TRACES 

Now on view in A-bombs / Climate walks at Transmission Gallery

Peter d’Agostino’s pioneering video and new media works have long addressed the two ongoing existential dangers of climate change and nuclear disaster always in play as the backdrop to the current crises. Now marking the 75th anniversary of the beginning of the Atomic Age, Transmission Gallery presents Peter d’Agostino: A-bombs / Climate walks, the artist’s personal view of nukes and the changing climate, is on display at the Transmission Gallery, October 1- November 21, 2020.

TRACES, a work in the exhibition, is the culmination of Peter d’Agostino’s lifelong obsession with the tragic consequences of nuclear proliferation. He was born in 1945, between the A-bomb test on July 16 in New Mexico, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, August 6 and 9. The TRACES video installation initially premiered at three art museums across the U.S. beginning in Baltimore, March 1995. During August, it was incorporated into the 50th anniversary series of events, “Becoming Death: Cinema and the Atomic Age,” curated by Steve Seid at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive. TRACES is a limited edition box set composed of a video, photographs, catalogue, letters and related ephemera dating back to 1945. It also addresses the controversy surrounding the Smithsonian’s decision to modify the “Enola Gay” exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC that opened in June, 1995.

TRACES
Edition of 5 + 2 AP   Box set 14” x 11” with a Certificate of Authenticity
Includes the video, 8 photographs, catalogue,  and 22 archival
digital documents ​in a black clamshell portfolio box 2” depth.

 TRACES (1995 / 2020) HDV 8 minute loop, BW & color, stereo sound
LINKS [ Video preview ] [ Virtual Installation ]

TRACES (1995 / 2020) 8 photographs: 14” x 11” Hahnemuhle Baryta Inkjet Archival paper
TRACES (1995) signed 20 page 8” x 8 “ catalogue, Introduction by Helen Glazer.
Documents include: letters, news articles, magazine covers, and museum ephemera.
TRACES of the Atomic Age (1945-2020) essay by David Tafler
TRACES exhibition review:
“Artist’s Birth is a link to the Birth of the Atomic Age” (Baltimore Sun, March 15, 1995)
Reports on the controversial “Enola Gay” exhibition,
at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum
“The History That Tripped Over Memory - War of Words: What the Museum Couldn’t Say”
(New York Times, February 5, 1995)
“Official: Enola Gay Response Unexpected” (Philadelphia Inquirer, April 20, 1995)
“Museum head quits over Enola Gay flap" (Philadelphia Inquirer, May 3, 1995)
Letters: Alamogordo, NM July 16, 1945; Baltimore MD April 22, 1995.
Statement: “Radioactive Fallout” National Association of Atomic Veterans
Magazines covers: LIFE (July 30, 1945) TIME ( July 29,1985) Newsweek ( July 24, 1995)
U.S. NEWS ( July 31, 1995) The New Yorker ( July 31, 1995)
Museum announcements: “TRACES: video installation by Peter d’Agostino”
Rosenberg Gallery, Goucher College, Baltimore, MD March 13 - April 28, 1995
Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive, CA August 2 - 30, 1995,
“Becoming Death: Cinema and the Atomic Age” curated by Steve Seid
Weatherspoon Art Museum, UNC Greensboro, NC November 5, 1995 - January 7, 1996

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More about TRACES:

The creative process for the TRACES video began in 1992 when I went to Hiroshima on August 6 during the annual Peace Memorial
Ceremonies, and to Nagasaki on an ordinary day in 1993. Returning home from Japan, I stopped in Hawaii to visit the USS Arizona
Memorial in Pearl Harbor commemorating the December 7, 1941 Japanese attack that precipitated the United States’ entry into
World War II. The inclusion of Pearl Harbor in TRACES addresses the broader context for the development of the A-Bomb.

Now in the year 2020, on the 75th anniversary of the birth of the Atomic Age, a startling confluence of events, the COVID pandemic
and Black Lives Matter protests, have justifiably come to the forefront of our consciousness. Climate Change, the other existential threat,
should not be forgotten as it relates to nuclear proliferation. Looking back to 1945, there is evidence that radioactive fallout from Atomic
and Hydrogen bomb tests, continuing through the Cold War Arms Race between the United States and Soviet Union, has contributed to
the acceleration of human induced climate change during the Anthropocene, a new epoch in the Geological Time Scale. – pdA
​

In her introduction to the TRACES catalogue, Helen Glazer described inherent poetical elements of the work and circumstances surrounding the 1995 exhibition:
​

The title TRACES was inspired by a passage titled "So," from Roland Barthes book Empire of Signs, which is devoted to a discussion of the Japanese poetic form known as haiku, dramatically brief literary works containing only 17 syllables each. D'Agostino refers to this quotation from Barthes: “Such traces (the word suits the haiku, a faint gash inscribed upon time) establish what we have been able to call the 'vision without commentary’.”

