Artist's Article
Thermonuclear Gardens:
Information Artworks about
the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex
Sheila Pinkel
[Figures]
Abstract
The author traces the evolution of her installations about the military-industrial complex during the 1980s and early 1990s and artworks that emerged as a result of her research. In addition to national and international data, maps, graphs and statistics about the industry, the author over time progressively added regional, site-specific information in order to empower viewers. The process of creating these works revealed the place of the nuclear industry in the author's own family, which ultimately facilitated the design of later installations.
By 1981 I had become increasingly aware of the military-industrial complex in the United States. At that time I was ignorant about the extent of U.S. military involvement and believed that my concerns would be assuaged through education. However, as I continued doing research I learned of much greater U.S. involvement than I had imagined and that locating information on this subject was quite difficult. Thus, I decided to make art installations as information artworks in order to educate others and myself. From 1982-1992, I installed 12 Thermonuclear Gardens in museums and galleries throughout the United States. The following is a description of those installations and the ideas and issues I confronted in the process of making them.
The first Thermonuclear Garden was installed at
B.C. Space, a gallery in Laguna Beach, California, in 1982 (Fig. 1) [1]. Fortunately, the gallery
director, Jerry Burchfield, was quite supportive of experimental work. I
referred to the installation as a garden because we have so many military
"plants" here in California. My research had revealed that California
received more research and development funding from the U.S. Department
of Defense than any other state. Thus, I began to think of California
as a thermonuclear garden.
I contacted the U.S. Department of Defense to see what information I could get from them about contract allocations. My assumption that this kind of information was readily available changed when I could find out very little through the government. If I wanted to get more precise information about government military contract allocations, I had to go to alternative groups. These groups subscribed to data services that provide monthly updates about contracts awarded to companies, the dollar amounts involved, the nature of the contracts, and foreign military sales. For a small fee they shared the information with me. I was surprised that I could not get this information directly from the Department of Defense. Throughout the 1980s, during the Reagan era, information about this industry from the government became even less available. At one point there was an article on the front page of the Los Angeles Times stating that, as a money saving measure, then-President Reagan had reduced or eliminated the requirement that certain [End Page 319] federal agencies collect information about themselves.
I also had great difficulty understanding the military-industrial complex through magazines or newspaper articles. I found that when newspaper articles did address the issue of the manufacture of weapons, those articles rarely gave enough details for the reader to form a clear picture of the extent and nature of corporate involvement. Obfuscation was also embedded in the language used. News items about activities or decisions in the industry usually indicated that "the industry" or a corporation made a decision. Rarely did it mention the specific individuals, either in government or industry, who actually made the decisions. And rarely was there mention of the money allocated to or profit made by specific corporations. Indeed, the industry seemed ephemeral rather than having physical presence. Thus, I decided that my "garden" had to have maps and statistics showing what was being made in specific locations so that I and others could more easily comprehend [End Page 320] the physical and monetary extent of the industry.
Foreign military sales started to emerge as my major concern. The United States was selling weapons to most of the countries in the world and I did not view these sales as neutral but as having a specific political and economic purpose. Even though the United States was not directly involved in fighting wars in those countries, the U.S. was, in fact, tacitly involved because of its military support, which was not neutral. I also found that sales of sophisticated planes to Third World countries functioned to destabilize the power relations in specific regions. Once the U.S. had sold to one country, other countries in the region felt the need to purchase planes and weapons systems as well. I viewed this process as insidious because up until that time those countries had not needed this kind of technology; in addition, they usually could not afford it.
Throughout the 1980s Congressional control of large weapons purchases by foreign countries was becoming increasingly lax. Large dollar sales of guns and weapons systems could be earmarked for local police forces and thus slip through the congressional net of approval. The U.S. was (and still is) the world leader in military sales, and throughout the 1980s sales increased. Sometimes monies allocated for foreign aid were used by the recipient foreign country to purchase weapons from American manufacturers. This created a kind of revolving door for aid monies, which ultimately ended up in the pockets of U.S. weapons manufacturers.
