Radioactive art
These artists did what?!?
Especially in the wake of the 2011 Japanese Fukushima disaster, artists are not afraid to work with radioactive materials. For a 2015 exhibition entitled Rocks, Stones, and Dust, Ojibwe artist Bonnie Devine created an installation called Phenomenology where she literally brings the toxic landscape into the gallery.
The installation consists of 92 hardwood stakes draped in white muslin, a chunk of gneiss, and a sample of uranium secured in a can sitting on a glass shelf. If we were holding a Geiger counter, it would go crazy! The 92 hardwood stakes (the atomic number for uranium) were pulled from a toxic waste site, as was the gneiss.
Juxtaposing the two materials on the shelf, Devine may be evoking that ancient belief that stones are alive, have agency, and that invisible forces are at work within and behind all things. She’s definitely pointing out the vulnerability and permeability of our bodies. As the title suggests, the artist is using the psychological effects of uranium to affect us, the viewer—to physically shift us into an embodied awareness; to help us feel and respect things we can’t see with our eyes. She’s trying to help us “internalize the external,” and her work reaches deep into the psyche because it reaches it not through abstract knowledge, but through visceral, sensorimotor experience. A council of ghosts stand by.
Here is another toxic readymade by Death Convention Singers. It’s not a representation but a presentation of toxic waste. We see a glass bottle full of golden water taken from the contaminated San Juan and Animas Rivers after the Gold King Mine wastewater spill of 2015. Remember that one? It calls to mind the pictures of Flint residents in 2016 holding bottles full of their contaminated water in front of the House Oversight Committee hearing in Washington, DC. One woman was also holding a clump of her hair, while another was holding a baby bottle full of the lead-contaminated water. They had signs and were shouting “Would you drink it?”
The art collective also brings radioactive material into the gallery—those little pieces of petrified wood on the shrine are radioactive. What happens to viewers in this space who walk into the gallery and notice people in hazmat suits making music with a Geiger counter? With this kind of artwork, people get a little taste of what it feels like to live close to radioactive toxic waste everyday. It’s like Chris Burden in the early 70s shooting himself in the gallery to give people a taste of gun violence.
“To internalize the external…”