TRACES is much too complex in its structure and its intentions to be a haiku, but d'Agostino’s choice of title suggests that he intends for some of the spirit and impact of the haiku to reside there. A bomb explodes; a mushroom cloud rises from the ground. A baby walks on a beach in 1945, casting a long shadow. A glowing paper lantern floats downstream at dusk; it tips over and goes dark.

In tackling this topic, d'Agostino has set himself a formidable challenge. Fifty years later, humankind continues to grapple with the implications of these terrifying demonstrations of the bomb's power. In Hiroshima one bomb wiped out over 100,000 people, some of whom were literally vaporized into traces - shadowlike shapes scorched into the earth where they were standing (an image incorporated into the TRACES video). Human beings were for the first time confronted by the possibility of becoming agents of their own extinction. The recent controversy over the Enola Gay exhibition at the Smithsonian is but one reminder that the bombing of Hiroshima still stirs intense emotions among both Americans and the Japanese; some observers refer to American guilt and Japanese shame, not to mention abundant anger and a sense of injury on both sides. In this emotion-laden atmosphere one must proceed with care and sensitivity in order to steer clear of blame and recriminations, on one hand, or propaganda on the other.

With TRACES, Peter d'Agostino strives instead to create a memorial to this event which functions analogously to the Viet Nam Memorial in Washington, D.C. - a public space which nonetheless allows for a personal response, where the dead are not absorbed into statistics and abstractions but are remembered as individuals.  – HG  

​David Tafler, who attended the opening exhibition, describes the installation and artist talk that followed:
      

Initially exhibited in 1995 during the 50th anniversary of the Atomic Age, the TRACES installation has two  continuous video loops. Nested within a V-shaped enclosure made up of Japanese styled Shoji screens,  the monitors face outward in opposite directions. One monitor includes a recurring mantra of Buddhist chanting during a staged die-in, followed by floating lanterns lighting the night in modern Hiroshima at the Peace Ceremonies on August 6. A second monitor plays a loop that portrays: Oppenheimer expressing regret with a quote from the Bhagavad Gita, ghostlike and ominous; the Enola Gay dropping the bomb on Hiroshima; footage from d’Agostino’s tour of  Nagasaki Harbor and his visit to Pearl Harbor. The sound from both monitors overlaps in the installation space. Photographs of the bomb, of shadows of children, digitally reconstructed from a LIFE magazine that marks the week of d'Agostino's birth in 1945, hang on the adjoining walls. The composite exists as a media-architectural environment.
 
Peter d'Agostino compiles these events while weighing their meaning within the virtual, metaphoric, and spiritual dimensions of his work. In the life of this artist, history begins with the Atomic bomb but continues through a very personal connection with the Lockerbee tragedy. Ironically, painfully, that tragedy also now resonates in the footage and text enveloping the bombing in Oklahoma City, April 19, 1995. On that date, during the first TRACES exhibition* at Goucher College in Baltimore there was a reception and artist talk. The event included an artist talk. With regard to the dropping of the Atomic bomb, Peter d'Agostino stated: "I wasn't there; this isn't necessarily only about that." TRACES engages multiple points of view and mediation. Other people did live the moments recorded as part of the events. D'Agostino continued, "If somebody wants to break through the screen and tell us what the reality was about, the work will acquire renewed contextualization.” Some in the audience had typical questions and comments but then an individual rose to read an emotional letter that he wrote in 1945, momentarily breaking down during the reading.  Apparently, this gentleman, a B-29 pilot who witnessed the detonation of the first Atomic bomb, also helped to spearhead the movement that forced the Smithsonian to reconsider and eventually retract its original Enola Gay exhibition, with information related to the destruction of Hiroshima, at the National Air and Space Museum.  A moving dialogue ensued raising questions of  history, its revision and reconstruction within the TRACES installation.**

In the case of this experience, an observer, a writer can record the meta-text described. Many other emotional and intellectual moments intersect at the site of the installation and lend a resonance to the forces driving the artist's work. They fill "the silent, motionless space" beyond the work itself, but go unrecorded. – DT 
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* Following the exhibition curated by Helen Glazer at the Rosenberg Gallery, Goucher College, Baltimore, March 13-April 28, TRACES  traveled to the Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive, August, 1995, and the Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, November 5 – January 7, 1996.  In Berkeley, the installation and a screening of the TRACES video were incorporated into a 50th anniversary event, “Becoming Death: Cinema and the Atomic Age” curated by Steve Seid. 

** Composed of photographs, news reports, personal letters and other related ephemera, TRACES  (1995/2020), the newly restored work produced for the 75th anniversary of the Atomic Age, also addresses the controversy surrounding the Smithsonian Museum’s decision to modify its show at the National Air and Space Museum that opened four months later on June 28, 1995.