From Trinity Test to Bikini Atoll (and after)
Bikini Atoll: A History Lesson (1946-1978) greg sholette: "assembler" (1978)
In the late 1970s, much of my art practice involved creating visual works in opposition to nuclear warfare and South African Apartheid. Both issues had generated large-scale, international social movements at the time. Given the renewed interest today in the backstory of nuclear weapons sparked by Christopher Nolan’s epic film “Oppenheimer” (long on dramaturgy, short on remorse), as well as the pending grim anniversary of the US bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 6 and 9, 1945), I present here a scanned version of my palm-sized artists’ book Bikini Atoll: A History Lesson (1946-1978). The publication is made up entirely of citations taken from mainstream news sources related to the United States military’s post-World War II atom (fission) and hydrogen (fission-fusion-fission) bomb tests carried out on several South Pacific atolls between 1946 to 1958, including Bikini, which is located in The Marshall Islands.
What the book really documents, however, is the patronizing and blatantly racialized, colonialist and imperialist attitude shown towards the inhabitants and environs of these islands. And not only by the US military, but also from some US Congress members, a few scientists, but certainly the mainstream media overall. In doing so, it traces the disastrous medical, environmental and cultural consequences for the local people, ecology, and many US soldiers exposed to radiation as human guinea pigs (not to forget the 146 actual guinea pigs, 109 mice, 176 goats, 3,030 white rats, and 57 pigs exposed to the explosion during Test Able, 1946). This profusion of harm continues into the late 1970s (when I assembled my book), but also remains evident today, some 45 years later, see for example The Guardian from July 13, 2023, “Marshall Islanders are still plagued by health and environmental effects of 67 nuclear bomb tests from 1946 to 1958.” Or some two decades earlier (1994) from a congressional oversight committee on the lingering contamination of Bikini Island,
And so since the Bikini people wanted to go back [they had been evacuated in 1946] the resettlement was authorized [1970]. The people were monitored continuously during this resettlement period and the monitoring showed that they were beginning to notice an unacceptable uptake of radionuclides in the people. And so before that level reached any level that would have been hazardous to their health, they were evacuated again. And that is my recollection. I believe that the record will support that. [testimony from page 425 of Radiation Exposure from Pacific Nuclear Tests, US Congress, Washington DC, 1994.]
Originally, my Bikini project consisted of some 55 pages of citations that I manually typed onto index cards. I then shot each card, frame-by-frame, in order to produce an “animated” 16mm movie made up entirely of intertitles. You see, along with social movement activism I was also a student of Conceptual Artist Hans Haacke (already using data as an art medium), as well as of filmmaker Robert Breer, and I was also a devotee of structuralist filmmakers such as Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits and Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet (although curiously not Bruce Connor, whose movie Crossroads I only encountered later). Nonetheless, my resulting Bikini Atoll film experiment was unbearable to watch. I still recalling Breer, wincing, together with my fellow Cooper Union classmates, as a seemingly endless didactic presentation rolled on, silently, with only the whirring of the Bell & Howell movie projector as accompaniment.
OK, yes, this was truly the era of anti-aesthetics. And yet, realizing that something was not working, I then transformed the project into a spare, black and white offset booklet, saddle stitching (stapling) 500 offset editions by hand. For a time, Printed Matter Books carried copies, although these appear to have now run out. What follows are excerpts from Bikini Atoll: A History Lesson (1946-1978), with the entire booklet available as a PDF Here.
* RE: Further Reading: I recommend this eyewitness account by David Bradley M.D., No Place to Hide published in the Atlantic Magazine in 1948 (behind a paywall alas), but also available as a book from the same year (and yes, that is the same title Glenn Greenwald chose for his book about Edward Snowden decades later).
I also suggest checking out this site by cold war/nuclear weapons theorist Ilona Jurkonytė, take a look at the Marshall Islands environmental activists, see this related art project by Susan Schuppli Radical Contact Prints, and watch Jeffrey Skoller’s short documentary, The Unimagined Lives of Our Neighbors (password: hiroshima), about a man, Joseph Fischer, Skoller’s neighbor, who was among the first US Naval seamen sent into Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just two weeks after the atom bombs were dropped.