Category: etc.

Here is an ad for Aspen Magazine in which The Madisons are composited all over their living room with pieces of various Aspens, including Brian O’Doherty’s “Museum in a Box,” Aspen 5+6 (1967). Actually, the text calls it a “museum of the moment.”
And here are a bunch of awesome-sounding Aspens which really did not happen like this.

Our next issue on Far Eastern Thought will be brimful with five rolled scrolls, miniature screens, Zen parable cards, even a dragon kite. All scented with incense. It’s the issue you’ll hang all over the house.
Other issues-in-the-works: an English Christmas Box edited and designed in London by Britain’s top artists and writers…a Buckminster Fuller issues with each article folding into a geodesic dome or other geometric construction…a Wilderness issue complete with Gourmet Survival Kit…a Cybernetic Art issue documenting the merger of art and science…and Much More.

O’Doherty’s 5+6 really turned out to be Aspen’s peak. That British box took at least two Christmases to arrive, and the Far East issue finally appeared, sans incense, four years later, the last one. Which is too bad; I’d love to see these other issues realized.

As cool as it might be as an object, there’s something about that “Manhattan Project Glass” window that just ain’t sitting right with me. I will not be bidding.

The Faces of Project Y, detail, assembled by Alex Wellerstein, via nuclearsecrecy.org
But researching it has led me to some absolutely amazing other objects from the dawn of the nuclear age that are well worth pursuing in an artistic context.
Let’s start with The Faces of Project Y, by historian Alex Wellerstein. A couple of years ago Wellerstein pulled all the recently declassified ID badge photos from the 1,200+ people who worked on Project Y, the code name for the Los Alamos section of the Manhattan Project. Then he tiled them up into one giant, 31×40 grid. It’s awesome.
That’s Richard Feynman smirking in the center of the detail, just above the woman with the Gerhard Richter blur. Wellerstein puts faces to other notable names on his blog, Nuclear Secrecy, and has created some swag coffee cups and other merch with the images on it. A giant print would be nice. But what’s needed, clearly, is wallpaper. Rather than lose the 29 folks on the bottom, incomplete row, maybe you could get all the images as individual files, and just let it flow till the wall is full.
I don’t know how I missed the extraordinary career and sad story of nuclear sculptor James L. Acord. Thanks to Seth David Friedman for pointing me to Tom Moody’s incredible 2001 tale of Acord’s rare, realized masterpiece, Monstrance for a Grey Horse. I will keep reading.

Then there is the first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1, built under the football stadium of the University of Chicago in 1942. To create a sustained, controlled nuclear chain reaction, Enrico Fermi and his team embedded uranium balls in a giant, quasi-spherical lattice of 45,000 graphite bricks, which were supported by a lumber grid, which was enclosed by a square, black rubber balloon.

Last year the Dept. of Energy posted photos of CP-1 to flickr, and it was basically Carl Andre’s greatest sculpture. Ever.

CP-1 graphit brick at the Atomic Testing Museum, img via flickr user rocbolt’s CP-1 photo album
At least four of the graphite bricks are known to survive. Here’s one at Oak Ridge. This photo by Kelly Michals is of the brick at the Atomic Testing Museum in Nevada. I don’t know why you couldn’t recreate the thing anew. From a window with a dodgy backstory, an untimely death, and a bunch of mug shots, to a nuclear Carl Andre Death Star inside a Kaba’a. These dots practically connect themselves!

Here is a window from the world’s first full-scale nuclear reactor in Hanford, Washington, USA. It is 3 feet high, 4.5 feet wide, and six inches thick and weighs 1,500 pounds.
I will buy it from someone who bought it from a junkyard in Walla Walla. I will strip it from its casement, except the bottom, where I will install three LEDs. Then I will attach it to an H-shaped base made of 8-inch timbers. I will attach this base to an old wooden cart.

I will take other, smaller windows of leaded glass salvaged from the reactor, which are 16×26 inches, and weigh 800 pounds, and I will carve some of them into sculptures. I will polish some large shards of this glass into abstract sculptures.

I will carve one piece into the shape of a mushroom cloud. I will set these sculptures on a basalt column mined from the reactor site. I will carve two pieces into spheres.

Someone will cut other pieces of this glass into an indeterminate number of 2-inch cubes. Someone else will carve one piece of this glass into a 1.5-inch skull.

I will try to sell as much of this stuff as I can through a booth at the Mineral & Fossil Co-op in Tucson. I will sell a 4-inch diameter sphere for $10,000 and a shard sculpture for $48,000 at Bonham’s.
The next year, I will show more shards and the mushroom cloud and the big window at the Mineral & Fossil Co-op in Tucson. Where no one buys the mushroom cloud ‘curiosity’ for $150,000. I will fail to sell the mushroom cloud for $100,000 at auction.
The next year, I will try to sell the big window on the trolley at auction for $150,000-250,000.
The Internet will explode. Yet no one will ask why, if the windows from the Manhattan Project were 16×26 inches, and this one is 36×54 inches, it is not actually from the Manhattan Project, but maybe from any other period of the Hanford site’s five-decades of operation, when its nine reactors and five large-scale plutonium processing complexes produced most of the plutonium for the 60,000+ weapons in the US nuclear arsenal.
And no one will ask why, if the glass is not actually radioactive or contaminated in some other way, even though it was salvaged from one of the most toxic sites on the planet, one of the first EPA Superfund sites [pdf], where specialized crews of hundreds of people spend five years dismantling structures containing such windows in ways that don’t dislodge even a flake of plutonium-laden paint, to the cost of $150 billion and counting, with decades still to go, maybe it wasn’t installed in a reactor? Maybe it was parts? Maybe there’s any documentation or provenance information at all regarding this glass’s actual historical use?
And certainly no one will ask about the downwinders of Hanford, and the soldiers and employees and their families, who have suffered from birth defects and cancer for the entire span of the nuclear age, and who have faced stonewalling, footdragging, and abrogation from the government and the military.
A blogger looking at this situation, who was initially drawn to the window because of its resemblance to minimalist sculpture, and its macho-retro-sexiness; and who would then get a little hot and bothered because he has a thing for Cold War-era spheres; and who knows his way around an auction, who would probably start digging. And then he would try to piece the story together, and try to get into the mind of the people involved. And it would keep him up late, when he was supposed to be doing other work. And then in the morning he would decide that the whole thing is screwy from top to bottom, and makes absolutely no sense at all, and what is going on with our world and history and politics and people and money.

Artist TimK made this animated GIF simulation of viewing Marcel Duchamp’s Étant Donnés some time before January 1998, which was when the Internet Archive crawled his Duchamp webpages for the first time.
That site is long gone, but TimK now has marcelduchamp.org.