Nobuho Nagasawa: “The Atomic Cowboy”

NJCU revives a show from the 1990s to commemorate the bombing of Hiroshima — and to make a few frightening points

In the soup: Nagasawa's explosive stack.

It says something about the amount of peril in today’s world that nuclear holocaust has lost ground to other horsemen of the apocalypse. Pandemics, environmental collapse, fascist ascendancies and the spread of carceral states: they haven’t chase the mushroom cloud from our nightmares, but they’ve eaten into its apocalyptic market share. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 took a little bit of the Cold War pressure off. No longer were we face to face with the ICBM. It was still there, dangling above us, but there was suddenly some breathing space between the payload and our poor tender heads. 

For us, anyway. For reasons too obvious and too painful to dwell on, Tokyo artists might feel differently about the nuclear threat than their stateside counterparts do. Eighty years ago, surviving painters, writers, and sculptors from Japan were the witnesses to a terrible truth about the destructive capacities of human beings. Modern Japanese artists, people for whom “fallout” is no metaphor, are the direct inheritors of that memory. They may have observations to make about the atomic bomb that have eluded the notice of many modern Americans. When Tokyo conceptual artist Nobuho Nagasawa first showed “The Atomic Cowboy” at the Daniel Saxon Gallery in Los Angeles, she was doing us a favor. It was 1992 — just after the dissolution of the Soviet Union — and the national mood was broadly optimistic. We weren’t attuned to the ways in which our pursuit of nuclear weaponry put our own country at risk. 

We still aren’t. We think of Japan as the only country that has felt the scalding heat of the blastwave and the insidious force of radiation. But one thousand nuclear bombs were test-detonated on United States soil, including hundreds at the Nevada Test Site. “The Atomic Cowboy,” reconstructed and reanimated at the Visual Arts Gallery at New Jersey City University (100 Culver Ave.) by Professor Midori Yoshimoto, explores the chilling ramifications of the arms race, and asks us to consider the cost of victory.

“Cowboy’s Dream,” the wall installation that anchors this show, is a grid of black and white headshots of film actors who made Westerns in the American desert during the height of the nuclear testing campaign. Every one of them developed cancer. Beneath each face, the unsparing Nagasawa lists the movies made and the afflictions developed: lung cancer, uterine cancer, leukemia, lymphoma, brain tumors, depressive suicide. Right in the middle of the display is a tribute to three hundred Native Americans who served as extras on the 1956 John Wayne vehicle The Conqueror, shot downwind of the Yucca Mountain test site. Almost half of the cast and crew would eventually get sick, including the director and both leads.

On the front lines, even if they didn't know it.

Was there a correlation? It’s never been proven. Cancer rates in the United States are disturbingly high, and Hollywood actors are not known for healthy lifestyles. But radioactive particles by the billions were carried by the breeze to nearby towns. It’s hard to believe that contamination of that magnitude left the countryside — or those who inhabited it — unmolested. And people with no interest in preserving the feelings (or the finances) of American authorities don’t believe it. They’ve even got a term for the people caught in the killing drift: downwinders. 

In “Atomic Cowboy,” Nagasawa jumps into the controversy feet-first, pairing the photo installation with a vitrine filled with supporting evidence, including an excellent essay by Kristine McKenna in a thirty-year old Los Angeles Times spread. But the artist doesn’t need to prove her point the way a lawyer might. All she needs to do is let “Cowboy’s Dream” and the surrounding pieces speak for themselves. The installation draws much of its force from the nature of Western headshots and the tough-guy swagger they projected. These actors took a certain attitude into the screen test: thoroughly American in their individualism and belief in the score-settling efficacy of gunplay and fisticuffs as they are commonly practiced in the national imagination. For reasons both professional and psychological, each carries the invincibility of the cowboy. Yet ultimately, they were felled by a force that nobody can see. Their nineteenth century weaponry, real and fake, could not match a space-age threat that we still struggle to wrap our minds around.

This disjunction is a problem. The United States likes to talk tough and dream tougher, but we are absolutely unequal to the magnitude of the threat we face. We’re so far from crafting a rational response to the killing technology we’ve invented ourselves that we do our best to pretend that it isn’t there. When actors who’ve made movies near test sites develop cancer, we’ll refuse to connect the dots. When international relations are shuffled and complicated by the threat of nuclear annihilation, we’ll barely mention the existential factor underpinning American dominance. The U.S.A. is like a man open-carrying a very large and lethal shotgun, stuffed with powder and sparking, going through his day, ordering coffee and interacting with terrified neighbors, all while acting like there’s nothing strange about his behavior. If that gun goes off, will we be ready? Have we forgotten that we’re even carrying it?

The maddening dailiness of our post-Hiroshima reality is addressed by several of the other pieces in “Atomic Cowboy.” Against the gallery’s south wall, Nagasawa has stacked a tall pyramid of cans, saluting us in the familiar Campbell’s livery. Yet she’s adjusted the labels so they read Cloud of Mushroom soup. An illustration of an atomic blast adorns each one, and a note on the side of the cylinder informs us that it was packaged in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Nuclear weapons, the sculpture suggests, have been fed to us alongside the rest of our groceries; they’re part of the stockpile of consumer capitalism and no more worrisome than any other item we might purchase. As long as nobody starts opening cans, we reckon we’ll be okay.

Yet the western landscape is littered with empties. Nagasawa is determined to impress the extent of testing programs like Operation Latchkey — two years of atmospheric detonations visible for miles around the Nevada Test Site.The artist fills another wall of the gallery with printed records of atomic tests and scatters cookie cutters in the shape of Homer Simpson, a symbol of casual human error in the face of nuclear threat, all over the floor. A few are standing up. Most are knocked over. 

I hope not.

Wisely, Yoshimoto hasn’t let “The Atomic Cowboy” stand on its own. Nagasawa’s exhibition shares the Visual Arts Gallery with “Take it home, for (_) shall not repeat the error,” a four-artist group show that situates the nuclear bombing of Japan in a context way too broad to fit in a soup bowl or shopping cart. In a little more than a dozen pointed pieces, curator and Hiroshima native Souya Handa connects atomic weapons with timekeeping, computing, resource capture, global conflict, and ongoing social unrest.

The Congolese artist Sixte Kakinda contributes video loops that remind us that the uranium that made Fat Man and Little Boy so fissile was mined by exploited laborers in his country; Kei Ito draws a connection to the Fukushima disaster and the seductive power of nuclear shortcuts in a volatile world. Then there’s painter Layla Yamamoto, whose painting of a turbulent sea bears an unsettling caption: Postwar Is Over, she tells us. The world in 2025 is a more dangerous place than it was even a decade ago. Is the period of fragile calm that held after the end of World War II coming to a close? The sound of sabers rattling around the globe tell us what Nobuho Nagasawa knew: we’re all downwinders now. As long as there are nuclear weapons, we always will be.

(The Visual Arts Gallery at NJCU is open during school hours: Monday through Friday, noon until 5 p.m. If you’d like, you can also write the Art Department directly for a tour at gallery@njcu.edu.)