Hiroshima, Its Alive!!!!!

In lecture we discussed how in the United States, wars become a spectacle, a source of “Shock and Awe.” I immediately likened those terms to ethnographic photography and sideshows, which are phenomena I have learned about in many of my History of Art and Visual Culture classes. Colonialism brought the spectacle of “otherness” into popularity for Western culture. Sideshows that were parts of World’s Fairs, circuses, and museums, exhibited “human oddities.” Many of these “oddities” were people of non-Western cultures put on display as spectacles to be scrutinized by viewers. Ethnography was this same examination constructed into a science; so ethnographic photographs displayed indigenous cultures posed to demonstrate their body types and measurements. This scientific approach to appease the Western need to degrade “othered” cultures reminds me of the way Hiroshima was viewed as a petri dish. The US ensured Hiroshima was a “virgin target” so it could measure the lethality of the “Little Boy” uranium bomb it dropped on the city. Photographs were taken of the spectacle of the mushroom cloud and then of the survivors to examine vastness of the bomb itself and the damage it achieved. Hiroshima demonstrated how wars become a spectacle in the United States because they are just another way for Western culture to examine its repression and destruction of racialized bodies. This domination is evidence that the United States practices contemporary racism and colonization.

Below I’ve provided a link to The Couple in the Cage, which is Paul Heredia’s documentation of Guillermo Gomez-Peña and Coco Fusco’s performance art piece entitled Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West. In the piece Gomez-Peña and Fusco dress up in “indigenous” costumes and travel around to museums on display in a cage under the guise that they are from an uncontacted, undiscovered Amerindian tribe. Though it was made in the early 90s, I believe this film demonstrates how the fascination with “other” cultures is still prevalent in contemporary Western society.

http://vimeo.com/79363320