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A Radioactive Sublime?

The Estate of Sigmar Polke/ADAGP/Photo: Flavio Karrer

Sigmar Polke: Uranium (Pink), 1992

Eighty years on, the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—known as the hibakusha—still shoulder a unique suffering: they endured the explosions and have lived through the long aftermath with radiation forever scorching inside them. Last December the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, the leading organization of hibakusha, which seeks the elimination of nuclear weapons and records testimonies of the suffering. The Nobel Committee saluted them for embodying the “nuclear taboo.” Against any states tempted by stockpiling, they stand as living proof of the destruction that unbridled man-made power has wrought.

Just about everyone would like to leave the Bomb behind, the Committee noted, to forget about fallouts and mutually assured destruction—but there the hibakusha are, at once witnesses and evidence. The Committee is right that the Global North has moved on. Not so long ago, surfeits of US and Soviet warheads kept alive the dread of mushroom clouds: the future was terrifying. Today who even says “atomic” anymore? We squint at old explosion videos and bemoan their horror—then forget it all and move on. 

We have settled on other names to account for our age. Sometimes it is said we are living through a “New Cold War.” There is vague talk of a “polycrisis.” Most often, however, ours is the “Anthropocene,” a portentous term that marks our ever-grander responsibility over vastly growing human power—yet it also leaves us in an alley where we are surely blind and perhaps politically impotent. These names are good for announcing frailty and futility and, when necessary, for blaming others. 

Jim Shaw/Gagosian

Jim Shaw: I’ll build a Stairway to Paradise, 2022

The gambit of The Atomic Age: Artists Put to the Test of History, an exhibit at the Musée d’art moderne de Paris, is that our contemporary sensibility—which combines an awareness of overwhelming manmade power and civilizational fragility—has its origins in the Atomic Age. The title carries the paradox: “atomic,” an adjective, stands in for a force compressed into the smallest of particles and the briefest of moments. “Age” draws out a period with an indefinite start and end. The curators, Julia Garimorth and Maria Stavrinaki, argue that the Atomic Age offers the fuller keyring for unlocking the era, 126 years now, since the discovery of radium. They highlight a genuinely global set of works that address atomic possibility and devastation: after 1945, everyone who believed that art should respond to world events made something out of nuclear power and fallouts.

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The exhibit is divided into three parts. The first and briefest features art mostly from the early decades of the century—art obsessed with the splitting of the atom. The works on display elevate the almost immeasurably small into utter grandeur. Hilma af Klint, Wassily Kandinsky, and several others looked to the Curies’ discovery for inspiration in the quest to link matter and spirit. Artists could be hierophants because radiation showed that objects brimmed—with the holy, with the invisible. The dancer Loïe Fuller likewise came to feel that radiation gave meaning to bodies: with input from Marie Curie, she performed her “radium dance” in a dress laced with fluorescent calcium to signify pure movement. Nearly a century after Henri Becquerel made the original images of radiation, Sigmar Polke was exposing photographic negatives to uranium particles, to catch the radiation emanating from the disintegration of matter—as if to rethink photography at the atomic minimum of representation. 

The Hilma af Klint Foundation

Hilma af Klint: The Atom Series, No. 7, 1917

The second part is simply titled “The Bomb.” Here the prewar sense that tiny particles unsheathe spirit crashes against the reality of nuclear destruction. First comes a series of moving drawings by hibakusha. In one, people hide in the water while Hiroshima’s port is in flames above them; in another, corpses float down a river while forests burn on its banks. Thereafter the exhibition traces how professional artists, from Barnett Newman to Salvador Dalí, learned to revolt against the bomb. Some works are on the nose: manifestos in (and on) painting, like Enrico Baj’s Manifesto Bum (1952), in which text is superimposed over a black nuclear mushroom against a yellow background. An English translation of the Italian might read:

MANIFESTO / The heads of humans are charged with explosives; every atom is about to burst. → BUM / The blind, that is, the non-nuclear, ignore this situation. / The forms disintegrate. The new forms of humans are those of the ATOMIC universe. / Thought → forces. Forces are electric charges; everything → electric charge.1

Four subjects dominate this section: human parts, abstract monochromes, atomic fallout sites, and beasts. Extended and distorted body parts are everywhere, particularly mouths and faces, from On Kawara’s Thanatophanies (1955-95) drawings to works by Francis Bacon and the Soviet photomontage artist Alexander Zhitomirsky. Outside of the exhibition’s framing, these mangled figures have passed as idiosyncrasies and matters of personal style. Here, they echo each other. 

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The monochromes that follow harden the feeling of a world shattered, losing its meaning. From Kazuo Shiraga to the Italian tradition that included Piero Manzoni and Francesco Lo Savio, one confronts paintings that are almost reduced to a single color. The effect is to arrest the viewer and reduce intelligibility to a minimum. At this level, “atomic” becomes all there is. Rather than dream up new spiritual possibilities, the paintings stage pure stamina in a disintegrating time. The highlight among them is Yves Klein’s work. Shocked by Fumio Kamei’s documentary about Hiroshima survivors, It Is Good to Live! (1956), which included the famous image of a man’s shadow burned into the stone, Klein began his “anthropometries”: paintings made by rolling naked women on a canvas, with either their bodies or the canvas covered in blue, so that touches became shades, and flesh translated into representation. He even titled two of them Hiroshima. Later he proposed including particles of International Klein Blue (IKB) into all nuclear test detonations, spreading it like fallout over the atmosphere. As Stavrinaki writes in the catalog, Klein was both fascinated and apocalyptic, imagining himself as “demiurge and buffoon,” dreaming up celestial paintings out of human extinction. 

