Walk through any art museum and you’re likely to see a mix of the classical and contemporary, impressionist and surrealist, refined and raw, beautiful, eerie, and provocative. Looking at art allows me at least a few moments of relief from the “that’s just the way it is” attitude of our hyper-consumerist, hyper-militarized, hyper-nihilist nation. I can step outside my day-to-day life and accept an invitation, however briefly, to boundlessness! I can experience invention, creation, and re-creation just moments apart. I can see everyday objects with new eyes as they’re repurposed and reframed in extraordinary ways. I can celebrate the relentless power of human vision and imagination. In a museum, I often find that I can actually breathe.
The Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, Connecticut, where I live, has one floor for its permanent collection, with works from the 1600s to perhaps a decade ago, a mixture of famous names and those that are (at least to me) obscure indeed. That collection on the first floor remains the same, year in and year out, while new exhibits circulate through the upstairs galleries every few months. I try to take in each new exhibit and often find myself surprised, inspired, and even educated by what I see.
Recently, I visited an exhibit I’ve been unable to get out of my mind: Beatrice Cuming: Connecticut Precisionist. Ever heard of her? No? Well, neither had I. Cuming was born in 1903 in Brooklyn and studied painting at the Pratt Institute. She continued her studies in France, traveling extensively to Brittany, Italy, Tunisia, and elsewhere before ending up in New London of all places. Cuming had returned to New York from her travels in 1933 and then decided to move to Boston. On a train with all her belongings, she looked out the window — so the story goes — as it pulled into New London and impulsively got off, drawn by what she later described as the “obviously beautiful, powerful, dramatic, [and] exciting” subject matter in our town.
And she stayed, painting city scenes and diving into the local arts community. To support herself, she got a job as a security guard at the General Dynamics Electric Boat company. I try to imagine her, maybe wearing a green jumpsuit, a flashlight, and a ring of keys at her waist, patrolling Electric Boat’s massive yard and docks in nearby Groton.
During World War II, that company must have been a 24/7 operation as it churned out 74 submarines and 398 PT boats from those very docks. Those subs were responsible for fearsome (and stealthy) destruction of Japanese targets. That war ended, of course, with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, in the 1950s, with the Cold War with the Soviet Union ramping up, Electric Boat would start manufacturing nuclear submarines.
Eventually, realizing the prodigious talent of its security guard, the company commissioned Cuming to begin documenting its contributions to the war effort. As Electric Boat’s artist-in-residence (so to speak), she produced a number of breathtaking works. All too literally. I sat across from her painting Welders at Electric Boat Company unable to breathe.
It’s a dark painting with enormous pieces of metal being transformed by heat and fire, the background crowded with partially built submarine components. Its dominant colors are brown and yellow. At the center, a white-hooded welder bends over his work as plumes of white smoke billow upward. There are four other workers in the painting, all indistinguishable, hooded and jump-suited in layers of protective gear. That’s the detail that stays with me, that stuck in my throat — those workers enshrouded in their safety suits.
However those suits may have protected them, count on one thing: what they and their successors built will not protect us. The power they wielded (and welded) to shape and connect part to part in the last days of World War II has held the world hostage ever since. We, all 8.1 billion of us, are today anything but protected from the nuclear submarines their successors would make. In our flimsy pedestrian garb, we remain so desperately vulnerable. In the background of Cuming’s painting, there are ladders up to a platform and almost out of the painting. Where do the ladders lead? Does Cuming mean to offer an escape from that man-made hell? That might be reading too much into the painting. But what else are you supposed to do in an art museum?
It’s a mesmerizing wartime portrait that draws you in — even though there’s nothing beautiful about it. Another of Cuming’s works from that period, Chubb, is at least set outside, with glimpses of sea and sky through the unfinished hulk of another sub, the USS Chubb, as it towers on that dry dock.
What took my breath away? I kept thinking about all the labor and money invested in constructing submarines — from the relatively crude and uncomfortable boats of the 1940s and 1950s to the brand new Columbia Class nuclear submarine that General Dynamics Electric Boat is building right now.
The Navy’s budget for just 12 of those ballistic missile submarines is $126.4 billion. Imagine! If the Navy’s budget for that one weapons system was a country, it would have the third-largest military budget on earth.
The Columbia will be the biggest and most expensive submarine ever built. How perfectly American, right? Even down to the fact that it’s named in honor of the District of Columbia, the disenfranchised, desperately unequal, and remarkably segregated capital of the United States of America. I’d love to see an artwork that encapsulates that grim irony.
Those new Columbia subs will dwarf what Beatrice Cuming’s welders were working on when she captured them in 1944. Each will be 560 feet long, or a few feet more than the height of the Washington Monument. And its bulk will displace 20,810 tons of water.
But the size and expensiveness aren’t anywhere near as important as the payload of nuclear weapons it will carry with a power those welders of Cuming’s time could hardly have imagined and that Cuming would have been hard-pressed to render with brushes and paint. Each of those 12 new submarines will be equipped with 16 nuclear missile tubes for Trident II D5 submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). And those tubes will each be able to house up to 12 independently targetable nuclear warheads, known as W88s, costing about $150 million each and packing a mind-boggling 455-kiloton wallop.
Okay, now do the math with me. What does 12 times 16 times 12 equal? That’s right: 2,304. Now, multiply that by the thermonuclear force of 455 kilotons, and you get more than one million kilotons. An unthinkable power.
Frida Berrigan is the author of It Runs In The Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing into Rebellious Motherhood.
She is a TomDispatch regular, writes occasionally for WagingNonviolence.Org, and serves on the Board of Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center. She has three
children and lives in New London, Connecticut, where she is a gardener and community organizer.
Source: CounterPunch
