I would like to give one step back - just after the end of WWII.
1945 marked the time when US became the super power that the rest of
the world admired or feared, and in any case respected.
Artistic groups all over the world questioned their submission to the
French culture. While doing so, and to the extent that societies were
reinventing themselves, there was a certain (return to? place for?...)
"nationalism".
In Brazil, 1945 marked not only the end of a distant war, but also the
death of Mario de Andrade, the rupture with prior modern art
movements, and the search for a new national artistic identity. One of
the characteristics of this identity were undoubtedly riming poems.
My point being that the extreme technological advancements of the war
industry seemed to have been met in certain parts of the world with
what could be seen at a first glance as a decay of 'form'.
Patrick's example is one of 'co-production' (as you put it Patrick).
I am interested in other examples where the reactive /proactive
movement to a sophisticated war machine is the simplification of form.
In 1957, a Brazilian magazine announced 'concrete poetry' (huge in
Brazil at the time thanks to Augusto de Campos and others), as
'poetry's rock'n roll'... the latest fad, hence doomed to die.
Concrete and visual poetry were another post war 'reactive/proactive
genre.
Here are Vinicius de Moraes' words on Hiroshima, in the voice of Ney
Matogrosso ( you *really need to watch and hear* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YJaaVAQ5lE)
. Vinicius was part of the 3rd modernist (post war) generation .
Pensem nas crianças
Mudas telepáticas
Pensem nas meninas
Cegas inexatas
Pensem nas mulheres
Rotas alteradas
Pensem nas feridas
Como rosas cálidas
Mas oh não se esqueçam
Da rosa da rosa
Da rosa de Hiroxima [...]
(1962)
I will only risk a short translation... f there is one poem that
succumbs to the tyranny of translation, this is the one... 'Think of
the children, mute, telepatic. Think of the little girls, blind,
inexact...'
Márcia Guidin has an excellent analysis of the 3rd art generation in
Brazil in "Social Critique and metalanguage" (Pedagogia e Comunicacao
journal) . Regina Vater has several texts on concrete /visual poets in
Brazil in the cold war period. Email me if interested in full
references.
Ana Boa-Ventura
HASTAC scholar (Humanities, Arts, Science & Technology Advanced
Collaboratory )
On Jun 1, 2009, at 11:33 AM, W. Patrick McCray wrote:
> Colleagues:
>
> First, I would like to say I am pleased to be part of this month-long
> Fission & Fusion discussion @ YASMIN. I am a historian of modern
> science and
> technology at the University of California which, of course, has
> long ties
> to many aspects of the nuclear-realm: Ernest Lawrence's lab;
> discovery of
> plutonium; Robert Oppenheimer; management of Los Alamos and Livermore.
>
> In terms of my own interests – I teach a regular undergraduate
> course called
> The Atomic Age which is a social and scientific history of nuclear
> weapons
> and nuclear power. Finally, for the last year or so, I have been
> working on
> the history of ITER, an international megaproject being built by the
> EU and
> several other countries (US, Japan, China, India, Russia, South
> Korea).
> Formally known as the International Experimental Thermonuclear
> Reactor (now
> it is just called ITER, a renaming which itself suggests some larger
> issues
> at work), this is a large-scale fusion energy project.
>
> As my first contribution to this discussion, I would like to call
> attention
> to an interesting book by Peter Kuran (VCE; 2007) called "How to
> Photograph
> an Atomic Bomb." Ironically, I first saw this book in March 2009
> when I was
> visiting the Titan Missile Museum located outside of Tucson, Arizona
> (one of
> 54 Titan missile sites active during the Cold War, the missile site
> is now a
> popular tourist attraction).
>
> Part macabre coffee-table book, part history of science and
> technology,
> Kuran's book presents the photography done at nuclear tests sites in
> the
> South Pacific and Nevada as a compelling artistic expression that also
> encompassed national security goals. However, what I found totally
> engrossing in Kuran's book was the descriptions of how photographers
> had to
> alter existing and develop entirely new photographic techniques in
> order to
> capture the micro-second details of a nuclear blasts. This, to me,
> was a
> fascinating and unknown part of nuclear testing. What does this say
> about
> the intersection of nuclear weapons and art or, more generally, the
> ways in
> which technology and art co-produce each other in the realms of
> fission and
> fusion?
>
> --
> W. Patrick McCray
> Department of History
> University of California, Santa Barbara
> Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9410
> TEL: 805.893.2665
> WEB: http://www.history.ucsb.edu/people/person.php?account_id=14
>
>
>
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