Julia Bryan-Wilson on Lisi Raskin.
Bryan-Wilson, Julia
LISI RASKIN ONCE SPENT AN ENTIRE MONTH looking for nuclear
submarines. The New York-based artist was on a residency in 2005 at Cove
Park in Scotland, which overlooks a Trident submarine docking base at
Loch Long. While she never caught a glimpse of one of these
billion-dollar machines slithering through the water, her attempt was in
perfect keeping with her ongoing investigations into the effects of
nuclear culture on the landscape. The installation that resulted from
Raskin's month-long vigil, (Remote Location) Observation Station,
2005, at Glasgow's Transmission Gallery, featured a video in which
she playfully became the submarine she longed to witness: She holds a
cardboard cutout of a submarine against her side as she crawls back and
forth in front of a pond; like a kid staging battle scenes in the
bathtub, she makes beeping sounds to simulate the sub's mechanical
noises. The video was shown in a ramshackle watchtower; in another part
of the gallery, a gray plasticine form rose up from the floor as if it
were a vessel emerging out of the sea.
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As these intentionally naive re-creations demonstrate, Raskin is
less concerned with faithfully transcribing atomic culture than with
plumbing the ways in which it haunts our collective imagination. She
grew up during the Reagan era in Miami, near the Turkey Point nuclear
power plant, but became attuned to the time's rhetoric of
apocalypse only after watching the legendary post-nuclear attack
television movie The Day After (1983)--whose bleak vision she recalled
after September 11, 2001, when she was in her first year of the MFA program at Columbia University in New York. The frenzy regarding
national security that followed reactivated her adolescent fixations on
ticking bombs and lingering radioactivity. Since then, her art has
delved explicitly into how these issues reverberate within spaces both
psychic and geopolitical.
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Raskin works across media, often creating site-specific
installations that mix fact and science fiction. For her Columbia thesis
in 2003, she made use of an alter ego called Herr Doktor Wolfgang
Hauptman II, described by the artist as a "mad-eyed scientist"
whose great discovery is TerraClear, a "thermophilic fungus"
designed to decontaminate radioactive material. This feat of
hypothetical biological engineering later appeared in '84-Ignalina
Heights, 2003, an interactive installation Raskin created in
collaboration with her brother for the group exhibition "24/7"
at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania: The work comprised
a mock sales office for a housing development (Ignalina Heights) on the
grounds of Lithuania's nuclear power plant, newly
"cleaned" by Hauptman's fungus--a postutopian,
protocapitalist Superfund site if ever there was one. A third project
that year, The Research Station, shown at the High Desert Test Sites 3
in Joshua Tree, California, showcased Hauptman's various futuristic
inventions, including a personal battery pack modeled on a nuclear
reactor. Raskin's tent outpost, with hazard tape and a makeshift
Geiger counter, alluded to Joshua Tree's location in the atomic
West. While artist Mel Chin has collaborated with actual scientists who
use plants to remove environmental toxins (Revival Field, 1990-93),
Raskin, with her fictive projects, hyperbolically performs, rather than
enacts, research. Whereas Chin specializes in engaged community
practices, Raskin stages theatrical demonstrations that send up zealous
claims of technological progress.
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This performance works on several registers. Her
persona--Hauptman--tests the limits of the audience's credulity with fantastical "what if" scenarios about removed pollutants.
(Such speculative situations, of course, are at the heart of the
cold-war mentality, with its intricately plotted war games.) And viewers
are asked to suspend their disbelief about the viability of Hauptman not
only as a scientist but also as a man. Raskin's drag performance is
a thick and elaborate pun, riffing on the doubling of nuclear power and
nuclear family. Her gender passing queerly cites, and potentially
detonates, the rigid heteronormativity enforced by the nuclear family.
