

ON THE INTERNATIONAL SHADOWS PROJECT: 1990

When the first atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima at 8:15 a.m. 
August 6, 1945, people within 300 meters of ground zero were 
vaporized by the intense heat. They left faint marks on nearby 
surfaces. These have been called shadows, and these shadows have 
been growing in importance as symbols, examples, and icons during 
the 45 years since. 

During the early to mid '80's the maniacal nuclear stratagems of 
the Reagan administration gave great impetus to the global 
anti-nuclear movement and artists, poets, and composers responded 
with an upwelling of oppositional work. A resurgence of the 
guerrilla theater of the '60's emerged as performance art. 
Anti-nuclear mail-art flourished. Ruggero Maggi in Italy and 
John Held, Jr. in the U.S. united mail-art and performance and 
sponsored many events at home and abroad. Perhaps the most 
important of the mail-art shows was held in 1988 in Hiroshima 
itself, under international sponsorship with the active guidance 
of Shozo Simamoto, Mayumi Handa and others. Work from this show was 
passed on to form the nucleus of a 1989 show in Calexico, a city on 
the U.S.-Mexico border, curated by Harry Polkinhorn. This material 
was passed on to me after the Calexico show closed. Polkinhorn and 
I discussed turning it into a DNA show, one that divided and 
replicated itself, with part sent this year to Clemente Padin in 
Montevideo who wanted to do a show.

Invitations started going out in late winter. One of my concerns 
was to bring in work from artists outside the mail-art genre. I hope 
future curators of similar shows will continue along these lines, 
making the project as open and uncliquish as possible. In the 
invitations I said the show would be "lightly juried." I would have 
liked to have left it completely unjuried, but wanted to be able to 
exclude work that would harm or get in the way of other pieces. One 
piece was set up so it made a continuous cycle of loud sounds that 
would have distracted attention from other works and would have been 
a sort of water-drip torture for people who worked in the bookstore 
or read in the gallery. This was the only piece excluded from the show. 
The openness of the show drew some criticism: Some thought that without 
a jury the show would be made up of nothing but junk from amateurs, 
fanatics, and lunatics. This may have discouraged a few people from 
sending work, but predictions of a cascade of trash were not born out 
by the show. A number of contributors fall into the amateur category 
but they didn't contribute insincere or irrelevant art. The lone 
rejectee was gracious enough to send a less harmful piece in place of 
the rejected one. That's hardly irrational behavior -- I'd like to see 
more people act as well in juried shows. 

The lack of a jury gets at one of the main goals of the show. The atomic 
age has been one of secrecy, exclusion, and elitism. It seems 
particularly appropriate to oppose this with complete openness, 
universal enfranchisement, and inclusion. Jerome Rothenberg's notion of 
the Critic as Angel of Death, as the officer at Auschwitz who decided 
who would live and who would go to the crematorium, seems appropriate 
here. We opened the show to everyone who wanted to participate, not 
deciding which works should "live" and which should "die." 

The nuclear age has been based in distrust, not only of foreign nations 
but also of people at home. The obsession with secret plots and 
domestic spies and saboteurs characteristic of the McCarthy witch hunt 
is alive and well in the current movement for greater censorship. A 
basic assumption of the Shadows Project is that artists can be trusted. 
Some contributors sent work that questioned or made fun of the concerns 
of the show, but none were guilty of bad faith. In this context, it is 
interesting to note that although the moral majority gestapo regularly 
patrolled the show, they found nothing that could be used to attack the 
gallery or close the exhibition. 

The show included about 600 pieces from some 300 contributors living in 
38 countries. Work included paintings ranging from Memling-like 
miniatures to large abstractions; elaborate collages and found art; 
video and audio tapes; poetry and musical scores; photos of everything 
from Hiroshima wreckage to children's faces to previous Shadows 
performances. Any inventory would be incomplete -- the show included 
many anonymous pieces, and even provenience is problematic: I sent 
invitations to artists in East Germany, and received responses from 
some of them at new addresses in West Germany, and the two Germanies 
ceased to be divided shortly after the show closed. About half the 
work was new. Of work from previous shows, some pieces are dated as 
early as 1982. It would be interesting to track their progression from 
show to show around the world over the years. Going by dates, some 
artists apparently had contributed to shows nearly every year throughout 
the decade.

That many pieces were anonymous brings out several important things about 
mail art. It is not an art form from which artists expect to make money 
or achieve fame. It is a form that is not intended to be a commodity to 
be bought or owned but to go out in the world with a message that is more 
important than the identity or fortunes of the artist. Hence it should 
not be surprising that a large number of contributors were from eastern 
Europe and the Fascist dictatorships of Latin America; that is, places 
where artists' commitments have been put to a severe test. That little 
work came from Asian countries other than Japan or from Africa is a strong 
reminder that many people in the world cannot participate in shows like 
this because they cannot afford postage. Perhaps it is a shortcoming of 
these shows that none of their curators has found a way of getting around 
this. 

