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Tracy Danison, Paris correspondent

Defining cultural times: big booms, social movements and individual experience [By Tracy Danison]

One of the unique things about the experience of people born after 1935 is the frequent cognitive dissonance induced by living long enough to have experienced the “eras” and “ages” of contemporary (potted) history.

Take the “Civil Rights Era 1950-1963”.

Born in 1955, I do remember the shock of running into a segregated water fountain in South Carolina and buying some candy in a “Negro” grocery in Georgia (and, notably, getting warned off afterwards, by a white man). I witnessed then, have witnessed since, witness now a lot of racism, legislated and cultural, have benefited a lot from legislation made to remedy it. But I can’t for the life of me locate a “Civil Rights Era”.

That’s because if “history” is something that has happened, which events, effects and outcomes are known and accounted for, then I’m living, along with others born on the tail-end of the Baby Boom, the struggle for race equality right now. Maybe the “Civil Rights Era” references a time period when elites were obliged to notice; Jim Crow may be down by law but not, by any means, out. The South is still solid, too.

Again, born in 1955 and placed in a Catholic elementary school in Wadsworth, Ohio, I learned early to squat correctly under a school desk in the event of atomic attack. Also, I remember, am still today touched by, the scene from the Time Machine where the elderly Filby (Alan Young) urges George (Rod Taylor) to get to the shelter, atomic satellites, you see. I reckon, then, as well as the Civil Right Era, I’ve been living, have lived, am living the “Atomic Age”.

But “Atomic Age” doesn’t name the time I’ve experienced, nor the outlook I’ve developed or, for that matter, those of my fellow humans. “Atomic” is not the right adjective, “Age” not the right noun.

“Atomic” puts aside the awful realization that “the bomber will always get through” as well as the actual experience and effects of the non-atomic firestorms at Dresden and elsewhere, the flattening of Warsaw, the flattening of Stalingrad, the flattening of Germany and then of Viet Nam, then of Afghanistan, now of Ukraine. If “Atomic Age” names the politics and social psychology involved in threats of indiscriminate mass killing with ecocide, why so? With a single exception none of the experienced horror has involved atomic booms.

Since 2022, for instance, not a week has gone by without Vladimir Putin, a fascist strongman who runs a now capitalist, neo-colonial Russia, threatening atomic war. It is said, and I believe it, the United States promises a non-atomic response more than adequate to such occasion. As previously, both sides hesitate. That all seems to me to be about getting in the best boom, not the atomic-est one.

Instead of “Atomic Age”, why not “Best Boom Age” or “Age of Boom”, then? Because the absurdity of “Age of Boom” points, at least for poets and lovers of irony, the absurdity of using “Atomic Age” to name humanity’s urgent struggle to get a grip on its relationships with each other and the rest of nature.

So, cognitive dissonance was my first reaction to the exhibition Les artistes à l’épreuve de l’histoire - l’Age atomique(“Artists confronting history – the Atomic Age”), which recently opened at the Musée de l’art moderne de Paris.

The curators say that the invention of the atomic bomb and its use marked a turning point in the modern history of the atom, starting a “new”, second Atomic Age. Since that big boom at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, art, science and politics have become indissociable.

First off, there’s reason to doubt there was a discernible first Atomic Age that would justify a second one that would revolve around a big boom in Japan. Vedantic and pre-Socratic thinkers theorized a world of atom and void. Getting booms out of chemicals already had a long history when John Dalton came up with a chemistry-based atomic theory in the early 19th century. Booms and atoms! Atoms and booms! What’s first? What’s second? What’s the cart? What’s the horse? It’s said that the boom of the cannon put an end to the Middle Ages; such Renaissance men as Benvenuto Cellini and Leonardo Da Vinci, to name only two, were quite involved in making things go boom as well as art, science and politics.

Today’s Nobel prize is founded in stuff that goes boom, although you wouldn’t know that from the themes honored. Luckily, then, the world, even since 1945, doesn’t turn around things that go boom. The world, its art, its science, its politics, turns around people and their problems.

That’s why it’s so hard for me to get my head around the idea that the 250-some paintings, drawings, photos, videos and installations on display for Les artistes à l’épreuve de l’histoire - l’Age atomique are somehow supposed to fit around a type of big boom which major distinguishing qualification has been, until recently, bang for the buck, the relative cheapness of its traumatic murder.

