Topographies of Anti-Nuclear Art in Late Cold War Los Angeles

Abstract

With the tenth anniversary of the end of the Cold War drawing near, museums around the world mounted exhibitions that focused on the cultural aspect of the conflict. From the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art , almost all considerations of culture in the Cold War focus on the first two decades. The periodisation of these exhibitions reflects the dominant trend in scholarship, which centres on the years in which the slow simmer conflict experienced frequent flare ups. Studies of Cold War culture take one of two tacks, exploring the impact of the bomb on manifestations of culture, such as art, literature and film, as well as fashion, design, and everyday aesthetics. Another school concentrates on the ways that high art was pressed into diplomatic service during the Cold War. This narrative strand ties the formalist concerns that dominated aesthetics to the zeitgeist of the Cold War. Since very little political content could be imputed to non-figurative or non-realist art, the story goes, this art made the perfect expression of American culture for use by cold warrior administrations. In recent years, both accounts of culture in the Cold War have received considerable elaboration in some finely wrought studies. However, the focus still remains on the 1950s and early 1960s, with the rare work moving past the Cuban Missile Crisis. The influential historian of the Cold War, Charles S Meier, divides the long conflict into eight epochs. The lengthy period of dormancy in the 1970s, which Meier characterizes as 'domestic reform and detente' resulted in a decline in the Cold War cultural battles. It also coincided with the fading of the first wave of anti-nuclear activism, as Paul Boyer has persuasively demonstrated in his analysis of the trajectory of anti-nuclear protests. By the 1960s, the American public had lost interest in the issue.