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| Tony Price, on the road, 1983 |
"Nuclear war toll projected at 1.15 billion,"
said one headline in the New Mexican. "70 Scientists Sing N-Arms Reduction
Petition," read another on the front page of the Albuquerque Journal. Fear
of the nuclear threat has risen dramatically in the past year, evidenced by
huge demonstrations in the streets of New York and European capitals, and
simple pleas by mothers, fathers, scientists, religious and government leaders.
But as the fear has increased, so has the frustration over finding sensible and
realistic solutions to the dangers of proliferation. So pervasive is the
frustration that many have resigned themselves to the feeling that no
significant steps will be taken until the bombs start falling.
New Mexico is a particularly appropriate place for both
concern and pessimism, for it is here that the first atom bomb was built and
exploded, and many of the far more powerful thermonuclear weapons developed and
assembled. Since 1943, when the U.S. Army and the Manhattan Project took it
over, Los Alamos, "the cottonwoods," has been one of the nation's
centers for weapons research and development, to the extent that the words `Los
Alamos' have come to symbolize a sinister, uncontrollable madness, the
antithesis of its sylvan origins.
The paradoxes are maddening and fascinating. Los Alamos
sits in the shadow of the Jemez Mountains and an extinct volcano that once blew
with such force that it threw house-sized rocks into central Kansas. Los Alamos
sits upon the ruins of the Anasazi culture which, 1,000 years ago, worshipped
the union of heaven and earth. Los Alamos sits in the midst of one of the most
vibrant art centers in the world. Los Alamos is technology run amuck. It is
also a major site for research into nuclear medicine, and solar and geothermal
energy sources.
No artist in the country is as committed to calling
attention of the dangers of things nuclear as Santa Fe sculptor Tony Price. For
more than 15 years, Price has scrounged materials from the Los Alamos National
Laboratory salvage yard and constructed bizarre and poignant works from
them--wind chimes of bomb casings that ring a ghostly tune, whimsical effigy
figures of death-driven robots, tense fountains with water flowing gently over
giant electrical generating machinery.
For most of the last year, Price's Last Salt Talks has
stood on the grounds of the Shidoni Gallery in Tesuque. Beside the group of
figures is a plaque: "A trophy for the winners of the next nuclear age.
The laboratories of Los Alamos have spawned these parts that were used in the
construction of this sculptural wind chime. The sculpture represents a
confrontation of two machine powers after mankind has been blown away. An
angelic umpire with forked tongue oversees this confrontation. A monitor
records the moment on an eternal disc. All figures confront a central nuclear
monolith. --From dust it came to dust. It will pass--its song. Listen and sense
the humorous madness that has allowed this to be. God bless all...T.A. Price,
1976-1981."
Figuring it would provide an apt introduction to Price
and Los Alamos, I joined the artist on one of his bi-weekly trips up to the Zia
Salvage Company. As we drove up the hill in his blue, 1951 Chevrolet van, the
wiry, intense Price talked about the salvage yard, Los Alamos, and the
landscape.
"I've been coming up here since 1965. I've gone
through a half dozen guys who've run the place. Most of them have died. But
I've got a barometer, Ed Grothus, a guy who's been up here for 30 years. He's
got a bad back, but nothing worse. There's not as much good stuff in the yard
as there used to be. I go mostly for beautiful machined pieces that look like
art themselves."
We pass a couple of Safeway trucks descending the hill.
"That's how they get the bombs out," Price quipped. "The first
thing you run into up here is the pistol range, with the human targets."
Sure enough, moments later, we pass the pistol range. Three men and a woman,
gripping their guns in both hands, knees bent, are shooting at black, humanoid
targets. We pass a sign for the Chilton B. Anderson Meson Facility.
"Nobody knows what they're doing up there. They build such odd magnetic
numbers, particle accelerators. It's all based on new, better ways to kill. A
thermonuclear device now costs about 13 cents a head.
"Okay, here we are at the yard. You never know what
you're going to find. I've seen everything from a house to a baseball glove.
The regulars who come here are a mixture of scientists, tinkerers, resalers.
