opposed to what one critic has called “the ideology of personal expression,” and in that sense the show was a breath of fresh air.

It’s pssible that this exhibition is part of a larger trend in the art world toward increasing polarization based on how artists define their priorities. For those in this show, for many of their contemporaries, and for younger artist outside the gallery nexus, a consciousness of global crisis is now a necessary condition of intellectual or creative activity. The growing perception that civilization is in an historically unique situation, articulated most fully in Jonathan Schell’s New Yorker essay “The Fate of the Earth,” means that new choices and decisions will be made or evaded by everyone, including artists. The threat of human extinction diminishes the viability of middle or moderate positions. We may see qualitatively new forms of the artist’s role and activity take shape in the near future. Not likely, but possible.

JONATHAN CRARY