“Art and science are parallel paths to truth and understanding.” This is a quote that a Seattle artist I just connected with shared with me. It’s something James Acord said and believed. It’s something I believe in as well.
Acord’s faith in the “transmuting” power of art was relentless, giving him the stamina to pursue his life’s work for decades. This is how he became the only private individual in history with a radioactive materials handling license: WN-10407-1, a number he tattooed on the back of his neck.
His pursuit cost him dearly, not unlike Will Navidson in Mark Z. Danielewski’s ‘House of Leaves.’ I am morbidly drawn to such characters, probably because I see a lot of myself in them. But I am also drawn to that act of faith itself; James Acord was not a performance artist, though his life was so artfully performative; he was a sculptor. His faith was in sculpture. He did what he felt he had to do to make matter that mattered.
And, in that, he is more akin to the priestly than the magical, as per Flint’s reading of Sir James Frazer: he believed in human will.
According to Flint, “the religious outlook is defined by its belief in the essential plasticity of the world, and most essentially by its faith in the possibility of miracle – by definition a rupture in the natural order of things.” And while I don’t find Flint’s use of this definition consistent across his catalog essay, I think it illumines the artistic path to truth and understanding very well. Science is magical, the belief “that one event follows another necessarily and invariably without the intervention of any spiritual or personal agency.” Art is a religious faith in rupture.
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I don’t think I was supposed to take these photos but I couldn’t help myself. There’s a whole stack of these old one-hour photo prints, unlabeled and undated, but very clearly taken with friends and family in Moody’s backyard on Bainbridge, where ‘Monstrance for a Grey Horse’ ended up for a long time, before it was purchased by Joey King and donated to Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. It remained in Moody’s backyard until after Acord’s death in 2011, when its new owners finally felt comfortable moving it out of Seattle.
Moody’s files also includes the original letter from Pete Bevis of the Fremont Foundry, where Acord worked for a while, before he was asked to leave “nuclear-free” Fremont. I had not realized that they’d stayed in relationship after that eviction.
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There’s been a spooky air of synchronicity around this research, not unlike “the bizarre coincidences that seem to surround Acord’s work” that James Flint writes about in the 1998 ‘Atomic’ catalog. Every time I feel like I’ve hit a wall, a hidden latch appears.
So, I wasn’t especially surprised to walk into the Special Collections basement to see an exhibit about Magick and Mystery. What else would I find while pursuing James Acord?!
According to Flint, James Acord “had long had an interest in alchemical practices” and “was familiar with the writings, not only of Frazer, but of Paracelsus and the sixteenth century metallurgist Vannoccio Biringuccio.” He was especially interested in the scientific basis of rituals like “inoculation” in the making of alloys: ‘You know when you read Beowulf and the Icelandic sagas they talk about the hero’s blood-quenched sword, and everybody thought poetic license, right? Blood’s extremely rich in nitrogen. And we now purposely dissolve nitrogen in water when we quench steels to make them harder than they would be when they were quenched in brine and pure water. A blood quenched sword is a stronger sword – it’s nitrogen quenching.’
He was also interested in “the practice of incorporating an alien element into a piece of work in order to imbue it with a certain quality,” which Flint connects to ‘Monstrance,’ a work that “combined elements of the medieval reliquary and the granite depository in a work of art that directly – and, in a certain fashion, alchemically – addressed nuclear issues.”
Flint wrote a novel based on his interviews with Acord that I haven’t read yet, but you already get a sense of his mythologizing of Acord’s life in this piece; it seems part of the UK “controversy” he also mentions, where critics wondered whether Acord’s work “should be regarded as conceptual art, performance art or actual sculpture.”
The myth is what drew me to him as well, but in Fred Moody’s book, I found traces of the man – the Seattleite – behind the magick. A man that Moody decided “only Seattle” could have “kept alive.” Is that still true today?
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The story of how this granite beast came to be in the center of this photograph is fascinating in and of itself. It’s the story that Fred Moody actually writes in the book I bought to learn a little bit more about its sculptor, James Acord.
Fred Moody’s book is about the sad saga of boom and bust in this upper-left corner we call Seattle. And it was the crazy wealth accrued in the dot-com bubble he experienced that gave Moody the opportunity to save this piece of atomic age lore; the cofounder of a startup he worked for offered to pay for any artwork he wanted, and this was what he chose.
On the flipside, it was the devastating dot-com crash that very quickly took down this same startup that made him reflect on the meaning of a city that could produce an artist like James. In the very last pages of his book, Moody reflects on Acord and others like him, comparing encountering them to “”those first tender green little shoots forcing their way up through the bare wreckage on the slopes of Mt. St. Helens.””
James Acord remains a marginal figure in Seattle’s story, however. How might this city look if we shifted him closer to the center of our field of vision?
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Digging up the memories of forgotten figures is more than an exercise in water sign romanticism and nostalgia; it’s a method for tunnelling through “the parochialism of intellectual history” in ways that transform the present. I would argue that a Seattle that remembers James L. Acord is very different from a Seattle that does not.
I got that expression about “parochialism” from a paper on another forgotten figure of the atomic age: the Jewish philosopher Günther Anders, best known in America for his published correspondence with Claude Eatherly, the weather reconnaissance pilot who flew ahead of the craft that actually dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima. Very little else of Anders has been translated into English, relegating him to relative obscurity.
This marginalization was a real shame, as Anders provides the present age with a missing link to bridge a rather vexing gap in post-WWII thought. This, the scholars who work to unearth him from the pits of oblivion argue, was far from accidental.
According to Adi Armon, “the reason he was marginalized is not only a matter of style or circumstances but also of language, location, and historical context–it is embedded in the text and content of his writings, which placed Auschwitz alongside Hiroshima and located signs of totalitarianism in the West as well.”
It was not fashionable to make these connections so soon after the triumph of western liberalism over fascism and at the cusp of the Cold War against soviet communism. But a world that remembers Günther Anders is different from a world that does not.
Anders called this emerging world that we now call the present an ‘inverted utopia,’ arguing in his ‘Theses for an Atomic Age’ (1959) that while “utopians are unable to actually produce what they are able to visualize, we are unable to visualize what we are actually producing.”
That’s the role of artists like James L. Acord. They help us look more closely and, hopefully, to see.