When the doors open at noon, these guys race in here, put what they want in a
pile, and you're supposed to respect the other guy's pile. It's like old ladies
at a dress sale. Low level gentleman's greed."
At precisely noon, the door of the huge steel Zia
warehouse swung open, and the 20 or so waiters rushed to get in. Price clearly
knew the ropes. We had been standing at the end of the line casually talking,
or so I thought, and suddenly Price was moving with the ghostly speed and
evasiveness of a quark. He slipped in ahead of half the line. He grabbed a
black box with the IBM logo on it, put it on the floor, and disappeared down a
ramp and into the yard at the back of the building. Aluminum wheels and brass
fittings flew from behind a stack of metal. Price appeared momentarily as he
raced between stacks.
Soon it started to rain, but Price and others stayed in
the yard, scrambling through the high tech refuse. "Look at these great
clappers," he shouted. "Weapons shields." About 12 feet in
diameter, they looked like huge tank lids.
Back inside the shed were large oscilloscopes ($25), and
small ones ($10), electric typewriters ($50), adding machines, optics, a movie
camera, thermocouple gauge/ionization gauges (marked down from $10 to $2), and
huge cabinets filled with computer components. Four men worked frantically in
one of the cabinets, stripping it of circuits or whatever was inside. The price
of the whole thing was $35. "Why don't you guys just buy the whole
thing," an observer asked. "Well," answered a curly haired man
in glasses and the classic furrowed brow of a German scientist, "it
belongs to two people. We take half, they take half. It's more
economical."
The rain turned to heavy hail that banged on the metal
roof. The movement inside slowed and people drifted to the large open door.
Some held their ears, most grimaced against the din, but the guys in the
computer cabinet kept working. Zia is only open an hour a day.
Price came in and immediately spotted a machine marked
"Pat Pend Rube Goldberg." It had wheels, pulleys, valves, and wires,
and was marked $50, and Ed Grothus had already claimed it. "It's some kind
of cutter," Price said. "I'll bet it can cut anything. Ed! I'll give
you $35 more than you paid for this!" Ed, a tall, distinguished looking
man who resembles Frank Waters minus about 20 years, emerged from the computer
cabinet and walked over. "What do you want with this thing, Tony?"
"Cut jade."
"Jade?"
"Yeah," Price said. "This heavy sculpture
doesn't sell, so I carve all this little stuff out of jade. Indians....
Everything I've carved, I've sold. It takes forever. This thing is
perfect."
"Okay," Ed said, "you can have it. But I
want the micrometer thing off it."
As Price checked out, the cashier said, "Dig deep,
Tony, $107 for everything." Price cursed under his breath. "There
went the grocery money," he said. "Ten years ago, it would have been
20 bucks. They would have begged me to take it away, and it would have all been
radioactive. Nuclear madness."
We helped Ed load his purchases (a steel desk, several
oscilloscopes, two electric typewriters, two Rolodexes, a broom, and some other
things), and spent a few minutes trying to figure out how to get the micrometer
off Price's cutter. After intense examination, the two determined the whole machine
would have to be dismantled. Ed told Price to take it home, they'd do the job
another time.
Price wanted to check out some bomb casings Ed had at his
private warehouse, which Price described as a "defrocked Methodist
church." Sure enough, a deep isosceles triangle of the former church sat
next to a dilapidated Shop-N-Cart mini mall at the edge of downtown Los Alamos.
Electronic gear was piled maybe 15 feet high in the old church, with narrow,
treacherous isles between piles. The building had an eerie feel--the steep
ascending walls and large stained glass
window holding and lighting a religious load of arcane electronics. Price
bought three bomb casings from Ed that had been stashed behind the church.
Price referred to them as bells.
It was time for lunch, and we repaired to Philomena's, a
clean place decorated with lots of glossy plastic. A willowy, tan young
waitress came to take our orders--chili cheese burgers and coffees. Price lit a
Camel, and our discussion returned to the bomb. He was eight years old when the
first one was tested at White Sands.
