The Language of Explosion
“The Language of Explosion: Documenting Nuclear Craters in the American West”, by Mary Walling Blackburn, was published in Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory in the issue on “falling” in the autumn of 2004.
The visual phenomenology of the crater has hardly been critically exhausted. For example, the article does not touch upon the photographs of bomb craters, created and photographed during the Vietnam War. On photos posted on veteran’s web sites, the craters take on multiple architectual dimensions- swimming pool, fish farm, emergency room. Where whence exploded bodies lay, soldiers swim. In other flooded craters, Vietnamese farmers raise fish. In the bottom of a dry bomb crater, US soldiers place their wounded men until the helicopter can evacuate. And so on.
To inhabit the crater, swimmer or the farmer, appears to have no truck with death. The swimmer or farmer defies culturally held notions that horror is locationally situated and that to dwell in its remains contaminates. But when they set up shop in craters, is it a cool refution of the past or is it a trembling dare? Does the crater dweller refuse to see a boundary between death and himself? And what of the viewer’s boundaries? How do we reconcile the fact that we notice the swimmer’s body in something that isn’t entirely outside of desire or the desire to laugh?
In the photo below, taken outside of Tay Ninh, the emerging soldier’s legs have been stripped of color; the photographer muses that perhaps the chemicals in the water had contaminated them all. And if we follow through on this line of thinking and realize that environmental cancers are sometimes created by this kind of contamination, we realize that a death by explosion can travel very slowly from a long ways of off. In an interview, Dee Dee Ramone (of the Ramones) describes an uncle who faught for the Nazis in Russia for six years. When he returns home to Germany, he goes swimming in a bomb crater and drowns. Making sense of this enemy soldier’s death is not unlike gaging the distance of the storm by its thunder; we can count the miles between explosive sound and its contact with the body.
Here is the pdf for “The Language of Explosion” language_of_explosion.pdf
