Three nails for J. Robert Oppenheimer, more than half a century after
the Manhattan Project.
For Want of a Nail takes as its starting point a series of curious
memoranda sent from J. Robert Oppenheimer's office in October 1943 and
archived in the Los Alamos Historical Museum, in which the eminent
scientist repeatedly requests a nail in the wall upon which he could
hang his hat. The persistence and specificity of the request for this
nail inspired the international art collective Futurefarmers to create,
by hand (and after more than a half-century delay), three nails for the
theoretical physicist: one forged from a meteorite, one cast using 1943
steel pennies, and a third made by re-fusing Trinitite, a material
formed by residue from the Trinity nuclear bomb test.
Growing out of a site-specific contribution to an exhibition in Santa
Fe, New Mexico, this book engages the region's complex nuclear history
as it relates to land use, resource extraction, and the far-reaching
decisions that were made within the Manhattan Project. Throughout this
multidisciplinary project, Futurefarmers constructs a narrative that
runs parallel, and in some cases counter to, the conventional accounts
of the Manhattan Project and Oppenheimer, its chief architect. Through
video stills, production shots, essays, and interviews--presented in a
book with uncut, unopened pages that the reader may cut to access more
images--For Want of a Nail not only opens new ways to think about the
region's particular atomic history, but also prompts more general
reflections on how knowledge and narrative are embedded and communicated
in material objects, both ephemeral and ancient.
**Contributors
**Peter Galison, Patrick Kiley, Lucy Lippard, Megan Prelinger and Rick
Prelinger, Anne Walsh