Possibly most disturbing of all was the realization that, because the business interests of the United States were interwoven into the fabric of the weapons industry, it was in their interests as well as the interest of the U.S. military to have these weapons used periodically so that more would need to be produced. Stockpiling of weapons is bad for business and, thus, cannot go on indefinitely. Throughout my research I found that the government was pro-active in supporting the military industry, which led me to start calling it the military-government-industrial complex.
My first "garden" consisted of small white boxes mounted on the wall, each with the name of a major military contractor, the amount of government contract money the contractor received and the extent of the company's foreign military sales. In each box I placed dead plants sprayed black to reflect the Thermonuclear Garden theme. The installation included maps that showed national nuclear and weapons manufacturing facilities and described the extent of their production. There were photographs of planes and weapons systems and up-to-the-minute descriptions of the numerous ways that destruction could be achieved. The installation included a wall of quotes from people around the world calling for a halt to the growth of the military-industrial complex. In this exhibition I mainly used photocopied enlargements and take-out food containers. I also generated monographs containing information about various aspects of the military-government-industrial complex, which were placed on a table in the exhibition space.
There was a great deal to read in the installation and I was afraid that people would find it overwhelming. However, Burchfield told me that people would come into the gallery and spend hours going through the exhibit. I was heartened by this because it meant that my premise was correct, that people wanted to know about this subject and that there were no readily available sources that made this information clear.
I continued to do more "gardens." Whenever possible I tried to
include information about the local area in which the exhibition
was held, believing that people are empowered by information that
is regional and thus manageable. For example, at the University
of Southern California Attalier Gallery (1983) in Santa Monica (Fig. 2), in addition to the elements
included in the first exhibition, I also included a list of the top
military contractors in the Santa Monica area. The head of a city
commission remembered this list when a military contractor applied
for a building permit. She abstained from voting, stating that she
did not support the expansion of military work in the city of Santa
Monica. Much to her surprise, the rest of the board abstained as well and
the contractor did not get his building permit. This is a good example
of how information can empower local people.
Art and Censorship
In 1982, the women's art collective Mother Art invited me to participate in [End Page 321] an exhibition in the foyer of the Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles. The management of the building never asked us what we intended to do. The group decided to do an anti-nuclear exhibition. I installed an information artwork on the four sides of a large pillar in the center of the foyer, which addressed the extent of the military-industrial complex in Southern California. Several days after we installed the works, the Federal Building management called to say that we had 24 hours to remove the exhibition or they would throw it out, so we removed the exhibition. This was my first experience of censorship. I was impressed that when I exhibited works in galleries I never had any trouble. But when I showed the work in the "public domain" it was censored.
In 1985, 19 other women artists and I were invited by Artemesia
Gallery in Chicago to participate in a billboard project sponsored
by the Rapid Transit District of the City of Chicago. Each of us was
to design a billboard to be mounted in a prominent location in the
city. At the last minute the Rapid Transit District authorities decided
to review our works before they were finally mounted. Nine of the 20
works were rejected in this review process. I felt proud but dismayed
to be included among the nine censored artists, joining a list that
included artists such as Barbara Kruger and Esther Parada. My work
(Fig. 3) consisted of a pair of
hands on a black ground with the statement "Fear Is Our Gross National
Product." I made this work after having done extensive research on the
military-industrial complex and realizing the extent to which the weapons
industry and foreign military sales had become interwoven into the fiber
of the U.S. economy.
Another work I created during the mid-1980s involved the definition
of the word "consumer" (Fig. 4). I
found that the first definition, "a person or thing that destroys, uses
up or wastes something" (Webster's New World Dictionary, 1962),
was replaced after the mid-1960s with the second definition, "a person
or thing that consumes, a person who buys goods or services for his own
needs and not for resale or to use in the production of other goods
for resale: opposed to producer" (Webster's New World Dictionary, 1979), a more benign definition in support of consumption. This
work in its final form, a 16-X-20-in off-set lithographic pairing of
these two definitions, was frequently included in gallery exhibitions
throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s. When I proposed an artwork for
a bus bench using the original definition of the word "consumer," I was
told I could not exhibit it because this definition of the word is too
disturbing. Once again, an artwork that was often exhibited in the gallery
setting was censored when I proposed to place it in the public domain.
