In-Security: The Nuclear Dilemma

IN-SECURITY: THE NUCLEAR DILEMMA

REVIEWS

For a person of my generation, it is impossible to be neutral about anything containing the word "nuclear." It conjures up the following images, all of which have entered that archive we might call "disaster nostalgia": Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on the UN tabletop, test buildings being dusted off the Nevada desert by a multi-megaton blast, missile-laden freighters steaming toward Cuba, children crouching under their school desks during attack drills, families stocking their fallout shelters. But it has been twenty-nine years since Three Mile Island and twenty-two since Chernobyl; today, Iran notwithstanding, the idea of a nuclear attack against a major power seems hard to fathom. More to the point, the price of oil has made everyone begin to forget why the N-word was so taboo.

There’s a perfect image of this forgetfulness in the exhibition In-Security: Le Dilemme Nucléaire/The Nuclear Dilemma, staged in the Musée international de la Croix-Rouge et du CroissantRouge in Geneva. In Jürgen Nefzger’s 2003 photograph of beachgoers frolicking in the sea near Penly, France, a massive nuclear power plant peeks just around the point. What’s the problem?

At the same time, many of the images by the ten photographers in the exhibition exert an aesthetic fascination that makes their impact ambiguous at best. Emmet Gowin is an environmentally committed image-maker, but his photographs of the nuclear test site craters in Nevada have the alien fascination of another planet, unrelated to ours. (Besides, we don’t do that anymore.) Nigel Green obtained privileged access to the now obsolete Dungeness B, Britain’s major nuclear facility, where his father had worked. Green’s riveting pictures look like something out of an Austin Powers movie: images of the future that was, astounding and comical.

In a brief introduction that reads like a defense, the curators assert that photographs can clarify and amplify other forms of scientific and political discourse that display a certain “opacity.” That is putting it mildly. This exhibition should have been accompanied by text panels displaying the official obfuscation and double-speak perfected by military strategists and industry apologists. But the issue here is the photographs, which keep putting us between a rock and a very hard place. To me the hard place is represented not by the many Chernobyl images, which, barring a miracle like cold fusion, we will have to learn to live with if we want more cheap energy. The real problem is represented, for example, by Tsuchida Hlromi’s ongoing project Remember Hiroshima, a photo-catalog of objects in the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Museum collected from the destroyed city, with accompanying narratives to explain them. To show more than the handful in the exhibition would have been too much for audiences to bear. Consider the image of Akio Tsukuda’s school uniform jacket, found hanging from the skeleton of a tree by his father

on August 8, 1945. No other trace of the boy was ever recovered. It recalls the line of the 1944 poem “Todesfuge” (“Deathfugue”) by Paul Celan: “Wir shaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng”: “We are digging a grave in the air there’s room for us all.”

The real nuclear dilemma is that there is no such thing as evil, only expediency, and because that lurks in all of us, it is very difficult to say “never again" about anything.©

Lyle Rexer

In-Security: Le Dilemme Nucléaire/The Nuclear Dilemma was presented at the Musée international de la CroixRouge et du Croissant-Rouge, Geneva, February 27July 27, 2008. The exhibition travels to the Fundación Museo de la Paz de Gernika, Spain, September 18, 2008-February 4, 2009.