Darrell D. Davisson
Art after the Bomb is a radical reexamination of art since 1945. The book offers a new system for understanding modern art that is no longer bound strictly to categorization by artistic style, but rather by expressive phases that clearly parallel the established psychological stages of response to trauma--the global destruction of future. The current 120 or more labels that have been assigned to various phases of post-Bomb art can be reduced to five major phases with remarkable clarity and consistency with the art produced 1945 to the present.
After decades in university and college classrooms, Davisson offers a unique view of modern art based on the psychology of social trauma brought about by the threat of global annihilation by nuclear weapons. Artists consciously and unconsciously respond to the most critical undercurrents of thcir time creating patterns that bond numerous artists into stylistic groupings that transcend the current popular labels assigned to modern art and architecture. With a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in the history of Renaissance art, Davisson brings a fresh and unique perspective to the current literature on modern art, increasingly validated by current neuron-biological research.
Socially, trauma and recovery work the same way. The apocalyptic “transpersonal fire of mammoth proportions” of nuclear explosions and the fragmentation of all that sentient beings have created as a social structure are only a metaphor for the dissolution of psyche and reconstruction of its structure. Our first instincts are to use familiar symbols, metaphors, and group fantasies to mask the shock, followed by explosive auto-revisitations as found among the early Expressionists. This pattern is then followed by titanic, controlling obsessions whereby the trauma is nearly covered or disguised, or at least hardened up—controlled, mocked, satirized, and popularized in simplistic terms or super-objective terms in defiance of the death of the ego structure. Next comes an attempt to restructure the ego in symbolic forms and iconographies (stories, dialectics). Ultimately we succumb with resignation to that death which is ultimately an internal, unknowable, a-historical event, like a dream the dreamer tries to reconstruct after awakening. These are the psychic and artistic paths of post-Bomb art.
