Concerning Consequences STUDIES IN ART, DESTRUCTION, AND TRAUMA Kristine Stiles The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London KRISTINE STILES is the France Family Professor of Art, Art Ftistory, and Visual Studies at Duke University. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by Kristine Stiles All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 12345 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77451-0 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77453-4 (paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-30440-3 (e-book) DOL: 10.7208/chicago/9780226304403.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Stiles, Kristine, author. Concerning consequences : studies in art, destruction, and trauma / Kristine Stiles, pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-226-77451-0 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-77453-4 (paperback : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-30440-3 (e-book) 1. An, Modern —20th century. 2. Psychic trauma in art. 3. Violence in art. I. Title. N6490.S767 2016 709.04075 —dc23 2015025618 © This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). In conversation with Susan Swenson, Kim Jones explained that ihe drawing on the cover of this book depicts directional forces in "an X-man, dot-man war game." The rectangles represent tanks and fortresses, and the lines are for tank movement, combat, and containment: "They're symbols. They're erased to show movement. III draw a tank, or I'll draw an X, and erase it, then re-draw it in a different position.... But when they're killed they're erased and that leaves a ghos, image. So the erasing is a very imponan, elemen, of the war drawings.... The important thing is that it's always 2005^7 vTr™0"'"C°nVmati°" with Wm Jones: April 25, W 0r '0051 4| T in Kim Jones: War Paint [Brooklyn, NY: Pierogi, 2005], 4), Two years earlier, Jones described his "war drawings" as images oTa war that never ends" in TmMngaDead „ Dav d Sch d7 KmJ°n3 vi«eo codirected by David Schmidlapp and Steve Staso (2003). Remembering Invisibility: Documentary Photography of the Nuclear Age (1998)' We knew every feature of the terrain over which we would be flying. And now the Japa­ nese landscape was unfolding below us just as the pictures had promised Our I.P. [initial point], an easily identifiable landmark that stood out in the aerial photos, was 15 1/2 miles east of the point in the heart of the city which was to be our target. PAUL w. TIBBETS, JR. The Tibbets Story2 INTRODUCTION Paul W. Tibbets flew the plane with a payload aimed at Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The aerial photographs had been precise, and his target was as visible as the bomb was lethal. The explosion vaporized two hundred thousand people. The flash from the blast lasted one fifteen-millionth of a second, long enough for the light to tattoo the warp and woof of woven kimono fabric onto flesh. It also bleached the stairs around someone sitting at the entrance to the Sumi­ tomo Bank 250 meters from the epicenter, leaving only a shadow of the atom­ ized body on the pavement.3 When Yoshito Matsushige, a thirty-two-year-old cameraman for the Hiroshima Chugoku newspaper, attempted to photograph the melee on Miyuku Bridge a few hours after the bomb was dropped, radiation speckled his film. Matsushige remembered the light of the bomb: I had finished breakfast and was getting ready to go to the newspaper when it happened. There was a flash from the indoor wires as if lightening had struck. I didn't hear any sound, how shall I say, the world around me turned bright white. And I was momentarily blinded as if a magnesium light had lit up in front of my eyes. Immediately after that, the blast came.4 Similarly, radiation burned the emulsion on Berlyn Brixners film when, three weeks earlier, standing in the North Shelter some ten thousand feet from the ex­ plosion, he photographed Trinity, the first atomic test, detonated July 16, 1945, at Alamogordo Air Base in New Mexico. The imprints of radiant energy certified a technological act, punctuated a turning point for humanity, and constituted undeniable evidence of the unprece­ dented capacity to annihilate life, a lethal power that would soon be augmented by the risks of nuclear energy and expanded weapons production. The imprints of the bomb's light resemble the heliographic "sun prints" first identified and explored by British potter Thomas Wedgwood just before 1800. In fact, the term "photography," coined by astronomer Sir John F. W. Herschel, came from the idea of "writing with light," the heliographic process that anticipated photog­ raphy, ominously forecasting the atomic and nuclear technology that enabled the bomb to inscribe the index of war indelibly on Japanese bodies and cities. Photography was also crucial to the precise targeting of the atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki —such that paradoxically, photography of the