VISUAL REPRESENTATIONS OF ATOMIC ENERGY

After last week's post on Henry Moore, a friend sent me a link to the Hyde Park Historical Society website. Much to my surprise, I found myself looking at a grim bronze monument by the artist commemorating the birth of nuclear energy. The skull-like sculpture entitled Nuclear Energy 

(1964-1966) was commissioned by the University of Chicago to celebrate the 25^th anniversary of their successful atomic experiment. In 1942, physicist Enrico Fermi and his team built the first nuclear reactor and "initiated the first controlled release of nuclear energy (1)."  The work, which was installed on the campus in December of 1967, is a visual reminder of the positive and negative consequences of nuclear power.

As Japan desperately struggles to prevent a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant damaged during the recent earthquake, and contain the flow of radiation seeping out into the atmosphere, I am reminded of yet another work of art, which depicts the horrors yet to come. The German artist, Anselm Kiefer completed his sculptural painting Burning Rods in 1987 twenty-years after Moore's celebratory work was erected. However, in his piece, Kiefer doesn't hint at the destructive power of atomic energy, he confronts the subject head on with his interpretation of a scorched landscape in the aftermath of a nuclear disaster.

Anselm Kiefer, Burning Rods, 1984-1987, oil, acrylic, emulsion and shellac on canvas with ceramic, iron, copper wire and lead, St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis MO.

Kiefer completed his somber abstract painting after the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl Power Plant in the Ukraine, which was one of the worse nuclear disasters the world has ever seen. The rectangular triptych, reminiscent of a large altarpiece, is hung so that it dwarfs and overwhelms the viewer. Black and gray pigments, applied in an impasto style, cover the three canvas panels. In several places, heavy folds of peeling paint hang from the surface creating a palatable sense of three-dimensionality. The resultant effect mimics a terrain cracked and burned beyond recognition.

This bleak expressive scene is further heightened by a thick, gray amorphous mass in the upper center panel. Reminiscent of a mushroom cloud, it hovers above a cluster of 14 cylindrical shaped structures. Although they look like Greek columns at first glance, the "rods" do not signal civilization but represent destruction and death. An old rusty ice skate in the lower left corner of the canvas and a ceramic shard in  the right panel is all that is left of the human life that once occupied Kiefer's environment, a space now contaminated by radiation fall out. In the aftermath of Chernobyl over 220,000 people had to be resettled (2). Many were given only hours to evacuate their homes. Where is the skate's owner? Is he or she dead or alive? These nagging questions trouble my mind as I contemplate this painting.

Kiefer's impervious mementos of an interrupted life parallel the journalistic photographs I am confronted with daily on the Internet of the broken lives of Japanese earthquake survivors. Tokens such as trophies, school pictures and children's toys litter frame after frame of debris. As the situation worsens at the Fukushima Plant, Kiefer's ruinous depiction becomes all too real. In the event Japan suffers a fate similar to the Ukraine, I wonder how artists will choose to remember the tragedy.  

REFERENCES:

(1) http://physics.uchicago.edu/about/history/manhattan.html

(2) www.world-nuclear.org