Joy Garnett
I'd like to tell you the story behind my web project, The Bomb Project--I'll stick to
the short version
here, but it is a long story. The Bomb Project is a
cumulative online resource and information hub
for nuclear issues that I have contextualized for artists.
It grew out of my image research that I was
doing in 1997 for a series of paintings of nuclear tests
that led me into scientific and military terrain I
never knew existed, and which ended up changing my working
methods entirely, not to mention my
relationship to and understanding of images in the media.
So, I will be clicking through some declassified images
that are now up on the site, as well as some
scans I made of the paintings, so you can see what I was
trying to do; and then I will show macquettes
for a DVD installation that I’m now working on entitled “Nuclear
Frisson,” based on found declassified
footage of nuclear tests.
Test Shots:
1) Trinity
2) Hiroshima
3) Nagasaki
4) Baker
5) Operation
Buster-Jangle: Dog
7) Castle Bravo
8) Castle Romeo
9) [Guinea] Pig, Nevada Proving Grounds
10) Castle Union
11) Met
12) Hood
Hi-res
image of Baneberry Venting (DOE Photo Library)
Okay. By the spring of 1999 when I mounted an exhibition
of these nuclear-test paintings, I had
amassed so many source links, and so many images, that
initially I considered uploading every
image I had to a website, like a sinister online version
of Gerhard Richter's Atlas—so, vast groupings
of jpegs that may (or may not) end up as paintings. But I
ended up doing something else entirely.
Initially I did upload some images, as you’ve been seeing
here, when I first launched The
Bomb Project
in a rudimentary version in 2000. I then took stock to
rethink the purpose of the whole thing, and
I re-launched it in its present form in August of 2002.
So, to just describe it briefly, as it stands now, The Bomb Project consists of
several sections of
links under the following headings:
Image resources
News resources
Nuclear Energy
Nuclear Weapons
Environmental and/or Peace Activism
Government sites, (which would include national
laboratories)
Non-Governmental Organizations
Treaties
Atomic Veterans & workers
Articles & reading lists
Nuclear Accidents
Nuclear Tests
Nuclear War
In addition to these groupings, there is a section devoted
entirely to art about The Bomb, including
artists' works, exhibitions, museums--with such diverse
entities as the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum,
the Atomkeller Museum in Germany, and Bravo 20
Park in the Nevada desert--also, there are links to films,
popular art movements and agitprop, vernacular ephemera,
artifacts of pop culture, and literature having
to do with nuclear issues. The categories in this section
are arranged chronologically, like a mini-art history.
I want to add that my intention and my hopes in developing
this project in the way that I have are not just
about revealing and sharing sources and raw material, or
just about encouraging easy access; it’s been
organized in such a way as to reveal and emphasize the
aesthetic significance of these issues. And it's
about recontextualizing the available information with an
emphasis on creative potential, in hopes that such
a resource can act as a hub or starting off point for
other artists’ projects.
So I probably should tell you: my original impulse to make
nuke-test paintings did not come out of
anything high falutin' or even particularly ethical; nor
was it merely a formal, painterly perverse exercise.
It was more like fascination. While watching the
movie Dr. Strangelove for perhaps the hundredth time,
I was struck by that last sequence of nuclear detonations:
this sequence, for those who may have forgotten,
is a bizarrely compelling montage of nuclear test clips
from footage shot over the Pacific in the 1960s, edited
in series, detonating in rapid succession [cynically] to
the tune of Vera Lynn singing "We'll Meet Again, Don't
Know Where, Don't Know When…" which was a popular
WWII song. It's that moment before the end of the
film, when the bomb is falling, and we know it's about to
all be over, and there are these pretty, fantastical,
unreal mushroom clouds expanding one after the other over
the screen. Now it strikes me that it was 1964
when the film was made--that's only one year since the
atmospheric test ban went into effect--and these clips
comprised part of the very tiny repertoire of declassified
footage that was then available for commercial use.
It took an artist--it took Kubrick--to see and to
tap into the whole absurd contraption of the Cold War and
nuclear deterrence and national security, and for the
finale he leaves you with the contradictory and disturbing
fact of these images, and that these are the real
thing.