Though we don't have any numbers to back this up, the show apparently 
drew a larger number of viewers than any other mounted in the summer 
at Woodland Pattern during its ten years at the present location. The 
show formally ended on August 6, Hiroshima Day, with a poetry reading. 
Despite the official closing, the show was left up for an additional two 
weeks. This not only gave more people a chance to see it, it also 
suggested a reprieve of sorts: it's hard not to think that the human race 
put a gun to its head and pulled the trigger on August 6, 1945 and is 
only waiting helplessly for the hammer to detonate the cap. Maybe we can 
keep that from happening. 

1990 was a torch bearer year for the International Shadows Project. When 
the show opened on June 17, concern about nuclear weapons was probably at 
its lowest point in forty five years. A lot of the careless euphoria of 
the preceding year was still in the air. By the time the show ended in 
mid August, the world seemed to have changed. Troops were massing in Iraq 
and Saudi Arabia, ready for a war that could go nuclear. Of the two giants 
that had been terrorizing the world with their threats of nuclear 
armageddon for half a century, one was in effect bankrupt and drowning in 
debt, while the other was rapidly disintegrating. In their place, their 
former client states were arming themselves with nuclear weapons made from 
materials the superpowers had given them. A world in which two bullies 
bluff each other now seemed safer than one in which many impoverished 
countries had nuclear devices and little to lose in using them. At the same 
time, many people in the U.S. began to advocate the use of nuclear weapons 
to rid themselves of the Iraqi nuisance. 

By springtime, many of those who had advocated nuking Baghdad were 
expressing sincere and heartfelt sympathy with the Kurds and other victims 
of the Iraq war. Clearly these people didn't have the slightest 
understanding of the indiscriminate destructive power of even a small 
nuclear bomb. One of the purposes of these shows should be educational. 
Serious consideration of the devastation caused by the bomb detonated over 
Hiroshima (little more than a firecracker by contemporary standards) 
apparently must be encouraged; and the images of human suffering, with 
human faces, must be kept before those who advocate the use of nuclear 
weapons. This is particularly important after a war that seemed to many 
people in the industrial nations like a video game.

By the following winter, the Soviet Union had become the world's first 
empire to disassemble itself. Through some sort of mass psychosis that is 
completely beyond my comprehension many people came to believe that the 
nuclear nightmare was over. This folly continued despite a hellish civil 
war in Yugoslavia that could easily be a rehearsal for civil wars in the 
former Soviet Republics, or more massive wars between the half dozen 
nuclear states that covered the center of Eurasia. The possibilities of 
nuclear weapons being used by China, India, the Koreas and other Asian 
countries became more apparent. None of the polyannas seemed concerned 
with the possible uses of material and technological ability that would 
be looking for some practical application if they were not used in such 
conflicts. The people who spoke of the end of the nuclear era had 
forgotten how ready people in the U.S. had been to use nuclear weapons on 
Iraq. Those who sponsor Shadows Shows in the future will have a more 
difficult job than mine. Of course, no matter how many shows are 
generated, not even if their number grows to thousands per anum, these 
shows can not be expected to put an end to the existence of nuclear 
weapons. But they may augment the many other anti-nuclear activities 
launched by responsible people all over the world. An unfortunate problem 
that any anti-nuke group faces is the speed with which images and ideas 
become passé. My hope is that the changing of future locations and 
curators will keep the shows themselves changing fast enough to stay ahead 
of the ennui and trendyness that are the strongest allies nuclear weapons 
have. I can see large scale changes in the aesthetics and the approaches 
of these shows. I hope this will be magnified in coming years when I'm no 
longer involved in setting them up. 

Since Clemente Padin stopped answering my letters before the Milwaukee 
show opened, I assumed that there would not be one in Uruguay, and feared 
that he might have become one of The Disappeared -- particularly since 
much of his work has dealt with the subject of Disappeared Persons, and he 
had been one himself for several years, until an Amnesty International 
style letter writing campaign initiated by mail-artists forced his 
release. A letter from Padin arrived in mid October saying that the 
Montevideo show was mounted along with an Africa show. In this case, the 
crazy optimism characteristic of these endeavors was completely justified. 




[This is a revision of an essay that first appeared in WORLD'S EDGE, an 
English language Japanese publication, edited by Sherry Reniker in 1991.] 
