Owing to dramatic recent news, the topic of nuclear technology has suddenly made a come-back to the center of attention in politics and the media. As is well-known, nuclear weapons and nuclear energy have long been the core issue in the ecological struggle of groups such as Greenpeace. Yet it is difficult to deny that recently, save for specific events, the subject had mobilized less than climatic factors and other, more immediately perceptible damages inflicted on the environment. Art has never had too much to say about it. Could it be that it is particularly resistant to representation? Radioactivity cannot be seen, and such invisibility would normally constitute an ideal ground for visual speculation - but the topic is serious and nobody wants to joke with nuclear questions.

In the 1940's and 1950's - the all-time high in terms of nuclear tests in the United States - popular culture served up the mushroom cloud in an infinite variety of forms, but artists did not show much interest in this fashionable motif. Obviously, the situation has changed since then. American photographer Peter Goin was the first civilian to obtain the authorization to enter the highly radioactive military sites of the Bikini and Enewetak atolls in the Pacific Ocean, but also in Nevada and the State of Washington. To this day, his photographic series Nuclear Landscape (1984-1992) remains one of the strongest made on these devastated sites, forbidding to humans but re-conquered by nature. Wasn't American culture founded on the myth of a wild, inhospitable nature, the wilderness? The nuclear era has shaped a new, frightening postmodern version of it, one whose own impenetrability is sealed by the lethal power of its territories. Other photographers such as Michael Light, with his project 100 Suns, have delivered a much more ambiguous discourse. What are we to make of a visual collection of nuclear tests in the atmosphere performed by the U.S. Army until 1962, which lines up aestheticized mushroom clouds and consists of photographs of the sublime - a combination of beauty and awe - in the most literal sense?

What is one to do with nuclear technology? Document its effects? Simulate a situation - with the risk of an almost inevitable poor taste? Fantasize a future? In 2008, Arts Catalysts organized a symposium and an exhibition in London under the provocative title Nuclear: Art and Radioactivity. On that occasion, Simon Hollington and Kypros Kyprianou presented The Nightwatchman (2008), their vision of a fifty-year history of the perception of nuclear technology in society, revealing to what extent discourses had gradually shaped a less noxious image of the nuclear industry. And in a video, Chris Oakley documented Harwell, the cradle of the British industrial nuclear energy.

It is difficult to deny that artists have been reluctant to broach the topic of nuclear technology from other angles than detailed documentary representations, largely backed up by evidence and rigorous investigations. With the exception of nuclear sculptor James Acord (the first civilian to be allowed to own radioactive materials, he passed away earlier this year), few artists dealt with the material itself, quite literally. Acord was obsessed with uranium and studied it so as to become an expert and obtain a license from the government. After studying for nine years, he was able to neutralize the effects of radioactive waste and sculpt it. Yet even "defused," his sculptures retained the deadly emanation of their earlier exposure. Acord also produced drawings and installations; in the past few years, his - unsuccessful - ambition was even to erect a nuclear Stonehenge in one of the most radioactive sites in the United States - by the Hanford plant (State of Washington), a site as contaminated as Chernobyl. Still, his position was strangely apolitical: "I am simply a sculptor. I live in the nuclear era, it is therefore logical, perhaps even inevitable, that I would work with radioactive materials. I am neither for nor against nuclear technology, we are all in it in a way and we have to deal with it." But is it really possible to be apolitical with respect to nuclear technology? That may be another reason why so few artists expose themselves to this highly sensitive subject.

Bénédicte Ramade

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