So anyway, I rewound the tape and shot some frames from
this sequence, and started what was to become
a 3-year-long obsessive project of amassing stills as well
as declassified films of nuclear tests, and then
making paintings based on them:
I had no idea what I was getting into--I had previously
been on the much more sedate track of collecting
scientific renderings and laboratory photography, both
microscopic and astronomic; science was my entry
into military imagery. And at that time I had no sense of
the extent to which science had become intertwined
with the military; I certainly had no idea of how
exhaustively and meticulously the weapons testing program
of the Cold War era had been documented, nor of the
primacy of place held by the images made from these
tests in the eyes of the government. After the war the US
Air Force actually recruited a slew of professional
filmmakers and sequestered them in secret in a studio in
the Hollywood hills known as Lookout Mountain.
Nuclear
Frisson proposal + macquettes
(a work in progress, by way of an illustration of
declassified film clips)
Their job was "to provide in-service production of
classified motion picture and still photographs for the
Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy
Commission between 1947 and 1969," after which the
studio was decommissioned. These are the guys who came
into the story on the heels of Harold Edgerton's
amazing still camera technology for capturing the instant
of detonation; the government was harnessing
the capacity to master the imaging of the Bomb.
So these atomic filmmakers shot footage from inside
bunkers in the Nevada desert, and from airplanes
flown over the desert and over the Pacific. There's
limited information about what happened to them later,
how badly they were exposed to radiation, how soon after
they died, etc. They shot 1000s upon 1000s of
films of nuclear tests--900 nuclear tests took place in
the Nevada desert alone--and they developed and
edited literally miles of film; and except for army
training films and the odd duck 'n' cover civil defense
film, it all remained hidden away for decades.
In 1997, when I first hit on this idea, I began to search
the Web for test shot images—and there were
plenty to be had. I also came almost immediately across
the site run by the DOE--The US Dept. of Energy—
called The Nuclear Film Declassification Project,
which explained a few things to me. The Freedom of
Information Act, passed only a year or so earlier, had
made it possible for the DOE to start declassifying
test films in order to preserve them--because a lot of
film had been lost—it was rotting away in DOE storage;
and apparently someone saw the need to salvage them, which
meant declassifying and then digitizing them.
I called the Albuquerque office and they offered to send
me a catalogue of declassified films available, which
has no pictures btw, just descriptions, code names, mega
tonnage, dates, locations.
A week or so ago, I needed to order more films for this
new video project I'm working on--6 years down the
line they've transferred that many more films; I can tell
you the catalogue is now about three times as thick
as it was, and it's available in pdf format, which the
Film Librarian in Albuquerque will email to you for the
asking. Tapes are still available for $10 bucks a pop. So,
even though quite a lot of online Cold War and
weapons test documentation is indeed being withdrawn
indefinitely, it is still possible to purchase these
so-called "sanitized" films.
So, what might be an interesting question is how half a
decade of secrecy may have influenced how we look
at these images now--are they abstracted beyond belief?
Does the aesthetic and emotional distancing
(combined with the inconceivable horror of it) that exists
between most of us and the reality of The Bomb
make for easy collective denial of ongoing and escalating
dangers? (Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, scholar and activist
and chronicler of the bomb refers to this as "psychic
numbing"). We are a viewing public that has come to
expect and revel in real-time transmission at all costs,
including--maybe especially--the real-time transmission
of disaster and horror and war. Nowadays our government
behaves somewhat differently than it did in the 50s
and 60s when it comes to controlling and releasing images;
one may well imagine how it might have used such
spectacular images in light of its triumphalist agenda
vis-à-vis the media. (But it's almost as though the images
themselves, to the extent that they did record such a vast
number of ongoing and extreme series of events,
were felt to be as dangerous as the radioactive isotopes
that produced them--and perhaps quite rightly). Has
the sequestering of such a vast amount of spectacular
imagery functioned as intended? Has 50 years of
secrecy contributed to erasing the significance of these
tests and what they represent from public awareness
(even as we are currently granted more access)? Does this
distance, remote in terms of both time and
geographical location, make nukes seem more like an act of
Nature (that is: unavoidable and inevitable) than
the result of policy-making? Or is there a possibility
that the power of images of the Bomb have been
heightened by the mystique achieved by so many years of
secrecy?
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