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Raskin soon left Hauptman behind to pursue new investigative
methods. A trip to Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the
site of critical plutonium and uranium research for the Manhattan
Project, inspired the artist's 2004 installation at Socrates
Sculpture Park in New York, Portal 3, included in the group show
"Field: Science, Technology and Nature." Mimicking the
lab's sealed-off areas of hazardous materials, Raskin dumped
swirling globs of paint on the ground, Lynda Benglis style, then
surrounded the spill with an exaggerated level of security, including a
fence, some barbed wire, a siren, and a coded keypad. Yet the warning
signs were drawn with Sharpie, crayon, and pencil, and the whole
apparatus had the cobbled-together feel of a tomboy's secret fort.
That the elements were so clearly handmade reflects Raskin's
increasing disinterest in artistic simulation. After a sculptural
component of her MFA thesis, Bomb, 2003--featuring bottles, a fireproof metal can, and wire--prompted a weekend security guard at
Columbia's LeRoy Neiman Gallery to call the police, Raskin lost her
taste for the terrors and thrills of the almost real. This sets her
apart from artists such as Gregory Green, who creates exact replicas of
nuclear devices--minus the plutonium--getting him into legal trouble
with postal workers and airport screeners. Raskin sees these scare
tactics as inherently fraught, given the positions of those who must
police the boundary between art and threat; as she explains, "I am
not interested in being a provocateur pitted against the working
class." Her deliberately clumsy fabrication registers the horrors
of potential annihilation with more of a psychological charge than
steely-eyed replication.
Rather than seeking verisimilitude, Raskin combines crafty
manipulation with serious attention to detail in her large-scale
environments. Space Ship, 2004, is a foam and fabric version of an
interplanetary rocket whose high-tech buttons and knobs are
schematically rendered with markers; Suite U-234, 2005, is a hexagonal
control room made of tinfoil but featuring real '60s-era control
panels from a defunct chemical-engineering laboratory. This tension
between the factual and the pretend is also evident in drawings such as
Auf/Zu (Open/Closed), 2005. Included in the 2005 group show
"Atomica" at Lombard-Freid Projects, New York, the work is a
painstaking depiction of a military chamber done in crayon and colored
pencil. The elementary-school materials and wobbly lines belie the
accuracy of these works, which are filled with details culled from the
documentary photography of Paul Shambroom and Robert Polidori, as well
as from Raskin's own trip to former East German nuclear bunkers.
Her photographs of a railway yard (where she was nearly arrested for
trespassing) and images from a government pamphlet on a 1955 nuclear
test were the source material for her collaged drawings in Switchyard,
2007, an installation currently on view at Guild & Greyshkul in New
York. This direct appropriation recalls the works of painter Joy
Garnett, whose imagery is derived from declassified governmental
documents.
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Though the cold war may be over, we are still shadowed by
anxieties--however potentially trumped up--of dirty bombs, WMDs, and
rogue warheads. This subject is undeniably riveting, and Raskin returns
to it compulsively. Maybe, however, in her month at Loch Long, she both
did and did not want to see a deadly submarine; the rush of adrenaline
that comes from witnessing destructive power up close can veer into
obsessive panic. Raskin's re-creations of bombs and bunkers thus
function like protective amulets, defusing and demystifying their
potency as shared nightmares. Her fascination with the nuclear sublime,
an awe tempered by fear, continues to lead her to far-flung places. For
her next project, she will expand her explorations further still. She
plans to travel north of the Arctic Circle to photograph Esrange, the
Swedish Space Corporation launchpad. What she will make out of this
research journey remains to be seen, but it will likely extend her
studies of the global consequences of the corporate and scientific
colonization of space. If outer space is the next frontier for
militarization and entrepreneurial ventures, it is also, by virtue of
its very remoteness, one more field of the imagination, an empty terrain
in which scientists and artists alike might map a possible future.
JULIA BRYAN-WILSON IS AN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR AT THE RHODE ISLAND
SCHOOL OF DESIGN IN PROVIDENCE.