nuclear age is equally indispensable to addressing the violent threat of living in the nuclear age. I contend that photography can play a vital role in the survival of the planet by enabling the visual knowledge necessary for remembrance, the prerequisite for agency. Photography can represent the micro and macro con­ ditions of the nuclear age, depict the hidden places and conditions of nuclear weapons manufacture and storage, and display nuclear energy industries, as well as record humans, animals, and the environment damaged by radiation and fallout. Vet, despite the wide range of photographs that depict the nuclear age, the unfathomable power and awesome beauty of the billowing mushroom cloud remains the icon of the age. A photograph, taken by an anonymous US government photographer, of shot Mike, a thermonuclear test conducted at Enewetak Atoll on November 1,1952, is paradigmatic of the image that is indel­ ibly imprinted in the minds and identities of billions of people on the planet. Yet, while the nuclear age and its images are a part of the psychological struc­ ture of populations throughout the world, and while its production, protection, and potential use shape global policies, the concomitant reality of its eff ects are • ^ k if^ 'n de^ense mecbanisms of denial and disavowal. These dissocia- aviors only increase the imperceptibility of the nuclear age, resulting in psychic numbing and forgetfulness. heSe PreCedemed conditions laJ 7 *"<1 unequaled images need a new vocabu- nuclear COncrete and bring tbe impact and threat of the mto the f reground f 1 nrr ° ° ^"-0" -d poi^.. nuce- documenta™ "npara"e'Cd Visual traces °f 'he bomb's light, nucleography for of thKnudear agc'and"for that war that nucleography are th H ** ™ process of becoming. The abstract prints of nuclear ave Thev & V'SUal rCCOrds of the '"visibility of radiation in the bombs fall and liFhUsT I^ !7°^ 3S 3" eW kind of war in which of everyday life The ^ °n 3 batt,efie,d but 'n the circumstances ^-lyuay me. The overt aeerescinn A civilian populations has no. hp* droppmg such weapons directly on shima and Nagasaki at l ° PCrpetrated a8ain s»nce the bombing of Hiro- said about nuc eo^hi CaSt ^^ S ° then' wba< -ore is to be C S? W0U d 3rgUe th3t the made bombs' ,ight a r o ruT ' ' "V 'he -cords sltuatlng nucleogIaphy as a ^Qf docuJ 1 remem " bering invisibil,TY figure 8. © James Lerager, Chernobyl Sarcophagus, 1991. All Rights Reserved. Cour­ tesy of the artist. photography, to whose illustrious and troubled history I shall return. Documen­ tary photographs of the nuclear age constitute a category of photographs that require special attention and need to be distinguished from other kinds of evi­ dentiary images. For documentary photographs of the nuclear age bear visual witness to a new kind of continuous war, born on July 16, 1945, and named "Trinity," cynically evoking the Christian doctrine that defines God as the hypos­ tasis of three states: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If the atomic bomb gave birth to "Trinity," its progeny is nuclcocide. The term nucleocide names the unabated nuclear assault on the planet. Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Markusen described the psychological response to the nuclear age as "genocidal mentality.'"' Drawing on and amplifying the con­ cept of genocide to include the destruction of the entire planet, 1 propose the term "nucleocide" to describe the defense and energy practices of advanced industrial nations around the global that produce nuclear weapons. While "genocide" refers to wars of race and national identity, "nucleocide refers to war against life: human, animal, and plant. James Lerager's photograph Chernobyl Sarcophagus (1991) is a visual record of the site of the worst nuclear accident to date. A reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, then part ot the Soviet Union, suffered a cata­ strophic increase in power that led to explosions in its core on April 26, 1986 (figure 8). The hulk of the partially destroyed plant at Chernobyl depicted in Lerager's photograph is a monument to the immediate death ot thirty-one indi­ viduals; the acute radiation sickness of more than two hundred people in the accident's immediate aftermath; the widespread pollution of lakes, rivers, reser­ voirs, and ground water that contaminated the food chain; the animals that 69 |REMEMBERING INVISIBILITY died or stopped reproducing after the accident (for example, the horses that were abandoned on an island in the Pripyat River four miles from the power plant, and which died when their thyroid glands were destroyed by radiation); the four square kilometers of pine forest directly downwind of the reactor, now called the "Red Forest," which turned reddish-brown and died; and the global radiation patterns and the spread of radioactive contaminants into the atmo­ sphere, which were extremely high in countries bordering on Ukraine, such as Poland and northern Romania.