Atoms for Art

This is Ivy Mike, the world's first full scale hydrogen bomb.  A true miracle of modern science.  One of the most powerful, and expensive things ever made my human hands.  Mike was detonated on November 1st 1952 with a yield equal to 10.4 million tons of TNT.  When the mushroom cloud stabilized it was 23 miles tall and 100 miles across.  Over a thousand times bigger than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Mike would have vaporized all five boroughs of New York City.  But really, what for?

People may say a contraption like this is stupid and useless.  They would be right in one sense, it didn't do anything.  Or at least it never did what it was meant to do, kill people.  In fact no human being has ever been killed my by a thermonuclear weapon, so what's the story here, what will this insane chapter in human history be remembered as?  The answer...art.

I recently went back to my mother's house in Mercerville NJ.  She had just cleaned out 25 years worth of garbage that had been collecting in her basement.  Luckily a box was set aside for me with some of my more valuable things in it.  One was a bundle of notebooks that represented most of my education.

Notebooks from fourth grade all the way to my last year at NYU film school.  Each notebook had two notable and hilarious characteristics.  First, no more than 10 pages had been used in any of them.  Secondly, almost every page had a drawing of an explosion on it somewhere.  Everything from a firecracker to a Mikelike mushroom.  It was an obsession.  A little disturbing that it lasted until college, but what the hell, I didn't have a lot of girlfriends perhaps that had something to do with it.  But the fact remains I was artistically inspired by these images, and I have chosen to pursue art as a career.  

Think about it, these monuments to man's desire to destroy itself live on in some of the most dramatic films and photographs ever taken.  The clouds themselves are beautiful.  Watch some of the tests if you can, the colors produced by the blasts drift down the spectrum like a rainbow being poured out of a cup.  Each one has its own characteristics and personality.  And the titles are genius:  Jangle, Teapot, Sunbeam, Roller Coaster, Zuni, Tumbler, Apple...it goes on like this.  Imagine a sculpture 23 miles tall and 100 wide fashioned from the energy that lies hidden in the very fabric of matter!  Its like lifting the curtain on the universe and getting a glimpse of what's inside.

They're only pictures, they can't hurt you, but they can still scare the living shit out of you.  Make you think about your place in this world.  How long will it be here?  How long will I be here?  The cold glare of reality bears down on you from these images and makes you think, makes you act out in some way.  And isn't that what good art should do?