“That
really froze the future. Even at that age, I was heavily into art. But it was a
frustrating thing. You couldn't build anything, you couldn't do anything that
would last, because they might blow the place away next week. They've played
with that threat for years, all through the Cold War, and it affected a lot of
people, not seeing a future. It was like Pandora's Box, the atom, letting it
out of the box and it multiplying into what it is today. People don't seem very
interested in it. It's too horrible to even think about. Nobody knows probably
how many of them have been made, who has them. [Long pause] I've lived in a lot
of places, and somehow something goes on here that's different. The emotional horror
that goes on periodically, like the prison riot, things like that where they're
just destroying everything. There are probably other little pockets around the
country where these waves are interacting and crossing. The biggest horror
is--if they set off a hydrogen bomb on earth, the same thing happens that's
going on in the sun. So for that moment when the thing is going off, there's a
connection between the earth and the sun. It's like I'm singing, and I hit a
note, and I ring the window pane over there. There's a connection between me
and that window pane, almost like a tube connects us of the same vibratory
level. And the same thing with these thermonuclear devices. For an instant, the
sun is on the earth which is...not supposed to be.
“You sit in a chair and think about a nuclear explosion,
and within 15 minutes you're so drained and so lost about what to do, how to do
it.... The only thing.... People, everybody, all at once, must stop doing what
they're doing and get rid of this menace! Get it off the planet! Disassemble
it. But it would take a strike of every living being who has any feeling toward
this thing being around, to do it, to make them stop it. You'd have to stop
being a reporter and find out how to get rid of this crap...if we're to have
any future at all. The consequences of personal things are dissolved, even
countries are dissolved behind this thing. But nobody wants to deal with it,
nobody wants to think about it, nobody knows anything about it.
“I saw this great movie the other day, Dark Circle. It was filmed at one of
these weapon places in Texas, where they assemble the weapons. The plutonium
triggers are this big [indicating a circle about four inches in diameter], and
each trigger has the potential of the explosion at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The
trigger looks like a donut, the trigger for a thermonuclear device. I mean, we
haven't grown up at all! The cap gun stage is still in these guys' hearts. They
want to see bigger and better explosions.”
But
you deal with the horror all the time, don't you? In your work?
Yeah, it's there.
Somehow the pieces, the sculpture.... It's almost impossible to go out into
that yard and think up something to make a statement about time running out, so
I assemble the stuff and it becomes another statement. When I was in the
service [Marine Corps in the mid-'50s] I saw the intelligences that are running
this country, the war games, the mindlessness that goes on, and then to step it
up to this high technology in which people have no idea what they're really
doing, they're just being paid a lot of money to do it, to come up with
something worse, something more horrible. And you think that with these great
minds and all the people starving, and nothing works, everything is built so
that it falls apart tomorrow.... What kind of attitude is that? To put that
kind of attitude into assembling these weapons, anything could happen. I'm real
surprised we're both alive this minute. 1945 was a long time ago. |
| Tony Price, The Last Salt Talks |
What
is the statement you're making in your work?
As an artist, I can do
almost anything. I can paint, draw, sculpt. To do this, though, is a turn on.
Someone like me can buy parts that would take months to actually manufacture,
and millions of dollars, and I trace back the use of some of these things and
find out this was a detonator for a thermonuclear device, and yet look at the
beauty of the thing, the form and shape of it which almost makes it something
else. It's kind of a valid art in a way, since we're surrounded by millions of
pounds of this crap that we could assemble into different things. Sculpture is
getting a hold of form and shape and coming up with a new and different form or
shape. But I'm also always trying to make an anti-nuclear statement. It's like
passing the ball around to other people, right? Trying to get somebody to even
think about this horror. It's like a gnat flying in your ear. If I could be a
gnat flying in the government's ear, I'd drive it up the wall. I mean, we're
very limited as people. We couldn't fight anything individually. And this
thing's here in Los Alamos, and everybody knows about it, and nobody wants to
think about it, and each day it grows worse. The amount of waste grows worse, a
pile they can never get rid of. I mean never. A 100,000 year decay, and what
does that mean to anybody? And yet, they're willing to put it on or in the
earth. It's unleashed, there's no way to get it back. You can't go collect the
bombs, unless everybody agreed. "Let's get rid of this." Nobody's
going to do that unless they get burned by it.
