``Nuclear tests are almost always presented and received as spectacles of transcendent nature - sometimes divine, sometimes malign, sometimes benign - rather than as planned social events that include scientific evaluations of manufactured weapons produced by human engineering. The desire for transcendence is, it seems to me, consistent with the American representation of Manifest Destiny in the nineteenth century, when the sublime gave visual form to the political agenda of westward expansion without admitting to acts of dispossession. The so-called `atomic sublime' represented in blast photographs is an extension of Manifest Destiny into the politics of the Cold War, into the agenda for capitalist expansion under the protection of the Pax Americana, though it is rarely stated in such blunt terms. (I worry that as a category the `atomic sublime' encompasses too little and explains away too much.) Relatively few images circulate of the extensive preparations leading up to a detonation...'' John O'Brian
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/EnvirPol/ColloqPapers/OBrian2005.pdf
This is a pretty good essay on the use of nuclear blast postcard of the 1950s and its intersection with cold war culture, politics, tv, and US mass propaganda systems explicitly developed by the US government and media. The point of the propaganda was to naturalize and domesticate, that is accomdate the hive mind of the US to a future where nuclear war would be the next great war to save civilization, i.e. the US system of capitalism.
The timeliness of the above essay is that, although not as explicitly as it once did, the US foriegn policy apparatus is setting up the old system of the early cold war. It is as if all that crap, all that `news', from my childhood and early teen years has been pulled out of archives and re-run through some new flangled photoshop vidio software, in order to make it look and feel au currant. Instead of the old giant K megaton behemoths of the 50s-60s, the new arsenal is more manageable for those fast, light, mobil land, sea, and air force units of Rumsfelt's plans, that we see have worked so well in Afghanistan and Iraq. It's quite possible that the US has already used some of these tactical devices in their bunker busters. We will probably never know, since the bombs and their fragments are buried under tons of debris.
John O'Brian, the author, is a professor of Art History, in Vancouver, BC. This weekend I was web surfing on Earle Loran, an art professor of mine, and found mention of him in O'Brian's essay that covered the career of Clement Greenberg, and Greeberg's review of Arnold Hauser.
I tried to post the essay, but it was too long. It is worth reading. It is a good example of a marxist art history of the post-war US:
http://www.uqtr.uquebec.ca/AE/Vol_14/modernism/OBrian.htm
On a personal level, I was highly influenced by both Greenberg and Hauser. Part of the consequence of that influence was that I slowly discovered, I had no future in the academic world, most especially in art history. If I had tried to work myself through a PhD program, I most certainly would have failed. I almost flunked out of the light weight art practice program at UCB. I squeeked through by turning to hard edge abstraction roughly based on Kline's calligraphic imagery. That is, I turned away of specifically anti-war representational work, where the `message' was unmistakable, i.e. the Disasters of War. I had tried the year before a different tract following some of Antonioni's photography, to get at alienation themes---which had much more indirect anti-establishmen themes. That work was toss out tout court. I only had one more chance.
Outside of academia, the official art world of the US also refused to depict the racist police state violence that accompanied the civil rights movements, and they of course refused to depict the horrors of Vietnam. Officially, there were no civil rights movements, no police state violence, and there was no war. It goes without saying there were no African American artists worth introducing, showing, or reviewing. Advanced art was a rich white boys and girls game and it was going to stay that way.
Month after month, Artforum, for example, detailed the emerging works and careers of the avant-garde, always happy to spin a new twist on the trivialities of Andy Warhol and other pop artists. Even for Roy Lictenstein and Robert Rauchenberg who did deal on occasion with the war, the magazine simply reviewed different works that did not bring up the war.
Meanwhile over at ARTnews, the same official silence prevailed. Artnews, did occasionally review an historical exhibit on the american art of the past. But it certainly never reviewed the communist and or social comment painters of the 1930s in the US or Mexico or anywhere else for that matter. Hart Benton for example was certainly still alive and still painting away through the 60s. Official art notices, zero. Social commentary, or even social realism without comment was out, period.
By the 1960s when I started reading these magazines, Clement Greenberg's career was mostly over. Greenberg had started off in the late 40s as something of a marxist and took a marxist influenced view of art and society in the US. But by the mid-50s when the first wave of the Abstract Expressionist were eclipsed by a second generation, Greenberg had turned into neoconservative-lite in his writing. That is to say, he turned to formalist criticism, and the mainstream. One simply didn't talk about the world beyond the frame. If the world happened to creep into the frame, one simply ignored the work.
I never heard mention of Arnold Hauser in my long list of art history courses, none of the books for those courses ever mentioned him or even referrenced him. I could never understand why not. It never dawned on me that he had been censored out the US official history of art departments.
Finally, Peter Seltz the new UCB museum director and art history professor, curated a make-shift show of poster art from student and worker movements from around the world during the political upheavals of the 1968. We called it the Fire House show because it was held in the old fire house horse and buggy stables that still existed on campus just northeast of Sproul Plaza. The new museum was still under construction. Why the poster art show wasn't held in the Worth-Ryder gallery or one of the bigger rooms of the Student Union was by then no mystery to me. The UCB administration wouldn't allow it.
The importance of John O'Brian's essay to me was that while reading it, it brought to light a whole universe of censorship in the visual arts. In this world of censorship, the overt reasons given to not display this or that work or this or that painter, photographer, etc, is always given as an aesthetic one. It's not gallery quality or museum quality. Likewise in the criticism and art history world of writing and reviewing work. This or that critic or this or that scholar is not up to the quality mark of publication. While the direct, immediate, in fact intended effects are blunt political censorship, these official judgements are coded or masqueraded as founded in the refined aesthetics of the gatekeepers, gallery owners, museum curators, and editors. This coding gives them plausible deniability of political censorship. The only social message officially allowed are the ups and downs of individualism or how free and liberal we are. See we tolerate assaults to the official morality. You can shit on crosses, fuck under glass, and all manner of nonsense that would only offend or interest a few. What you can not do is remind the public in a big way of the vast injustices, horrors, and criminality of this world, that have been deliberately and routinely produced by the machines of capital and state, our supposed institutions of freedom and liberity for all.
The whole problem of perception here, is that most people, even the critically minded don't notice what isn't there. I only notice the almost complete lack of protest art on official levels because I was looking for it as models and couldn't find any. I finally resorted to a ham handed psuedo documentary style of painting using spray cans, charcole, and oil in what was supposed to look like billboard photo collage panels. Since there were no atrocity photos even from news magazines I had to make them up based on old concentration camp footage and stills and give the bodies Vietnamese looking facial features. While the message was obvious, my skills were not up to the task and these works could be justifably rejected on aesthetic grounds. Although Mai Lai had happened about this time the news photos just showed bundled lumps face down in a shallow ditch. Not much pictorial drama. Although as I thought on these few photos, they reminded me of Goya's prints and mysterious wrapped bundles usually in the background or running along the sides of the print. Certainly Goya's Third of May.
And so it goes on:
Hidden Treasures What's so controversial about Picasso's Guernica? By David Cohen Posted Thursday, Feb. 6, 2003, at 6:56 PM ET
The tapestry in question
Earlier this week, U.N. officials hung a blue curtain over a tapestry reproduction of Picasso's Guernica at the entrance of the Security Council. The spot is where diplomats and others make statements to the press, and ostensibly officials thought it would be inappropriate for Colin Powell to speak about war in Iraq with the 20th century's most iconic protest against the inhumanity of war as his backdrop. Why is Guernica such a powerfully controversial image after all these years, and how did it come to hang in tapestry form at the United Nations?..''
CG