Artists represented include, to name but a few*, Vassily Kandinsky, Hilma af Klint, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Bacon, Salvador Dalí, Yves Klein, László Moholy-Nagy, Barnett Newman, Sigmar Polke and Jackson Pollock. They and their peers are shoehorned into three periods: esthetics of the atom and radioactivity, the creation and immediate aftermath of the use of the atomic bomb and the “nuclearization” of politics and society.

The show points connections between feminism, ecology and reaction to the arrival of the atom bomb, but turns causes and effects on their heads. Feminism and ecological awareness long-preceded reaction to the atomic boom of ’45.

Mary Wollstonecraft published Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792; Emmeline Pankhurst founded the suffragettes in 1903; John Muir began working at the end of the 1850s; Lady Eve Balfour, a suffragette and key actor in British agriculture production organization in World War II, launched organic agriculture in 1946; Rachel Carson switched her major from English to biology in 1928; Carson published her Sea Trilogy in 1941; the United States Army began spraying DDT after 1941; Carson published Silent Spring in 1962; Simone de Beauvoir is said to have founded asecond wave of feminism with the Second Sex in 1949 … While I am sure all of these folks would have or did note, and with great dismay, the invention of the atomic bomb and its immediate use as a big boom, they were especially surprised or alarmed by neither. And in truth, I could not find much more reaction in the artists featured in the exhibition either.

And back to being born in 1955 and experience.

The first political demonstration I ever attended was one against the war in Viet Nam; I was horrified to see that booms and bangs had turned a local boy into an idiot, just like in a novel. The second was the first Earth Day (1970), recommended by my science teacher, who also explained the word “ecology”. Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986) were, for me, ecological, not atomic, disasters… Our Bodies, Ourselves was published in 1970. I think the broad experiential ambiance and points of view are/were shared: Tony and his partner Cherie Blair and New Labor were formed by the “anti-nuke” CND, in the same way as a lot of the first members of Germany’s Greens were shaped by protests against medium-range and neutron-bomb missiles and nuclear power. Subsequent development suggests that, like mine, their real concerns were not the unruliness of atomic booms, but relationships and the ecology. Cherie Blair’s role and independence and the male-female co-leader arrangements of the Greens seemed as natural as the ecological concerns...

When Allen Ginsberg called on Americans to fuck ourselves with the Bomb, he wasn’t so much concerned with its boom as with the obsession with it. And I’d say that Ginsberg’s sideways perspective certainly better characterizes the real attitudes of artists like Yves Klein, creator of performance art, action-artist abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock and even happening innovator Jean-Jacques Lebel, together with the rest of the visual artists represented. Because they’re born when they were born, they’re shoehorned into a theme that’s essentially, historically, artistically, esthetically, politically, hollow.

While Les artistes à l’épreuve de l’histoire - l’Age atomique is full of intriguing work, the theme “Atomic Age” itself is a distraction from real history and real concerns – not only of the artists featured in Les artistes à l’épreuve de l’histoire - l’Age atomique –  but for understanding art, science and politics in our time.

As the obscure but ever-so astute poet Robert P. Tristram Coffin put it: “Alexander Graham Bell did not invent the telephone!” That would be his sick auntie out on the sea island.

 

Les artistes à l’épreuve de l’histoire - l’Age atomique/Josephsohn - Reanimation Paintings: A Thousand Voices is a a triptych of exhibitions contextualizing esthetics and history, high art and contemporary inclusion culture. It runs through 16 February 2025 at Musée de l’art modern de Paris.

 

“That Is No Longer Our Smoke Sign” (undated, 1950s) by Justino Herrera. Photo © Smithsonian American Art Museum

 

“Bomb, Canopic Jar, Victims”(1967) by Nancy Spero. Photo © Nancy Spero

“Les Mortifères” (1977) by Hélène de Beauvoir. Photo Christian Kempf © Hélène de Beauvoir

“I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise”(2022) by Jim Shaw. Photo © Jim Shaw

“Uranium and Atomica Melancholica Idyll”(1945) by Salvador Dali. 
Photo © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dali

“The Atom series, N°7” (1917) by Hilma af Klint. Photo © The Hilma af Klint Foundation  

“Three Studies for a Portrait”(1976) by Francis Bacon. Photo © The Estate of Francis Bacon

“Dance for Radium” from Loïe Fuller’s Radium Dance (1904) by Pierre Huyghe. Photo © ADAGP, Paris, 2024

 


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