Your
gnat, the gnat in your work, has a peculiar, bizarre sense of humor.
[Laughter] Yeah, you
got to have a sense of humor. But that's what this is! It's humorous that man
would devise something like this that blows up the skyline. And you talk to these
guys up here, and they say [his voice goes high pitched and nasal], "You
know, there's more than ten times the energy unleashed in the average thunder
storm than there is in some bombs." Yeah, but it's not leaving radiation
around, and burnt bodies. It's an outrage, and I think everybody ought to do
something about it, no matter what position they hold in life. Pure madness.
It's almost like this terrorist thinking is an offshoot of this nuclear
umbrella that we've grown up with. People are willing to do anything because
they realize there's no tomorrow. It's put a shadow over the whole earth,
everybody affected by it, and they don't know it! It's something that doesn't
belong in our time, doesn't have anything to do with life, unless we're
fighting some galactic battle, trying to protect the planet.
Think about what we're sitting on here. These guys have
buried their mistakes up in these mesas, and some of then have probably been
horrendous mistakes. Radiation is a thing that affects the biological time
clock, which means the biological time clock moves and everything mutates with
this movement. Hey, they make these things [indicating our hamburgers, which
have just been delivered] out of rats now, fat California rats.
Do
you remember when the bomb was first dropped? Your reaction?
We won the war, got rid
of all those Japs. But look what we unleashed! What did Oppenheimer say,
"I have become death, the destroyer of worlds." Right out of the
Bhagavad-Gita. All of them now, you see them on television, weeping for what
they've done, tormented so badly by this grand idea, right, that should no way
have entered into our.... I mean, we'd almost have a sane, working world today.
But now everybody wants one. If Argentina had the bomb, I'm sure they would
have used it rather than drop their macho and surrender to the British. [Pause]
It's inconceivable that as human beings we can't see each other's pain. We just
sort of walk by each other's pain.
[I thought about
the artist's difficulty in selling his `nuclear' constructions. He had
commented earlier that he had dumped some of his sculptures into fissures in
the earth, walled others into caves, and dragged some into the desert and left
them, hoping that anthropologists of the future would find them and wonder.]
Why
do you think your work is so hard to sell?
Well, it's a hard
market out there. I never really intended to sell it in New Mexico. I thought I
could take it where there's a great big population, where there might be some
people who would recognize it for what it was. I've had shows in New York and
sold the whole thing out. Here people are interested in the Western cowboy
thing. Over the last few years, the contemporary scene has opened up, in Taos
in particular, and Santa Fe, but I've never seen a contemporary gallery make it
here. People want a little trinket of the West, a picture of a steer they
remember. That's the intellect on the art level here. To stay alive, I've done
the carving--marble, jade, rocks, turn them into Indians, a bowl, something I
could race out and sell the same afternoon I finished it. [Pause] Everybody's
in their own dream, anyhow. The idea is to push a piece into somebody's dream,
and out here that's real difficult.
Do
you think of yourself as especially political? Are you an activist?
Politics is some kind
of joke to my head. It's always replaced by something worse, no matter what
happens.
But
I don't get the impression that you're about to give up.
I've been outraged so
long it's funny. [He laughed an unfunny laugh.] I'd have a better chance to
wake people up if I was a writer, maybe, but people are all asleep. When the
government picks up these over-developed intellects, they're just tools for
this political horror show that says, "Build me something bigger and more
horrible."
But
who are these people who are saying, "Build me something bigger, more
horrible?"
The frightened ones.
They're probably afraid to go out, yet they can sit in their laboratories and
cook up a little bacteria that's gonna take us all down.
It
is a little strange up here in Los Alamos. Driving to the restaurant, I saw
houses with cyclone fences around them and big German shepherds in the yards.
And this in what must be among the most secure towns in the world. I can't imagine
there'd be much crime up here.
It's the almighty
dollar that's got them all up here, great grants, big bucks. People here make
ten times what people down the hill make. What do they do with it? They buy
their cars, educate their kids in the same way they were educated. They don't
know any better. There's no consciousness up here, yet there's 15 churches in
that little strip we just passed! [Pause] People just aren't happy. And it
started centuries ago when we arrived here and started turning the thing over.
