How art makes visible what had been invisible--the effects of
radiation, the lives of atomic bomb survivors, and the politics of the
atomic age.
The effects of radiation are invisible, but art can make it and its
effects visible. Artwork created in response to the events of the
nuclear era allow us to see them in a different way. In Invisible
Colors, Gabrielle Decamous explores the atomic age from the perspective
of the arts, investigating atomic-related art inspired by the work of
Marie Curie, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the disaster at
Fukushima, and other episodes in nuclear history.
Decamous looks at the "Radium Literature" based on the work and life of
Marie Curie; "A-Bomb literature" by Hibakusha (bomb survivor) artists
from Nagasaki and Hiroshima; responses to the bombings by Western
artists and writers; art from the irradiated landscapes of the Cold
War--nuclear test sites and uranium mines, mainly in the Pacific and
some African nations; and nuclear accidents in Fukushima, Chernobyl, and
Three Mile Island. She finds that the artistic voices of the East are
often drowned out by those of the West. Hibakusha art and Japanese
photographs of the bombing are little known in the West and were
censored; poetry from the Marshall Islands and Moruroa is also largely
unknown; Western theatrical and cinematic works focus on heroic
scientists, military men, and the atomic mushroom cloud rather than the
aftermath of the bombings.
Emphasizing art by artists who were present at these nuclear events--the
"global Hibakusha"--rather than those reacting at a distance, Decamous
puts Eastern and Western art in dialogue, analyzing the aesthetics and
the ethics of nuclear representation.