Visual Studies Workshop
One of the largest "gardens" I made was installed at the
Visual Studies Workshop (VSW) in Rochester, NY (1985) (Fig. 5). In addition to information and
maps, I had enough space to include numerous artworks. Image/text works
such as Killing Time (Fig. 6),
Army, Arm Me, To Be Is Not To Have, Soil Soil and Arms
for the Poor reflected my growing interest in puns and word play as
rhetorical devices to expand meaning. In a later exhibition, language play
was embedded in the title of the show: "Dream Dreams, Scheme Schemes,
Soil Soil, Waste Waste: A Brief History of The Nuclear Industry." Also
in the VSW exhibition I included a work in which hands successively crush
a photograph of a bomber (Fig. 7).
I also made a piece entitled Nuclear Vision, a seven-part work
(Figs. 8, 9) consisting of a 36-X-48-in central matrix and six 20-X-24-in
panels that asked questions of the viewer such as: "Are we afraid to
say what we think?" "Is the strength of a country found in its military
rather than its culture?" and "Is the decision to live
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comfortably and make things which destroy really the solution?" I
made these images by placing my face and hands on the scanning area
of a photocopier and printing the images onto vellum. The vellum was
then contacted to diazo sepia paper. I wanted to include a visual,
interpretive component to the exhibition and found that the attenuated
images of distorted hands and faces combined with natural and human-made
things raised the issue of the fragility of living things and added a
human dimension to an otherwise didactic show. However, the information
in the show was itself also organized to highlight the human implications
of this industry and so, in that regard, it also had powerful and poetic
impact. The placement of images and text in relation to their human
implications was crucial in making the installations into artworks.
I also included a section, called "Shoot with Kodak," about Eastman Kodak's military involvement, since Kodak's home office was also in Rochester, New York. In the mid-1980s I had discovered that Kodak ran a government-owned, company-operated explosives factory in Kingsport, Tennessee, called the Holston Company, which produced high-yield explosives. In the late 1970s, according to the Council on Economic Priorities, Eastman Kodak was among the top 100 military manufacturers in the United States [2]. Furthermore, according to National Action/Research on the Military Industrial Complex (NARMIC), between January 1978 and June 1979, Eastman Kodak ranked 13th among U.S. companies engaged in foreign military sales, most of which where itemized as classified [3].
I decided to call Tennessee Eastman in Kingsport, Tennessee, to check whether they, in fact, manufactured ammunition and/or explosives at the Eastman facility there. A receptionist answered the phone. I asked if I was connected to the ammunition factory. She answered, "No, honey, that's down the street." When I asked what it was called, she told me, "The Holston Company." That was the way I was able to find the actual name of the company.
I also called the U.S. government office administering this operation in Washington, D.C., while on a trip there. I asked about the allocations to the Holston Company for the next fiscal year. The secretary asked where I was calling from. I answered, "The Smithsonian," since I was standing in the lobby of that institution. She had me wait a minute and then got back on the phone and gave me the information. When she asked which office in the Smithsonian I was calling from, I said that I was just a visitor standing in the lobby. She angrily told me never to call that office again and hung up. As a result of this conversation I realized that the information I wanted was on-line and at the fingertips of specific government personnel but it was not readily available to the general public. For me, the contrast between Eastman Kodak's public image and its military involvement was striking, especially because it was so difficult to get information about its military involvement. Today, Eastman Kodak no longer runs this facility.