With technology.... We should have stopped with the typewriter.
Do
you have any feeling about why it's happened here? Why Los Alamos?
Well, they say it was,
like, Oppenheimer went to boys school up here [the old Los Alamos Ranch
School], and he said this would be a perfect place to have a secret operation.
But I think everything repeats itself so many times in the same place. It's
like at the totality of this moment, right now, the totality of all men is
giving up everything mankind can give up at this moment, everything that's
happening to them. Some are being born, some dying, some being crucified, some
being run over, some discovering something. The thoughts, feelings,
movements--that's all we do as people. We don't do anything but think, feel,
and move. Each one of us is a cell in the body of mankind, and we're giving out
this energy. Each thought is in tune with the vibration that goes to join other
thought, goes to maintain something else in nature. We have no idea what it is,
yet we say, "Well, I'm the president of a bank, I'm an important asshole,
and this guy is the tailor, he's a jerk"--we're all doing the same thing.
It's almost as if you can see each city as this enormous crystal giving off
this energy, that these people are producing inside of it. It's like this
machine of life, and over on the other side of the planet it might be grinding
people up in droughts and wars, starving babies...the machine of life forcing
these people to die, to give up on thinking, feeling, moving. Now here's
something comes along that will stop everything--nuclear weapons. It's like,
when they blew the first one off, it could have just.... They didn't know. Some
theorists thought it would burn off the atmosphere. "What the hell, let's
try it anyhow. There are six of us willing to try it," right?
There's some force that's making us do it. We built this
thing from fear, a super fear force. The Germans, Russians.... Actually, the
Germans weren't making bombs. They were making a reactor for lighting a city or
something. Even that's pure madness, using a reactor to make hot water. You can
make hot water other ways. Why contaminate everything, change everything, for
hot water? [Gallows laughter] An unlimited, cheap supply of energy--what a
bunch of b.s. that's been perpetrated. This thing's [waving about at Los
Alamos] cost so much money, we could have fed everybody, given them their own
ranch, their own cow. [Long pause] But they don't think about any kind of
sequence. One guy is focussed in on the highest temperature a thermonuclear
bomb can produce, and somebody comes along and grabs that information, and they
take it over to Jones and see what he's created, he's got a little information,
but nobody knows what the other guy is doing. That's the horror of this secret
society up here. If it doesn't work they cut it up and throw it in the yard...
And
you grab it...
And there's some fool
waiting for the stuff.
We left Philomena's. Driving back down the hill, Price
talked about his love of New Mexico. "A lot of it's the space. There are
no ground rules here, or very few. The natural sculpture, just what the wind
and rain have done, far surpasses anything else I've seen."
Tony Price himself creates art that makes a bizarre and
pointed comment on the nuclear condition. He combines the sheer beauty of
technology with the ultimate horror of the fears that inspired the function of
the beauty. It's as if nuclear weapons represent the best and the blackest. Our
rational powers and our irrational fears have grown hand in hand over the last
several thousands of years, and here we are at the clearest crossroads humanity
has ever encountered.
Passing Tsankawi, the lovely ruins just outside Los
Alamos, I remembered a passage in John Fowles' novel, Daniel Martin, from which
I had first learned of the ancient village, not marked on most maps. When I got
home, I turned right to the following:
"In some way, the mesa transcended all place and
frontier; it had the haunting and mysterious personal familiarity...[and] a
simpler human familiarity as well, belonging not just to some obscure and
forgotten Indian tribe, but to all similar moments of supreme harmony in human
culture; to certain buildings, paintings, music, passages of great poetry. It
validated, that was it; it was enough to explain all the rest, the blindness of
evolution, its appalling wastage, indifference, cruelty, futility. There was a
sense in which it was a secret place, a literal retreat, an analogue of what
had always obsessed my mind; but it also stood in triumphant opposition, and
this was what finally, for me, distinguished Tsankawi from the other sites: In
them there was a sadness, the vanished past, the cultural loss; but Tsankawi
defeated time, all deaths. Its deserted silence was like a sustained high note,
unconquerable."
Stephen Parks, July,
1983
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