Of course, no atomic tests actually dispersed IKB. Instead photographs show children cowering under desks, desert relaxation playgrounds in New Mexico, parking spots in fallout zones, and so on. We are carried along through the pedagogical tradition that inculcated terror. One room presents advertisements of the benefits of nuclear energy—even as a lifestyle—coupled with admonitions about protecting oneself during nuclear war. But more effective is the bestiary scattered throughout the exhibit, full of godzillas, Wilfredo Lam’s angular chimeras of the apocalypse, as well as flying tigers and a Statue-of-Liberty-cum-dinosaur by Koichi Tateichi. The godzilla—the archetypal creature awakened by nuclear power—is hardly a surprise, but the proliferation of animals suggests how hard it is to imagine new creatures that are not atomically deformed. 

Two works neatly frame the representational stakes of this middle section. The first is Bruce Conner’s thirty-six-minute film Crossroads (1976), which depicts a 1946 nuclear test at the Bikini Atoll. It consists of declassified government footage of the test, seen from different angles and slowed down to a crawl, so the mushroom cloud looks as clear and dense as the military ships and radioactive debris that falls into the sea.2 As explosion after explosion jar the frame, space seems to dissolve into the volva of the mushroom cloud.

The second is Tatsuo Ikeda’s ink on paper Count 10,000 (1954), which depicts tuna caught in a net, their eyes dazed. Ikeda was commenting on the Castle Bravo incident, when the United States tested a thermonuclear—that is, hydrogen—bomb in the Marshall Islands, exposing Japanese fishermen to the fallout. His work turns to what we could only imagine in Crossroads: the annihilation of marine life, what lives beneath, along with everything we see. While bordering on caricature, fish pleading in anthropomorphic expressions, it speaks to the sheer animality of humans reduced by technology to prey in a net. 

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Paul Virilio paraphrased “total war” to call ours the total peace of nuclear deterrence, where war never ends. Total peace is a suitable moniker for the third part of the show, “The Nuclearization of the World,” which tracks how societies have been shaped, one might even say decanted, out of the Trinity explosion in July 1945. The curators suggest that advertising, public service announcements, and architectural competitions since the Sixties have gradually naturalized the nuclear system.

The Estate of Francis Bacon/ADAGP/DACS/Photo: Skarstedt

Francis Bacon: Three Studies for a Portrait, 1976

From children and their chaperones playing in Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s video Atomic Park (2003-2004), shot near the Trinity site, to Peter Watkins’s famous BBC film War Game (1966), which dramatized what the effects of nuclear war would be on England, the works grapple with how states have recast not just conflict but civilians too. The exhibit showcases infrastructural projects, like Buckminster Fuller and Sadao Shoji’s “Dome over Manhattan (1960),” which proposed to cover part of the island with a transparent cupola, and Frei Otto, Ewald Bubner, and Kenzo Tange’s City in the Arctic (1970-1971), which depicts a society altogether separated from the atmosphere. The curatorial provocation is that, in comparison to these rather haywire ideas, we have come to take the nuclear system and its “malfunctions” for granted. 

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As Chernobyl and Fukushima have shown, states today agree to abide both the general nuclear threat and the occasional “accident.” The antinuclear movement and public awareness of the dangers of warheads and energy plants have not lead to full abandonment: Japan still relies on nuclear energy, and in Germany, which has decommissioned its nuclear plants, debate is ongoing as to whether nuclear energy counts as green. Similarly, the curators argue, we have learned to forget the nuclear degradation and destruction of Indigenous lands in New Mexico, the Marshall Islands, colonial Algeria, French Polynesia, and elsewhere. 

The last rooms of the show play out both of these problems—nuclear colonialism and accepted risk—by focusing on landscapes that are forever contaminated, like the Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979). A luscious forest atop a former uranium extraction mine in France, photographed and re-pigmented by Susanne Kriemann; a gorgeous sunset on a beach on the Bikini Atoll, photographed by Julian Charrière, who dispersed radioactive sand on his negative; another beachfront with a fading nuclear mushroom in the distance, painted by Jim Shaw. With every forgotten disaster, every degraded locale, we move less toward the apocalypse of Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s manga Akira (1982/1988)—whose opening scene, in which a nuclear detonation levels Tokyo, covers an entire wall—than toward an unevenly violated world. Soon enough, what seems sublime in nature will be radioactive. The endpoint of history, in these artists’ account, is a world in which landscapes are corrupt. Half-lives don’t care who remembers 1945.

Musée d’art moderne de Paris

Installation view of Keiji Nakazawa’s manga Barefoot Gen (volume 1)

These concluding works carry the weight of nature perpetually distorted. But the one that forces the terror of the end of history is placed earlier: the Danish situationist Asger Jorn’s Le droit de l’aigle (1951). In it, a sharp-toothed two-headed imperial eagle symbolizes the rising Cold-War sovereignty of the US and the USSR. Against a grey-blue sky and yellow-green ground, it is all in furious black, lording over the viewer from high, its eyes red and yellow, the downward movement of its body flickering, like a gestalt drawing, from predator to nuclear mushroom stalk. At the bottom the volva opens out to a blue-eyed thin tentacle and a meatier, ravenous fishface. To the side a second, jellyfishlike mushroom cap overstates the point. 

The smoke of the Bomb doubles as the ravenous regal body: I stood before it as if confronted with a secular twist on Benjamin’s Angel of History, now a herald of nuclear sovereignty. The End of History means being frozen in place, then eaten into this black hole. All the while debris piles up. 


“The Atomic Age: Artists Put to the Test of History,” is at the Musée d’art moderne de Paris through February 9. 

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