Nevada Test Site
In 1986 I was invited by the director of the Allied Arts Council Gallery in Las Vegas, Nevada, to do a nuclear installation, which became Thermonuclear Garden #10. Since the gallery was relatively close to the Nevada Test Site, I dedicated the whole installation to the nuclear industry itself. One entire wall was filled with a 38-ft-long continuous photocopy devoted to the history of the nuclear industry in the United States. In addition, I included a spectrum of my other artworks about the nuclear industry, some of which I had used in prior exhibitions.
The gallery director invited me to join him on a trip to the Nevada Test Site as a guest of the Department of Energy to see a high-level nuclear waste burial demonstration project near the site. After a 2-hour pre-dawn ride to the site, we arrived at a barren, flat desert landscape that gave no hint that thousands of people were working underground. After we located the demonstration project, called Climax, half of us entered an ancient industrial elevator suspended by a single cable and were lowered a quarter of a mile under the ground. We waited in a large tunnel but the rest of the group did not come down. Finally, our guide took us to see the demonstration project, which consisted of several canisters sunk into the floor of the granite tunnel. One of the group members looked up and saw a piece of corrugated metal suspended above the canisters from the granite ceiling and asked what it was doing there. The guide explained that this spot had been selected because granite seemed like the safest material in which to bury high-level nuclear waste. However, later they discovered that water was seeping through the rock and leaking onto the canisters. It turns out that water is the vehicle of transmission for nuclear materials and, thus, a potential hazard.
We went back to the elevator to wait for the other group, only to discover that the elevator had broken and they were not coming down. Our guide told us not [End Page 323] [Begin Page 325] to worry--if they couldn't fix the elevator we could walk out, a quarter of a mile straight up. My claustrophobia was now setting in. Finally, two hours later, they repaired the elevator and we were lifted out. The other group never was able to visit the site. This was the Department of Energy's demonstration project showing that the burial of high-level nuclear waste was completely under control! This story became an image/text installation on one wall of the gallery.
While preparing this exhibition, I asked my then 70-year-old father to explain to me, his then 45-year-old daughter, the difference between boiling-water and breeder reactors. He drew me precise schematics and explained the differences. I was impressed by his ability to do that so well and asked him how he knew so much about this technology. He said that he had designed the first research reactor used at NASA's Lewis Laboratory in Cleveland, Ohio. I was quite impressed that I never knew that my father had worked in the nuclear industry and that his work had been so top secret that he had never discussed it at all with his family.
Growing up in a "top-secret" household gave me the inside experience of how secrecy can disrupt familial relations. I never really knew what my father did for a living until I was an older person. As it turned out, my father agreed with my criticism of the nuclear industry. He shared with me his analysis: that the industry's problems arose from loss of control by the scientists because of power-grabbing by attorneys and businesspeople, which led to the too-rapid development of an industry before it was ready.
Nuclear Industry and Media Deconstruction
The final "garden" was exhibited in 1991 at Harbor College, Huntington Beach, California. In this installation I juxtaposed advertisements from the nuclear industry with either images or text that commented on or deconstructed information in advertisements for the nuclear industry. I had attempted to find magazines about nuclear energy and the nuclear industry in all the major libraries in the Los Angeles area: the Los Angeles Public Library, the science library at Pomona College, the main library at the Claremont Colleges and the research and science library at the University of California at Los Angeles. None of them had any such magazines. Then I went to my parents' house for dinner and there on the dining room table was a magazine published by the nuclear industry itself, which contained the advertisements I was looking for. Through this incident I became aware of how the nuclear industry tightly controls information about itself and why the general public knows so little about it.
I made several dozen works for this
[End Page 325]
installation. For instance, in the nuclear industry magazines there
were many color images of beautiful, untrammeled landscapes in Arizona
or New Mexico in which a company was claiming that nuclear energy was
clean energy, a way to ensure that the environment remained intact. My
research into the mining of uranium in Arizona and New Mexico revealed
that often mining conditions were so unsafe that miners became ill from
working with radioactive materials, and ultimately the mines had to be
closed. In addition, massive mounds of uranium tailings, the residue
of mining activity, were left above ground adjacent to the mines,
and carcinogenic residue was slowly infiltrating the water system in
the area. In this installation I juxtaposed the ads with this kind of
information (Fig. 10).
