<\/p>\n
Test Able, Operation Crossroads, Bikini Atoll, 1 July 1946<\/em><\/p>\n Operation Crossroads consisted of two detonations: Test Able was detonated in the air on July\u00a01; three weeks later Test Baker was detonated underwater. Taking place in the murky twilight of the Cold War, the tests occurred in a highly charged political context as ties with the Soviet Union deteriorated and the UN debated how to establish control over the use of atomic energy.<\/p>\n In contrast to the wartime stealth demanded by the atomic detonations in 1945, the Bikini tests were the first to be publicly announced beforehand and observed by an invited audience, including a large press corps and artists such as Crawford stationed 18 miles from the perimeter of the target fleet. The detonations were conveyed to the world via radio broadcasts, newsreel images, and the circulation of thousands of photographs in the popular press. Crawford\u2019s response to Operation Crossroads appeared in the December 1946 issue of Fortune<\/em>.<\/p>\n Just as Crawford\u2019s weather maps for the Air Force demanded the translation of unpredictable and ever-changing forces into a planar lexicon of graphic symbols, his work for Fortune <\/em>entailed developing a visual language that captured the magnitude of the atomic blasts and their lethal aftereffects. Many of these, such as the deadly beta and gamma rays released into the atmosphere by the detonations, were invisible. As is evident in Test Able<\/em>, Crawford exploded space, fused figure and ground, fragmented form, and scattered brightly coloured shards across the picture plane.<\/p>\n Although Test Able<\/em> initially appears entirely abstract, his modernist rationalism and contrived manipulation of form and color remain sufficiently tethered to visual reality to identify an aerial view of the detonation, including the salmon-hued cloud of the explosion, the yellow haze of radioactive particles, the contrasting blues of sky and lagoon, and the grey of torn navy vessels recognized by their port holes.<\/p>\n Crawford\u2019s paintings were greeted with a mix of incredulity, misunderstanding, and ridicule. However, extant treatments continue to view them in isolation from the interpretive context of the Fortune <\/em>article such that much of their meaning and particularity is lost.<\/p>\n Firstly, Crawford insisted that the paintings were published alongside documentary photographs and explanatory texts, thereby rendering a literal picturing of the blasts redundant. As he asserted, it would be \u201cpointless to paint the bombing realistically\u201d since \u201cphotographs do a much better job reproducing it physically than a painting ever can.\u201d<\/p>\n Secondly, he was interested in a \u201cbroad democratic method of distribution\u201d for art, making dissemination in a magazine more effective in reaching an audience than the easel painting. Finally, it was never Crawford\u2019s intention to directly transcribe the detonations in the South Pacific.<\/p>\n Echoing the sentiments of political writer Dwight MacDonald, Crawford agreed that naturalism was \u201cno longer adequate, either esthetically or morally, to cope with modern horrors.\u201d Crawford maintained \u201cthe millions of words and miles of photographs emanating from Bikini generally imparted no more than the most superficial and external record of this profound and terrifying experiment.\u201d<\/p>\n In response to efforts of government officials to \u201chumanize\u201d and \u201cnormalize\u201d the bomb by claiming that it was \u201csimply the latest step in man\u2019s long struggle to control the forces of nature,\u201d and in an attempt to counteract the complacency resulting from the numbing effects of media saturation, Crawford was also keen for his Fortune <\/em>commission to serve a purpose, to be useful in the same way as his weather maps were able to translate invisible forces into effective graphic symbols.<\/p>\n \u2018If Bikini Atoll Had Been New York Harbor,\u2019 <\/em>Fortune, December 1946<\/em><\/p>\n He insisted on designing a map that pictured the extent of radiation poisoning and fall-out that would accompany bombs such as those detonated at Bikini if dropped over a densely populated region on the eastern seaboard. Taking up Macdonald\u2019s point in an editorial for Time<\/em> magazine titled \u201cDescent Into Barbarism,\u201d the \u201creal horror of the Bomb is not its blast but its radioactivity.\u201d Crawford was thus seeking to make the imperceptible visible to American audiences.<\/p>\n For Crawford, art could not, and should not, passively re-present the new realities of the nuclear era. Rather, painting could be used to formulate an analogue of contemporary experience through the rational and considered use of form, colour, and composition, and thereby serve as a medium of communication that was both visual and ideological.<\/p>\n Crawford met the bomb\u2019s capacity for destruction and chaos with the artist\u2019s capacity for creation and order. Logic and reason were what was needed as history stared into a moral and technological abyss.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n About the Author:<\/strong><\/p>\n Dr Jody Patterson<\/a> is Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) in Art History<\/a> at Plymouth University. Her research interests include visual arts and cultural politics in the United States; international mural painting and public art;\u00a0New Deal Art Programmes; and state art and culture during the 1930s.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Jody Patterson In the aftermath of unleashing a new arsenal of atomic weaponry on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 American artists struggled with the question of how to respond to the unprecedented atrocities of nuclear warfare. What could they say in the wake of the carnage wrought by the militarization of science for… Continue reading Feature: “Painting radioactivity: How to represent the unrepresentable”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":168,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,137],"tags":[87,89,88,91,90],"class_list":["post-165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-histories-memory-memorialisation","tag-art-history","tag-jody-patterson","tag-painting","tag-ralston-crawford","tag-wwii","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":176,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165\/revisions\/176"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"patterson](\"http:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/60\/2016\/03\/patterson-1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>Ralston Crawford, <\/em>Test Able (1946)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n