Another ad that I used came not from a nuclear publication but from
Time magazine (Fig. 11). It
was generated by the U.S. Council for Energy Awareness, an organization
employed by the nuclear industry, to create a positive public image for
the nuclear industry. In this ad the fear of an oil shortage was used as
the rationale for shifting to a limitless and "safe" fuel like nuclear
energy. I duplicated the drawing they used, replaced the word "oil"
with the word "plutonium" and discussed the current glut of oil and
the problems with nuclear waste disposal, in an attempt to deconstruct
the manipulation of public sentiment through misinformation in their
ad. This exhibition was well received at Harbor College, and I was later
told by the gallery director that not only art classes but also physics
and sociology classes had visited the exhibition.
In 1995 I did a final graphic on the subject of the nuclear industry in
commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima
(Fig. 12). This graphic contrasted
two news items about the nuclear industry that had appeared one month
apart. The first stated that the United States pledged to stop any future
nuclear developments. One month later a second news item described the
U.S. government's intention to resume nuclear testing. I was saddened
by the unabashed double-speak of the government on this issue.
As I continued to research I learned of more horrific weapons--neutron bombs, napalm, cluster bombs, bombees (clusters of small bombs developed by Harley-Davidson for use in Southeast Asia). The bombs exploded over Basra in southern Iraq reportedly sucked the oxygen out of the atmosphere where they detonated. The bombees used in Laos each could maim dozens of people and were almost impossible to detect. The United States dropped more bombs on Laos during the second Laotian war than the United States and Great Britain dropped during all of World War II, and 30 percent of them did not explode, rendering a large percentage of the country unusable. Recently, I have learned that the U.S. military used depleted uranium in military activities in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Puerto Rico, creating dangerous radioactive environments for U.S. soldiers, as well as for people and all other living things in those countries. I keep thinking that I have already heard about the most horrific and inhumane destructive devices in existence and then I learn about an even more Mephistophelean approach that the U.S. military has generated for creating destruction.
Ultimately, this work provided the background for my photo work during the 1990s on the realities of the Indochina Wars for the indigenous peoples in the region and as refugees. In 1990 I photographed in three Cambodian refugee camps and two Hmong camps in Thailand and during the last 10 years have continued to document the lives of refugees to better understand the impact of the war and U.S. participation in it. Today I watch with increasing horror as the prison-industrial complex joins the military-industrial complex as a growing contemporary problem. There's more work to be done.
Manuscript received 19 January 2000.
Sheila Pinkel, an associate professor of art at Pomona College in Claremont, California, is an interdisciplinary artist whose artwork deals with her love of nature and her concern about its destruction. She is particularly interested in making visible unseen dimensions in nature and culture. She has been an International Editor of Leonardo for 16 years.
Sheila Pinkel (artist, educator), 210 N. Ave. 66, Los Angeles, CA 90042, U.S.A. E-mail: <spinkel@aol.com>.
This text is part of the Leonardo special project Artists and War, guest edited by Michele Emmer. The project is dedicated to addressing topics that relate to the role and work of artists and scientists in times of war.
References and Notes
1. Subsequent installations were done at galleries in downtown Los Angeles; the University of Southern California Attalier Gallery; Lang Art Gallery at Scripps College; Peace Museum of Chicago; University of Syracuse LightWork Gallery; Allied Arts Council Gallery in Las Vegas; Arizona State University Gallery; the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY; and Harbor College Gallery, Huntington Beach, California.
2. Council on Economic Priorities Newsletter, November 1980.
3. Trafficking in Arms: A Catalogue of 300 U.S. Foreign Military Sales Agreements, pamphlet by the National Action/Research on the Military Industrial Complex (NARMIC) project of the American Friends Service Committee, 1980.
